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Management Mess to Leadership Success Challenge 2: Think Abundantly | Where is scarcity in your thinking impeding the best results? How difficult is it for you to share credit, praise, recognition, or power?
You’ve probably had occasion to dine at a buffet (except for my sophisticated wife, who abhors them). There are two schools of thought when approaching the line: first, there’s only a finite amount of food, so grab everything you want before someone else does. On the other hand, you might believe that there’s plenty of food to go around, more than anyone could possibly finish, so you can let the elderly man with the oxygen tank go ahead. There will be, in fact, enough shrimp for everyone. Remember, they arrived frozen in a 40-pound bag, after all.
It’s essentially the difference between a Scarcity Mentality (get yours before it’s gone) and an Abundance Mentality (there’s plenty to go around for everyone).
My first lesson in the power of thinking abundantly came from a colleague. I was deciding whether to move from Provo, Utah, to the ski town of Park City, about 50 miles away. Same job, just a longer commute, living in a cooler town (about as different as skim milk is from tequila). The relocation would almost double my rent, and I was trying to determine if this was a good financial decision (to be clear, it wasn’t). As I was talking with this work friend, he said something I will never forget: “You’ll never have enough until you define how much is enough.” I’ve shared that aphorism with countless friends, because it speaks to the heart of abundance thinking. Define “enough,” or you’ll be constantly worried you don’t have it.
My second lesson was a little more brutal and, appropriately enough for our culinary metaphor, happened over lunch. (I have a proven method for choosing restaurants for business meetings. If I expect the exchange to be high-stakes, I like being in a secluded booth on neutral ground. I never have difficult conversations in my favorite restaurants, so I can distance the emotion of the meeting from my affinity for the food.)
On this occasion, I had scheduled lunch at one of my favorite restaurants, Cracker Barrel, because I was expecting a pleasant meal with one of my most trusted team members, Jimmy. Imagine my surprise when he ordered his country-fried steak and said, “Scott, I’m tired of you taking credit for all of my projects.”
That sentence needs no translation. Further context? Yes, please.
Jimmy continued by sharing specific instances where he felt I had overshadowed his work: announcing the results of a campaign he’d led, talking up a product launch he’d planned, etc. In each case, I had never even mentioned his contribution.
My first instinct was to disagree, and with a healthy dose of indignation. The old me certainly would have done that—I used to pride myself on telling people the way things were, damn the consequences. But working at FranklinCovey had changed me, and I inhaled a measured breath between the stimulus of the moment and my chosen response. I did my best to validate Jimmy’s concern and commit to being more aware of the issue.
After lunch, I began to unpack what he’d said. How much of it was true? Certainly, I had no reason to hoard credit. At that point in my career, my influence in the firm was substantial and my track record with the CEO and the board was exceptional. Was I so insecure that I needed more attention and accolades than I already had? Was reaching up for that next rung on the career ladder more important than helping someone else up? Had I really, consciously or subconsciously, managed my brand, reputation, and career at his expense?
I believe the executive team would tell you that, in their presence, I frequently lift others up and acknowledge their contributions. But what happens in a closed-door session with management doesn’t always get passed on to other employees. So, what went wrong this time?
I had failed to think abundantly.
It’s human nature to feel scarcity when we fear we won’t have enough — money, gifts, attention, praise, fill in the blank. Was there really a finite amount of credit in the firm? Clearly, no. To use the buffet metaphor, I kept ladling “credit” on my plate like a pile of shrimp. Not only had I not stopped to consider “what was enough,” I was driven by a scarcity mindset that made me fearful of missing out. Worst of all, I wasn’t even aware that I thought that way.
After my conversation with Jimmy, I made a conscious effort to publicly praise anyone who truly warranted it, and share credit when my team had shone independent of me. I haven’t always been perfect since then, but by remembering the principle of abundance, I believe I’ve become a more gracious, generous, and respectful leader. And not only do I not miss out, I’ve found more reward in the accomplishments of others. | https://medium.com/management-matters/management-mess-to-leadership-success-challenge-2-think-abundantly-60bddb44b700 | ['Scott Miller'] | 2020-12-11 14:38:06.191000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Management', 'Management And Leadership', 'Leadership Development'] |
Do You Need A Writer, An SME, Or Both? | Do You Need A Writer, An SME, Or Both?
Who do you need for your project? It’s important to understand from the outset
Dealing every day in technical writing, I come across a lot of esoteric requests for writing.
Clients need a 2,000 word deep dive based upon the contents of a cybersecurity conference panel about the various ways in which serverless cloud workloads can be secured.
Others require an overview of AWS’s billing structure.
The next one wants to talk about how artificial intelligence (AI) can help automate bulk processing of NDAs and other legal paperwork.
I could go on.
For every four projects I take on, there’s probably one that I have to turn down. The usual rationale: you need an SME, my friend, not a writer.
Here’s the difference.
Writers Turned Quasi SMEs
Most writers choose to specialize in a certain field. Mine is B2B technology.
They often do this because they have a strong personal interest in the field. Or because they have personal familiarity with the subject matter.
I’m a geek-at-heart Linux-using type that has a major interest in backups due to unaddressed chronic anxiety about losing my data (as soon as I hit the publish button this post will be syndicated to my blog lest Medium vanish overnight..) I’m also studying for a cloud computing certificate so know a thing or two about AWS.
I write about consumer technology products that I use. I also write about Linux. And I’ve written about backups both for myself and for clients.
Do I know more than most people about all of these fields? I would reckon yes.
Am I an “expert” in these areas? A lot of writers would brand themselves in this way but I tend to err on the side of caution.
Do I know as much about Linux as a systems administrator who has spend 20 years managing Linux servers for a major enterprise.
Absolutely not.
Consider me a writer and quasi subject matter expert (SME).
SMEs Turned Writers
On the other end of the spectrum we have Linux engineers who decide one day that they want to dabble in freelance content writing. Yes, it happens.
The existence of these creates always puzzled me somewhat. Why would somebody earning six figures want to dabble in writing?
Motivations might include:
They like the prospect of side income
They are trying to develop name recognition and show off their authority
They think that writing is fun and don’t really care about the money involved
Brief The Right Projects — At The Right Budget
The difference between quasi SME writers and SMEs turned writers is really one of depth of knowledge.
Writers tend to write about several niches. This is dictated by the market more than anything. They thus tend to have good subject matter expertise about a variety of topics within their niche.
SMEs turned writers — a much rarer breed — know an awful lot about a little. Writers’ lore has it that the highest rates in writing are paid to these rare creatures. Personally, I think that’s entirely fair.
In general, the more expertise a brief requires the higher your budget should be. I’ve seen countless technology startups try to get writers to produce SME-level writing for paltry budgets. This is a trend that should be resisted. The next time a client asks you to write about the concept of angular momentum in nuclear physics — for $20 — please tell them no.
By the way:
SMEs turned writers and quasi SME writers aren’t pitched in some kind of adversarial battle. They can work well together, in fact. Clients just need to understand the differences between the two and make sure that both are being fairly compensated.
Technology clients and non-technical agency staff should: | https://medium.com/freelance-writing/do-you-need-a-writer-an-sme-or-both-769161f4c73c | ['Daniel Rosehill'] | 2021-04-04 12:10:21.672000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Writing', 'Freelance', 'Writing Tips', 'Freelance Writing'] |
Sony Loves Indie Studios Again | Sony Loves Indie Studios Again
Will it last this time?
In early November of 2019, Sony announced a major shakeup in the Sony Interactive Entertainment leadership ranks. Hermen Hulst, head of Sony first-party studio Guerilla Games, would become the Chairman of Sony Worldwide Studios. At the same time, Shuhei Yoshida would move on from his role as President of Worldwide Studios. Yoshida was being tapped to lead a new initiative with Sony’s external, indie development studios. Many people called it a demotion, but was that really true?
There is no more famous or popular figure in the Sony hierarchy than Shuhei Yoshida. He has a cult of personality among developers, journalists and fans alike. He’s also known to have a keen eye for games, coming up as he did in the executive producer role for games including Gran Turismo, Ape Escape and The Legend of Dragoon. So why then would he be demoted, after years at the helm when Sony had the best-selling console two generations in a row? He wouldn’t be, and the reality is that Sony needed him to do what he has always done best, which is to nurture developers to do their best work.
Yoshida’s new role appears, at least in part, to be a reaction to reports that indie devs felt left behind by Sony over the last few years.
Back in 2013, as the sun was setting on the PS3, Sony was all in on the indie game scene, having established what was called the “PlayStation Pub Fund”. Instead of just supporting and publishing games from indie devs, Sony was actually putting it’s money where it’s mouth was. The publishing giant would pay the developers as soon as the game went gold, then take on the burden of selling the title with the goal of recouping their investment. The studio was free to move on to the next title, having already been compensated for their work.
The Pub Fund led to some of the most well-received indie games on the PS4 platform, with Guacamelee, Hotline Miami, Spelunky, Blacklight: Retribution and Luftrausers either being made for PS4 or ported over from other editions. As late as 2016, Sony was still talking about Pub Fund, with additional games like Axiom Verge and Salt and Sanctuary being touted as alumni of the program. These were all well-received and successful titles, but it seems that Sony eventually lost interest in the program.
Conventional wisdom is that they weren’t making enough money on their investments, and turned their attention to other matters. Sony was heading into the early phases of the generational switch, and had many huge AAA titles in the pipeline, so it’s not hard to guess that the the bloom was off the indie-rose for many of the people making the decisions. Thus the indie studios didn’t feel the love coming from Sony, so that part of Sony’s library languished somewhat in the years that followed.
Hotline Miami.
Fast forward to last week, when it became clear exactly what the goal of Yoshida’s new position would be. Sony announced the PlayStation Indies initiative, with the stated goal of making PlayStation the place where indie devs want to make their games, and gamers want to play them.
This was accompanied by the announcement of 9 games throughout that day, and one guesses they will get a lot of pop from the mothership throughout their development and subsequent release. Of these 9 games, only one was a title and studio that was immediately recognizable, the new Worms game from Team 17. Back in 2013, though, no one had heard of DrinkBox Studios either, so it’s hard to know which studio will be the next big star in Sony’s constellation.
The real question is, will Sony stick with the initiative this time? There seems to be no reason they would abandon it as they did with the Pub Fund, mainly because they aren’t fronting the money this time around. They are providing support, but it only appears to be logistical, not financial, so they have much less at risk. From Yoshida’s statements, Sony seems to also understand that the skyrocketing costs and time required for AAA titles are no longer sustainable.
It only makes sense to shift some of the eggs into the indie basket, especially with those studios becoming more prominent and putting out more well-regarded titles every year.
One can hope that Sony will do itself and the new initiative some favors, starting with a redesign of the PlayStation Store. With so many games on the service, they need to take steps to make these indie gems easier to find. They have also gone away from the wildly popular PlayStation Blog feature called “The Drop”, which highlighted all the games coming out in a particular week. This was a key vehicle for gamers to learn about new smaller titles that would otherwise be lost in the forest of games available for purchase, and it’s removal is already being felt by fans who have no idea what comes out each week.
With the star power of Yoshida at the helm, less inherent risk and a higher profile product, we should expect Sony to keep tooting the indie horn for the foreseeable next-gen future. No matter how they go about it, it only benefits the publisher to support as many good studios as possible, making the best games for your console, whether they are true or timed exclusives. Time will tell what the outcome shall be, but it should be fun to watch (and play) to see how it goes. | https://medium.com/super-jump/sony-loves-indie-studios-again-5a429387cb18 | ['Bryan Finck'] | 2020-07-10 09:36:19.142000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'PlayStation', 'Games', 'Features', 'Startups'] |
Streaming Events through RabbitMQ | Streams in NodeJS
A stream is an abstract interface for working with streaming data in Node.js. The stream module provides an API for implementing the stream interface. (Node.js docs)
The stream module is one of the biggest powers of Node.js. Streams together with async io enable a server to act while still receiving data, minimizing memory and cpu usage.
Especially when working with big chunks of data, you can work on them in small chunks (e.g. as you read them from the file system) and don’t have to load big parts in memory.
There are many build in streams:
Http request
Http response
Process.stdout
However, working with streams is difficult. It requires a lot of boilerplate code and a deeper understanding of its concepts.
A native way to perform an http get request:
Example taken from: 5 Ways to Make HTTP Requests in Node.js — Twilio
And a way to serve http requests:
Example taken from: Stream | Node.js v15.11.0 Documentation
Directly handling streams is difficult and that’s the reason we have many frameworks and libraries doing the boilerplate and handling errors for us.
When custom logic needs to be implemented though, streams are a powerful module to work with.
Type of streams
Streams can be readable, writable, or both. All streams are instances of EventEmitter. (Node,js docs)
Streams can be any of the following 4:
Readable
Writable
Duplex
Transform
We will describe in more detail Readable and Writable streams.
Readable Stream
Readable streams are an abstraction for a source from which data is consumed. (Node,js docs)
In simple words a Readable stream provides an interface to “read” data from a place. It could be the file system, network or anything else.
A Readable Stream can be either in flowing mode or in paused mode. While in flowing mode the stream will continue to read data from its source. To go from paused to flowing mode one of the following should occur:
a ‘data’ event handler is added
stream.resume() method is called
stream.pipe() is called
The opposite can be done with:
stream.pause()
stream.unpipe()
The Readable stream API evolved across multiple Node.js versions and provides multiple methods of consuming stream data. In general, developers should choose one of the methods of consuming data and should never use multiple methods to consume data from a single stream. (Node,js docs)
Writable Stream
Writable streams are an abstraction for a destination to which data is written. (Node,js docs)
In simple words a Writable stream provides an interface to “write” data to a place. It could be the file system, network or anything else.
Pipe
readable.pipe(destination[, options])
destination can be Writable , Duplex , Transform
can be , , Returns destination
Pipe is a convenient method to direct a readable stream into a writable stream.
eg:
fs.createReadStream(file).pipe(duplex).pipe(fs.createWriteStream(otherFile))
Figure 1: Pipe Readable/Writable
For more information about streams, the events and methods they support, the ways to implement custom ones, the official node docs is an excellent resource: https://nodejs.org/api/stream.html
RabbitMQ and RPCs
RabbitMQ is the most widely deployed open source message broker. (RabbitMQ official page)
RabbitMQ is an open source smart Message Broker. It is smart because it knows what messages to send to each consumer. It is responsible for routing messages to queues.
We use RabbitMQ to make our microservices communication asynchronous. Sometimes a microservice needs a response from another service. Instead of using HTTP we utilize RPCs over RabbitMQ a lot.
To better visualize how this works let’s imagine a service Calculator that knows how to do mathematical calculations and a service Billing that uses the Calculator service to do math.
Calculator is consuming messages from a queue named add among others.
Billing service wants to calculate the sum of 1+2. So it sends a message to add queue with the extra header reply-to: billing_queue* the name of a queue that only this process of the service is consuming messages. This is important because if we have many instances of the Billing service we would like the process that sends to the add queue to be the process that receives the response.
Now the Calculator service consumes the message from the add queue and sends the results to the queue mentioned in reply-to header: billing_queue. Billing service was waiting for the response so it will read it and continue its processing etc.
Figure 2: Calculator RPC example
If we had many instances of the Billing service this would work the same way.
Figure 3: Calculator RPC example in scale
Billing has 3 instances. Each one has an exclusive queue. Each one can use the add RPC from the Calculator service.
Each message that Billing service sends to the add queue also has a correlation_id header that is used to correctly map responses to the corresponding requests. This allows us to send multiple concurrent requests to the Calculator service from the same process without the responses being mixed.
* actually the name of the queue is a random string so that it is unique, usually a server named queue.
Examples
Let’s see now how the above could be implemented in Node.js with code.
We are using rabbit-queue, a module that handles the RabbitMQ integration. It is a high level module that provides an abstraction layer above amqplib. It also has convenient classes to easily implement retries on failures and add messages to dlqs after the retry limit is reached.
Disclaimer: The author of this article is the main contributor of rabbit-queue. The module is production battle tested as we have 10+ microservices using it for various use cases.
Calculator and Billing Service Examples
As we see in the examples above, calling an RPC is as simple as calling an async local function. That’s why it is so powerful. It makes the communication between our microservices seamless and easy.
The Problem
A couple of years ago we wanted to scale our Campaigns product. So we started designing an internal campaigns management tool for this. Until then, our Campaigns manager would use an internal tool to calculate audiences and do many other steps and configurations manually.
Our internal tool was producing some big files that our Campaigns manager needed to download. To be more specific the internal tool was calling another microservice (Orchestrator from now on) to do this job. Orchestrator would produce a big file and ping the internal tool when it had finished with the s3 url of the file.
Figure 4: Communication between Internal tool and Orchestrator through RabbitMQ
The process was problematic because the Campaigns manager had no idea of the progress of this long running task that usually took hours. The processing that the internal tool had to do was added on top of the time to produce the whole file, upload it to s3 and then download it. To make matters worse the memory of the internal tool was reaching its limits when the whole file was downloaded as we had a solution that processed all the data in memory.
How we solved it
When redesigning this process to scale, we knew we could do better. We were developing a new microservice to handle the campaign management called Campaigns. We knew Orchestrator was producing data at smaller chunks, we just had to find a good way to communicate them back to our Campaigns microservice.
The desired architecture would look like this:
Figure 5: Ideal communication between Campaigns and Orchestrator
We were using RabbitMQ rpcs for the communication between the two services. We just had to figure out how we would implement such a solution:
There was no easy way for Campaigns to paginate somehow to the Orchestrator . Eg to send rpcs requesting more and more data. Only the Orchestrator had the ability to do its internal pagination.
to paginate somehow to the . Eg to send rpcs requesting more and more data. Only the had the ability to do its internal pagination. There was a way for Campaigns to initiate the request to the Orchestrator, and Orchestrator to send data in chunks to a queue that Campaigns would listen to. This however would require the process to be stateless and fully asynchronous. Different campaigns processes should be able to handle different chunks of data. However this solution wasn’t very elegant, we needed something better.
Photo by Jason Strull on Unsplash
And then it crossed our minds. We needed to transform a flow that reads the whole file into reading it in small chunks at a time. If this was not between microservices but in one service the obvious solution would be to use streams (in Nodejs).
What if we could extend the implementation of our RPCs to offer a similar interface with that of streams? Was this even possible?
It was a good thing that we maintain the Node.js rabbitMQ driver we use: rabbit-queue. We could experiment with that and find out!
Actually, the first happy path implementation was less than 2 days of effort!
The interface was very elegant too. Let’s see:
Reading a file in a single process:
Pretty nice? Right?
What is happening behind the scenes? Let’s again take our example with the Orchestrator and Campaigns. Let’s assume that a Campaigns process is requesting from the Orchestrator using a jobId to calculate the file needed and send it over a few lines at a time.
Figure 6: An example with 25 lines returned
Pretty straightforward right?
This way we managed to send all Orchestrator responses to the same Campaigns process.
But are we done yet? Not quite…
Error handling
The happy path didn’t cover most error handling cases.
The interface is creating a local readStream. So we had to transfer errors that happened to the remote readStream to the local one.
Figure 7: Errors happening in the middle of a stream are transferred to the consumer
Backpressure
What would happen if the producer of the stream(Orchestrator) was creating data faster than the consumer(Campaigns) could consume? The consumer would start piling up memory. Until it would run out of memory.
If you have implemented your custom stream you probably are already familiar with backpressure. In essence you should:
- Never .push() if you are not asked. - Never call .write() after it returns false but wait for ‘drain’ instead.
from Node,js docs
Moving back to our example:
The idea here was to make the orchestrator wait for the Campaigns to acknowledge it has processed a message before continuing to the next one. Stream implementation has a default buffer of 16 messages (in case the stream is in objectMode). So by default the consumer will acknowledge the first 16 messages even if your program hasn’t processed any.
To implement this acknowledgement:
Like before, Campaigns sends a message to the queue of the Orchestrator with a replyTo header and a correlation id (RPC).
But now the Orchestrator instead of replying to replyTo queue the chunks of data it has, it actually initiates an RPC call sending a message to the replyTo queue and expecting back a reply. Inception right?
Figure 8: Orchestrator will wait for Campaigns acknowledgement before sending new messages
What if consumer is down while reading
Now that we added a backpressure, the Orchestrator implementing the RPC had a problem. What if the Campaigns instance was killed? The Orchestrator would wait indefinitely for an acknowledgement. If a new Campaigns process was started it would be unaware of this. The acknowledgement was expected by the Campaigns instance that was killed as the RPC was sent to its own exclusive queue.
Restarting Orchestrator would not resolve this issue too as the initial RPC message would remain in the queue and another process of it would try to process it, waiting acknowledgements from a reply-to queue that no longer existed. There are 2 possible solutions to this one:
Know if the replyTo queue exists and stop the process if it does not Add a timeout when waiting for the acknowledgement
Although the 1 seems preferable we implemented the 2nd one as it was easier and already supported by rabbit-queue.
Figure 9: Last Campaigns ack is delayed and Orchestrator times out
What if the consumer has finished its job?
At last at some point we wanted to give the consumer the option to stop the service from sending more data in an elegant way. Eg. without skipping an acknowledgement and relying on the timeout being reached. This was easy to support when using the backpressure feature because Orchestrator was already waiting for acknowledgements. We could send in the last acknowledgement that the Campaigns needs to stop consuming messages. Note that due to buffering Campaigns might have in memory several more chunks when we send the stop acknowledgement.
Figure 10: Campaigns can ask from Orchestrator to stop
A full example with backpressure and timeout and stop:
The backpressure, timeout options are passed as rabbitmq headers.
The option to stop a stream is only available if backpressure is true.
You can see more examples.
Next steps
Although this implementation covers all our current use cases the feature is far from complete. There are improvements that can be made. Also more options could be added. Eg.: | https://medium.com/@workabletechblog/streaming-events-through-rabbitmq-8c12b6bea193 | ['Workable Tech Blog'] | 2021-09-14 14:50:04.188000+00:00 | ['Rabbitmq', 'Nodejs', 'Asynchronous', 'Software Development', 'Microservices'] |
Simple Football Predictor: Week 11 Predictions and Testing Other Models | So I’ve noticed it usually takes two weeks to add new data to my dataset, so I’ve decided that on the off week I will play around with different concepts in data. This week, I’ve tested out a few different types of classifier and regression models.
Week 10 Results:
Week 10 and Total Performance
The model had a decent bounce back this week, reaching a score of 8/14, an improvement of 2 games vs last week. The model did okay or above expectations in most confidence tiers, but struggled significantly with an 0/3 in the 60–65% range.
For the season, the model continues to struggle a lot in the 50–55% range, and last week’s week performance in the 60–65% range brought down the season total to 50%.
The model that predicts against the spread went 5–7–2, a decrease in performance from last week’s 7–7 performance.
Different Model Testing:
So in the past I’ve used a Logistic Regression model for predicting the winner, and an Ordinary Least Squares Linear Regression Model for predicting the spread. However, there are other models one can use to make these same predictions including Support Vector Machines (SVM), Decision Tree Classifier/Regressor, and Random Forest Classifier/Regressor. I will not go into the math behind each one, but will provide the necessary metrics from our test data for each one.
Classifier (Predicting the Winner):
As a reminder on which metrics are used to judge classification and regression models please refer to last week’s article. As always we will use accuracy as our chief metric for classifiers.
Logistic Regression:
Accuracy 64%; Precision 64%, Recall 80%, F1 71%
Support Vector Machines:
Accuracy 61%; Precision 51%, Recall 90%, F1 71%
Decision Tree Classifier:
Accuracy 58%; Precision 62%; Recall 59%, F1 61%
Random Forest Classifier
Accuracy 60%, Precision 62%, Recall 70%, F1 65%
We see that the Logistic Regression model has the highest accuracy, though it does show a major bias towards predicting the home team.
Regressor (Margin of Victory):
OLS:
OLS Metrics
MAE: 11.57
MSE: 216.48
RMSE: 14.71
R^2: 0.0961
SVM:
SVM Metrics
MAE: 11.79
MSE: 221.26
RMSE: 14.87
R^2: 0.0402
Decision Tree Regressor:
Decision Tree Regressor Metrics
MAE: 15.57
MSE: 416.85
RMSE: 20.42
R^2: 1.0
Random Forest Regressor:
Random Forest Regressor Metrics
MAE: 11.95
MSE: 228.68
RMSE: 15.12
R^2: 0.8623
The Decision Tree Regressor and Random Forest Regressor each have high R² scores, but in my opinion they seem a little to high to be trustworthy as a chief measure. Based on the other 3 metrics, I believe the OLS model is the best way to go.
Predictions:
Predictions vs Spread (as of 4:33PM Wednesday)
Seahawks (-3) vs Cardinals: Cardinals
Chargers (-8.5) vs Jets: Jets
Ravens (-6) vs Titans: Titans
Panthers (unavailable) vs Lions: Panthers
Browns (-3.5) vs Eagles: Eagles
Texans (+2) vs Patriots: Texans
Jaguars (+10) vs Steelers: Jaguars
Saints (-5) vs Falcons: Saints
Washington (-2) vs Bengals: Washington
Broncos (+3) vs Dolphins: Dolphins
Colts (-2) vs Packers: Colts
Vikings (-7.5) vs Cowboys: Vikings
Raiders (+7) vs Chiefs: Raiders
Buccaneers(-3.5) vs Rams: Rams
Quick Observations:
The model still seems to shy away from large predictions for margin of victory, which could explain why its average error is11.5 points per game.
Secondly, there seems to be more than a few games where the model predicted a winner and a margin of victory that don’t matchup, with the probability of victory ranging to higher amounts than previously, this is probably a weird quirk in the models.
Finally, the Jets are back in action and back to having low odds.
I am currently enrolled in the Applied Data Science Professional Certificate program at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College. Please reach out to met via LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanielselevan/) or comment below with all questions, comments, project suggestions, or to act as a mentor. All likes and comments will be well appreciated. | https://medium.com/@sully51494/simple-football-predictor-week-11-predictions-and-testing-other-models-45b4ab06953c | ['Nathaniel Selevan'] | 2020-11-19 14:33:48.489000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Data Science', 'Predictive Analytics', 'Scikit Learn', 'NFL'] |
We Matter | We Matter
End all racism
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash.
Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat
Bullets sprayed
Red-colored rain
No one answers for all this pain
Please help!
Woman cries
while holding her son
watching as his life drains
from him
She cries out. “Why?”
“My baby boy,”
The woman stands
and carries
his lifeless body
The crowd wailed
and stood strong
“No Justice–No Peace” protesters chanted.
It just made the enemy come
back even harder
Tear gas
Billy clubs
Tat-tat-tat-tat
“No Justice–No Peace,” protesters said.
Still, warm bodies slumped
on top of each other
The woman made through
the angry crowd holding
her son’s body
She speaks her voice
rattled with grief
“He’s never gonna–finish school
“No scholarship,”
She looks down at her son
“My only child,”
“H-He,”
She sniffed
“That special light inside him–gone,”
She took a deep
“All his dreams are now at my feet,”
She takes a step forward.
“Stand down,” the officer says to his men.
Ma’am, stay behind the gates.
Another step forward.
“He’s gone,” she says repeatedly.
“No Justice–No Peace,” crowds say.
The crowd begins to
move forward.
“Ma’am please” the officers shouted.
She looked up at him.
She says. “My boy is waiting for me,”
Officer steps back and gives a signal.
She takes one more step.
Gunshots fired.
The woman laid therein
the street with her son.
No
Justice
No
Peace
When will the bloodshed end?
My son’s, my daughter, my future
It all matters
Black lives matter | https://medium.com/prismnpen/we-matter-fc21dad7506a | [] | 2020-06-15 15:22:20.172000+00:00 | ['Violence', 'Writing', 'Poetry', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Racism'] |
How The Helix Token Will Power Knowbella Tech’s Growth | Knowbella Tech is an open science company that connects global researchers to intellectual property and assets that are sitting idle across institutions, universities and companies. The company’s collaboration platform will provide tools and services to match researchers to IP and to crowdsource and advance new discoveries and innovations.
Blockchain is Knowbella’s underlying technology that manages grant funding and the Helix token. It is the “blockchain” part of the equation that we will discuss today, as this introduces a number of new ideas and concepts for people outside the blockchain and cryptocurrency sector. Specifically, I want to discuss the Helix token, which can be used as a value exchange within and without the Knowbella Platform.
The Helix Token: The Currency of Science
This reasonably raises the question as to why we need our own currency. Fiat currencies like the dollar, pound, or yen are very well tried and tested, and if we really insist on using a cryptocurrency, then bitcoin and ethereum are also already commonplace. Would using one of these more established and prolific currencies not be easier? The answer to that question is a lot more interesting than you might imagine.
The Helix Token
Firstly, by using our own currency we will be able to reward scientists for their time and participation in a way that simply would not be possible with a fiat currencies such as the U.S. dollar. Since our project is concerned with collaboration and open science, Helix allows us to incentivize research activities, as well as activities that grow the Knowbella Platform. Helix can be used by our global user base (without the need to use currency exchanges) to purchase equipment or services (within the Knowbella ecosystem) and in any other situation where value exchange is necessary. As the platform grows, the demand for Helix grows with it, which in turn drives up the value of Helix.
This is the Knowbella Tech ecosystem as powered by Helix.
Users are rewarded in Helix for registering, building a profile, uploading intellectual assets, and contributing to research.
Helix tokens are convertible to common shares in Knowbella, thus the users gain economic rights to Knowbella in a liquidity event such as an IPO or acquisition.
Helix encourages user retention — the participants, platform, and currency together form an “ecosystem” that work seamlessly with each other as the exclusive means of value exchange within the network.
By contributing and participating in our ecosystem the users increase the value of the platform and the Helix they hold.
Helix will be traded on an SEC compliant alternative trading system (ATS) for other token securities or fiat currency.
Knowbella Platform users are not exploited for their scientific contributions as their participation directly impacts the value of Helix, whereas if Knowbella Tech used fiat or other cryptocurrencies, their participation would have no impact on the value of their holdings.
The blockchain enablement affords our ability to provide voting rights through Helix-as-an-equity.
And finally, as Helix is tied to the Company’s equity, as the Company gains in value, so too does Helix. In this way, Helix is truly a security in the U.S. This means Knowbella can avoid the international complexities that mainstream cryptocurrencies are experiencing.
These points illustrate exactly why Helix is such an integral part of the Knowbella Tech business plan and model. Helix helps us to build our global ecosystem and fuels growth, as well as fostering the ecosystem. Helix will also give our users voting rights within the network, democratizing the Knowbella Platform and helping to shape the future direction for projects, funding and platform tools and services.
Lastly, Helix will guarantee holders a stake in the Company and a share in the profits should the company conduct an Initial Public Offering (IPO) or some other positive liquidity event.
We are very keen to not exploit our scientific members and their holding of Helix guarantees this. Our members are rewarded for their efforts and will also participate in the upside that they create for Knowbella.
Helix Gives More
In creating Helix we have done our utmost to create a token with the strongest and most robust use case possible. Helix helps us to build a strong community, which in turn creates strong loyalty and strong network growth. For any blockchain project the question should always be asked, ‘is there any need for this token?’ In the case of Knowbella Tech that answer is an emphatic yes! | https://medium.com/knowbella-tech/how-the-helix-token-will-power-knowbella-techs-growth-e19f69146f0e | ['Mark Pohlkamp', 'Evp', 'Sellside Upstage.Io'] | 2018-06-15 18:27:45.296000+00:00 | ['Open Science', 'Cryptocurrency', 'SEC', 'Bitcoin', 'Security Token Offering'] |
DevOps Automation: Create Windows amazon EC2 Instance & Login to VMs Using WinRM Port | Developers, Sysadmins, and IT administrators have been carrying out system administration tasks or DevOps tasks ‘manually’ from time immemorial. Be it desktop machines configuration, server configuration, operating system installation, software installations, or setting up VMs; everything was manual, time-consuming, and error-prone until DevOps conquered the software development and delivery space.
With profound knowledge and deep expertise in Azure DevOps automation services, our automation experts share scripts to help you automate creation of Windows Amazon EC2 instances using DevOps and automate logins to VMs using WinRM Port.
Other similar post: How to Automate Windows remote machines logins using DevOps
When you sign up with AWS (Amazon Web Services) you sign up for an entire universe of cloud computing services. One of such services is Amazon EC2 instance — a virtual server where subscribers provision compute servers in the AWS cloud. We understand creating Windows Amazon EC2 instances is a time and cost consuming process, especially in a 3-tier architecture where software developers require multiple VMs and several thousand dollar budget. The below automation for creating EC2 instances can save your business a fortune.
Let’s begin:
Create AWS EC2 instance
Install-Module -Name AWS.Tools.Installer -Force
Install-AWSToolsModule AWS.Tools.EC2,AWS.Tools.S3 -CleanUp -Force
Install-Module -Name AWSPowerShell -Force
Install-Module -name AWSPowerShell.NetCore -Force
Import-Module AWSPowerShell.NetCore
Setup credentials and login to AWS Console
Set-AWSCredential -AccessKey <YOUR-ACCESS-KEY> -SecretKey <YOUR-ACCESS-SECRET-KEY> -StoreAs awsprofile
Set-AWSCredential -ProfileName awsprofile
Initialize-AWSDefaultConfiguration -ProfileName awsprofile -Region us-east-1
$keypair = New-EC2KeyPair -KeyName KeyPair
$keypair.KeyMaterial | Out-File -Encoding ascii C:\AWS\ec2-demo-key.pem
Create Security Groups — For opening WinRM Port (inbound / outbound)
New-EC2SecurityGroup -GroupName EC2DemoSecurityGroup -GroupDescription “Security group for EC2 demo”
Get-EC2SecurityGroup -GroupNames EC2DemoSecurityGroup
Grant-EC2SecurityGroupIngress -GroupName EC2DemoSecurityGroup -IpPermissions @{IpProtocol = “tcp”; FromPort = 80; ToPort = 80; IpRanges = @(“0.0.0.0/0”)}
Grant-EC2SecurityGroupIngress -GroupName EC2DemoSecurityGroup -IpPermissions @{IpProtocol = “tcp”; FromPort = 3389; ToPort = 3389; IpRanges = @(“0.0.0.0/0”)}
Grant-EC2SecurityGroupIngress -GroupName EC2DemoSecurityGroup -IpPermissions @{IpProtocol = “tcp”; FromPort = 5985; ToPort = 5985; IpRanges = @(“0.0.0.0/0”)}
Grant-EC2SecurityGroupIngress -GroupName EC2DemoSecurityGroup -IpPermissions @{IpProtocol = “tcp”; FromPort = 5986; ToPort = 5986; IpRanges = @(“0.0.0.0/0”)}Get-EC2SecurityGroup -GroupNames EC2DemoSecurityGroup | Select -ExpandProperty:IpPermission
Fetch the available AMI ID for the provided region
Get-EC2Image -Owners amazon -Filters @{Name = “name”; Values = “Windows_Server-2016*English*”} | select imageid,name | ft –auto
Create new instances
New-EC2Instance -ImageId ami-000bf92d1a21bf9ac -MinCount 1 -MaxCount 1 -KeyName KeyPair -SecurityGroups EC2DemoSecurityGroup -InstanceType t2.micro$instance = Get-EC2Instance -Filter @{Name = “reservation-id”; Values = “r-092d7d1c85675c615”}
$instance.RunningInstance.State
$instance.RunningInstance.publicdnsname
Fetch default passwords assigned to VMs
$password = Get-EC2PasswordData -InstanceId $instance.RunningInstance.instanceid -PemFile C:\aws\ec2-demo-key.pem -Decrypt
$password
And you’re done!
With years of polished, niche expertise in Azure DevOps Automation services, our team of automation experts has rendered support to several SMBs in automating workloads, saving significant costs on cloud operations.
Got a workload that’s costing you additional business hours and budget? Get in touch with our DevOps automation experts for automating cloud operations. | https://medium.com/@seotabexp/devops-automation-create-windows-amazon-ec2-instance-login-to-vms-using-winrm-port-2e719aab553d | ['Tabexp Apps'] | 2020-05-01 09:47:55.383000+00:00 | ['Aws Ec2', 'Windows', 'AWS', 'Virtual Machine', 'Remote Machine'] |
11 Trending React Native UI Components | REACT NATIVE UI COMPONENTS
React Native encourages you to build the UI of your application using isolated components. It is much easier to build applications using libraries and UI toolkits as it saves time and make development faster.
There are a lot of React Native UI components available to get started. Here, I am listing 11 React Native UI components that you should know. The list does not rank any framework and is listed in a random fashion.
Am I missing anything? Feel free to comment and add your own suggestions. | https://medium.com/hackernoon/11-react-native-ui-components-you-should-know-in-2019-75404e6c9a00 | ['Surender Vikram Singh'] | 2019-01-24 15:50:24.030000+00:00 | ['Mobile App Development', 'React Native', 'Development', 'React', 'UI'] |
2 Hours of ML a Day — Day 4: 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. | Background: 2 Hours of ML a day
Intro: I stumbled upon an ongoing a Kaggle competition — Tabular Playground Series — Jul 2021, which does not have images or audio related data (those are too advanced for me). My plan is to understand the goal or the end result. Following this, my first step is to perform EDA (exploratory data analysis), which will help me understand the data better. During the working of the project, I will refer to — already submitted codes for this competition.
Yesterday’s link
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Starting a bit early today, to get into a better time to do this. During the night, I just struggle a lot more when I get stuck. Hope this time is a better one!
Outlier Detection (contd)
I had talked about a function yesterday, that could be used to identify an outlier. The output of that function is a list of outliers in the form of a list. I googled a lot to identify how to filter a DataFrame based on a list, and its just not working! So instead, I am filtering every variable based on the upper and lower bound identified in the function.
For example: for one of the target variables —
outliers = []
outliers1 = pd.DataFrame()
sorted(df[‘target_carbon_monoxide’])
quantile1, quantile3= np.percentile(df[‘target_carbon_monoxide’],[25,75])
iqr = quantile3-quantile1
lower_bound_val = quantile1 -(1.5 * iqr)
upper_bound_val = quantile3 +(1.5 * iqr) print(“Upper Bound = “, upper_bound_val)
print(“Lower Bound = “, lower_bound_val) df = df[(df[‘target_carbon_monoxide’] >= lower_bound_val) & (df[‘target_carbon_monoxide’] <= upper_bound_val)]
df
For one of the sensor variables
outliers = []
outliers1 = pd.DataFrame()
sorted(df[‘sensor_1’])
quantile1, quantile3= np.percentile(df[‘sensor_1’],[25,75])
iqr = quantile3-quantile1
lower_bound_val = quantile1 -(1.5 * iqr)
upper_bound_val = quantile3 +(1.5 * iqr) print(“Upper Bound = “, upper_bound_val)
print(“Lower Bound = “, lower_bound_val) df = df[(df[‘sensor_1’] >= lower_bound_val) & (df[‘sensor_1’] <= upper_bound_val)]
df
Yes, the initial data stack had 7111 records, but after removing the outliers, it stands at 5850 records — around 17% of the data was removed as outliers.
Outliers are a bit tricky. I dont know if this was an essential step or not, but will keep it for now. If my model results are not significant, I will revisit this part.
For further EDA, I want to try to use a library. I have been browsing through a few recently, and was interested in trying one at least that I might like using.
EDA Libraries exploration
I am following this link, to explore the EDA libraries for now.
a. pandas-profiling
Installing the library
pip install pandas-profiling
Then two lines of code. Here I will be using the dataframe for which the outliers are not removed, to see the results from the library.
from pandas_profiling import ProfileReport
profile = ProfileReport(df, title=”Pandas Profiling Report”)
Exploring the results —
Overview is pretty straightforward, with just the details of the dataset, with additional features like pointing to missing values or duplicate rows.
Next is Variables. Very detailed overview — some points that caught my attention were Min/Max, percentiles & skewness. Since the skewness is between -0.5 and 0.5, the data are fairly symmetrical. Not sure what three times HIGH CORRELATION in red means though — highly correlated with three variables? may be…
Similarly, I will explore other variables as well. I found that sensor_1, sensor_2, sensor_3, sensor_5 and all the three target variables are highly skewed, based on similar summary as shown for deg_C variable
Moving on to Interactions, I personally did not like the representation of this. I would have preferred a scatter plot for easier interpretation. The diagram below shows the interaction between sensor_1 and target_carbon_monoxide.
Correlation is a standard heatmap. I would prefer to list down the highly correlated independent variables at this point —
deg_C is highly correlated to relative_humidity, moderately correlated with absolute_humidity, relative_humidity is moderately correlated to the work_hours. absolute_humidity is highly correlated to sensor_3 and sensor_4 all the 5 sensors are highly correlated to one another!
b. sweet-viz
pip install sweetviz import sweetviz as sv my_report = sv.analyze(df_orig)
my_report.show_html() # Default arguments will generate to “SWEETVIZ_REPORT.html”
The results are quite similar to pandas-profile, however it looks very different
c. autoviz
May be, I am bored at this point, so did not want to resolve this error that I got using autoviz
pip install autoviz #importing Autoviz class
from autoviz.AutoViz_Class import AutoViz_Class#Instantiate the AutoViz class
AV = AutoViz_Class()
error:
d. D-Tale
Unfortunately, I could not make it work as well. Urghh… But I want to move on….
blank output
Autogluon exploration
With half an hour more on my plate. I was looking to explore the autogluon which is an Automated ML tool, that evaluates different models. I have just read about it, but let’s use and see the initial results. Will give me something to think about for the next few hours.
https://pypi.org/project/autogluon/
pip install -U setuptools wheel
pip install -U “mxnet<2.0.0”
pip install autogluon # autogluon==0.2.0
I will reconvene tomorrow! installing autogluon took sometime, as it required restarting the kernel.
Not a bad day! | https://medium.com/@ur.pratibha/2-hours-of-ml-a-day-day-3-5-30-p-m-to-7-30-p-m-25bd37a80d8d | ['Pratibha Ur'] | 2021-07-23 01:17:54.227000+00:00 | ['Outliers', 'Sweetviz', 'Autogluon', 'Pandas Profiling', 'Exploratory Data Analysis'] |
Crossing Boundary: Symbol of Barrier, Imagery of Water, and the Third Space Formation. A Text Analysis on Your Name Engraved Herein | 跨越疆界：《刻在你心底的名字》中的阻隔象徵、水的意象與第三空間的形塑
Poster of Your Name Engraved Herein. A Taiwanese film directed by Guang-Hui Liu.
I. Introduction 導言
As COVID-19 struck the world in 2020, revolutionizing the living way of humanity and destroying almost the whole box office around the world, Your Name Engraved Herein, directed by Taiwanese director, Guang-Hui Liu, marked as a graceful blossom in a downfall winter that brought a light of hope and warmth especially to the world of LGBT films in Taiwan. While reaching the first in Taiwan’s 2020 box office already shows its popularity (not to mention its categorization as gay film to ever surpass Taiwan’s highest box office in the history), the nomination of the “Best Cinematography” in 2020 Golden Horse Awards, the prestigious Taiwanese film festival and award in the Sinophone world, also demonstrates its cinematic achievement (Updated: the Best Cinematography Awards received). This article, as a consequential homage to the beauty of the film, aims at analyzing how the film, through representation of barrier symbols and utilization of water imagery, forms the Third Space in which the two protagonists build and develop relationship, finally to search for and/or surrender themselves by crossing boundaries, factual or virtual.
II. Boundary Formation and the Third Space 疆界的形塑與第三空間
In the film, boundaries are formed by the use of representation of multiple “barriers” which further provide a space for the formation of “Third Space,” where the two protagonists kindle, develop, and even ruin their relationship. According to Edward Soja’s definition in Third Space: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places, Thirdspace is a “radically different way of looking at, interpreting and acting to change the embracing spatiality of human life.” As Firstspace is macroscopic and the factual mapping of a place, the Secondspace stands for its conceptualization. Moving a step further, Thirdspace encompasses the previous two as “radically open and openly radicalizable” for hybridization of emotions, experiences, and events. In this sense, the Thirdspaces formed by the barriers in the film are presented closed, exclusive, and thus meaningful for the characters’ emotional encounter and interaction.
School Fencing: Division between School (Norms and Order) and Outside World (Freedom)
學校圍牆：制度/秩序的校園與自由的校外世界
The first and most obvious barrier symbol is the “school fence” that divides the characters’ world into two: School and Outside World. The school becomes the center for Chia-Han Chang (referred to as A-Han henceforth) and Buo-Te Wang (referred to as Birdy henceforth), the two students in the boy school, Werthers High School, in the age under the Martial Law in Taiwan (1949–1987). Norms and order are imposed on the campus, as the “dormitory supervisor” and “military instructor” are everywhere to invade students’ privacy and life as academic version of “public power” demonstration. As the diegesis moves on, however, the seemingly liberal Outside World reveals as a space for potential social threat, while the restricted world of campus may and could instead offer security and more exclusive Thirdspaces for the youthful lovebirds.
The school fence divides the characters’ world into “School” and the “Outside World.”
School 校園
1. Barrier Symbols 阻隔象徵
Barbed Wire: Against Gender and Sexuality 鐵絲網：性別的阻絕
While A-Han looks through the female student zone through the barbed wire.
The first barrier symbol presented inside the school is the barbed wire used to separate the boys and the girls. The norms are reificated into the actual barbed wire; the two genders are parted strictly. The barbed wire not only stands for the norms and order required but also the public power of the faculty, as the military instructor enters and interrupts the student orchestra’s daily practice: the school is where “students study for college entrance exam and fulfill the obligation for rule obedience.” Nonetheless, as the story moves on, the orchestra turns out as a free space without the gender division and even further becomes where both homosexuality and heterosexuality blooms in the love triangle among A-Han, Birdy, and the female protagonist, BanBan. After all, the dividing barbed wire is just as what the Father puts, “ridiculous.”
Tree Fence: High School Subject Division 樹叢：高校分組的界線
Birdy peeks through the tree fence that divides him and A-Han, when the supervisor is telling A-Han’s mother for his compulsory transfer into Social Sciences Division.
Besides the barbed wire, the tree fence that separates A-Han and Birdy also divides their daily encounter: class division. It stands for the segregation of Taiwan’s high school Science Division or Social Sciences Division, as A-Han is in the former and Birdy the latter. The tree fence is shown when A-Han’s mother comes and listens to A-Han’s mentor’s announcement of his regrouping to Social Sciences Division which is considered inferior in the film’s background. Birdy peeps through the tree fence for A-Han. They were separated, while at last A-Han joins Birdy’s class, and the tree fence (the subject division) disappears, which further provides them time and space for their relationship development and acceleration.
2. Thirdspaces 第三空間
Swimming Pool and Underwater: First Encounter 泳池與水底：初相遇
The swimming pool is the first Thirdspace for A-Han and Birdy. It is the very start of their story, their encounter. They meet for the first time during P.E. class, where the Father teaches the students swimming. Although the swimming pool is not physically exclusive, it represents a limited spiritual Thirdspace for physical contact: the gaze, the observation, and the appreciation. The water then becomes the vehicle for their emotional exchange. When every student dives into the water, it provides a limited private space for A-Han’s voyeurism which, instead of quenching, “ignites” his desire deep in his heart.
Mosquito Net: Birth of Love 蚊帳：愛情的誕生
The mosquito net provides a spiritual space for A-Han and Birdy’s birth of love.
The second Thirdspace, similar to the swimming pool, is also a limited one, in the sense that the mosquito net above A-Han’s bed does not really separate them from his homophobic and bullying roommates, but conditionally forms a spiritual space where Birdy shares the walnuts he steals from dorm supervisor’s room. While the stealth symbolizes resistance to public power, the sharing is the manifestation of Birdy’s love. The shape stands for heart, while the peeling sound is the beating. Inside the heartbeat is the birth of their love. The Thirdspace of Mosquito Net also cinematographically juxtaposes the two: the physical company at last turns into psychology.
Shower Room 淋浴間
a. Impulse: Against Prejudice and Violence 衝動：對偏見與歧視的反抗
While A-Han holds back impulsive Birdy as violence avoidance but also connivance, Birdy’s nudity also allows direct physical contact of the two protagonists.
The first scene of shower room brings in the homophobic prejudice and violent bully in the school, when the junior student is being sexually mistreated by A-Han’s roommates. The symbol of barrier is also used in the construction of the shower room scene, as the wall of three sides and the door form a completely closed and thus exclusive space for A-Han and Birdy’s interaction. Again, while A-Han holds back impulsive Birdy as violence avoidance but also connivance, Birdy’s nudity also allows direct physical contact of the two protagonists. More specifically depicted in the novel, A-Han can even “feel Birdy’s raging heartbeat” in the embrace. The Thirdspace of shower room also gives place to their emotional exchange: this is when A-Han feels Birdy’s recklessness and courage against injustice and human downside, and this also reflects the allusion to the character in the 1984 film Birdy.
b. Sexual Enlightenment: Revelation and Recognition 性啟蒙：轉折與情感展現
Shower room as a Thirdspace for sexual enlightenment for both A-Han and Birdy.
On the other hand, the second scene in the shower room provides a much more intensive emotional and even physical exchange: sexual enlightenment as emotional revelation and recognition in the diegesis. This time no other people are included outside the room in the scene; only A-Han and Birdy are enclosed in the domain. The shower room becomes the private place for sexual behavior, and the extreme (even nearly violent) masturbation urges out the ejaculation of their true feelings. They hug; they kiss; they burst into tears while the warm water showers on both of them. This marks the film’s recognition of the two protagonists’ love for each other, despite its soon downfall in the aftermath.
Society 社會
1. Barrier Symbols 阻隔象徵
Barricade: National Homage 拒馬：國喪
Barricades are used as barriers in the scene when A-Han and Birdy go to Taipei for national homage to the deceased president. The barricade, like the school fencing, symbolizes the order and the restrictions, as the two students join the parade inside the barricade and put on their uniform which also stands for the norms imposed always on the two students while they are in school. Outside the barricade is the normal world with freedom which later on reveals also as potentially dangerous with social prejudice and conservatism that still lingers in the old Martial Law age.
Cascades 瀑布
Cascades are presented in the scene when the grown-up A-Han arrives in Montreal in behold of the Niagara Falls that, recounted through the mouth of the tour guide, separates the two countries of Canada and the United States. The division is again emphasized, and the two separated countries could be metaphorical of the two protagonists eventually parted by the destiny and one’s disability to embrace one’s true self. The addition of heart-breaking story of the aboriginal suicidal girl, on the other hand, deepens the melancholy brought by the waterfall that resembles the flowing tears.
2. Thirdspaces 第三空間
Theater Box: A-Han’s Realization and Recognition 影廳包廂：阿漢的領悟與情感實現
a. Development: Intellectual Exchange and Physical Manifestation of Love
情感的進展：精神交流與情感的物理展現
A-Han kissing Birdy. This is the first time of his direct physical manifestation of his love toward Birdy.
Theater Box is the first exclusive Thirdspace where A-Han and Birdy perform their intellectual and hence spiritual exchange: they together watch the meaningfully alluding film Birdy, in which two male protagonists accompany each other through setbacks and hardship in life. In the novel and the eliminated sections in film, the relationship is even discussed around the topic of “love” under the echoing juxtaposition of the two couples. This is when A-Han realizes Birdy’s importance to him; this is the realization of his feelings manifested through the soft and tender kiss A-Han puts on Birdy’s lips.
b. The First Setback as Potential Social Threat in the Society: Exterior Invasion to Privacy
社會的初次阻礙：私領域的社會性入侵
The theater clerk looks through the window of the box’s door for surveillance on A-Han and Birdy.
However, this kiss in the form of revealing bravery soon triggers potential threat in the outside world of society. Even without academic normal imposition, A-Han’s behavior is under surveillance of theater employee who directly interrupts the homosexuality taking place in the private Thirdspace. “Inappropriate behavior shall be prohibited here,” puts the theater employee to A-Han, in the sight of his manifestation of love. As the conservatism back in old age is still lingering while the Martial Law has just been lifted, homosexuality could only be considered “inappropriate” under the context, just like A-Han once tells Birdy after their failure in military song contest, “You thought the world has changed? No, it hasn’t. It’s still the same.”
Ferry Box: Birdy’s Compensatory Recognition 船艙包廂：Birdy的補償性情感展現
While the theater box stands as the Thirdspace for A-Han’s realization and revelation, the next Thirdspace presented, ferry box, is for Birdy’s. The Thirdspace takes place after the diegetical climax where A-Han and Birdy’s fight at A-Han’s place. Heartbroken, A-Han heads for “somewhere without Birdy’s existence” to Taiwan’s outlying island, Penghu. After the severe fight (both physical in school and mental at home), Birdy cannot but hold onto A-Han with embrace. He only wants to be with A-Han, hugging and sleeping with him. This is the revelation of Birdy’s guilt but also his love, with which, however, the prevailing cowardice brings forth the saddening end to their relationship.
Harbor and Beach: Last Reciprocal Confession 港口與海灘：最後的告白
Lastly, as the film comes to the end, the Ma-Gong Harbor and the beach is the last Thirdspace for A-Han and Birdy in their youth. Only the two exist in this domain, and the coastline is also one symbol of the barrier: it is the limitation of their life, as Birdy puts in response to A-Han, “You can’t go anywhere.” The escaping attempt could only bring forth failure. As the barrier symbols shows, the end is the sea water that prevents human being from marching without “bird wings.” The barrier, however, again allows the formation of an exclusive Thirdspace for the two heroes. This is the last place for their physical and psychological connection: they touch, they kiss, and they accept the truth that there will always lie the limit at the end in their life, and that is why Birdy could only surrender to the reality.
III. Imagery of Water in the Thirdspace: Swimming Pool, Shower Room, and Harbor
第三空間中的水的意象：泳池、淋浴間與港口
Interesting is also the use of “water imagery” in the film especially in the Thirdspaces, inside or outside the main background of school. The cinematographic representation of water diegetically echoes with the three Thirdspaces related to water: swimming pool, shower room, and the harbor, reflecting the two heroes’ relationship and their emotional collision. As important as the representation of water along the storyline, the use of “rain” in many other scenes also serves as what Greg M. Smith defines in Film Structure and the Emotion System as filmic “mood-cue approach” that keeps recalling the Thirdspaces adhered to the protagonists’ relationship development.
1. Swimming Pool: Water as Emotional Conduit for Voyeurism
泳池：凝視的情感媒介
A-Han gazes at Birdy (along with his body) under the water in the swimming pool.
In the swimming pool where A-Han and Birdy first meet each other, the pool water is confined in a closed space and thus calm and tranquil. Its harmony provides a peaceful setting for the development, and the water serves as a conduit for the flow of emotions and feelings between the two characters. Especially in the scene under water while A-Han opens up his eyes fixating on Birdy’s appearance, the water becomes the conduit of “gaze.” Only through the private and secure domain in the underwater could this fatal “homosexual gaze” take place and march all the way to the object of love.
2. Shower Room: Water and Vapor as Boiling Emotional Revelation
淋浴間：情感的沸騰展現
While the violent masturbation takes place, the water appears in the form of vapor that surrounds the two embracing protagonists.
In the second Thirdspace correlated to the water imagery, shower room, the water comes from the shower, hot and surrounded with misty vapor. The mist-like vapor creates a suffocating environment, in which the water in the form of vapor becomes conduit for the violent manifestation of A-Han and Birdy’s desire. Following the masturbation and ejaculation, when A-Han turns the shower on, the boiling emotions echoing with the vaporization condensates back to the flowing water onto both A-Han and Birdy’s bodies, accompanied by the two’s flowing tears and hybridization of emotions: love, affection, regret, and guilt, guilty as Birdy’s repetitive voices of “sorry” echoing in the shower room.
3. Harbor and Beach: Water as Emotional Mass and Limited Reality
港口：比海還深的情感與現實的阻礙界線
Lastly at the harbor and beach, the water is no more calm as the pool or boiling as the vapor in the shower room. It is massed into the ocean surrounding the island and imprisoning the islandic inhabitants. Its mass represents the maximization of A-Han and Birdy’s love for each other, while it also virtualizes the limitation of the world, the norms, the restrictions, and even the prejudice imposed in the society that both of them cannot surpass. They make their final love in the seaside; they caress every inch of their body with affection on the beach, but they are no seagulls following them to Ma-Gong Harbor. A-Han fails at crossing the cliff since he has no wings, and Birdy embodies again the secular force by holding A-Han back to the beach.
Rain as Mood-Cue Approach, the Reminder: Balloon Stealth, Car Accident, and Telephone Booth
雨的「情緒提示手法」：熱氣球、車禍與電話亭
The representation of rain, also connected to the image of water, is, despite the lack of Thirdspace formation, used in the important scenes for A-Han and Birdy’s love dynamics. First of all, in the scene of grand balloon stealth, the rain showers also on the two characters’ faces. The effect of rain is especially emphasized when A-Han, looking up, tries to fix his eye on Birdy up in the air stealing the balloon. The rain pours on A-Han’s face, rendering it difficult for him to see clear and succeed in confessing his love to Birdy, who, on the other hand, keeps attempting to dodge A-Han’s bravery for crossing the boundary set by the traditional old era. With all the timings and opportunities spoiled, A-Han could only go back home on the scooter with despair on his look, soaked with the rain or his own tears.
The next scene showered in rain is the car accident in which Birdy breaks A-Han’s scooter on the street. While Birdy helplessly seats himself on the asphalt awaiting A-Han’s appearance, he is also completely soaked in the rain. The car accident and the destruction of A-Han’s scooter strengthens and ignites Birdy’s guilt toward A-Han, as he at that time has already decided to cross the boundary from homosexuality into heterosexuality and intentionally avoid A-Han. Nonetheless, Birdy still refuses/fails to get back to where he and A-Han together belonged. Like the rain in the grand balloon stealth scene, the rain represents the failure of the conveyance of their love.
The last scene where rain appears is the telephone booth where A-Han calls Birdy after their parting. Not able to express their true feelings to each other, what is left for them to do is say nothing but listen to the song A-Han plays for Birdy, with both of them again soaked in tears. The rain serves as mood-cue approach in these three scenes throughout the film to remind audience of its symbolization of tears and thus sadness that envelops their relationship and the boundary that they can never succeed in crossing. Both the image of water and the appearance of rain brings out the emotional development and revelation in the diegetical aspect and links all those important scenes together.
IV. Boundary Duality: Limitation, Crossing, and Protection
疆界的雙面性：限制、跨越與保護
As boundary obstructs connection and divides spaces into two, it also provides occasions of Thirdspace formation for interaction. One can not only cross the boundary that creates the Thirdspace for further exploration or attempts, crossing the obstructing boundary conspiring to barriers could also bring forth rewards for desire, however, potentially at the cost of threats and setbacks at wider range in the outside world.
1. Crossing School Fencing: Freedom & Potential Danger
跨越學校的圍牆疆界：自由與潛藏危機
The first and most apparent boundary crossing is the beginning when Werthers students are crossing school fence to the outside world of society. The “Trumpet Band” by A-Han and his roommates crosses for freedom of desire and sex as they date female students from other high school and have sexual relationship in the cemetery. Birdy also crosses school fence in the evening for freedom for gluttony as he buys night snack back to the dorm. When A-Han and Birdy are out in Taipei for National Homage, “It’s so nice to be out here. We can do anything we want without surveillance,” says A-Han, which demonstrates the liberty that contrasts the restrictive norms back in school. They smoke; they steal posters in the theater; and they shout to the sky on the scooters at night in the street. It is in the free outside world that A-Han and Birdy are able to intensify their feelings and develop their relationship, even eventually manifesting their love to each other.
Crossing school fence shows as a way of challenging regulations and pursuing for freedom.
Crossing boundary of school fence brings them occasion for crossing the line of friendship and lovers, heterosexuality and homosexuality, while just as previously mentioned, on the other hand, the society could not only represent freedom but also the potential danger that the restrictive school cannot protect. That’s when the theater employee invades into their Thirdspace of theater box intruding and disrupting their affection, and when the police arrest the LGBT protester, Chia-Wei Chi, on the footbridge depriving his right to freedom and equality. This marks the first realization of the two high school lovebirds of the potential severity and limitation in the liberal outside world against their developing, hopeful pure love.
2. Opening Up Shower Room’s Door: Against but Exposure to Prejudice and Violence
跨越淋浴間的疆界：歧視與暴力的反抗和陷入
Birdy showing his recklessness and courage against injustice and sexual bully.
Opening up the shower room’s door and stepping forward against the sexual bully is also a way of crossing physical boundary set by the room’s door. Not able to endure the bully against gay inferior student, Birdy eventually steps out and brings Skinny (Chen-Hung Shieh) away, as a strong contrast to A-Han’s cowardice and surrender to the mainstream heterosexual hegemony embodied by his roommates. Birdy’s courageous rescue of Skinny, nonetheless, as shown later in the film, also results in Da-Ba (main leader of A-Han’s roommates)’s hostility toward Birdy as well as his close relationship with A-Han that further leads to Birdy’s metaphorical jumping from the building.
3. Crossing Tree Fence: Surpassing School Division and Friendship
跨越樹叢的疆界：超越分組與一般友誼的界線
The tree fence, as previously analyzed, blocks away A-Han and Birdy who peeks through the crack when A-Han along with his mother is told of A-Han’s compulsory transfer from Science Division to Social Sciences one. In this scene, A-Han, contrary to the swimming pool scene, becomes the object of desire for Birdy’s gaze and voyeurism. Birdy performs his curiosity and care for A-Han, which supplements the swimming pool scene when A-Han also crosses the boundary of water (from the air down to underwater) just to watch Birdy with affectionate curiosity. A-Han being transferred to Birdy’s class, the tree fence disappears and their relationship moves closer, and this, unfortunately and even fatally, has caused the threat to A-Han’s roommates and classmates that represent the collectivist brotherhood in contrast to A-Han and Birdy’s exclusive, potential homosexuality: “I am now in the same class with Birdy. Why shouldn’t I be going with him but with you?” A-Han replies confidently to his roommates, while this has also led to the castration anxiety in the process of male bonding formation for them. A-Han’s elimination and his forming an exclusive close bonding with Birdy generates not only the anxiety of “extraction from brotherhood” but that of castration threatened by “homosexuality,” in which male also becomes desire of object as represented by A-Han and Birdy’s reciprocal voyeurism.
A-Han turning away from Da-Ba and his group for Birdy, as they are now in the same class.
4. Crossing Gender Division: Failure of Reaction to Homosexual Love
跨越性別疆界：跨越性向界線的失敗
The iconic and symbolic scene when Birdy jumps down from the building into the female zone of the school. This marks his decision to enter the zone of heterosexuality with Ban-Ban from homosexuality with A-Han.
Lastly but most importantly, crossing gender division and limit could be seen and analyzed through Birdy’s jumping down from building into girls’ section as a result of Da-Ba’s counterattack to their castration anxiety. When Birdy is severely bullied by Da-Ba’s group, he resists, he fights back, and grabs onto the high transom window bars like a bird, howling, however, vainly toward the violent representation of imposing heterosexuality. This is why he eventually decides to jump down from the building with the flying gesture like a liberal bird into school’s female section and thus choosing to “retreat to the side of secular, hegemonic heterosexuality.”
Throughout the film so far, both A-Han and Birdy, in order to accept their own feelings toward each other, crosses boundaries for several times, including crossing school fencing into free outside world to get with each other enjoying their world of two, and crossing water surface and tree fence to convey their affection through voyeurism. While this time, Birdy’s crossing the building’s fence is instead an act, a manifestation of his incapability of “crossing the boundary of sexuality,” crossing the line between “heterosexual male-friendship” and “true love and feelings” he has toward A-Han. Just like what Birdy says at the near end of the film to A-Han when he tries to escape to the end of the world without Birdy’s existence, “Where else can you go? You can’t go anywhere.” The image of island, of his own country where he lives, is a grand metaphor of the final and biggest boundary that both two of them cannot cross: at the end of the very land will always be the vast ocean, and they are no fish to swim through and no bird to fly over. The water imagery becomes the metaphorical cruel reality in their life back in that age, and just as what being said in the previous chapter, as a mood-cue approach, it can only re-remind audience of their epic love as tragedy.
V. Conclusion 結語
Through the representation of barrier symbols, the use of water imagery, and the formation of Thirdspace, the film depicts two protagonists, A-Han and Birdy, crossing boundaries of school fence, water surface, tree fence, and building’s fence to respond to their surrounding domains and their feelings to each other in the course of their relationship. They watch their love happen, grow, develop and even quenched in the closed and exclusive Thirdspaces with physical, intellectual, and psychological exchange as well as interaction. As barriers could be crossed and conquered, boundaries, physical as ocean and metaphorical as sexuality, are nonetheless the line that both A-Han and Birdy can never cross and hence could only make the tragic epic out of this love. The film succeeds in diegetically recounting an epic love story against the whole world as set in the background of Martial Law in Taiwan, and cinematographically presenting two beautiful youths’ dynamics among each other and different scenes of barriers, boundaries, and spaces. Here’s to every person in love to ever overcome obstacles that lie ahead in the search of their love, and to every setback to be conquered by people with all sexualities and sexual orientations.
Here’s to the epic, to the film. | https://medium.com/@fiersandlimone/crossing-boundary-symbol-of-barrier-imagery-of-water-and-the-third-space-formation-a9e6097821f7 | ['Fiers'] | 2020-12-27 09:01:58.573000+00:00 | ['Film', 'Taiwan', 'LGBT', 'Movies', 'Filmreview'] |
Five Ways to Be a More Productive Writer | Five Ways to Be a More Productive Writer
‘Responding’ vs ‘Reacting ‘ and what that means in your journey to become a better writer
Photo by XPS on Unsplash
What’s the difference between responding and reacting?
Imagine that you are doing a follow-up session with your doctor for a problem that will not seem to go away. He has prescribed some treatment for you and tells you:
You are responding to the treatment; or
You are reacting to the treatment
Which would you rather your doctor tell you? I believe you would rather be told that you are responding to the treatment.
A similar outlook can be used to approach your remote work. That is, do you want to be responding to the work you need to do (a proactive approach), or do you want to be reacting to the work you need to do (a passive approach). Inspired by Cole Shafer’s Freelancing Course, he wrote the analogy as a segue into ways to be a more effective remote worker. I wanted to expand on the proactive approach (responding to work) and share other ways that I think will help you become a better writer.
Set up the work the night before
When you work as a management consultant, you have multiple projects and tasks that you need to manage and prioritize. To add to this further, you have ad hoc requests come in from managers and clients. The worst thing that you could do was to let your day be dictated by ad hoc requests because you would never make a dent on your to-do list.
That’s why, after having several ad hoc days in a row, I took ten minutes at the end of my workday to write all the things I needed to do the next day. It was half brain-dump and half my to-do list, but it was a simple way to remember what my priorities are for the next day and to make sure I am focusing on those priorities.
For me, as a writer, I use the ten minutes at the end of my workday to brainstorm ideas and write headlines or outlines. That way, I am ‘planning ahead’. I’m not sitting down in front of a blank page trying to come up with an idea, headline, outline, and all the writing at once. I set myself up for success by having an outline so I can focus on the writing.
Develop a morning ritual to prime your body and mind
Many articles have been written about morning habits. Heck, I even wrote a book about all the kinds of successful habits that leaders, entrepreneurs, and athletes use in their lives.
No matter what your morning habits are, I believe there is value in establishing one for a few reasons:
There is comfort in developing a routine that you do every day
Like a Pavlovian dog, you link your routine to feeling good and productive
The routine helps to prime your body and mind for the day ahead
My writing routine for example comprises waking up, stretching, making myself some tea, doing some light reading, journaling, and then sitting down at the computer to write Medium articles. I can’t tell you what things you should do, but I can tell you the elements that other successful individuals use through Hal Elrod’s acronym SAVERS:
Silence (meditation, yoga, etc.)
Affirmation (search on YouTube for positive affirmations)
Visualization (think about what a successful day looks like for you)
Exercise (can be stretching, bodyweight exercises, a run)
Reading (learning something new)
Scribe (journaling your thoughts)
No phone and no distractions
One of the first things I do is I put away my phone and charge it before I get into my morning routine. I usually do not charge my phone overnight, letting it get dangerously low by the morning so I am forced to charge (and stow it away) rather than leaving it by my side as I write.
I used to silence my phone and disable all notifications while leaving it by the side of my computer while working, but I found it too easy to reach over and look at what I missed every once in a while. Do I need to see what Trump has said in the Presidential Debate right now? Or whether any of my friends have messaged me with funny cat videos?
Make it a practice to put away your phone so you are not constantly checking it for social media, messages, or other distractions. Putting some distance between you and your phone makes you think twice before you walk over to check notifications.
Take productive breaks
Maybe you use the Pomodoro technique where you work on a task for 25 minutes and then take a 5-minute break (and every 4 pomodoros, you take a longer 20-minute break). Or you have your own focused time for writing.
But have you considered what your breaks should look like? Productive breaks do not include scrolling through social media on your phone or checking and responding to email. Instead, here are a few things that I do that I consider ‘productive’:
Put on your gym clothes and do yoga
Refill your tea and take a few deep breaths
Meditate
Getting yourself a healthy snack of yogurt and nuts
Talk to a loved one and give them a hug
I consider these more effective breaks because you are disconnected from a screen. Find ways to take a break away from technology.
Batching activities
Wang, what about email and phone calls for work? If I don’t reply to emails, my boss starts following up with me over Instant Message and it is annoying.
Okay, I get it. Emails and phone calls are musts for your line of work. In this case, do what Tim Ferriss suggests: batching.
Tim Ferriss suggests batching emails, phone calls, and other admin work into a single time slot. For example, and this is extreme so please adapt for your situation, Tim has an auto-responder that says that he only answers emails between specific times, for instance, 12–1 PM and 5–6 PM. In this way, he is not constantly in his inbox answering emails as they come (or don’t come) and when he does respond to emails, he is focused only on answering emails, which means he is more productive than switching between tasks (which as research shows, kills productivity).
Final thought
Just because writing is a challenge does not mean there are not ways to set yourself up for more productive writing sessions. Whether it is developing a morning ritual to prime your mind, planning and setting things up for yourself ahead of time, taking productive breaks, putting away your phone, or batching admin work, you can take a proactive approach to writing, thus being able to respond to your work rather than reacting. | https://medium.com/curious/five-ways-to-be-a-more-productive-writer-95bfe5f32727 | ['Wang Yip'] | 2020-10-06 15:35:26.555000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Writer', 'Productivity', 'Writing Process', 'Writing Tips'] |
Wisdom from Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come | As Ebenezer Scrooge once observed, the festive season can be expensive. Enjoy good cheer all year round with our wisdom from Christmases Past, Present and Yet to Come.
Scrooge is probably the most famous of all Charles Dickens’s creations. He’s also, perhaps, the most misunderstood. You probably remember him as just a selfish old miser. What people forget is that he had good reasons for his penny-pinching ways. The Ghost of Christmas Past shows us a deprived child and a hard-up young man, desperate to escape his former circumstances. It isn’t really nastiness that makes Ebenezer what he becomes — it’s fear that he might end up that way again.
Of course, Scrooge learns his lesson just in time, after receiving some heavy-duty advice. But he could have saved himself a lot of trouble — and terror — if he’d seen a different kind of adviser much sooner. He could then have enjoyed a life of financial ease without having to be so mean or miss out on the joys of Christmas.
We’ve summoned up our own three spirits of advice so that you can feel secure without being a Scrooge.
Lessons of Christmas Past
Here are a few blunders that you may have made in the past — perhaps sending a ghostly chill through your finances:
Spending more money than thought: Have you splashed out on flash gifts to impress someone, only for the items to gather dust? Think harder about what loved ones will really value and use, and your money won’t be wasted.
Social media rivalries: There’s huge online peer pressure to be seen to be having the perfect Christmas. If you’ve ever bought extravagant decorations, Christmas crackers containing jewellery or electronics, or far too many presents for your kids just so you can post impressive photos on Instagram (yes, we’re onto you), then take a step back and ask yourself if it was worth it.
Letting Christmas catch you by surprise: Christmas comes every year, and it’s always costly — yet somehow you keep forgetting to budget for it. This year, work out how much more you spend over the holiday, divide it by twelve, and add this amount to your monthly savings plan. That way, next Christmas should be paid for in advance with much less last-minute stress.
Tips for Christmas Present
No, not just tips on what presents to buy, but general wisdom and insights for the here and now:
Combine gifts with charity: For the right person, a carefully chosen charitable donation can be the perfect gift. Sponsoring a child, an endangered species or another good cause will help you both feel the Christmas spirit, while providing a sponsorship pack that can be unwrapped on the day. If you choose your recipient wisely, this could be far better received than a more materialistic gift — so don’t be afraid to be different.
Try volunteering: You can ease the annual guilt of over-indulgence by giving up some of your time during the winter break period. Charities such as Crisis, FoodCycle, AgeUK and Re-engage are always in need of extra help at this time of year. Delegate some of your domestic festive duties to a family member and lend a hand to those less fortunate. You’ll enjoy your own Christmas all the more.
Remember that charity can save you money too: If you’re a higher rate taxpayer and you make charitable donations using Gift Aid, you can claim back the difference between your rate of tax and the basic rate — that is, £25 for every £100 you donate. You can do this through your tax return. You can save even more tax if you plan to leave money to charity in your will. Money bequeathed to charity is exempt from inheritance tax, and if you give away at least 10% of your estate then the overall rate of inheritance tax drops from 40% to 36%.
Don’t waste the bonus: If you’re lucky enough to get a Christmas bonus in your pay packet, resist the urge to blow it all on extra lights. If you haven’t let Christmas catch you by surprise (see above) you should aim to put at least some of it aside for a rainy (or snowy) day. You have a number of options here: put it into savings, invest it, add to your children’s savings, make an overpayment on your mortgage, or even make an extra pension contribution to benefit from additional tax relief.
Guidance for Christmas Yet to Come
The future is nothing to be scared of. By looking ahead, you can be ready to enjoy it when the time comes:
Save! It’s the simplest advice, but saving little and often is by far the best way to build up your spending power. Think of saving as a way to focus your efforts on the things that really matter, rather than letting your hard work go to waste on trivial things that don’t make you happy.
Invest for the future: Christmas is the time for children — and if you have children, you also have some easily foreseeable financial goals. For instance, you know when they’ll start and leave school, and when they’ll reach adulthood, so you can plan a long-term investment strategy as soon as they’re born — or even sooner.
Think of the elderly (that’s you, in the future!): Give your future self the ultimate Christmas present by planning your retirement income a long way in advance. The earlier you can optimise your pension plans, the more comfortably-off you’ll be when you finally stop work.
If you would like to talk about any of the issues in this article or need more general help with your finances, please get in touch with us.
This article first appeared on Unbiased.
Read this article on the NorthStar website. | https://medium.com/@ns_wm/wisdom-from-christmas-past-present-and-yet-to-come-712ad8f4b15d | ['Northstar Wealth Management'] | 2020-12-22 19:47:38.728000+00:00 | ['Money', 'Christmas', 'Financial Planning'] |
How to use machine learning for anomaly detection and condition monitoring | Technical section:
It is hard to cover the topics of machine learning and statistical analysis for anomaly detection without also going into some of the more technical aspects. I will still avoid going too deep into the theoretical background (but provide some links to more detailed descriptions). If you are more interested in the practical applications of machine learning and statistical analysis when it comes to e.g. condition monitoring, feel free to skip ahead to the “Condition monitoring use-case” section.
Approach 1: Multivariate statistical analysis
Dimensionality reduction using principal component analysis: PCA
As dealing with high dimensional data is often challenging, there are several techniques to reduce the number of variables (dimensionality reduction). One of the main techniques is principal component analysis (PCA), which performs a linear mapping of the data to a lower-dimensional space in such a way that the variance of the data in the low-dimensional representation is maximized. In practice, the covariance matrix of the data is constructed and the eigenvectors of this matrix are computed. The eigenvectors that correspond to the largest eigenvalues (the principal components) can now be used to reconstruct a large fraction of the variance of the original data. The original feature space has now been reduced (with some data loss, but hopefully retaining the most important variance) to the space spanned by a few eigenvectors.
Multivariate anomaly detection
As we have noted above, for identifying anomalies when dealing with one or two variables, data visualization can often be a good starting point. However, when scaling this up to high-dimensional data (which is often the case in practical applications), this approach becomes increasingly difficult. This is fortunately where multivariate statistics comes to help.
When dealing with a collection of data points, they will typically have a certain distribution (e.g. a Gaussian distribution). To detect anomalies in a more quantitative way, we first calculate the probability distribution p(x) from the data points. Then when a new example, x, comes in, we compare p(x) with a threshold r. If p(x)<r, it is considered as an anomaly. This is because normal examples tend to have a large p(x) while anomalous examples tend to have a small p(x)
In the context of condition monitoring, this is interesting because anomalies can tell us something about the “health state” of the monitored equipment: Data generated when the equipment approaches failure, or a sub-optimal operation, typically have a different distribution than data from “healthy” equipment.
The Mahalanobis distance
Consider the problem of estimating the probability that a data point belongs to a distribution, as described above. Our first step would be to find the centroid or center of mass of the sample points. Intuitively, the closer the point in question is to this center of mass, the more likely it is to belong to the set. However, we also need to know if the set is spread out over a large range or a small range, so that we can decide whether a given distance from the center is noteworthy or not. The simplistic approach is to estimate the standard deviation of the distances of the sample points from the center of mass. By plugging this into the normal distribution we can derive the probability of the data point belonging to the same distribution.
The drawback of the above approach was that we assumed that the sample points are distributed about the center of mass in a spherical manner. Were the distribution to be decidedly non-spherical, for instance ellipsoidal, then we would expect the probability of the test point belonging to the set to depend not only on the distance from the center of mass, but also on the direction. In those directions where the ellipsoid has a short axis the test point must be closer, while in those where the axis is long the test point can be further away from the center. Putting this on a mathematical basis, the ellipsoid that best represents the set’s probability distribution can be estimated by calculating the covariance matrix of the samples. The Mahalanobis distance (MD) is the distance of the test point from the center of mass divided by the width of the ellipsoid in the direction of the test point.
In order to use the MD to classify a test point as belonging to one of N classes, one first estimates the covariance matrix of each class, usually based on samples known to belong to each class. In our case, as we are only interested in classifying “normal” vs “anomaly”, we use training data that only contains normal operating conditions to calculate the covariance matrix. Then, given a test sample, we compute the MD to the “normal” class, and classify the test point as an “anomaly” if the distance is above a certain threshold.
Note of caution: Use of the MD implies that inference can be done through the mean and covariance matrix — and that is a property of the normal distribution alone. This criteria is not necessarily fulfilled in our case, as the input variables might not be normal distributed. However, we try anyway and see how well it works!
Approach 2: Artificial Neural Network
Autoencoder networks
The second approach is based on using autoencoder neural networks. It is based on similar principles as that of the above statistical analysis, but with some slight differences.
An autoencoder is a type of artificial neural network used to learn efficient data codings in an unsupervised manner. The aim of an autoencoder is to learn a representation (encoding) for a set of data, typically for dimensionality reduction. Along with the reduction side, a reconstructing side is learnt, where the autoencoder tries to generate from the reduced encoding a representation as close as possible to its original input.
Architecturally, the simplest form of an autoencoder is a feedforward, non-recurrent neural network very similar to the many single layer perceptrons which makes a multilayer perceptron (MLP) — having an input layer, an output layer and one or more hidden layers connecting them — but with the output layer having the same number of nodes as the input layer, and with the purpose of reconstructing its own inputs.
Figure 2: Autoencoder network
In the context of anomaly detection and condition monitoring, the basic idea is to use the autoencoder network to “compress” the sensor readings to a lower-dimensional representation, which captures the correlations and interactions between the various variables. (Essentially the same principle as the PCA model, but here we also allow for non-linear interactions between the variables).
The autoencoder network is then trained on data representing the “normal” operating state, with the goal of first compressing and then reconstructing the input variables. During the dimensionality reduction, the network learns the interactions between the various variables and should be able to re-construct them back to the original variables at the output. The main idea is that as the monitored equipment degrades, this should affect the interaction between the variables (e.g. changes in temperatures, pressures, vibrations, etc.). As this happens, one will start to see an increased error in the networks re-construction of the input variables. By monitoring the re-construction error, one can thus get an indication of the “health” of the monitored equipment, as this error will increase as the equipment degrades. Similar to the first approach of using the Mahalanobis distance, we here use the probability distribution of the reconstruction error to identify whether a data point is normal or anomalous. | https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-use-machine-learning-for-anomaly-detection-and-condition-monitoring-6742f82900d7 | ['Vegard Flovik'] | 2020-09-29 07:11:34.017000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Analysis', 'Predictive Analytics', 'Towards Data Science', 'Statistics'] |
The magical 2 minutes. Have you ever sat through a full movie… | Have you ever sat through a full movie that you didn’t like after the first 15 min?
How about a 1-hour intense workout session? Why were you motivated to get through the whole session though you usually hate working out?
If we went by logic, there was no good reason to get through the whole movie or the complete exercise routine.
So, what gives?
The 2-min rule
The starter ritual that propels us forward to complete a certain routine is called a Gateway Habit.
Our brains are wired to keep us going with whatever we’ve started.
This is great news!
Anytime you find yourself postponing something hard, all you need to do is to get it started.
For example, one of the things I procrastinate on is blogging.
So I devised a 2-min gateway habit to just help me get started:
Open up my laptop Open up my favourite writing tool and set it to time-out if I stop writing within 2-min [*]. And wallah! By the time I’m done with 2 minutes, I’ve built up enough momentum and motivation to finish the post.
The first two minutes are all it takes me to get over the fear/anxiety/motivation of writing. The fear of f not coming up having any ideas to write about. The anxiety of if I’d be able to write clearly enough. Or if anyone would read it. Or how long I can keep doing this…
Just 2-min and poof! All those thoughts and worries are gone — and I’m in a state of flow to complete what I started.
Try it. It works like a charm.
[*] I’ve now got a bookmark that takes me straight to my favourite writer with the 2-min timer already set. Here’s the link that does that. | https://medium.com/@vaidy/gateway-habits-9a5adcd123b6 | ['Vaidy Bala'] | 2020-02-22 11:38:34.994000+00:00 | ['Procrastination', 'Atomic Habit', 'Writing'] |
Integrify: Your gate to software development skills and employment | Things are progressing in a fast pace and we’re thrilled about it!
We are excited to announce that our first programming cohort started on 4.12.2017 right after Slush.
We received hundreds of applications and interviewed 100+ applicants.
The applicants were very good and it was painfully difficult to select only 10 participants for the upcoming program.
However, if you were not among the first 10 to start our program, no worries, we are planing to start a new program in the beginning of next year around February/March.
So regarding applying to our program
We offer a boot-camp style of learning experience. The program is a full-time commitment organized Monday-Friday from 09–17. The first six months consist of classroom teaching by extraordinary teachers following with a 6 month internship at one of our partner companies. Our curriculum is designed to consist of very practical coding skill with numerous real life cases to really get into the art of web development.
On the technical side, we are focusing on modern open-source front-end technologies such as JavaScript, React.js, Redux/Flux. In essence, technologies that will get you started and are very much sought after by the current market.
We are now open for applicantions for the next batch starting around February / March 2018. The program will take place in Helsinki.
Intensive and accelerated program for employing skilled programmers in the Finnish job market
You are encouraged to apply if you are:
1. Highly motivated and truly want to become a software developer
2. Skilled logically
3. Have a good command of English language
4. Have a university degree or equivalent
If you have a background/experience in software development or coding languages preferably HTML5, JavaScript, Python, PHP, SQL — it would be considered a major plus.
The whole focus of the program is to provide a fast-track to the world of software development and employment in Finland. Our partner companies are excited to hire and recruit our graduates — so there will be plenty of opportunities to kick-off your career in Finland.
If this resonates with you please send your CV in English to [email protected]
with the subject line (Program Application). Name the attachments (firstname_lastname_CV) and cover letter (firstname_lastname_CoverLetter)
We will contact the suitable candidates for interviews.
Note: we are currently processing applicants living in the city of Helsinki
Good luck!
Eyas Taha
Head of HR & Operations
www.integrify.fi | https://medium.com/integrify/integrify-your-gate-to-software-development-skills-and-employment-572e218b73cd | ['Eyas Taha'] | 2017-12-22 12:31:00.634000+00:00 | ['Finland', 'Programming', 'Software Development', 'Jobs', 'Integrify'] |
How Can Cloud Computing and Blockchain Reduce the Bullwhip Effect in Supply Chain? | Originally published on the Infopulse blog.
The modern business landscape commands more complex supply chains. With more links being present in the chain, the risk of failure at some stages becomes higher. Costly delays, insufficient or excess inventory, gaps in production planning are just among the few “symptoms” of ineffective supply chain management. And all of these often stem from lack of visibility into the supply chain.
In 2018, 21% of supply chain managers named “visibility” as their biggest organizational obstacle. The number may not seem significant. But just a year before that, only 12% mentioned visibility among the top challenges. This should come as no surprise considering that an average company now needs to pass 52 pieces of data across the supply chain. And traditional ERP or SCM (Supply Chain Management) systems can no longer cope with managing so much information.
As a result of limited data processing capabilities and lack of collaboration within a supply chain, a major issue emerges — the bullwhip effect.
What is the Bullwhip Effect and How It Manifests in Supply Chain Management
The bullwhip effect refers to an occurrence, taking place in the supply chain. This effect takes place when the demand at the downstream end (customer/retailer) causes larger variance at the upstream (factory/manufacturing facility).
In short, the slow-moving customer demand can create significant swings in production for the supplier at the opposite end of the supply chain. | https://medium.com/@infopulseglobal_9037/how-can-cloud-computing-and-blockchain-reduce-the-bullwhip-effect-in-supply-chain-6e88f7b3dfa4 | [] | 2019-09-23 14:27:03.823000+00:00 | ['Supply Chain', 'Cloud Computing', 'Smart Contracts', 'Blockchain', 'Supply Chain Management'] |
If LeBron James Needs Rest and Recovery, You Probably Do Too | If LeBron James Needs Rest and Recovery, You Probably Do Too
Hustle culture isn’t doing you any favors
Photo: Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images
LeBron James told the productivity guru Tim Ferriss on his show that he sleeps eight or nine hours each night. Sometimes 10. If the basketball star can’t get that stretch in at night, he’ll catch up with a two-hour nap.
And it’s not just sleep that’s vital to James’ regime: As he chatted with Ferriss, you could hear some rustling in the background. His trainer of 15 years, Mike Mancias, explained that the athlete was applying ice to his knees.
“Recovery never stops,” Mancias said. That’s the sentence to remember.
“If LeBron plays 40 minutes one night, if he plays 28 minutes one night,” said Mancias, “we’re still going to keep recovery as our number one focus, whether that be in nutrition, whether that be in hydration, more flexibility exercises, stuff in the weight room. It’s a never-ending process, really. And I think that’s the approach that we must take in order for us to be successful.”
James isn’t the only top athlete who’s obsessive about quality shut-eye. Usain Bolt, Venus Williams, Maria Sharapova, and Steve Nash also cite lots of sleep as crucial to their performance. It’s obvious that sleep is essential — not just for physically demanding activities like sports, but also for knowledge work and creative professions.
But sleep, and the lack of it, isn’t the only issue. Rest and recovery are also key — and not just for professional athletes. We all know how tough it can be to host a long meeting, or how exhausted we are after hours of creativity. So, why are we so reluctant to give ourselves the time we need to recover?
Sleep is still a hard sell
It’s not just that we can’t stand the idea of working less in order to sleep more — it’s working less for any reason at all that petrifies us. This deeply embedded cult of busy isn’t something you can combat with a long vacation and a few pills. It requires a huge shift in societal attitudes and awareness.
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors “worked” about 3 to 5 hours per day. Many people today could probably get away with less work than that to ensure their survival, yet we keep busting our backs. Work hours have barely changed since the 1950s, and have actually increased recently.
Although sleep health in the United States has been improving, in 2018, a mere 27% of Americans reported getting the recommended seven to nine hours on weekdays, and only 10% claimed they prioritize sleep. Hustle culture is still alive and kicking, with Elon Musk admitting it’s often “no sleep or Ambien” and one in three Goldman Sachs employees feeling “utterly strung out” by their work at the bank.
If sleep really is so central to success, then why is it so hard to get people excited about going to bed? Well, for starters, no matter how good it is for our bodies and minds, sleep feels like dead time. There’s no real way to multitask with sleep, no matter how hard we try. It’s not like running, where you can turn on a podcast and passively soak up ideas along the way. With sleep, you’re forced to single-task with no recollection of the time you put in — and that’s tough to swallow.
The deeper problem
Sleep is just the tip of the iceberg. The real problem runs much deeper — and it starts with the status of work in our modern culture.
This has both cultural and technological causes. We invented machines to alleviate manual labor, but then applied that model to creative and intellectual labor as well. In his book, Rest, the researcher Alex Soojung-Kim Pang explains:
The modern office was conceptualized as a machine for rationalizing and organizing intellectual labor, and it copied the working hours of factories. But the model has been an imperfect fit in creative industries, as it’s extremely hard to measure productivity and quality in creative and knowledge work.
Eight-hour shifts, an open and transparent physical environment, clocking times — these all make sense for producing units of a tangible product. But for year-long projects to develop innovative business strategies? Not so much. Yet we still have the 40-hour work week, open offices, and time-tracking systems.
Meanwhile, status-driven spending, increased parenting stress, compulsive use of social media, and long commutes keep our minds busy outside of work too — despite our domestic lives being increasingly automated, thanks to washing machines, kitchen appliances, and smart-home technology.
If the purpose of civilization is to indeed make us more civilized, then it seems we’ve got it backwards. We’re either busy using computers for the wrong tasks, or we’re trying to act as computers ourselves in areas where that clearly doesn’t work, like thinking and creating.
A framing of downtime I want to embrace
Let’s go back to that moment in the chat between Tim Ferriss and Lebron James: “Recovery never stops.”
Clearly, a good sleep routine is just one part of a much bigger picture: We must complement work with seemingly unrelated activities if we really want to deliver our best performance.
Recovery is key, and it plays a larger role than passive recuperation. It’s active restoration. Just as James’ routine involves icing, hydration, and special exercises and stretches, we can all find ways to recover; pockets of rest to restore ourselves throughout the day.
Taking breaks and having fun are as valuable to the creative or intellectual worker as sleep and nutrition are to the world-class athlete
Resting is a “skill,” Pang argues in Rest, when he describes the problems with our modern attitude around work:
I’ve argued that we should treat work and rest as equals; that we should treat rest as a skill; that the best, most restorative kinds of rest are active; and that when practiced well, rest can make us more creative and productive, without forcing us into a funhouse mirror of endless work and ever-rising expectations. A life that takes rest seriously is not only a more creative life. When we take the right to rest, when we make rest fulfilling, and when we practice rest through our days and years, we also make our lives richer and more fulfilling.
That’s why taking breaks and having fun are as valuable to the creative or intellectual worker as sleep and nutrition are to the world-class athlete: Rest isn’t just the well of physical recovery, it’s also the spring of insight.
How to live a restful life
The psychological benefit of seeing rest as a skill or a habit to build, as opposed to a mere necessity, is that you’ll feel more in charge. Pang has several ideas as to how to make this mental shift:
Pang’s “deliberate rest” concept suggests that by developing it as a mindset, “you’ll start treating work and leisure as two sides of one coin: living a good, happy, meaningful life.” Instead of seeing downtime as a forced retreat from the default of busy, you’ll start looking for pockets of calm everywhere. Recovery never stops, remember?
Once you adopt this practice, it turns out you can rest in lots of situations. You can meditate on the subway or observe your fellow riders, rather than send emails or listen to a podcast on 1.5x speed. You can walk to your coworker’s desk instead of calling them, or simply look out the window from your desk and let your mind wander. All of this is rest — and it’s empowering.
All you need to know
World-class athletes like James learn to value a good night’s sleep early in their careers. They have to. Pushing their body to its physical limits has a price.
Those in less physical professions may not feel the consequences of creative or intellectual work as immediately or explicitly, so to them sleep and other means of recovery might appear to be obstacles on the path to success.
In reality, our biggest roadblock is our inability to let go of this idea. Sometimes the fastest way to gain new perspective and move forward is to take a step back, divert our attention, and let ideas sit. When we cling to our work too desperately, we’ll miss the very moments we most desire from it.
Only if we embrace rest as one half of a balanced scale can we truly perform our best, think our best, and live our best life. That requires active relaxation, which might mean working fewer hours, taking more breaks, and cultivating a hobby purely for fun.
But it also requires that we make rest a real habit and an attitude we carry within. To do that, we need to look for quiet moments — quiet thoughts, really — everywhere and all the time.
If we manage to find them, we’ll build what we’d like to see when we look back in our old age: not a life full of work, but one full of balance. I’d like to think that’s what LeBron dreams about at night. | https://forge.medium.com/why-rest-is-essential-to-high-performance-975db3f68863 | ['Niklas Göke'] | 2019-08-06 21:13:50.742000+00:00 | ['Productivity', 'Live', 'Creativity', 'Health', 'Succeed'] |
The Glove | Ensuing treks led me to The Burren, in county Clare, where I met an integrated family of two-leggeds and winged ones, whose shared love is given in educating others about the need to protect those with wings.
“Who wants to hold the barn owl?” the handler queried his fascinated audience. The falcons at The Burren Birds of Prey Centre were only to be ‘managed’ by experienced handlers, so I waited, hoping for an opportunity to share a few moments of intimacy with one of these winged ones. Barn owls are so lovely! And, a goddess-send for country dwellings of every kind.
Sitting at the front of the audience arena, I tentatively raised my hand, not wanting to eclipse the adventures of any of the children present. After all, I’d spent my day with this family already. The handler, with whom I had enjoyed a hawk walk that morning, grinned and nodded, “come on then.”
Donning the gauntlet, I placed my hand just behind the owl’s legs as I’d learned that morning. An experienced ‘educator,’ it lightly hopped aboard. Imagine my amazement, when the leather glove protecting my hand was heavier than the owl it supported!
“It’s so light!” I couldn’t help but exclaim as the owl and I observed one another, eye to eye. The handler grinned again, as Sir Barn Owl fluttered back onto his perch, preening slightly as he settled.
Source, my iPhone
I couldn’t stop thinking about how the bird weighed less than the falconer’s glove protecting my hand. I’d had the lessons, of course. The birds push off on take-off, and grip on landing, and can unintentionally injure human flesh with their talons. But the owl had been so gentle, so serene, even in the presence of an audience. Would it truly have injured me? The facility can’t take that chance, of course.
Why are our bodies so alien to this world? What weights do we carry, needed or not, that allegedly protect us? Will we ever truly remember how to lighten up and be part of nature?
Is our armoring always heavier than what it protects us from? To what have we bequeathed our inherent connections with power? | https://medium.com/divine-mother-portal/the-glove-c313abcc8321 | ['Nalini Macnab'] | 2020-12-04 18:06:23.807000+00:00 | ['Nature', 'Protection', 'Birds', 'Wisdom', 'Consciousness'] |
Plant a forest of kisses | I will walk for miles while you’re asleep
to find some land to keep
and plant a forest of kisses
on each cheek,
so when you wake, you’ll see
I grew for you,
this land of plenty.
Never feel your hands are empty;
you’ll always have mine to hold
on to.
Yes,
that’s what mothers do.
I will climb a mountain while you dream
to find a crystal stream
and stoop to fill myself
to quench your thirst,
so when you wake, you’ll see
pure liquid love
and drink from me.
You’ll never miss a drop, until;
one day you’re not a baby, you’re
my boy.
Yes,
that’s a mother’s joy.
I will gather firewood through the night
to keep our stove alight
and throw myself upon it,
if I must,
so when you wake, you’ll see
a light still on;
when I am gone
you’ll never be alone. I’m in
the dark that you’re so
fearful of.
Yes,
that’s a mother’s love. | https://psiloveyou.xyz/plant-a-forest-of-kisses-ff8ff9aba6ea | ['Amy Knight'] | 2020-12-27 13:02:59.733000+00:00 | ['Poetry Sunday', 'Love', 'Maternal', 'Poem', 'Motherhood Journey'] |
Startups that were founded by designers you didn’t know about | Think of any successful and famous startup and, most likely, their founders were either engineers or business people. Nonetheless that trend is reverting. Products and services that you use on daily basis are now created and delivered by startups whose founders are designers. Here you can see some of these companies and their founders.
Enjoy! 🤘
Youtube
Founded by Chad Hurley, during his tenure at Ebay, Hurley designed the original PayPal logo. | https://medium.com/dsgnrs/startups-that-were-founded-by-designers-you-didnt-know-about-651b020dd4cf | ['.Dsgnrs. Team'] | 2017-02-06 09:08:10.975000+00:00 | ['UX', 'Startup', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Designers', 'Design'] |
PayPal Quits Facebook Libra for China? | PayPal bails on Facebook immediately after becoming first foreign payment company in China; betting on China’s digital coin over Libra?
Just four days after PayPal announced it became the first foreign company to acquire a payments licence in China, it ditched the Facebook Libra consortium it was in. The Libra Association is composed of Facebook and 27 other companies and organizations, which includes PayPal’s rival Stripe.
Two days before PayPal bailed, The Wall Street Journal reported that Visa, Mastercard and other members of the consortium, were also “reconsidering their involvement following a backlash from U.S. and European government officials”.
PayPal’s vote in favor of Chinese communism?
Government regulation is the biggest stumbling block for Libra. A CNBC article that broke the PayPal withdrawal news said that Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell raised “serious concerns regarding privacy, money laundering, consumer protection, financial stability” and that Maxine Waters, Chairwoman of the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services, said that Congress would “move aggressively” on the Libra issue so that it can be stopped until they “get a handle on this”.
In contrast, shortly after Facebook announced Libra, China sped up its own plans to issue a central bank backed digital currency, which is now “almost ready for launch”. Given Libra’s current troubles, China’s digital currency could become the first in the world.
“We look forward to partnering with China’s financial institutions and technology platforms, providing a more comprehensive set of payment solutions to businesses and consumers, both in China and globally.” — Dan Schulman, President and CEO of PayPal
In the last four decades of economic reform, one of China’s biggest advantage has been its ability to implement market reforms and force conformance within the private industry.
Indeed, besides mobile wallets, China’s brand of government controlled capitalist economy has resulted in the only domestic payments network — UnionPay, that can rival Mastercard and Visa. This, combined with its massive consumer base, also makes it the only country that could possibly challenge the US and western financial institutions for dominance in global e-commerce and online payments.
Is China using PayPal to dominate digital currencies?
PayPal is the most significant western player in the online payments space. The only market it has never succeeded in penetrating is China, where Alipay (Alibaba) and WeChat Pay (Tencents) still rules in e-commerce. No doubt the blocking of entry to western players — who had a much earlier head start —helped the ascendance of local ones.
Now that has changed. The number one western player is being let in; barely four months after Libra was announced. And immediately after being given access, PayPal ditches Facebook.
Coincidence?
I smell a pact made at the China/PayPal bargaining table.
According to a recent China Daily article, “In terms of the cross-border usage, it could be a challenge for other countries’ monetary authorities to accept (the) Chinese central bank digital currency.”
Allowing PayPal’s entry into the Chinese payments ecosystem could be a strategic move to use it to bridge this gap.
Perhaps…the great Libra abortion?
Facebook has always wanted to create the ability for its users to transact easily on its instant messaging and social apps — Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram.
This will not only create user stickiness, but more importantly, a new source of massive revenue at a time when scandals over data privacy was damaging its ability to capitalize on advertising — its key revenue source.
Creating Libra, its own digital currency, would have been the answer to frictionless and cheap online payments for its platforms. But the baby is in danger of miscarriage.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Visa Chief Executive Al Kelly said at the company’s earnings conference call in July, “No one has yet officially joined.” She was referring to the Libra Association.
The article also said some of Libra’s backers have “declined Facebook’s requests to publicly support the project...”
It is unclear how many of the initial Libra Association members ultimately will commit to the network. So far, association members have signed nonbinding letters of intent, and they haven’t yet handed over the $10 million that Facebook requested from each member to fund the creation of the digital coin. — The Wall Street Journal
Looks like Facebook’s attempt to become the world’s biggest central bank could be a dream killed at conception. | https://medium.com/behind-the-great-wall/paypal-quits-facebook-libra-for-china-3ebd6563adf2 | ['Lance Ng'] | 2019-10-06 01:17:32.263000+00:00 | ['China', 'Facebook Libra', 'Facebook', 'Digital Currency', 'PayPal'] |
Top 5 Ways to Finish Your Summer Internship in Style | As the end of your summer experience approaches, make the most of every opportunity with these five tips:
1. Update LinkedIn (again!)
LinkedIn can always use some love. Did you make any connections this summer? Meet any awesome people during your internship? Before you say farewell, connect on LinkedIn. Bonus points if you give someone a recommendation and/or ask for a recommendation.
2. Have a Coffee Date
While you have time, schedule a coffee date with someone to either make a connection stronger, make a new connection, or say “thank you” for a great internship experience. Don’t have time to sit down for coffee? Send a virtual coffee card — it only takes $5 to make someone’s day (and make yourself look really good). Need ideas for who to connect with? I School alums, your supervisor, team members, other interns, and fellow I School students are great places to start.
3. Send Thank You Notes
Before you leave your internship, send thank you notes to your supervisor, team member(s), and the recruiter who helped you secure your position. Bonus points if the thank you notes are handwritten (it’s so retro!).
4. Ask for one thing
Feedback really is a gift that you should take advantage of. Instead of asking “do you have any feedback for me?”, which can feel like a daunting question to answer, ask “what is one thing I could improve on that would make me a more valuable professional?” Asking for one thing makes it easier for you to make (and show) real improvement. And remember — feedback is a gift, but it’s not one you have to take. If you really don’t believe in the feedback you’re given, consider the context, ask questions, and at the end of the day — be comfortable in who you are and make the improvements you find most beneficial.
Instead of asking “do you have any feedback for me?”… ask “what is one thing I could improve on that would make me a more valuable professional?” Asking for one thing makes it easier for you to make (and show) real improvement.
5. Serve as a Bridge
You can do your school and your internship employer a great service by serving as a bridge strengthening connections between them. Connect your internship employer with your friendly career services contact, offer to help recommend students for future internships and/or FT roles, or serve as a student representative on campus.
And as a BONUS tip…
6. Take a Beat!
School is no joke — and you’re going to need to recharge to do your best in the coming year. Take a moment to center yourself, in whatever way you find most relaxing. Get outside, explore the city where you spent your summer, or binge on that beach read/Netflix show you’ve been meaning to watch (#GLOW anyone?). Be sure you can come back excited for the school year, feeling like you’ve had a productive AND restorative summer. | https://medium.com/berkeleyischool/top-5-ways-to-finish-your-summer-internship-in-style-a00e46622327 | ['Berkeley I School'] | 2018-08-07 15:01:01.680000+00:00 | ['Ischoolcareer', 'Career Advice', 'Internships', 'Uc Berkeley', 'LinkedIn'] |
Missing in Prince George — The Jack Family | The Jack Family
In 1989 the Jack family, a family of 4, of the Cheslatta Carrier Nation went missing from Prince George BC. Ronald and Doreen Jack are the parents of Russell, age 9, and Ryan, age 4. All four of them seemingly vanished that year in 1989.
On August 2, 1989, Ronald called his mother in Burns Lake to tell her that he and his wife Doreen had got jobs at a logging camp. And that is the last time anyone has seen or heard of the Jack family.
Ronald had said that he met a man at a local bar who told him about the jobs available at the camp, but time was an issue and they would have to leave right away if they were to take advantage of the opportunity. As a young family where money was tight, Ronald was excited about his luck meeting this man that provided the information.
Ronald told his mother that the camp was five miles past Bednesti in the Cluculz Lake area, that they would be gone for about 10 days and that the camp had a daycare available so they were going to take their young children with them as well, and would definitely be back home in time for Russell to go to school in September.
I have so many questions regarding this case. Who was the man that Ronald met in the bar that fateful night, and was he involved at all in the disappearance? Or did the Jack family run into foul play on the way to the camp? Where exactly was the camp located? Did it exist at all? What happened to the family’s vehicle? Did the family suffer an unfortunate car accident on the way to the camp? Some theories include that the man Ronald met in the bar that night instead took the family to a drug operation.
One thing to consider is that maybe the Jack family decided to leave their old life behind and start anew somewhere else. My gut feeling is that this is unlikely. From what I have read they were a close-knit family, I have trouble believing that they chose to disappear and did not say anything to anyone in their family. Doreen’s sister Marlene has been tireless in her search for her sister’s family since 1989.
An eyewitness described the man Ronald met in the First Litre pub in Prince George as a tall caucasian man in his mid-30s to early 40s. Standing 6`to 6`5" and “hefty, but not fat” estimated by the witness to be 250–275lbs. A pretty big guy. Ronald was 5'6" and 150 lbs and Doreen was 5'2" and 110lbs. This guy Ronald met would have towered over them.
The man Ronald met had red hair and mustache, a beard and wore blue jeans with a red plaid shirt and a baseball cap, work boots, and a waist-length nylon jacket. It has been suggested that this description bears a striking resemblance to David Pickton, brother of the infamous pig farmer/serial killer Robert “Willie” Pickton.
RCMP searched the area around Prince George by foot and by air but turned up nothing. It is interesting to note that when the police spoke with the logging camps operating in the area, none of them said that they were hiring at the time.
On January 28, 1996, local RCMP received an anonymous tip stating that the family had been killed and buried on a ranch. The voice on the line was really muffled and hard to hear, and even after trying to clean up the audio on the call, the police we unable to hear exactly what the ranch name was, or its location.
The police thought that the tipster said that the family was buried on the south end of “Gordie’s Ranch”. The RCMP searched what they thought was the right Gordie’s Ranch, but didn’t find any trace of the missing family. The caller’s phone number was traced to the Stoney Creek area of BC.
The residence that the call came from had a house party the night before, explaining how hard it was to hear what the caller was saying. RCMP interviewed the party-goers but discovered no new leads, and could not identify the person that made the phone call.
A possibility regarding this case is that they may have come into contact with Bobby Jack Fowler, who I have written about before. A convicted serial killer that operated along Highway 16 also known as the Highway of Tears. The highway runs from Prince George to Prince Rupert, and Bobby was known to frequent the very bar that Ronald was last seen in. But, I don’t think the man Ronald met in the bar that night was Bobby. He doesn’t fit the description, but that isn’t to say that Bobby wasn’t there and overheard the conversation.
The Highway of Tears has a long list of missing and murdered people, mostly women and mainly First Nations. But the Jack Family is the only family in Canada’s history to completely vanish. Maybe one person here and there, but never an entire family.
2019 will mark the 30th anniversary of the Jack Family’s disappearance, and we are no closer now than we were back in 1989 to finding out the fate of these 4 people. Ronald and Doreen would be 56 this year, Russel would be 39 and Ryan 34.
Doreen’s sister Marlene doesn’t think that the family is still alive, but at this point who killed the family if anyone is secondary. She and the rest of her family just want to know what happened and to return them home.
Someone out there knows something. Maybe someone reading this now.
If you have any information on this case please contact Prince George RCMP at 250–561–3300 or, to remain anonymous, contact Crime Stoppers at 1 (800) 222–8477. | https://zeph456.medium.com/missing-in-prince-george-the-jack-family-a18d3202792b | ['L Hall'] | 2020-03-23 02:18:41.949000+00:00 | ['Missing Persons', 'British Columbia', 'True Crime', 'Canada'] |
Indian Migrant Construction Workers: An Existential Absurdity | Preface: Migration as an inherently Kafkaesque Phenomenon
“My grandfather used to say: Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that -not to mention accidents- even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey.” — The Next Village, Franz Kafka (Kafka, 1917–1923)
The Lens: State of Individuals in Mobility
Migration is an inherently Kafkaesque phenomenon. The ‘very-short short’ story The Next Village describes the vulnerabilities and anxieties of a migrant whilst in the process of migration. The terms underlined in the story above collectively convey: (Trahan, 1963)
· How the totality of life appears to be minuscule in comparison to the idea or the weight of change necessitated due to migration (voluntary or forced).
· The very mentioning of the ‘next’ village exerts the importance given to the forthcoming context or rather is a suitable tool to express the meaninglessness of the context of the migrant that precedes ‘the next village.’
· How migration distorts the understanding of the time perception of the scale of life lived and challenges the notions of normal happy life (and in raising the point, it begs one to consider what constitutes a normal happy life in the first place?)
· Lastly, it arrives at the definition of such an act or event as a journey with unforeseen ends, hinting towards its natural state of perpetual transition, motion, and lack of finality. The timeline of the process of migration as a phenomenon (assumably) exceeds the span of the experiencer (the migrant) itself.
The Next Village also serves as an empathetic lens and precursor to Kafka’s elaborate novel The Castle that paints a deeper socio-political picture into “the nightmarish challenges posed to access by modern bureaucracies…” (Jong & Rizvi, 2008)
The Premise: An Absurd Existential Positionality
The Castle is the story of a land surveyor “K.,” who enters a village that is ruled by a castle on a hill, under the impression of reporting to duty to a castle authority. Unable to gain access to the castle due to a bureaucratic mix-up, K. remains stuck in the village, tirelessly struggling to explain his quasi-legal status to the villagers who seem to hold the castle in high regard, and thus, tolerate K. and justify the rules and procedures of the castle to him, which seem to serve a singular purpose: to exclude K. from the castle. (Kafka, 1983) As a result, “not only is there no way for him to reach the castle, but there is also no way for him to leave the village.” (Jong & Rizvi, 2008)
The novel is an elaborate picturization of the absurd existentiality of the positionalities of three actors:
· K., who feels not only obligated but also rightful in his pursuit of the castle authority. (Kohzadi & Azizmohammadi, 2013) His quasi-legal status of migration is not only driven by the need to fulfill his duty but also his own desire to be of service to the castle, thus, blurring the distinction between his act of migration as one forced upon him and one of his own choice, thereby, putting the burden of proof on K. to justify his demand for access to the castle. (Webster, 1951) His history is irrelevant to the physical realm of the story.
· The castle authorities, who seem to operate opaquely, in opposition and defiance of their own stated purposes and seem to hold no accountability to the rule-driven establishment that is ‘the castle’ (Corbella, 2007), which in itself is an obscure sovereign exclusionary abstraction that is never revealed in the story. (Shah, 2014) Furthermore, they demonstrate no recourse to K. in order to fulfill his objective.
· The villagers, whose interpretations are driven by the idea of a flawless bureaucracy that they serve, exercise unsolicited power and governance over K. in their own self-interest and remain insensitive to K. by marginalizing him as the problematic element. (Breeding, 2016) The village becomes the physical manifestation of power in the absence of the castle’s authority that makes one question whether it is truly ‘the castle’ or ‘the village’ that is to be blamed for denial of access to K. (Yari & Afrougheh, 2013)
The absurdity of the situation arises, possibly due to three factors. Firstly, lack of information and ability on the part of K. to inform himself of his rights and means to gain access to the castle or lack thereof. Lack of awareness on the part of the castle authorities about their own bureaucratic discrepancies and their neglect to fulfill their societal commitments to K. A wilful or unconscious veiling of the incompetence of castle authorities by the villagers due to lack of their own institutional capacity and motivation to act on problematizations put forth by K. Here, access to the castle is a loosely defined metaphor towards the exercise of individual rights, that is (or fail to become) enforced when there is a (mis-)match between the above stated three factors at play. (Jong & Rizvi, 2008)
The Hypothesis: A Metaphor for Power Dynamics
The story itself is a metaphorical import to describe the situation of migrants, where they are the protagonist K. The Castle is a correlation to the government and its diverse bureaucratic agencies responsible for actualizing the rights of migrants as citizens under a democratic framework and servicing them with a spectrum of resources and facilities on a regular basis to support their livelihoods, such as housing, food, potable water, electricity, connectivity, education, healthcare and transportation. The village is the city itself, and its inhabitants the intermediaries that allow or deny access to the various opportunities of the city to the migrants. (Jong & Rizvi, 2008)
The access to the stated services is perhaps, one of the fundamental aspects of power relations between the established actors that interact with each other through intermediary organisations. The government, as an indirect provider, usually outsources the provision of public goods to non-state actors under a legal and management framework. As a direct provider, it chooses to execute it through semi-autonomous agencies. (Lipsky, 2008)
In both cases, the access to delivery mechanisms established between a migrant/citizen and the services ultimately define their access to the services. Since delivery mechanisms exist in the realm of the city and its citizens, the migrants depend on them to gain access to services. It is safe to conclude thus, that for a migrant, access to service will directly depend on access to people, organisations and groups of a city that administer the delivery mechanisms. Even in the case of equal access as a principle mandated by the government, true access might vary due to procedural discrepancies. (Zuurmond, 2008)
In such a case, it is the intermediary organisation in charge of the delivery mechanism that has the power to provide an equitable solution to the migrant, if it wishes to. This holds true for the provisioning of services and prevention of marginalisation as well. However, even minimal state intervention, to enforce and protect the access and rights of citizens, requires publicly financed intermediaries and delivery mechanisms, and their administration needs to be paid for. (Lipsky, 2008)
Thus, higher demand for civil rights and services would require a higher cost of operation. In the case of limited resources, the intermediary organisation may be forced to provide equitable service of poor quality to all or an inequitable service to those with the strongest access to the intermediaries. Here, already existing social inequalities have a chance of determining the outcome. If such is the case, then migrants who have limited access to these intermediaries are already disenfranchised by the established power dynamics of distributing access. They might further face vilification due to arbitrary and discriminatory practices of the government itself, and corruption. (Zuurmond, 2008)
Thus, we can conclude that the power dynamics presented in front of a migrant are already tilted and unfair to the practice of social justice and equal opportunity since an unequal outcome is only acceptable when all citizens have an equal advantage to compete in the system. In the case of migrants, they are already at a disadvantaged position to ever expect fairness out of the existing societal commitments or institutional capacity. It is imperative for migrants to have access to separate mechanisms for having their needs met since the idea of distributive justice in their case is not coherent with the idea of equal access. (Kruiter & Jong, 2008)
A major problem occurs when such separate mechanisms are deliberately disenfranchised by the government and its intermediaries, based on their limited and parochial definition and vision of access and its related delivery mechanisms, which ultimately leads to epistemic injustice. This is one of the most significant reasons for the Kafkaesque situation of migrants and forms the premise of the explorations in the dissertation on the power dynamics presented above by the three forms of actors and the three factors that control the power dynamics between them. (Kruiter & Jong, 2008)
Since this dissertation is a study on migrants, a very particular typology of migrants: the Indian migrant construction workers; to be able to discuss the life of migrants, one must understand migration not through the lenses of pedagogical exercises in its exertion on social, economic or geopolitical boundaries, but, through the lens of its inherent lived experience, of that of a migrant. Here, only literature will suffice, and the preface has aimed to provide just that. Therefore, it is to be noted that the above deductions are salient themes to view the following chapters, where they are not explicitly described. They serve as an implicit lens to weigh the arguments put forth by this dissertation.
Abstract
There is a sedentary bias in Indian urban policies owing to their colonial roots. Social and citizenship rights and access to their entitlements and provisioning services are linked to domicile status. Critical public services such as access to voting, nutrition, healthcare, hygiene etc. remain inaccessible to circular migrants. Within those, migrant construction workers, who live in work-dwell communities on construction sites, remain isolated and in politically dark arenas.
The dissertation is an inquiry into the status of their participation in urban areas and their relationship to systems of urban governance and democratic processes, both historical and current. The research is an effort to understand the objective policy and planning frameworks of the city through the lens of subjective literature.
The dissertation further details the participatory and representative processes of migrant settlement forms with a focus on Kumbh Mela, as a reconceptualization, design and implementation of a migrant camp-city, not with the idea of resuscitating its form but in reviving its underlying methodologies in a bid to make urban planning processes and decision-making mechanisms of the country more dynamic, their means more inclusive and heterogeneous, and thus, more responsive to kinetic urbanism, in order to augment urban-to-rural capital and assets flows.
Keywords: Circular migration, access, co-production, kinetic, right to the city, urbanisation
Introduction: Making a Case for Migrant Construction Workers
Macro: Geography as a Problem
Theoretical literature on migration assumes the primary motivation for migration to be differentials in a person’s or family’s overall earning opportunities due to better employment or wage prospects; triggered by the incentive of more productive and lucrative sectors in spatial locations other than the geography of their residence. However, if the migration is forced upon due to loss of livelihood at home, then the differential in income may not be realized due to exploitative labour practices. Their situation might further be aggravated by growing congestion in urban centres and deterioration of delivery mechanisms of public services in areas of high migrant influx. (Srivastava & Sutradhar, 2016)
Since the post-liberalization period, Indian cities are in a constant state of ‘flux’ by the continuous migration that characterizes their reality and giving rise to aspirations of permanence. In order to encourage urban agglomerations, systems of governmentality have shifted their focus away from regional policies, fuelling growth in and around existing urban centres, thus, further aggravating regional disparities. The realization of push and pull factors behind migration patterns is the primary motivation of migrant literature studies in India. (Srivastava, 2019)
Figure 1 Share of India’s urban population by district. A comparison between Census 1991 (left) and Census 2011 (right). Source: Geopolis, Census of India 1990–91 and 2010–11
Indian migration literature has intensely focused on the scale of regional disparity in the country. One of the reasons for regional disparity arises from the fact that a great majority of Indian rural poor live in rainfed areas that witness low agricultural productivity. (Connell, et al., 1976) Historic urban pockets like Kolkata, Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore etc. receive rural migrants mainly from rainfed areas of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Orissa, Kerala, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan. (Dasgupta, 1987)
In 2004–05, 80% of the total rural poor were comprised of SC, ST and religious minority groups. With extremely low physical and social capital and means of access, marginalized communities in rural areas lack the services to support increasing populations and aggressively participate in migration to urban areas. (NSC, 2012) Post-independence, unabated migration proved to be a prominent growth factor for the national economy, which has turned it into a pertinent livelihood strategy for the rural non-agrarian poor. (Joshi & Joshi, 1976)
NSSO surveys since 2004–05 have been able to shed light on the share of industries employing seasonal migrants. 73% of India’s GDP comes from its urban areas comprising of 150+ cities and 400+ towns. It is supported by 80 million families that migrate every six months from rural areas to find daily wage work. The construction industry has constantly been the largest employer of migrant labour, employing 36.2% of total seasonal migrants. (RBI, 2012)
With slowing growth in textile, manufacturing and agriculture industries over the years, the construction industry has become a significant contributor to the country’s growing GDP and is now the third-largest employer in terms of gross capital. Seasonal migrants constitute over a third of its total workforce in urban centres, although they remain invisible in prevalent policy discourses. (Soundararajan, 2008)
With India as the third-largest construction market in the world in 2018, promising threefold growth by 2030 (Sharma, et al., 2019) construction industry is the most important employer of circular migrants in the country. Small-scale public and private residential activities compose the bulk of the Indian construction sector and present a diverse landscape to understand migrant flows. Therefore, migrant construction workers are the key to map the problems to urbanisation posed by seasonal/circular migration. (Srivastava & Sutradhar, 2016)
Some 16 million households (~34.3mn workers) work as unskilled laborers in the construction industry and live in make-shift colonies. With no land in both rural and urban areas (non-agrarian, agrarian), the seasonal migrants depend on labour and mobility for sustenance, lacking assets or skill to take on better roles in the economy or to build capacity to service or upgrade their community in rural areas. 60% comprises of families with both working adults with one to three children and a monthly family income between INR 6000–12000 (USD 100–200). (Roy, et al., 2017)
Laborers in cities with a high rate of construction typically dwell in 3 formats: (Broatch, 2017)
· Within the building as it is being constructed (small scale development)
· On the construction site in labour colonies (re-usable shanties that disassembled and reassembled from site to site, under the operation of a labour colony sub-contractor)
· Market ‘nakas’ (nodes)– prominent nodes of the city (in the form of slums)
Labour Colonies and nakas are work-dwell communities that rely on the autonomous relationship of construction labourers, private sub-contractors and informal material markets. (Broatch, 2017) (Roy, et al., 2017) (Srivastava & Sutradhar, 2016) Here, all socioeconomic interactions and networks are condensed within a strong spatial boundary, and thus, the cultural development of the occupants is dependent on the quality of space as a necessary pre-existence. (Fernández-Galiano, 2000) This robust local-relationship gives them a political identity that serves their economy and provides them with a cultural role in the nation-building narrative. (Barthes, 1993)
For such people, informal land markets ‘nakas’ become the predominant aspect of gaining access to urban lands. Little is known about the functioning of these land markets, while some studies show the relation between household and market typologies and the onset of permanent characteristics in such areas. (Posel & Marx, 2011) Housing in such a context is a prerequisite for socio-cultural development that ensures the safety and security of the marginalized and forwards tools that can allow for the inclusion of migrant construction workers into the city to delineate the meaning of ‘right to the city’ for such a population. (Purcell, 2002)
However, the changing location of the construction site every one to two years makes the mainstreaming of such areas problematic for the real estate industry. Providing static infrastructure to numerous workmen for every project by pooling/leasing private or public land, and to demolish it at the end of the project is not logical for any labour-resource intensive industry. (Bhasin, 2019)
Here, a broader understanding of housing and provisioning services, administrative and political frameworks, human development, economic opportunity, and socio-economic growth needs to be understood to create participatory mechanisms for the mainstreaming of migrant construction workers in urban environments and alleviation of urban poverty while augmenting urban-to-rural flows of assets.
Micro: A Cycle of Despair & Despair
Rapid urbanisation was touted to alleviate the poverty of rural populations, but since the 1980s urbanisation has slowed down, with an overall rate of 34% (much below the 55% global average). (United Nations Population Division, 2018) This slowdown in the rate of urbanisation is attributed to the phenomenon of seasonal migration, also termed as circular migration, which constitutes the movement of undocumented labour across the country. (Tumbe, 2016)
It is characterized by labour remaining in constant flux to find work opportunities in cities for both the short and long term without the prospect of settling in urban centres. (Sharma, et al., 2014) Many macro and micro surveys peg the population of circular migrants somewhere in the figure between 80 to 100 million for the year 2007–08. The incidence of rural households participating in circular migration with at least one household member as an out-migrant lies somewhere between 30–80%. (Deshingkar & Akter, 2009)
This flux is rooted in colonial policies when workers from rural areas were forced to migrate to urban centres in search of labour and capital but were subject to Influx control and apartheid laws limiting their access to the city and their rights to its services, disallowing them to gain assets in the city or settle. (Legg, 2007) Even after decades of the abolition of such discriminatory laws, such migration patterns have not changed, and human development indicators have not improved and have been hard to measure. (Das, 2015)
Rural-to-urban migration has failed to achieve the expected growth in the living conditions of the circular/seasonal migrant population. However, all studies largely fail to trace linkages between their source of workplace and home, leading to an improper understanding of the push and pull factors and the relationship between circular migration and poverty. (Breman, 2016)
Urban growth in India has been characterized by exclusionary and exploitative practices leading to the formation of newer forms of socio-economic inequalities and persistence of poverty amongst circular migrants. (Mosse, 2007) Roughly 93% of urban livelihoods remain informal and characterized by insecure contracts, long hours of work, and hazardous work-life environment. (Jain & Sharma, 2018) Lack of institutional capacity of urban local bodies and government institutions has thus led to urbanisation being a ‘messy and hidden process’ in India. (Ellis & Roberts, 2015) Poor means of access to platforms of collective bargaining incapacitates circular migrants from gaining legal access to legally mandated facilities, services and minimum wages that are to be provided by the employer. As a result, they are unable to afford formal rental accommodation and subsidize urban areas by living in abysmal living environments. (Shah & Lerche, 2018)
Figure 2 Vulnerabilities in circular migrants’ settlements. Source: Author, Tanya Talwar, Tashi Zaidi
Furthermore, because they lack official identity, they are not counted in the decision-making planning and policy processes undertaken by governments and their intermediaries. They lack any social capital and remain marginalised from the socio-cultural aspects of the city. Having little to no access to the administrative frameworks of urban centres, they lack the provision of basic citizenship rights and facilities that the rest of the population enjoys. Although many slums in Indian cities over time have achieved recognition of citizenship rights, housing facilities and provisioning services, migrant settlements continue to remain illegitimate and at a constant threat of displacement. Thus, over generations, due to lack of avenues, they have failed to improve their work environment in the urban areas or living conditions in rural areas. (Bhagat, 2017)
Figure 3 Vulnerabilities hampering long-term growth of circular migrants. Source: Author, Tanya Talwar, Tashi Zaidi
Lack of enumeration data, along with politics, and lack of tenure security legislations around utilisation of (costly) land parcels of urban centres for affordable housing, coupled with their own temporality, have left circular migrants without a political voice or tool. (Desai & Sanghvi, 2018) Hence, they remain outside the purview of even the fringes of urban planning, disenfranchised, almost criminal, adding a social stigma that makes them an undesirable population for the local population and governmental intermediaries forming the social and spatial margins of the city. (Sugathan & Jayaram, 2018)
Figure 4 Condensing infrastructural issues faced by circular migrants into 6 parts. Source: Author, Tanya Talwar, Tashi Zaidi
Both National Population Census and NSSO over decades have grossly underplayed the importance of circular migration as a livelihood strategy, mostly due to lack of accountable data arising due to inaccuracies in data collection because of empirical difficulties. (NCEUS, 2008) This increases the necessity to create a better understanding of seasonal and circular migration because the migrants forming a part of these patterns, according to surveys, form the weakest socio-economic profile, with social deprivation, lack of capital flows, low education, high mortality and engagement in casual work. (NCEUS, 2007)
It demands exploration of space and place, based on socio-economic indicators of human development, role and limitations of technology to include the community in measurement and improvement of key performance indicators on-site, and co-production strategies and mechanisms for the creation of a web of numerous labour colonies supported of critical policy frameworks. (Marx, 2006)
All this begs the consideration of alternate meanings of citizenship, nature, and means of access and inclusion for a population that does not identify its ‘right to the city’ from the established paradigms of participation in the public sphere of that city or permanence but represent their kinetic form of urban dwelling, one that exists “beyond the control of both state and capitalism.” (Purcell, 2013)
Literature Review: Taking History in Synchronicity
New Delhi: Systematic ‘Othering’ in the Colonial Past
New Delhi was conceived as a spectacle of imperial modernity. Commissioned in 1911 to transfer the capital of British India from Calcutta to Delhi, it sought to embody the rationality of imperialism of the British Raj in its aesthetics, science and politics. It was Britain’s vision of legitimacy and longevity in the late-colonial period. The decision to transfer the capital from east of the subcontinent to its centre was not just motivated by the idea of locating it in a particular physical geography, but to distance the ‘Government of India’ away from the influences of the revolutionary province of Bengal and much closer to the mysticism and traditions of Delhi that had been the seat of power for the subcontinent 11 times since 900 B.C. (Legg, 2007)
However, the imperial will could not realize the utopia of New Delhi. Rather, its administration and governance style came to be dominated by the old walled city of Shahjahanabad (Old Delhi) to its north. The contrast between New Delhi and Old Delhi is apparent. While the former is driven by neo-classical monumentalism where life is conducted in sterile and geometric spaces, the latter boasts of haptic and sensory places, congested and winding streets, where temporal flows are dictated by communities located historically on the basis of their religion and caste. (Legg, 2007)
New Delhi, thus, turned out to be a spectacle of colonial anomalies. “The city lacked both the insolence of conquest and the generosity of concession, and by its deliberate separateness it perpetuated invidious old comparisons.” (Morris, 1983) It soon became a classic example of the exercise of Foucauldian ‘biopower’, where unstable ‘sovereign powers’ representing the free individuals of both the old city and the new city, and their decisions, sought ‘domination and discipline’ of the body, in a structure of force that left subordinates little to no space to maneuver, (Hindess, 1996) through ‘governance or governmentalities’-Government of India-as an exercise and experimentation into the conduct of an autonomous regulation over the economy and society of the colonized. (Foucault, 1979)
Foucault rejects the idea of the interpretation of powers by neat separation and temporal discontinuity, stressing on the ‘dovetailing’ of different rationalities where the seemingly the above mentioned three forms of power entered into a triangulation (as also expressed in the deduction of Franz Kafka’s The Castle), but where the ‘government,’ conceived as autonomous, attained pre-eminence over both, the sovereign powers and the disciplines. (Foucault, 2001) This form of power retained complex relationships, and rather than being successionist, delineated subtle changes through means, modes and events, excluding outside subjects, only to include them later as a transformative part of its exclusionary social order and outcast state. (Dillon, 2004)
The colonial ‘government’ sketched a “seemingly oxymoronic geography of liberalism” (Legg, 2007) where liberty was granted to people closest to be deemed sufficiently ‘normal’ according to the Western ideals of a ‘white, adult, heterosexual, able-bodied male.’ (Mehta, 1999) It served not only as a means of textual representation and institutional mechanisms of authority, control and denial of voice (Thomas, 1994) but a design to produce effects of order, manifested through discontinuous developments and projects of a contingent nature, to ‘improve’ the population by “the systematic redefinition and transformation of the terrain on which the life of the colonized was lived.” (Scott, 1995)
The colonial government operated with violence, exception and enmity towards native rural and tribal territories and people, synthesizing massacres through mercantile and military logic. Space was marked and impressed with boundaries, zones and hierarchies through exploitation and domination. It was construed as a raw material of sovereignty, which was another meaning for occupation, which simply meant relegating native rural and tribal populations into a state ‘between subjecthood and objecthood.’ (Mbembe, 2003) Colonial violence embodied the idea of the state into imagined legitimate territories, as ones over which colonial order exercised, and illegitimate territories, the ones over which it did not. (Mbembe, 2001)
At the centre of its episteme was segregation through ‘race’ that over-lapped with different forms of ‘othering’ already prevalent amongst the colonized. (Chatterjee, 1993) It neglected the democratisation of human rights, and by adopting regional forms of segregation and ‘othering,’ it also created decentralised forms and traditions of colonial power. (Scott, 1995) Religion, caste and community were embedded within laws and governmental programmes, disciplinary systems, penal codes, and urban planning. Based on location, particular castes, communities and minorities were ostracized at the behest of more powerful native communities. (Hussain, 2003)
Demanding control and knowledge of the population, urban reconstruction and planning were used as tools to ensure the political security of the elite, where population censuses and land surveys collected intimate details of their subjects in order to understand the nature and state of affairs of municipalities and the ‘disposition of things’ sovereign powers sought to govern. (Legg, 2006)
Since they were ultimately a part of capitalist world systems, they remained focused on extractive policies to produce cheap exports to boost the economies of the imperial heartland and challenge the manufacturers based in the rural hinterland of the colonies. This resulted in the creation of underdeveloped economies lacking the capacity of services and functions that could ever create robust mechanisms to deliver citizen services. It furthermore created a protracted attitude of the government towards engaging with or investing in the economy of the state for maximising profits. (Goswami, 2004)
To conclude, the economy remained heavily intruded upon by the state but too underdeveloped to be left to free-market forces. Society was thought to be irrational and kept traditional, lacking representation in public institutions. Wide-scale social programmes and education were avoided. The colonial government sought the minutest of details of its subjects but refused to use that knowledge to finance interventions for their welfare. That kept the government confined to the art of regulation and policing rather than the science of security and liberalism. Thus, the colonial Government of India remained unsure of its security to ever trust and develop on its own delivery mechanisms of society and economy, and kept to organising the disposition of its population, but without any investment or recourse into the existing hallowed ground of traditions of ‘othering.’ (Legg, 2007)
In its early period, the colonial state existed as an externality to the Indian society deemed unfit to regulate itself. Its laws that were aimed at guiding the population away from its own despotic forms of incarceration, such as the caste system, failed to penetrate the dominion and reconstitute the subcontinent. (Prakash, 2002) Forms of governmental apparatus of imperialism were put in place, but they remained doubtful on the true ability of the colonized to ever be able to support the very modes and processes of governmentality on which governments of the liberal West relied. Only the institutions that could exercise immediate and direct power remained utilitarian. (Prakash, 2002)
That saw the need for sovereign powers to move towards centralised administration, fixed borders and permanent territorial controls. (Hussain, 2003) As a result, state institutions became more forceful in their desire and needed to infiltrate and conduct society. The state kept expanding on its territory, seeking to map and obtain control over all its territory but lacking the resources or the institutional capacity to do so effectively. It was forced to create newer alliances in order to retain security in the face of rising anti-colonial nationalism and crumbling state sovereignty. In a way, economically and bio-politically, it became more developmental, with an effort to modernise the economic apparatus, making its boundaries more permeable to external influences. This late period of colonialism saw the emergence of a ‘self-destruct state’ as it oversaw the process of Independence of India and the transfer of power to the Government of India. (Darwin, 1999)
“And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd — seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.” Shooting an Elephant, George Orwell (Orwell, 1948)
The post-colonial analysis of New Delhi is not to privilege the colonial institutions of the city and the embodied state, but an examination of the patterns of colonialism and rationalities of rules established under the colonial Government of India, that may be relevant in the present, in an effort to contest their domination and provide social justice. The idea is to reflect on the nature of social ‘reforms’ and interrogate their modalities that altered the landscape of resistance against governmental domination, altered the lives of colonised, and continue to do so. (Scott, 1999)
Urbanisation: Post-Liberalization Processes of Dispossession
In 1979, the Government of India had launched the ‘The Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act 1979’. The Act recognised the rapid rate of urbanisation in India, the trend of circular migration, and a careful assessment of the problems faced by circular migrants. It created regulations to normalize minimum wage, work hours, regular pay and equal pay regardless of sex for any work demanding labour from 10 or more circular migrants. The Act mandated provision of displacement and journey allowance within the tenure of the work and to the place of residence at the end of the tenure of work, respectively, to cover the component of expenditure due to travel between urban and rural areas. (Government of India, 1979)
It further made provision of suitable work environments for both men and women obligatory, by mandating all employers to provide affordable rental accommodation, water closets, drinking water and washing facilities, creches and day-care units, canteens, medical and healthcare facilities, and protective clothing, free of charge. This marked a significant moment to streamline the flow of capital towards expenditure on creating income-producing social values and assets.
Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act set up a committee to oversee the implementation of the policies underlying the Act. By authorising a labour representative as an intermediary between local government bodies and businesses, it created administrative mechanisms to ensure liabilities on the part of employers and contractors if they failed to meet the compliances. (Government of India, 1979)
“The policy affixed the idea that an employer had to use the capital not just to create infrastructure that will be utilized in the production of goods, but a portion of the capital must be set aside to create industry infrastructure that would enhance the quality of life of workers that provide their labour for utilization of industry infrastructure to ultimately produce the goods of value, thereby, asserting on the importance to maintain and enhance social capital in the section of the society that remained economically marginalized, deprived of assets and socio-cultural growth.” (Bhasin, 2019)
To evade any cost of compliance to the Act, and to ensure that the labour remained cheap, flexible and accessible, industries created non-standard forms of casual, contract, or daily wage work. Without formal employee-employer contract and relationship, labourers were left incapacitated to demand social security measures mandated by the Act or ask for legal protection from the government in their absence. This led to the proliferation of toxic work environments that constituted unregulated work hours and low wages. (Sankaran, 2007)
This tendency of capitalism was strengthened by the complacency of the state in the implementation of the Act and successive governments in strengthening labour reforms. On the contrary, the country saw gradual dilution of the state’s own regulatory function and bureaucratic oversight of the Act, dilution of labour legislations synonymous to the Act and weakening of trade unions with the Liberalisation Reforms of 1991. (Mitchell, et al., 2014)
The urban-led capitalist growth model, designed to attract foreign technology and capital investments into large urban agglomerations, and enhance product competitiveness in global markets, has since been the main driver of development in post-liberalisation India. (Hoelscher, 2016) It marked the characterisation of urban agglomerations as economic powerhouses, booming with industries in the manufacturing and service sector competing in global value chains. The construction sector came up to meet the needs of the ever-growing infrastructural needs posed by incoming migrants. (Das, 2015) Soon, it not only became infamous for exploiting the urban environment and natural resources but also the swathe of the unskilled manual labour force of the country. (Samaddar, 2016)
Realising the growth in the construction sector and the need for regulating working conditions specifically in that industry, the Government of India launched ‘The Building and Other Construction Workers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1996’ and set up a CESS Fund under the synonymous ‘The Building and Other Construction Worker Welfare Cess Act 1996’. Although it was a reiteration of almost all the mandates from the previous Act, it added a labour tax on developers equal to 1% of their profits, to be collected and utilized by the government for the welfare of migrant construction workers. (Government of India, 1996a) (Government of India, 1996b)
The BOCW Act mandated all developers to register all their workers (including migrant and casual wage) under it. The districts and state governments were mandated to collect the tax, and the central government took charge of regulating it and reimbursing it to the states for workers’ welfare. However, lack of accountability and identification of workers, on behalf of the state of their residence, due to them being in mobility or at a worksite in another state, created a blockade in development and relief work, as the states refused to spend money arbitrarily. (Roy, et al., 2017)
Despite the underutilization of the CESS Fund, the BOCW Act saw a better adoption compared to its predecessor, but then no other reform happened in two decades to follow. Until, the government in 2018, through Draft National Urban Policy Framework, gave a hint into the direction of utilisation of CESS Fund with two statements “It is imperative to move beyond the family-based housing unit towards communal and flexible modes suited to, for example, migrant workers” and “Labour cess should be utilized for providing rental housing for the construction workers.” (NIUA, 2018)
Circular migration has since the BOCW Act become the backbone of this contemporary exploitative system in the construction industry, based on ever-increasing informalisation of work by hiring circular migrants to accumulate profits. (Mitra, et al., 2017) Construction and other industries prefer to hire them since they do not have to provide them the similar standards of living wages, or accrue costs on health, education, nutrition, household needs, old-age, as they have to do with regular employees. (Shah & Lerche, 2018)
Numerous academic papers and surveys have consistently revealed discrimination faced by migrant construction workers in access to getting higher wages or decent job roles, due to them being entrenched and stigmatised in the Indian job market. (Chandrshekhar & Ghosh, 2014) (Papola, 2012) Data reveals that SC, ST and religious minorities fare worse in urban environments as well, with women and children making the most vulnerable within an already dispossessed population. (Srivastava & Sutradhar, 2016) (Breman, 2013) There has been a proven overlap between the economically weakest quintile of the country and groups historically marginalised under the colonial rule. (NCEUS, 2007)
The situation for circular migrants has been exacerbated by neoliberalisation of the agrarian sector and the ensuing rural distress. The agriculture is seeing lowering productivity levels leading to loss of livelihoods and employment in the sector, as a direct result of the withdrawal of support prices on crops and farm products and the withdrawal of state subsidies on infrastructural components. (Prasad, 2016) Furthermore, rural populations and tribal communities are being increasingly dispossessed of their ancestral lands, food, water and other natural resources, at the behest of the government and judiciary by exploitative environmental reforms giving leeway to large corporations to utilize natural and semi-natural hinterlands of high resource productivity for non-agrarian purposes. (Das, 2015)
This has created swathes of agrarian non-agrarians who are migrating to urban areas and being able to afford jobs only at the bottom rung of the service and manufacturing employment value chains. (Kundu & Mohanan, 2017) Upon reaching urban areas, they will be adversely incorporated by the capitalist economy that keeps them outside the structure and governmental systems of the city. They remain isolated and poorly remunerated with little vertical mobility, forcing them to establish a foothold in the city and, thus, keep migrating. (Srivastava, 2012) The post-COVID labour reforms of the government to condense all existing labour legislation into four codes is the culmination of this agenda that will regularize the cheapening of labour and flexibilization of the employer-employee contract and make it more exploitative than ever, just to get more advantage in the global capitalist markets. (Vaddiraju, 2016)
This transformation of urban areas reflects the priorities of the global capitalist order, as did New Delhi during colonial rule. The model has not limited itself to the reformation of economic policies but has altered the fabric of social spaces and reoriented the relationships that exist within both urban and rural landscapes and has succeeded in influencing democratic and governmental institutions as well. (Banerjee-Guha, 2009) It is an explicit and hegemonic expression of the colonial past of the government’s complacence to align with the sovereignty of the state that is nothing but the security and exploitative accumulative interests of the elite, disguised as the global neoliberal narrative. (Das, 2015)
Urban Governance: Limits to ‘Right to the City’
Although the urban economy’s growth is five times that of the rural economy in India, inequalities prevail in both, especially in upcoming urban centres. Persistent forms of inequality have accompanied urban growth since the colonial period and have been aggravated by post-liberalisation of the economy. The protracted outlook of colonial government towards participation in the state’s economy has been brought forth by alteration of foundational forms of urban governance, shifting the discourse away from the model of a welfare state to base itself on the idea of rapid economic growth achieved by ‘private capital-led infrastructural development’. (Das, 2015) Technical reforms on the lines of market-oriented solutions have replaced the managerial models of urban governance. (Chattopadhyay, 2017) Being termed as inefficient to respond to the needs of fast-growing cities in the country, the idea of urban governance is being structurally transformed and re-marketed as ‘good governance’. (Leitner, et al., 2007)
The intervention of the state in urban governance has been reduced from upholding citizenship rights to merely ensuring the disciplining and prevalence of the rule of the market. This is evident in the increasing gentrification of cities according to the conceptual images reflecting upon the aspirations and interests of the elite, which has led to the re-organisation of urban spaces, land acquisition policies, zoning and land use to facilitate large scale infrastructural and redevelopment projects. Urban planning has been standardised by the emergence of SEZs, smart cities, green cities, SDGs and fast corridors that do not consider the needs of urban populations; but adhere to emerging monopolies of land mafias and builders. Displacement of urban poor from their spaces and resources to the peripheries of cities, and the destruction of their livelihoods, is one of the concessions made for securing financial capital for development. The situation has been exacerbated by the withdrawal of state-led development interventions from housing and provisioning services and the introduction of paid models under Public-Private-Partnerships (PPP). (Banerjee-Guha, 2009)
Democratically elected local bodies are subsumed by autonomous institutions and private bodies through setting up of Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) and parastatal agencies to carry out large projects. (Samaddar, 2016) This has created further marginalisation of the urban poor by depriving them of the basic services guaranteed under existing civil rights and then excluding them from the participatory processes which form an integral part of the processes of urban/good governance. (Chattopadhyay, 2017) The 74th Constitutional Amendment that guarantees public participation in local urban governance stands ignored. (Vaddiraju, 2016) Half-decentralisation and institutional fragmentation of state powers and urban local bodies with quasi-public/private/autonomous agencies and non-state actors from the economic, political and social elite, like free individuals representing the sovereignty during colonial rule, constitute neoliberal urban governance. (Kamath & Joseph, 2015)
Within this context, via literature and through practice at micro-level, urban spaces embedded in everyday life of urban poor are turned into their sites of contestation, struggle and resistance. (Benjamin, 2008) The processes of electoral democracies allow urban poor to negotiate with the state publicly and reappropriate the city’s resources to be able to obtain better access to resources to conduct their livelihoods and claim land rights. (Bhide, 2017) However, the idea of cities as sites of contestation is problematic for circular migrants and migrant construction workers. (Chatterjee, 2008)
The tribal populations and lower caste groups within circular migrants, who lack the socio-political and political influence to mobilize themselves, remain outside of the electoral mobilisation of the poor. Although citizenship rights delineating principles of interaction between the state and the people, and within people, are mandated to be egalitarian, interactions on the ground with governmental intermediaries may imbibe different forms of inequality. (Jain, 2018) Migrant construction workers living in inert labour colonies at/near construction sites and facing an ‘internal alien-ness’ in the urban environment fall at the intersection of many such inequalities. This makes it even harder for them emotionally and psychologically to legitimize their presence in the city and make claims. (Shah & Lerche, 2018)
They face structural inclusion due to the sedentary institutional design of the government processes that, due to lack of accounting capacity, is unable to track the movement of people within the country; and data enumeration, which to date faces conceptual and empirical difficulties in deciding, whether or not to and how to include circular migrants within their various categorisations. The ethnic and regional nature of the country’s policies and planning processes for resource provisioning further limit their citizenship rights. (Roy, 2008)
Moreover, Indian states, and districts, following colonial urban planning, remain organised based on ethnicities and languages, and since citizenship experience finds political grounding in socio-cultural similarities, circular migrants face a situation like international migrants. These biases create everyday barriers for circular migrants in their place of work and manifest themselves in several manners, due to lack of identity proof, enumeration, and voting rights. (Abbas, 2015)
Without citizenship rights being granted at the workplace, circular migrants and migrant construction workers cannot find access to public provisioning services, inclusion in the socio-economic systems, and opportunities of the city. Although counter-intuitive, multilocal livelihoods of circular migrants allow for the preservation of rural lifestyle, augments urban-to-rural flows of information, capital and assets. Therefore, its importance as a phenomenon necessitates moving beyond conventional solutions to ‘Right to the City’ to more immediate ones. (Desai & Sanghvi, 2018)
Proposition: A Century of Impermanence
Concept: Emergence of the Kinetic City
If the 20th Century was about the architecture of permanence, then the 21st Century will be its undoing, the architecture of impermanence. The post-colonial landscape of Indian cities has been characterised by a pluralism of coalescence of distinct physical and visual contradictions. Colonialism itself witnessed distinct social, cultural and economic worlds within the same city occupying different spaces and governed by different rules. (Mehrotra, 2011)
This separation helped maximise governmental control and was aimed at minimising conflict. However, the post-colonial landscape allows both these conceptions to occupy the same spaces; still, they continue to use them differently. With inadequate urban land parcels, the emergence of agglomerations and service-based economies, these two worlds are intertwined now more than ever, turning cities into sites for negotiations between the elites and subaltern cultures. This critical arena of contestation has created new spatial domains, much like migrant labour colonies that have woven themselves throughout the urban landscape. This ‘bazaar-like urbanism’ or ‘pirate modernity’ has been created by those that remain outside the formal modernity of the state and its laws, not with the purpose of consciously creating a counterculture but to simply survive in the ‘everyday’ economic and cultural struggles. (Chatterjee, 2003)
Therefore, we arrive at two common states of the city — the Static and the Kinetic, defined by their materiality as well as lived reality. The former is built from permanent materials, concrete, steel and brick, expressed through its two-dimensional conceptual forms, maps and monumentality. The latter is built from recycled plastic sheets, canvasses, scrap metal and waste wood, fragile, temporary, open to modification and innovation. Its spaces are not conceptions but a reflection of associative values that support the residents’ socio-economic fabric. “Patterns of occupation determine its form and perception. It is an indigenous urbanism that has its particular ‘local’ logic.” (Mehrotra, 2013)
Kinetic City represents the articulation of space that is temporal in nature, leading to a deeper sensibility of spatial occupation that is suggestive of expansion of formal spatial limits to accommodate unimagined scenarios. It allows inquiry into the blurred lines of the current state of urbanism and the lives and roles of people that occupy it. Here, entrepreneurship folds the ‘formal and the informal into a symbiotic relationship’ through autonomous and largely oral processes. It leverages social networks and established infrastructure of the Static City, takes them beyond their intended margins, where regulations are made redundant, where local wisdom carries beyond without the ‘fear of the modern.’ It forces the Static City to shun its project of utopia and re-engage itself in contemporary issues, demanding facilitation of robust and flexible environments that allow the Kinetic City to flourish. While the Static City constantly tries to ‘erase or re-codify the local into a macro-moral order.’ (Mehrotra, 2008)
The superimposition of two opposite worlds and perceptions within the same city requires accommodation, juxtaposition and overlapping of the varying uses and physical forms demanded by both through constant evolution, invention and safeguarding of the critical ‘urban hardware’ of the historically important Static City. The idea is not to arrive at cities that are temporary in nature, rather, to shift our policy and planning perceptions to allow reservation of more parcels of urban land better suited to allow the performance of activities of temporal scale. It will require draining of symbolic import in architecture and conservation and constructing forms of significance that deepen their ties with contemporary realities and experiences. This will allow the transformation of urban realities to better position them to service contemporary life and aspirations. (Mehrotra, 2004)
But how do we pursue Kinetic Cities? Is it through the understanding of social and spatial divisions and economic inequalities resulting due to increasing concentration of global capital flows? Architecture, which is the ‘spectacle’ realisation of a Static City, and a tool for its interpretation, fails to achieve the same dominant image in the Kinetic City. A city characterised by an ever-transforming streetscape, constant motion and continuous change in its physical fabric demands a deeper understanding into its wide range of places and the processes of the commemoration of the culture of the excluded. A deeper analysis reveals that festivals have achieved a pervasive presence in everyday life and popular culture of the Kinetic by creating public pathways for realisation of fantasies of subaltern cultures and their organisation into forces of political action. One of them is the ‘Kumbh Mela.’ (Mehrotra, 2017a)
Case Study: ‘Kumbh Mela’ as Big Data
In the 21st Century, change is the new normal, making reversibility and openness two critical attributes for the articulation of sustainable urban development. The robustness of Kumbh lies in its reversibility and lack of technological specificity — non-permanent solutions for non-permanent problems. The whole city is used as a holding strategy for temporary urban processes without any aspiration to be permanent. Its reversibility is examined in two distinct dimensions, i.e., the physical/material reversibility of the entire apparatus of the city and the reversible institutional and political framework that supports the organisation of the city. The city plugs into the existing state-level urban management systems and draws its knowledge from existing institutions and their best administrators. By doing so, it becomes an autonomous agency governed by several state actors that hold jurisdiction over the site for the time of the conglomeration. This process is divided into four stages. The administration of Kumbh Mela has an impermanent and flexible organisation structure that facilitates transversal communication across all hierarchies of actors. Power relations vary according to the implementation stage as expressed in Table 1 below: (Vera & Mehrotra, 2015)
By using low-tech construction and a generic implementation strategy, Kumbh Mela crafts stunning morphologies with the possibility of reversing their operations during or after the festival. The materials and infrastructure are dismantled meticulously and reincorporated into the local material economy for reuse by markets and industries: (Vera & Mehrotra, 2015)
1) Akhara camps (individual settlements of religious sects/groups) are first to be dismantled, right after the religious order inhabiting them has left. It is done by the contractor who constructed them in the first place, under direct payment from the Akhara or indirect payment from the Kumbh Mela magistrate. Specific days for logistics are booked. Tents, plywood, steel sheets and joining components are dismantled and transported via trucks, with each truck carrying one specific material. They are carried to compounds where they are carefully stored, counted and checked for damage, after which they re-enter the vast tent supplier market of the country.
2) Infrastructure comes next with all wastewater and water supply pipes, motors and tap connections are dug up by their suppliers and city water board and reused in other locations. Elements such as water reservoirs and sewage pits are chemically treated or covered with sand, while sandbags, bio-digester toilets etc. are removed. Toilets are provided by the Kumbh Mela administration and are dismantled by the sweeper community, and then all parts like toilet seats, brick and bamboo are sold to contractors to be reused on other sites. Electric poles and wiring are carefully dismantled and put back in storage carefully monitored by a special electricity board.
3) Roads and pontoons take the maximum time since they are dismantled sector by sector and sent back to three main government monitored storage locations. They are often relocated to other areas under the jurisdiction of the government.
4) Other waste is scavenged by a large number of ragpickers, who pick up construction waste, sand, dumped coal, discarded wood and bamboo. Any organic material is left to decompose over time gradually.
5) Agriculture starts taking over once the deconstruction activity is finished. People from nearby villages return to plant seasonal vegetables. All organic material is burned and added to the soil to enhance its fertility. The river bank also serves as a cremation ground, which is also reestablished.
The Kumbh Mela is constructed and disassembled in an equally short period of time using many heterogeneous elements that are organised in a combinatorial fashion using simple and minimal building strategies. The materials and construction techniques chosen for the purpose provide safety and flexibility, offering infinite design possibilities through permutations and combinations. Heavy machinery and advanced technology are rarely used, and highly-skilled specialists are rarely employed. It is the mammoth workforce of untrained low-paid labourers undertaking piecemeal construction who realise the urbanism of Kumbh Mela. The achievement of the entire system is in its capacity to deliver multiple distinct succinct forms with minimal translation and maximum modularity to adapt to any context or situation and to be reused both in the formal and informal economy. (Mehrotra, 2019)
Analysis: Political Economy of the ‘Kumbh Camp’
The physical manifestation of the ‘Kumbh Camp’ is also contested and negotiated upon on the ground, with participation from administrators, Akharas (formalised/political-religious groups/sects), visitors, contractors, labourers and villagers, until the last spatial agreement. This dialogue between numerous agencies and dynamic socio-natural processes of the geography together comprise of the form of the city. Even with the grounding of the project, separations begin to appear as spaces are occupied with diverse functions and meanings in the almost permeable open and closed divide of the festival. This porosity manifests not just in spatial planning but the internal organisation and sense of commune as well. Here, the public, the private, and the sacred are blended in a heterogeneous fashion. (Mehrotra, 2017c)
The material and service cycles happening within the camp, and at its peripheries inform on the generative socio-economic patterns. Major intersections at Kumbh Camp are seen harbouring food stalls, general stores, medicine shops. While food is provided for free by religious orders in communal halls, many vegetable vendors at the periphery of the camp provide the necessary stimulus to fill the gap. Several spots are rented, even for years, which means that several vendors are recurring and are invested in the political and economic cycles of the festival for their livelihoods. Each Akhara has its organisational structure of volunteers tasked for managing visitors, handling supplies, and other related operations. They hold, articulate and aggregate systems and resources at a private level concerning the functional capacity of their tents, all have their own economic processes linked to several other cities. Thus, the capital, material and resource flows of each tent correspond to cyclic processes and allow Kumbh Camp to become a phenomenon during the time period of its existence. (Mehrotra, 2017c)
The Akharas themselves are arranged spatially according to their prominence and interact with each other in their own political dynamics, with their own laws, codes and sacred spaces marked in distinct visual identities forming territorialities in an open landscape. While the planning of the camp changes every year, Akharas try to preserve their internal spatial configurations and relationships as much as possible. In the words of Richard Sennett, “growth in an open city [Kumbh Camp] is a matter of evolution rather than erasure.” (Sennett, 2006)
But, the most important of all is the social transgression and appropriation of the site, its spaces, and material cycles by the devotees and saints, defined by a common religious purpose: to bathe in the waters of the confluence of two rivers. This common utilitarian purpose preserves the identity of Kumbh Camp as an open work based on an implicit contract of confidence, challenging the social, economic and cultural inequalities to create an incomplete fabric that is inclusive, equitable and unifying, with, within and beyond its context. (Mehrotra, 2017c)
Conclusion: How Apparent Finality can emerge
On Heterotopias: The Ephemeral Quest for a ‘Self-Narrative’
Quoting Foucault on migrant construction workers’ colonies, they are heterotopias, “places of this kind which are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.” They create an ‘otherness’ through which the city can reflect on itself socially, politically and morally, and decentre itself epistemologically. These urban encampments are physically, socially, and symbolically representative of heterotopias, and by locating, identifying, and observing them, the limits of the city can come into view. (Foucault, 1997)
In doing so, their second identity, as a refuge, as a shelter from rejection, is highlighted. Here, the identity of migrant construction workers’ colonies and its urban logic of the refuge and of a place ‘in the making’ gains primary importance. It is a place that is ‘tolerated’ by the city at its limits. Since the people of the place, migrant construction workers, already have a socio-economic life (all employed under the same work) and by means of the BOCW act (if registered by their employer under the act), have a political life as well, it is therefore only the cultural specificities that need to be imported in time, in the Spatio-temporal realm of the space to create ‘an auto-perception of own identity.’ (Agier, 2019)
With time and population growth, local conflicts allow learning of forms of intra-urban displacement that can be accounted for in the administration of these camps. An encampment with a lasting internal social organisation will benefit by imprinting from numerous narratives and experiences of assembling and disassembling, and metamorphosis beyond a place of refugee to a heterotropic place assuming its own cultural identity, thus, finally gaining autonomy as a ‘large, dense and permanent settlement of heterogenous individuals.’ (Agier, 2019)
The material and social forms of these camps that are currently defined illegal have the possibility of newer socio-politico-cultural forms unforeseen in urban planning and urban ethnography. While the State may have currently kept these colonies outside its own boundaries, the State has the capacity to localize its own margins and legitimize the identity of migrant construction workers’ colonies over time. Unlike other circular labour colonies that although have an urban logic but lack a political logic to defend the idea of the formation of their place, migrant construction workers’ colonies do not require a relationship with their surrounding limits, and thus, they form an absolute heterotopic space. Therefore, their identity lies in dislocation, in continuous mobility, and lack of centering and transformation in the urban fabric that makes them independent of the political world of the City and of the State. (Boano, 2017)
They are cities within themselves, capable of developing a sense of confinement and social organisation. This potential capacity allows them to welcome humanitarian agencies for sanitary, logistical, and medical support amongst others; and intertwine their programmes within its own operational framework. Even though they are places of transit, and places ‘in-transit’, established hierarchies in the current policy and market dynamics allow the continuity of certain social responsibilities and paradigms of internal social organisation. (Foucault, 1997)
The inherent Kafkaesque phenomenon of migration and its uncertainty will always remain, with three possible outcomes for any colony: disappearance or dissipation; recognition and legitimization by way of centering the colony in the city and struggling to become a ghetto; or to forever remain in waiting, in mobility. Here, the third possibility is a necessity and surety, enforced by way of economic logic (constant movement every one to two years because of change of construction site) allowing migrant construction workers’ colonies to forever find a place in the city, at a distance, and being ‘tolerated’, but also being able to negotiate the limits of this tolerance. It is within this distance and spectrum of ‘tolerance’ that their unique self-narrative will be invented to overcome the narrative provided to them by the city. This self-narrative will allow the migrant construction workers to look beyond the sovereign, the government and capitalism, to claim a unifying story that connects them to other migrant construction worker colonies scattered all across the country and their economies of scale. (Agier, 2019)
On Welfare States: Necessary Mandates and Co-Production
To begin with, the government must act as the guardian of the rights of circular migrants and regulator of systems of access and care; and ensure the upholding of clauses in existing Policy Acts. When the government does not have to micromanage the services better-taken care of by the communities themselves, it then has the capacity to mainstream informal settlements and related populations into formal development of the city and consequently creates better channels to improve the environmental health of such areas. To note, it can then act on correcting the historic systematic delegitimization of the migrant population and the habitats and ‘informal’ environments they occupy and develop an integrated assessment framework for the valuation and co-production of city ecosystem services, functions, goods and socio-cultural values. (Mitlin, 2008)
The integrated assessment approach should fundamentally imbibe the roles and responsibilities of various actors and allow of transversal communication across all hierarchies to respond to contingencies. Table 2 below underlines the most rudimentary interventions required to actualize such processes: (Aajeevika, 2020)
In saying so, at policy level, we need to legitimize the informality and provide it same legal access to the city municipal services such as water, waste, electricity etc. The serviceability of such a model can be ensured by individual advancement of communities through processes of co-production.
Here, it is necessary to explain what is meant by co-production. It means that the people availing the services are given the power and legal means to form organisational structures within themselves responsible for handling the provision of said services of resource access. “Therefore, instead of one central municipal department financing, executing, operationalizing, managing, and refurbishing infrastructure for the provision of water or electricity or sewerage; small self-help groups under the guidance of the municipal department carry out such activities on their own, to develop their area in a phased manner. Not only does it create more economic opportunity by the employment of youth, but it fundamentally empowers the local population by helping them understand processes or urban development and renewal.” (Aggarwal & Bhasin, 2020)
Over time, grassroots co-production movements move beyond local to more contemporary and collective issues based around macro production and consumption patterns. They become a tool for local groups to negotiate a greater control over issues that affect them directly, by creating an informed platform for a sustained, deliberate dialogue with the state. If coproduction as a tool is implemented strategically at policy and planning level, the response to circular migrants and migrant construction workers can be, perhaps, not a narrative of disenfranchisement but one of socio-political self-reliance and empowerment.
“In order to do so, we need to understand that basic services such as water, electricity, nutrition etc. should not require the permission, mandate or heavy hand of the government to be procured under the ambit of ‘legality’ and the government itself must abstain from creating such a definition.” (Aggarwal & Bhasin, 2020)
We need better governance and accountability into providing access to citizen services and newer administrative frameworks that parley with existing ones to ease the burden of arduous governmental processes for releasing new tracts of land or offloading existing governmental lands in costly city centres to be developed for affordable rental housing models. These parcels of land currently occupied voluntarily or out of necessity by informal settlements and people without access to opportunities and deemed unsuitable for human habitation because of environmental or infrastructural vulnerabilities can then be creatively and sustainably remodelled. (Mitlin, 2008)
It involves tapping into the existing social capital, entrepreneurship, innovation and support at grassroots and utilizing them in creating local structures that take care of public microfinancing and management of commonplace self-help activities by encouraging participation at the ‘individual, household, or collective self-help at camp level.’ (Mitlin, 2008)
Grassroots co-production generates a favourable political outcome for marginalised groups and gives them an extension to political practice, leadership experience and subject-matter expertise through socio-economic, environmental and infrastructural matters such as design and logistics of building temporary structures, improvement of artificial and landscape drainage, creation of waste disposal systems, installation of solar electricity, etc. It also nudges the state to act more inclusively and positively towards all of its citizens. (Mitlin, 2008)
Consequently, co-production develops the capacity of communities involved in the process and helps them understand the fundamentals of resource management. The response to any issue indelibly linked to the health of urban ecosystems can be improved upon exponentially, under the mode of co-production, by acutely raising the collective awareness of communities as a direct result of simply involving them in both the consumption and production processes. This generates an ‘ecosystems thinking’ that allows the camps to imagine their environment’s operational value in terms of the output and efficiency of the processes underlying its socio-economic systems. (Aggarwal & Bhasin, 2020)
On ‘The Project’: The Camp as the Open Lived City
To achieve the invention of this assumed narrative is the birth of the project of migrant construction workers’ colonies, not for the purpose of finding its finality, but with the requirement of producing data and knowledge that will allow migrant construction workers to move closer to realising its possibility on their own. (Boano, 2017)
Buildings are designed with permanence in mind, notwithstanding the need for reconfiguration and weathering. A highly articulated sense of construction allows us to handle and implement complex construction processes efficiently, although they do not determine the sustainability of our built environment. Rather, how efficiently we reconfigure our built spaces does. With the help of digital tools in the production of built environments, the most transformation opportunities can arise by aligning them with simple, low-tech tactics. (Vera & Mehrotra, 2017)
Spatio-temporal openness is central to addressing the questions posed by circular migrants. Temporary interventions within the existing density of Indian cities have the capacity to enhance urban experiences by the generation of open-ended systems. Technology now enables designers and policymakers to control form and matter and anticipate forthcoming events by data modelling of natural and human processes that inform complex dynamic planning operations, giving birth to a completely new set of inclusive possibilities. New techniques of planning offer a chance at restructuring our design and planning processes. Within the scope of the project, Kumbh Mela shows us the fundamental importance of design as an “incomplete, circular and intentionally unbalanced operation.” Through its understanding of operations, it provides insights into scenarios where cities might act as or accommodate unfinished open systems to allow diverse temporalities to exist, forming autonomous material discourses, with time at the heart of their function. (Vera & Mehrotra, 2017)
Taking the idea from Richard Sennett’s open city as ‘incomplete, conflictual and non-linear,’ and applying it to the idea of pop-up cities like the migrant construction workers’ colonies, we arrive at systems of negotiation where guidelines of the city are handed over to the people themselves to be developed, materialized and further evolved and transformed. It is in this analogy, where Kumbh Mela, with the lack of a fixed plan, is a practice of conceptualising a set of relationship between state and non-state, legitimate and non-legitimate actors in an organization and progression of sorts, dictated by the socio-natural processes of the shifting geography of the floodplains. (Sennett, 2006)
Figure 5 Project Map of Migrant Construction Workers’ Colonies. Source: Author, Tanya Talwar, Tashi Zaidi
The project will delve into social landscapes of migrant construction workers’ communities to produce kinetic urbanism, which will absolve from all external contexts to become an ‘endosomatic’ system.’ (Fernández-Galiano, 2000) It will build on three different but synchronised cycles of social capital/development, resource-built-efficiency, and finance. It will try to understand the architecture of labour colonies as a source of mediation, identity and constancy; to conclude how any spatial order that has receded to a background condition in the city can be periodically brought to the fore through collective participation and representation. The project will allow generation of infinite combinations of socially inert and resource conservative spatial mechanisms that can be employed as a means of re-conceiving migrant work-dwell communities in urban areas for sustainable resource consumption-generation processes, closed-loop material cycles, spatial equity, economic empowerment and ultimately a balanced social order — through the self-proliferating ritualistic re-enactment of social development practices and their respective spatial recall augmenting urban-to-rural flows.
CODA
Contemporary times have seen urban centers in India undergoing massive evolutions, morphogenesis, and mutations to shed some remnants of their colonial past and for some others to resurface through the wave of neo-liberal reforms. They face increasing flows of rural-to-urban migrants participating in their economies. Within these flows are circular migrants who do not wish for their future to be invested in cities but to develop on their assets back home, augmenting urban-to-rural capital flows. And within this typology lies the construction industry as the biggest employer of countless such aspirants, who keep moving from one urban center to another in search of daily-wage work.
This strata of citizens lack access to urban resources and also to means and institutions of access to urban governance that deliver them. Current mechanisms of access to resources, citizenship rights and recognition remain limited to industry-based trade unions or to informal workers at the neighbourhood level only and have no way of articulating or servicing the needs of those who remain in constant flux. This has created existential dilemmas for the concepts and perceptions of urban governance mechanisms that are required now to be more flexible than ever in trying to juxtapose two seemingly opposing forces of everyday life, one kinetic, in motion, and the other static and rigid.
This friction has resulted in a lack of support being afforded to circular migrants both at the planning and policy level, leading to fragmentation of the idea of the workplace for them and disenfranchisement from getting access to a healthy workplace environment and their benefits. They lack the social capital to enhance their livelihoods and ways of living in either urban or rural areas, and the isolated living condition (especially of migrant construction workers) keeps them in the politically dark areas without collective bargaining power.
Thus, fostering the agency of migrant construction workers and circular migrants will not only require the existing bureaucratic platforms to take cognizance of their unique situation and issues at a fundamental level to form parallel policy mechanisms and ideas of citizenship; but also to re-conceptualise, re-create and re-imagine newer forms of their spatial participation, relationship and negotiation with and within the city itself, to construct a reality that is better able to organize and resist the pressures of the state, of capitalism and of urban governance.
There is a lot that can be learned from spatial forms that are consequences of mobility and displacement, and in recognizing them, not as temporary but ephemeral phenomena, innovation can occur. In the face of ever-increasing mobility and displacement of human settlements due to six primary factors: (Vera & Mehrotra, 2015)
· Natural disasters and climate change creating involuntary displacement necessitating short-term holding strategies and shelters.
· Geo-political tensions creating forced displacement necessitating refugee camps.
· Non-religious cultural commemorations within and outside urban centres demanding deployment of temporary structures and facilities.
· Settlements configured for extractive industrial purposes generating temporary cities for the duration of the extractive activity and the availability of a resource. These tend to generate large complex settlements with a mix of both social and industrial operations, of high environmental consequences with the capacity to modify the topography of the landscape in question on a territorial scale.
· Pop-up cities required for military purposes, or transactional purposes, at the fringes of urban centres (migrant construction workers’ colonies in market ‘nakas’ or on/near construction sites).
· Religious pilgrimage demanding cities to be constructed for religious celebrations. There has been a sharp rise in the intensification of pilgrimage activities such as Hajj in Mecca, or Durga Puja/Ganesh Chaturthi/Kumbh Mela in India in recent years, propelling exponential demand for temporary urban infrastructure.
All six typologies are synonymous in terms of the scale and structure of planning and operations required to implement them, and thus, learnings from one can inform the other. For this purpose, Kumbh Mela, one of the largest historical and contemporary cyclic pilgrimage mobilizations (of more than 100 million people), is perhaps the perfect example to present an alternative understanding of urban planning corresponding to the idea of Kinetic Cities. ‘The Ephemeral Megacity’ helps expand on the nature of gigantic human flows, and helps us understand the function of cities in broader terms. The analysis of its remarkable operational capacity to be constructed and disassembled in a short period of time can benefit the visualisation of migrant construction workers’ colonies. (Mehrotra, 2017b)
The camp itself has the capacity to become a legitimate constituency of inquiry in the improved urban planning and policy frameworks and can be an entity having an equal entitlement to the city’s resources and provisioning services. Simultaneously, it can augment its separate circuits of economy and bargaining in the material markets to further allow informal land and labour markets to gain autonomy over their formation and regulation, giving migrants an unrestrained right to exercise their citizenship in all crucial walks that constitute public life and sphere.
This is a fundamental step towards reassessment and recharacterisation of visions of citizenship and the relationship of a citizen with the city and his/her ‘right to the city’. Kinetic urbanism and the project of the camp are pertinent towards realising universal access to social entitlements and rights, occupation of space, basic consumption, and survival of heterogeneity in the face of a nebula of culturally grey landscapes that exist in the generic cities that are a product of 21st Century urbanisation.
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Srivastava, R., 2019. Emerging Dynamics of Labour Market Inequality in India: Migration, Informality, Segmentation and Social Discrimination. The Indian Journal | https://medium.com/@yodagoesskinnydipping/indian-migrant-construction-workers-an-existential-absurdity-8de384db9c48 | ['Tarun Bhasin'] | 2020-12-16 16:20:31.801000+00:00 | ['Migration', 'Construction', 'India', 'Real Estate', 'Development'] |
IT’S 50 YEARS FOR PAUL SMITH!- | The ace fashion designer Paul Smith celebrates 50 years of creativity in the fashion industry by launching the Paul Smith book and Paul Smith foundation.
Britain’s foremost fashion designer, Sir Paul Smith, celebrates the 50 golden years of his label Paul Smith. Known for the distinctive style, fashion trends, latest fashion, and signature colored stripes, the veteran designer has come a long way with his creative instinct that amalgamates tradition and modernity.
An avid cyclist, who was born on 5th July 1946, in Nottingham, met with an accident at the age of 17. The accident introduced him to a new group of friends that put his mind into the world of creativity. This exploration embraced his life-long journey with so much discovery in music, fashion, and design. Also, it was his now-wife, Pauline, who introduced him to the artistic world of cinema and training at the Royal College of Arts, where he developed the design skills for garments and tailoring.
From Nottingham streets, he prospered his business at the global level, with his presence in 5 continents, over 70 countries, and 3000 shops. His first shop, Paul Smith Pour Homme, on 9th October 1970 in Nottingham, featured self-designed clothes and established clothes of other brands.
From being an owner to one small shop and showcasing his first men’s collection in Paris that exhibits casual and semi-formal designing, he continued to flourish with his first flagship store in London in 1970.
He specializes in unique fashion trends of men’s wear, women’s wear, shoes, fragrances, watches, and accessories. He uses his creative ideas to match traditional craftsmanship and a new design that epitomizes the latest fashion. He expresses his individuality by choosing eclectic combinations of colors and patterns into his iconic stripe prints that also matches the contemporary aesthetics.
In 2020, the brand celebrates 50 years with the launch of a book published by Phaidon, edited by Tomy Chambers, founder and creative director of design and lifestyle consultancy TC & Friends and co-chair of Brainstorm Design, and have a foreword by designer Jonathan Ive. The book talks about all the varied inspirations over the years, is lensed through 50 objects that Sir Paul has himself chosen. It is an exploration of his long journey from streets to flagship stores. The selected 50 objects, show his dynamics in design and honors his work over the years. Be it a packet of flower seeds or family photographs each of them is significant to Sir Paul that has inspired him to create beautiful designs and the latest fashion of all times. The beautiful cover made by cloth is an inspiration from yarn, which also creates colorful stripes. So, every one of the 50 objects is responsible for his vivid inspirations that have been cataloged in various collections.
The 50th anniversary is celebrated, with an announcement of the Paul Smith Foundation that will give helpful advice to creative people. He wants to share his unique spirit and fruitful experiences that he has gained with young minds to grow their business. It is a digital platform that welcomes not only designers but chefs, graduates, publishers, or entrepreneurs. The foundation will expand its horizons through various channels like websites and social media.
I KNOCK FASHION DESK
One of the renowned creative spirits embraces the brand’s 50th anniversary by publishing an eponymous book that is an exciting representation of his work and launching a foundation for all that spans different categories like ‘Defining your point of view’, ‘Making an impression’, and ‘Learning by doing’. The anniversary capsule collection is about casual menswear and womenswear, featuring photo prints created by Sir Paul and archive graphics from 1988 to 2002, visualizing Sir Paul’s iconic approach towards the design and displaying the latest fashion.
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WHAT’S YOUR REACTION? | https://medium.com/@iknockfashion/its-50-years-for-paul-smith-b6e8c8752b0f | ['I Knock Fashion'] | 2020-12-25 10:55:31.797000+00:00 | ['Fashion Industry', 'Fashion', 'Fashion Trends', 'International News', 'Fashion Designer'] |
Mindfulness | Mindfulness
A collection of links for mindfulness related resources — updated weekly)
Photo by Chris Ensey on Unsplash
Looking for some inspiration for guided meditation or mindfulness exercises?
Here we list a selection of mindfulness and related stories and websites and invite you to explore the links. We will update this story with our weekly finds, so please feel free to stop and check them out.
We have been following some of these mindfulness resources and found them useful. We invite you to explore these links but please keep in mind that there are several methods to get started in mindfulness or meditation, and you might have to try several ways to find the one that resonates with you. It is also worth noting that a wide range of experiences is possible when engaging in the meditative process and that it may not be the right approach for everyone.
I found it helpful to have support from a teacher experienced with meditation, to guide me as I was starting to explore meditation. A meditation group or a meditation circle might also be helpful. I encourage you to try various methods, and hopefully, you might find one that makes sense and works for you.
Leave us a note if you have a favorite and we will check them out too!
With Gratitude.
Last updated: Dec 20th, 2020 —
Meditation for Anger by Headspace
A 10-Minute Guided Meditation to Tame Holiday Stress by mindful.org
Loving-Kindness Meditation — Strengthen feelings of kindness and connection toward others at The Greater Good Science Center based at UC Berkeley.
A Basic Meditation to Tame Your Inner Critic at Mindful.org
Guided Meditation on the Inner Critic, by Mark Coleman
With mindfulness, life’s in the moment by Liz Mineo
A Harvard Health article — Benefits of Mindfulness
How to Be More Mindful at Work
Mindfulness for Children
What Is Mindfulness?
Guided Meditations by UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center
Breathe Better With These Nine Exercises | https://medium.com/science-soul/mindfulness-f0a5620f0ed5 | ['R. Rangan Phd'] | 2020-12-21 00:28:02.999000+00:00 | ['Mindfulness', 'Inspiration', 'Science And Soul', 'Nourishment', 'Psychology'] |
Measuring Traffic Speed With Deep Learning Object Detection | Object Detection
Object detection means locating the object in the image or a video frame. The input to object detection is a clear image of an object. This image is passed to the software which outputs the position, or a bounding box surrounding the input object. The picture below shows bounding boxes for the traffic on a city street.
Vehicle detection on a city street
Traffic Vision
In this article, we use Yolo-v2 neural network as the basis for our software trafficVision for vehicle detection. We augmented Yolo model (converted to MIVisionX model for higher performance on AMD GPUs) with vehicle speed estimation and vehicle direction capabilities. The picture below shows a high level design of the app.
high level modules for traffic vision app
Detected Box Speed Calibration
Box speed calibration is simply a mapping of box-speed in pixels/sec to vehicle-speed in miles/hr (or km/hr if you happen to follow SI system).
Here is the algorithm for detecting up/down speed:
1. Get a sample video with up-down traffic in the frame.
2. Collect box locations and compute center y-coordinate of each box
3. Draw the histogram for the y-coordinate (see histogram)
4. Find the y-range within which majority of detected vehicles are passing.
5. Remember to exclude regions where vehicles could be stationary.
6. Find average speed between frames in y-range.
7. Calibrate center-pixel-distance/one-frame-duration between two consecutive frames to known speed limit of the road.
Vehicle Center Point Histogram with Data Extracted from YoloV2 Detection on a Live Traffic
The picture above shows the center point of detected vehicles as boxes. It is easy to draw the region (shown as blue rectangle) covering most vehicles. One can use ±½σ, ±σ or ±2σ as a metric to draw the region. Left and right side of this rectangle is y-range. In our example (shown in picture), this range is 167, 232.
Location Scale Factor
Remember, you’ve calibrated only small part of the frame. This calibration must be scaled to rest of the frame assuming most vehicles are traveling at the speed limit (statistical inference). Collect estimated speed of area beyond the calibrated region and divide it by statistically estimated speed of the calibrated region to find scale factor based on location. In our example, the location factor graph is shown below.
pixel travel distance between two consecutive frames
Summary
We used the techniques mentioned above to calibrate the street. This calibration is used in estimating the speed as shown in the video below.
References | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/measuring-traffic-speed-with-deep-learning-object-detection-efc0bb9a3c57 | ['Rohit Sharma'] | 2019-03-30 17:12:47.312000+00:00 | ['Computer Vision', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Neural Networks', 'Deep Learning', 'Machine Learning'] |
Why Is a Cloud Computing Titan Venturing Into Workforce Management? | Why Is a Cloud Computing Titan Venturing Into Workforce Management?
Image from Salesforce.com
What is the deal?
Salesforce, the #1 CRM platform announced its biggest acquisition ever: the $27.7 purchase of Slack, an innovative, fast-growing collaboration platform. Forbes reports that this is the 8th largest M&A deal in tech history.
The combination will create the operating system for the new way to work, uniquely enabling companies to grow and succeed in the all-digital world.
Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce stated, “Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world”.
This year, there has been an acceleration in the adoption of digital innovations. Organizations rushing to embrace an all-digital world where work happens wherever people are. For example — this combination of Salesforce and Slack will provide companies with a unified platform for connecting employees, customers, and partners with each other and the apps they use every day, all within their existing workflows.
Why is WEM gaining importance ?
The deal is one of the largest among a recent spate of acquisitions made by tech companies to capitalize on the shift to remote work. Adobe for example recently announced its plans to acquire the workforce management software company Workfront for $1.5 billion.
But why are all these tech companies trying to secure a foothold in workforce management?
Photo by William Iven on Unsplash
The concept of Workforce management is over 3 decades old, initially, it was all about operational efficiency — making sure that service centers were run smoothly by forecasting the workload and the staff requirements.
Then with the emergence of AI, automation became a key factor in building and maintain a productive workforce. This included real-time data gathering, performance & training management, and service optimization
“Automation has had a direct impact on the agent’s quality of life — in a positive way.” -Melissa Matross, senior vice-president product management, salesforce
Eventually, a new, broader term, workforce engagement management (WEM) came about. As per Gartner’s characterization, WEM also included functions like — recruiting and onboarding, time management, metrics and recognition, and Voice of the employee.
With the recent shift in consumer behavior toward digital channels and the growing virtual workforce, companies have had to adapt their WEM systems yet again. Keeping a distributed workforce engaged means providing better support within the organization. Even companies that did not use workforce management software have felt the need to deploy one now to ensure their teams are fully equipped to deal with evolving new demands.
As the new interface for Salesforce Customer 360, Slack will allow companies to transform how their people communicate and collaborate.
Adobe also acknowledges the need to deliver content across increasingly dispersed teams and their Workfront deal shows they are rising to meet the increasing expectations of their customers.
How does it tie in with customer service?
Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash
Service agents today are required to engage with their customers on multiple platforms -email, text, a plethora of social media- and still deliver quality service. They need to keep a track of their multiple interactions and have ready access to data from all these sources.
Companies have realized the value and need to have empowered teams, where employees learn & grow. Employees that have the necessary resources and support to do their jobs successfully will automatically deliver great service.
Tying workforce management with cloud bases CRM system seems to be an ideal solution. Service teams can easily collaborate with internal clients and stay connected with eternal clients no matter where they are.
Peter Tsai, who is the Senior Technology Analyst at Spiceworks Ziff Davis says: “In our Workplace Communications Trends in 2020 report, we found only 41% of business chat app adopters use tools such as Slack and Teams frequently for external communications, compared to 79% for internal communications. This represents an opportunity for Salesforce, which has clear intentions to use Slack to help facilitate better communications between businesses and their customers and partners using ‘Slack Connect.’ With an established foothold in the CRM market, this acquisition could further strengthen Salesforce’s position and help grow Slack’s user base.”
Adobe caters to a very wide audience from marketers to creatives and analysts. Now they can operations managers to this list. Their aim is to overcome the old “siloed work management” and bring collaboration and productivity with the combination of Adobe Experience Cloud and Workfront.
Let’s look at Slack
Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, Image from Forbes
In 2009, the company was called “Tiny Speck” and they focused on the development of a multi-player game. While they had to shut it down due to a lack of interest, they still had a great IM system. CEO Stewart Butterfield pivoted the company and it emerged as Slack: the successor to email. It raised $1.4 billion, went from zero to a $7 billion valuation to IPO, checking off every box on the start-up founder’s wish list.
Soon it was making news for its rivalry with Microsoft Teams.
Slack garnered a lot of support as the David of Silicon Valley standing up to the Goliath Microsoft. It has a lot of great features and has been called a messaging app on steroids. It allows teams to pick to choose their own tools as it can be used across multiple devices and platforms, and is equipped with robust features that allow people to chat one-on-one as well as in groups.
What Slack didn’t have is distribution. Slack’s users have increased from 4 million to 12 million in the past 4 years, Microsoft on the other hand went from 0 to 115 million. It was clear this start-up fairy tale wasn’t going to end well.
Stewart Butterfield had some strong words regarding Microsoft, saying the software giant saw his company as an existential threat.
“When you’re a scrappy start-up going against an 800-pound gorilla that’s one of the most well-capitalized companies in existence, it’s tough to compete,” Mr. Purk said of Slack. “This is more or less saying: ‘We can’t compete with Microsoft Teams anymore. We need more firepower.’”
Enter Salesforce.
Slack will now get the support of one of the world’s largest software companies which is a huge advantage for them. They can now reach customers on a global scale and compete with Microsoft or more even footing.
What do we know about Salesforce?
Salesforce Park, San Francisco, Photo by Jason Barone on Unsplash
Salesforce describes themselves as global CRM leaders, empowers companies of every size and industry to digitally transform and create a 360° view of their customers. In 2006 it began acquiring companies to boost its business operations and has completed 60 acquisitions to date, including Tableau, Mulesoft, and Demandware.
In August 2020, Marc Benioff the Salesforce CEO and chairman told investors “We’re not in a good M&A environment, this isn’t part of our plan right now. We don’t see that. We really see focusing on our business.”
So it was an abrupt turn around when it was announced they are definitively acquiring Slack. Salesforce president and COO Bret Taylor said the pandemic had fundamentally shifted consumer behavior and the way people work. Buying Slack would help Salesforce’s customers make the digital transformation, he said. According to Benioff “This is a match made in heaven”. He has also likened the beginning of Slack to that of Salesforce.
With this deal, Salesforce is set to make clear in-road into the workforce management market which is projected to reach $9,391 million by 2027. | https://medium.com/@vrunda.nagpal/why-is-a-cloud-computing-titan-venturing-into-workforce-management-ca80de1d797e | ['Vrunda Nagpal'] | 2020-12-25 15:02:33.957000+00:00 | ['Case Study', 'Startup', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Workforce Development', 'Innovation'] |
Serverless BI: A data-driven path to digital transformation | Serverless BI: A data-driven path to digital transformation
Adopting a Serverless approach simplifies an organisation’s path to data-driven Business Intelligence.
A full commitment to being data-driven can benefit organisations of all manners and sizes. A data-driven approach allows large companies to achieve effective digital transformation, whilst allowing smaller companies to productize their valuable data and effectively leverage the promise of artificial intelligence (AI). The key benefit of being truly data-driven is that it empowers any organisation to make the right decisions at the right time.
Data-driven organisations need every stakeholder at every level of the organisation to have access to the data they need, when they need it. Sometimes access is as simple as knowing set metrics (e.g., number of orders, revenue or conversion), and other times it’s about quickly making discoveries from data with the right tooling.
Developing an effective data-driven strategy often requires Business Intelligence (BI) tooling. BI is not a new concept; it has its origins in trade for centuries, crossing into the sphere of technology at IBM in the late 1950s. Today, Business Intelligence has become a widely recognized approach among management practitioners. That being said, according to NewVantage Partners’ 2019 Big Data and AI Executive Survey:
“69% [of executives] report that they have not created a data-driven organization”
The reasons many executives haven’t been able to transform their organisations into being data-driven are manifold. Some of these are, of course, organisational — larger companies often lack the agility required to transform the process and mindsets for their organisations to become data-driven. There are also many failed transformations due to technology, with existing IT teams unable to create the tooling needed to allow companies access to accurate, reliable and up-to-date data.
Cultural challenges often present a significant hurdle to organisations attempting a transformation to becoming data-driven. Ensuring a smooth BI technological integration can help mitigate cultural challenges — keeping costs low and minimizing business disruption will allow for proper investment into developing a data-driven culture. Further to this point, businesses need to increase flexibility in their business processes; it’s critical that the technology used keeps up with the changes made in those processes. As is the case with any software, the approach needs to be iterative, responding to the needs of the users to increase adoption.
Where does Serverless come in?
Serverless is a broad and polymorphic space, and is rapidly evolving. As a term, it’s widely used, but not well understood. For the purposes at hand, let’s think of Serverless as allowing applications and services to be run without having to manage the underlying infrastructure, as well as using a “buy-not-build” approach to services that have been commoditised.
Third-Party Services
In a Serverless approach, companies rarely build their own Serverless web applications; instead, they consume them as a service (e.g., AWS Cognito, Okta, Auth0). This leveraging of third-party services, as well as its pay-per-use model, makes Serverless an ideal fit for BI systems and data pipelines, as the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and time to market is reduced.
Security
There are security benefits as well. The underlying infrastructure and many critical security functions are managed by the cloud provider, making critical data security simpler and easier to audit and manage.
Data governance
Data governance concerns can also be simplified with a Serverless approach by employing a repeatable architecture that easily can be deployed across many regions. While Infrastructure as Code is not a new concept, Serverless architectures take it to the next level as more of the application infrastructure is simply the orchestration of cloud resources. The abstraction provided by Serverless services and the increased usage of cloud-native solutions makes multi-region deployments more easily manageable and maintainable.
As an example, while working with a startup revolutionizing the digital therapeutics space for neurodegenerative disease with a team at Theodo, we ensured the entire architecture could be deployed consistently across many regions. This simplified the regulatory constraints on this data, and global data aggregation could be handled in a dedicated pipeline, ensuring the removal of personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive data. Further, many of the audits were simplified by the lack of self-managed infrastructure.
Pay-Per-Use
Finally, pay-per-use is a natural fit for many BI needs, as reports are run periodically and access tends to be sporadic. This allows cost-efficient solutions for large organisations as well as affordability for startups.
Practical Serverless BI — In 4 Steps
For the purpose of this exercise, let’s take a simple case of an e-commerce company selling books. This company’s existing application happens to have a 100% Serverless architecture on AWS, and until now, the only analytics have been provided by Google Analytics. Other than that, executives have had to hunt down developers to run manual data extracts from the live databases. Let’s call our company “BookLess”.
This example will focus on building a Serverless BI solution for a Serverless application, but similar techniques can be used for more traditional architectures in a hybrid approach. The benefits of Serverless can still be realised in the BI tooling and data pipelines.
Step 1: Storage — The Serverless Data Lake
Where the data is stored is the first concern of any BI strategy. Traditionally, many BI solutions work off traditional relational databases using SQL as their lingua franca, in combination with other less structured sources. Sometimes data is aggregated in a data warehouse. Other times, it’s pulled out of a range of application-specific databases, or from an unstructured collection of data known as a “Data Lake”.
Our company BookLess has a completely Serverless application architecture; therefore, it will not be using a traditional relational database. Instead, all its application data will be stored in a number of DynamoDB databases (a low latency Serverless NoSQL database). As the team has had limited analytics so far, and years of data, they want to get all this data into a data lake for usage by the new data team (that’s us!).
Amazon S3 (an object storage service) makes for a great data lake solution. It’s Serverless, almost infinitely scalable and has mature tooling around security, encryption and integration with other cloud services. One of the concerns of companies adopting newer technologies is the lack of mature tooling, yet services like S3, which happens to be Serverless, already have a mature tooling ecosystem.
🗂 Real World Case Study: FactSet automated DynamoDB data exporting to Amazon S3 Parquet to create a Serverless data analytic platform.
Read the full case study
To get the DynamoDB data into S3 we will make use of DynamoDB streams, Lambda (Function-as-a-Service) and Kinesis Firehose (a data streaming service that can target data lakes, data stores and analytics tools).
Every time a table item is modified in a DynamoDB database, a stream captures a time-ordered list of changes, and these are then picked up by AWS Lambda (which can be batched). The changes can then be sent to the Kinesis Firehose to write them into S3. Using Kinesis instead of our own hosted Kafka again applies the tenant of Third-Party integrations, reducing the TCO.
Data streaming into S3 Data Lake
🗂 Real World Case Study: Woot.com cloud-native data warehousing solution. Replacing 5 year legacy system in just 3 months.
Read the full case study
BookLess also wants all their data in one place, and they want more control and flexibility over their frontend analytics (currently provided by Google Analytics). While they will keep Google Analytics for conversion funnel and demographic analysis, they want similar and other custom metrics from their data lake. Their frontend application, like most today, is a Single Page Application (SPA).
It’s quite a simple job to send their existing events to another analytics provider. Here again, we will use Kinesis Firehose into S3, but this time directly from the frontend client via the Amazon Kinesis Firehose Analytics Provider from the AWS Amplify Library. AWS Amplify provides a big range of functionality, but its library can be used independently to simplify integration with AWS Services from the frontend.
Step 2: Query — Getting Data From The Lake
We now have the data in our lake, and the business stakeholders are keen for insights. As the data is stored in an efficient format for query, thanks to Parquet (an open-source & performant flat data format), we can begin to gather insights using Amazon Athena (an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL).
Typically, querying this data would have required a complex extract, transform, load (ETL) process into a data-warehouse. Although managed ETL services exist — e.g., AWS Glue — this process can involve complex infrastructure management, moving away from our Serverless target. Luckily, AWS Glue is fully managed and has a pay-per-use model, but even in that case, it requires a more sophisticated skill set. For BookLess, we’ll use Athena, which allows simple access to the insights hidden in our data lake until we grow to need more advanced tooling.
Athena is also completely Serverless, meaning we’ve not added any complex infrastructure to manage, cost is per-use and typical SQL can be used by the application developers to run queries for the business. This is obviously not the data-driven dream we were aiming for, with everyone in the organisation empowered by access to insights, but it is a lot better than the previous scenario, and we’re closer to our goal.
As queries get more complex, it can make sense to bring in a data warehouse to allow more dynamic queries to be run. AWS Redshift will integrate well with the Data Lake we’ve established, and Amazon Redshift Spectrum allows Redshift to query data directly from files on Amazon S3 (in a similar manner to Athena). This is instead of having to copy it into the Redshift cluster first, querying the data in-situ.
The use of the term “cluster” should have set some alarm bells ringing. AWS Redshift (with the exclusion of Spectrum) is, sadly, not Serverless. You need to choose your cluster type. Although pay-per-hour pricing is available, the system is not Serverless, but it does provide more functionality. We will decide between the two and show how they can work together next.
Step 3: Insights and Analytics
So far, we’ve moved data around and formatted it for developers and data engineers to be able to do ad-hoc queries. Now, we need to put the data in the hands of the business.
Data-driven organisations need everyone at every level of the organisation to have access to the right data at the right time.
We need the ability for data to be queried by stakeholders without SQL skills, and we need to combine multiple data sources, along with data visualisation, dashboard creation, sharing and automated reports.
AWS QuickSight provides the functionality to pull data from the data lake we’ve established, as well as from other data sources inside and outside of AWS. Users can interact with the data without needing to understand SQL, and interactive dashboards can be created and shared. Additionally, automated reports can be generated and sent to stakeholders’ inboxes, which will help cultivate a data-driven culture and allow everyone in the organisation to see the value of the data-driven approach.
QuickSight can pull directly from S3, as well as from Athena and Redshift. The exact configuration needed depends on the specific reporting needs of the organisation. Direct to S3 is the simplest, but most limited version, followed by Athena and then Redshift. Startups, and those beginning their journey to being data-driven, will get good results with Athena and QuickSight. As an organisation grows into its data-driven approach, Redshift can provide additional functionality.
Another useful aspect of AWS QuickSight is the mobile app, which provides access to dashboards and offers the ability to interact with data while on the move.
Although it can take time to fully transition an organisation to a data-driven approach, getting stakeholders to engage with the app version rather than relying on auto-generated reports can be a big win in terms of security and data protection.
The app can authenticate with traditional methods as well as with FaceID, allowing users fast and secure access — a big security win over PDFs. This also can be a strong improvement to the GDPR, PII and Security aspects of an organization’s reporting process.
Step 4: Artificial Intelligence — Discovery and Future-proofing
Companies look to gather clean data, as it aids not only their day-to-day reporting, but it also helps to leverage AI and machine learning (ML) to compete with industry competition in the future.
Amazon QuickSight offers ML Insights to parse natural language, forecast trends and discover insights. This can be taken further with the (still in preview) integration with Amazon SageMaker, a cloud machine learning platform. Existing SageMaker models can be used inside of QuickSight to augment reporting, and we anticipate such integrations will develop further.
As companies become data-driven, data becomes a first-class citizen. This means a company’s day-to-day operations involve keeping data clean, consistent and up to date, as it directly impacts reporting and the ability to gain business insights. This has the added benefit of ensuring companies look after an asset of growing value: their data. Whether this is to commoditise the data at a later point, use it to learn from users or simply to maintain a data-driven culture, this resource will pay dividends in a not too distant future.
Conclusion
A Serverless BI solution ensures that investment is focused on getting the right data to the right people at the right time. The pay-per-use model ensures that large companies don’t waste money on licences for unused systems, and it lowers the barrier to entry for smaller companies to become data-driven, essentially democratising the data-driven approach to business intelligence.
The right tooling can help ensure success in the cultural changes needed to become data-driven. Once success is realised, the underlying data lakes and pipelines become assets for the future.
It’s important that AI and machine learning be considered, even if not immediately adopted. The data gathered today will be the data used to power future AI/ML systems. Ensuring day-to-day operational data quality by leveraging data-driven analytics today is essential for the future as well as the present.
Coupled with the right architectural approach, and treating data as a first-class citizen in a highly integrative format, we can sow the seeds for businesses to succeed in the Serverless AI revolution around the corner. | https://medium.com/serverless-transformation/serverless-bi-a-data-driven-path-to-digital-transformation-4aeb8f01e587 | ['Ben Ellerby'] | 2020-08-10 10:51:39.941000+00:00 | ['Serverless', 'AWS', 'Business Intelligence', 'Digital Transformation', 'Cloud'] |
How George Soros Broke the Bank of England and Made $1,5B in the Process | How George Soros Broke the Bank of England and Made $1,5B in the Process
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
When a pipe bomb arrived at George Soros's suburban home in NYC, and the Authoritarian Hungarian Government shut his college in 2018, the world again remembered the name of one of the most prized currency traders in history.
Democratic donor on the left, and a globalist boogyman on the right, George Soros is an interesting persona we don’t really know much about.
We do, however, know what he has done during his career as an investor and why he’s so famous today, even beyond the right-wing propaganda of globalist conspiracies. Soros’s infamy takes place soon after a single event.
September 16th, 1992 is known as Black Wednesday in the UK, but among Forex traders, it’s the day George Soros Broke the Bank of England.
The power of institutional money can humble even the most powerful nations.
Smart Money is the term for institutional bets that abruptly amass in single security (stock, bond, fx pair). Financial institutions, including hedge funds, commercial banks, and brokerages, have the power to set the market and disrupt trends.
When it comes to investing, the volume is a solid indicator that something is happening, and volume almost always means smart money is getting into a position before a big event takes place.
In early 1992, Smart Money started accumulating against the British pound, and what happened next paved the way for Britain’s departure from the European Union, and furthered a moral crisis in the UK.
Prelude to fiasco
Six European countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands) got together to end the bloodshed on European ground that raged for millennia.
The union was supposed to be as economical, but it grew past trade deals.
The UK, a flailing colonial power at the time, first saw the EU as a half-baked idea and decided to pass on the call to join forces in creating a free and prosperous Europe.
Soon, after, when the European dream caught traction, the UK decided to make an entry. But the global power received a harsh no, twice. Charles de Gaulle, France's president, vetoed the UK’s attempts to join the EU in 1963, and again in 1967.
“But the question, to know whether Great Britain can now place herself like the Continent and with it inside a tariff which is genuinely common, to renounce all Commonwealth preferences, to cease any pretence that her agriculture be privileged, and, more than that, to treat her engagements with other countries of the free trade area as null and void — that question is the whole question.” — de Gaulle’s statement from 1963.
In short, the French president believed the UK would seek privileged status in the Union before it disrupts the common markets and instigates division among the member states.
However, The UK joined the EU in 1973, on its 3rd attempt, and secured a special agreement that would favor UK’s waters, fish, and agriculture. The agreement held for less than 40 years. The UK has left the EU on the 1st of January in 2021, causing division among the other member states.
Charles de Gaulle understood Britain better than its leaders and citizens at the time, according to many historians.
The opening act to currency wars
Geroge Soros, a Jewish Billionaire who gave away 32 billion dollars to worthy causes during his career, emerged as the face of everything bad on the far right.
His story begins before the crisis of 2008, the Trump Administration, and his defiance against the authoritarian regimes and anti-semitism.
In 1976, European nations were trying to make sense of different national currencies within the Union. The financial institutions created the European Rate Mechanism (ERM). The ERM tied exchange rates to each other, forcing central banks to artificially maintain the value among European currencies to avoid strong fluctuations in the value of money among member states.
The UK refused to join at first. Alan Waters who was Margeret Tacher’s economic’s advisor called the idea “half-baked,” and Britan refused any role in ERM. However, the performance of the German mark seduced the UK’s top officials a decade later and the Westminister representatives crafted a clever plan to take advantage of ERM’s loopholes.
The Forex crusade of 1992
George Soros believed the UK was stacking the deck against the other European countries. The British pound was artificially overvalued against the German Mark, as history shows.
Soros spearheaded the crusade against the BoE exchanging the Pound for Deutsche Mark (German’s currency before Euro). Investors following the volume amassing against the British pound weren’t surprised by what followed.
Before September 1992, other financial managers, including Paul Tudor Jones and Bruce Kovner, developed similar concerns and started betting against the Bank of England and the British government.
“They bet that the politicians and central banks could not much longer maintain artificially high exchange rates in the interests of European unity,” wrote authors Thomas Jaffe and Dyan Machan.
Soon, all hell broke. The Bank of England refused to accept the market sentiment, inflation, and the overwhelming push to lower the price of the pound. The central bank pumped more money into the system by exchanging the Deutsche mark for pounds, in a desperate attempt to maintain the ballooned price of the pound.
Sir John Major, the Prime Minister, and the leader of the Conservative party at the time, rose interest rates to 10% and authorized billions in support funds to buy more pound sterling from other markets.
On the morning of September 15, the currency trades have got the news and started massively selling the British pound. The financial laws required the central bank to accept each transaction against the pounds. BoE found a way to avoid any contract issued outside the working hours and coined a plan for the next day.
In the early morning of September 16th, at 8:30 am, the bank executed two orders of 300 million pounds, but the currency investors kept pushing against the pound sterling.
At 10:30 am, the government announced a base interest rate hike from 10% to 12% to bait speculators to buy more pounds. When the interest rate goes up, the price of money is supposed to raise consequently because money is now more expensive to buy from the central bank.
Speculators kept pushing with full resolve, distrusting UK’s government. Sir John Major announced another hike in the early afternoon, this time up to 15%, which showed a sign of true desperation. For context, interest rates are the most potent tools for central banks to keeps the value of money in check. Interest rates don’t change often, let alone in two massive spikes during the same day. For reference, the United States has been enjoying an interest rate between 0% and 2.25% for the past 13 years, slightly tuning interest rates 3–4 times a year.
At 7:00 pm that day, Norman Lamont, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced Britain's withdrawal from the ERM and accepted defeat.
September 16 is known as Black Wednesday, a day of the total and utter fiasco of Britain's monetary policy. Among investors, September 16th is known as the day when George Soros broke the Bank of England. The events damaged conservative reputation in the UK, and the world, and were condemned as a massive waste of money.
Soros’s short position against the British Pound made 1 billion in a single day and increased the assets under management in his hedge fund (Quantum Fund) from $3.3B to $7B in 1992, which continued to grow beyond $11B in 1993. Paul Tudor Jones netted $250 million officially, and Kovner’s Caxton Corp reported $300 million profit from that event.
Quantum Fund took the throne as the largest hedge fund at the end of the last millennia but lost the position soon after, following the dot-com crash.
The many morals and takeaways from the story.
→ You can’t compete against the market even if you’re a colonial power. Black Wednesday uncovers the power of democratized finance.
→ Many blame ERM, while others blame the UK’s colonial past and a sense of grand superiority. Both sides are to blame.
→ Black Wednesday was actually beneficial for the UK during the Eurozone crisis in 2009. Bank of England could steer the pound more effectively and wasn’t obliged to help other sinking economies in the Eurozone.
→ The events paved the way for Britains departure from the European Union.
→ ERM is by no means a fully-baked system, but it keeps on improving year-over-year, together with the rest of the European Union.
Who was George Soros on that day?
Was he a brave investor who took a position against a colonial empire, or an opportunist that traded in global misery? Depending on where you stand on the political spectrum, this story may have a different ring to it.
George Soros is a man that broke the Bank of England, changed the course of modern history, and still continues to deliver on his work even though he’s 88 years old.
Is he a good man? Who knows.
Is he a brilliant economic mind? Yes, he is, and Black Wednesday is the proof. | https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/how-george-soros-broke-the-bank-of-england-and-made-1-5b-in-the-process-e510783e6904 | ['Toni Koraza'] | 2021-02-11 16:13:55.689000+00:00 | ['Finance', 'Forex', 'Politics', 'Bitcoin', 'Investing'] |
5 Ways to Make Your Software Development Resume Stand Out | Writing an effective software engineer resume is more art than code, but it’s not that hard to create. You just have to focus on a few key things. A resume is like a super business card. Its purpose is to get you in the door, so it needs to sell you and your skills as the best candidate for a job.
Here are 5 things in no particular order you can do to improve your resume and start getting quality interviews.
1. Keep it Short
Just like any good piece of communication, your resume should be no longer than it has to be. Some people swear by one page, others swear by two, and I’ve seen a few four page resumes filled with relevant and also not so relevant keywords. I think four pages is way too long.
Your resume doesn’t have to be one page, but keep it short and to the point. Edit your work and remove unnecessary spaces, redundant content, and long-winded explanations of what you did. Save that stuff for your interviews.
For each job, what are the standout results of your efforts? What did you do with your days, and how did your efforts contribute to the overall goals of the team and business? Concisely communicate the best parts, and leave out the fluff.
2. Bullet Points with Impact
Your resume should have bullet points for each item of interest. They’re easy to read, and they’re easy to skim. We all know so few people actually read resumes in detail. Some lazy hiring manager should be able to skim your resume and get the highlights you present in bullet format. And for those responsible recruiters, make sure each bullet communicates effectively.
Don’t be long-winded with your bullet points. Short and straight to the details will be the most effective approach. Each detail needs to hit the person skimming your resume right in the face. What impact did your work have on your organization and what value did you create?
Hiring managers and team leads want to know what you can do for them. Make sure you communicate that clearly.
3. Use Actual Metrics
When highlighting the impact and value your work brought to each organization (team, product, etc.), you’ve got to provide real numbers whenever you can. Think about the last time you got a raise. Both the dollar amount and percentage increase are real values your brain can latch on to and determine if you’re getting shafted or not. 5% raise? 7%? 1.2%? Which one of those metrics would be the best result for you?
Likewise, if you wrote some software that automated something, you’re saving time for actual humans. Put a number to that. If you cut out unnecessary spending on redundant services (I once learned my job at the time had websites spread across three different hosting companies for no reason other than “why not,” so I consolidated and saved money), write down the savings.
Don’t exaggerate your metrics, because that’s dumb, but make sure you put as much relevant data into your resume as makes sense. Numbers are a good way to show people you’ll be a good hire.
4. Drill Down to Exact Version Details
How many differences are there between the first version of MS SQL Server, and SQL Server 2017? What about PHP 4 to PHP 7? If you built websites with classic asp 17 years ago, can you build one using .NET Core 2.1 today?
Versions matter in our profession. Specificity matters. Software engineering is a career of precision, so be precise with your tool versions. Team leaders like to know if you’re versed in the same version of Oracle being used in production.
If you don’t put it on your resume, they may ask if you can use something. Or… they might just skip over you completely and move on to the first resume that lists Ruby 5.2.1.
5. Benefits vs. Features
If you’ve taken a sales course, you know the importance of communicating benefits instead of features. A person buys something because of what it can do for them, or maybe because of the emotional response it triggered when they first saw whatever it was. Features of a thing might play a part in the buying decision — think specs on your next laptop — but you’re buying it for the benefits it will provide you.
A feature of you might be, “I know Node.js,” but that might not communicate much to a prospective employer. You can say that you know Node, but do so in a way that shows the reader how it will benefit them. A benefit solves a problem. A benefit is a solution.
How will one of your features solve a problem, or improve a process, or be used to create a new product that will earn the organization money, time, or even mindshare? Sell your benefits, and communicate your features along the way.
Bonus Tip!
This might seem obvious, but make sure you don’t skip this part. You have to proofread like a maniac. Write your resume, read it, fix the mistakes, read it again, fix the mistakes you missed on the first fix run, and then give it to someone else to proofread. Then read it out loud to make sure the words flow and sound natural.
Imagine you owned a blender company, and a copywriter gave you a business card offering their services to help you sell your blenders. When you look at it, you notice the business card has a spelling error on it. Your next step is to throw that card in the trash and find another writer who cares enough to check their work to help you sell your blenders.
Don’t be that individual with the bad business card. Proofread your resume and make sure it’s perfect. Communicating that you care enough to do a good job and deliver a quality product is vital to your success.
You are Selling Yourself to Both a Person and a Machine
Many years ago I worked a job with PowerBuilder, which is an old development tool used to make database applications. I haven’t heard of anyone using it in the real world since I left that job, but it’s on some copy of my resume floating around out there. To this day, I will occasionally get hit up by a recruiter for a PowerBuilder job. The recruiter clearly hasn’t read my resume, because if they had they would see that I haven’t used it since 2006.
When you upload your resume to some job websites, a machine crawls through it looking for keywords to match to jobs. That’s where tip #4 can come in handy. You’ll match tools, languages, and even specific versions to jobs in the database, and that can get you talking to a real person.
A good job recruiter will look at the resume the system found and determine if you are an actual potential candidate for the position in question. Once you make it past the machine screener, you have to be selected by the human recruiter. That will take a great resume. That will take impact and a clear expression of your effectiveness.
If you’ve got the keywords for the system to match you to a job, do you also have compelling benefits and a great career story to impress a job recruiter?
Take a look at your resume and give it a solid rewrite. You never know when you might need it. | https://calebrogers.medium.com/5-ways-to-make-your-software-development-resume-stand-out-3d26befe96e0 | ['Caleb Rogers'] | 2019-12-09 05:28:14.589000+00:00 | ['Careers', 'Software Development', 'Resume'] |
New Year’s Resolution: Don’t Lose Weight | I am fitness professional of over 17 years and I am begging you not to set a New Year’s Resolution to lose weight.
The short reason: You will make yourself miserable. You will make yourself less healthy. You will gain the weight back.
The long reason: The tradition of setting weight loss goals is rooted in diet culture. Diet culture is a system of beliefs that prioritize weight over well-being; it is the glorification of losing weight and pursuing thinness at all costs. It is also rooted in white supremacy and patriarchy, and has deep ties to capitalism.
Weight loss is difficult to maintain without habits that are ultimately damaging to your body and health. 95% of all diets fail, and 2/3s of people who lose weight on diets will end up regaining more than they lost. More than 1/3 of those who admit to normal dieting become pathological dieters, and this causes weight cycling (go on a diet, lose some weight, go off the diet, gain it back, lather rinse repeat forever). Pathological dieting is linked to heart disease, insulin resistance, higher blood pressure, inflammation, and, ironically, long-term weight gain. The Framingham Heart Study has shown that regardless of initial weight, people who weight cycle have twice the risk of dying from heart disease. The dieting itself causes stress on our bodies and leads to ill health.
If that isn’t unsettling enough, 35% of normal dieters progress into disordered eating and 25% develop an eating disorder. If those numbers feel unbelievable, note that 30 million people in the USA have an eating disorder. The culture of shame around our bodies keeps many people who suffer with these disorders quiet, as only 10% seek professional help. So if you read these stats and think, “this can’t be, I don’t know anyone who struggles with this!” think again. It is widespread and it is urgent that we reckon with the culture that drives us to hate our bodies and go to great lengths to change them. It is literally life and death - every 62 minutes someone dies from an eating disorder. And if it doesn’t kill you, eating disorders lead to real health consequences, like cardiac weakening and failure, gastrointestinal breakdown, neurological weakening, endocrine deregulation, decreased white blood cell count, kidney failure, and infertility. And if you think the risk is worth it because the culture tells us that being fat is worse than having an eating disorder, reconsider. The narrative that being overweight will lead to worse health issues than doing whatever we can to be thin is a farce. In the United States, a child is 242 more times likely to have an eating disorder than type 2 diabetes.
I can throw as many stats at you as exist but we humans are emotional creatures, so I invite you to reflect on your history with dieting. Reflect on your relationship to health and fitness. Reflect on your relationship with your body. If you are someone who has a history of dieting, how has that gone for you? Has it made you healthier? Has it made you happier?
I can speak for myself — my first diet started around age 10. I dieted all through my teens, trying every ridiculous idea I could get my hands on. I eventually developed bulimia in my late teens and battled it through my 20s. No one really knew that I had a violent eating disorder, as many of my behaviors were considered normal in our diet culture infested society. While I moved from diet to diet, I thought surely the next one would be the answer, and that if I could just lose weight, I would finally be accepted and respected. I tied so much of my self worth to the number on the scale, that every accomplishment I made as a young adult was overshadowed by my body. And that didn’t come from nowhere — our culture drills into our heads as early as age 3 that smaller bodies are better bodies. Diet culture tells us all sorts of lies, and holds up a very specific type of body that we should all aim to be. Thin. White. Able bodied. Straight. You can fill in the rest.
When I finally found the strength to process and heal, I realized that I had to let go of dieting and the pursuit of thinness at all costs. As a fitness professional, this was a challenge as my entire industry is built on the premise of thinness. Every workout, every bit of nutritional advice seemed to have some sort of tie to thinness. Ab blaster! Trim and tuck! Lean and tone! Flatten your belly! Shrink your love handles! Get that thigh gap!
I had to question everything I knew, everything I had taken for granted, everything I had been taught. I had to embrace different perspectives and get really curious. I eventually had to reject much of what I had considered to be true. I completely reframed how I view bodies, wellness, fitness, and what really consitutes a healthy life.
Here is what I have learned: Dieting doesn’t work. Anyone who claims differently is trying to sell you something. Eating disorders are hell and I wouldn’t wish one on anyone. We should be doing all we can as a society to minimize them, and instead we do everything we can to ensure more people suffer with them. Weight cycling is much more dangerous than carrying extra weight, and the societal stigma and discrimination around fatness is significantly worse for our health than being fat. In fact, weight stigma and discrimination may actually explain the impact on health instead of the body size itself. Health is not directly related to weight, and physical health is just one aspect of a healthy life — our mental, emotional, and social health are just as important and it is crucial to recognize how our behaviors in pursuit of the lie of thinness can negatively impact each of those areas.
So what can we do instead? If we want to focus on bettering our relationship to health, what sort of goals can we set?
First ask what is driving the desire to lose weight — what are you trying to feel or accomplish? This takes time to be introspective and honest with ourselves, so I suggest setting aside some time to reflect and journal. Ask what prompted the weight loss goal, and then ask what is driving that need, and then ask what is driving that feeling, and keep asking until you get to the root. We can find a lot of clarity when we slow down and dig in.
Then, challenge the narrative that we need to be thin to be worthy (or enter any word here: loved, valued, etc.). This is a central lie to diet culture — if you lose weight, suddenly all of your needs will be met and your dreams will come true. Spoiler alert: this is bullshit. Whatever is driving that desire will still be there if you lose weight. Focus directly on the driving need and let your body exist as it is.
Next, set goals that align with your purpose and the underlying drivers. Maybe you want to lose weight because you think it will build your confidence, so instead of weight loss you can focus on self love. Saying affirmations each morning, starting a gratitude journal, identifying your strengths and investing time into them, and practicing self acceptance are all ways to increase confidence without punishing yourself with dieting. Connecting to health professionals like therapists, coaches, etc. can help you set a specific plan to really address the underlying need. If working with a professional isn’t accessible to you, there are lots of great resources online for free from qualified professionals as well.
Finally, we can look at our relationship with health, wellness, and fitness. If we can separate ourselves from diet culture, even for a moment, we can start to see ways to integrate behaviors that support all aspects of our health. Maybe we can make a goal to move our bodies for a few mintues each day in a way that brings us joy. Or maybe we can make a goal to let go of dieting and reestablish our relationship with food — Intuitive Eating is a great philosophy to heal. Maybe we add a goal to challenge diet culture in a real way every day, whether by unfollowing anyone on social media that causes us to hate our bodies, finding voices to follow that build us up, throwing away diet books and diet food, deleting calorie tracking apps, tossing out our scales, committing to stop reading nutritional content on food labels, letting go of measuring everything we eat…the possibilities are endless because diet culture has its tentacles in so many parts of our lives!
My advice: pick one thing that is doable. Give yourself grace and recognize that healing and growth are not linear. Some days will be easy, others will not. Once that thing becomes a natural part of your existence, pick another. Let go of the seduction of hopping on another diet. They likely haven’t worked for you (see above stats) so why not try a different approach? Give yourself permission to reject the messaging that is so prevalent this time of year. You don’t need to lose weight. You don’t need to change your body. Self development and growth are beautiful things, and a diet will not give you either. Reject diets. Diet culture is the air we breath and we are brought up in it. Years of conditioning will not be undone with the magic of a new year. But we can chip away at it, day by day, until one day you wake up and realize you are free. | https://medium.com/@rachaelbabs/new-years-resolution-don-t-lose-weight-a50b24b53667 | ['Rachael Babiracki'] | 2021-01-02 19:05:30.058000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Wellness', 'Diet Culture', 'New Years Resolutions', 'Fitness'] |
3D Bioprinting the Technology is Constantly Evolving to Enhance the Effectiveness of Artificial Organs | 3D Bioprinting the Technology is Constantly Evolving to Enhance the Effectiveness of Artificial Organs Market Strategy Dec 16, 2021·3 min read
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Website: https://straitsresearch.com/ | https://medium.com/@marketstrategy/3d-bioprinting-the-technology-is-constantly-evolving-to-enhance-the-effectiveness-of-artificial-f0d5ec3d68e1 | ['Market Strategy'] | 2021-12-16 16:49:17.814000+00:00 | ['Artificial Organs Market', 'Artificial Organ', '3D Printing'] |
The Intuition Behind the Apriori Algorithm | Analyzing shopping trends is a pretty big deal in data science, and market-basket analysis is one way in which that’s done. Techniques in this sub-field seek to understand how buying certain items influences the purchase of other items. This allows retailers to increase revenue by up-selling or cross-selling their existing customers.
Understanding the Apriori Algorithm is foundational to building your understanding of many techniques for market-basket analysis. It’s used to find groups of items that occur together frequently in a shopping dataset. This is usually the first step to finding new ways in which to promote merchandise.
So… What does shopping data look like?
Imagine we have a file where each line represents a customer’s shopping cart at checkout time. Let’s call this a basket.
Each line above represents a basket
Each basket is made up of items. Our objective is to find sets of items that occur frequently together in the dataset. We’ll call these frequent itemsets.
Our objective is to find sets of items that occur frequently together in the dataset.
We’ll set our own definition of what frequent means. This definition will likely change based on the number of baskets in the dataset. Typically, we’ll be interested in frequent itemsets of a particular size. Today, let’s assume that we’re looking for frequent triples (i.e. itemsets of size 3).
As we continue exploring below, let’s use this example dataset to enhance the discussion. It takes on the format described above.
Some quick stats about the example dataset:
It contains 100,000 baskets
There are 5,000 items that are sold at this particular supermarket
Each item is a fake ISBN number (you know, like for books 📚)
Let’s also say that appearing more than 1,000 times makes an itemset frequent. (Note: The count of an itemset is often called its support.)
The Naïve Approach
The first thing that comes to mind is to scan through the dataset, count up the occurrences of all the triples, then filter out the ones that aren’t frequent.
The naïve approach is appealing for its simplicity. However, we end up counting a lot of triples.
In the example dataset, there are over 7 million total triples, but only 168 of them are frequent.
There are over 7 million total triples, but only 168 of them are frequent.
Lots of triples, but not a lot of frequent triples.
This is a problem for two reasons:
Keeping track of the counts for those millions of triples takes up a lot of space.
Building and counting all of those triples takes a lot of time.
If only there were a way to avoid building and counting so many triples…
A Key Intuition
There is a way to avoid doing that! And it relies on a key piece of information. Don’t worry, we’ll break it down together, but here it is:
The key intuition is that all subsets of frequent itemsets are also frequent itemsets.
To add some clarity, consider these four baskets:
Eggs, flour, and milk seem to be a pretty popular combo
We can clearly see that the set {eggs, flour, milk} occurs 3 times. And at risk of sounding overly simplistic: each time we see the group {eggs, flour, milk}, we are seeing the individual items {eggs}, {flour}, and {milk}. As a result, we can safely say that the support (i.e. count) of {eggs} will be at least as large as the support of the set {eggs, flour, milk}. The same applies to flour and milk.
Our newfound conclusions
In fact, we can extend this fact to pairs of items inside of the set {eggs, flour, milk}. That means Support({eggs, flour}) ≥ Support({eggs, flour, milk}). Again, that’s because the set {eggs, flour} necessarily occurs whenever the set {eggs, flour, milk} occurs, since it’s a subset of it. Of course, this generalizes to sets and subsets of larger sizes.
Okay… So what?
The fact outlined above becomes useful when you think about it in the other direction. Since sugar, for example, only occurs once, we know that any set that contains sugar can only occur once.
Think about it: if a triple that contained sugar occurred more than once, that would mean that sugar occurs more than once. And since sugar only occurs once, we can guarantee that any triple that contains sugar will not appear more than once.
That means that we can simply ignore all of the sets that contain sugar, since we know that they can’t be frequent itemsets.
We can apply this same logic to larger subsets as well. In the image above, {milk} and {butter} each appear three times. But as a pair, they only appear together twice (i.e. Support({milk, butter}) = 2). This means that any triple that contains the pair {milk, butter} can appear at most 2 times. When scanning for triples that appear 3 or more times, we could simply ignore {milk, butter, flour} since it contains {milk, butter}, so we know that it must appear no more than 2 times.
The Apriori Algorithm makes use of this fact to eliminate needlessly constructing and counting itemsets.
The Apriori Algorithm
Unlike the naïve approach, which makes a single pass over the dataset, the Apriori Algorithm makes several passes — increasing the size of itemsets that are being counted each time. It filters out irrelevant itemsets by using the knowledge gained in previous passes.
Here’s an outline of the algorithm:
First Pass
Get the counts of all the items in the dataset
Filter out items that are not frequent
Second Pass
Get the counts of pairs of items in the dataset. BUT: only consider pairs where both items in the pair are frequent items. (These are called candidate pairs.)
Filter out pairs that are not frequent.
Third Pass
Get the counts of triples in the dataset. BUT: only consider candidate triples. If any of the items in the triple are not frequent, the triple is not a candidate triple. If any of the pairs of items in the triple are not frequent, the triple is not a candidate triple.
Filter out triples that are not frequent.
Nth Pass
Get the counts of candidate itemsets of size N. ( Remember: If any of the subsets of items in the itemset are not frequent, then the itemset cannot be frequent.)
If any of the subsets of items in the itemset are not frequent, then the itemset cannot be frequent.) Filter out itemsets that are not frequent.
While this algorithm ends up taking more passes over the data, it saves a lot of time by cutting down on the number of itemsets that it builds and counts.
Take a look at these stats from our example dataset:
We only consider 352 of the 7m+ possible triples.
Ultimately, this reduction in the number of itemsets considered is what makes the Apriori Algorithm so much better than the naïve approach.
Want to truly understand it…?
I encourage you to implement the Apriori Algorithm yourself, as a way of cementing your understanding of it.
To get you started, I’ve set up a Github repo with some example datasets and other resources to get you started.
Here are two challenges — one much harder than the other.
The Challenge
Extract frequent triples from the example datasets by implementing the Apriori Algorithm and conducting three passes through the dataset.
Check you implementation by also implementing the naïve approach and comparing your results.
The Bonus Challenge
Implement the Apriori Algorithm such that it will extract frequent itemsets of any given size. For example, if I want to extract frequent itemsets of, say, size 13 it should be able to do that.
The Github repo includes a script that you can use to generate very large datasets. Use this to test your more general implementation.
(If you choose to take on the bonus challenge, I encourage you to do the 3 pass implementation first. I think it’ll help build your understanding.)
Avoid this common mistake
One of the most common mistakes when implementing this algorithm happens when checking for candidate itemsets. Folks often remember to check if the individual items in an itemset are frequent, but they forget to check if all subsets of the current itemset are frequent.
Folks often remember to check if the individual items in an itemset are frequent, but they forget to check if all subsets of the current itemset are frequent.
Remember: Triples contain pairs. Quads contain triples and pairs. And so on.
Let’s chat!
If you take on either of the challenges above, please let me know. I’d love to swap implementations of the algorithm with you and hear about your experience.
I’ve listed my email on the Github repo, so please feel free to reach out. | https://medium.com/weekly-data-science/the-intuition-behind-the-apriori-algorithm-4efe312ccc3c | ['Dan Isaza'] | 2018-07-19 06:25:06.194000+00:00 | ['Algorithms', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Data Science', 'Education', 'Machine Learning'] |
Be aware of the people who bitch about other people | I am sure most of us have already heard the quote,
“Surround yourself with people who talk about visions & ideas, not other people.”
But how many of us have truly paid attention to it? There will be very few people who are following this. I am sure most of you would be thinking that what bad it can do to me! In fact, I also thought that way till last week. But what had happened that caused this idea to trigger me?
So, this is in short what happened;
My smartphone was taken away from me so that I cannot chat with my college mates(boys of my class) just because my parents heard of someone’s silly talks about a girl who eloped with a boy and she used to chat with boys. Now if she had done that, this doesn’t mean all girls will do that, what’s our fault? I couldn’t have access to my phone for 2 and half days until I said them that from now on I will not talk to boys. Just imagine for a girl in an engineering college where the girls make only 20% of the students, and you are telling her that she should talk only to girls.
What I concluded from that incidence is this,
“Never allow yourself & your family members(especially parents) to be surrounded with people who talk about other people.”
And I mean it. Because we never know how badly they can affect us in a way, we cannot even think about it.
Maybe your freedom (even if you had a little of it) could be taken away just because your parents heard some gossips about anyone’s daughter from someone (can be your neighbors or door ke rishtedaar). Just like what happened with me.
And they have the potential to affect not only girls but boys also. Maybe you would not be allowed to pursue the profession you want, just because your parents have heard about someone who failed in that profession.
But remember, if he failed it is not necessary that you will also fail.
These are just two of the many things that can directly affect us even if we are not directly in touch with those people just because our parents are hearing those gossips. And we all well know that how much our parents are influenced by these neighbors and relatives or we can say society.
Emotional Atyachaar……
And then comes the emotional atyachaar part. We are told that ‘woh aapke parents hain, woh aapka bhala hi chahte hain, they are always right in whatever they are doing, so how can you disobey your parents aur fir hum bhi in emotions me beh jaate hain’ but what we fail to realize is that ‘whatever decisions, rules, restrictions they make are not solely theirs, it’s only because how their mind is influenced by those toxic people who have no other work other than gossiping’.
Conclusion
Their talks may be cheap, but the cost of listening to gossip is expensive.
So, in short, that’s good to keep a distance from the people who talk about other people and it’s equally important to keep away your family also from those people.
Do comment below if you also came across any of these situations !!! | https://medium.com/@sherrybansal/be-aware-of-the-people-who-bitch-about-other-people-734d9844ae33 | ['Sherry Bansal'] | 2021-07-02 11:08:29.991000+00:00 | ['Quotes', 'Experience', 'Self-awareness', 'Improvement'] |
Beyond the win: accessing the long-term benefits of CX | The profile of Customer Experience has risen rapidly over the past couple of years, it is now accepted business wisdom that good CX provides competitive advantage and with that has come widespread support for projects that target improved performance through a CX approach.
Marketeers and brand teams have generally been quickest to embrace the concept, leveraging positive customer feedback to win new business and improve the rate and efficiency of customer acquisition. But the real value of Customer Experience is in the ongoing relationship. It is the delivery of the promise, not the promise that should take precedence for businesses.
The major wins from CX are in the existing customer base, helping businesses increase life-time value of customers, reduce churn and drive customer advocacy through better relationships. These aren’t marketing KPI’s, these are the operational fundamentals for most businesses, underpinning the case for much wider ownership of CX, including at senior levels, within organisations.
Recognising the opportunity in CX is straightforward, delivering it can be more of a challenge. Moving from strategic goals to effective implementation throws up two major obstacles, co-ordination and, the nemesis of every company, budget.
Co-ordination is quite often seen as a facet of the budget challenge. Most businesses of significant size split responsibility for customer management over multiple departments. The end result often being that what sales and marketing propose and what product development, technical teams and customer support are able and/or willing to deliver can be at odds. As can the way that they communicate with and handle customers at different touchpoints throughout the relationship, the culture of each leaking into the customer experience.
The utopian vision of solving this problem, centralised responsibility for CX handing down specific and actionable direction from a board level CX authority (the CXO) who holds a budget fit to fund it all, is a pipe dream for most businesses. While it’s easy to identify the positives in such a set up, the reality is that funding and approval for establishing such significant change is difficult to achieve and the actual benefit for the company as a whole of passing responsibility in this way is questionable.
A more distributed model is achievable and doesn’t require sacrificing consistency, or excellence, in the pursuit of pragmatism. The foundation is a simple and easily applied set of CX principles, applicable across the business, signed off and signed up to by all departments.
This may seem as daunting a challenge as getting a CXO in place, but most CX improvements will have outcomes that directly align with department targets, priorities and requirements. Initial buy-in can meet resistance from those that perceive CX as a marketing fad, but achieving a company-wide approach is mostly about open dialogue, alignment and language. Advocates of a customer-centric approach can normally be found, or created, across functions once the benefits, and the reality, of better CX are described in language that resonates. As an added benefit, internal conversations that improve outcomes for customers often improve interaction between teams as well.
Budget can be a harder nut to crack, Customer Experience really is a durable competitive advantage, but to be successful the whole business has to support it. The best way to get that support is simple; prove that it works.
For businesses attempting to build enthusiasm for CX we believe the initial goal should always be a limited project, where benefits can be closely identified and therefore the beneficiary encouraged to find budget. Without a portfolio of projects that demonstrate success - getting a mandate for large scale CX projects, and structural change to support it, is generally an arduous process with no guarantee of success. In the time it takes to get board approval for a decent sized project half a dozen smaller projects could have been defined and executed.
So how could you approach this within a moving business, without necessitating a restructure or massive investment?
Start with knowledge
What is the current customer experience? You can’t improve what you don’t understand, even small scale qualitative research can drive significant insight. Map an existing journey, understand all the places where customers interact with you along that path.
Co-ordinate
Establish a multi-departmental team as your CX working group, start with understanding how CX impacts each team, establish principles of good CX for your business, agree what you are trying to achieve, meet regularly.
Identify opportunities
With a cross-functional team the customer journey map can be used to rapidly identify current areas where customers are frustrated, or opportunities for the business exist. It can be a long list, the goal isn’t to fix it all, but to find it all.
Set priorities
Where can you make the biggest impact for the least amount of internal disruption? What is driving customers away? Establish the priority opportunities and then establish a first project. Don’t go crazy, start small and measurable.
Identify a budget
Ideally the budget will come from the primary beneficiary. Often where budget is already allocated to tasks that can be ‘re-badged’ as customer experience, for example user guides or online resources, it’s easier to repurpose funds. This is especially true where the budget for these resources is held by operational rather than marketing teams.
Measure widely
Using your working group, get feedback across the business on the impact of changes, have sales increased? Have customer service calls decreased? Are technical teams seeing a difference in demands on them? Reinforce for the team and their departments that improving the CX helps everyone.
Keep going
With each project a stronger case for prioritising CX is being built. Show the business it would benefit from a centralised CX lead and full time budget. This will be easier if the departments recognise the value to them and are willing to contribute, so it’s not new money.
When initiating a new CX function we encourage businesses to find the sweet spot between doing enough to generate valuable outcomes and overreaching with regard to budget and activity. With the right starting point it can be surprisingly cost effective to deliver significant impact and generate momentum and enthusiasm within the business as whole.
—
Jay is Strategy Director at design agency Make it Clear, we make technology easier to use, engage with and understand. We help organisations improve customer interaction with products and services through clarity in design and communication, delivering better experiences at every touchpoint. | https://uxdesign.cc/beyond-the-win-accessing-the-long-term-benefits-of-cx-b6a8cc69fa1b | ['Jay Nicholl'] | 2018-04-19 09:56:31.617000+00:00 | ['Product Management', 'UX', 'Customer Experience', 'Strategy', 'Marketing'] |
Why I’m so fond of the iPhone 12 Pro Max | Why I’m so fond of the iPhone 12 Pro Max
I hear you, I feel you. For the past couple of years the iPhones Pro and Pro Max have been identical except for the Max part. The waist part. But this year… this 2020 year… the cameras are different and even the size differences… are different.
This is why many of us — including me — have a hard time deciding between the iPhone 12 Pro and the iPhone 12 Pro Max. Especially now that pre-orders are less than a week away.
So if you are still on the fence. If you prefer the classic Pro size but want that Pro Max camera or battery. If you don’t mind big phones but you’re worried, the new Max is just too big. But if you are also worried that if you don’t understand, you might regret it. If you have plenty of FOMO YOLO, but don’t worry, the Pro Max price is just banned …
Then, in the hope that I can help you out anyway, here’s why I personally choose the iPhone 12 Pro Max this year.
IPhone 12 Pro Max price: Only $ 100 more … for more
The Max is $ 100 more than the Pro. And that’s all. For everything we’ll cover next, the cost differential is only $ 100. Which I understand can be a lot for some people, like 10% more, even on a $ 1000 phone. But with the trade-ins, the installments, the upgrade programs, the difference over the course of a year, let alone several, won’t be that great. Of course never, I mean never, never spend a dime more than you can or should, and if you have a hard limit stick to it absolutely, I’m just saying if you don’t have to. Other concerns, as with everything, the price just isn’t a huge flashing neon stop sign for the Max. Not once you’ve decided to at least go Pro.
IPhone 12 Pro Max Size: Bigger Than Ever
iPhone 12 Pro, iPhone 11 Pro Max, iPhone 12 Pro Max .caption
This size though. I mean, Apple has already made the Pro bigger. It’s a full iPhone XR, like the iPhone 11 now. 5.8 inches to 6.1. So if you go Pro you get big and taller. Not too big, however. The screen has gone from 6.5 inches to 6.5 inches. So this is really the maximum iPhone maxi set that Apple has ever created.
But, part of that is a scaled-down bezel. Ok, a little bit of that. It is 0.11 inch taller, but only 0.01 inch wider, and it is also 0.03 inch thinner. Although, yeah, 0.06 ounces more.
All of this to say that if you were okay with one of the Plus size iPhones, or if you’ve ever owned or held the iPhone XS or iPhone 11 Max, the iPhone 12 Max isn’t going to do much. difference. In fact, the biggest difference might just be the all-old-is-new-again squared design. Because the loss of the iPhone 6 to the curves of the iPhone 11 era makes the iPhone 12 series more… substantial. Grippier maybe. The edges not only slide in your hand, they squeeze in, which some prefer and others… really don’t. Let me know how you feel in the comments.
Anyway, if you’re coming from a smaller iPhone, not even talking about an original 5 or SE, but just a 6 or 10 or even XR or 11, you might want to consider the cut. If you’re coming from a Plus or a Max preview or, damn it, yeah, basically any Android phone on that side of a non-XL Pixel, you’ll probably be fine.
IPhone 12 Pro Max screen: more information or more visibility
iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone XR, iPhone 12 Pro Max.
Colors, Silver, Graphite, 18k Gold and Pacific Blue are the same, same, same, same on both Pros, as is the design, stainless steel antenna bands, matte glass on the rear, ceramic Shied at the front. The Notch. All the same, just like Pro, all checked, on both.
Even the screens of the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro are identical in all respects except for the size. Same OLED, same HDR, same contrast ratio, typical and max brightness levels. Even everything. Except for the size.
With the increased size, you get a higher pixel count on the iPhone 12 Pro Max screen. An extra 246 vertically and 114 horizontally, which is like half and the original iPhone, which is ridiculous, but with today’s pixel count and density, it’s not really that big. -thing. And, like, 10 and 6 more than the 11 Max. Probably not even enough to put extra strain on the A14 Bionic chipset inside.
However, it’s physically larger, which means you can fit a bit longer on the screen, if you just like
IPhone 12 Pro Max battery: Max is max
The A14 Bionic chipset is the same in the iPhone 12 Pro and Max, same architecture, same IP. Same Qualcomm X55 modem for low and medium speed FR1 5G in the world and FR2 Highland, mmWave in the US Both have 6GB of RAM, which can keep even the most popular social media apps and games in memory. swollen, much longer than before. And both go up to 512GB of storage if you want to pay the premium.
Where they differ is that while the Pro Max has a bigger screen to power and more pixels to move, it has a bigger battery to do so. Bigger enough, Apple rates it for an additional 3 hours of local video playback, an additional hour of video streaming, and an additional 15 hours of audio playback.
Both work with Apple’s new MagSafe Magnetic Inductive Charging System and both have a Lightning port and can quickly charge up to 50% in 30 minutes with Apple’s new 20-watt power adapter, but no. included in the box. And yes, still super salty about it.
But the bottom line here is, bigger is just more. Especially with the regular Pro taking a bit of a toll on battery life, thanks to the new build and especially 5G, the Max is still a Max-as-in-Max battery for those who want a iPhone lasts as long as an iPhone can.
And especially with the new camera, which is why I will personally be buying the iPhone 12 Pro Max this year. It’s a little extra for me, but I just want the best camera, and adding a bigger battery makes the choice for me.
You have to do it, however. Let me know what you decide and why in the comments! | https://medium.com/@mzabbrah/why-im-so-fond-of-the-iphone-12-pro-max-41cb5ddf2739 | ['Brah Tim'] | 2020-12-14 14:59:07.218000+00:00 | ['iPhone', 'Tech', 'Iphone 12 Pro', 'Mobile', 'Technology'] |
The Ultimate Guide to Listen to Live College Bowl Games for Free | It’s College Football Bowl Season!
No matter where you are over the holiday season, TuneIn lets you hear all the big college bowl games for free on ESPN Radio!
From early matchups to the New Year’s 6 and the College Football Playoff, TuneIn is streaming all the biggest games, including the Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Orange Bowl, Cotton Bowl, Peach Bowl, Fiesta Bowl and the National Championship.
Below, we’ll show you when and how to listen to live play-by-play on any device. Whether you want to listen with your computer, your phone, or connected device, you don’t have to miss a minute of the college bowl game action.
Can I listen to College Football Bowl Games on the radio?
Yes! You can listen to college football bowl games for free with ESPN Radio and Firstteam Radio on TuneIn.
Where can I hear the College Football Bowl Games on radio?
Listen to college football bowl games on TuneIn.
College Football Bowl Schedule
Listen live on our app or online.
Dec. 21
Myrtle Beach Bowl
Appalachian State vs North Texas
Brooks Stadium (Conway, SC)
2:30pm ET
Dec. 22
Idaho Potato Bowl
Tulane vs. Nevada
Albertsons Stadium (Boise, Idaho)
3:30pm ET
Boca Raton Bowl
UCF vs. BYU
FAU Stadium (Boca Raton, Florida)
7pm ET
Dec. 23
New Orleans Bowl
Louisiana Tech vs. Georgia Southern
Mercedes-Benz Superdome (New Orleans)
3pm ET
Montgomery Bowl
Memphis vs. Florida Atlantic
Cramton Bowl (Montgomery, Alabama)
7pm ET
Dec. 24
New Mexico Bowl
Hawai’i vs. Houston
Toyota Stadium (Frisco, Texas)
3:30pm ET
Dec. 26
Gasparilla Bowl
South Carolina vs. UAB
Raymond James Stadium (Tampa, Florida)
12pm ET
Cure Bowl
Liberty vs. Coastal Carolina
Camping World Stadium (Orlando, Florida)
12pm ET
First Responder Bowl
Louisiana vs. UTSA
Gerald J. Ford Stadium (Dallas)
3:30pm ET
LendingTree Bowl
Western Kentucky vs. Georgia State
Ladd-Peebles Stadium (Mobile, Alabama)
3:30pm ET
Dec. 29
Cheez-It Bowl
Oklahoma State vs. Miami
Camping World Stadium (Orlando, Florida)
5:30pm ET
Alamo Bowl
Texas vs. Colorado
Alamodome (San Antonio)
9pm ET
Dec. 30
Duke’s Mayo Bowl
Wake Forest vs. Wisconsin
Bank of America Stadium (Charlotte, North Carolina)
12pm ET
Music City Bowl
Iowa vs. Missouri
Nissan Stadium (Nashville, Tennessee)
4pm ET
Cotton Bowl
Oklahoma vs. Florida
AT&T Stadium (Arlington, Texas)
8pm ET
Dec. 31
Armed Forces Bowl
Tulsa vs. Mississippi State
Amon G. Carter Stadium (Fort Worth, Texas)
12pm ET
Liberty Bowl
West Virginia vs. Army
Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium (Memphis, Tennessee)
4pm ET
Texas Bowl
Arkansas vs. TCU
NRG Stadium (Houston)
8pm ET
Jan. 1
Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl
Cincinnati vs. Georgia
Mercedes-Benz Stadium (Atlanta)
12pm ET
Citrus Bowl
Auburn vs. Northwestern
Camping World Stadium (Orlando, Florida)
1pm ET
College Football Playoff Semifinal at The Rose Bowl Game Presented by Capital One
#1 Alabama vs. #4 Notre Dame
AT&T Stadium (Arlington, Texas)
4pm ET
College Football Playoff Semifinal at the Allstate Sugar Bowl
#2 Clemson vs. #3 Ohio State
Mercedes-Benz Superdome (New Orleans)
8pm ET
Jan. 2
Outback Bowl
Ole Miss vs. Indiana
Raymond James Stadium (Tampa, Florida)
12:30pm ET
Fiesta Bowl
Oregon vs. Iowa State
State Farm Stadium (Glendale, Arizona)
4pm ET
Orange Bowl
Texas A&M vs. North Carolina
Hard Rock Stadium (Miami Gardens, Florida)
8pm ET
Jan. 11
College Football Playoff National Championship
Hard Rock Stadium (Miami Gardens, Florida)
8pm ET | https://blog.tunein.com/heres-how-to-listen-to-live-college-bowl-games-for-free-4e08112c386d | [] | 2020-12-30 06:31:23.577000+00:00 | ['Bowl Season', 'College Football', 'Audio', 'Football'] |
I Write From My Heart So I Can Connect With Yours | I Write From My Heart So I Can Connect With Yours
photo by author
My nose isn’t that big in person. Just saying.
Moving on …
I treasure authentic connection. That’s why I read and write on Medium. I’m not interested in finding out “The Top 5 Android Apps of 2020” or the top 5 anything for that matter. If I was, I simply would google it and save the $50 per year Medium subscription cost.
When I read articles, I’m looking for an authentic voice. The more authentic your voice is, the more interested I am in what you have to say and the more I benefit from your words. Because I feel your presence, your heart, your caring. That motivates me.
I write authentically. Which translates to writing from my heart. I’ll never win a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction writing. Fortunately, that’s not my intent. I’m happy I write well enough to get my message across in an authentic caring way. | https://medium.com/change-your-mind/i-write-from-my-heart-so-i-can-connect-with-yours-48cbd5a23571 | ['Art Bram'] | 2020-12-21 12:24:56.894000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Personal Development', 'Life', 'Connection', 'Writing'] |
Crust Project Development — June 28 — July 4 | Crust Community Activities
Maxwell Preview Network Weekly Report
Crust Decentralized Storage Market was officially opened on February 28th, 2021 (GMT+8). There are 2,642 nodes in the entire network, with a total storage capacity of 617 PB as of June 28th. The network is currently in a state of lack of tokens.
Starting from the evening of May 5th, Crust Maxwell Preview Network has reduced token rewards, and after that, the daily token rewards of the preview network will be 1,500 CRU.
Maxwell Preview Network Weekly Report:
Profit Data
“Profit Data” is currently live. In order to ensure the fairness and justice of the activity, and to allow more users to experience Crust distributed storage and obtain rewards at the same time, the Crust operations team has optimized and upgraded the “data computing power” rules and implemented these changes immediately to prohibit the behavior of malicious spammers.
For details: Profit Data | Data Power Rules Adjustments and Upgrades
For rules: Profit Data | Activity Rules
sManager Updates
The Profit Data activity brought a large number of orders to the Crust Maxwell preview network, but also brought tests and challenges. To tackle these issues, we have updated sManager again. This version makes the order-taking strategy maximize profit, thereby increasing the order profit of the node.
Data Power Boost
“Data Power Boost” has been launched on July 1st and will continue for 10 days. The data power generated during this period will be calculated with a 10x multiplier.
For details: 10x for 10 days! “Data Power Boost” is Launched!
Decoo supports “Profit Data” Platform
In the activity process of “Profit Data”, it is necessary for users to store files to be a Data Provider. Decoo, one of the Crust Grants Program projects, has built a simple channel for novice users. They only need one step, which is to open a web browser to upload documents. One step to earn rewards!
Entrance Link: https://decoo.io/activity/crust-free-space
For details: Decoo supports “Profit Data” Platform
Crust Network x IPFS
Crust is included on the IPFS official website ecosystem page(https://ecosystem.ipfs.io/) and tagged in the <Content delivery> column. On the IPFS Ecosystem page, projects and products built on IPFS can be displayed by industry, tools, and other tags. Crust was previously included in the IPFS docs.
For details: https://www.ccvalue.cn/article/1163611.html
Kusama Parachain Slot Auction
At 14:30 on June 30th, Crust distributed the third batch reward of the slot auction, a total of 472 CRU and 94,572 CSM were awarded to the 6,755 KSMs which supported Crust Shadow.
*A total of 72 users with CRU rewards are reserved for the fourth batch due to the small KSM amount.
Crust’s Kusama slot auction channel are including:
1）OKEx: https://www.ouyi.cc/earn/slotauction
2）Math Wallet: https://cloud.mathwallet.xyz/#/auction
3）Kraken: https://www.kraken.com/u/funding/parachains
4）Hotbit: https://www.hotbit.io/slotauction
5）Nutbox: https://polkadot.nutbox.io/#/crowdloan/kusama/parachain/2012
6）Newland: https://ksm.newland.finance
7）Atoken: https://atoken-plo.biliangwang.com/plo
8）Polkadot Apps: https://polkadot.js.org/apps/#/explorer
9）Bounce: https://ksm.bounce.finance/
10）Gateio: https://www.gateio.ch/cn/hodl/600
11）MEXC: https://www.mexc.com/slot/assessment
Crust x CoinMarketCap
On June 30th, Crust x CMC 9,000,000 CSM Airdrop activity successfully ended. Thanks for participating! The number of participants exceeded 160,000, creating a historic high in the CMC airdrop activity! The number of Crust Telegram and Twitter followers has also reached new highs. Let’s build the Crust community together!
The first batch of the airdrop rewards will be distributed on July 5th.
For activity results: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/crust-shadow/airdrop/
PolkaBase Top Voice
At 8pm on July 3rd, Crust was invited to “PolkaBase Top Voice: How Polkadot community predict and think of Kusama slot auctions” online panel discussion — organized by PolkaBase, supported by Robonomics, co-organized by Polkadot.club, Polkafund and Huoxing Finance, supported by Huoxing Video.
Crust Project Development
Protocol Layer
Chain Work Overview
1. [Maxwell] Mechanism of free accounts not supporting tip tipping
2. [Shadow] Upgrade Crust Shadow to v0.9.7
3. [Mainnet] Support staking upper limit block update to improve chain TPS
4. [Mainnet] Separate constant settings in test and production environments
sWorker Work Overview
1. SRD can be set after enclave initialization is complete
2. Fix the bug of coredump in objectrange when using JSON
3. Standardize external GET interface
4. Fix the bug of SRD capacity detection
5. Test and study the growth model of IPFS DB
6. Update docs and test examples
Application Layer
sManager Work Overview
1. Add the processing logic for Pending tasks
2. Update the tips priority strategy on Maxwell
Apps Work Overview
1. Add frozen period reminder of modifying the guarantee rate on the profit data module account action page
2. Modify data power unit
3. Add English and Chinese link of data power boost introduction and countdown
Profit Data Work Overview
1. [Pipeline] Count Pending files and Exceed pendings
2. [Pipeline] Modify and test chain synchronization logic
3. [Pipeline] Add read the latest synchronized block logic from db when restarting
4. [fVerifier] Detect multi-layer Links in files and optimize the detection model of meaningless files.
5. [fVerifier] Adjust click farm files
6. [fVerifier] Penalize user data power which click farm and exceed Pending
7. [fVerifier] Accumulate and adjust for Power Booster
Crust Grants
- User Application Layer -
Socbay
Decentralized Youtube website based on Crust and IPFS
1. Add Crust order function
2. Add file status query function
3. For details on new features, see
https://socbayio.medium.com/how-to-place-a-crust-storage-order-by-crust-wallet-on-socbay-io-21286bff5254
CruTransfer
File sharing platform based on Crust
1. First time application, being reviewed
- Blockchain Application Layer -
Subscan Crust Storage Explorer
The Crust storage browser on Subscan
1. Complete the prototype design, including: computing power overview, Group information, Member information, order list and storage file list
Wanke NFT
A Crust-based NFT asset management platform, and a general Crust-based NFT asset management tool will be developed at the same time. All NFT platforms use this tool to integrate Crust
1. First time application, being reviewed | https://medium.com/crustnetwork/crust-project-development-june-28-july-4-4531f89fc3f4 | ['Crust Network'] | 2021-07-06 07:40:37.328000+00:00 | ['Polkadot', 'Web3', 'Data', 'Cloud', 'Crust'] |
Creating migrations when changing an enum in Python using SQLAlchemy | Photo by Chris Ried on Unsplash
This was originally posted on my personal site at https://markrailton.com/blog/creating-migrations-when-changing-an-enum-in-python-using-sql-alchemy
Recently at work I've spent some time working on a scaffold project that we'll be using for API projects that we'll be building.
For a number of reasons we've decided to use Python as our backend language and Flask as our API framework. One of the things I love most about Flask is that it's very unopinionated and let's you build what you want, pretty much how you want.
One of the features I've been working on is an audit log. For data integrity purposes we decided to use an enum field for the `event type` value in both the code itself and also in the database. Like many Flask applications, we're using SQLAlchemy as an ORM and Flask-Migrate to automatically create Alembic migrations. Using a SQLAlchemy model with the field type set to an enum equal to the enum used in the code, I had expected Flask-Migrate to automatically create a new migration any time we added values to the EventType enum class, however this is not the case.
After some searching around, I discovered that this is a known issue with Alembic and that migrations for enum changes have to be created manually. I've got a sample migration that I created manually below as well as some steps so you can see how to handle adding or removing a value from an enum in Flask. Note that this migration is specifically written to work with PostgreSQL as that is the database engine that we use.
1. Make changes to the Enum in the relevant model
2. Create an empty migration file ```flask db revision -m 'Add Logout_Success to AuditEvent'```
3. Populate the new migration with code to create the changes, note you will need to add values for the existing and new options ensuring to keep the revision and down_revision numbers that already exist in the new migration file | https://medium.com/@railto/creating-migrations-when-changing-an-enum-in-python-using-sqlalchemy-252174e7c13d | ['Mark Railton'] | 2020-11-26 12:26:46.635000+00:00 | ['Flask', 'Sqlalchemy', 'Migration', 'Python'] |
FILCOのキーボードブラシを買ってみた | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/charlieblog/filco%E3%81%AE%E3%82%AD%E3%83%BC%E3%83%9C%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89%E3%83%96%E3%83%A9%E3%82%B7%E3%82%92%E8%B2%B7%E3%81%A3%E3%81%A6%E3%81%BF%E3%81%9F-741a6e5d6c08 | ['Charlie Iwaki'] | 2020-12-24 12:25:59.174000+00:00 | ['Japanese', '日本語', '日本', 'Japan'] |
Decoding Scala without the Code | Decoding Scala without the Code
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
I came across Scala while working with Spark, which in itself, is written in Scala. Coming from a Python background and with little to none Java knowledge, I found Scala a bit confusing in the beginning, but over time, it grew on me and now, it is my preferred language for most use cases.
With experience, I have picked up a few bits and pieces of scala and its workings. Please read on to find out a bit more about scala, mainly the non-coding part, how exactly code turns to execution. Maybe you would be using it for quite some time but something can still surprise you.
Also, I won’t go into how to code in Scala as I believe there is no better way to learn a language than to build something in it and which can be a discussion for another time.
What makes Scala cool?
My first impression of Scala was Java++ (okay, this is pretty lame), but I saw Scala as a better Java with an almost similar structure and lesser code.
Scala(which stands for scalable language) is a combination of object-oriented & functional programming language which runs on JVM. As of October 2020, the latest version of Scala is 2.13.3
Everything is an object in scala, in fact, scala is said to be more object-oriented than Java. Let’s see how:
Integers like 1, 2 are objects of Int class, and methods of Int class can be called on integers, For instance, you can call a method over integer like:
print(-1.abs) # absolute value of -1
1
Functions are objects of Function trait in Scala. (Read)
Scala allows for lazy evaluation, which can be used for the optimized use of resources. Scala’s lazy evaluation allows for expressions, code not to be evaluated until its first use. This feature of Scala is the basic principle in the workings of Spark, i.e. Spark is lazily evaluated.
Scala automatically does Type Interference, we don’t always need to define the type of a variable when declaring. In most cases, the type of variable can be detected at compile time by the compiler. (How type inference works)
Scala appears to be interpreted but it is actually compiled making it faster, though at the first glance Scala appears to be an interpreted language, at least to me. Because we have a scala shell available, where we can execute test code, just like Python, I also assumed scala to be an interpreted language.
The scala command starts an interactive shell where Scala expressions are interpreted interactively. The shell is REPL, which under the hood compiles the code & run the compiled code.
Scala has close integration with Java, so you can write code as a mix of Java & Scala if needed. Also, almost all the Java libraries can be imported into Scala.
Lastly, Scala is written in Scala, that is how cool it is! (reference)
How does Scala code work?
Scala code is compiled into Java Byte Code which is executed by the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) which essentially is how we can use a mix of Java & Scala code.
The JVM is an abstract computing machine that enables a computer to run a Java program. Since the scala code is compiled into a Java Byte Code, it is executed via JVM.
JVM is basically Java god(also for us scala peeps), the sooner you learn it, the better. It takes care of everything, from loading the code, verification of the code, execution of the code, memory management, allocation of resources from the OS, and lastly, a run time environment to do it all.
Memory Management in Scala
Scala runs on JVM, so it employs memory management similar to Java. All execution is dependent on memory & we can define memory management as allocation of resources from OS, and freeing up unnecessary memory to not run into OOM errors. (will be discussed later)
On a higher level, JVM memory consists of three parts: Heap, Stack & Other. Let’s try to understand each component one by one.
JVM Memory Architecture(Image created by me, on http://draw.io/)
Heap
Heap stores the actual objects and is created when JVM starts up. There is only one heap space which is shared across all JVM processes. Also, note that Garbage Collector(or GC), runs only on heap memory.
The heap can be of fixed or variable size, depending upon the GC strategy. User can set maximum heap size using the –Xmx option which is by default 64 MB.
Stack
The stack area is created with the thread. It stores local reference to the objects stored in the heap memory.
Due to its LIFO structure, a stack works perfectly for clearing up the space for methods, as for that, we don’t need to randomly access data.
Other
This section stores JVM specific code and data.
Garbage Collector(special mention):
Over time, unreferenced objects can cause heap memory to grow, cleanup of which is an essential component of memory management. But as a user, we don’t have to worry about cleaning up these unreferenced objects, called Garbage, ourselves. GC or Garbage Collector does this for us.
Garbage Collector is a daemon which cleans up unnecessary memory occupied by unused or unreferenced objects. | https://towardsdatascience.com/decoding-scala-without-the-code-6db00f37c469 | ['Jyoti Dhiman'] | 2020-11-09 15:33:28.847000+00:00 | ['Big Data', 'Java', 'Data Science', 'Scala', 'Data'] |
Ruby II | Loops ♾️ | Welcome to the second instalment in my Ruby series…Loops!
The first question we should ask ourselves, so that we have a better understanding, is why are loops so necessary in coding?
Well, the purpose of a loop is to allow us to repeat an action many times, with or without a limit. So repeating an action many times allows us to run through a list of elements and work with them individually, allows us to perform an action a set number of times and allows a program to run until the user decides to stop. Any major application you have used, most definitely has some kind of loop buried within the code.
Each Loop
Let us begin with the most common loop in Ruby, the each loop!
#each loop using an array animals = ['penguin', 'lion', 'tiger', 'giraffe']
animals.each { |animal| puts "At the zoo, I saw a #{animal}!" } #each loop using a hash pets = { 'Ginny': 3, 'Rex': 5, 'Mr Chops': 6 }
pets.each { |pet, age| puts "#{pet} is now #{age} years old!" }
As you can see from the example above, we need a collection of items such as an array or hash in order to successfully create an each loop.
The function of each allows us to go over every item in the list without having to specify a counter or the number of iterations; ending the loop when there are no more elements to go over.
Times Loop
The times loop is the most simple loop we can use and explicitly shows the amount of times we want to carry out an action.
20.times { puts "Coding is fun!" }
The above example prints out “Coding is fun!”…guess how many times? 🤔
If you said ‘20’ then well done!
We can also use the same n variable as we did before (in the each loops) to print out the number, for example:
20.times { | i | puts "How many people did you say 'Good morning' to today? #{i}" }
This would print out:
How many people did you say 'Good morning' to today? 0
How many people did you say 'Good morning' to today? 1
How many people did you say 'Good morning' to today? 2
How many people did you say 'Good morning' to today? 3
How many people did you say 'Good morning' to today? 4
How many people did you say 'Good morning' to today? 5
...
How many people did you say 'Good morning' to today? 19
Notice that the first time it prints out, it prints 0 ! This is because in Ruby, the index always starts at 0 and so printing it 20 times would finish off with the number 19 . So, what do we do if we want to start at 1 ? 💭
Range Loop
If you’re still wondering what the answer is to the previous question, then this is your solution! A range , coupled with the each method, allows us to explicitly state which range of numbers we would like to print out.
(5..10).each { | i | puts "My favourite number is #{i}!" }
The result:
My favourite number is 5!
My favourite number is 6!
My favourite number is 7!
My favourite number is 8!
My favourite number is 9!
My favourite number is 10!
While Loop
The while loop allows us to carry out an action on a set condition.
i = 0 while i <= 20
puts i
i += 1
end
The set condition is while i <= 20 — which means, while i is less than or equal to 20 then carry out the action below.
This would print out all numbers from 0 to 20. If we did not include the equals symbol and just put < , then this would exclude the number 20.
Until Loop
The until loop is very similar to the while loop but it is reversed. So instead of: while this is the condition then do this, it is now: until you reach this condition then do this.
i = 0 until i === 20
j = i += 1
puts "I love counting: #{i}"
end
Also, notice the result with until will start off with the number 1 .
Now you know more about Ruby loops, you can have a whole lot of fun with them and write more efficient code by working with individual elements all at once or outputting things a number of times! ♾️ | https://medium.com/@milan-parmar/ruby-ii-loops-%EF%B8%8F-6196bb319daf | ['Milan Parmar'] | 2020-12-27 14:11:06.824000+00:00 | ['Software Engineering', 'Software Development', 'Programming', 'Ruby', 'Coding'] |
3 Reasons Why I No Longer Buy Starbucks | Why you shouldn’t either
Photo by Gema Saputera on Unsplash
Just like you I was used to my routine. Waking up on a cold frosty morning craving a hot cup of a carmel maccahiatio. This was my go-to, along with some sort of breakfast sandwhich. Bringing my grand total to around $9–10/day….everyday. I had no grasp at how much per year I was spending on JUST coffee and breakfast. If I am having Starbucks daily, which I was for the last year and I’m spending around $10/day. On average I am spending $70 per week totaling $3,640 a year. Once I did the math I had a holy shit moment. I have now switched to buying oatmeal in bulk and drinking coffee at home I have calculated on average my breakfast cost me around $2/day with a whopping $728/year spent on just breakfast.
I have since applied this method and method being “not a fucking idiot” to every aspect of my life. Finances, dating, work ect. The outcome has been unreal.
Cost Savings
This one is obvious but with how much I was saving by eating just breakfast at home I was able to pay off TWO credit cards. When I’m in a super crave mood I get creative. Add vanilla, cinnamon and a splash of coconut milk to spice up my coffee. The concoctions are endless and makes my heart happy knowing I won’t go broke trying to fill my coffee void. I have even thought of quitting coffee and save the money and just sticking with water. Maybe in 2021.
Make The Recipes At Home
I know I know, it just taste better when someone else makes your food/drink. I felt the same way, trust me. I loved the convenience of driving down the block, waiting in an absurd drive through line, just to tell someone exactly what I want and have it handed to me ten minutes later. Let’s be real those morning Starbucks drive-through lines take forever. You pay for the convenience of quick, fast, food.
This weekend I tried to recreate the iced green tea lemonade. One of my favorites. I would get the venti size (mostly all ice LOL) and sweeten it up!
I made the recipe at home for less than half the price of Starbucks and in almost the same amount of time the drive through would of taken, plus I have extra to share!
1 organic green tea bag
2 tablespoons of organic honey
1 full lemon
Seep the tea bag and honey in hot water for five minutes. I add a few ice cubes to cool it down because I’m extremely impatient. Then add the fresh squeezed lemon and you’re finished. If it’s too bitter for you add more honey. I made 5x the amount to share with my family for a refresher pick me up mid day, it was a hit.
You can also do this with the coffee. Grind your normal coffee beans with different spices to change things up! Cinnamon, cacao, vanilla bean are just a few that will turn your dull cup of black coffee into a whole new world. Ok, maybe i’m addicted to my cup of joe in the morning but I tell myself I could be addicted to worse substances.
Health
Hate to burst your bubble but those frappuccino’s have massive amounts of sugar in them. We all know what it’s like when they hand you your drink and there’s literally carmel swirled and stuck on the sides of your cup. Don’t get me wrong I am a sucker for carmel but I’m also a sucker for not dying before my 30th birthday due to sugary unhealthy coffee drinks. I am pretty sure like the rest of the country I am addicted to sugar. I could lick the sides of the Starbucks carmel cup and it would get my endorphins going! It wasn't until I got older I realized just how bad that was for my body.
“The food you eat is either fighting or feeding disease”.
Save your money and your health by making your favorite drinks at home.
Leave your favorite coffee and tea recipes below, I would love to hear them!
XOXO,
Sage | https://medium.com/@sageelisabeth/3-reasons-why-i-no-longer-buy-starbucks-e22a7d36eb9f | [] | 2020-12-07 13:48:14.338000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Money', 'Budget', 'Coffee', 'Saving'] |
Our World Needs a Reset Button or Maybe a Rewrite #7 | Our World Needs a Reset Button or Maybe a Rewrite #7
A poem that places a face on Coronavirus
My newest short story’s
main character is a
mutated jellyfish,
sporting fangs
He slithers on land
Sits beside me when I write
Follows me on long hikes —
I am of the supporting cast
This siphonophore plays the villain
Using his tentacles to
Deposit mold spores
Where I walk and on my food
Turning sushi, prime rib and
Maryland blue crab into
Unhealthy delicacies
I crave but must resist
Microscopic mold buds
Infest humans, imitating a cold
Cause weakness and death
If I allow them to be a part of the story
However, I am the author who
Cannot allow the protagonist to
Control the final outcome
He lives between the lines
My hands freeze unable to
Alter the climax
The resolution falling
To an action that requires revision
With a slash of my pen
Verbs decline, adjective multiply
His influence diminishes
His barbaric yelp silenced
Granting the reader hope
Redemption and grace
To be realized in the sequel
of life’s long arduous journey
A preventable tragedy
— Sarah, female
This is one poem of many that were composed after interviews with people affected by the pandemic. | https://medium.com/live-your-life-on-purpose/our-world-needs-a-reset-button-or-maybe-a-rewrite-866be96c5048 | ['Brenda Mahler'] | 2020-12-27 21:08:34.286000+00:00 | ['Covid-19', 'Faces Of Covid', 'Reflections', 'Poetry', 'Coronavirus'] |
Welcome to DOJO Basics | We at DOJO, have recently launched DOJO Basics. DOJO Basics is a personalized membership experience, a platform for our partners to build their social presence in such a difficult time, through the services provided by us. We help our partners to create a brand name online that upholds their reputations throughout.
Once you sign up for DOJO Basics, you will get listed on our DOJO app at free of cost. This helps you to generate more leads. We will provide you with an application through which you can look over all the working on your social handles.
We provide various services for partners, consisting of free as well as paid. We aim to generate more leads and increase sales for our partners. And through our services, we do not fail at nailing the bull’s eye.
We provide a one-month free trial so you can understand what we do, and how we do.
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Samsung The Frame 4K UHD TV review: Refining the art of wall-art TV | If you’re looking for the ultimate TV that doesn’t appear to be a TV, look no farther than Samsung’s The Frame.” It’s a quantum-dot LCD styled to appear as a wall-hung picture frame that displays art when you’re not watching video of some sort, and it looks amazingly convincing in that role.
Throw in custom-colored bezels, a library of 1,400 available works of art (20 are included in the purchase price), and even the most demanding home decorator should be pleased.
This review is part of TechHive’s coverage of the best smart TVs, where you'll find reviews of competing products, plus a buyer’s guide to the features you should consider when shopping for this type of product.Design and specsTo better mimic a wall-hung picture, The Frame uses a rectangular replaceable bezel that juts out slightly beyond the 60Hz, 10-bit, 3840 x 2160 (4K UHD) LCD panel. The back is completely flat, with a recess where the included, shallow-profile wall mount is attached. Yup, it fits flush against the wall, just like a picture frame.
If the stock bezel doesn’t appeal to your color sense or match your décor, white, pink, beige, brown, and yellow bezels that attach magnetically to the main chassis are available for $100 each.
Samsung Samsung’s The Frame looks for all the world like a real wall-hung painting when in Art Mode. It also features excellent viewing angles.
As normal power and connection cables would sully the aesthetics, The Frame also features Samsung’s One Connect single-cable connection. This clear (except for the wire) cable connects to a breakout box that houses most of the electronics and all the ports. Given a suitably light-colored wall, the cable is hard to spot. It will stand out more against dark surfaces.
Obviously, a picture frame is useless without pictures, and Samsung supplies about 1,400 of those in its Art Store. Alas, it’s not all gratis. You get 20 free works of art, and a free three-month subscription to the store; after that, a subscription costs $5 per month. You can also purchase works you like for $20 each.
The Frame is currently available in 32-inch ($600), 43-inch ($1,000), 50-inch ($1,300), 55-inch ($1,500), 65-inch ($2,000), and 75-inch ($3,000) flavors. A Black Friday sale happening as of this writing discounts those prices.
Connectivity includes four HDMI ports (one of which supports ARC), two USB ports, ethernet, coaxial (for a TV antenna), digital optical (Toslink) audio output, and a 3.5mm RS232C jack for integration. 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are also provided, and the latter supports low-latency connections so you can use headphones and other speakers without undo lag.
Interface and remoteThe remote is Samsung’s familiar One Remote, with its minimalist layout and controls. It’s very classy, and in this case, it’s white.
Samsung Samsung’s minimalist, but highly effective and comfortable One Remote comes with the Frame, albeit colored a friendlier white.
The Samsung Smart Hub user interface is one of the best in the industy, easy to use and to configure. That said, settings menus requires lots of drilling down, and you’re never returned to where you left off the last time you visited the Smart Hub. Then again, how often to you tweak settings?
There’s a large collection of apps, including all the biggies (Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, and so on). It’s not as good as Android TV, but it’s very good.
PerformanceThe Frame delivers a very good picture. It’s everything it needs to be for its intended role and offers excellent viewing angles and screen conformity (there’s no cloudiness from coatings).
For movies and TV, however, it’s not up to what I’ve seen from Samsung’s most recent high-end entries. Yes, I’ve been spoiled. Put another way, it reminds me far more of the 2019 Q60R I reviewed this time last year than something like the Q80R or Q90R, let alone the superb 8K Q900R. Then again, those TVs will do no better displaying static art than The Frame, and wouldn’t look as good on your wall.
I’m guessing part of the reason The Frame’s image is not Samsung’s best is that the company doesn’t make its best TVs in smaller sizes. When this 43-inch was delivered, one of our front desk folks volunteered that they liked the size better than the massive sets we usually get in for review.
It does seem like the mammoth-sized TV market has become saturated, or perhaps viewers feel overwhelmed by them. We’re starting to see things like 49-inch OLEDs, and other smaller-sized high-end LCD drop in the market. I hope Samsung’s numbers push them in this direction as well.
Samsung This picture won’t tell you much about The Frame’s color or brightness, but the first is excellent thanks to quantum dots and the second is more than adequate.
Perhaps it’s not high-end in terms of brightness, or in the way it handles pans of complex images, but The Frame’s color is excellent due Samsung’s well-known quantum dot technology. Motion compensation was surprisingly good considering the TV has only a 60Hz refresh rate. There is enough peak brightness that the HDR effect will be noticeable with HDR material, it just wasn’t as spectacular as it can be with more contrast and brightness available.
Note that The Frame will sense ambient light while in Art Mode and adjust accordingly to give you the proper amount of brightness. Given normal lighting at any rate—if direct sunlight hits the sensor, all bets are off.
Pricey but worth it for the shape-consciousThe Frame is all about looking good on a wall displaying art, and it does that extremely well—far better than any other TV I’ve seen. For that, it’s a stellar product and very, very good overall TV.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details. | https://medium.com/@sherry35910769/samsung-the-frame-4k-uhd-tv-review-refining-the-art-of-wall-art-tv-8aa33ea812ce | [] | 2020-12-12 09:45:33.899000+00:00 | ['Home Tech', 'Security Cameras', 'Chromecast', 'Lighting'] |
The Overall Process of Migrating Databases to Alibaba Cloud(Part 1) | By Shantanu Kaushik
Cloud migration is like sipping a hot drink; it’s more enjoyable if you take your time with it, and it’s not advisable to rush through it. Cloud migration is best done in stages, and every stage should be treated as a case-study that you can learn from. Being patient and working through the process in an incremental manner will help to achieve a successful migration while ensuring business continuity. In this article, I’ll talk about the overall process of migrating databases to Alibaba Cloud and provides suggestions on planning your migration.
Alibaba Cloud Database Migration Solution
Alibaba Cloud offers a self-service database migration solution, which supports MySQL-to-MySQL migration, MySQL-to-PolarDB migration, and more. Alibaba Cloud migration service ensures minimal impact on your business and offers unlimited storage space. If you have custom migration scenarios, you can also reach out to Alibaba Cloud for customized solutions and migration preparation guidance. They can provide you with a migration strategy depending on your organizational goals and current setup.
When it comes to security, Alibaba Cloud has worked tirelessly to provide an end-to-end security practice with their solution. With access control, end-to-end encryption, and authorization policy management, Alibaba Cloud covers all of the bases for a successful database migration practice.
I am using Alibaba Cloud services to expand into the depths of database migration and all the products and services referenced in this article will be from Alibaba Cloud.
Evaluation
Testing the Waters
The first step in the migration process is to test the waters by getting yourself acquainted with the complete migration process, and start by copying an already existing (smaller) database to the cloud. This could work as a proof-of-concept.
Thereafter, you can start to manipulate the database by creating trusted user groups within your current team to gather feedback and alternatively train multiple users to handle database services on the cloud.
First Service
After you have evaluated the service, you can start by cloning some small service or services application data to begin with. This could be any non-critical service that may provide you with additional experience on how your applications will behave post-migration.
This is an easy one to do, as you can change the configuration of your application to point to the cloud database. This application could be hosted anywhere, and can already be on the cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid cloud setup.
Benefits from the Move
Using conventional practices with databases has worked for years. However, with a changing world, one should start to leverage new technologies developed in recent years. Moving your database on the cloud offers significant boost in every aspect, be it security, performance, maintenance, or accessibility.
Another aspect that has revolutionized the service industry is DBaaS; Alibaba Cloud provides database solution as DBaaS (Database as a Service). This ensures an enterprise-level managed solution, without the hassle of maintaining backend resources like operating systems, RDBMS products, or any virtual servers.
Alibaba Cloud also provides cloud-native database solution such as PolarDB. This ensures that you don’t need to worry about overheads in database storage, or provisioning more storage resources if in case you run out.
Alibaba Cloud offers virtually unlimited storage with their database solution. Based on the pay-as-you-go model, the storage automatically expands to accommodate any change in usage.
Object Storage Service (OSS) has revolutionized how storage works on the cloud. It presents you with a solution that is way cheaper than using anything on an on-premises setup. This fully managed service takes over any hardware provisioning or maintenance issues, making it a more cost-effective solution.
Planning
One of the most important benefits of migrating your database to the cloud is the number of product options that you can choose from. It is the first step towards the evolution from traditional practices and solutions to a new architectural design. Cloud-native solutions can help a business to reach new horizons and expand rapidly.
Another key consideration is to minimize any sort of downtime while migrating. Ensuring that both your on-premises and cloud databases are fully functional should be the core practice for any business to follow.
Lastly, you can choose to migrate just by copying your database to the cloud, but it is always advised to look for upgrade your architecture. A well desgined and up-to-datechance to redefine the architecture and solution, provides a great opportunity while you are planning to move. This offers better business continuity and expansion scenarios.
The Solution | Alibaba Cloud
Tools
Alibaba Cloud has a feature-rich collection of tools that make it easier to manage the total migration process and the aftermath.
Data Transmission Service (DTS)
I am going to cover Data Transmission Service (DTS) what and how to in the next article. Here is a brief introduction:
Data Transmission Service (DTS) offers incremental or phased database migration solution. It supports multiple sources for database migration needs and is known for its proven reliability. This feature rich tool supports non-stop data flow and high-peak usage scenarios.
Data Management Service (DMS)
Data Management Service (DMS) provides a centralized control panel for you to manage authorization policies across databases. It enables the configuration of resources and services that protect sensitive information against unauthorized access. It also provides functionality to audit all operations and to manage the full lifecycle of your databases.
Database Backup Service (DBS)
Database Backup Service (DBS) is a solution that offers real time, continuous backup of databases. It supports multiple environments like hybrid cloud, public cloud and other enterprise data center. Database Backup Service (DBS) is a cost-effective solution that supports incremental backup and offers industry leading practices in security and encryption.
Full-Stack Control panel
An on-premises database solution comes with a lot of backend configuration and maintenance requirements. Multiple teams need to work on managing this solution as there are authorization challenges and numerous security threats and issues to sort through. Security, performance, and management concerns have had their time with administrators sorting through issues for days and weeks at a time.
With a fully managed Database Management Service (DMS), you can manage your user base easily. Not only that, almost everything happens over the ease of a click. The full-stack access control-based panel allows you to achieve every control task with ease and without any hassle.
Continued in Part 2
Industry specific solutions and success stories
Database solutions by Alibaba Cloud
Conclusion
Migrating existing databases to the cloud offers many benefits like cost saving, operations & maintenance (O&M), better scalability, and an overall more agile practice. Cloud migration provides a performance centric and cost-effective solution to achieve business excellence and expansion.
To ensure that your migration goes as smoothly as possible, and to leverage all the features associated with the migration solution, you must plan your migration and do it in stages.
Alibaba Cloud backs the solution with unlimited storage to further reduce the strorage based over-provisioning. The industry-leading range of cloud database technologies and tools further strengthens the system’s ability to cope with demand at peak times.
Lastly, the most important advice I can pass across is that you consult Alibaba Cloud’s migration team to get your current setup evaluated before planning a migration. This will ensure a smoother and more reliable practice, with selection of correct tools and resources.
Next In Line
Database Migration with Alibaba Cloud — Part 2 Data Transmission Service — What and How
The views expressed herein are for reference only and don’t necessarily represent the official views of Alibaba Cloud.
Original Source: | https://medium.com/@alibaba-cloud/database-migration-with-alibaba-cloud-part-1-88980f3cb8ba | ['Alibaba Cloud'] | 2020-12-21 06:10:06.425000+00:00 | ['Alibabacloud', 'Migration', 'Database', 'Database Migration', 'MySQL'] |
Python Function Guide: Day 10 | Hello all, This is post 10 of my 365 posts of re-learning python. I am writing about small topics from python I learned /used during the day at work. At the end of 365 days, the aim is to be better at python than I am today. If you are reading this, this is not a regular tutorial/ how to do this-that page, but a page out my python-re-learning-guide-journal-ish-thing. Only prerequisites are you must know what list, tuple, array, data frame, series and sets.
I am currently looking into functions of numpy. For reference of the numpy series I will be using O’reilly book “Python Data Science Handbook” by Jake VanderPlas.
Today we will look into our final topic under the Numpy library, that is sorting arrays.
There are definitely more functions available to work with arrays but this too follows the Pareto rule, if you know 20% of most commonly used functions then you can solve 80% of Numpy problems, and so the goal is to master that 20%
Thank you all for reading this.
I only write for self-cognition-process. I am no expert.
If you think there is something I could have done better or I have done wrong, please let me know at [email protected]!
I have also started an instagram page. I draw my own drawings (uploaded at the start of the page). Please follow my Instagram handle.(https://www.instagram.com/append_art.py/) | https://medium.com/@append-info-py/python-function-guide-day-10-49e752db2e3 | ['Python Novice'] | 2021-05-06 02:20:27.873000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Numpy', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Sort'] |
Quantum Computing: The Future | Contributor: Gaurav Lohkna
As we have observed, computer technology is exhilarating a radical transformation in our society from an industrial economy to an information economy. Code-driven systems have spread to more than half of the world’s inhabitants in ambient information and connectivity, offering previously unimagined opportunities to them.
Let us understand computation from the very beginning with an electrical computer ENIAC, 1946, being the first electrical and programmable computer that could perform 10 Kilo instructions per second(KIPS) with a memory space of 2 KiloBytes (KB) and occupying a basement of size 50x30 feet. With more than 17,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 6,000 switches, and 1,500 relays, it was easily the most complex electronic system theretofore built. It was a mammoth, producing 174 Kilowatts of heat and performing up to 5000 additions per second, which was several orders of magnitude faster than its electromechanical predecessors.
And today, here we are with much more powerful computers that have multi-core GHz processors and can process more than 100 billion instructions per second and we can fit them in our pockets while using them for everyday lifestyle. Put simply, the iPhone 6’s clock is 32,600 times faster than the best Apollo era computers(1960) and could perform instructions 120,000,000 times faster. Awestruck?
Now, you might be wondering how did we achieve all this computational power? So the answer is, the smaller the processors we made the faster the computers processed. According to Moore’s law, “the numbers of transistors in a dense integrated circuit double about every two years and hence the processing power increases”. However, Moore’s law is slowing down, meaning that decades’ worth of endless enhancements in computing power is coming to an end as it gets more expensive to create even smaller silicon-based transistors for computer chips. Still, researchers all around the world have found ways to push the limits of transistors so much that today we have 5nm, 3nm, 1nm, 0.5nm, and even single-atom transistors in the labs of researchers.
But recently, we have dared the laws of physics by creating a transistor of 0 nm, yes you read it correctly— 0 nm. Scientists have created a single-photon transistor that has a non-existent dimension.
With this much smaller transistors we might be able to achieve super-computer processing power in our smartphones in near future but the question that arises is, are supercomputers that really fast as they seem?
For some problems, supercomputers are not that super. Until now, we’ve relied on supercomputers to solve most problems. These are very large classical computers, often with thousands of classical CPU and GPU cores. However, supercomputers aren’t very good at solving certain types of problems, which seem simple at first sight.
This is why we need a whole new concept of computing: quantum computing. Quantum computers harness the phenomena of quantum mechanics to achieve a huge leap forward in computation to solve certain complex problems that today’s most powerful supercomputers cannot solve, and never will.
Now let us take a simple and classical problem of computation to understand the computational power of a supercomputer and quantum computer. Imagine you want to seat a few fussy people at a dinner party, where there is only one optimal seating plan out of all the different possible combinations. How many different combinations would you have to explore to find the optimal?
For 2 people there would be 2 combinations, for 3 people there would be 6 combinations. Can you guess how many combinations would be there for 10 fussy people? There would be more than 3 million combinations, to be exact 3,650,000 combinations. Surprised?
And what if you have to make a seating arrangement for 100 of such people? You would be requiring a supercomputer to determine the seating arrangement plan and it would be around 9.34 x 10^157 (157 zeros after 9.34) combinations which might take several days to compute. Saying it in a sarcastic way the guests would die of hunger if they have to wait for the seating arrangement plan. Here comes the quantum computer to save the guests from dying of starvation which can calculate it within seconds. Amazing, right?
Let me try to tell you in a layperson’s way of understanding about the comparison between the speeds of two. Suppose you wanted to find a person from a line of 1 trillion people (1,000,000,000,000 people), and each person took 1 microsecond to check (which is really-really fast) then a classical computer will take around 1 week to find that person and a quantum computer will take around 1 second only.
This wild beast, IBM Q, currently about the size of a household fridge, with an accompanying wardrobe-sized box of electronics, designed by IBM can create vast multidimensional spaces in which to represent these very large problems. Classical supercomputers cannot do this. Algorithms that employ quantum wave interference are then used to find solutions in this space and translate them back into forms we can use and understand.
A quantum computer uses quantum bits or qubits rather than using binary bits ( 0 or 1). A qubit itself isn’t very useful. However, by creating many qubits and connecting them in a state called superposition we can create vast computational spaces. We then represent complex problems in this space using programmable gates. These quantum bits behave randomly and to use their computational power we need entanglement, quantum entanglement enables qubits to be perfectly correlated with each other. Using quantum algorithms that utilize quantum entanglement, specific complex problems can be solved more efficiently than on classical computers.
Quantum computing is an exceptionally powerful computational tool and with this much power, we can enhance our human civilization. There is a broad spectrum of possibilities in which we can use the quantum computer. I am going to discuss some of the primary applications of quantum computers.
Molecular Modeling
One of the topics that thrill me the most is molecular level biology of some of the most famous drugs that are used to treat cancer in different type of protein cells. We can design a molecular model for every protein cell and how it is getting affected by the drug interaction because chemical reactions are quantum in nature as they form highly entangled quantum superposition states.
Weather Forecasting
Directly or indirectly, the world’s 30% of GDP is affected by the weather and its forecasting. Currently, we use classical computers to predict the weather but it is not that efficient and it might take longer than it takes the actual weather to develop. In weather forecasting, there are billions of billions variables which are dependent on each other and it gets really complex for a classical computer to predict it but a quantum computer’s basic ability is to perform exponentially large calculations parallelly and reducing the time and labor. With this, we might be able to produce better crops, save people from natural calamities, and even foretell the effect of humans on the environment in a long run.
Cryptography
Almost every online transaction’s security depends on the difficulty of factoring large numbers into primes. A classical computer can do this work but again it will take an exponential amount of time to factorize but a quantum computer can do this work in a fraction of time and thus making prime factorization cryptography out-of-date. Hence, we are going to need new and complex cryptographies to protect the internet. | https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/quantum-computing-the-future-68ffedec5559 | ['Gaurav Lohkna'] | 2021-05-14 00:34:17.831000+00:00 | ['IBM', 'Quantum Computing', 'Future', 'Cryptography', 'Computer Science'] |
Most of us simply want to be comfortable in life. While there’s nothing wrong | I discovered Stoicism in early 2015, right around the time my grandmother passed away, and I was dealing with a breakup and a career switch — everything happened at the same time. Stoicism helped me remain resilient during that difficult time. I’ve been studying the philosophy ever since.
Inspired by Seneca’s renowned letters, I’m starting a weekly column here on Medium, that I call the Stoic Letter.
Roughly speaking, there are two philosophies to base your life on.
Seeking pleasure: Think of Hedonism and Epicureanism Finding pleasure in duty: Think of Stoicism, Zen, and other philosophies that promote self-reliance
I believe seeking pleasure is the current philosophy of the world. We live in a society that revolves around pleasure, consumption, and escapism.
Most of us simply want to be comfortable in life. While there’s nothing wrong with making our lives better, there’s major risk in taking this philosophy too far.
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When you’re primarily driven by pleasure, you risk ending up on the hedonic treadmill. This is not new information. We all know social media makes us feel unworthy and depressed. We know we can’t buy our way to happiness. We also know that seeking pleasure turns us into slaves of our desires.
And yet, we fall for these traps every day.
Enter Seneca’s moral letters to Lucilius
One of my favorite philosophers is Seneca. He was not only a thinker, he had a long career in politics, serving as a senator and later as the advisor to Nero. His works show how practical he was. Towards the end of his life, he started traveling and writing letters to his friend, Lucilius.
The goal of these letters was to share Stoic thoughts with Lucilius, who had hedonistic tendencies and lived a busy life. At the time, Seneca himself took a step back from public life and left Rome.
From the quiet countryside of southern Italy, he wrote 124 letters to Lucilius. I’ve been a long-time fan of these. You can tell that Seneca subtly tries to convince his friend to be more stoic, to pursue tranquility, and to focus on what’s inside his control.
These letters serve as reminders to focus on the right things in life. The Stoics believed that, to live a happy life, you need to go against the herd. In a letter to his brother, Seneca wrote this:
“Let us enquire what is the best, not what is the most customary, thing to do, and what establishes our claim to unending happiness.”
The weekly Stoic Letter: Focus on what’s important
I love Seneca’s letters to his friend because it feels like he could’ve written them to you and me, living in the 21st century. Seneca successfully stepped away from the busy life of Rome and gave Lucilius an outside perspective. Sometimes, that’s all you need to get out of your own head.
Every Friday, my followers will receive a new letter that deals with today’s problems and concerns using practical Stoic thoughts. The format and feel will be the same as Seneca. The goal of these new letters is to help you focus on the things that matter most in life. The things that you value — not the herd.
If you want to read these letters every week, simply follow me here on Medium. I’m looking forward to corresponding with you. All the best. | https://medium.com/@2mimi0034l/most-of-us-simply-want-to-be-comfortable-in-life-while-theres-nothing-wrong-48c8ab3de30a | [] | 2020-12-19 00:30:34.253000+00:00 | ['Stoicism', 'Life', 'Stoic Letter', 'Philosophy', 'Self'] |
Race and the Church in Singapore | Jonathan Chan and Tan Jing Min
Leaders of the Trinity Annual Conference, Emmanuel Tamil Annual Conference, and Chinese Annual Conference of the Singapore Methodist Church in 2016. Image taken from Salt&Light.
What is there to talk about race in Singapore?
As young Singaporean Christians immersed in social media and educated in the United Kingdom, we were involved in conversations around systemic racism in the Western world after the murder of George Floyd. The Black Lives Matter movement made evident the systemic injustices that Black people face on a daily basis in the United States. Terms like ‘brownface’ and ‘Chinese privilege’, as well as anecdotes of racial discrimination, resurfaced in social media discourse and were discussed with gusto or dismissed entirely. There is no doubt that the socio-cultural context of Singapore is very different from that of the United States and Western Europe, but it does not mean that racialised thinking is a distant reality here. We write this piece as a way of imagining what a conversation about racial justice in the Singapore Church might look like. Of course, ‘the Church’ in Singapore is neither homogeneous nor monolithic. There is a multiplicity of conversations happening within ‘the Church’, according to the stages of life, socioeconomic situations, ethnic backgrounds, and political leanings of its members.
What is ‘race’? In Singapore, it is easy for us to look to the racial classification model of ‘Chinese-Malay-Indian-Other’ (CMIO) as an answer. However, historians and anthropologists tell us that from the 16th to the 18th centuries, groups of people around the world were distinguished based on physiological and stereotypes of cultural differences, and hierarchised into ‘Savages’, ‘Semi-Civilised’, and ‘Civilised’. Racism is a global structure, a logic that underpins discrimination and labour exploitation with material effects. Its entrenchment was accelerated by the expansion of European empire, seen first under the Spanish from the 15th to the early 19th century, and then the British empire from the 16th century until the 20th.
As political theorist Dr Jaako Heiskanen explains, race has ‘a clearly hierarchical connotation, which reflected this division of the world on an imperial basis into the colonial periphery and the European core.’[1] In the 15th century in Spain, racialised thinking was wielded in the Spanish Inquisition to justify the mistreatment of Jews and reconcile such injustice with the Christian belief in human equality. British colonialism took racial hierarchies as a governing principle — justifying expropriation of Black-owned land in South Africa, famines in India, and the exploitation of Black bodies in the global slave market. The codification of systems that routinely dehumanised indigenous people in the Americas, slaves originating in Africa, and colonial subjects in Asia gave racism an institutional expression. Any pre-existing awareness of ethnic difference was codified, institutionalised, and propagated by imperial pseudoscientific thinking. This is why discussions on race from different parts of the world can never be wholly divorced from one another.
Our histories of racial relations may be different from our counterparts across the Pacific, but this conceptual framework of racialised thinking flows from this shared legacy of European colonialism. In the late 19th century in Singapore, the British delineated formal racial categories and popularised stereotypes of the different races as part of ‘divide and rule’ policies. Along with the propagation of racialised thinking that originated in Europe, colonial rule sowed seeds of suspicion and division between the racial groups in Singapore that germinated over decades, and would spring forth in the violent racial riots of the 1960s.
Under the British, the very construction of modern Singapore was premised on Anglo-Saxon supremacy. Hence, ‘European Town’ (today’s downtown Singapore) was geographically and functionally prioritised over other communal zones. In turn, Singapore’s Arabs, Bugis, Malays, and South Indians were allotted lands on the settlement’s outskirts, lest they tarnish British prestige. It is worth remembering as well that Stamford Raffles’ own father was a slave trader.
Stereotypes that find their origin under British governance, such as the ‘lazy Malay’, ‘venal’ Chinese and ‘cringing and cheating’ Indian,[2] have infected societal mindsets and individual interracial encounters to this day. Yet, this does not disavow us of other concomitant, regional manifestations of ethnic discrimination. From the 19th century up to the early 20th century, Bugis traders brought shiploads of slaves who were themselves from Bugis (modern day Sulawesi Island in Indonesia) to trade in Singapore as well. It would also be remiss to omit manifestations of racism under Japanese imperial rule, one that created a new form of ethnic hierarchy with the Japanese in governing roles and drove the systemic killings of the Chinese across Malaya under the Sook Ching campaign.
Racism is not always so overt: subtler forms of differential treatment that dehumanise individuals belonging to minority groups are manifestations of this same racialised thinking. The remnants of this colonial construction of race continues to proliferate all areas of public life, our inner biases, and social organisation. Therefore, while ‘race’ is not a stable fact or truth that has existed since time immemorial, we persist in thinking in racial terms, and this extends in subtle ways to policy, governance, education, and social assistance in Singapore. Racialisation is intuitive for most people, even if we do so without understanding what it is. As a sociological phenomenon, it is defined as the process of ascribing ethnic or racial identities to a relationship, social practice, or group that did not identify itself as such.
The protests in the US and recent controversy in Singapore surrounding allegedly racially inflammatory statements made by Workers’ Party MP Raeesah Khan have reinvigorated discussion in Singapore on racial injustices that occur beneath a thin facade of multiculturalism. The present and future integrity of our multicultural society requires that it be further interrogated, not least when discriminatory behaviour was never just the domain of European colonialists.
Singaporean Christians are not invulnerable to latent prejudice, whether that manifests as indicating racial preferences in advertisements on the housing rental market, indicating a preference for fluency for Mandarin when recruiting employees, or assuming that members of a church community that have a different skin tone do not belong to the congregation. The Church in Singapore, as a social institution, is not exempt from discourse and developments happening in wider society. It should not neglect engaging in difficult critical self-reflexivity — as Christians, we simply know this deepening recognition of wrongdoing as ‘repentance’.
2. What is there to talk about race in the Singaporean Church?
In understanding not only the colonial history that Singapore shares with other multicultural nations grappling with the question of ‘race’, such as the United States, India, or South Africa, but also the local and regional histories that culminated in interethnic interaction on our shores, we can begin to understand racism as a particular manifestation of sin. Racism assumes that a group of people share a set of largely negative physical or behavioural characteristics on the basis of their physiology or ethnic background. This reduction of individuals contravenes our ability to affirm the doctrine of Imago Dei. Genesis 1:27 states that ‘God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them’.
When we allow presumption to cloud our ability to affirm the image of God in another person, it paves the way for behaviour that is insensitive, demeaning, and spiteful. The hatred can easily take root from a handful of misguided assumptions; one needs to look no further than the dismissal of migrant workers from Bangladesh as prone to criminality, the denouncement of Indian expatriates on the presumption of their arrogance, or the continued characterisation of the Malay community as backward. The call to love our neighbour emanates from our common identity in our Creator.
Each of us is made to be loved by Him and in turn, to show this same extravagant love to those around us. Pastor Rodney Woo writes, ‘The fact that as humans we all equally possess a divine image necessitates that we perceive and treat each other with a dignity commensurate with this truth. To interact with someone who has been created in His image, regardless of skin color, affords us the opportunity to see the face of God as we gaze into the face of another created being.’[3] The ethnic diversity of Singapore, described by Bishop Emeritus Dr Robert Solomon as its historic ‘multi-racial reality’[4], provides us as a church with ample opportunity to realise this call to recognise the dignity of each person. It is out of this that we can pursue our call from Jesus to ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ and ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ (Matthew 22:37–40 NIV)
Within the schema of agape love that God compels us toward, there can be no room for animosity or suspicion on the basis of one’s ethnicity to linger. Christ himself models the radical love that dismantles ethnic barriers in choosing to parse the divides between Jews and Gentiles during His ministry on earth. We see this in his approach of the Samaritan woman and asking her for a drink of water, in spite of the historic mutual hostility between her people and the Jews. In doing so, He dismantles any sense of racial disparity by regarding her as His social equal. We see this in the love and compassion Jesus extends to the Roman centurion who places his faith in Jesus to heal his servant in Matthew 8, as well as in early examples from the church of Antioch that had its own set of ethnic tensions to grapple with.
What provides the possibility of racial reconciliation in the church is not only an assurance of our divine imprints, but also of a shared faith in Christ. Such is the power of this recognition that it extends to every person, whether or not they profess to know Jesus, for as is written in the Gospel of Luke: ‘If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them.’ (Luke 6:32)
Of course, Singapore is fortunate to have not experienced the same ethnic strife that continues to rock the world, effectively guarding and pre-empting any threat to its social compact. It is easy to presume that racism does not operate in the same pervasive way in our society that it does in others, where a history of European settler colonialism or rapid imperial expansion may sully even the most innocuous of interactions. Much of this can be attributed to careful state management of population policies, whether in establishing racial quotas in different neighbourhoods, or keeping a tight rein over immigration and naturalisation. The riots of 1964 remain a spectral presence that the state consistently returns to in outlining its prevailing ideology of multiracialism, one that justifies the state’s strict management of discourse surrounding race and religion.
Yet, what this results in is a diminishing of the discrimination faced by our minority communities from schools to the workplace, from the media to our civic institutions. The corrosive effects of assuming the immutability of ethnic difference manifest time and time again, from anecdotal accounts of minorities being demeaned because of cultural practices such as Indians applying coconut oil to their hair, to material forms of discrimination such as employers only recruiting those who are fluent in Mandarin. That most Chinese Singaporeans rarely have to contend with such patronising treatment has been attributed to ‘Chinese privilege’ in contemporary discourse.
Our own churches often stand at the nexus of education, economic power, and racial homogeneity. It would be remiss to assume that our church communities are exempt from such instances of prejudice or microaggression, not least when so many of them continue to be predominantly monoethnic, whether because of ministry being conducted in specific languages or, more worryingly, a failure to accommodate difference. When too many Christians are willing to overlook certain behaviours that may be considered sinful, we may cease as a body to find the need for repentance at all. We cannot allow our hearts to harden toward the easy allure of cheap prejudice at the expense of our brothers and sisters of different ethnic backgrounds.
This leads us then to the image of the church that is presented in the book of Revelations. John writes of the future coming of Christ:
After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. [Revelation 7:9a (NIV)].
The vision that John receives is one of unity in difference, one that does not homogenise the church as one discrete linguistic or cultural identity, but one that affirms that the church is a multiethnic, multilingual body. The Singaporean church is uniquely positioned to affirm this principle and provide a model of how to pursue multiethnic ministry, as well as the spiritual maturity it demands. It is not uncommon for larger campaigns, such as the Celebration of Hope, or even Billy Graham’s crusades in Singapore in 1978, to consciously engage in multilingual ministry. In fact, it is not uncommon for churches themselves to organise fellowships that reach out to different linguistic communities. International Baptist Church, for example, organises services in English, Tagalog, and Bahasa Indonesia, Church of Singapore (Marine Parade) conducts services in Hokkien, Cantonese, and Mandarin, and The Methodist Church of Singapore as a denomination is organised according to its churches that conduct ministry in English, Mandarin, and Tamil.
Yet, the challenge that remains is the integration of discrete linguistic communities into one united church community; the sharing of individual rooms in a common building is no substitute for fellowship in direct proximity with those of different backgrounds. It remains necessary for our churches to affirm the multicultural principle at the heart of the Gospel, one in which ‘there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.’ (Colossians 3:11).
Beyond the confines of our own churches, it is here that we have an opportunity to distinguish ourselves in our unequivocal denouncement of racial prejudice. This is particularly crucial at a time when people are beginning to regard Chinese Anglophone Christians in Singapore with a particular scrutiny, not least when so many of this milieu are in positions of authority in government, education, or healthcare. Even if we rigorously guard against racial prejudice within our congregations, it is imperative that we show our faith by our works in the public domain, actively pursuing a love of our neighbours while recognising that we live in a rich, complex, and pluralistic society. Oftentimes, the advantages bestowed by rare encounters with prejudice may lead us to an obliviousness toward the social and cultural capital we maintain. It can be easy to overlook how these unconscious advantages operate on account of this axis of race, religion, and education.
To love our neighbours demands an active recognition that we are no better for our material or societal positions, and that to love another person is to humble oneself, affirming the common dignity we share as image bearers of God. This further compels us toward exercising empathy, sensitivity and an active willingness to sit with others and listen to the struggles and difficulties they may face. To love one’s neighbour can surely extend beyond a mere tolerance of another’s existence, and be shaped into a deep understanding and acknowledgement of another person in their fullness.
3. What can we as the Singaporean Church do?
Having understood that systemic racism is antithetical to the all-embracing redemption of Christ, how can the Church respond? The primary role of the Church is to bear faithful witness to the Gospel through proper handling of Scripture and discipleship. The Church’s attention is drawn to divine justice and Christian life, and the outflow of this to our respective social spheres is where our concern with social justice can be made manifest. Our belonging to the body of Christ does not stop at the buildings where we physically meet (or, in this season, the Zoom rooms we dial into). We also reflect Christ as the wider Church, in how we collectively mobilise to impact our communities, and in how we love one another (John 13:35). As individuals and congregations, how can we practice belonging to one united church community?
Bishop Emeritus Dr Solomon suggests one way: celebrating our multi-ethnicity by taking care of our minorities. Within the Church, there are some areas that are more well-resourced than others. Perhaps the Church would be nourished by more cross-congregational interactions, through sharing resources and facilities, as well as through intentional exchanges.
As individuals, this requires a preparedness to be uncomfortable, as missionary Dr Mark Syn points out. Cross-cultural relationship building demands radical hospitality and an awareness of certain identities that define the matrices of belonging to a certain group, so that those who hold those ‘dominant’ identities are intentional about including those who hold ‘subordinated’ identities. This radical hospitality should look the same regardless of whether the other party is Singaporean or a work pass holder, a professional expat or a foreign domestic worker. And this radical hospitality operates at a collective, institutional level too: so, for instance, if a Tamil-speaking congregation and a largely Chinese Anglophone congregation hold a joint event, leadership of both churches can be intentional about projecting the event as a collaboration, rather than one church ‘reaching out’ to another, and making the necessary adjustments to facilitate multilingual ministry.
Christian leadership should also be unequivocal about preaching against prejudice, particularly in its latent, subconscious form. In the spirit of theologian Karl Barth’s counsel, pastors should preach with the Bible in one hand, and the newspaper in the other: we cannot afford to go to Sunday services to forget about our country and our world. Quite the contrary: we are nourished by God’s Word so we can return to our neighbourhoods, families, workplaces and manifest biblical justice even more boldly. When xenophobic rhetoric wracks public debate on television broadcasts, news headlines and Facebook comment threads, it is crucial for our pastors to speak against it. When a racist joke or racialised comment is made offhand in church settings, we all have a responsibility to gently rebuke our brothers or sisters in love.
It is the strength and embedded awareness of the church’s status as a multinational and multiethnic body that empowers us to be empathetic and compassionate members of Singapore’s pluralistic society. It is fundamentally rooted in a recognition of Imago Dei as made manifest in each person and every culture. Beyond the confines of the institutional church, Scripture instructs us not only to ‘seek the welfare of the city’ where God has sent us into exile (Jeremiah 29:7), but also to be ‘peacemakers’ (Matthew 5:9). These injunctions necessarily encourage us to live at peace with all those who we share our nation with, regardless of whether they are believers in the Christian faith. As Reverend Malcolm Tan explains, ‘I believe that through the Lord Jesus Christ we can be agents of peace and promote social holiness and social peace.’ This ethos of seeking peace is underpinned by the necessity of respecting the human dignity of each person we talk to, especially those of other faiths and ethnic backgrounds, which are so often entwined in the Singaporean context.
As Reverend Tan further illustrates, John 1:4 states that in the Word ‘was life, and that life was the light of all mankind, and this light shines in everyone who has come into the world. This underscores the fact that the light of Christ shines in the hearts of everybody and that even in non-Christian cultures, there are elements of the light of God therein. This helps us understand not only that the light of Christ can be discerned in all people, but that we should be humbled by the prospect of such reciprocity with every person we meet. Each encounter holds the wondrous possibility of sharing something of Christ and learning something of Christ in return.
As theologian Emil Brunner describes, truth is not just propositional, it is also personal, and it is captured in an encounter. The impetus for Christians in a pluralistic, multiracial society, therefore is to seek to introduce people to the Christ, praying that they may receive His witness, but also to maintain a mutual, social respect in our interactions. This spirit of reciprocity enables us as a church to listen empathetically, seek justice, and oppose instances of racism individually and systemically, while also actively pursuing a deeper knowledge of the religious faiths and practices of those we live with.
As Christians, we should not be afraid to address the question of racial and religious difference, not least when its histories are punctuated by discomfiting associations with colonialism, racism, systemic injustice, and violence. In seeking the peace and welfare of the nation we reside in, we may find ourselves having to reckon with the illicit elements of the church’s past, as well as instances where the church has not represented Christ well to the broader populace, whether because of the behaviour of public figures or other organisations.
Equally, we may be impelled toward looking outward to the instances of injustice that pervade within organisations and as a result of imperfect policies. Yet, an increasing sensitivity to the needs of our neighbours, as well as a deepened willingness to humble ourselves and to listen those who have faced experiences of marginality and discrimination, will only serve to strengthen our sense of compassion as we continue to bear witness to the love of Christ.
This is an extended version of a forthcoming article with ETHOS Institute Singapore.
Bibliography
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Abd Rahman, Nor Afidah, ‘Bugis trade’, Singapore Infopedia, 17 February 2016 <https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_2016-02-17_161442.html>
Alatas, Syed Hussein, The Myth of the Lazy Native (Great Britain: Frank Cass and Company Limited, 1977)
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Chua, Leslie, and Adeline Chua, ‘Biblical Perspectives on Race’, Rock of Ages Church, 19 June 2020 <https://www.rockofages.org.sg/pastoral-reflections/2020/6/19biblical-perspectives-on-race>
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Goh, Robbie B. H., ‘Christian identities in Singapore: religion, race and culture between state controls and transnational flows’ in Journal of Cultural Geography, 26.1 (2009), pp. 1–23
Gorsky, Jeffrey, ‘How Racism Was First Officially Codified in 15th-Century Spain’, Atlas Obscura, 22 December 2016 < https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-racism-was-first-officially-codified-in-15thcentury-spain>
Hansen, Emil Sondaj, ‘Dr. Jaakko Heiskanen: “We are not inherently or naturally ethnic … It is the modern international order that makes the world seem to us this way”.’, Cambridge Journal of Political Affairs, 8 September 2020 < https://www.cambridgepoliticalaffairs.co.uk/blog/jaakko-heiskanen-interview>
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[1] Emil Sondaj Hansen, ‘Dr. Jaakko Heiskanen: “We are not inherently or naturally ethnic … It is the modern international order that makes the world seem to us this way”.’, Cambridge Journal of Political Affairs, 8 September 2020 < https://www.cambridgepoliticalaffairs.co.uk/blog/jaakko-heiskanen-interview>
[2] Syed Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native (Great Britain: Frank Cass and Company Limited, 1977), p. 115.
[3] Rodney M. Woo, The Color of Church (USA: B&H Publishing Group, 2009)
[4] Robert Solomon, ‘The Church as a Multi-racial Community’, Graduates’ Christian Fellowship, 11 and 12 September 2003 < http://www.gcf.org.sg/resources/the-church-as-a-multi-racial-community> | https://medium.com/@tanjingymin/race-and-the-church-in-singapore-e5dac62dc8d3 | ['Tan Jing Min'] | 2020-12-13 00:14:52.698000+00:00 | ['Christianity', 'Singapore', 'Race'] |
Haiku 347 | Sign up for Writers on Fire Community News
By Writers on Fire
Occasional missives for writers passionate about following the words to see where they may lead... The WOF group is an online writing group affiliated with The Nexus Generation community. Take a look. | https://medium.com/writers-on-fire/haiku-347-ec9e15e99dea | ['Zoe Day'] | 2020-12-13 05:22:41.625000+00:00 | ['Meditation', 'Haiku', 'Joy', 'Mindfulness', 'Poetry'] |
Woebe is pushing the underground community to stand out, and be different. | On Monday, December 28, 2020 Woebe is releasing a new single called “raise hell!” that pushes the boundaries of the small community he resides in. More than anything, Woebe wants to spread love and positivity to everyone he comes in contact with, but this doesn’t mean he’s afraid to make a statement.
Woebe is an Emo-Rap/Meme-Rap musical artist sitting at around 130 followers on Twitter, 530 subscribers on Youtube, and averages 60 monthly listeners on Spotify. His most recent release was “rip your ears” which was posted on December 14, and his most popular track as of recent is “iwillkillyouinyoursleeptonightsostayawakelol” which was published on December 10. Having the small fanbase that he does makes it difficult for him to get his music out there in the community, and in fear of being forgotten he’s pushed out many projects that he isn’t proud of. Woebe states “Making music is a true passion of mine, it’s one of my favorite things to do! But to me making it to somewhere, where I can be comfortable is hopeless”
One of Woebe’s main problems with the community, is that small artists like himself all follow a “blueprint” in their music which gives them very similar sounding tracks. Woebe is not a fan of this, as he states in his upcoming single, “Calling me on the celly saying please show me the way, all of y’all songs all sound the same”. Using his influence, he is really pushing the message of creative freedom. Woebe states “Stop being afraid of what people might think, create what you want to create, no matter how crazy you think it is. THAT is art.”
Woebe has an upcoming single titled “raise hell!” that will hopefully make some sort of impact on the community, if he gets his point across it may change a lot of small artists perspectives on their methods of creating music, for the better. | https://medium.com/@602evil/woebe-is-pushing-the-underground-community-to-stand-out-and-be-different-7e53d2943965 | [] | 2020-12-27 19:44:35.874000+00:00 | ['Art', 'Short Read', 'Rap', 'Music', 'Emo Rap'] |
The Bread Box that only Grows Mold | The Bread Box that only Grows Mold
There is always a story around inanimate objects. It’s the mother’s ring that was grandmas or your brother’s baseball or your daughter’s flower girl dress or the family Betty Crocker black and red check cookbook or the chipped Christmas bulbs. These ordinary, everyday objects are sponges for memories. They evoke the day grandma prayed over you, the day at the tournament where we all shared cheese fries, the wedding when we left the shoes at the hotel and little feet walked the aisle bare, the banana bread that has been a weekly staple, the bliss of Silent Night.
What happens when we hold onto the objects that do not hold the cherished warmth of life but the cold remnants of disfunction?
I did not know that I had a bread story to tell. I’m a baker, but more of a blueberry muffin than sourdough talent. The protagonist currently sits in my basement, looking at me as I fold laundry or change the cat litter. It is my vintage wood breadbox from childhood that I simply cannot part with; like I’m the bread and it’s the wire tie holding in my fresh-baked goodness. Only, every slice that has ever entered the hinged doorway grows mold. It’s a sad bread story.
Here’s what I know about the history of the said breadbox. It’s my understanding that it was a wedding gift to my now-divorced mom and dad. It sat on the counter of each home we rented throughout my young life. It always has the loaf heels, never a crustless middle, or at least that is how I remember it when I went for a self-made PP&J. It’s likely pine, aged to now look like a whisky barrel by fingers and moves. My mom kept the breadbox in the divorce, not that it was written in the official papers, it was just tossed in a cardboard box marked “kitchen” and onto the next life. The old breadbox made it to the next marriage and the next house and new family which also ended in, you guessed it, divorce papers. The poor breadbox never stood a chance. When my mom combed the house of all the things to take to her new apartment, she left her newfound ex- with the said breadbox. After I finished college, and a million stories and sandwiches in between, I lived with my step-dad once more. I swapped him a breadbox that I got gotten for my wedding for the “family heirloom”. He gladly accepted.
I finally bought my first home and began to see my babies grow and begin to build their own self-made PB&Js. However, there was never bread in the box. There was half an English muffin, a random old bagel, and of course the spouting fuzzy signs of expiration. It came over me in a flush, this is the saddest bread box that ever lived. The breadbox that grows mold. It lacked nurturing in its infancy and now rushes time and leaves you dissatisfied. It takes up counter space in the worst way, the dark secrets of the house kinda way.
So I have hung onto this damn thing into my adult life. There are currently clothes pins stored in it near the washer. I don’t use and it honestly often sours my thoughts looking at it. All these terrible attributes and I still hang on to it. I can purge clothes and food, make-up and toys. When it comes to the memory of the past, I hang onto every stitch. The bread box is not the highlight of good times, but it is a true piece and all I have left of it. There were not a lot of photos or letters from that time, there was barely any bread.
So how does this story end, what is next for said breadbox? Should I sand it down and paint it, disguise it as something new? Grab some wine and make a bonfire in the backyard? Donate it to the salvo; will the next owner have better reviews? For right now, I wanted to write about it. I wanted to tell my breadbox story out loud. I feel lighter. That breadbox has zero power over me or my bread! I am free because the story is free. Inanimate objects have this way within our lives, I won’t deny that. I know I have a soft spot for all the life they truly hold. Fascinating really and yet- it is only in the power we allow it to have. Free yourself from the “stuff” and hold onto the pieces that bring value to the soul. There is my answer! | https://medium.com/@b.wilder_bennett/the-bread-box-that-only-grows-mold-d849dcc45f0b | ['Brooke Wilder'] | 2021-11-24 14:00:18.879000+00:00 | ['Cleaning', 'Baking', 'Hoarding', 'Memories', 'Creative Writing'] |
Run Jupyter Lab on a Remote Server | Jupyter lab is a great web application for Python coding. This post instructs you how to run jupyter lab on a remote server using an ssh tunnel. I assume you know jupyter lab and already used it locally. Now, you want to run jupyter lab on a remote ubuntu server and access this jupyter lab server from your local machine (e.g. notebook). This way you can code directly on a remote server (e.g. a DGX machine) trough the web browser of your personal end device. — Hey, that’s cool.
Turn on your laptop. Turn on the remote server. Enable an ssh connection between your local machine and the remote server. Establish an ssh connection and set up an ssh tunnel. For instance:
$ ssh [email protected] -L 8889:localhost:8889
opens an ssh tunnel on port 8889 and logs in the user mercury on the server 192.168.127.123.
3. Now, you are logged in on the remote server. Install conda, jupyter lab on the remote server if not already done. I am doing this in the snippet below and also create the conda environment named jlabenv.
mercury@DGX:~$ sudo apt install conda
(base) mercury@DGX:~$ conda create --name=jlabenv
(base) mercury@DGX:~$ conda activate jlabenv
(jlabenv) mercury@DGX:~$ conda install jupyterlab
4. Start jupyter lab without opening a browser and let it connect on the port you set the ssh tunnel on. Below, I type a command to start jupyter lab as a background process using nohup and dump the output to a specified logfile:
$ nohup jupyter lab --no-browser --port=8889 > ./jupyterlab.log &
The &-sign allows me to get a new prompt.
5. Get the token to connect to the jupyter lab server. You can copy the token from the log file. Just open it with your favourite editor. I choose vim:
$ vim ~/tmp/jupyterlab.log
6. Copy and paste the given URL to access the jupyter server from your local machine.
Here you go!
Just make sure not to close the ssh tunnel. Otherwise you’d loose the connection to the server. If you lose the connection, don’t worry, you can just reconnect and return to the jupyter lab server where you left. | https://medium.com/@geronimo-bergk/run-jupyter-lab-on-a-remote-server-5137d64e9788 | [] | 2020-12-09 18:24:24.578000+00:00 | ['Ssh Tunnel', 'Jupyter Notebook', 'Jupyterlab', 'Ssh'] |
Building and Deploying Explainable AI Dashboards using Dash and SHAP | Let’s take, as an example, the task of predicting tips received by waiters based on features such as the total bill, the gender of the payer, the day and time, etc. A black-box model that ingests all those features just to predict the tips could be highly biased and might not be useful for business analysts trying to understand the behavior of the customers. However, by applying SHAP, we can gain more insights on the impact of each feature on the final value predicted by the model, which can be useful for understanding how the model perceives factors prone to biases, such as sex, age, race, etc.
In order to make such xAI methods more accessible and interactive, we used Dash to build an end-to-end application that runs an ensemble model called LightGBM on custom inputs. The dashboard and the full model are deployed on our Dash Enterprise Kubernetes servers, and both the black-box model and SHAP are running in real-time.
In the app, you will find controls that let you control the total bill, sex, day of the week, etc. Each one of those controls defines an input feature, and every time you update them, a new sample is given to the trained LightGBM model.
However, since LightGBM is a type of gradient boosting method, it is hard to directly interpret it. Therefore, we simulated the controls to allow the app to compute the SHAP values and display them in a waterfall chart.
In addition to specifying custom model inputs, you can also select a random example from the training set. Whenever you do this, you will see the real label appear on the right side (as a scatter point). You can then tweak the feature values to see how the various SHAP values change.
Moreover, you can also decide to make binary predictions (e.g. the sex of the customer) and interact with the graph using the Plotly modebar. | https://medium.com/plotly/building-and-deploying-explainable-ai-dashboards-using-dash-and-shap-8e0a0a45beb6 | ['Xing Han Lu'] | 2020-08-03 21:29:12.178000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning', 'Dashboard', 'Explainable Ai'] |
Dynamic Array made by C++ | Dynamic Array(가변 배열) 을 C++ 로 만들어보자
우선 세가지 파일이 필요함
CArr.h → class 멤버변수, 멤버함수 선언 CArr.cpp → class 멤버함수 정의 Main.cpp → main 함수
이전에 만들어뒀던 C언어 코드를 활용하자
/CArr.h
class CArr
{
private:
int* m_pInt;
int m_iCount;
int m_iMaxCount;
public:
CArr();
int GetCount()const;
int GetMaxCount()const;
void PushBack(int _iData);
void Resize(int _resizeData);
void ShowMember() const;
void ShowData() const;
~CArr();
};
class 와 struct 의 차이점 중 하나는 class는 생성자와 소멸자가 존재하기에
따로 함수로 구현할 필요가 없다는 것!
생성자를 통한 초기화 , PushBack , Resize(가변배열 크기변경) ,
ShowData , 소멸자를 통한 메모리해제
이렇게 다섯가지를 CArr.cpp 파일에 구현해보자
//CArr.cpp
#include "CArr.h"
#include <cassert>
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
CArr::CArr()
: m_iCount(0), m_iMaxCount(2)
{
m_pInt = new int[2];
}
int CArr::GetCount() const
{
return m_iCount;
}
int CArr::GetMaxCount() const
{
return m_iMaxCount;
}
void CArr::PushBack(int _iData)
{
if(m_iMaxCount <= m_iCount)
Resize(m_iMaxCount * 2);
m_pInt[m_iCount++] = _iData;
}
void CArr::Resize(int _resizeData)
{
if(_resizeData <= m_iMaxCount)
assert(false);
int* pNew = new int[_resizeData];
for(int i = 0; i < m_iCount; i++)
pNew[i] = m_pInt[i];
delete[]m_pInt;
m_pInt = pNew;
m_iMaxCount = _resizeData;
}
void CArr::ShowMember()const
{
cout << "iCount : " << GetCount() << ", " << "iMaxCount : " << GetMaxCount() << endl;
}
void CArr::ShowData()const
{
for(int i = 0; i < m_iCount; i++)
cout << i+1 << " : " << m_pInt[i] << endl;
}
CArr::~CArr()
{
delete[]m_pInt;
}
지난 글의 C 언어와 다른 기능을 가진 함수는 Resize 함수임
배열이 꽉 찬 상황에서만 늘어나던 지난번과는 달리
이번에는 사용자가 직접 배열크기를 할당해줄 수 있음
하지만 if 문의 조건과 같이
사용자가 iMaxCount 이하의 크기를 할당하게 되면
프로그램에 assert 함수에 의해 콘솔창에 경고가 뜸
(assert 함수는 false 값이 들어오면 경고가 뜸
→ 헤더파일은 C : assert.h , cpp : cassert)
경고는 다음과 같이 뜸
iMaxCount 가 4인데 Resize 함수로 크기가 4인 배열의 재할당을 요구했더니
경고가 뜨는 것을 볼 수 있음
그럼 Resize 함수를 잘 동작시키면 어떻게 될까?
iMaxCount 가 4인 크기가 4인 배열에
크기가 6 인 배열의 재할당을 요구했더니 iMaxCount , 즉 크기가 6인 배열이
재할당 되고 데이터가 더 들어가는 것을 볼 수 있음
자동으로 재할당 되는 배열은 크기가 2배로 증가함
main 함수는 자유롭게 수정이 가능하기에 위의 사진들을 참고하면 좋을듯!
오늘은 여기까지 :) | https://medium.com/@qldrhqorhsh/dynamic-array-made-by-cpp-3479b459f120 | [] | 2021-08-29 15:59:18.727000+00:00 | ['Development', 'C Programming', 'Study', 'Cpp', 'Developer'] |
The ‘L’ Principle | Meet Barbara
The ‘L’ Principle? Before we get into definitions and theories, let us take a sneak peak of some of our everyday rituals through the eyes of Barbara. Barbara is a working woman living in a gated community. She is passionate about technology and hence applies the same in her day-to-day chores.
Christmas is Coming!
Barbara finds her house to be super messy and plans to book a service from a household service aggregator. She opens her mobile app, CityClap, and makes a booking. While she wraps up the booking, she gets a message from her cousin! Ting… ‘Hi Barbara, Surprise! I am at town. Shall we meet sometime?!’ Barbara, looks at the time and plans for a quick visit. She books a cab in a taxi aggregator app, Ober. Driver details are assigned and she makes a visit to her cousin. She did not like the food outside, and as she returns home she feels hungry. She opens a food aggregator app, Chiggy, and orders food. She settles down and enjoys her food.
Wait! Why is the story of Barbara shared here and how is it relevant to the so called ‘L’ Principle? There is truly a connection. Let us examine each one of them.
Household service
The app’s booking engine aims at assigning a suitable person for cleaning work. The person can either be an experienced + most popular workman (or) an average credit earned workman. Barbara would not interrogate on the person’s experience . She is happy as long as the person services effectively and the home is clean.
Taxi booking system
The booking engine could either allot a driver with own taxi (or) a driver with rental taxi. Barbara is least bothered about the taxi’s ownership. She is satisfied with the service if the driver takes her to the destination hassle free.
Food delivery system
The delivery person at the food delivery system could either be working part time or full time. Barbara is delighted as long as her food is delivered at the right time.
The delivery person assignment system is independent of the type of employee. The portion of the system to the right of dotted line is thus substitutable.
Is the underlying subtle commonality evident? To be precise, the workman in the household service app, the car ownership data in taxi booking system and the delivery person employment data in food delivery system are independent of the booking made in each of the systems. These attributes are substitutable and the system remains unchanged if one of them change. We, as consumers of the services, delegate these choices to be made within the system.
Let’s dive into the principle
This is the underlying concept of a very important principle in software design, the Liskov Substitution Principle (LSP). As per Robert. C. Martin’s definition from the book Clean Architecture,
What is wanted here is something like the following substitution property: If
for each object o1 of type S there is an object o2 of type T such that for all
programs P defined in terms of T, the behavior of P is unchanged when o1 is
substituted for o2 then S is a subtype of T.
In the above examples, what are P, T and S?
Breakdown of P, T and S in Liskov Substitution Principle
For the purpose of understanding the principle better, the following words are best suited in the Object Oriented (OO) world.
Functions that use pointers or references to base classes must be able to use objects of derived classes without knowing it.
In the breakdown table above, the base class is T and the derived classes are S.
What this principle is NOT!
Let us use one of the examined examples and write code in both ways - one that follows LSP and one that violates.
public interface WorkSchedule {
LocalTime getStartTime();
LocalTime getEndTime();
} public class PartTimeSchedule implements WorkSchedule {
@Override
public LocalTime getStartTime() {
return LocalTime.of(18, 0);
}
@Override
public LocalTime getEndTime() {
return getStartTime().plusHours(5);
}
} public class FullTimeSchedule implements WorkSchedule {
@Override
public LocalTime getStartTime() {
return LocalTime.of(9, 0);
}
@Override
public LocalTime getEndTime() {
return getStartTime().plusHours(10);
}
} class FoodDeliveryPerson {
private WorkSchedule workSchedule;
FoodDeliveryPerson(WorkSchedule workSchedule)
{
this.workSchedule = workSchedule;
}
void printWorkTimings() {
System.out.println("Work timing : " +
workSchedule.getStartTime().toString() + " to " +
workSchedule.getEndTime().toString());
}
A FoodDeliveryPerson can either have a full time or part time work schedule. The program works independently from the type of WorkSchedule injected in FoodDeliveryPerson . This is an example of Liskov Substitution Principle (LSP) applied.
Consider, we have a requirement to capture credits earned by each delivery person. In case of full time employee, extra credits are granted.
class FoodDeliveryPerson {
private WorkSchedule workSchedule;
private int creditsEarned;
FoodDeliveryPerson(WorkSchedule workSchedule, int creditsEarned) {
this.workSchedule = workSchedule;
this.creditsEarned = creditsEarned;
}
void printWorkTimings() {
...
}
int getCreditsEarned() {
if (workSchedule instanceof FullTimeSchedule) {
return creditsEarned + 10;
}
return creditsEarned;
}
}
getCreditsEarned method is an example of LSP violation. The WorkSchedule type injected is no longer a black box for FoodDeliveryPerson , as the method checks for the WorkSchedule type and calculates the credits.
This brings us to the final section - Introduction to this blog.
Introduction to this blog is purposely structured to be the last section. Having understood the practical applications of LSP, we could now relate to why this is important in large systems. Some of the benefits that LSP brings to the table are,
Better delegation of work
Loose coupling
Scalable and extensible system.
Just like a building architect, who is responsible for the structure and the visual appearance of a building, a software architect, owns the structure of the system. How to architect a system effectively? Are there any guidelines or protocols to be followed? Well, this is subjective. However there are quite a few principles that can be embedded in the design to bring out a cleaner architecture. One of them is the L Principle - The Liskov Substitution Principle, which is the third of the SOLID Principles.
Let’s build cleaner systems by employing the right principles at the right places! | https://medium.com/@madhumithap/the-l-principle-7a16112f8e | [] | 2020-12-25 09:34:02.334000+00:00 | ['Solid Principles', 'Software Design', 'Liskov Substitution', 'Software Architecture'] |
Conquer The Fear Of The Unknown. | Photo by Jimmy Conover on Unsplash
At times we think those with the thick skin as an elephant can hope to sail through life unscathed by self-doubt and bouts of depression, but the truth is; we all at some point reach that point in life.
There is a time when a realm of deep personal power leads an individual into conducting their own education, exploring inspiration, shaping the environment and sharing their adventure with others. While work fills a very large part of our lives, those with a great taste in intuitive understanding and creation often strive for perfection in crafting their work.
Humanly, perfection is perceived as a positive thing. Even saying you have perfectionistic tendencies can come off as a great trait; even though internally you feel coldness and darkness has taken over.
We think that by sacrificing our quality time with friends and family or have a good rest when we are tired and exhausted will help us concentrate and work on that project perfectly that we have been thinking about but the truth is that neither one increase our productivity nor puts us in a perfect mental position that will help us cope with what’s to come. It leads to getting frustrated, beating yourself up for past failures or feeling like you can’t live up to your ambitions and expectations which lead you in peril. | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/conquer-the-fear-of-the-unknown-9094736c4cf1 | ['Ntwari Moise'] | 2020-06-29 11:22:36.911000+00:00 | ['Social', 'Work Life Balance', 'Fear', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Life'] |
Weeknotes S03E02 | Back at it again with my week-noting, when a change to my role happened and it felt bittersweet, so this is in part an ode to my lovely friend and colleague Simon and his awesome content design team.
Content no more
When I joined Citizens Advice almost two years ago, I took on leadership of the delivery function but also the content design team. This was an entirely new discipline to take on leadership of for me, but thankfully I had the wonderful Simon Kaplan doing all the hard work — I just had to make sure he was OK and had everything he needed.
Well this week, Simon was promoted to Head of Content Design (a role created after a re-shuffling of some of the customer journey leadership team) and I could not be happier for him. It’s absolutely bittersweet though because it’s been an absolute pleasure to work closely with Simon over the last couple of years. He’s worked so hard and has such an incredible dedication to the clients and advisers we serve as well as his team, so it’s with a tear in my eye I now say goodbye to him as one of my team. Luckily I still have him nearby as he joins the customer journey leadership team as my peer.
Reflecting on my 2 years
I always like to make time to reflect when significant changes happen in my career, to remind myself of what I have achieved but more importantly what the team have achieved and some of that includes (in my opinion):
Masses of recruitment, including shifting our dependency on fixed term contracts, stabalising the team in substantive posts and lots of internal promotions and external hires
Reorganising the team, introducing a new role to take on strategic leadership across advice content projects
Introducing new content design principles for the team and encouraging more sharing
Raised the profile of our work across the organisation and started to define the role of content design in product teams (a work in progress)
Battled the brexit and then COVID-19 storms together (holding on to each other and keeping each other going)
Improve collaboration with colleagues in other disciplines including our expert advice teams, user research, delivery and product design
Continued to maintain and develop our advice content more broadly, responding to user feedback and working on the accuracy across the vast amount of advice content we are responsible for
And overall keeping the good advice content ship going, delivering masses and masses of new and updated content to help people find a way forward. It’s emotional thinking about the numbers of people we have helped and I’ll always be very grateful for the opportunity to play a role in leading the wonderful content design team.
My future role
I started to think about my role moving forward now that I no longer have content design in my area — and I’m excited! Earlier this year delivery managers from technology and expert advice came together with my team and I’ve not had the time, space and focus to bring that team together in the right way. Luckily Jo has been doing such a great deal of work with the delivery community of practice that I think a lot of stuff I’d normally want to achieve (feeling like a team, defining purposes, roles etc) has happened somewhat organically through the community of practice work, but I’m looking forward to (at some point) having space to think about how I can build on the great work already done and what delivery at Citizens Advice means in the new year!
Public speaking
I did a quick lightning talk at the organisation’s show and tell session about remote working on Thursday, sharing what we’ve done in Customer Journey to support our team working remotely. I am not a very confident public speaker and get quite anxious about it (which a lot of people find hard to believe — it is true) and I got all worked up about it and am frustrated with how I did so that’s annoying. I wont beat myself up about it too much though and will let it go — in the grand scheme of things, it does not matter.
I also did a little presenting at the customer journey away afternoon on Thursday, giving an update on our latest staff survey results. Leanne then introduced a session for the team to help us with action planning and what good would look like against some of the themes we have scored well on, but have some ‘detractor’ comments about.
Areas from our staff survey that we did some work on at the away afternoon
The time we spend together as a team is always so nice — people generated loads of great ideas we can take forward and so I’m looking forward to bringing work on those forward with the rest of the extended leadership team in the coming months.
The away afternoon also had a section where we spent time reflecting on what we were proudest as well as an opportunity to thank each other. Reading through the jamboards was very emotional and acted as a helpful reminder of how much we have to be proud of as a team. We have achieved a huge amount during a really trying year, with such a focus on delivering for our clients and advisers. A very proud moment.
Could not agree more Giulia
Friday
Fridays are generally my time to catch up on the week that was, but today was a bit hectic — I chaired our weekly extended leadership team meeting where we discuss cross team things like wellbeing, staff survey, strategy, line management things and our EDI and anti-racism work.
I then had to record our weekly leadership team video — each member of the extended leadership team records a weekly update for the team, giving a round up of goings on, what we have been discussing and pointing to any important things we need people to do, as well as a question for some engagement like what’s your favourite lockdown discovery. I guess that was more public speaking for me — brutal!
I finished the day doing an end of year retrospective with Jo in my team using this festive themed retro, but tailoring it slightly. Jo and I catch up weekly and in the before times we used to have an offsite 90 minute monthly catch up to discuss broader development and objectives. These have not happened enough during remote working times so I was glad to make the space for some big thinking chats.
I think Jo and I work well together, so I enjoyed taking time out to reflect on all the wonderful things she has achieved this year. Particular highlights for me include:
her leadership of the delivery community of practice as well as leading the cross community of practice for most of the year
her work on remote interviewing which went far and wide, helping loads of others across the org (and twitter`) learn from her experience
her work supporting her team through difficult years — reflected in lots of amazing feedback from them and thank yous in the away afternoon yesterday
her support in taking on numerous cross team initiatives, being a genuine and authentic leader whilst being so brilliant at her job
Jo also qualified as a coach this week so I’m super proud of her for that achievement.
Weekly watches
This week I have mostly been watching:
Defending Jacob on Apple TV — it’s so expensive looking, and a bit of an apple advert but I love Michelle Dochery and will watch her in anything.
Re-watching Real Housewives of New York — the first few seasons are on Netflix but if you want to dive in and watch all of the franchises (like I have) then join HayU.
This weekend
I have big plans to see some lovely humans for walks, and to meet this incredibly adorable ball of floof for the first time! | https://weeknot.es/weeknotes-s03e02-3b3ac90c5714 | ['Matt White'] | 2020-11-27 17:46:17.741000+00:00 | ['Content Design', 'Public Speaking', 'Weeknotes', 'Delivery', 'Citizens Advice'] |
Las 5 tendencias de RRHH | in Change Your Mind Change Your Life | https://medium.com/@fichap/las-5-tendencias-de-rrhh-e8478c0b6586 | [] | 2020-11-17 20:14:29.474000+00:00 | ['Management And Leadership', 'Team Building', 'Personal Growth', 'Human Resources', 'Recursos Humanos'] |
How to become another person? | Hi, My name is jordy. I’m new here so please guide me :)
Okay let’s back to the topic “How to become another person?”
this question is really ambiguous, Why? because what are you refer to be another person? there’s so many aspect that become our measurement to think what’s good on me. like maybe you have a friend that’s good doing something, good on manage his time, good on styling his own outfit or something else that good one someone else.
So, this is about you to find what’s wrong about my life? Why when someone can do everything but you can’t?
We need to change that mindset, because we can do anything as we try… so the context here is not become another person, but to become yourself and do it on your way. we have our own pace. let it flow and while it flow do your best for your life, do it for yourself! don’t do it if you want to become other person.
this is my first story. maybe it’s not good like other’s writing. but I’ll try my best at finding a good topic.
because this paragraph just pop out after I’m registered medium. lol
Thankyou | https://medium.com/@jordyandreas76/how-to-become-another-person-a826313572a4 | ['Jordy Andreas'] | 2020-09-06 04:13:05.688000+00:00 | ['Social'] |
4 Common Mistakes When Using React to Avoid | 4 Common Mistakes When Using React to Avoid
Photo by Daniela Holzer on Unsplash
React is a great library nowadays. It eases the process to build beautiful and smooth web applications.
But there are some common mistakes if you don’t notice, it will create a burden for your project later.
Without any further ado, let’s dive right in to know what mistakes you should avoid when using React.
1. Create Superman Components
Superman components are components that can do many things.
I once experienced that kind of component from my coworker. He put many unrelated UI blocks into one component. Then he used a property to control the display for each block. Something like if viewId=0 then show view_0 .
class SupermanComponent extends React.Component {
render() {
return (
<div>
<div>
/* UI Block 1 */
</div>
<div>
/* UI Block 2 */
</div>
<div>
/* UI Block 3 */
</div>
<div>
/* UI Block 4 */
</div>
</div>
)
}
}
You may think it’s convenient at first. However, when the project grows, it will become a mess soon. Not to mention it will take time to investigate when problems occur.
A component should focus on only one thing. Don’t give it too much power to handle a lot of tasks for the sake of reusability and scalability.
For example, you should restrict NavBarComponent’s ability to navigation bar functionality. Unrelated other features should be removed. By doing that, you can reuse it anywhere you need.
Don’t be lazy by wrapping all features into one single component. Spend time to think what your desired component should look like and design it as unique as possible. These unique components are easier to maintain and work well together in the whole composable system.
BlockOne component:
class BlockOne extends React.Component {
render() {
return (
<div>
{ /* Block 1 */ }
</div>
)
}
} export default BlockOne;
BlockTwo component:
class BlockTwo extends React.Component {
render() {
return (
<div>
{ /* Block 2 */ }
</div>
)
}
} export default BlockTwo;
BlockThree component:
class BlockThree extends React.Component {
render() {
return (
<div>
{ /* Block 3 */ }
</div>
)
}
} export default BlockThree;
2. Pass Numbers as Strings
Take a look at the component below:
class UserDetails extends React.Component {
printGender() {
if (this.props.gender === 0) {
return ‘Male’;
}
if (this.props.gender === 1) {
return ‘Female’;
}
return ‘Other’;
} render() {
return (
<div>
Gender: {printGender()}
</div>
)
}
}
We’re using gender property as a number to decide the gender. 0 for Male , 1 for Female , and anything that differs from 0 and 1 for Other .
Now, let’s use the UserDetails component somewhere:
<UserDetails gender=“0” />
You expect the gender will be Male but it’s not. Because you pass 0 as a string not a number. So, the actual value will be Other .
To fix it, use curly brackets when passing numbers as props:
<UserDetails gender={0} />
3. Modify The State Directly
One of the most common mistakes that beginners make is modifying the state directly. Like this:
showButton() {
this.state.buttonVisibility = true;
}
You change the state directly and the React system doesn’t know about it. Thus, it might not trigger the re-rendering.
The React state should be immutable. If you try to modify it directly, errors or unexpected behaviors might occur like the UI isn’t re-rendered in the example above.
Instead of changing the state directly, you should use setState() . It will tell React, “Hey dude, I’m about to change something. Please be aware of it.” Then React will prepare everything to serve the change correctly.
showButton() {
this.setState({ buttonVisibility: true });
}
4. Use The State’s Value Right After setState()
showAvatar() {
this.setState({avatarVisibility: true}); if (this.state.avatarVisibility) {
// Do something
}
}
Can you point out the issue of the above snippet?
It’s that avatarVisibility is used right after it’s updated by setState() .
Why is it an issue?
This is a subtle mistake you may not notice but setState() works asynchronously.
It means if you use setState() to update a property, the change may not be applied immediately. That’s why using a property right after the updating can lead to unexpected behaviour.
However, you can solve this problem by using the second parameter of setState()
showAvatar() {
this.setState({avatarVisibility: true}, () => {
if (this.state.avatarVisibility) {
// Do something
}
});
}
By using the callback function, your calculation will work accurately because that callback function will be called after the state is updated.
Conclusion
Above are the common mistakes you probably make when working with React. I hope this article will help you avoid all of them to make sure everything works perfectly. | https://javascript.plainenglish.io/4-common-mistakes-when-using-react-to-avoid-ed9de4307de5 | ['Amy J. Andrews'] | 2020-12-03 08:05:36.332000+00:00 | ['Frontend Development', 'Web Development', 'Javascript Development', 'React', 'JavaScript'] |
Putting Quality First | The global off-grid appliance market, despite recent growth, remains nascent in most of the world. Good-quality, energy-efficient off-grid appliances (“high performing appliances”) are more durable than their low-quality counterparts and enable consumers to maximize the value of their system by powering more devices. However, most consumers remain unaware of their benefits. High-performing appliances are often more expensive than traditional appliances. As a result, many consumers only consider the upfront purchase price of the appliance when making a decision or see it as a high-risk investment.
Consumer experience has a significant impact on off-grid appliance sales in Bangladesh. A positive personal recommendation is one of the most effective drivers of sales. If early adopters like Tarek are satisfied with energy-efficient appliances, their positive feedback would motivate more conservative buyers and stimulate market growth.
Since purchasing his appliance, Tarek has proved to be a strong referrer for his Rahimafrooz TV. “The picture quality is better than my previous TVs and I’ve recommended this TV to my customers,” he says with an inviting smile. Tarek’s positive experience with this TV is likely to be passed by word-of-mouth and directly lead to more purchases and thereby strengthen the process of market creation.
Tarek and his family with members of the Global LEAP Awards team.
—
About the Global LEAP Awards Customer Spotlight Series
The Global LEAP Awards is an international competition to identify and promote the world’s best off-grid appliances, accelerating market development and innovation. This unique program has evolved into a trusted global brand that serves as the de facto source of accurate, actionable information about the quality and energy performance of off-grid appliances, with support from Power Africa, UK aid, Energising Development, Powering Agriculture, and USAID, and in partnership with the Efficiency for Access Coalition.
This series tells stories collected through interviews with off-grid appliances customers who purchased their product through a Global LEAP Awards results-based financing (RBF) mechanism. Through its RBF, CLASP supported the delivery and enhancement of energy access for over one million beneficiaries across Bangladesh and East Africa. In Bangladesh alone, the RBF mechanism supported sales of about 194,000 energy-efficient off-grid fans and 7,000 best-in-class solar TVs. The series sheds new light on the impact, and thereby the real socio-economic value, of off-grid fans and TVs to appliance consumers in critical appliance markets like Bangladesh. | https://medium.com/efficiency-for-access/putting-quality-first-78086b47f663 | ['Global Leap Awards'] | 2020-12-09 20:27:13.568000+00:00 | ['Energy Access', 'Off Grid Solar Systems', 'Renewable Energy', 'Technology', 'Bangladesh'] |
Learn How to (easily!!) do 3 Advanced Excel Tasks in Python | Excel is the ubiquitous data analysis tool — it’s easy to pick up, mostly everyone has a copy of it, and it’s quite powerful once you get the hang of it! Meanwhile, Python is often regarded as a bit more challenging to pick up, but as having limitless potential. In this post, we’ll explore three things you can easily do in Python that you normally do in Excel!
We’ll begin by import pandas and loading two dataframes based on the sheets available in our workbook. We’ll call them sales and states.
Importing our datasets into Pandas dataframes.
Let’s image we ran the .head() method on the dataframes, as sampled below:
print(sales.head())
We can compare this to how the data would look in Excel:
Comparing how data is displayed in Excel vs. Pandas (source: Nik Piepenbreier)
We can see the data that’s displayed is relatively similar to how Excel would display the data, but there are some key differences:
Excel starts at Row 1, while Pandas starts at row (‘index’) 0,
Excel labels columns with letters starting at A, while Pandas labels the columns with variable names
Let’s begin to dive into how to work with Pandas to complete Excel tasks. | https://towardsdatascience.com/learn-how-to-easily-do-3-advanced-excel-tasks-in-python-925a6b7dd081 | ['Nik Piepenbreier'] | 2020-06-21 12:29:00.279000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Pandas', 'Excel', 'Data Analysis', 'Python'] |
Training vs Product Tool | Training vs Product Tool
Have you been tasked with researching software tools for your team? Only to come up against resistance, as decision-makers don’t understand the difference between a product tool vs a training tool, and why they both may be needed?!
When searching for any software solution, it is important to identify the challenges as well as the key features the solution must possess. For this particular example, let’s first list some goals a product team may have while in search of a tool to help improve their product & user experience.
Product Goals:
Guide the user through interface via an in-app walkthrough
Explain components in-app with tooltips
Notify the user in-app of a new feature or re-location of feature
Promote Paid features or Features inside a Menu
Highly Customizable with Coding(CSS, JavaScript, Jquery, etc)
In-depth Analytics to analyze engagement
Overall Purpose:
Guide, emphasize and promote features of the application to the users
Next, we’ll list out some goals a training or learning & development team may have when it comes to a training creation or authoring tool.
Training Goals:
Fast, Intuitive Tool — Works out of the Box
Requires No Coding Knowledge, Only Application Knowledge
Creates Linear Task-based Instructional Guides
Easy to Edit & Revise with Software Updates
Multi-Mode & Export Output Options
Ease of Sharing with Users: Help Center, Knowledgebase, Widget, etc
Integrates with Current Tools
Privacy options that keep training material secure
Company branding for a quality user experience
Engagement Analytics for each guide
Collaboration to allow teamwork on Guides
Overall Purpose:
Train, educate, prepare users to complete specific tasks or workflows within one or many applications
Comparison
After reading both the team's goals, you can understand how there could be confusion and possibly some overlap in functionality creating some gray space.
The product team is looking for a highly customizable tool to point out features in-app, guide the users through components on many pages, and unfortunately, this many times requires coding, which requires time, and lots of it! They are trying to promote new features or possibly even guide users to an upsell opportunity. This said they are searching for a tool that provides in-depth analytics on these workflows to better assist users as well as help them get more from the product. Thus, the gray space that diverges between product tool vs training tool.
While the training team has boatloads of training to create & ship, not to mention maintain, as the software evolves over time, thanks to the next update. Training departments often don’t have the skillset for development, as they are skilled at… training! They don’t have the time to develop & customize intricacies, they need to bust out lots of content as quick as possible, and have an easy way to maintain it when it needs updating.
This team frequently wears many hats, which can include meeting with customers, creating documentation, supporting customers, implementation, the list can go on. It’s crucial that this often undervalued group has the proper tools, to get their job done well. The training team knows the product better than most in the organization, they are constantly supporting & promoting the product, making them, we could say, the MVPs of the company. Providing them with the proper tools gives them time back in their day to spend with customers, instead of spending countless hours creating training content. As a result, turning customers into product ambassadors, as a result, increasing company sales.
Where’s iorad fit?
There are companies that use iorad for their product needs, but those are teams that don’t have all the goals listed above under product. Instead, their goals are more from a training approach rather than a product walkthrough approach. Where iorad excels is in the training world. Whether that is customer or employee training, iorad is your go-to. There are lots of options as far as how to share content, for instance, via a help center, knowledge base, in-app widget, or a live overlay. However, these are specific task-based instructional guides at the point of need. The user will generally seek out this help themselves or access it via onboarding.
The Conclusion
While there may be commonalities, these teams have different end goals and different needs. Based on your company needs & challenges the “proper tool” will vary. However, as a general statement product tools have a different set of features that solve the product teams’ main objective & training tools focus their efforts on features that support and enhance training goals. | https://theioradlife.com/training-vs-product-tool-b7cde374200e | ['Lauren Taylor'] | 2021-02-15 14:55:10.096000+00:00 | ['Learning And Development', 'Product', 'Thought Leadership', 'UI', 'Training'] |
How To Create An Online Course And Earn A Passive Income? | If you haven’t considered creating a passive income stream by making and selling your own (create an) online course, why not? To say that this has been a challenging year would be like saying that coffee is nice — somewhat of an understatement.
While this has, without a doubt, been the most difficult year for my own and many others’ businesses, if we scratch a bit, we can find some positive outcomes. We’ve learnt how to be resilient and to keep going, even if we’ve had to change how we do business.
Studying content through digital learning takes up to 60% less time than traditional classroom learning.
That’s been my biggest lesson: to be agile, accepting, and willing to try new things because who would ever have thought that the world could shut down?
But shut down is what the world did. Along with it, many of our own businesses. And if they didn’t close entirely, they certainly felt the shockwaves of a shuttered world. We’ve come a long way since then and we’re better prepared and more knowledgeable, but our lives are different because the world is different.
What we need to be doing now is finding ways to strengthen our businesses by exploring alternative income streams. A great option for just about any business is to create and sell online courses. And with businesses having become remote, and online, now is the time to be getting your courses out there.
3 Reasons Why You Should Create an Online Course Now
1. Uncertainty about the economy
No one is able to predict an end date for this pandemic. The only thing we can be certain of is that the world has changed and continues to every day. When I started writing this post a few days ago (ok fine, it was a week ago!) the world was still tentatively open.
Today the United Kingdom announced a new lockdown, and much of Europe has implemented heavier restrictions or done the same. Things change quickly. As more and more businesses struggle and close, the more other businesses feel it.
We need to be doing all we can right now to bolster our businesses by finding alternative and parallel income streams. A great way to earn this passive income, and give yourself a feeling of security, is to create an online course.
2. Your audience is right where you need them, right now
Now more than ever people are online. They’re working online, meeting online, shopping, playing, and learning. They already know the value of online learning, so you don’t have to convince them. That part’s already been done. What you do need to do is create a course that they need, something that will help them solve a problem, or make their lives easier. Then they will buy it!
3. Building relationships now helps build your business
Even though a business may have slowed down, maybe even dried up, it doesn’t have to stay that way. People may not be able to buy your product or services right now, but they will remember you when they are in a position to buy if you helped them.
By creating an online course, you are establishing yourself as an expert in your industry. If you create helpful, quality resources for your customers or clients, they will come to you when they need help again.
There has never been a more necessary time to investigate passive income streams than now. With your audience already spending most of their time at their computers, an online course that adds value to their lives, wouldn’t take much convincing to buy.
How To Create An Online Course
As with most things in life, you can wing it and hope for the best. Or if you’re not a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants type person, you can follow a process based on instructional design knowledge and experience. Let’s take a look at the second option.
Step 1 — Choose your topic
Your first step is to decide the topic to create an online course. While it’s a good idea to choose something that interests you, it’s even more important that your topic is something your audience wants to or needs to know about. Brainstorm the following:
What are your areas of expertise?
What are you interested in?
What does your audience need?
What is the gap in your niche?
Once you have a few ideas for each of those, look to see if there is an overlap. That overlap is your course topic.
Step 2 — Research your audience and create an ideal client profile
When you’re choosing your topic, you’ll need to consider your audience’s needs. You may already have an idea of who your ideal client or audience is, or maybe you aren’t clear about who you are selling your service or product to.
In either case, creating an ideal client profile will make crafting your course easier and more efficient, and it will help ensure you are consistent in how you speak to your audience.
An audience profile describes the demographics (age, occupation, primary language), behaviour, psychographics (values, attitudes, beliefs), and the type of business your ideal client owns. If you know what interests your audience, and what they value, you will be able to speak to them in a way that is relevant to their lives. And it’s when something is relevant to a people’s lives, that they see the value in it.
The better your understanding of your audience, and the more you use this information while you create your course, the harder your course will hit. If you have a clear picture of your audience, how they behave in certain situations, and what they value, you’ll be able to speak to them in a way that they understand and that is meaningful to them.
Step 3 — What content do you have?
You have your topic, and you know your audience like you know your own face. Your next step is to check what content you have and what you still need, by doing a content audit. If the topic you have decided on is an area you’re an expert in, you already have a lot of content — your knowledge.
But there may still be areas where having a source that confirms your views is valuable. I use a table to organise my information and help me to find content gaps. I also use the table to differentiate between the content my audience needs to know, and what is just nice to know. Stick to need-to-know information, otherwise, they’ll get information overload!
Step 4 — How will you deliver your course?
There are as many different ways to deliver your course as you can think of, but not all content is suited to all types of delivery. Instructional videos that explain how to make something, for example, a beaded purse, would be more effective than a workbook with text only.
These are great for asynchronous learning. A career coaching course would be a great opportunity for synchronous learning or coaching. Let’s dive a little deeper into asynchronous and synchronous courses.
Synchronous online learning
Synchronous or real-time courses are live. Zoom workshops, webinars, and Facebook Live events are all types of synchronous online learning. Your audience participates together, and they have the opportunity to learn from each other and share their own experiences. This type of learning doesn’t appeal to everyone though, and they may prefer asynchronous options.
Asynchronous learning
Asynchronous learning is self-paced, and your audience can complete the course according to their own schedule. If you decide that asynchronous learning works best for you and your audience, you can include pre-recorded videos, workbooks. eLearning modules, and podcasts.
1. Blended learning
So, how do you know which type of learning is best for your course? You need to consider a few things:
What does your audience need?
What type of learning (asynchronous or synchronous) works for your content?
What can you commit to delivering? (for example, can you commit to hosting and facilitating live online workshops at a specific time on a regular basis?).
You could also create your own custom blend of learning materials that suit:
Your audience’s needs for a solution to a problem or challenge they’re having
Your content and topic
Your time and financial budget
A blend of scheduled and self-led learning (also called hybrid learning) lets you personalise your course by using live events. It also allows you to extend your reach. For example, if your audience is time zones away from you, your online live events may not fit their schedule.
E-learning is energy saving, with 90% less energy used by the open university when turning to digital education outlets.
2. Video
Video is a great vehicle for delivering content to your audience. Here are some benefits of using video in your course:
Videos are easy to make now with so many video platforms and video-editing apps available.
People are used to watching videos on their computers and on their mobile devices.
Video content is also easy to share, so if you’re giving your course away as part of your marketing strategy, or if you’re giving away sections of your course, it can be easily shared.
Video is best used in 2–3-minute clips for learning. It may seem short, but you must remember that you want an engaged audience. Not someone passively staring at the screen for three hours. Also, if you keep your videos shorter, people can access them anywhere and learn in three-minute bursts.
3. Workbooks
Workbooks are a popular option when it comes to creating courses. They are easy to put together, publish, send out, and update. They’re also a great way to deliver topics that need in-depth explanations. My caution here is to use workbooks as part of a blend of media in your course. Use workbooks, but include videos, eLearning (if it’s an option), and webinars (a simple Facebook Live is perfect).
4. eLearning
Things have changed since the days of wordy hours-long online learning you may have had to do at work or school. There are loads of online learning platforms and learning plugins available now (for example, Teachable, Thinkific, Udemy, LearnDash). Like anything else, some are fabulous, and others aren’t great.
The way to tell the difference is by looking at the actual POINT of a learning platform: to make learning, and delivering learning, efficient and effective. So, if you’re looking at using an app, it should make your customer’s life EASIER, not more difficult, or they will abandon the learning!
Summary
With most of our lives already being spent online, and with the constant uncertainty and changes our businesses are facing, now is an excellent time to create an online course.
Not only is it a way for you to create a parallel income, but also it’s a way to build your reputation as an expert in the field who is happy to help people.
This focuses then on relationship building and helping your clients and potential clients, is what will bring them back to you in the future.
Have you created your own online course? What things do you keep in mind? | https://medium.com/timetasks/how-to-create-an-online-course-and-earn-a-passive-income-bbe391873ee | ['Kelsey Hill'] | 2021-08-25 04:09:13.287000+00:00 | ['Course', 'Online Courses', 'Passive Income', 'Course Creator', 'Money'] |
Restaurants Are the Riskiest Places You Can Go Right Now | Using cellphone data, researchers have developed a new computer model that shows which indoor places, aside from people’s homes, drove the most Covid-19 infections in major U.S. cities this spring. The verdict? Restaurants, gyms, coffee shops, and hotels were the riskiest places for transmitting SARS-CoV-2.
Their report, published in the journal Nature on November 10, also calls for restricting capacity at these places in lieu of complete lockdowns.
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“Restaurants are by far the riskiest, about four times riskier than the next category, which are gyms and coffee shops, followed by hotels,” Jure Leskovec, PhD, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford University and senior author on the paper, said during a press briefing on Tuesday.
To make the model, computer scientists used anonymized geolocation data collected between March to May from 98 million Americans living in 10 major cities: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. That data showed where people went in the course of a day, how long they stayed there, and how crowded those places were. The researchers then merged that information with demographic and epidemiological data.
The resulting model predicted that a small number of locations, such as full-service restaurants, accounted for a large majority of infections. For example, in the Chicago metropolitan area, just 10% of the places people visited accounted for 85% of the predicted infections. The infections predicted by the model largely matched actual Covid-19 cases in the cities studied.
The study backs up the idea that most Covid-19 transmissions happen at “superspreader” sites, like restaurants or places of worship, where people remain in close quarters for an extended period of time. The researchers recommend capping the occupancy of indoor venues at 20% of its maximum capacity. Doing so could reduce new infections by over 80%, they predict.
The research also helps explain why minority and low-income people are disproportionately being affected by the virus. Researchers found that people in lower-income neighborhoods with fewer white residents were not able to reduce their mobility as much as people in whiter, higher-income neighborhoods. In addition, the places that lower-income groups attended were more crowded, which increases the risk of infection.
“Our model predicts that one visit to a grocery store is twice more dangerous for a lower-income individual compared to a higher income individual,” Leskovec said.
The authors think reopening businesses with lower occupancy caps will benefit disadvantaged groups the most. “Because the places that employ minority and low-income people are often smaller and more crowded, occupancy caps on reopened stores can lower the risks they face,” study co-author David Grusky, PhD, a Stanford sociology professor, said in a university statement. “We have a responsibility to build reopening plans that eliminate — or at least reduce — the disparities that current practices are creating.” | https://medium.com/@jhumlareyjhum99/restaurants-are-the-riskiest-places-you-can-go-right-now-d3726a47d62d | ['Jhumla Reyjhum'] | 2020-12-15 19:45:54.647000+00:00 | ['Restaurant', 'Health', 'Covid 19', 'Safety', 'Baby'] |
The Challenge 36: Battlegrounds (6 teams of 6) 💥 | So the next season of The Challenge has not been announced yet, and we are all PARCHED for content in this punishingly long off-season. WHERE IS THE TEASER TRAILER, MTV?! Filming ended a whole ass month ago and I am DYING here.
As y’all know, I’m part of the #UnspoiledGang and therefore can’t be discussing everything that happens on Season 35. So instead, let’s daydream about Season 36, which would be a great time to try out a new format. So I introduce to you an idea:
Season 36: Battlegrounds
The casting pool has exploded in recent years. It started way back on Season 12, Fresh Meat, but has really ramped up since S26— which brought Are You the One? alumni on for Battle of the Exes II — and especially on seasons 31, 32, and 33, which introduced Big Brother players, UK competitors, and personalities from a whole friggin’ litany of other shows.
Season 34, Bloody Hell aka War of the Worlds 2, featured a US vs UK theme, with an Australian and Turk thrown in for good measure. It was restrictive casting in order to fill up a British roster, so we didn’t get any American debuts — for the first time ever.
I won’t spoil it (all) here, but S35 returned to their typical casting and features polarizing new US stars. I am more psyched about this cast than any recent season besides Invasion — especially because I actually know the newbies (as opposed to people like Esther, Alan, Shaleen, and the Shipwrecked alumni).
Whenever pre-departure speculation happens for the next season, I am all over it — so I have a good sense of how casting works. Therefore I see this format and the people I’ve chosen for it as actually realistic. Let’s get to it.
Only casting spoilers for Season 35 — no elimination or winner spoilers.
Format
36 competitors split into 6 teams of 6, each representing different TV shows. Eliminations are individual.
Big Brother | https://medium.com/@novarogue/the-challenge-36-battlegrounds-6-teams-of-6-25b506e9f59f | [] | 2020-02-10 18:23:44.131000+00:00 | ['MTV', 'Reality TV', 'Television', 'The Challenge', 'TV'] |
The Birth of Baby Becky | Babies | Birth | Daughters | Family
The Birth of Baby Becky
The story of my daughter’s birth
Photo by Michal Bar Haim on Unsplash
My daughter is a gorgeous girl,
I grew her in my tummy.
My waters broke, I was in pain,
It really wasn’t funny.
“Get the f**king drugs,” I screamed.
“Let’s get this baby born.”
But little Becky wouldn’t budge,
“I like it here, it’s warm.”
To get the little monster out,
They sliced me with a knife,
And rummaged in my belly,
Hard, to drag out this new life.
“What’s her Apgar score,” I shrieked.
I had to know right then.
“It’s eight,” they said. “Oh no, it’s changed.
It’s gone right up to ten.”
They swaddled her and showed me,
My tiny baby girl.
A tuft of dark red hair, she had,
Quite straight, without a curl.
She stared at me intensely,
She knew I was her mummy.
I looked right back and studied her,
All small, and sweet, and gummy.
My little girl is grown up now,
She is my best creation.
I won’t forget the day she came,
And filled me with elation. | https://medium.com/no-crime-in-rhymin/the-birth-of-baby-becky-45f61aa55103 | ['Wendy Scott'] | 2020-12-18 12:06:02.982000+00:00 | ['Baby', 'Birth', 'Poetry', 'Humor', 'Family'] |
Understand JavaScript Execution Context. | Understanding how JavaScript runs your code is the key to becoming a seasoned developer. Execution context is one of the key concepts one has to understand if you are to know how your code runs.
Knowing this will help you to fully understand scope, hoisting, closure, improve your debugging skills and improve your ability to read large code base.
We would approach this concept using lay man words to lessen the complexity surrounding this concept. So, lets have an understanding of lexical environment which will help us to understand execution context. Lexical environment of a code is the physical location of a code in a program.
let me = 'i am inside an environment called me' function whereIsMe() {
let me = 'i am inside an environment called me';
console.log(me);
} console.log(me);
whereIsMe()
In the above code, we have two variables called me; both me is living in two different environments. Looking physically at the code, the first me is living in a global environment and the other me in a function. This represents their lexical environment.
Having known that the environment of a code is important to JavaScript, what the heck is execution context?. In programming, execution means to run your code and context means where or place.
Hence, execution context is a wrapper or an environment that manages your code that is running. So, at a point in time in the life cycle of your program, there is at most one execution context running, that is known as the running execution context.
A new execution context is created whenever control is transferred from the executable code associated with the currently running execution context to executable code that is not associated with that execution context. The newly created execution context is pushed onto the stack and becomes the running execution context.
A bucket or a data structure called call stack is created to keep track of the current execution context and all the execution contexts. The stack puts the current one that is running at the top which is the last to enter the stack. This design pattern is referred to as LIFO meaning last-in first-out.
call stack
We have three execution context in JavaScript viz: Global execution context, function execution context and exec execution context.
Global Execution Context (GEC).
Global execution context is an object wrapper or an environment JS Engine creates immediately a js file is loaded to the browser even when you have not written single line of code.
When a script executes for the first time, the JavaScript engine creates a Global Execution Context. During this creation phase, it performs the following tasks:
Create a global object i.e., window in the web browser or global in Node.js. Create a this object binding which points to the global object above. Setup a memory heap for storing variables and function references. Store the function declarations in the memory heap and variables within the global execution context with the initial values set as undefined.
GlobalExecutionContext : {
GlobalObject: {}
variableEnvironment: {
EnvironmentalRecord: {
//keeps tracks of the environmental variables
a: 'undefined'
b: 'undefinde'
c: <Pointer to Fec for c>
} thisBinding: window || global
outerRef:
}
}
Note: this = GlobalObject only in Global execution context.
JavaScript engine creates the execution context in the following two stages: Creation phase, Execution phase.
In the creation phase JavaScript engine doesn’t execute any code. Rather, it compiles the code by scanning over your program. In the creation phase, JS engine performs the following task:
Creates VariableEnvironment Object: This contain all the variables, function arguments and inner functions declaration information.
2. Creates the LexicalEnvironment: The JS engine initializes the scope chain which is a list of all the variables objects inside which the current function exists. This also includes the variable object of the global execution context. Scope chain also contains the current function variable object.
3. Determine the value of this: the JavaScript engine initializes the value of this. The value of this can either be the global object or an object containing the function in terms of function execution context.
In the execution phase, JS engines will again scan through your code to update the variableEnvironment variables which was initially set to undefined with the values of the variables and execute the code.
After the execution stage, the variable object will look like this:
GlobalExecutionContext : {
GlobalObject: {}
variableEnvironment: {
EnvironmentalRecord: {
//keeps tracks of the environmental variables
a: 'i have been updated'
b: 3
c: <Pointer to Fec for c>
} thisBinding: window || global
outerRef:
}
}
Function Execution Context (FEC).
This is an environment that is created by JavaScript engine every time we call a function. The Function Execution Context is similar to the Global Execution Context but instead of creating the global object, it creates the arguments object that contains a reference to all the parameters passed into the function.
This keeps track of the number of arguments passed to the function using the length property in the argumentObject. It also follows the same pattern for execution and creation phase we discussed above with global execution context.
variableEnvironment = {
argumentObject : {
0: a,
1: b,
length: 2
}, a: 3,
b: 2,
} FunctionExectionContext = {
VariableEnvironment: {
ArgumentObject: {
0: a,
1: b,
length: 2
}, a: 3, b: 2, outer: <GlobalLexicalEnvironment>,
ThisBinding: <Global Object or undefined>
} }
About The Author
Jude Nwafor is a software engineer @sterling_bank Plc. You can follow me on twitter @thaddydore | https://medium.com/@thaddydore/understand-javascript-execution-context-b7314606f54a | ['Nwafor Jude'] | 2020-11-17 10:34:46.944000+00:00 | ['Execution Stack', 'Call Stack', 'Javascript Development', 'Execution Context', 'JavaScript'] |
Letting Molly Go | Molly laying at the highest point in the pasture watching over her sheep
I knew this day would come but also knew I’d never be ready for it…
Molly was just 6 months old when my husband and I drove 3 hours to meet her. Molly and her litter mates had been guarding goats and when they were sold their owners no longer needed guards.
All but 1 of the Great Pyrenees Pups came to greet us. The one who didn’t was Molly. She had her back turned to us and her face buried in the corner of the barn trying her best to be invisible.
“That’s the one I want”, I said pointing to Molly. Both her owner and my husband tried to talk me out of it. But I already knew she was my girl.
The whole drive home Molly had her back turned to us in the car not even acknowledging my voice. When we got home I introduced her to the “her” sheep and she looked up at me for the first time and her brown eyes smiled — overjoyed to have a job. At that moment I became her person, her only person for the entire 14 years of her life.
We had gotten another guard puppy 2 months earlier named Daisy and, due to my inexperience and lack of knowledge I did not realize it was best to have 2 pups together in the pasture so they could play and guard together. The first dog had decided to chase the sheep out of sheer boredom and just because it was fun, I suppose.
When Molly stepped into the pasture and saw the other dog chasing sheep she alpha rolled the bigger dog (that was twice her size) and pinned her to the ground. Molly’s number 1 rule was established: Do not chase or harass her sheep. Though she was the smallest of our guards she also established herself as the alpha.
Molly pins Daisy for chasing sheep
Two days after Molly came to our farm lambing began and the sheer joy this dog exuded was palpable. She looked up at me and smiled as if to say, “More sheep, you gave me more sheep”. Ewes that had twins actually allowed Molly to dry off one of their newborns as mom took care of the other lamb. Some of the lambs even followed Molly around the pasture half convinced she was their mom.
Molly checking newborn lambs she had just helped dry off
Molly and one of her lambs
I can’t explain the peace of mind I had with Molly guarding in the pasture. Since the pasture she guarded butted up into dense woods I knew coyotes would be tempted to snatch a lamb before I would even notice. During Molly’s lifetime we never lost 1 sheep to predators even though we could hear coyotes often calling nearby in the middle of the night. However, over the years I did find an assortment of unfortunate raccoons, skunks, possums and other small perceived “predators” that had met their end in Molly’s pasture.
As we added sheep to our farm we also added more Great Pyrenees and Pyrenees/Anatolian crosses — 6 pups in all — and Molly trained every one of them. Though she never had pups of her own, she became a surrogate mom to those she trained. If not for her and the “Molly Factor” on our farm, we could not have safely raised our 2 breeds of Miniature Wool Sheep — Shetland and Babydoll.
So many years and so many memories of Molly come to my mind and echo achingly in my heart as I think back over the time I had with this dear girl:
-Molly, staying with a lamb separated from the flock barking until I found them both.
-Molly, sitting on top of the highest hill she could find watching for predators.
-Molly, bringing a few “lost” sheep to the safety of the barn from a bottom pasture during a blizzard — breaking a path for them in the deep snow.
-Molly, keeping watch in the barn with me during lambing season.
-Molly, standing between her sheep and any perceived threat — even if that “threat” was my husband.
-Molly, sitting next to me as I tended to a sick or dying sheep.
-Molly, and her “boyfriend” sheep sleeping peacefully together — she lying with her head on his side.
-Molly, frightened by thunder and fireworks seeking comfort from the terrifying sound by burying her face in my lap as we sat in her barn together.
-Molly, her soft brown eyes looking into mine with so much love I thought our hearts would burst.
As is the case many times with those we love, it is easy to not see the changes that happen right before our eyes. I think that’s because the eyes of love are veiled, perhaps because we cannot admit the inevitable is happening. Someone we love is aging. Someone we love is dying.
And so it was with Molly. She had slowed down this winter but would not stand to be separated from her sheep so, I set up a comfortable warm spot in the barn where she could be with them. My goal was to get her through winter to warmer weather. And, we were almost there.
This winter she enjoyed many cans of dog food and treats, lots of love and encouragement from me, the company of her sheep and another guard dog she had trained 8 years ago. She was content.
Every day she got up and followed her sheep around. Every night she laid in the hay with them as they slept. As always, even the slightest noise would wake her — ever the faithful guard.
This morning was different. I went out to do chores to find Molly softly whimpering, unable to sit up. I worked with her and she finally sat up and ate some canned food then went back to sleep.
It wasn’t until that moment that my veiled eyes — momentarily unveiled — saw the Molly that truly is (the aging guard), not the one that had been (the shy younger girl with the indomitable spirit). My Molly was suffering and for the first time in her life she told me so. She’d never been sick a day in her life.
As Molly aged, I had hoped she would choose her time to leave so I would not have to. But she was not going to leave me or her sheep peacefully on her own and I could not let her leave this world painfully.
Through my veiled, tear-filled eyes she was asking if I could let her go, if I loved her that much. She had done so much for me how could I not do this one last thing for her? So I made the call and the vet came to our farm and Molly breathed her last in the field where she had lived her whole life with her beloved sheep.
I don’t know if I will ever see Molly again and I think (at least right now) I am okay with that. I guess it’s enough for me that I have been privileged to see this girl for 14 years — loved her and shared her life. And I will still see her every day of my life as long as I live. Even if I lose my memory my heart will never forget my Molly. She owns a piece of it I can never reclaim and she has been one of the greatest gifts God has given me in my entire life.
The last thing I said to my Molly every night (her whole life) as I left her was, “You’re in charge tonight, Molly. You’re in charge. I love you Molls”. And I do believe that if there’s a celestial sheep flock Molly will be there guarding it. And, she will be in charge. She will be in charge!
Copyright 2019
Jackie Deems | https://jackiedeems.medium.com/letting-molly-go-c79a07e6d114 | ['Jackie Deems'] | 2019-05-18 22:57:29.238000+00:00 | ['Working Dog', 'Dogs At Work', 'Loss Of Pet', 'Love Of Dogs', 'Short Story'] |
Maxwell’s Equations | Before we begin, be aware that talking about electromagnetism in any meaningful way means talking about vector calculus. Please don’t be intimidated, even if you don’t have the first idea what any of the symbols or terms mean. Vector calculus is hard but its core ideas are intuitive and I will explain everything as we go.
In SI units, Maxwell’s famous equations for the electric and magnetic fields are:
These are differential equations (equations which describe a rule for the rate of change of a function with respect to one or more of its input variables) for the electric field E and the magnetic field B in the presence of a charge function ρ (“rho”) and an electrical current j. The quantities ε₀ (“epsilon naught”) and μ₀ (“mu naught”) are physical constants called the permittivity and permeability of vacuum. The speed of light c obeys the important relation c² = 1/ε₀μ₀. When boundary conditions for the fields are specified, these equations completely and uniquely determine the fields.
Usually one does not attempt to solve these equations directly for a given configuration of boundary conditions, charges, and currents. Instead, numerous mathematical tricks have been invented to simplify many different kinds of problems. However, it is still important to understand the physics behind these equations.
The electric and magnetic fields
A charge q with velocity vector v and speed much less than c in the presence of an electric field E and a magnetic field B is subject to the Lorentz force:
Interestingly, this is still true in the relativistic case when the force F is meant to denote the time rate of change of the relativistic momentum instead of the classical momentum. There are two terms in the Lorentz force. The first is qE, called the electrostatic force. This force is caused by the electric field E, which is produced by stationary charges. The second force is qv⨯B, which is called the magnetic force. The symbol ⨯ is called the vector or cross product, and it denotes a vector perpendicular to v and B and with magnitude |v||B|sin(θ) where θ is the angle between v and B.
The “right-hand rule” is a useful mnemonic for remembering the directions of the vectors in the cross product. Source
A magnetic field B is produced by a current and interacts with a moving charge to produce a force. A current is a charge times a velocity so qv is a current element, and it follows that magnetic forces act between currents.
To simplify things, we will pretend that currents and charges are separate entities that exist independently of each other. Now this obviously is not the case because a current is by definition a moving charge, but when we start talking about moving charges we have to bring in special relativity. However, we can get very far without relativity, as did James Maxwell and his contemporaries. It turns out that Maxwell’s equations are already relativistic, though the 19th century physicists couldn’t have been aware of it. A follow-up to this article will address this if there is enough interest.
So for our purposes, stationary charges exert forces on other stationary charges via the electric force and currents produce forces on moving charges via the magnetic force.
An example of the Lorentz force can be seen in the case of cyclotron motion. Suppose that a magnetic field points into this page and an electron has a velocity vector entirely in the plane of this page.
The x symbols denote a uniform magnetic field pointing into the page. The force vector, in red, is the cross product of v and B and so by the right-hand rule the force vector points towards the center of a circle. If a charge in a uniform magnetic field is given some initial velocity with a direction perpendicular to B then the charge will move in a circle at constant speed. This is called cyclotron motion.
A Teltron tube (pictured above) is a device that demonstrates cyclotron motion. Free electrons are produced heating a small filament and given an initial velocity by producing an electric field in the small region around the device. The field in the tube produced by the two coils is approximately uniform, so it pulls the motion of the electrons into a ring. The electrons produce light as they strike atoms of a very low-pressure gas.
Vector fields, field lines, and flux
The electric and magnetic fields are vector fields. A vector field is a function that assigns vectors to points in space, as in the following picture which shows the electric field vectors of an electric dipole consisting of a positive charge at (+1,0) and a negative charge at (-1,0). Note that for clarity’s sake, the vectors only show the direction and not the magnitude.
You can see that electric field vectors point away from positive charges (sources) and towards negative charges (sinks). Since the force on a positive test charge q is given by F=qE, this corresponds to the fact that charges of opposite sign attract and charges of equal sign repel. We almost always assume that the sources of the fields, be they charges or currents, do not move.
Just as important as the vectors of the vector field are the field lines. For the electric dipole the field lines probably look familiar to many of you:
To get a clearer picture of what the field lines tell us, let’s pick out just a few of them and show them along with the field vectors:
This diagram shows some important properties of field lines.
Field lines are not just curves in space, they also have a direction. A field line originates at a source and terminates at a sink. It may also originate or terminate at infinity. They appear to break in the pictures because of the limitations of the software I used to draw them.
Field lines are tangent to field vectors at every point.
Field lines never intersect each other, or else the vector at the point of intersection would be pointing in two directions at once, which is impossible.
Field lines change their direction continuously.
Let us now briefly change our focus from electromagnetism to fluid dynamics. Suppose that the velocity of water with uniform area density (kg/m², since we are considering a two dimensional problem) ρ around a source is given at every point by a vector-valued function v(r, θ), where r is the radial distance from the source and θ is the angle between the position vector of r and the horizontal.
Suppose that the source is located at the blue dot, and that the boundary S is a circle of radius R. How much water flows past this boundary per second?
Dimensional analysis is always a great place to start a problem like this. We are asked for something with units of kg/s and we are given an area density with units kg/m² and a velocity with units m/s. We can combine these to get the momentum per unit area, which has units of kg/m⋅s. If we can eliminate the units of 1/m from this quantity then we will end up with something with the right units. This should make us think about integrating the quantity ρv with respect to length l along a curve C, but ρv is a vector quantity and we are asked for a scalar quantity, so we need to introduce a dot product somewhere. Since the water flows over S, we might naturally guess that the curve C should be the circle S and the vector should be the unit vector pointing out of the circle. It turns out that this is the correct approach, and the answer to the problem is the quantity
This is called the flux of the vector field v over the boundary S. The flux of a three-dimensional vector field through a surface or a two-dimensional vector field through a curve can be interpreted as telling us how much that vector field “flows” over the surface or curve. If v is any vector field and S is a boundary (surface or curve) enclosing a region (volume or area) V, then we also have the critically important divergence theorem, which we present here without proof:
Thus the total flux over the boundary of the volume is equal to the integral of ∇⋅v within the volume, so we can think of ∇⋅v as the flux leaving each point within V. The quantity ∇⋅v is called the divergence of v and it is the subject of the first two of Maxwell’s equations.
Gauss’s Law
This is the differential form of Gauss’s Law. Let’s first consider the integral form. Suppose that S is a closed surface and that the total charge in the region enclosed by S is Q. Then:
So Gauss’s Law tells us that the flux of the electric field through S is the total charge enclosed by S divided by the permittivity. One of the great features of this law is that S can be any surface that completely encloses the charge distribution, and the flux through the surface will be the same.
The differential form is obtained with the divergence theorem:
Note that in general ρ is a function of position. We will not consider the case where it is also a function of time since that would require special relativity, although the follow-up to this article might.
The differential form can be thought of as the integral form applying to infinitesimally small spheres enclosing every point in space.
Gauss’s Law tells us a few useful things:
If ρ(x,y,z) is positive then the flux leaving point (x,y,z) is positive and if ρ(x,y,z) is negative then the flux leaving point (x,y,z) is negative, which is equivalent to saying that a positive flux enters point (x,y,z). This formalizes our earlier claim that field lines originate at positive charges and terminate on negative charges.
If there is no charge in a region of space, then any field line that enters that region must exit that region.
Let’s derive Coulomb’s Law as a demonstration of Gauss’s Theorem. Suppose that a point charge Q is located at the origin and a test charge q is located at a distance r from the origin. Since F=qE, this problem can be solved by finding E due to Q. Let the Gaussian surface S be a sphere of radius r centered at the origin. Let’s start by writing down Gauss’s Law:
The unit vector is in the radial direction, and the differential area element dS for the surface of a sphere of radius r is r²sin(θ)dθdφ where φ and θ are as in the diagram:
Note: Some authors switch φ and θ. Source
Therefore:
By symmetry, we can see the electric field depends only on distance from the origin so we can pull it and r out of the integral:
E must be radial because electric forces act on the line between two charges:
Then we obtain Coulomb’s Law with F=qE:
Gauss’s Law for magnetism
This law tells us that all magnetic fields are divergenceless. Using the ideas we developed in the last section, this means that:
There is precisely zero net flux entering or leaving any region in the presence of a magnetic field. Any field line that enters any region must exit that region.
All field lines form closed loops.
There are no sources or sinks for magnetic field lines. Equivalently, we can say that magnetic charges, or monopoles, do not exist in classical electrodynamics (the jury’s still out on whether they exist in quantum electrodynamics).
The most important use of Gauss’s Law for magnetism is in defining the vector potential. That would take us beyond the scope of this article so we will just move on.
Interlude: Conservative fields
We know from basic physics that the work done on a particle when that particle is made to move a distance ∆x by a constant force F is W=F∆x. If instead F varies continuously and the particle is made to move in a straight line from a to b then the work is
What if instead the particle moves along a curve of arbitrary shape in a three-dimensional force field? Suppose that F is a force field and that the particle moves along a curve C, which may or may not form a closed loop. At any point along the curve, we can say that F is a vector with three components: one along êₙ, perpendicular to the curve, one along êₜ, tangent to the curve, and a component along êₙ⨯êₜ, perpendicular to êₙ and êₜ. Only the component of F in the direction of the path does work so we take its dot product with êₜ and integrate with respect to dl, the differential length element of the path:
There exists a special class of force fields called conservative fields, which may be written as the negative gradient of a potential energy function: F=-∇U. If this is the case, then the fundamental theorem of calculus for line integrals tells us that:
This means that for a conservative force field, the work done by a particle as it moves from point A to point B depends only on those points and not on the path chosen. In fact, this is usually given as the definition of a conservative force field, but the definition of a conservative field as a vector field arising from the gradient of a potential is exactly equivalent: a force field F is conservative if and only if we can say that F = -∇U.
It is also clear from this equation that if the particle moves along any closed curve C, then the work done is 0. We write this as:
The circle in the integral sign indicates that the path of integration is a closed loop.
In addition to the divergence theorem, the other theorem you must know to get anywhere with learning electromagnetism is Stokes’ Theorem, which we present without proof. For any surface S for which C is the boundary:
From this we can also see at once another equivalent definition of a conservative field: since if F is conservative then it is the gradient of a function and since ∇⨯(∇A)=0 for any function A, we see that ∇⨯F=0 if and only if F is conservative. We can think of ∇⨯F as the tendency of a field to cause rotational motion about a point. This quantity is known as the curl of F and it is the subject of the next two of Maxwell’s Equations.
The Maxwell-Faraday equation
This is one of the first of two equations that connect E and B. It tells us that E is a conservative field in the absence of a magnetic field or if the magnetic field is constant in time. To interpret this, let’s start with what we know about about potential and kinetic energy.
Physical systems will evolve through time in a way that allows them to minimize their stored potential energy. They do so by transforming potential energy into kinetic energy by performing work. In a conservative force field, a particle does no work by moving in a closed loop, and so there is no way that a conservative force field can cause a particle initially at rest to move in a loop. Closed orbits can occur depending on the initial velocity, as in the case of planetary motion.
Suppose that we want a charged particle, initially at rest, to move in a closed loop. This means that we must make the electric field nonconservative, so we must give it a nonzero curl. We turn to dimensional analysis to guide our intuition. Since E has units of N/C, ∇⨯E has units of N/C⋅m. We know that B has units of Teslas, and 1T = N⋅s/C⋅m. Therefore ∇⨯E has units of T/s. Since ∇⨯E is a vector field, this means that we must expose a charged particle to a vector field with units of T/s if we want it to move in a closed loop.
Since the quantity -∂B/∂t is a vector field with units of T/s, it’s possible that this is the quantity that we’re looking for, and Maxwell determined that it is indeed the case that ∇⨯E=-∂B/∂t by interpreting Faraday’s experimental data.
We can use this equation to derive Faraday’s Law of Induction, which states that:
The quantity ℰ (script E) is called the electromotive force in a loop of wire and has units of volts, and 𝛷 is the flux of the magnetic field through the area enclosed by the loop. The EMF is the work done by a unit charge as it moves once around the loop, therefore:
So according to Stokes’ Theorem:
Then by the Maxwell-Faraday equation:
The partial derivative with respect to time gets pulled out of the integral and turned into an ordinary derivative because the integral does not depend on position. By definition, this integral is the flux of B through the area enclosed by the loop of wire C so this completes the proof that
This explains why a changing magnetic field near a circuit induces a current in that circuit.
Ampere’s Circuital Law
And finally we come to Ampere’s Law. Ampere’s Law allows us to finish the process of building a complete unified theory of electromagnetism and electromagnetic waves.
Let’s start with the original form of this law, ∇⨯B=μ₀j, which holds when there is no time dependence. This tells us that the circulation of the magnetic field around a point is proportional to the current at that point. The integral form of this equation is:
This says that the integral of B around a closed loop is proportional to the total current penetrating the area enclosed by the loop. As a demonstration, we can use this to find the magnetic field around a wire. In this case the tangent vector is in the polar angle direction and so if we put the wire at the center of an imaginary loop of radius r, then dl =rdθ. Then:
This formalizes the right-hand rule for a magnetic field around a wire:
In the time-independent case, E is always conservative because its curl is zero. But we’ve just seen that even in the time-independent case B is only conservative in a region containing no currents, and most interesting problems involve regions near current. Furthermore, the magnetic force F=qv⨯B is never conservative because it depends on velocity. So we can’t treat B as a conservative field in general, and those rare cases where we can are not important for us right now.
Now let’s talk about the second term in the right hand side of Ampere’s Law, called the displacement current. The name comes from another field, called the electric displacement D=ε₀E, which is useful in problems involving fields in materials rather than empty space. Ampere’s Law as originally written did not include this term, and it was Maxwell who discovered that it was necessary. Before then, that incompleteness in Ampere’s Law caused some problems. Most significantly, it would have meant that electromagnetic waves couldn’t exist.
In physics, a wave equation is a differential equation with the form:
The operator ∇² is called the Laplacian and it is given by:
And k is the speed with which the wave propagates through space. If the function f is instead a vector field, then each component of the vector satisfies the equation. Let’s try to obtain wave equations in free space (no charges or currents), pretending to be ignorant of the displacement current. Maxwell’s equations would then be:
Let’s start with the vector calculus identity ∇⨯(∇⨯A)=∇(∇⋅A)-∇²A where ∇²A means that the Laplacian operator is applied to each component function of A. Since ∇⋅E=∇⋅B=0, this means that ∇⨯(∇⨯E)=-∇²E for the electric field and ∇⨯(∇⨯B)=-∇²B for the magnetic field. If ∇⨯B=0 in free space then observe that we can’t get the correct wave equations. For E we get:
And for B we get:
To fix this, we have to add the displacement current. Of course, we can’t just plug in the displacement current because it will give us the equations that we want, we need to justify it. To do so, let’s anticipate that the problem is in the equation ∇⨯B=μ₀j. Let’s take the divergence of both sides: ∇⋅(∇⨯B)=μ₀∇⋅j. Since the divergence of a curl is always zero, this means that ∇⋅j=0 always. But this not the case. Electric currents obey the continuity equation:
This equation says that the rate of change of the charge in a region is the negative of the net current flowing out of the region. If ∇⋅j is positive so that there is a net outflow of charge then the charge in the region must decrease, and vice versa if it is negative.
This means that we must instead have:
This means that ρ is the divergence of some vector field. Happily, Gauss’s Law tells us that there is a vector field whose divergence is equal to ρ, that being ε₀E, the displacement. If we plug ε₀∇⋅E in for ρ and cancel the divergence from both sides, then we get the correct equation:
This gives us the correct Maxwell equations for free space:
Now we can get the correct wave equations:
For E. Then for B:
This is why these equations are named for Maxwell even though he didn’t discover the laws that they describe. It was his ingenious idea to introduce the displacement current into Ampere’s Law that allowed for the final unification of the theory of classical electromagnetism.
Conclusion
If you managed to make it to the end of this, then you should be proud of yourself. This is pretty difficult stuff and we’ve only just scratched the surface. If there’s enough interest, then the next article will be expand on some points about relativity that I alluded to in this article. Let me know in the comments if you think I should write that. I’ll end this article with a little teaser on what that would entail.
Stinger: Covariance
The principle of covariance says that the laws of physics must appear to be the same according to all observers in the universe, in the sense that the form of the equations describing those laws must be the same in all reference frames.
Suppose that the origins of two coordinate systems S and S’ are in relative motion with constant speed V along the x-axis.
The primed coordinates are related to the unprimed coordinates by the Galilean Transform:
Let’s consider just the one-dimensional wave equation for the x-component of E. The principle of covariance tells us that if someone in frame S observes an electromagnetic wave and determines that the wave equation is
then the observer in S’ measuring that same wave must observe the equation in terms of their coordinates as
Can we accomplish this by making a Galilean transform on the coordinates? Using the transforms and the chain rule, the partial derivatives transform as:
So the unprimed wave equation transforms into:
This means that there’s a problem, and it’s either the wave equation or the transformation. It can’t be the wave equation because Maxwell’s equations are verified by experiment, so the problem is with the transformation. To solve this problem, we must let go of some of our most fundamental ideas about the world and introduce special relativity. | https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/maxwells-equations-7484212839b1 | ['Panda The Red'] | 2019-10-20 13:18:45.278000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Physics', 'Science', 'Tech', 'Mathematics'] |
Reduce 30%-50% Compressed Air Consumption for Drying & Blow-off Process, which can reduce the operating Cost & increase efficiency with performance | Reduce 30%-50% Compressed Air Consumption for Drying & Blow-off Process, which can reduce the operating Cost & increase efficiency with performance Puspendu Dhara Jan 16·4 min read
What is compressed air?
Compressed air is a form of energy storage due to its ability to perform work when decompressed. The production of compressed air is carried out, for the most part, with electric power by means of a compressor.
Where is compressed air used?
The vast majority of industrial companies use compressed air in some way or within some equipment, i.e. for surface drying or cleaning.
After assimilating the total cost of a compressed air system during its first 10 years of operation, it is understood that 73% comes from the electrical energy necessary for its operation. The rest of the costs includes the initial in- vestment, maintenance and installation costs.
The energy efficiency of a compressed air installation is very low, since of the total energy provided only.
between 8% and 10% becomes useful energy capable of performing a job. The rest is lost in compression, regulation, cooling, dehumidification and leakage in equipments and pipes.
In addition to the compressed air generated by the compression units, it is estimated that 50% is used in nonproductive demand components such as leaks, inappropriate uses of compressed air and artificial demand (excess of the level of air pressure at which our compressed air installation is adjusted above the actual values necessary for it to function properly).
How to reduce a system’s operating costs?
When it comes to saving on operating costs, there are several measures that can be taken. An installation can be divided into two fundamental parts: one is production, which includes compressors and air treatment; the other is demand, which includes distribution, storage systems and end-use equipment. The correct combination between production and demand leads to a decrease in costs.
There are several ways to make an installation more efficient and reduce its operating costs, such as energy recovery for other functions, pressure reduction, decrease in the number of leaks and optimisation of operations through a correct control and regulation system.
Chart of the various Operation Cost
Savings opportunities in a compressed air installation: Leak control
Installations can have different types of leaks, which can be prevented by performing frequent maintenance. An installation is considered to be in good condition when leaks constitute 10% of production
Compressor air intake control
For greater compressor performance, it is important that the sucked air is clean and cold. Since the specific volume of air depends on temperature, the colder it is, the more air fits in the compressor, thus improving its performance.
Inefficient applications
There are parts of the installation that are obsolete or whose operating cost could be reduced with a small investment. This is the case of air nozzles: using nozzles designed for each application instead of a tube increases system efficiency and cuts costs.
Air Nozzle Arrangement
Graphs with Compressed Air Savings Data of Ikeuchi Air Nozzles
using 1/4M TF-R 8–010 PP IN Nozzle we can save 35% Compressed Air
2. 1/4M CCP 2.5A S303 Nozzles can save 50% Compressed Air
1/4M CCP 2.5A S303 Nozzles can save 54% Compressed Air
Ikeuchis Energy Efficient Air Nozzles
It’s not about compressed air, It is about saving operation Cost
PUSPENDU DHARA
Sales Engineer
H.Ikeuchi & Co., Ltd, Japan
Contact number : +817036634478
Website:https://ikeuchiindia.in/ | https://medium.com/@p-dhara/reduce-30-50-compressed-air-consumption-for-drying-blow-off-process-which-can-reduce-the-7d2cc3ecd485 | ['Puspendu Dhara'] | 2021-01-20 05:01:02.857000+00:00 | ['Innovation', 'Engineering', 'Manufacturing', 'Energy', 'Productivity'] |
The Night I Almost Ruined My Friends’ Lives | The Night I Almost Ruined My Friends’ Lives
A story of corruption in the Caribbean.
Photo credit: Nicholas Gomez
This is an English translation of a story that took place in Cancun, Mexico in the summer of 2015. I was with four of my closest friends that night. All of their names and identifying details were changed to protect their privacy. Everything else remains as it actually happened.
“Come on, dude! Hurry the fuck up!”
“Relax, goddamn! Don’t you know this shit’s its own art form? Make yourself useful and tell Jose to turn the air on.”
“Car’s almost out of gas. I’m giving it a break.”
“While you two finish jerking each other off, I’m gonna go piss.”
I try to be as quiet as possible when I exit the car. Despite the fact that the lot we’re parked in belongs to my dad, it wasn’t long ago that the cops handcuffed me and tried to take me to holding just a few blocks from where we are now. Of course, back then I was completely innocent — which is why I wasn’t taken — but tonight there are five of us all anxious to smoke weed in Jose’s car, so I’d rather not take any risks.
Across the street from us is the house I grew up in. I clock us at around eight p.m. but I still see gardeners watering plants in what is now an old folk’s home. I stand with my back against the car and let my cock enjoy self-expression in its rawest form.
“What the fuck? You’re still not done?” I ask as I get back in. I close the door and notice that Jose has the air running again.
“I am, I am,” says Alex. “Fran’s got it. This is the second one.”
I turn to Fran and ask him to hurry up.
“It’ll get to you. We’re going clockwise.”
After he says this he hands it to Jorge, the most inexperienced one in the group.
Not even a minute after I return, Jose turns off the air again. “This has to be the worst hotbox I’ve ever done in my life,” I tell them all.
“Here you go,” Jorge says as he hands the joint to Jose.
Jose takes two long hits and passes it to me — finally! I take my time with it as I hit it once and don’t feel a thing ’cause I’m so damn used to that Cali weed. The second time I let drag and start to cough like a newcomer.
“Do you want to hit it Alex?” I say between coughs. “Or should we skip you so you can finish rolling?”
“No, no, give it here daddy.”
I turn to give him the joint and that’s when I see them. Two white lights flashing against the back windshield of the car, one of them headed for my passenger window.
“Holy shit!” I say. “Cops!”
Jose curses at no one in particular. “No fucking way!” he says. “No FUCKING way!”
“I don’t think those are cops,” Fran says. And for a second I think, what could be worse than cops?
I turn my head to the window where one of the lights flashes up and down to get my attention. There is no doubt these are cops.
“Oh they’re cops,” I say. “You try to hide the weed and I’ll talk to them.”
I lower my window and hope for a miracle, but as soon as fresh air enters the car, the clouds of weed smoke get sucked out and hit the fatter of the cops in the face.
“Well, well,” FatterCop says. “These kids are smoking reefer, Bob.” Then to us: “Out of the car. All of you. And don’t even try to dispose of it or I’ll take you straight to holding.”
I realize then that there is only one way out of this. But what worries me is that my friends haven’t caught up to the same realization.
We all get out of the car and let the cops search every inch of it. I hear Jose in a frantic state of mind because it’s his car and that means he’s the most liable of us all. Alex wasn’t able to hide the weed so I’m sure he’s got piss dripping slowly from his cock, too. Come to think of it, we’re all scared of what comes next.
FatterCop finds the weed and says to his partner, “Look at how much these kids are carrying. Federal crime if I’m not mistaken, isn’t it?”
Both cops approach me like I’m guiltiest. “Weren’t you the one driving?” OtherCop asks.
Unsure of whether this is a scare tactic or him experiencing short term memory loss, and also not wanting to rat on Jose, I just nod my head no.
“It was me,” Jose says. “The car’s mine.”
Relief washes over me.
“Great. Well then let’s get you all on the back of the truck and head to holding.”
I’m taken by surprise when I hear them say that. But still, blind confidence tells me that tonight’s not going to end with us in holding. “Just like that, huh? You guys can’t think of any other way to fix this?” It’s the first time in my life that I’m insinuating bribery to a cop.
“I don’t know,” FatterCop says. “You tell us how we can fix it.”
I wait for one of my buddies to chime in but am met with absolute quiet.
“I don’t know. Whatever it takes?”
As I finish my sentence Jose sticks out his tongue and gets down on one knee so he can lick the cops balls. He says, “Can’t you just let us off with a warning or something? We promise it won’t happen again. Promise!”
The cops look at each other, pause, and then laugh like high schoolers.
“Yes, please,” Alex adds. “It was a mistake. But we learned our lesson. It won’t happen again.”
“Kids, with this amount of weed we could be looking at years of jail time.”
“OK then, how else? How much?” I ask.
“Uh…let’s see,” OtherCop says.
FatterCop puts his hand on OtherCop’s chest and says to us, “How much are you carrying?”
The words hit us like sobriety hits an abusive husband when his wife offers him a fifteenth and final chance. We reach in our pockets and bring out all the cash we have on hand. We even start to count it like we’re raising money for the Red Cross. I empty my wallet of two-hundred pesos.
I’m handed the money when we finish the count like I’m the responsible one in the group. As if it wasn’t me who convinced everyone to leave the party we were at and come to my dad’s empty lot to smoke weed.
“It looks like all in all we have about…nine hundred and fifty.”
“What do you think, partner? I hear the fine for this is over one hundred a pop.”
“Nah, partner, if they’re not even at a thousand we’re not on the same page. Empty your pockets and show us what you’ve got that’s worth something.”
Fuck that. I’m not sure what my friends are holding, but I’ve got my brother’s car keys, my wallet with two debit cards full of cash, and my iPod, which for some reason is what I care about most.
“And if we catch you hiding anything we’re taking you straight to holding. We’re going to check each of you individually, so don’t play us, you hear?”
I keep the car keys because it’s not like they’re going steal it from me. My wallet’s empty of cash and I doubt they want to drive me to the ATM to empty my bank accounts. I don’t think they’re looking to complicate their night like that.
What about my iPod?
Maybe it was worth a lot five years ago, but after swimming in my pool with it so many times, the god honest truth was that it was going to stop working soon anyway.
“I don’t have anything on me,” I lie.
“Yeah, me either,” Fran says. “We just left the beach. You really caught us at a bad time.”
“Alright blondie,” FatterCop asks me. “Where do you live?”
“I’m not from here,” I lie. “I’m visiting from Merida. Came to visit my friends and…well, that’s why we were smoking when you found us. We hadn’t seen each other in — ”
“What about you?” FatterCop asks Fran.
A beat.
Fran says, “Who? Me? I live here in Cancun.”
I can tell the cops are unaware of it, but I know Fran so well that his condescension is obvious to me. He doesn’t like these cops. Like me, he’s someone that doesn’t do well with authority. The only reason I’m not talking back to them is because of how high I am. Not like, stoned senseless. More of a calm high. And it stops the gravity of the situation we’re in from really sinking in.
FatterCop continues to ask us where we’re from. By the end of his interrogation, I realize I’m the only idiot that lied. But whatever our answers, we end up back at square one.
OtherCop says, “Well, you either get more money or you get in the back of our truck. No other way around this.”
“Excuse me, but…technically we’re on my property,” I say, as if the law is going to be upheld by these corrupt motherfuckers.
They look at each other in shock. “Well goddamn! And you said you don’t come from money!”
Oops.
“See the thing is,” FatterCop adds. “Technically you’re standing outside of the property. If you’d pulled into it, odds are nobody would care to report you. But when people see a strange car parked across the street from their house, they’re going to report it.” He spits. “We received a call about a strange vehicle. We even drove around for a while and couldn’t find you. But when someone makes a call like that, it’s our responsibility to make sure we fill in a report at the station.”
“Alright! Alright!” Jose says, more out of desperation than anything else. “What if I drive to the ATM and withdraw two thousand? Will you let us go then?”
They look unsatisfied.
“Where are you gonna get the money? And how do we know we can trust you?”
“We’ll hit the corner store a mile down the road. We’ll hurry up and I promise we’ll be back. It’s just a mile down this road.”
In all my time knowing the guy, I’ve never seen Jose so simultaneously frustrated, sad, and nervous. I even start to feel bad for the guy. But I’m so relieved that we didn’t drive my car that it’s all I can really think about.
“Let’s do it,” FatterCop says. He points his finger at me and adds, “He stays with us, though.”
Alex and Jorge, still quiet as can be, don’t seem to mind the idea — fucking traitors. But Fran does. “You three go. I’ll stay with Niko,” he says. “That way it’s a little more even.”
More even? I think. In case what? A fistfight breaks out between us and the cops? Does Fran really think I’d be of any use to him if that happened? The closest I’ve been to being in a fight was in ninth grade when I got tackled by the class bully.
Luckily, the cops overlook Fran’s comment and agree to let him stay. Then Alex, Jose, and Jorge get in the car and drive off. Fran and I sit on the pavement.
“Boys, boys,” FatterCop says. “You know they’d tear you a new asshole if we took you back to holding, don’t you?” OtherCop walks back to the truck and picks up the radio. “TEAR you a new asshole.”
I nod and so does Fran. I think both of us know that all he wants is to scare us.
“If you’d smoked on the other side of that fence we wouldn’t be standing here. But I swear, people in these neighborhoods don’t take well to unknown vehicles. They start to wonder what the hell they’re doing parked like that so close to midnight.”
“Yeah, I mean, what can we say, right?” I laugh. “You probably get a lot of these calls don’t you?”
“We took down that entire seafood restaurant last month, actually. That lobster joint down the street. But nah, very few people report things like this.”
As I think of another question to fill the time, FatterCop beats me to it.
“Did you say this property belongs to you?”
“Uh…it belongs to my dad.”
“And where does he live?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in over five years. This place is one of the few memories of him that I still carry with me.” I’m surprised by how quick the lies come to me. And as I write this I’m also grateful that they did, because had they not, the stakes would’ve been much higher. “That’s why I told my friends we could smoke here.”
OtherCop jogs back to us and tells FatterCop, “I just got word that TheGeneral’s truck is in the neighborhood. What do we do if he drives by?”
Fran says, “We can hide until after they do.”
Reasonable enough, one would think. Not these two. They spend the next two minutes arguing and ignoring us. And then, to make matters worse, that truck they mentioned drives by and quiets us all down. It drives by at under twenty miles an hour, surveying the scene from the road, and stops by the dead grass, next to FatterCop and OtherCop’s truck. OtherCop walks toward it.
“Goddamn it,” I whisper to Fran. “If this turns into a whole ordeal I swear to you I’m gonna flip out. I thought we were through with them.”
OtherCop walks back. FatterCop asks him what he said. “What do you think I said? That we’re babysitting two grown boys in the middle of the night? I told them we had a situation, but I didn’t tell them how much it was for.”
Fran and I whisper to each other about our futures and watch as TheGeneral’s truck takes off in a hurry. Seconds later, just as it escapes our line of sight, we hear it come to a screeching halt. Then we see it come back in reverse and stop. Three cops with machine guns hop out of the back and run toward us. TheGeneral parks it and exits the car, follows behind the armed men.
“We’re fucked,” Fran says.
“Yep. Fucked is right.”
TheGeneral approaches the armed men and tells them to head back to the truck. “What are you boys doing here?” he asks. “Come on. Stand up. We’re taking you to holding.”
I look at FatterCop and OtherCop and they look back at me, all three of us share the same facial expression. One that says, “I guess we tried, but TheGeneral’s here and he decides.”
“But…” I say, and don’t finish my sentence.
Fran says nothing.
“But what?” TheGeneral asks.
So far I know three things for certain: OtherCop told them about a situation, so TheGeneral knows something is going on; Alex, Jose, and Jorge are due back any minute now, and if I don’t straighten things out with TheGeneral before that happens, things are only going to get worse; lastly, there’s no way our deal is going to hold up now. The question is: how do I tell TheGeneral about the bribe without telling him about the bribe. So what I say is, “Didn’t these two tell you where our friends went?”
“They didn’t tell me a thing. Where’d they go?”
Fuck it, I think. One of us has to stop playing dumb.
“They’re withdrawing money at an ATM.”
“How much money?”
Fran takes the lead, “We have a thousand on us, plus another two grand our friends are getting. So three total.”
“Just three thousand pesos? You know the fine’s more than ten grand a pop, don’t you? Three grand’s not going to cut it!”
“They said three grand was enough.”
Just then our friends return. TheGeneral turns his back to me. Jose is first to exit the car. He doesn’t notice that there’s a third cop now.
“Here’s the two thousand — ”
“Jose,” I try to interrupt him but fail.
“Are we good to go?”
“Jose,” I try again. This time TheGeneral interrupts me.
“Blondie over here says you kids rounded up three thousand. Is that right?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Can we go now?”
“No one leaves here until I say so. Do you understand?”
FatterCop and OtherCop become mirror images of Alex and Jorge. All four of them forget how to speak. Fran and I look for a way to explain to Jose what has unfolded. But our subtlety is so strong we never open our mouths.
“But we agreed that three thousand was enough!” Jose raises his voice at TheGeneral.
“You better check yourself, son.”
Jose drops the attitude and says, “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to disrespect you. I just want to reach an agreement so we can all go home.”
I understand his hand is forced, but this is a Jose I’ve yet to witness. He never stands down to authority figures.
“How much more can you get from the ATM?” TheGeneral asks.
“More?” Jose looks shocked. “It’ll take me a while to go there and come back, but I can do another two-thousand. I think that’s all I have left.”
“Do you know how lucky you are that we’re even considering letting you go?”
“I do, I do, but I’m being honest with you. If I had more I wouldn’t lie to you.”
TheGeneral turns to me and Fran. “How much did you say we were at?”
Fran and I look at each other and piece together a scrambled version of this sentence, “We started with a thousand, plus the two-thousand he just brought, that’s three thousand total. Unless you want to count the two he’s about to withdraw, in which case it’d be five.”
TheGeneral turns to Jose and says, “Go on then. Go get the money. And be quick boy.”
All three of our friends get in the car and drive off. TheGeneral pulls out his handgun and aims at the concrete, says, “You two sit your asses down.” Then he walks to his truck and the other two cops come and talk to us.
“I thought you said two grand was enough?” I ask them.
“It was for us,” FatterCop says. “But TheGeneral’s in charge now and he always wants his cut.”
I look at them like the pigs that they are. Silence fills the air. They walk to their truck and leave Fran and me alone.
“Dude,” I say. “What would you do if I got up and took off running?”
He laughs and says, “I don’t know. Eat shit, probably?”
“You wouldn’t run with me?”
“I mean, I wouldn’t see it coming. That’s why I would eat shit. But who knows, maybe I’d try.”
“OK, OK, what about,” I laugh. “What if I did the same thing, but this time all three of them pulled out their guns and shot me dead?”
We laugh like we were in the school rec yard. “In that case, I’d definitely cry. And that only means I’d eat more shit.”
Our friends return from the ATM.
“Well, well,” TheGeneral says. “It’s about time. How much did you get?”
“I emptied my card. Three-thousand. So, that’s six thousand we have altogether.”
“Give it to FatterCop so he can count it.”
I gather the money and give it to Jose so that he can give it to FatterCop. FatterCop counts the money and says, “It’s six grand.”
“Great. You know what to do then. I’ll wait in the truck.”
And that’s the last we see of TheGeneral.
FatterCop tells OtherCop to pull out his cellphone. “You!” he points at Alex. “You hold the bag. The rest of you stand next to him. Right here, next to the car. We’re going to take a picture.”
Are you fucking kidding me?
After seeing hundreds of pictures in the newspaper with six drug dealers standing next to kilos of cocaine and dozens of machine guns, I finally get to pose for my own. What’s funny, too, is that all Alex holds in his hand is a tiny fucking bag with a half-ounce of weed in it. People will find that funny if it ever reaches the newspapers.
As we get close for the picture, I think about throwing my arms over Fran and Jose and smiling bigger than any picture I ever smiled for. But when I see Alex and Jorge tremble from nerves, I throw on my baseball cap and lower the front of it just enough to cover my face.
OtherCop takes the picture and FatterCop says, “We have proof, in case any of you decide to open your mouth.”
I kept my mouth shut for a week. Then I wrote and published this story. | https://medium.com/recycled/the-night-i-almost-ruined-my-friends-lives-6831cc946dec | ['Nicholas Gomez'] | 2020-02-28 12:16:01.183000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Nonfiction', 'Humor', 'Life', 'This Happened To Me'] |
6 Science-Backed Baby Sleep Strategies | Everything about baby sleep can seem frighteningly high-stakes at 3 A.M. in the morning.
Make one tiny mistake in his or her training and your child’s development will be seriously affected: he’ll either end up waking in the night well into his high school years, or worse, develop anxiety, depression, or mood swings.
And with every sleep expert offering slightly different advice on the ideal timing and method for sleep training you may be unsure about who to believe, how to proceed, or which sleep training method you should follow.
That’s where this article fits in — I’m going to help you separate sleep fact from sleep fiction by zeroing in on 6 science-backed strategies that have been proven to promote healthy sleep habits in babies and young children.
Strategy #1
Learn to Spot Your Child’s Sleep Cues
Like the rest of us, your child has a sleep window of opportunity, a period of time when he is tired, but not too tired.
If that window closes before you have a chance to tuck your child into bed, his body will start releasing chemicals to fight the fatigue and it will be much more difficult for you to get him to go to sleep. So how can you tell if your baby is getting sleepy? It’s not as if your one-month-old can tell you what he needs. Here are some sleep cues that your baby is ready to start winding down for a nap or for bedtime:
Your baby is calmer and less active — this is the most obvious cue that your baby is tired and you need to act accordingly.
Your baby may be less tuned-in to his surroundings — his eyes may be less focused and his eyelids may be drooping.
Your baby may be quieter — if your baby tends to babble up a storm during his more social times of the day, you may notice that the chatter dwindles off as he starts to get sleepy.
Your baby may nurse more slowly — instead of sucking away vigorously, your baby will tend to nurse more slowly as he gets sleepy. In fact, if he’s sleepy enough, he may even fall asleep mid-meal.
Your baby may start yawning — if your baby does this, well, that’s a not-so-subtle sign that he’s one sleepy baby.
When your baby is very young, you should start his wind-down routine within one to two hours of the time when he first woke up.
If you miss his initial sleep cues and start to notice signs of overtiredness — for instance, fussiness, irritability, and eye-rubbing, simply note how long your baby was up this time around and then plan to initiate the wind-down routine about 20 minutes earlier the next time he wakes up. (The great thing about parenting a newborn is that you get lots of opportunities to practice picking up on those sleep cues — like about six or seven times a day!)
Learning to read your baby’s own unique sleep cues is the first step to a more rested and more content baby.
Here’s something else you need to know about babies’ sleep cues, something that can toss you a major curve ball if you’re caught off guard:
Babies tend to go through an extra-fussy period when they reach the six-week mark. The amount of crying that babies do in a day tends to increase noticeably when babies are around six weeks of age.
You aren’t doing anything wrong and there isn’t anything wrong with your baby. It’s just a temporary stage that babies go through.
If your child becomes overtired, your child is likely to behave in one or more of the following ways (results may vary, depending on his age and personality):
Your child will get a sudden burst of energy at the very time when you think she should be running on empty.
You’ll start seeing “wired” and hyperactive behavior, even if such behavior is totally out of character for your child at other times of the day.
Your toddler or preschooler will become uncooperative or argumentative.
Your child will be whiny or clingy or she’ll just generally fall apart because she simply can’t cope with the lack of sleep any longer.
You will probably find that your child has his or her own unique response to being overtired. Some children start to look pale. Some young babies start rooting around for a breast and will latch on to anything within rooting distance, including your face or your arm! When nothing seems to be wrong (he’s fed and clean), but he’s just whining about everything and wants to be held all day, he’s overtired and needs help to get to sleep.
Learning to read your baby’s own unique sleep cues is the first step to a more rested and happier baby.
Strategy #2
Teach Your Baby to Distinguish between Night and Day
Because our circadian rhythm (our internal time clock) operates on a 24-hour and 10-minute to 24 hour and 20-minute cycle (everyone’s body clock ticks along at a slightly different rhythm) and all of our rhythms are slightly out of sync with the 24-hour clock on which the planet operates, we have to reset our internal clocks each and every day — otherwise, we’d slowly but surely stay up later and sleep in later each day until we had our cycles way out of whack.
Daylight is one of the mechanisms that regulate our biological cycles.
Being exposed to darkness at night and daylight first thing in the morning regulates the body’s production of melatonin, a hormone that keeps our bodies’ internal clock in sync to that we feel sleepy and alert at the appropriate times.
By exposing your baby to daylight shortly after he wakes up in the morning and keeping his environment brightly lit during his waking hours, you will help his circadian rhythm to cue him to feel sleepy at the right times.
Moreover, he’ll start to associate darkness with sleep time and bright light with wake-up time — you’ll find that it works best to take advantage of sunlight (as opposed to artificial light) whenever possible.
Studies have shown that exposing your baby to daylight between noon and 4:00 P.M. will increase the odds of your baby getting a good night’s sleep.
Strategy #3
Let Your Baby Practise Falling Asleep on His Own
Some sleep experts recommend that you put your baby to bed in a sleepy-but-awake state whenever possible from the newborn stage onwards so that he can practice some self-soothing behaviors.
Others say that you should give your baby at least one opportunity to try to fall asleep on his own each day.
Lastly, some others say that there’s no point even bothering to work on these skills until your baby reaches that three-to-four month mark (when your baby’s sleep-wake rhythm begins to mature so that some sleep learning can begin to take place).
Sleep experts claim that the sleep-association clock starts ticking at around six weeks. They claim that this is the point at which your baby begins to really tune into his environment as he’s falling asleep.
So if he gets used to falling asleep in your arms while your rock him and sing to him, he will want you to rock him and sing to him when he wakes up in the middle of the night — that’s the only way he knows on how to fall asleep.
This is because he has developed a sleep association that involves you — you have become a walking, talking sleep aid.
Some parents decide that it makes sense to take a middle-of-the-road approach to sleep associations during the early weeks and months of their baby’s life — they decide to make getting sleep the priority for themselves and their babies and to take advantage of any opportunities to start helping their babies to develop healthy sleep habits.
Regardless of when you start paying attention to the types of sleep associations your baby may be developing, at some point you will want to consider whether your baby could be starting to associate any of the following habits or behaviors with the process of falling asleep:
Falling asleep during bottle-feeding
Being rocked to sleep
Having you rub or pat his back, sing a lullaby, or otherwise play an active role in helping your baby to fall asleep
Having you in the room until your baby falls asleep
Relying on a pacifier
Here’s something important to keep in mind, particularly since we tend to fall into an all-or-nothing trap when we’re dealing with the subject of sleep.
You can reduce the strength of any particular sleep association by making sure it is only present some of the time when your baby is falling asleep.
If, for example, you nurse your baby to sleep some of the time, rock your baby to sleep some of the time, and try to put your baby to bed just some of the time when he’s sleep but awake, he’ll have a hard time getting hooked on any sleep association.
Sleep experts stress that the feeding-sleep association tends to be particularly powerful, so if you can encourage your baby to fall asleep without always needing to be fed to sleep, your baby will have an easier time learning how to soothe himself to sleep when he gets a little older.
Most babies are ready to start practicing these skills around the three- to the four-month mark.
Strategy #4
Make Daytime Sleep a Priority: Children Who Nap Sleep Better
Scientific research has shown that babies who nap during the day sleep better and longer at nighttime. While you might think that skipping babies’ daytime naps might make it easier to get them off to bed at evening, babies typically end up being so overtired that they have a very difficult time settling down at bedtime and they don’t sleep particularly well at night.
And rather than sleeping in so that they can catch up on the sleep they didn’t get the day before, they tend to start the next day too early and they have a difficult time settling down for their naps, as well.
Simply put, it is important to make your child’s daytime sleep a priority, just as you make a point of ensuring that he receives nutritious meals and snacks on a regular basis — your child needs nutritious sleep snacks during the day in addition to his main nighttime sleep meal in order to be at his very best.
In addition, babies, toddlers, and preschoolers who nap are generally in a better mood and have an improved attention span as compared to their age-mates who don’t nap.
Strategy #5
Know When Your Baby No Longer Needs to Be Fed At Night
Your baby may continue to wake up in the night out of habit even when he’s outgrown the need for a middle-of-the-night feeding.
If your baby is going without that nighttime feeding some of the time or doesn’t seem particularly interested in nursing once he gets up in the night, it might be time to eliminate that nighttime feeding and use non-food methods to soothe him back to sleep.
Eventually, of course, you’ll want to encourage him to assume responsibility for soothing himself to sleep, but the first hurdle is to work on breaking that powerful food-sleep association.
With some children, it happens quickly. With other children, it’s a much slower process.
Once you break that association, he may stop waking as often in the night and may be ready to start working on acquiring some self-soothing skills.
Strategy #6
Remain as Calm and Relaxed as Possible about the Sleep Issue
If you are frustrated and angry when you deal with your child in the night, your child will inevitably pick up your vibes, even if you’re trying hard to hide your feelings.
Accepting the fact that some babies take a little longer to learn the sleep ropes and feeling confident that you can solve your child’s sleep problems will make it easier to cope with the middle-of-the-night sleep interruptions.
Scientific studies have shown that parents who have realistic expectations about parenthood and who feel confident in their own abilities to handle parenting difficulties find it easier to handle sleep challenges. | https://medium.com/@salim1321aff/6-science-backed-baby-sleep-strategies-ac3a92061c2 | ['Muhammad Salim'] | 2020-03-03 14:12:31.871000+00:00 | ['Baby', 'Sleep Disorders', 'Childcare', 'Kids', 'Sleeping'] |
Love in the time of Covid-19. | Love in the time of Covid-19.
2020, the year in which a pandemic seemed to be cribbing straight from Camus’ “The Plague” and an increasingly unhinged president rage-tweeted lines that sounded like bowdlerized passages from “King Lear.”
Few of my picks here address Covid explicitly — most were in the can well before the outbreak. But more at least touch on the political and social pestilence that fueled the actual, biological pestilence. Which might have something do with that fact that a few of the oldsters here cranked out their best work in years (or decades, in the case of X).
These albums will endure in my listening rotation. But to 2020 itself, begone. | https://medium.com/slightly-listing/love-in-the-time-of-covid-19-c7c258667748 | ['Rob Brookman'] | 2020-12-20 21:23:43.470000+00:00 | ['Run The Jewels', 'Album Review', '2020', 'Albums Of The Year'] |
Humans — Netflix 1st Season Review | A totally non-objective promotion for my latest binge.
I’m a little late to the game, I’ll admit; this epic sci-fy series ended its three-season existence back in 2018.
However, I don’t lament that I missed my chance to play the cliff-hanger game; I’m built for the 9–5 workday binge, and I’ll never be capable of taking only one cookie out of the cookie-jar.
My personal home-comfort motto is Binge, Beer, Broke, not Live, Laugh, Love.
So I would be lying if I said I didn’t spend eight hours yesterday ravenously watching.
Boy, was it worth it.
If you’re looking for a fast-paced sci-fy drama filled with phenomenal actors and riot-inciting plot twists, you’ve found the right program.
All image rights belong to AMC — Humans
The series focuses on the existence of AI robots made in our image; and as with every human-cyborg drama, they’ve developed consciousness.
Bit of a shocker, I know.
But this series (so far) is less about the impending doom and destruction of mankind, and more about how technology, especially intelligent technology, impacts our lives and our abilities to live and function in the human world.
It’s vaguely reminiscent of the movie H.E.R in that regard, or even Black Mirror, if you’ve ever seen either.
Even if you’re not an empath like myself, the characters are well-developed, and continue to grow as the series progresses, leaving you with no choice but to get attached.
You’ll cry when they cry, and throw your Iphone earbuds across the room in a rage when inevitably, the greed of humanity gets in their way of being free.
For that is the question that this series inspires the audience to consider; if your machine grows to become a conscious, intelligent entity in its own right, then at what point does it stop being property and deserve human dignity?
I can say with assurance that this show has hooked me not only on a primal-entertainment level, but also intellectually.
Humans is available on Netflix currently.
Rating: 8/10. | https://medium.com/@whatyearisitanyway/humans-netflix-1st-season-review-26d8118adb3b | ['Emily Ryan'] | 2020-11-27 19:16:44.022000+00:00 | ['Review', 'Humans', 'Science Fiction', 'Netflix', 'Series'] |
A Challenge in Collaboration: Sharing Understanding | How does misunderstanding happen?
Generally, in order to deal with problems, we have to know why it has happened. When it comes to collaboration work, there are a plethora of issues taking place within human interactions. One of the most general issues would be misinterpretation because of the diversity of team members.
For example, when I did a project related to Electric Vehicles, surprisingly, every team member imagined different pictures of EVs. Jen who is from the United States, where it has been a while that EV cars take over from the car market, she imagined how her neighbours, who are EV owners, are satisfied with their EV experiences. It could be interpreted that her understanding is already a level that is able to sympathize with the users. On the other hand, Judy and Jesse who are from China, where the technologies are highly developed, they came up with some high-tech Chinese products suggesting innovative ways of charging.
Many interpretations of an agenda are not bad at all. This issue, which occurs naturally in a multi-diversity environment, has the advantage of producing universal as well as creative outcomes. For this reason, many companies now consider team diversity as an important condition for successful collaboration. Researchers claim that it can improve organizational flexibility, creativity and problem-solving skills, improve resource availability, improve marketing benefits, and reduce costs(Horwitz and Horwitz, 2007)
On the other hand, there is a point of view that seeing team diversity involves a paradox. Diversity in the workplace is also the cause of misunderstandings, doubts and conflicts, which can result in absenteeism, low quality, low morale, and low competitiveness. (Bassett Jones, 2005).
In order to prevent this paradox, we must ensure that various interpretations do not lead to misunderstandings. If we leave the diverse understanding intact and keep going through the work, gaps arise in all subsequent processes due to the difference in the underlying understanding of each person. This is a very small spot, easily overlooked in the process, gathers and causes problems at a later stage of decision making, where people can not easily agree with each other, makes the team feel uncomfortable due to this reoccurring disagreement. Therefore, misunderstanding may not be a paradox of team diversity but just a failure of adjusting this small gap which actually could be the solution of causing misinterpretation. | https://medium.com/@uraha/a-challenge-in-collaboration-sharing-understanding-a88347300e92 | [] | 2019-03-18 13:06:04.349000+00:00 | ['Collaboration', 'Communication Skills', 'Collaboration Tools', 'Coworking', 'Service Design'] |
2021: The learnings from Pandemic | Hi Folks!
Hope you all are doing great and a safe and healthy :-)
“Time changes everything..but the way things change depends on you!”
-Mann
The last two years have been real tough for the entire world. This blog is to share some of the key learnings I have had in the past two years. So lets get to it:
Loved ones and Support System
Last two years could have not been dealt with without a strong support system: family, friends, mentors and well wishers! Build a strong bond with your loved ones and you will have a cushion to fall back. Be a part other’s support system and you will have a feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction. Health: Mental and Physical
This has been most discussed point in the pandemic: health! The saying is so true: “Health is wealth”. We all know that we should strive to be healthy, but how many of us actually work towards it? The mad rat race culture we are a part of leaves us with little room to execute our plans in this regard. And majority of us just cater to physical aspect of health and neglect the equally important (if not more!): the mental health. With the pandemic scenario, almost everyone out there has been impacted : physically and/or mentally. It is high time to get our priorities sorted. Make that morning routine that is on your diary a reality, take that hobby that you have been longing for, spend time doing what you love doing! Meditate: Meditation may be different for each of us. For me, a swing of my cricket bat doing shadow practice helps me calm down, solidify my thoughts and gets my creative juices going: for me that is meditation. Make that fitness regime a reality! Find yours and do it! You will thank yourself later! Career aspirations
Now that the remote is the new normal, the opportunities are endless and ever growing! There seems to be upcoming wave in the digital era that is never seen before: cross country working may soon be a reality and with the increase in digital human interaction, the learning opportunities are endless. This seems to be right time to pick that long pending skill that you were waiting for! This looks to me an era where a lot of career switches would be made and technology would be at the heart of this innovative trend. Be a part of it! Personal goals
With the world going remote, the work life harmony is the new idea to be dealt with. Work life balance seems to be a thing of the past and a harmony of work and life is the way to go. If you are happy in your personal life, that reflects in your work life as well and vice versa. Now with extra time in your hand(thanks to lesser commute times), life has extra space to fit in! I would suggest to align your work priorities with you personal life goals instead of juggling between the two! Self belief
This is one of the essential tools we humans have! We can conquer our greatest fears with this! By believing in oneself, we rise above the problem at hand and instead of cribbing, we start looking for possible solves! Always, Always have faith in your abilities and trust the almighty. Stop overthinking! When the darkness takes over, keep moving forward, for there is light down the end of tunnel! Also, as a wise wizard once said- “Happiness can be found in even the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light” :-)
To sum it up, we have witnessed one of the most craziest times in human history and we have stood strong. I wish everyone a safe and happy new year with the hope that everything will fall in place for each of us.
“Jo maangna hi hai us khuda se, to jee khol ke maango,
Kya pata aaj har dua kabool hone ka din ho!”
-Mann
Signing off
Mann | https://medium.com/@mgulati02/2021-the-learnings-from-pandemic-e0afd1799409 | ['Manpreet Gulati'] | 2021-12-31 10:00:55.707000+00:00 | ['Motivational', 'Life Lessons', '2021', 'Tech'] |
Why Sexual Pen Names Are So Important — And Should Be Respected | Pen Names Are More Than Just A Name
Recently, I have begun pondering the ethics of sexual entitlement. It’s a creative venture that has taken me to an unusual place in my writing life. It has also forced me to begin asking myself a simple question that's increasingly sounding like a Batman riddle.
“What is in a name?”
As I continue to throw myself down the rabbit hole of sex blogging, I can’t help but notice a strange trend — many sex writers don’t use their real names. More often than not, they are frequently women and often masquerade under stylish profile pictures. These are people that live enchanting double lives on the internet. On one hand, they’re vulnerable, and often exciting tales of sexual exploration capture your attention by gripping with sheer brutal honesty on a taboo subject. You feel enthralled and compelled to keep reading because of the taboo nature of sex, especially in the world of women. While there is a weird disconnect in my self-awareness of their pen name, that doesn’t discount the fact that the education and stories they write are often fascinating and enlightening.
However, I have often come to accept that there is a darker side to this lifestyle. Once again, societal double standards come into play here. For men, most of us wouldn’t give a shit about oversharing. When men give sex advice, which is usually just a form of egotistic braggadocio, we’re often praised and put on a pedestal. Rarely, is there ever a fear of recourse in a man oversharing too much about his sexual interests.
Women, unfortunately, do not have this same luxury. For all of the joy that the internet has brought us, it can very easily lead to a dangerous realm for my female peers. Time and time again, society has proven unkind to the female perspective on many important issues — with sexuality being somewhere near the top of that list. With the rise of social media, comes the painful reality that safety is a very real concern for many. From possibly deranged stalkers to ridiculous violent threats that should be taken seriously, there is no telling who may pop out of the dark corners of the world wide web and attempt to ruin your life.
Pen names are more than just a fancy pseudonym — there a real-world shield against very real-world problems. While I do believe that certain social standards should be held, I’m also self-aware enough to know that being a woman adds an extra level of risk to many activities of life. A risk that many sex writers are cognizant of at all times.
Women, Sex Writing and Career Safety
In the world of career work, taboo subjects and workplace social habits simply do not mix.
Whether you work as a school teacher or a powerful company, it’s a difficult fact of life that certain things are borderline forbidden in the workplace. Whether that’s sexuality, social justice moments, or fighting toxic workplace cultures, there’s always the heavy risk of performing career suicide. Particularly, in the case of women and sex, it’s more than just career suicide — it could be the spark to a misogynistic fire if they're not careful.
As this pandemic continues to ravage the world, the benefits of having job security and the benefits that come with that, cannot be understated. Most writers, sexual or otherwise, are not financially independent people. They are not out here making Tim Denning levels of cash through sheer writing alone. Actually, most of us can’t realistically pay the bills with our writing. And to even achieve that level of financial success through content writing, it takes a long period of the hustle and grind that’s often not mentioned enough around here. When compounded with the life pressures of womanhood, having a job that can back you up is an absolute blessing.
Thankfully, sex writing is more than just money — it’s art. It’s the expression on sexual matters that have taken increased importance in today’s modern society. It’s sexual education for those that never received the proper real-world talk that one should have as they grow up. It’s a therapy for those with sexual traumas and healing for the broken-hearted.
Sex writing may not be good for the bank account, but it’s incredible for the human soul.
While the world of career work still caters to the old-fashioned view that women are still sluts for speaking on sexuality, sex writing can have a positive effect.
I mean yeah you have your derivative “how to give better sex and blowjobs” reading that we’ve seen a million times, but there is a lot of important information out there for those exploring sexuality.
No One Is Entitled to Your Personal Life
At the end of the day, no one is entitled to someone’s personal life — fake name or otherwise.
As scandalous as some of their writing may be, the truth is we’re not owed anything. This extends to a much deeper conversation on the nature of Parasocial relationships:
Parasocial relationships are one-sided relationships, where one person extends emotional energy, interest and time, and the other party, the persona, is completely unaware of the other’s existence. Parasocial relationships are most common with celebrities, organizations (such as sports teams) or television stars. In the past, parasocial relationships occurred predominantly with television personas. Now, these relationships also occur between individuals and their favorite bloggers, social media users, and gamers.
Source: National Register of Health Service Psychologists
These types of relationships are the literal definition of socially-distanced. It used to be the world would gush over celebrities and high-profile individuals like Will Smith, Keanu Reeves, and Kim Kardashian. However, with the rise of social-media centric society, it’s much easier to cultivate a connection with your favorite online personality. Whether it’s on Twitter and Facebook, the streaming community of Twitch and OnlyFans, or popular YouTubers, they are the ones most frequently using this style of relationship. Or even a certain writing platform we all know and love.
However, due to the one-way nature of this connection, it’s easy to demand more out of our favorite personalities. When we read a juicy sex story, we want more details. When they detail an amazing sexual encounter, we may wish we were there. More and more, we may push the boundary of expectation from our favorite writer — and not even realize it.
Pen names exist to protect people from that level of social demand. When someone can just as quickly look you up on a social media platform, it demands an extra layer of security. While social media engagement has given way to increased creative freedom, it has also created another avenue of social stalking. Specifically, if you’re a woman oversharing her sex life, it’s all too easy to fall into the stress of toxic perceptions.
Pen Names Are More Than Just Sex
Pen names exist for a reason — if you want vulnerable, honest, and truly informed writing, a pen name helps. It inspires confidence and liberation in the minds of those that utilize them. A pseudonym not only gives you the ability to become someone else, but it also allows you to craft powerful critiques that wouldn’t be otherwise possible.
And there is an incredible historical precedent to support this.
Ayn Rand is not a real name — it’s a pseudonym that was adopted because her real name is too complicated for American readers.
Dr. Suess is also not a real name (God I hope people knew that) — it’s a pseudonym created due to a college drinking incident. He would go on to become one of the most popular kids' writers of all time.
Stan Lee is also not a real name — Well, he created Marvel Comics and we all saw how that went.
Mark Twain, Voltaire, Toni Morrison, and Lemony Snicket are — you guessed it — not real names, but pen names for their careers as writers. For various reasons, they all chose a pen name that was more favorable. Their work also influenced history in one form or another.
Taken one step further, the made-up names of social media influencers, YouTubers, and music artists are all a form of a pen name. Using a made-up name sounds way cooler than most of our average sounding names.
Source: Electric Literature (more sources at bottom of page)
Conclusion
In the world of sexual writing and blogging, pen names serve an important purpose. It’s more than just creating a sexy alter ego — it’s oft necessary insurance of safety from discrimination and judgment.
Personally, I don’t think it makes you a pussy for hiding behind a pseudonym. In fact, as long as you’re speaking your truth, I think it shouldn’t matter really.
So, to answer my earlier question… “What is in a name?”
A human being. And that’s enough. | https://medium.com/sexography/why-sexual-pen-names-are-so-important-and-should-be-respected-ea90317f6646 | ['Dayon Cotton'] | 2020-12-28 20:09:45.740000+00:00 | ['Equality', 'Women', 'Writing', 'Sexuality', 'Sex'] |
Are Women Safe in 2018? | Are Women Safe in 2018?
It may be 2018 but it doesn’t mean women are any safer than they were in the 1920s.
It’s 2018 and you would think as a woman I would feel safe to walk around my campus, but the truth is I don’t. I’m not the only one. I asked many girls around campus whether they felt safe or not and the response I got was very shocking. Most girls on campus do not safe walking alone, especially at night. it isn’t just around campus, its everywhere. As a girl, we are brought up in a certain way that does make us fear.
I personally carry my pepper spray with me everywhere, I have noticed that most girls on campus do too. Has it become normal for a woman to fear for herself every single time she steps out the house? Has it become normal that if I wear shorts I should expect for a guy to cat call me and be completely okay with it? Has it become normal that because I am a woman a man gets to objectify me? None of this is normal. None of this is okay.
We as woman should not have to deal with these things and instead of staying silent when they happen, we need to speak up. We need to let these men know that what they do is not okay. They don’t have the right to cat call us and expect us to like it, we deserve way more respect than that. We have the right to fight back and not be scared to defend ourselves.
After asking girls why they didn’t feel safe, they said they were scared. I asked scared of what, and this girl responded, “Scared that one day I’ll be walking back to my dorm and someone tries to sexually assault me, because if someone did I wouldn’t know what to do.” She explained to me that she wouldn’t know if she would fight back or be too scared to do anything. It reminded me of what I read in “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention” by Sharon Marcus, it said “A rapist confronted with a wisecracking, scolding, and bossy woman may lose his grip on his power to rape; a rapist responded to with fear may feel his power consolidated.” I believe in some form this is very true because men who rape are looking for woman who they see as weak. In most cases women do not fight back because they’re scared to make their perpetrator even more upset and they will end up dead.
“Fear forges the link between these contradictory statements: rape is so terrifying because it is like death, and this totalizing fear disables us from combating the rape.” (Marcus 395)
There’s this thing in society that because I am a woman, I should be afraid of the world because many will take advantage of it. It’s sad to say that its true. I’m afraid but I’m done being afraid, because if it’s one thing that I have learned is that I am just as strong as any man, even stronger.
When will we stop being afraid? | https://medium.com/gendered-violence/are-women-safe-in-2018-2476dcb8e011 | ['Krystine Morales'] | 2018-03-28 00:25:48.826000+00:00 | ['Rape', 'Safety', 'Powerful Women', 'Women'] |
Performance Testing Life Cycle: A Comprehensive Guide To The Testing Phases | Performance Testing Life Cycle — Edureka
The modern era of IT has seen an overwhelming evolution of the Software Testing industry giving way to greener pastures. Thus it becomes very important to ensure the effective performance of the software application. This “Performance Testing Life Cycle” article will provide in-depth knowledge about the process of testing in the following sequence:
What is Performance Testing?
Advantages of Performance Testing
Performance Testing Life Cycle
Types of Performance Testing
Tools for Performance Testing
What is Performance Testing?
Performance Testing is a type of software testing which ensures that the application is performing well under the workload. The goal of performance testing is not to find bugs but to eliminate performance bottlenecks. It measures the quality attributes of the system.
The attributes of Performance Testing include:
Speed - It determines whether the application responds quickly.
- It determines whether the application responds quickly. Scalability - It determines maximum user load the software application can handle.
- It determines maximum user load the software application can handle. Stability- It determines if the application is stable under varying loads.
Now let’s move ahead with our Performance Testing Life Cycle article and have a look at the advantages of Performance Testing.
Advantages of Performance Testing
Validate Features — Performance testing validates the fundamental features of the software. Measuring the performance of basic software functions allows business leaders to make key decisions about the setup of the software. Measure the speed, accuracy, and stability — It helps you in monitoring the crucial components of your software under duress. This gives you vital information on how the software will be able to handle scalability. Keep your users happy — Measuring application performance allows you to observe how your customers respond to your software. The advantage is that you can pinpoint critical issues before your customers. Identify discrepancies — Measuring performance provides a buffer for developers before release. Any issues are likely to be magnified once they are released. Improve optimization and load capability — Measuring performance can help your organization deal with volume so your software can cope when you hit high levels of users.
Now that you know the advantages of Performance Testing, let’s have a look at the different steps involved in the Performance Testing Life Cycle.
Performance Testing Life Cycle
Performance Testing starts parallel with Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). The different phases of the Performance Testing Life Cycle (PTLC) are:
Non-Functional Requirements Elicitation and Analysis
Performance Test Strategy
Performance Test Design
Performance Test Execution
Performance Test Result Analysis
Benchmarks and Recommendations
Non-Functional Requirements Elicitation and Analysis
It is one of the most important and critical steps to understand the non-functional requirements in PTLC. It helps to evaluate the degree of compliance with non-functional needs.
Performance Test Strategy
The second defines how to approach Performance Testing for the identified critical scenarios. You need to address the kind of performance testing and the tools required.
Performance Test Design
This phase involves the script generation using the identified testing tool in a dedicated environment. The script enhancements are needed to be done and unit tested.
Performance Test Execution
The next phase is dedicated to the test engineers who design scenarios based on identified workload and load the system with concurrent virtual users.
Performance Test Result Analysis
In this phase, the collected log files are analyzed and reviewed by the experienced test engineers. Tuning recommendation will be given if any conflicts are identified.
Benchmark & Recommendations
This is the last phase in PTLC which involves benchmarking and providing a recommendation to the client.
These were the different phases involved in the performance testing life cycle. Now let’s have a look at the different types of performance testing.
Types of Performance Testing
The different types of performance testing are:
Load testing — It checks the application’s ability to perform under anticipated user loads. The objective is to identify performance bottlenecks before the software application goes live.
— It checks the application’s ability to perform under anticipated user loads. The objective is to identify performance bottlenecks before the software application goes live. Stress testing — This involves testing an application under extreme workloads to see how it handles high traffic or data processing. The objective is to identify the breaking point of an application.
— This involves testing an application under extreme workloads to see how it handles high traffic or data processing. The objective is to identify the breaking point of an application. Endurance testing — It is done to make sure the software can handle the expected load over a long period of time.
Spike testing — This tests the software’s reaction to sudden large spikes in the load generated by users.
— This tests the software’s reaction to sudden large spikes in the load generated by users. Volume testing — Under Volume Testing large no. of. Data is populated in a database and the overall software system’s behavior is monitored. The objective is to check the software application’s performance under varying database volumes.
— Under Volume Testing large no. of. Data is populated in a database and the overall software system’s behavior is monitored. The objective is to check the software application’s performance under varying database volumes. Scalability testing — The objective of scalability testing is to determine the software application’s effectiveness in scaling up to support an increase in user load. It helps plan capacity addition to your software system.
Now, if you want to perform any of these testings on your server, you would need different types of tools that are compatible with your test plan. Let’s have a look at some of the important performance testing tools.
Tools for Performance Testing
The market is full of a number of tools for test management, performance testing, GUI testing, functional testing, etc. I would suggest you opt for a tool which is on-demand, easy to learn as per your skills, generic and effective for the required type of testing. Let’s have a look at the top 10 Performance Testing Tools :
LoadNinja
Apache JMeter
WebLOAD
LoadUI Pro
LoadView
NeoLoad
LoadRunner
Silk Performer
AppLoader
SmartMeter.io
With this, we have come to the end of the Performance Testing Life Cycle article. I hope you guys enjoyed this article and got an idea about the different phases involved in performance testing.
If you wish to check out more articles on the market’s most trending technologies like Python, DevOps, Ethical Hacking, then you can refer to Edureka’s official site.
Do look out for other articles in this series which will explain the various other aspects of Software Testing. | https://medium.com/edureka/performance-testing-life-cycle-d4242d39a5aa | ['Archana Choudary'] | 2020-05-11 12:24:24.698000+00:00 | ['Performance Testing', 'Text Design', 'Software Testing', 'Testing Life Cycle', 'Test Strategy'] |
What Upstanding Citizens Believe Vs. What Crazy Conspiracy Theorists Believe | Crazy, stupid conspiracy theorists believe a mature worldview requires skepticism toward power.
Smart upstanding citizens believe the government is your friend, and the media are its helpers.
Crazy, stupid conspiracy theorists believe that powerful people sometimes make immoral plans in secret.
Smart upstanding citizens believe the TV always tells the truth and the CIA exists for no reason.
Crazy, stupid conspiracy theorists believe that extreme government secrecy makes it necessary to discuss possible theories about what might be going on behind that veil of opacity.
Smart upstanding citizens believe that just because a world-dominating government with the most powerful military in the history of civilization has no transparency and zero accountability to the public, that doesn’t mean you’ve got to get all paranoid about it.
Crazy, stupid conspiracy theorists believe it’s okay to ask questions about important events that happen in the world, even if their government tells them they shouldn’t.
Smart upstanding citizens believe everything they need to know about reality comes out of Mike Pompeo’s angelic mouth.
Crazy, stupid conspiracy theorists believe the very rich sometimes engage in nefarious behavior to expand their wealth and power.
Smart upstanding citizens believe billionaires always conduct themselves with the same values that got them their billions in the first place: honesty, morality, and generosity.
Crazy, stupid conspiracy theorists believe it’s important to remember the lies that led up to the invasion of Iraq, and the disastrous consequences of blind faith in government claims.
Smart upstanding citizens believe “Iraq” is a fictional land similar to Narnia or Middle Earth, from the writings of a fantasy author named George Galloway.
Crazy, stupid conspiracy theorists believe Syria is fighting to avoid becoming another Libya in a war of defense against extremist proxy armies of the US-centralized empire, who were given billions of dollars in military support with the goal of toppling Damascus.
Smart upstanding citizens believe Bashar al-Assad is a real-life version of a cartoon supervillain who just started murdering civilians willy nilly in 2011 because he loves murdering civilians, then in 2015 his friend Vladimir Putin joined in because he loves murdering civilians also.
Crazy, stupid conspiracy theorists believe the extensive history of US government lies means you should always demand mountains of independently verifiable evidence when they make claims about unabsorbed nations.
Smart upstanding citizens believe Russia literally committed an act of war on the United States in 2016, China is orchestrating a second Holocaust, Maduro is deliberately starving the Venezuelan people because he hates them, Assad is using chemical weapons but only when it makes no strategic sense, Cuban spy crickets are trying to assassinate US diplomats, there’s novichok everywhere, and every noncompliant party in the Middle East is secretly working for Iran.
Crazy, stupid conspiracy theorists believe that it can be difficult to figure out what’s going on in a mass media landscape that is saturated with the propaganda of the US-centralized empire.
Smart upstanding citizens believe that all you need to do to ensure you’re getting all the facts is watch television and run screaming from the room if you accidentally flip past RT.
Crazy, stupid conspiracy theorists believe the Gulf of Tonkin incident was faked, the “taking babies out of incubators” narrative was a lie, Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, Gaddafi’s rape armies never existed and the Libya intervention was never really about humanitarian concerns.
Smart, upstanding citizens believe it’s better not to think about such things.
Crazy, stupid conspiracy theorists believe the latest WikiLeaks publications of internal OPCW documents provide ample evidence that we were lied to about the 2018 Douma incident.
Smart upstanding citizens believe those documents aren’t real because The New York Times never reported on them.
Crazy, stupid conspiracy theorists believe that increasing levels of government secrecy are making it easier for government agencies to do unethical things in secret.
Smart upstanding citizens believe that questioning your government makes you a Russian anti-semite.
Crazy, stupid conspiracy theorists believe that the billionaire class which owns the mass media has a natural incentive to prop up the status quo upon which it is built, and so construct an environment where reporters are incentivized to always support the establishment line.
Smart upstanding citizens believe that if that kind of conspiracy were really happening, it would have been in the news.
_______________________________
Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2 | https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/what-upstanding-citizens-believe-vs-what-crazy-conspiracy-theorists-believe-4cf81a2183ee | ['Caitlin Johnstone'] | 2020-01-02 00:12:50.260000+00:00 | ['Media Criticism', 'Propaganda', 'Conspiracy Theories', 'War', 'Government'] |
Stop wasting everyone’s time by sending inflated CVs | Photo by João Ferrão on Unsplash
Who am I?
I’m a senior developer with over 10 years of experience. First, I applied for jobs and went to interviews, and later I started working as a tech lead and began interviewing people myself. I’ve been on both sides of the table. Since I’ve been fortunate enough to work with many successful companies, I’ve had a chance to talk to and interview many developers and review many CVs. In all honesty, the sheer amount of them that was not good is why I decided to write this article and help future developers apply for new roles.
Introduction
I know the title of this article sounds like something that goes without saying, or it’s clear to you that actively wasting anyone’s time doesn’t make any sense. Personally, I would not be writing this if it were less than 50% of candidates inflating their CVs. Still, unfortunately, in my experience, the number of people wasting time is far greater. Stay with me, and I will try to briefly explain using examples from my own experience to give you some tips on avoiding doing this.
What’s this about?
From time to time in companies where I worked/am working, I am tasked to put together a new team. The company sends me different resources where I can pick up CVs, and I spend days looking into them, and most of them are crap. Let me try to explain why that is and what the problems with the CVs are.
Why is a CV important?
On the one hand, a CV is your entry point for your next company. Of course, other resources can be important too, but don’t think your CV counts for any less these days. If you are blindly sending a CV thinking, maybe it will pass — believe me, it will not. If you aren’t paying attention to the details, we are.
What matters?
If you are applying for a position, read the description of the job carefully. Try to find out what the company does and who is already working in the company. Think about it, and check if you and your CV fit with the company and the people that already work there.
Example
I will give you a concrete example from my former company.
The company is a travel agency, and the goal was to put a team together to redesign the current web site module-by-module with the “latest” tech.
Here is what I put in the ad:
Strong programming foundation and experience in Javascript
3+ years of NodeJs and Javascript (ES6)
2+ years of React experience
Document/NoSQL database experience (MongoDB)
Webpack, HTML, CSS, Babel
Git, GitLab, and source code management concepts
Experience with running Node on production, ideally in the context of a server-side rendered app
Understanding of web performance and page speed optimization techniques
Integration, unit and end-to-end system testing principles
Excellent English communication skills (spoken and written)
What can we see from this ad? What’s obvious?
The stack was based on JS, and the company needed full-stack developer(s).
Now let’s crunch the numbers. Here’s what I found in the CVs we received:
55% of the CV’s didn’t have any trace of JS
30% had all the possible technologies on the market :)
10% had some experience with JS
5% were worth checking out
I already mentioned reading the job description carefully and not wasting either your or the company’s time. If you do not have anything with JS in your CV, of course, you will be skipped, and my opinion is that in this case, it’s not even worth letting you know what’s happened with your application.
The second bullet above is my favorite one.
Why is that?
Many people seemingly believe that they will look like a better candidate if they list many technologies. That’s wrong. After reading this kind of CV, I am baffled and need a lot of time to figure out what programmer you are.
Instead, the opposite is usually the case, and employers like CVs that are very succinct and, more importantly: accurate. I am not saying it is impossible, but people are rarely an expert in many different technologies at once.
There are two reasons why I don’t take this kind of CV:
The math is simple, takes the number of programming languages, multiplies them by a reasonable assumption of years of experience that you think it is necessary to be good at them, and compares that with your CV experience.
Five programming languages (C++, Java, C#, JS, PHP) Minimum of two years per language to be familiar with each one of them 5 x 2 = 10 years (CV has 5 years of experience) — really?
2. I call them and ask them questions about their CV, and the first question I ask about is always about something that is used very rarely (e.g., JS programmer and has Oracle in the CV).
In most cases, they do not know anything about it.
As I mentioned in the third bullet, 10% of the CVs had some connections with JS.
What do I mean by that?
Most of them were back-end developers, worked with JS in college, or did some small tasks as front-end developers. It’s totally OK to switch, and I am fine with this kind of CV because it’s honest. I would contact these guys to hear the full story, why they applied, and their history.
The last bullet point above should be clear now, and you can see why only 5% make it to a deeper check.
Takeaways
In the end, we know what we are looking for and what we need to see, so:
Read the job description carefully
Make a concise CV that fits the job description
Only include that which you know how to explain
Extra tip: try to find out as much about the new company and future colleagues’ profiles.
Let me know about your own experience in the comments, and how we can further improve communication and not waste anyone’s time. | https://medium.com/@dragan_lalos/stop-wasting-everyones-time-by-sending-inflated-cvs-873ff9ebf11e | ['Dragan Lalos'] | 2020-10-13 12:13:56.904000+00:00 | ['Cv', 'Job Interview', 'Company', 'Job Search', 'Write'] |
The Art of Poetry | There are many forms of literature that play a huge role in the whole concept of expressionism and evokes a high concentrated imagination. But poetry specifically is one of a kind, a type of literature unlike the rest — an art form that’ll leave you either with the deepest scar mentally and/or emotionally or teach you an unforgettable lesson. The reader behind the screen delves into deep poems thinking “wow what could have evoked such brilliant writings?” when that’s the true question. The writer who is exerting his/her magic to the world with their writing is experiencing those words and emotions on a profound level.
We don’t tend to consider the emotions that the writer needed to summon or the insane amount of thoughts swarming in their mind in such a rhythmic and composed way that is still understandable.
As a poetess, I find myself creating new words, new languages within the English language because I can’t find a word that satisfies what I am trying to portray. I feel as if the English language or language in general is the barrier between me and poetry. Yet it is also the bridge that connects the writer to the reader. How else would you understand what I mean?
The amount of emotional and mental stimulation that a poet requires to write a poem like no other with the exact thoughts and intentions, is an underrated art. Sometimes a spark of motivation to write a poem arises and while writing my poem I find myself delving into a whole new topic, just because my mind is full of all these thoughts and ideas.
So what I do is a method called the “yes-continue method”. For instance, “yes my intention is to write about ‘so and so topic’ and even if I get out of track I will continue following the endless thought process in my mind then edit later. With this I find myself making three different poems within one poem. I have three different thoughts in one so now I made edit or elaborate in each poem. This allows me to fully clear my mind of thoughts, and as an overthinker this has been my holly grail. I completely spill the guts of my mind onto paper and let it all out no matter where it takes me.
Even if I do make my own words, I either create a little word key defining them or find the closest meaning to them.
Expansion is the key. Don’t let anything restrict your imagination and freedom of thinking. That’s the true magic of it all, when you are able to turn a boundary or restriction into a positive use! | https://medium.com/@hajars-conciousness/the-art-of-poetry-7da7bb852ba4 | ['Hajar M.'] | 2020-12-23 19:09:00.355000+00:00 | ['Poetry On Medium', 'Articles', 'Poetry Writing', 'Writing Tips', 'Art'] |
The Do’s and Don’ts for Tiny House owners (infographic) | I’m bound by the laws, That do not hold others back, Invisible strings, That tie me down, Hidden powers, That sap my strength, For I’m a prisoner of, What I want to be, Where I live, Instead of who I am.
Do not be afraid to be who you are, to follow your dreams and your heart. You might not know it yet, but a tiny house can bring a lot of benefits in your life. Do you find sustainability important or to have an affordable path to homeownership. You will experience an emotional and financhial freedom. To achieve all of this you will have to prioritize preparation, as well as developing the right mindset and setting realistic expectations. Therefore when living in or building a tiny house, you need to consider these ‘do’s and don’ts before you dive in.
Lefton, A. (n.d.). 10 Things No One Tells You About Tiny Houses. Retrieved from: https://www.bobvila.com/slideshow/10-things-no-one-tells-you-about-tiny-houses-52896
Berzins, H. (2015, 20 November). Tiny House Living Dos and Don’ts. Retrieved from: https://www.realworldsurvivor.com/2015/11/20/tiny-house-living-dos-and-donts/
Rose Home Tiny House. (2018, 10 April). Do’s and Don’ts of Tiny House Building. Retrieved from: https://rosehomeblog.wordpress.com/2018/04/10/dos-and-donts-of-tiny-house-building/ | https://medium.com/@fleur.meuleman/the-dos-and-don-ts-for-tiny-house-owners-infographic-3118e773542 | ['Fleur Meuleman'] | 2020-09-23 14:07:18.454000+00:00 | ['Tiny House', 'Lifestyle', 'Infographics', 'Self Improvement', 'Dos And Donts'] |
The Indescribable Time Traveling Device | Lee Krasner, “White Squares” (1948)
The space pirate unearthed the indescribable time traveling device in an underwater palace on the twelfth moon of Vlijirakon. Twenty-two years old, he had decided to track down the mythical instrument when he first heard about it while smuggling lamwracks through the Zadar quadrant for Captain Lotharia Durexfer. He had stored aboard his first interstar frigate six years before, so he wasn’t innocent-dreamed enough to believe the ship chef’s stories about the Glyphic artifact — for that’s what it was, a leftover of that learned, invisible civilization — until she confessed that, in her words, ‘strictly speaking, it doesn’t exist.’
‘What do you mean?’ the pirate, who had not yet committed his first act of piracy, asked.
‘The Glyphs made it, so it doesn’t exist in the way that you or I do,’ she explained. Her fibbodios were boiling, so she excused herself to switch off the fark bottom, but the wide-eyed pirate pursued the subject.
‘If it doesn’t exist, how can anyone use it? Or find it?’
Agrippa — since that was the name she’d chosen, not too long ago — turned back to the spice slab. ‘Like I said, that depends on what you mean by “exist.” But you’re too young to understand that.’
‘You mean like Where do I end and the world begin? That kind of koanish clatter?’
‘Sort of,’ she eyed him, ‘but those abstracts won’t ultimately get you anywhere.’
‘For that I need the I-interrogation, right? Self-searching and shadow-silhouetting — all that lethe?’
She smirked. ‘You’re a show-don’t, you know that? Pretty words but let’s see you do.’
The red-feathered tamwinder perched on the ice-flank ruffled its wings, whistling. Tracking his eyes back from the bird, the unamused pirate asked flat-out,
‘Do you know where I can find this thing or not?’
After studying the youth’s face for a last doubting moment, the chef sighed. That afternoon, she tested him: could he detail, with clear-eyed clarity, all of the influences that had sculpted his psyche, determined his decisions, zemwarlay’d him into a life of piracy? Agrippa had concocted a show-do soup she’d recipieved on Alar Eleven to appraise his honesty, but — despite the broth’s live scorflers — the boy didn’t wince under questioning, not once. His was a typical childhood for that system — a heat-fly embryo birth, fifteen rims at Corsair Academy, capped off by a passing mark in the requisite rebellion — and Agrippa learned it with uncaring eyes.
‘One can cultivate complete, accurate self-appraisal, but still suffer from delusion,’ she warned him, ‘If you fail to act accordingly. What do you want from this device?’
The pirate had grown intimidated by the cook’s intelligence. While the rest of the crew siesta’d, they waylaid in the blue-lit mess each afternoon, the pirate watching while Agrippa sizzled enlightenment elixirs in culinary experiments with letheways and welterslops.
‘I don’t know,’ he confessed.
‘And yet you are willing to squander your life searching for it?’ He remained silent, so she went on. ‘Braver than you have tried and failed, losing themselves in abstraction, and precisely because they did not have a good grasp of why they searched –’
‘How could I know why before I find it?’ The thought had occurred to him as he said it. ‘In fact, I want the device so that I can figure out why I want anything. What other purpose could there be to time travel?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Agrippa replied. ‘Traveling through time.’
‘But we’re doing that already. Facts, objects, happenings in the future, or the past — these don’t interest me. I’m not a scientist –’
‘You don’t say –’
‘– I don’t know what I am.’
‘I thought you were a pirate.’
‘I’m a clone — a clone that was programmed to become a pirate. But I don’t want to be one.’
Agrippa’s face remained unreadable. At last she said, ‘I don’t have the map,’ pausing to scan the pirate’s parting lips before adding, ‘but I know where it is.’
‘So you’re testing me to see whether or not I’m worthy, even though you already know I am. So why these meetings?’
Suddenly, he could read her lips, too, and they entwined right then in his bunklet. Afterwards, she gave him the map’s coordinates. He hardly cared about it.
‘Come with me,’ he whispered, but she smiled.
‘No. You must go alone.’
He stole into a void arrow with the morning, paying the docking bay sentry a month’s savings to erase his theft and departure from the metaframe. He had committed his first act of piracy. Agrippa knew he would never return to frigate-bound life. Now his machine plummeted through space at a velocity impossible to measure on devices any older than the vessel itself — unless of course the technology was Glyphic. As for the pirate, he still had to endure the claustrophobic horrors of deep space hibernation. Yet even in his fugitive dreams, which brought him to an island outcropping people’d by spectacularly oversized tamwinders, the pirate remained in his birth dimension. Piercing the black of space, the arrow sluiced to a stop with an 180 degree pirouette, threading the starchapelago of Onomaphlix Seven and arriving at the map.
Suspended light-centuries from the nearest habitable planet, the map’s saber-thin terrace spun barely visible to the synthetic eye. The pirate alighted the arrow on the map’s least cluttered corner, activated his invisisuit, and stepped upon the cobalt surface. In unison the chaos of three-dimensional nebulas, galaxies, and infinity cliffs gyroscoped around and through him, sailing down lazer holoshow cascades of rainbow constellation clouds in neon miniature. Unfortunately, the pirate had no onark how to read any of it. Sifting through the holographics, he read no sign indicating where he could find the indescribable time-traveling device.
‘What the Morph,’ he muttered, sitting and letting his head dangle between his up-v’d knees, holding the nape of his neck with both hands. Had Agrippa been florped? She would not have tricked him. That had been his first time entwining, which he’d confided in her afterwards, leading to their second oneing. Agrippa wouldn’t have lied then. He caught himself: Why was his first instinct to suspect her, rather than his own stupidity? Stung by guilt, he scoured the map’s lines once more. The delicate shower of simulated stars continued. Could their fall symbolize something? His own falls — and there had been many — certainly did. The constellations evaporated upon reaching the shifting tableaux of the map’s nominal surface, which swallowed the starlight like a black hole. Lying down on his stomach, the pirate sidled up to the map’s edge and looked underneath it. Nothing.
‘Isn’t this all supposed to be psychoanalytical?’ he asked aloud. ‘Don’t I need to divine some deep self-truth to see this out?’
A map. What if the fact he can’t read it is the point? No, that’d be too predictable. I don’t know why I want this device. He can only discover why by finding it — right? But if the device doesn’t strictly speaking ‘exist’, how can the map help him? What is the use of a map on a journey into inner space? The Glyphs did not even use maps — they were their own maps, their own dimensions.
Part II
Wild-eyed for a moment, the pirate resolved upon his plan and reboarded the arrow, swinging it over the map to look down on its illegible spectacle. Which direction were the holographic stars falling? Down, but what does direction mean in space? Could the answer to the riddle be that obvious and stupid? Shouldn’t it be? Follow the map: it is moving down. Switching on the druv quartotemers, the pirate aimed the arrow’s point at the map and fired. The four needle-like zangs threaded through the waterfall of colorful constellations before fastening onto the map-plate as the arrow began accelerating. Following and guiding the map, the pirate rolled his eyes while gaining speed.
Was he going in the right direction? He had no way of knowing. But the map showed no signs of having been moved before, which was encouraging. If some other searcher or even wayward object had moved it, then this half-plan would never work. When attempting to reach a destination across intergalactic vastness, setting your course off target by even a quiffle of an harphimer would fling you into outblivion. Knowing this, the pirate gave himself a ten-day limit on traveling before setting the map adrift and returning to the more pragmatic life of piracy for which he had always prepared. Why piracy? The intrepid romance, daring freedom, and assumption he had to become a murderer to attain either — being a clone alone, that kind of mythwit. Yet soon after boarding the Quellcaster — his first outer-Quadrant job — he found that the pirates were for the most part equally as repressed and unremarkable as your typical cusp-world fort adapter.
Thus the pining for some daysway more arcane, elusive, emancipating. Agrippa’s story had provided the challenge, and now he was solo in a cylindrical ship no wider than two of him, subsisting off atom ants and making outrageous use of the raff rejector. Out his zinlow-shaped window he saw nothing. With all that time alone he would have gone quarsane were it not for the audio spunquicks. He listened to dozens all the way through, including a quark of the Library of Triskelia’s holdings on ancient maps that float mysteriously in space, which — it turns out — was quite a bit.
‘I wish I’d listened to these sooner,’ he lamented aloud, adding, ‘then again, if I find this time traveling device, I could.’
Perhaps as cosmic punishment for that remark, not to mention the fact he’d been talking to himself since halfway through the journey’s first day, he arrived. At first the planet Vlijirakon, solemn and regal in resplendent yellow like a calcified sun, appeared to be the map’s destination. The unpopulated planet remained riddled with the forsaken spires, strip malls, and aquedorms of an untenable civilization, which had been destroyed millennia before by an inborn cataclysm. The pockmarks on the surface, along with its holed-out moons, suggested that a planet-wide weapons cruxall had failed spectacularly — as was standard for a society at that stage. Yet a strong sense of deja-true suddenly stole the pirate away from such speculations. He recalled leaving the academy mess twelve years previously to walk back to his hive when his eyes inexplicably dreamt or saw or evoked three to four seconds of the scene before him now: the titanic planet and, slowly orbiting before Vlijirakon’s burnished yellow visage, the chipped orb of one of its moons. Such visions came to him less and less frequently since his childhood, when he had seen scenes from his future almost every day, which first sparked his interest in time travel. Of course, seeing the future had failed to help him predict it, let alone prepare for it or live accordingly. Maybe going back in time, he thought, to trace the causes of events would help him map his own aimless wanderings. He was about to find out.
The pirate had arrived. So far as he knew, there was no record of any civilization ever taking root on this nameless moon, which was mostly covered by a sea that emptied off the broken surface’s cracked edge into its exposed dynamo of a collapsed core, from which the sea sprang back to the surface through an elaborate network of fissures in a delicate cycle. The Zero Distributors must have created it in their aeon-adolescent toying with the laws of physics. Now the moon floated as a synthetic sentinel, unconsciously aware of the pirate’s presence as he pushed the map into the sea and followed it into a different, darker deep. If what the pirate thought about time and free will and the use of the map or any map was true, then even now he should be going precisely towards the indescribable time traveling device, since the whole of time and space had conspired to bring him there. Or, to be precise, the Glyphs had conspired to lead him — why him? it made no difference — here. For the Glyphs to have planted a device on a Distributor artifact was also appropriate. According to certain Academy theorists, the two were one and the same, but the pirate thought that idea was nonsense. Glyphs would have considered the Distributors’ creations completely frivolous and would never have made any themselves. Admittedly that opinion was not his own — he had heard it on a spunquick — but presumably he would soon be able to solve that question, too.
He had reached the sea floor and discovered the lonely palace waiting there. Presumably the risks had paid off: the revolutions of the planet had aligned perfectly with his timing. But this was no reason to feel special — quite the contrary: it is common knowledge that the Glyphs and Distributors have a hand in the lives of everything, in ways noticeable and not. A translucent dark glowered about the seafloor-secured arrow as the pirate disembarked in his invisisuit, sonaring the cragged stalagmites and shifting crevasses that lined his path. The moon’s ever-empty cyclic seas maintained a ceaselessly strong current, sculpting down the palace’s ziggurats and friezes into aerodynamic echoes of their original, ornamented forms. Above the front entrance, through which one had to crawl (as is typical of Glyphic architecture), the map had landed, allowing its constellations to bathe the building’s erosioned phantasfrieze in brilliantly shifting color. The pirate was readying himself for the unpleasant task of crawling into the building and searching through the palace’s seven hundred and seventy-seven rooms when a helmeted figure swam out of a hole in the roof and down to him, holding what could only be the indescribable time traveling device.
‘Yglai!’ the pirate cried.
‘Entai, yourself,’ the figure replied.
‘How’d you find that?’
‘I just swam down to a random ruin on a random moon to pick up this object for no reason.’
The sarcasm was obvious. The pirate squinted. ‘So that’s –’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you used it already?’
‘If I did, would I be talking to you?’
He hesitated. ‘Agrippa?’
She removed the helmet. ‘How’d you guess?’
‘Why’d you come here?’
‘Well, I didn’t want you to have all the fun.’
‘But you didn’t wanna come with me –’
‘I wanted to take the scenic route –’
The pirate betrayed no emotion. ‘But you got here first.’
‘There wasn’t much to see.’
Neither had smiled the entire dialogue — they could anticipate each other’s humor that well.
‘You’re gonna time travel solo, too,’ the clone guessed.
‘It’ll be in there for you, by the time I’m done with it.’
‘When’re you going to?’
‘I’m actually not using this to travel though time. I’m going to find out about someone on the other side of the universe.’
The clone was the first to smile. It was genuine. Only days before, he had twined with her. But he knew that the things he admired about Agrippa — her fearlessness, acerbic humor, generosity — could be his own, while she should never be. A weight fell away while he guessed, ‘You’re in love with them.’
‘That’s what I’m going to find out. What about you — when are you going?’
‘To the beginning of time.’
And now Agrippa smiled. ‘You’re such a romantic.’
‘If I find the cause of everything, that’ll help me figure out the present — and my future.’
‘You don’t trust yourself to figure that out by just living?’
The clone paused, defensive, embarrassed. ‘It’s not that simple.’
‘I know. Just be careful — this thing doesn’t go in reverse.’
And with that, she activated the device somehow and vanished.
Part III
Having been presented with an alternative to crawling, the pirate swam over the ruin, around the glowing map, and through the caved-in southeasterly quarter of the roof to enter the labyrinth of the palace. There was no trick to finding its center. He simply had to try each of its coiling pathways, most ending in walls bare aside from hieroglyphics he didn’t bother to read. Eventually he reached the inner sanctum. So far as inner sanctums go, it was noteworthy. But only because the indescribable time traveling device was inside. The pirate could not begin to describe the device itself, and he also had difficulty finding the language to describe his reaction to it: ‘overawed’ didn’t quite catch the feeling, though neither did ‘befolderdahl’d’ or ‘gezmooch’d’ or even ‘Flumfortled’, for that matter. Instead of perusing his invisisuit’s Thesaurus, however, the pirate approached the device, picked it up, and said,
‘Let’s go to the beginning of my life.’
Suddenly he was gliding — not without discomfort — through the strange ether of an interdimensional gateway. He did not have to move his body at all. The device remained in his hand, his arms slightly upraised from his sides and his legs dangling uselessly below while a mad collage of blurred sensations rippled across him. To say he experienced all of the things that had happened to him since birth would be inaccurate. Rather, the clone stretched out over the geography of his life’s course, with scenes from his childhood running over his feet, adolescence his legs, the flower of his youth girded his waist, middle age rounded out across his belly, and so forth. But consciousness, along with time as we understand it, had little to do with what happened, and once he revisited his newborn self he was already consigned to the knowledge that fully explaining the voyage to anyone — himself included — would be impossible.
But that also did not matter. Suddenly — how much time had passed, if any, for him, independent of the lifecycle he witnessed? — he was out of the interdimensional gate and fully conscious as a spectral facsimile of himself. His body was no longer in the palace on the moon, but he was not inside his body here, either. Instead, his body lay in front of him, as if he were in a lucid dream. He stood in a dilapidated clonosphere on Lodar Nine, surrounded by hundreds of newborns sleeping in pods, looking down at his youngest self, indistinguishable from the other babies in the vast laboratory. He had been born in this pod, an O-Clone I model, and bought by Captain Lotharia Durexfer soon after sprouting, a purchase which he had only just witnessed before going still further back in time to when he was in this room, an unselected clone. Yet that was Lotharia’s first and only appearance in his life — Durexfer had pre-ordered a rebellious lifeway for the clone so that he would eventually work on one of the pirate’s frigates, then disappeared, his work done. The clone had always known about pre-charting, but had not realized how all-encompassing it could be. Had Durexfer planned this journey through time, too? Whether it was the pirate, a Glyph, or a Distributor made no difference — the clone genuinely wanted to trace the forces that had created him, but now that he knew, what difference did it make?
Re-experiencing his past had already reaffirmed what he feared yet knew to be true: his whole life had been spent on a pre-planned track, which is why he had immense difficulty figuring out what he wanted to do now that he had seemingly stepped off it. The training skirmish on Kenflar, when he had mock-mutilated a drunken berserker… the Academy had taught him that the grin after a day’s plundering was the inevitable apex of life, but that’s when he owned up to his disgust with the entire enterprise of piracy. It was an entire worldview, one with which he no longer wanted any part. To see himself as an infant, trapped on the same track he had been steered upon all along, showed the clone that this trip had been necessary, yet returning to the present and charting his own future was more necessary still. But how? He fumbled with the device’s controls. Then he remembered: there was no reverse. He could not simply retrace his route back to the present he knew. But then how could he escape? His youngest self looked up at (though not necessarily to) him. He could not save himself at any moment in the life he had already lived. Instead, the pirate pushed further back in time, beyond himself, beyond what he knew to find some way to be of use.
First, in the form of an undetectable spectral presence (for time travelers cannot interact with the past; they can only regard it from new angles), the pirate surveyed the construction of the building in which he had been incubated, the creation of the zaminlarp that manufactured him, the Academy-night chats of its founders, who believed in the unimpeachable righteousness of clonomatics. This moral universe was only one of many that had flourished and fallen on Silifir Melo, so he pushed back further. He sat on the cornice of the viceroy’s galadahall in Old Entremaltada. Wombat vleptankers, curflonging at his eye level, brazenly screeched at the pomaded revolutionaries flooding through the capitol’s courtyard below. A kaleidoscope of scenes presented themselves, each increasingly remote: Lylie General Mishknot fjording the Bantagla, bevies of sheklas grazing on the Limitless Fields that stretch over the Twinkling Sea, a wedding attended by a species of two-faced humans before their one-eyed neighbors wiped them out in a genocide of jealousy. How had all of this once existed on his home planet without him knowing? His local government — so much as it could be called such — had made a show of transparency in its education system. But no matter. He was starting to see things he recognized from the Academy, since they were ancient enough to be taught: the creation of the planet seen in rewind, the cooldown of a tamed surface giving way to the fiery infernoscape of its earliest cycles. So, it turns out his was not a Distributor Planet? He made a mental note, as if that knowledge would ever be useful. It seemed he cared about that kind of thing, in any event. Learning — yes, if he pursued that, would he somehow be able to return to the present? Would Agrippa be there? Neither could be his goal. And thankfully it turned out he was interested in the lifecycles of planets, not to mention the mythic beings who assembled some of them. Perhaps they could offer not an escape from his life — for there was no escape — but rather destinations for it.
Yet while jumping thousands of light decades and several millennia from one planet to another, questing deeper back in time in search of a fingerprint from the Glyphs, the pirate encountered one in the spectral sphere between dimensions. A lithe apparition of silverblue tendrils and mute eyes solid yellow, his humanoid sidecestor drifted alongside him as he experienced ever-distance eons. Astonished, he moved his mouth to speak, but couldn’t. Instead the Glyph started the conversation in their silent tongue, which sent a deep reverberation through the pirate’s body that he intuitively understood. The ageless being, which instead of being born and then dying merely emerged from and later would return to their species’ mysterious source, was therefore not quite an individual in our own sense of the word. The pirate remains unaware whether or not he was able to respond, or even if he did. But he knows that the Glyph, in its own way, encouraged him to jump straight back to the very beginning of time. So, he did.
Many millennia later, as he sailed at last to the humble home for which he had searched his entire life, the pirate remembered that final bold strike into the beginning of the universe. Only then did he realize that he had operated the indescribable time traveling device by speaking in the untranslatable language of the Glyphs, even though no person had claimed knowledge of it since Anabel herself. The language had never belonged to him, his lips had not even moved, yet he had felt a heart vibration rattle out down his arm into the indescribable time traveling device, and it would then take him when he wanted to go. But he could not force this language, these vibrations, into being. This time, however, was different. When the Glyph suggested that he visit the beginning of the world, the pirate became too self-conscious about the process. If the Glyph suggested it to him, could it still be something he could communicate to the device as his own sentiment? He’d dreamt of going to the beginning of time all along, but it was so impossibly remote — what could it teach him about his own life? He chastised himself for indulging in escapism, yet he did want to see the beginning of the world, as an end in itself, regardless of where it would lead. As soon as the truth of that sank in, the pirate was on his way.
Yet now, the pirate accelerated through time until he reached a seeming standstill that was in fact an unbelievably violent velocity. Along the way, he began to thin out still more than he had been before, when he had simultaneously experienced all of the moments in his life. Now he was experiencing every moment ever. The part of him that was an individual hardly existed, though from this new perspective the astonishing fact is that he ever thought he existed in the first place. For some time, he wasn’t certain when, he had been dimly self-aware, but now the word ‘awareness’ along with all language ceased to hold any meaning, aside from Glyphic, which that civilization had sutured through the fabric of the multiverse. He never fully arrived at the beginning of the universe yet would never fully leave, either, and for a time any other mode of existence back with dimensional beings seemed impossible. In fact, the clone was no longer a ‘he’, but they weren’t a ‘she’ or even a ‘they’, either, and ‘it’ felt far too insufficient.
One was the universe, though thankfully not for long. For one had experienced all that ever was, so they desired solely to create a world of one’s own within the universe as one dreamt it. And what did that look like? What, in short, did one want? Without realizing it, one had begun their quest back to the present, which one could only begin after journeying though the beginning of oneself back to the birth of the universe. For a surreal time one was everything and an awakening person, whom one would choose to mold however one wished. They could turn themselves into any other person, but chose instead to re-endure the failings, missed chances, along with the rare, well-earned joys. So one began, slowly, to be a clone again, albeit with the knowledge that they would shrug off that descriptor soon.
There was so much he wanted to destroy, to raze to waste: the forces that had made him an aimless, apathetic pirate: the Clonocrome Corporation; pirates; specifically, Durexfer. But even while he remained with the universe he did not have the power to erase them from reality completely. Starting off with a blank map was impossible — the palimpsest of history always remained, even at the precise moment when time began. So yes, even in the present which he was helping to create, the things he wanted most to destroy would be waiting for him. Despite his extraordinary self-searching, the meaning of this fact still eluded him.
Part IV
The clone knew when he wanted to go — the moment he had left behind — but not where. To pursue Agrippa would be creepy, not to mention unnecessary. She had her own path, and he his. Yet where did it lead? His own body felt fuller now, more rounded out and defined as he approached his temporal destination, though that only emphasized how malleable his form had been all along. Regardless, he wanted to arrive where he could bring himself the best to bear. It did not matter the status of the station, only the validity of the vocation. Countless presented themselves: Korlop narding on Aklainet Six, filligadling for Etrophlers, posing as the junior Bishigil Inflerploper for Aka Incorporated. This last option was tempting, since it would allow him to have a hand in interplanetary affairs, setting him on a career trajectory that would eventually enable him to free over 100,000 oklas from captivity. Needless to report, he had far more lucrative, selfless, enjoyable, ennobling, enlightening, and healthy opportunities, as well. Yet his privileged position as a participant in the creation of the multiverse had enabled him to see that each moment is the moment of creation, which completely changed the way he approached his new present. He knew the calculus which would chart his life’s path: it was, like the time machine itself, indescribable. All that remained was to attend to a final matter.
Suddenly, the clone was standing between the rainswept skyscrapes of a grey metropolis, caught in the afterflare crowd of commuters. He held the indescribable time traveling device in one hand as he walked across the footbridge that arched over one of the city’s canal-coffined shantytowns. On the other side, above the ruins of the Library of Triskelia, a massive tree housing the Wise Women of Mari loomed. A glass partition separated the outpost’s courtyard from the rest of the city, and the clone was stopped at the only entrance — a nondescript, minimalist groove in the glass — by a uniformed young woman.
‘State your aim,’ she commanded. The WW never asked a person’s name or rank, only their purpose.
‘I’m dropping off a time machine.’
She was mildly surprised. ‘May I see it?’ He held up the device. ‘Very well. You may schedule a meeting with our lead –’
‘Oh, I don’t need to enter. You can have it.’
And he handed her the device. She blinked.
‘This is a priceless artifact. Why are you just dropping it off?’
‘You need it more than I do. You’ll know why, when the time is right.’
And with that he turned to leave, but the woman stopped him.
‘Wait. When did you go to?’
‘The beginning of the universe.’
The guard looked at the indescribable time traveling device in faltering belief, then back down at the man. ‘What was it like?’
The End. | https://medium.com/@matthewhennigar7/the-indescribable-time-traveling-device-57e5c4b1e36e | ['Matthew Hennigar'] | 2021-07-06 16:46:34.782000+00:00 | ['Time Travel', 'SciFi', 'Science Fiction'] |
How to eat healthier? | The basic rules for eating healthier.
Apply immediately
The first rule that cannot be waived and that must be applied immediately is to empty your cupboards, fridge, and freezer of everything industrial.
This includes
Prepared dishes (ALL)
Brick or freeze-dried soups
White bread, rusks, pre-baked bread …
Industrial cereals (even muesli)
Cookies whether they are classic, organic, or gluten-free … A cake is a cake
Crisps and company
Cereal bars
The stock cubes and stocks of poultry, veal …
Viennese pastries, pastries …
The cold cuts
Ready-made fruit juices (the only valid ones are cold-pressed and organic ones like those from bang the juice for example)
Surimi, fish “steak” …
Sweet or low-fat compotes (we accept “no added sugars”)
Sugar
“White” starchy foods, quick-cooking, in sachets … a good old 1-kilo package of brown rice will give more pleasure to your body and your wallet.
Sodas, chocolate (except dark minimum 70%), candies …
Dessert creams, fruit, sweet, light yogurts …
Ready-made sauces (except mustard)
If food is advertised on TV, don’t eat it.
Always eat fruits and vegetables in season and buy organic those that do not peel.
Reduce your consumption of animal flesh (red, white meat, fish, seafood, etc.) and replace them with vegetable proteins (lentils, quinoa, chickpeas, beans, peas, etc.). The WHO recommends not exceeding 500 gr per week or 2 to 3 servings max. I wrote an article about it, I put the link here if you are interested.
Stop cow’s milk, which is completely useless and indigestible for humans, and reduce other dairy products (yogurt, cheese, cream, etc.).
Preferably steam.
All of this, of course, is to be done gradually, at your own pace, when you feel it. No need to do it all at once, you might get lost and see it as a constraint when these are just positive changes.
Whole grains (rice, quinoa, pasta, etc.)
Legumes (lentils, chickpeas, beans, split peas, etc.)
Seasonal fruits and vegetables (a lot)
Sachets of frozen vegetables (they’ll save your life when you’re in a hurry)
Potatoes and sweet potatoes
Organic eggs
Green tea and organic infusions
Organic honey
A carton of vegetable milk
NATURE and NOT SWEETENED yogurts made from whole milk (goat or sheep preferably) or soya
Oatmeal
Almonds
Coconut milk
Soy cream
Goat’s and sheep’s cheese
For non-vegetarians: white fish, salmon, seafood, ham, minced steak 5% fat, chicken breast, etc. fresh or frozen without marinade, sauce or other preparations, sardines, mackerel, canned tuna WITHOUT oil
Some mustard
70% dark chocolate
Dehydrated spices and herbs
Lemons (a bottle of organic lemon juice can help too)
Cold-pressed and organic olive oil
Apple cider vinegar
This list is of course not exhaustive, but above all the good news is that you will find it all in any hypermarket.
The “most important meal of the day” is essential to be healthy and to keep or regain the figure. A healthy and balanced breakfast will never make you fat. Rather, it gives you energy and regulates your appetite for the rest of the day.
On the other hand, forget the cookies, rusks, cereals, muesli… and switch to oatmeal.
Oatmeal is the simplest alternative, the cheapest, and especially used by many athletes or models. Yes, yes, even the Victoria’s Secret Angels eat oatmeal for breakfast!
– Be careful, I don’t promise you Karine Lima’s line, but why not start the day like her
Here are 3 simple, healthy oatmeal recipes with minimal ingredients:
The minute recipe: mix a soy yogurt with 5 tablespoons of oatmeal, a teaspoon of honey, and a piece of raw fruit cut into pieces.
Hot porridge: In a bowl, mix 5 tablespoons of oatmeal with 200 ml of vegetable milk. Heat 2 times 1 minute in the microwave, stirring between each. Leave to stand for 2 minutes after cooking, then add a teaspoon of honey and a fresh fruit cut into pieces.
The “express” porridge is eaten cold and should be prepared the day before. This is the one I do almost every day! The recipe is here.
For lunch, prepare a nice plate composed of:
Half vegetables
A quarter protein (vegetable or animal)
A quarter starchy foods
1 teaspoon or a tablespoon of olive oil (depending on whether you want to stay stable or dry) to use in cooking or in a seasoning.
I give you some tips for organizing your lunch boxes here.
At dinner time, avoid proteins that are more difficult to digest (and therefore disrupt sleep and recovery) and anything that is too fatty (cream, cheese, etc.). Compose a meal based on:
3/4 vegetables
1/4 starches
Don’t worry, starchy foods at night don’t make you fat as long as they are in the right amount.
Two snacks a day (one mid-morning and one in the afternoon) are needed to regulate hunger and provide continuous energy. If you want to know more about the subject, I talk about it here.
A balanced snack consists of fresh fruit alone or with almonds (the palm of a hand), a whole yogurt, or two squares of dark chocolate (70% minimum).
Do it according to your means, your budget, your time… it will never be perfect, but it will always be one more step towards better health and you will quickly see the benefits (digestion, sleep, skin, immunity…). | https://medium.com/@aadilshahee/how-to-eat-healthier-ab95eb8483c5 | ['Aadil Shaikh'] | 2020-12-26 03:34:38.265000+00:00 | ['Eating Disorders', 'Health', 'Healthcare', 'Health Foods', 'Healthy Lifestyle'] |
Consulate General of the United Arab Emirates Reports on Interfaith Iftar | The Consulate General of the UAE in New York reported on an interfaith iftar, hosted by H.E. Lana Nusseibeh, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of the UAE to the United Nations, and H.E. Abdalla Shaheen, UAE Consul General in New York:
In attendance were senior UN officials, including H.E. María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés President of the 73rd Session of the UN General Assembly, Amina J. Mohammed, UN Deputy Secretary-General, and H.E. Miguel Moratinos, the High Representative of the UN Alliance of Civilizations. They were joined by prominent faith and community leaders in New York, including Imam Ahmed Dewidar from the Islamic Center of Mid Manhattan…and Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, the Executive Director at the Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life at New York University and recently appointed first chief rabbi of the Jewish community in the UAE.
In her keynote remarks, Ambassador Nusseibeh underscored the importance of interfaith dialogue in fostering peaceful and inclusive societies, particularly in times of increased faith-based violence and hate crimes.
Read More: https://bit.ly/2wXareu | https://medium.com/uaechiefrabbi/consulate-general-of-the-united-arab-emirates-reports-on-interfaith-iftar-76a0431595ae | ['Chief Rabbi', 'Jewish Community Of The Emirates'] | 2019-06-19 02:37:12.547000+00:00 | ['United Nations', 'Jewish', 'Uae', 'Rabbi', 'Interfaith'] |
What’s Worse Than the 2015 Red Sox Season? | If anything is certain in this bizarre Red Sox season, it’s that everyone has lost their fucking minds. Yes, this season has been one shot to the groin after another. First the pitching was terrible. Then that got better, as the numbers suggested it might. Which is when the offense, initially buoyed by an unsustainable spike in unearned runs, disappeared. Every night, the Red Sox seem to find new ways to lose. Starter goes 8 and gives up 2 runs? Our offense comes up empty against a rookie starter with unimpressive stuff. Offense puts an eight spot on the board? Pitching staff implodes and gives that away in an inning. When we get decent pitching and score a few runs? Well, the defense is happy to do its part to throw away games. And on and on and on and on and on.
I still watch and listen to the games more or less daily, so I get that things are miserable — I’m living it. But here’s the thing: this is baseball. There is a reason that cantpredictball is a Twitter account with over 28,000 followers, and that reason is that you can’t predict baseball. Or maybe you expected that the Rays, Royals and Astros would be atop their respective divisions?
For all that analysts like Curt Schilling are currently quick to remind everyone of their skepticism of this winter’s signings of Ramirez and Sandoval, I’m not aware of anyone who predicted that by June the Red Sox would be nine games under .500 and have the third worst record in the American League. And when I say anyone, I mean anyone. Not everyone picked the Red Sox to win the American League East like Fangraphs’ projections, but no one expected them to be this bad.
But they are. Which is bad because the math now says that our chances of making the playoffs are less than one in five. Back on April 5th they were better than sixty percent. So the Red Sox are losing — frequently — in brutal fashion, and every day we wake up less likely to make the playoffs than yesterday. Can’t get any worse, right?
Wrong. As if it’s not bad enough to watch the on the field product at the moment, off the field the average fan is now besieged by angry fans and media who have completely gone off the rails. It’s one thing for the jaded Peter Abrahams of the world to claim that the team is “immensely screwed” for the long term, but as noted by the essential Red Sox Stats, when the normally fair Ken Rosenthal starts arguing that it’s time to jettison your largest offseason signings less than three hundred at bats into their first season with the club you know people aren’t thinking clearly anymore.
So let’s try and do that for a second. Let’s look at the big picture questions and take them apart rationally.
Q: Should the Red Sox really try to trade Ramirez and Sandoval so soon?
A: First, let’s acknowledge the obvious: they’ve both been terribly disappointing. Below replacement level for forty or so million collectively, in fact. The question, however, isn’t whether they’ve been bad, but whether they can be expected to perform closer to expectations.
Let’s take Sandoval first because his case is easier. His stupidly overblown Instagram infraction notwithstanding — the third baseman has been acceptable offensively. When a right-hander is throwing, at least. The average major league third baseman this season has put up a .260/.317/.412 line. Sandoval’s a tick above average, then, with his .274/.326/.416 numbers. And that looks even better when you realize that last season’s third baseman, Will Middlebrooks, is at .230/.260/.397. His issues against left handers are concerning, but lifetime he’s hit left handed pitching adequately, so that seems like something that should regress to the mean.
The bigger problem is his defense. Since 2008, Sandoval has four seasons in positive UZR/150 territory and three in red, with his worst clocking in at -6.3 by that metric. This season he’s at -26.6. There are two ways to look at the data. One, he has, as of this season, not only lost the ability to play the position,he’s now among the worst in the league there. Two, he’s having early season jitters because of the contract, the city or both. I know which seems more likely to me.
Q: And what about Ramirez?
A: As for Ramirez, well, as I said, I’ve been watching the games. He is one of the worst defensive outfielders I have ever seen. I expected him to be better than this, and in fact I expect him to be better than this moving forward. But let’s assume he doesn’t get better, or not much better: can the Red Sox live with that? At least until Ortiz retires and you make him the DH?
To answer that question, let’s look at some numbers. From the start of the season through May 4th, Hanley Ramirez was rocking a .283/.340/.609 line with 10 home runs. To put that into context, if he’d kept up that pace, a .949 OPS would place him 8th in the league, just behind Mike Trout (.962) and Giancarlo Stanton (.951). On May 4th, however, he hit a wall. Again, literally. Since he took on Fenway Park and lost, he’s hit .260/.301/.377. Correlation doesn’t prove causation of course, and you can’t assume he’d keep up his original pace. But let’s assume he was somewhere in the .900 OPS range and the club was in contention for first place. Would the fever pitch for paying a lot of money for him to play somewhere, anywhere else be so high? Seems doubtful.
Shorter version of the above: trading either player right now would be idiotic. First, you’d be trading them at an absolute nadir in their value, which is bad, and you’d be dealing from a position of desperation, which is worse. Second, there are reasonable chances for improvement in both cases, in which case they’re both assets. And in Sandoval’s case in particular, you don’t have a viable alternative (no, Brock Holt is not a full time third baseman). The smart play here is to be patient, hope for rebounds for both players, either because it helps your team, because it boosts their trade value, or both. It’s also worth noting that Rosenthal has essentially no suggestions for who, if anybody, would take either player.
Q: Are the Red Sox really “immensely screwed” for the long term?
A: I’m not even sure where to start with this one. Let’s assume, conservatively, that you think the Red Sox winter trades/signings of Miley, Porcello, Ramirez and Sandoval are total losses at this point — that none of the above will be better than what they are right now. Collectively they’ll make $67 million dollars next year. If we were the Rays, then, we would indeed be existentially doomed. Per Cot’s Contracts, however, we entered this year with a payroll of $184 million. Next year’s obligations? $112 million. Even after accounting for the potential Ortiz option and raises via arbitration, the Red Sox are not the Bruins, with many needs but no room under the projected budget ceiling. Does anyone want to be spending money on replacement level players? Obviously not. But the Red Sox do have the ability to recover from financial mistakes.
Second, those crying that sky is falling usually fail to acknowledge that the Red Sox minor league system is relatively deep, even after the recent promotions — both planned and otherwise. Obviously the introduction of new players is not without risks as the club learned first with Jackie Bradley Jr followed by Xander Bogaerts and most recently with Mookie Betts. But most clubs would kill to have a collection of young, borderline-major league ready talent like Betts, Bogaerts, Blake Swihart, Christian Vazquez and Eduardo Rodriguez, with Brian Johnson, Henry Owens, Matt Barnes and Pat Light waiting in the wings. Several of those players will fail, of course. But the Red Sox will very likely have several major league roster spots filled by young players, some of whom have All-Star potential, that will be making pennies on the dollar for the next three to six years.
Even if, however, you’re the type of fan or writer that is convinced that the Red Sox are uniquely unable to integrate young players, there are assets up and down the roster that can be converted into proven major leaguers. Further down the system, for example, any of Rafael Devers, Manuel Margot, Yoan Moncada or even potentially Michael Kopech could be the centerpiece in a major acquisition at some point.
At worst, then, the Red Sox may have some dead money on the roster for a few years. Existentially doomed, they are not.
Q: Should the Red Sox fire Ben Cherington, John Farrell or both?
A: For me, it’s no. And if you’re going to do it, there’s essentially no upside to doing it in season.
Of the two, the manager is easier because his role is theoretically more limited. Unlike football, the manager’s on the field tactical impact is relatively minimal over the course of a season. There are big picture concerns — is a given manager likely to Joe Torre-his favorite reliever into the ground, for example — but generally speaking baseball games are won by baseball players, not baseball managers. Which means that a manager’s primary contribution is outside the lines. How they manage to keep 25 very different competitive personalities from killing each other over the course of a season, for example. And in Boston, working with the media is a significant part of the job.
Asinine brushfires like the Sandoval-Instagram incident or Miley’s comically inappropriate blowup or no, Farrell seems to be managing both the clubhouse and the media about as well as can be expected given the circumstances. He’s no Tito — dismissing him was the worst move of this ownership’s tenure, in my opinion, other than replacing him with Valentine — but he seems to understand both stick and carrot.
The obvious caveat to the above is that we don’t really know what’s going on in the clubhouse. During the Valentine era we all try and pretend didn’t happen, for example, the local beat writers were eventually revealed as hopelessly compromised when the national writers came in and to a person diagnosed ours as “toxic.” So maybe it’s that bad right now and we just don’t know, in which case Farrell has to go. But I’d bet not.
As for Cherington, addressing his situation in full would require a post of its own, and maybe we’ll get there. But in general, two last place finishes going on three notwithstanding, it’s not clear that he’s the problem. He has made mistakes, certainly, and should probably not be allowed to trade for relievers anymore, but overall he’s navigated the complicated environment that is Boston as well as can be expected. Consider the problems facing him.
First, he has a rabid fanbase with very high expectations; the Astros’ strategy is simply not an option for the Red Sox general manager.
Second, ownership has seemingly prohibited him from doing some of the things the media wants him to do: sign an ace, for example — we’ll come back to that.
Third, he has to somehow ascertain remotely whether incoming players will be able to handle Boston, like Napoli or Victorino in 2013, or whether they’ll implode á la Crawford or Renteria. I believe the operative phrase there is good luck with that.
Lastly, he’s not great with the media and not much of a self promoter, so he’s not likely to find allies from the fourth estate. They run around asking Cherington to pay a 35 and 36 year old outfielder with a history of drug problems $30 million a year; instead he goes out and signs Koji, Napoli and Victorino with that money. When you win a World Series with that approach, reporters can’t say much. When you don’t, as with the non-signing of Lester, you leave yourself open to criticism. The more rational members of the media get this, and on detailed reviews of the track record build the case that Cherington’s not the problem. But there just aren’t that many rational members of the media. Alex Speier and Chad Finn from the Globe. Brian MacPherson and Tim Britton from the ProJo. Peter Gammons, always. There are a few others, but it’s a short list.
Q: Do the Red Sox need an ace?
A: I went on record prior to the season as saying no, and this trainwreck of a season has not altered that position. Would it be nice to have an ace-caliber starter? Of course. Would the season look much different if we had one? It’s hard to make that case. Unless we’re talking about someone like Ruth, who can hit a bit as well.
Q: So you don’t think they should have signed Lester, then?
A: If they had him here for the insulting $70 million they offered him last season, of course. Or if they could have gotten him on something closer to Porcello money, even, yes you want him on your staff. But consider that twice in his last four starts he’s given up at least five runs, and that his strikeout rate is down this year while his walk and home run rates are up. And that he’ll play next season as a 32 year old. Do I want that pitcher? Yes. Do I want to be on the hook to pay him over $150 million? No I do not.
One other interesting tidbit. Everyone talks about how the Red Sox need an ace, and how the club should have matched or outbid the cubs for Lester. Understandable, because he is sporting a 3.80 ERA and 3.57 FIP, good for almost a win and a half (1.4) by Fangraphs’ WAR. But how does that compare to Buchholz, who the Boston Globe’s Nick Cafardo is still trying to run out of town, all these years later? The pitcher every media member wants gone has a nearly equivalent ERA at 3.87 and is substantially besting his former rotation mate with a 2.81 FIP. This makes him worth better than two wins (2.1) by Fangraphs’ metric. In a league where there are no pitchers hitting.
Q: So the Red Sox shouldn’t trade Buchholz, then, as Cafardo recommends?
A: With the necessary caveat that everyone is available if the price is right, the idea is dumb enough it’s not even worth discussing.
Q: What about Rusney Castillo? Is he a $70-plus million dollar bust?
A: The media’s treatment of Castillo has been hilarious, when you think about it. First, they killed Cherington daily for having a “millionaire” playing the outfield in Pawtucket to see what they had, if anything, in Victorino. Now, Cherington’s taking fire for giving all that money to a player that everyone is convinced can’t play because he’s 28 and has a .551 OPS. You want to point out to writers like Silverman that the player has had less than 80 at bats this season, but, really, what’s the point? The it’s-way-too-early-to-make-judgements narrative isn’t going to generate the controversy the media lives off of. Anger sells. Patience, not so much.
Q: The farm system was talked about above very positively, but some believe our minor league talent is questionable, with Nick Cafardo quoting a scout as saying “Not as much there as you would think.” Should we be worried about the vaunted Red Sox farm system?
A: For a few Red Sox prospects, it hasn’t been a great year. Garin Cecchini, once viewed as a third base prospect with questionable defense who would at least hit for average and control the strike zone has done neither of those things with a .204 batting average and .278 OBP. He’s not hitting for any power, either, with a slugging percentage of .316. Henry Owens, meanwhile, who ranked ahead of current Red Sox starter Eduardo Rodriguez on many prospect lists coming into the season has simply not performed. He hasn’t imploded to the degree that Cecchini has, as he’s still basically impossible to hit with a batting average against of .191, but his walk rate has soared and strikeout rate is down 10%. When a pitcher who’s never had a strikeout-to-walk ratio of less than 16% suddenly is in the low single digits, well, let’s just say he’s not on a fast track to the majors.
But looking beyond subpar performances like those, the future of the Red Sox system seems bright. Besides the graduated prospects currently maturing at the major league level and potentially helpful if not star caliber pieces at Pawtucket, the lower levels of the Red Sox system have a number of very interesting names — many referred to above.
Asked about the NL scout’s opinion about the Red Sox system, in fact, ESPN Prospect Analyst Keith Law said “he’d be wrong about that.”
Q: So if things aren’t all bad, why does it seem like they are?
A: Because when you’re not winning, at least in a town that cares about its team, this is what happens. Negative results breed negative sentiment which breeds negative stories which breed negative sentiment in a vicious cycle.
Q: But overall you’re positive on the Red Sox prospects?
A: Not for this season. I’m with the math; I think they miss the playoffs. They’re much better than they’ve played, but they’ve dug themselves too big a hole, in all probability. It’s very unlikely that a Wild Card will come out of the AL East, so they have to win the division. And while you never know how things will play out — injuries could hit any of the clubs, and none of them are exactly world beaters — even optimistic fans would have to acknowledge that the team is a long shot at this point.
But if we zoom out a bit and take a deep breath, I’m fine with where the Red Sox are at the moment. They have very talented positional prospects in Betts, Bogaerts, Bradley Jr and Swihart, they have young starters either with the club already (Rodriguez) or on the cusp (Johnson, Owens) and they even have a few of the highly coveted, hard throwing bullpen arms that the team has lacked in recent years on the way (Barnes/Light). After a precipitous dip last year, Pedroia’s power appears to be back. Buchholz has had his ups and downs, but is outproducing many so-called aces this season. Hell, even Allan Craig is hitting at Pawtucket — and his money is officially off the competitive balance books because he cleared outright waivers.
If you think then that each of Miley, Porcello, Ramirez and Sandoval are better than they’ve shown, and that some benefit of the doubt must be extended because of the new city/big contract factor, the roster looks that much better.
And even if they’re not, the club should have money available next year to improve. How much? Probably something close to what Houston’s paying their entire roster in 2015. Which is why we appear to be pretty far from “immensely screwed” looking beyond this year. | https://medium.com/wicked-clevah/whats-worse-than-the-2015-red-sox-season-a8b5e0cfbb44 | ["Stephen O'Grady"] | 2016-12-08 21:34:55.328000+00:00 | ['Payroll', 'Trades', 'Players', 'Free Agents'] |
[Foresting Platform: Get to know first] #5 | Dear friends!
Let’s continue our series of revealing Foresting secrets.
The previous article was about PTON in Bitberry wallet. That makes sending and receiving PTONs so much easy and fast. So, you can get PTONs from your friends in seconds.
But there is another way of getting PTON — FORESTING platform.
Today we are going to tease you with some screenshots from our 3rd Closed beta test 😊 On 4rd of March we started testing rewarding social media platform FORESTING. About 100 people with different background, age, and interests from 25 countries are participating in testing. Testing will continue until the end of March. The main purpose is to fix bugs and to test overall user experience before Open beta Launch, which will be just right next month 😉
Here are some screenshots:
“by @Leigh MacArthur
@Jay, Marketing Team at Foresting
You might be curious about the difference between LIKE and BEAT. So, lets me explain it briefly,
LIKE is a secondary indicator for content evaluation, allowing unlimited activities.
But…
BEAT is a voting tool for content value promotion. 30 BEATs are provided to start, and one BEAT is generated automatically every 2 hours. In addition, BEAT is apportioned between the user and content creator.
To tease you even more here are some screenshots of Korean Illustrator @Lazy.drawing, who also participates in Closed beta test. | https://medium.com/foresting/foresting-platform-get-to-know-first-5-732faf27f564 | [] | 2019-03-07 09:04:08.673000+00:00 | ['Rewards', 'Platform', 'Blockchain', 'Media', 'iOS'] |
Is AI Disrupting Online Advertising? | Introduction
Deep learning based artificial intelligence (AI) is disrupting the insurance sector. Can it also disrupt online advertising ?
We start by reviewing the AI led innovations in the insurance sector. We outline the image based deep learning algorithms or convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that are leading these innovations and enabling us to recognize images in our daily lives. The online advertising business model and its dependence on being able to understand image ads to improve its prediction engine is highlighted. We further explain how CNNs are being trained to decode ads and the challenges of cultural context in these efforts.
AI and Insurance
A recent New York Times article (link to the article) highlighted how deep learning algorithms were disrupting the insurance sector.
It described how insurers are in the process of leveraging submitted vehicle damage photographs to automatically generate initial repair estimates. This is in contrast to the established practice of using an adjuster to inspect the damage either through photographs or in person, and then generate those initial estimates.
Image recognition deep algorithms were used to parse the provided automobile damage photographs to generate those initial estimates. The algorithmic approach reduces the claim settlement cycle considerably by eliminating the role of an adjuster, with it taking only a few seconds now to generate the initial claim estimates.
Image Recognition Deep Learning Algorithms
These developments highlight how image recognition deep learning algorithms or convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are making significant inroads in our transactional lives.
CNNs are already enabling us to process images and multi-media videos by leveraging complex interactions through additional layers. They are classifying various objects in images (including recognizing hand written digits and facial expressions).
As a result, CNNs are at the forefront of making self-driving cars a reality in the near future.
Similarly, video hosting websites are leveraging CNN to better recognize, index, search, and recommend an increasing number of uploaded videos.
Many researchers have also started leveraging CNN on breast cancer image data in efforts to improve detection rates through visual inspection. CNN driven apps are also being used to scan X-rays for signs of tuberculosis early on in India in remote locations where qualified radiologists are in short supply.
Most recently, Microsoft released a free deep learning app Lobe supporting image classification.
What is a CNN
CNN is basically a classifier that processes an image and classifies it to an image class. For example, CNN may learn from thousands of different labeled tree images to be able to correctly classify an unlabeled tree image.
Object Detection with CNN
In the shown figure (source), the CNN is able to correctly identify the imbedded objects of a dog, a person, a horse and a car after being trained on thousands of such tagged images.
How does it do that? The algorithm breaks the image into different square pixels of various gradations (i.e., it pixelates the image) and these unique pixels with unique locations serve as predictors for the algorithm.
In our earlier insurance example, CNN pixelates the provided photographs and is able to recognize the damaged part and its extent of damage and then recommends the claim estimate.
Online Advertising Trends
Thanks to near universal internet access, digital advertising spends have exceeded the combined offline media spends including TV advertising, print ads, and billboards. Digital advertising now accounts for roughly 55% of the market share in the United States.
Most of these online advertising spends are devoted to search and display advertising. Roughly $55 billion was spent on search ads and $36 billion on display ads in the US in 2019. By some estimates, over 1700 banner ads are shown to an average consumer in a month with a 50% click through rate (CTR).
Display ad spending is growing at a faster rate than search ad spends. This is expected since display advertising allows excellent customer targeting and richer multimedia executions in comparison to search advertising.
These ads play a very important role in generating brand awareness and moving the prospective customer along the discovery stage of the sales funnel.
Both search and display ads are sold through real time bidding (RTB) auctions where advertisers bid for the placement of their ad at a favored rank / location at the search engine results page, the publisher websites or social network feeds etc.
Search engines / publishers get paid by advertisers whenever the targeted customer clicks the shown ad and reaches the advertiser website. Therefore, both the search engines and the publishers are interested in showing ads that have a higher probability of the ad being clicked when shown to the target.
Ad platforms predict and rank the CTR of the available ads and show ads with the highest CTR.
Better CTR prediction allows the search engines / publishers to show the relevant ad to the target that results in click through behavior and revenue for the advertisers. Displaying a relevant ad also increases web experience.
Thus, CTR prediction plays an important role in defining the keyword / webpage location and customer profile combination bid price and is considered a core task in ad allocation.
How do we predict CTR?
Various machine learning algorithms (including logistic regression and decisions trees) are used to predict ad level CTR. These algorithms leverage online behavior related features including:
keyword actionability (searching for hotels in San Francisco vs San Francisco)
ads with higher historical CTRs
display rank
other contextual features such as text and traffic volume for the landing page.
target average CTRs across different search ads
earlier target search / browsing / purchase / reviews behavior where available
target demographic characteristics such as locations, age, and gender and
more general constructs such as target interests topics and target intent: browsing, knowledge building, search, or buying.
Essentially, behavioral targeting (BT) is used to show the most relevant ads or ads with the highest CTR to the targeted consumer. BT leverages the prospective consumer’s past history including searches, pages visited and past purchases.
Target user interests can also be derived by combining different elements of behavior including websites visited, past searches, and reviews. User interests in combination with demographic details can provide insights to the user profile and underlying segment affiliation. This can enable further customization of the shown advertisement.
CNN and CTR
Till recently, ad level features had not played a significant role in the crucial task of CTR predictions. Context and user level features including demographics and historical online behavior were generally used to make such predictions.
Advances in CNN are now helping advertisers leverage ad level features in these CTR predictions.
It is easy to train a CNN to identify various imbedded objects (and at what location) in a display ad.
More exploratory analysis can be done by identifying the imbedded objects algorithmically and asking:
which ads are similar to each other?
which ads are more text oriented and which ads are more image oriented:
among the image oriented ads, which ads are focusing on the product and which ads are focusing more on lifestyle?
what imbedded objects are repeated most across ads in a given product category?
Most importantly, CNN enables advertisers to understand how ad level features including various imbedded objects in different positions are driving the CTR of an ad. Following common types of ads have been observed from this perspective:
text ads, in which most of the ads contain mainly text, rather than images;
models ads, in which images of people are the primary focus of the ad, and in many cases these people are performing various actions or standing in various poses; and
product ads, in which an image of the product is the focus of the ad, something especially common in ads under the Auto category.
Understanding Ads
Leveraging CNN to understand persuasiveness of ads or any image is confronted by significant challenges.
User impression of an image (including ads) is driven by the persuasiveness of that image. Understanding the persuasiveness of an image is a much more challenging task than simply identifying the imbedded objects in that image.
Persuasiveness of ad images is not defined by the mere presence / absence of different objects and at what location. It is defined by how the imbedded objects, text, and sound (in case of multimedia visuals) interact to make the ad topical and relevant and deliver various emotions / sentiments for the target audience. These latent sentiments / emotions then combine nonlinearly to drive the overarching appeal of those visuals.
Decoding the causality from the imbedded objects in various rendered forms to the evoked emotions and then from those emotions to the overall appeal is a challenging task for any CNN algorithm. It requires the CNN to be trained on thousands of images that are tagged on various aspects including:
the imbedded objects
the sentiments / emotions conveyed by the visual
symbolism / rhetoric of the visual if any
the topicality of the visual or what the image is conveying
what action the visual wants the viewer to take and
why should the viewer take that action.
Visual Examples
Two Visual Examples
Let us take examples of two visuals to motivate the process and challenges of CNN learning.
The first picture consists of a tree with branches and leaves and a white background.
The second images shows a boy lying on the beach with a paper boat and moonlit waters in the background.
Recognizing imbedded objects
The trained CNN algorithm would be able to generally identify the imbedded objects of:
leaves, branches, and a tree against a grayish background in the first image and
a seafront, a sleeping boy, a paperboat, and the moon in the second image.
What is the ad saying
Beyond recognizing the individual objects, CNNs are being trained to convey the description of the image or what the image is saying.
In our examples, a trained CNN would describe
the first image as that of a tree and the second example as that of a child sleeping on the beach after possibly playing with a paper boat.
Sentiments
The algorithm needs to understand how the identified objects are interacting to generate different sentiments / emotions.
Sentiments drive the persuasiveness of the image in combination with its topicality / context.
Thus, image sentiments can help in understanding the ad beyond the location of the objects or the description of the image. Algorithmic image description can be modified by the sentiments and the rhetoric of the image that are defined by the imbedded objects.
In our examples, the tree image is evoking the sentiments of quiet, sparseness and gravity. Similarly, the boy on the beach image is conveying the sentiments of stillness, darkness and mystery.
Visual Rhetoric
Visual rhetoric flows from the choice of how the objects are shown and why they are portrayed so. It can completely change the intent of the imbedded objects and the photorealistic story line. Therefore, the ability to understand ads is critically dependent on the algorithm’s ability to automatically decode this rhetoric.
In our first example, symbolism is imbedded with the tree being shaped as two lungs of the planet. A deep learning algorithm can understand this symbolism only if it recognizes the branches shaped as lungs and is aware of saving the environment context. With this symbolism, description of the image would be updated as that of trees being portrayed as lungs and life of our planet / environment.
The algorithm finds it very difficult to understand the symbolism of the second image as the tragedy of boat refugees, since the image was created in response to the disturbing news of a 3-year-old Kurdish boy Aylan Kurdi washed up dead on a Turkish beach. With this symbolism, now the image description becomes that of the tragedy a dead child refugee washed on the shores.
Topicality
More generally, the algorithm is also being trained to recognize the context or topicality of the ad image that plays a critical role in defining its persuasiveness.
The topic of the image gains clarity once the visual rhetoric has been decoded.
The topic context for the first image is that of saving the environment and the plight of refugees in the second image.
Thus, in the first image, the topic of environment is being combined with the sentiments of urgency and seriousness with trees being portrayed as lungs and life of the environment / planet.
Similarly, in the second image, the topic of refugees is being paired with the sentiments of tragedy and sadness.
What does the ad image want us to do?
CNNs will further have to be trained to derive actionability from the combination of the topic and its sentiments.
The first image is suggesting to us to act on saving the environment. The second image is asking us to develop a better understanding of the tragedy and suffering of the refugees.
Conclusions
As the New York Times article highlighted, CNNs are disrupting the insurance sector by making it easier to understand the extent of claimed damage without active human intervention.
Are CNNs ready to disrupt online advertising as it continues to grow on the wings of more multimedia content? That depends on how effectively CNNs can contribute to predicting CTR by understanding the persuasiveness of the image or multimedia content exposed to the target.
AI and CNN architectures are rapidly evolving in their ability to decode images and multimedia creatives and understand their persuasiveness in eliciting desired targeted response.
CNNs have obtained excellence in identifying various imbedded objects in their varying degree of presence, e.g., recognizing different objects, recognizing damaged vehicle parts, recognizing cancer disturbance in x-rays etc.
Thus, CNNs can help CTR prediction incrementally where the presence / absence of objects are relevant to the ad.
At the same time, CNNs are still not fully evolved in decoding and understanding the persuasiveness of an ad image.
The biggest challenge CNNs face is to understand how the imbedded objects and rhetoric update different sentiments and topicality and then persuasiveness.
Decoding rhetoric requires a monumental task for a CNN to understand the cultural context changing over time. This can be seen as a possible problem of underspecification in the training samples with the samples not fully representing our cultural experience.
This suggests that we are a few years away before CNNs may be able to replicate the human eye appreciation of an ad image and its persuasiveness. It is only then that CNNs will be able to contribute significantly in CTR prediction and in impacting the online advertising business model.
Acknowledgement
The editorial contributions of Parvathi Kamath, Ph.D. are gratefully acknowledged. A fuller version of this article can be read here. | https://medium.com/@pkohli01/is-ai-disrupting-online-advertising-7413ef0a70b5 | ['Pankaj Kohli'] | 2020-12-01 20:00:08.788000+00:00 | ['Online Advertising', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Convolutional Network', 'Click Through Rate', 'Return On Investment'] |
Love Scene in Bed | Henry enters the room and finds me lying in bed, naked. My legs are spread and I’m inserting a pink dildo into my pussy. The camera acts as his POV.
“Babe,” he calls out to me, but I pretend not to be aware of his presence until he then calls me by my name. “Jinx. Honey, what are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?” I answer.
“Looks like you’re playing with yourself. That’s what it looks.”
“I guess you’re right then. You’re out playing video games, so this is me catching my fun.”
“Yeah, but you could have at least called me. I’m here. I can help.”
“You can, but I doubt you’d wanna help me with this,” I moaned as I continued to fuck my dildo. “Unless you don’t mind getting dirty.”
“Oh, I sure as fuck don’t mind.”
Henry drops to his knee by the foot of the bed. The camera catches sight of his hand reaching for the dildo. He takes it from my hand and proceeds to slide it in and out of my pussy. I lean backward on my elbows and moan as he fucks me with it. I moan and respond how much it feels so fucking good.
He applies his hand to my pussy. I lift my legs apart as he thumbs his finger against my clitoris. My hands squeeze my tits and I unleash a sensuous squeal.
“Uuuhhhh . . . Ohhh, yeah. You’re getting me hot and wet, babe.”
“You know I could do a lot more with my tongue,” says Henry. “Would you want me to do that, babe?”
“Sure. But first, you’re gonna get rid of that camera if you wanna get this pussy of mine.”
“Just a second then.”
Henry goes and plants the camcorder on the tripod stand. The camera captures the bed and much of the room. Henry discards his shirt, and then his jeans, before climbing onto the bed. He wraps his arms under my thighs as he then lowers his face toward my crotch and eats me up. My moans grow fervent and louder as I endeavour to put on a show for the camera. I later have him lie on the bed and then it’s my turn to go down on him. His cock fills my mouth, and I continuously sweep my hair from my face so that the camera gets enough of me facially.
“Hmmm, your cock does tastes good in my mouth. I think it’s about time I got to ride it. What do you say?”
“I’d say you’d best be doing that.”
I glance at the camcorder before going forward to settle my butt on my lover’s pelvis. I lift myself and grab his cock and insert it into my vagina, and then we head off to the races. I work my hip muscles hard. Henry’s cock grows hard inside me and I’m loving the feel of his muscle. My breathing becomes laboured and I start gasping with my mouth open as more warmth spreads over me. Henry pulls me forward. His hands smack my butt as he begins jerking harder. We kiss and afterwards roll over the bed.
Henry digs his hands under my backside and goes to work on me. His thighs slam against my butt as he lifts me a few inches off the bed while still feeding me his dick. My arms lock tight around his shoulders; my breaths hit each other’s face. The feeling is so incredible, and I think I must have said that because he then utters the same words back at me.
He lowers me to the bed and falls flat on top of me. I kiss his cheek and taste the sweat dripping down his neckline. My arms snake under his armpits while my lower body continues to jerk under his bulk. His cock slides back and forth, taking me higher toward the mountaintop until he eventually drops me off.
My climax was a special one.
Through it all, the camcorder continues to wink at us. | https://medium.com/ir-cuckold-avenue/love-scene-in-bed-aa07b35f178d | ['Damien Dsoul'] | 2020-12-19 16:30:51.788000+00:00 | ['Sex', 'Erotica', 'Relationships', 'Romance', 'Fiction'] |
What Happens in the Brain When You Reconnect with an Old Flame | What Happens in the Brain When You Reconnect with an Old Flame
Priscilla Du Preez; Unsplash
When I arrived at the swanky wine bar, there was only one open table — dimly lit and intimate. The booze, sexy music and candlelight felt like a callback to our first kiss 15 years before, almost to the day.
There was no sign of him, so I ordered a Chardonnay, two small plates and tried to focus on the novel I brought with me, ironically titled “What She Knew.” Instead I flashed back to our last meeting nearly a decade before.
We had just returned from a trip to Napa to scout wedding venues. After a heated kiss, I drove to my apartment 95 miles away.
Days later, I learned he had been cheating on me and ended our 6-year relationship, the best of my life up to that point, with a two-line email. He fired back with a litany of messages, which began with profanity and culminated in pleas.
“PLEASE DON’T LEAVE ME … YOU ARE MY EVERYTHING,” he screamed through the screen.
He sent texts, letters, roses, and initiated countless hang up calls.
I never responded. I never told him a mutual friend confirmed my suspicions. I never considered reconciling.
Over the years we corresponded intermittently, but not about anything deep — and never to revisit our history. But when work took me to his hometown of Santa Barbara, I reached out and asked if he’d like to meet.
I’m happily married with kids. He’s engaged. What’s the harm? I thought.
Apparently my urge to reconnect with an ex makes sense. “The brain develops pathways based on learned patterns. So, if you laid down a powerful pattern that this person was your life partner, your brain retains traces of that circuitry, even after you’ve bonded with someone new,” says Love Researcher Helen Fisher, Ph.D., senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute, Indiana University.
Nevertheless, I struggled to understand why, even though it’s certainly not the case for everyone — especially those who have had toxic relationships — I felt so comfortable sitting across the table from someone who pulled the rug out from under me. Determined to get answers, I set out to uncover what happens in our brains when we reconnet with an old flame.
Laying Down a Template
I met Ben (not his real name) when we were both 26. We had a sweet, albeit star-crossed romance. He was an irrepressible free spirit, a dreamer, a romantic. I was an ambitious type A who played it safe. Like peanut butter and jelly, we complemented each other.
He was the first to make me dinner, teach me to surf in ice-cold waters and unlock the seemingly impenetrable fortress of my body. Together, we formed our identities and defined what love meant. In the process, he ingrained himself into my psyche.
Experts say the neurological attachment that happens between young lovers is not unlike the attachment a baby forms with its mother. Bonding hormones including vasopressin and oxytocin play a starring role in both scenarios.
If that person was your first, best or most intimate, the mark is even more indelible. Such preferential encoding is one reason why stories of people reconnecting with a high school or college flame are commonplace.
Experts say the person you have your first orgasm with, especially if that person cuddles with you afterward (which releases a flood of oxytocin), lays down a template for what you find attractive.
It goes something like this: According to a 2010 study published in The Journal of Neurophysiology, feelings of romantic love trigger the brain’s dopamine system, which drives us to repeat pleasurable experiences. The brain’s natural opiates help encode the experience, and oxytocin acts as the glue that helps forge those feelings of closeness.
“Oxytocin unleashes a network of brain activity that amplifies visual cues, odors and sounds,” explains Larry Young, a psychiatry professor at Emory University in Atlanta. That, plus the effects from your brain’s natural opiates and dopamine, and your romantic partner’s traits — strong jaw, piercing blue eyes, musky scent — leave a sort of neural fingerprint. Those preferences become soft-wired into your reward system, just like an addiction.
Even creatures prone to promiscuity, like rats, are often primed to revisit their first pleasure-inducing partner, according to a 2015 study. And it seems humans may follow a similar pattern.
Anonymous; Unsplash
Drawn to the Past
When Ben walked into the bar, I stood up, navigated my way toward him and gave him a big hug, standing on my tiptoes to reach his neck. My first thought: He bulked up! I felt like a doll enveloped in his 6’1” frame.
“Congratulations,” I whispered. “You look great!”
He puffed up with the compliment, that familiar sparkle gleaming in his eyes.
It was comfortable. Easy. Seeing Ben instantly reactivated the networks my mind encoded a decade before. Add a bear hug to the mix — and the accompanying flood of oxytocin — and my brain circuitry lit up like fireworks. Justin Garcia, the associate director for research and education at the Kinsey Institute, says that’s no surprise. Just like a recovering alcoholic craving a drink after decades of sobriety, we can still be drawn to an old lover.
“It doesn’t mean you still want to be with that person,” he says. “It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. It means there’s a complex physiology associated with romantic attachments that probably stays with us for most of our lives — and that’s not something to be afraid of, particularly if you had a great run.”
Rose-Colored Memories
High school sweethearts typically meet, fall in love and dissolve before they hit 25, so their brains are still developing. I met Ben just as my brain’s frontal lobes were reaching maturity. In fact, once I began operating with a full mental deck, we were entering our final act.
By the time we split, my 32-year-old brain was viewing life in high definition. I wanted a family. He wanted freedom. We reached an impasse.
Today, our lives couldn’t be more disparate. He’d been living in a loop since I left — upscale dinners, regular happy hours, exotic vacations — and before his engagement, a different woman by his side every few years. I married, bore three children and spent most days with a toddler attached at the hip — or more often the knee because both hands are full.
But I don’t regret our relationship. Not when we broke up. Not even years later. Instead, I treasure the time we spent together. And that’s in line with how many people look back on their old, positive relationships. The human mind not only becomes more sentimental with age, it’s also adept at rewriting our early romantic history.
“After we resolve a romantic relationship, we have this remarkable ability to forget the bad parts and focus on the good ones,” says Fisher. So while I could easily recall the time Ben scattered hundreds of rose petals throughout my apartment, I conveniently forgot (or chose to ignore) the time he took off on a guys’ ski trip without warning.
The truth is, I still love Ben — just not intimately. I love him for the role he played in my story. Ben was never the right guy for me, but he was the right person to help me discover my romantic identity.
The experiences we shared together, and even how we split, stay with me in a positive and healthy way. They helped form the person I am today. In fact, because of Ben, I embarked on a relationship with my husband from an empowered place, and my every dream has become a reality — well, minus the urine and feces. | https://psiloveyou.xyz/what-happens-in-the-brain-when-you-reconnect-with-an-old-flame-6eab49709812 | ['Amy Paturel'] | 2021-03-05 18:09:56.943000+00:00 | ['Romance', 'Life Lessons', 'Love', 'Love And Sex', 'Reconciliation'] |
From Medan to Kediri, When Marginalized Communities Meet the Policymakers in a Virtual Room | To address the critical needs for two-way communication on COVID-19 mitigation between the policymakers and the vulnerable groups, LeaN On by INVEST DM invited the representatives of the national and regional Agency for Disaster Management (BNPB and BPBD) to meet and discuss with the representatives of vulnerable groups in a series of virtual talk shows. Through the virtual rooms, people with disabilities and other vulnerable community members represented by LeaN On by INVEST DM caseworkers conveyed their aspirations on inclusive disaster risk communication and management strategies.
The mini talk shows were held on October 27, 2020, which coincided with the commemoration of the Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) month, and on November 10, 2020. In addition to bridging the communication between policymakers and vulnerable groups, this activity also marked the inauguration of 500+ LeaN On by INVEST DM caseworkers who are assigned to reach 165 thousand people with disabilities and other vulnerable community members in Medan, Jabodetabek, Bandung, Yogyakarta, Solo, Surabaya, Kediri and greater areas.
Talk Show 1: LeaN On Each Other: Reaching Vulnerable Groups in Community-Based Social Restrictions
The first mini talk show invited several speakers, including Dr. Ir. Agus Wibowo, M.Sc. — the Director of Disaster Management Strategy Development (PSPB) BNPB, Mr. Ebet Nugraha — the Head of Preparedness at BPBD Jawa Barat, Mr. Arjuna Sembiring — the Head of BPBD Kota Medan, and Mr. Dian Rudianto — the Head of Disaster Management at DKPB Kota Bandung. The lineup was joined by Ms. Nicky Clara from ThisAble Foundation and Mr. Ferry Suranto from Human Initiative as the representatives of LeaN On by INVEST DM partners, as well as Ms. Siti Mazumah from LBH APIK, who was representing MAJu’s partners.
In this session, the Director of PSPB, Mr. Agus Wibowo, elaborated the penta-helix approach used by BNPB as the benchmark in developing disaster management policies and strategies in Indonesia. He acknowledged that in implementing community engagement as one of the five pillars of penta-helix approach, BNPB should have involved more marginalized groups. Thus, he appreciated the role taken by LeaN On by INVEST DM, which targets the outreach of 165 thousand people with disabilities and other vulnerable groups in seven regions in Indonesia, as part of a holistic, integrated, and multi-perspective disaster management effort as mandated in BNPB regulation N0.4–2019.
The expositions from the Director of PSPB BNPB and BPBD’s representatives were warmly welcomed by LeaN On by INVEST DM partners, including ThisAble Foundation and the Human Initiative that were representing the target groups. Furthermore, the two partner organizations expressed their wish to be actively involved in the development of an inclusive disaster management strategy with BNPB and BPBD.
The session was also enriched by a presentation from LBH APIK which highlighted the challenges and social dynamics faced by vulnerable groups during the pandemic, as well as the assistance that has been and is being carried out. The presentation was further complemented by a summary of support expected from the government, particularly BNPB, regarding gender mainstreaming and protection of vulnerable groups in disaster management, as mandated in the Regulation of the Head of BNPB №13–2014.
Talk Show 2: “Nothing About Us Without Us: Inclusive Disaster Risk-Communication”
In the second talk show, we invited Dr. Ir. Udrekh, M.Sc. — the Director of Disaster Management System (SPB) BNPB, Mr. Dadang Iqwandy — the Head Prevention at BPBD Jawa Timur, Mr. Ligik Triyogo — the Director of Mitra Alam Surakarta Foundation (YMA) and Ms. Ratna Dewi Setyaningsih who represented LeaN On by INVEST DM caseworkers as well as the Association of Women with Disabilities ( HWDI), Yogyakarta. This second event was held under the theme Nothing About Us Without Us: Inclusive Disaster Risk Communication.
The Director of SPB BNPB and the representatives of BPBD Jawa Timur used the opportunity to explain the efforts that have been made in regards to inclusive disaster risk-communication, including the launching of InaRISK Personal application; the official disaster risk-communication app in Indonesia. InaRISK Personal is expected to be further developed with more inclusive features so that it can become part of the daily life of all Indonesians to be more disaster-resilient.
The representatives for LeaN On by INVEST DM partners and caseworkers, Mr. Lilik and Ms. Ratna, appreciated the efforts made by BNPB and BPBD in realizing inclusive disaster management, both through the development of the InaRISK Personal application and the involvement of people with disabilities in various disaster response training. However, they also further encouraged BNPB and BPBD to engage a broader community; includes other vulnerable groups. More importantly, the representatives also emphasized the need for BNPB and BPBD to actively and consistently involve people with disabilities and other marginalized groups in developing policies and strategies for disaster management so that they become more inclusive and effective.
The Director of SPB BNPB and the representatives of BPBD welcomed this input and summarized the discussion on two points: the importance of (1) involvement and (2) facilitation for more inclusive disaster risk-communication and management.
The mini talk show series which was conducted in a virtual room with limited time turned out to be quite effective in bridging the communication between BNPB and BPBD as the policymakers and the representatives of vulnerable communities. Thus, it is expected that the voice of the vulnerable people contributes to a more inclusive disaster risk management and communication strategy in Indonesia. Besides, this mini talk show series is also expected to strengthen the cooperation between BPBD and Satgas COVID-19 and the LeaN On by INVEST DM caseworkers in the seven program areas. This activity was attended by more than 600 participants from various regions in Indonesia including LeaN On by INVEST DM caseworkers, representatives from BPBD, Social Services, and Health Services from provincial and district/city levels. | https://medium.com/@investdmleanon/from-medan-to-kediri-when-marginalized-communities-meet-the-policymakers-in-a-virtual-room-3139feeccc46 | ['Lean On Invest Dm - En'] | 2020-12-14 06:34:05.786000+00:00 | ['Community Engagement', 'Empowerment', 'Risk Communications', 'Disaster Management', 'Resilient Communities'] |
A Long Guide on Dual-Booting Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS and Windows 10 on the Dell XPS 15 9560 | Part 5: Improving Battery Life
If you’ve perused Reddit where people discuss Linux on the XPS, you know that battery life is pretty bad. This is usually because the dual graphics card setup of the XPS doesn’t play too well with Linux to begin with. It gives the 1050 power even though it uses the integrated Intel graphics for your display. As a result, power draw at idle could be like 20W which is insane.
To fix that, we’re going to use 3 pieces of software:
TLP Power Management PowerTOP Nvidia PRIME
Another piece of software some people recommend is Bumblebee which lets you use the 1050 only when you really need it. I never plan on using my 1050 while in Linux so I didn’t bother, but you can search up guides for it.
We’re going to start out battery improvement techniques by editing the boot options again (I promise this is the last time). Go back to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line within /etc/default/grub and add acpi_rev_override=1 after splash and before nouveau.modeset=0. So now your line should look like this:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet splash acpi_rev_override=1 nouveau.modeset=0”
Save your changes and run:
sudo update-grub
This makes sure grub is aware of these new boot options and will use it one the next boot. Once you’ve done that, you can start installing the software I listed above using the commands below:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tlp tlp-rdw powertop
sudo tlp start
sudo powertop
Once you run the last command, your terminal window should go blank for a little bit before loading up PowerTOP. Make sure your laptop is unplugged before you do so. If your laptop is plugged in, PowerTOP won’t be able to report a battery discharge rate so you have to exit PowerTOP, unplug your laptop and re-enter PowerTOP. PowerTOP should report a discharge rate anyhwere from 8 to 12W. This means, with the 97WHr battery like mine, you should get between 8 and 12 hours of battery life at idle or with light web browsing.
Now with TLP and PowerTOP running, we can get to Nvidia PRIME. Within Ubuntu, press the super key (the Windows key on the keyboard) and search for Software and Updates. Go over to the Additional Drivers Tab and your 1050 drivers should load up. Select nvidia-driver-390 and follow the steps.
At one point during the installation of the Nvidia driver, you will be asked to enter a Secure Boot password. This is because we didn’t disable Secure Boot earlier. Enter a Secure Boot password and write it down somewhere for now. You’ll need it afterwards. Once the Nvidia driver installs, you can reboot the system. Before GRUB loads, you should see a dark blue screen with the text Shim UEFI key management at the top. Press any key and select Enroll Key in the list of 4 options. Continue until it asks for a password. Enter the secure boot password from before and continue. Ubuntu should boot up normally and your Nvidia card should be working. To make sure your Nvidia drivers are installed correctly, run:
nvidia-smi
You should get an output that has your driver version as well as your Nvidia card listed. If you get any other output, it probably means your Nvidia driver wasn’t installed correctly. This means you have to purge remove any Nvidia package that was installed and reinstall the driver.
If the driver was installed correctly, you’ll probably notice a significantly higher power draw now. Anywhere from 15 to 25W. That is because our 1050 is now getting power. To stop this, run:
sudo prime-select intel
This will tell the system to disable the 1050 and power on the Intel graphics on the next boot. So reboot your system and your power draw should have reduced down to 8–12W again. | https://medium.com/@paperplanesunboxed/a-long-guide-on-dual-booting-ubuntu-18-04-2-lts-and-windows-10-on-the-dell-xps-15-9560-8f0818ba96df | ['Bored College Student'] | 2019-08-08 05:56:45.714000+00:00 | ['Windows 10', 'Dual Boot', 'Xps 15 9560', 'Ubuntu'] |
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