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The most creative website solution provider in Adelaide. | Websites are vitally important tools for any sort of modern business in many ways such as boosting sales, helping clients management, perform specific functionalities and etc. Nowadays, even a freelancer can make a website by his/her own but in various qualities. At YNW Web and Apps, we talk about the real custom-built website design and development base on your specific business needs and marketing scenario. You will not waste your money on building your website and doing SEO with us. We have many success cases and project experiences in our area. If you haven’t been familiar with us so far, you will. We are confident about the quality of services and works we have done for our clients. Perhaps, you are going to talk about or being taught about ‘YNW’ soon.
We provide professional web design services at an affordable price. No project is too big or too small for us. We have teams to do photography, Graphics Design, front end design, back end development. A website with full functionalities which is able to help your business not only in marketing but also in many other aspects is not that far from you. All you need to do is to sit with us and tell your ideas, then we can do all the rest works for you. Isn’t it easy enough? We guarantee our customers’ happiness on the services they have been offered, and we care about if you are happy to bring your friends back to our door.
We provide premium SEO and digital marketing services to Adelaide business owners at a fair price. We know how a website works and also know how Google ranks all the websites. If you are our Web Design customer, then congratulations, you have already done the first step of SEO — On-page SEO. All of our website design works are made to SEO friendly which means you can easily get SEO works done with fewer efforts being paid. Every of our customer will get an On-page SEO report from us which shows how good your On-page SEO score is.
One of our Customers — Basic Trailers, selling the best trailers in Adelaide. They add an additional 2-year contract with us after we have ranked their website onto the first page of Google Search Results by their most important keyword “trailers for sale” in 20 days. Now they get 600+ clicks every day and more than half of the visits are from organic searches by keywords. So, just think about it how much money they can save from being a client of Google Ads. They would pay $10K a month for the visit flows from Google Ads.
We also do photography jobs for our website design customers by the needs of their website building. We design websites, so we know exactly what kind of pictures going to fit best on our customers’ website to make a stunning looking. We do 4K resolution drone photo and video for our specific customer group(farms, wine companies, outdoor living and travel etc.). If you have checked the websites we have done, you will be surprised by how beautiful photos we have taken.
At YNW Web and Apps, We offer visual design and printing services at a very good price. If you going to take a large order from us, we guarantee you will have the lowest price within South Australia. We have creative employees to give stunning designs with freshest ideas. If you are our web design customer, all the graphic design works will be included to the website project, in another word, it is totally free for you.
Try us and be prepared for what we going to surprise you and the belief we going to present to you. | https://medium.com/ynw-web-and-apps/the-most-creative-website-solution-provider-in-adelaide-cbb91afeaeb4 | ['Zhang Wei'] | 2019-02-17 13:15:49.234000+00:00 | ['Photography', 'Website Design', 'Website Development', 'Web Development', 'Web Design'] |
Lost Without You | Written by Berlanga 08/19/2016
I wonder to and fro… I look deep and long… I hunt you across mountains, seeking you… I hear you…. I feel you… Can’t see you but hear you calling me. I can feel your heart calling me… My Love where are you? My mind racing… thinking where you must be…. My heart beats in rhythm with yours… I sense it… beating as one.
Google Images: Lost Without Context — Jeff Nischwitz
I long to see you… your voice invades me… my eyes see you everywhere but you vanish once I reach you…. my heart yearns of your touch…. you feel me but no hands touch me… they are yours… those gentle caress I love… Love, where did you go…. why I can’t I find you.
I sail across oceans to find you…. I venture through valleys to locate you…. I march in the heated desert from oasis to oasis…. travel across Plains seeking you…. I hear you calling me…. my heart leads me…. I must find you, my Love….
I’m tired my love…. your my strength keeps me going…. I feel you close to me…. hearing your lovely voice as the wind blows…it vanishes…. my mind is with you…. Oh love, my Queen…. my Everything…. my True Love…. Exhausted I continue my search….
Every gust of wind carries your scent… It’s intoxicating… mmmmmm…. Baby I’m coming for you…. Wait for me… I’m coming… I’m a Wolf driven to find his Kitten… I must find you….
I travel to the corners of the World…. I look into the Heavens…. I go deep into the Darkness…. I shall never quit looking for you my Love. My heart beats with you… I feel the Love… the Passion… the Intimacy of your touch. | https://medium.com/@Berlanga66/lost-without-you-a3c47900774f | [] | 2019-09-23 18:38:00.474000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Diary', 'Thoughts And Feelings', 'Hopeless Romantic', 'Lost Love'] |
Is the 2015 Fantastic Four Film Really That Bad? Yes, and Here’s Why | The Fantastic Four gang
While the 2015 Fantastic Four film directed by Josh Trank doesn’t quite deserve the immense hatred it attracts from some comic book fans, it is by no means a good film. Yes, it is flawed. But no, it wasn’t terrible. Could a further watch redeem it from a cinematic hell usually reserved for abject failures like Battlefield Earth or every Uwe Boll film? Fuck no.
The problems with the film started way before anybody saw it, with stories of egotistical and difficult direction by Trank, unhappy stars, meddling studios, and budgetary problems. The negative buzz in the build up to release was palpable and expectations from even the most ardent Fantastic Four fans were low.
But Trank’s Four isn’t the first film to experience such negativity and survive. Films like Waterworld and even James Cameron’s Oscar winning behemoth Titanic fought production woes to turn out ok (yes Titanic is only ok until the last half hour where it becomes amazing). The 2015 version of Fantastic Four is actually ok, and certainly no worse than its mediocre predecessors (2005’s Fantastic Four and 2007’s Rise of the Silver Surfer). But comparing it to previous films in the franchise is like comparing dog turds in the park to see which one is more pleasing on the eye.
Sometimes okay isn’t good enough. And for fans of comic books who’ve become accustomed to quality in the shape of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy and the burgeoning Avengers universe, 2015’s Fantastic Four was a massive downer.
I thought you said it was a bad movie?
Don’t mistake my incredibly faint praise for any sort of fondness for the movie. In many ways the film is a train wreck of infuriating ideas that veer from campy schlock, to noir grittiness, to total ridiculousness, with a bit of body horror thrown in for good measure. The film screams of meddling and you can see the vision of the director being destroyed at every turn.
That’s not to say that Trank’s original ideas for the film were good in the first place. His determination to veer from the source material and darken the tone of the movie shines through in the first two acts. And while these are easily the better parts of the movie, they just aren’t the Fantastic Four that fans had come to love and expect.
In some ways you have to applaud Trank’s bravery for the choices he (tried to) make, but there is a palpable feeling of disdain for the source material that begs the question why he chose (and was chosen) to do the movie in the first place.
So, the director was the problem?
There’s no doubt that Trank, under the right circumstances, is a good director and you can understand why 20th Century Fox chose him after his low budget superhero hit Chronicle hit the right notes with critics. But as is so often the case with directors who’d previously worked on tight budgets, the temptations of more money can lead to an overexuberance to try new things and push boundaries… that is until the studios realise what they are doing and step in.
On top of this, the pressures of handling a larger movie with higher expectations put them under and immense amount of pressure and can bring them into direct conflict with both the studio and producers. This can be especially true if the director in question is prickly in the first place and by all reports Trank can be pricklier than a cactus.
Hiring Trank was a calculated risk for Fox and like any decision of this type, was always prone to failure. Disney made a similar decision when they hired James Gunn, a director noted for his schlocky, gore filled horror films, to direct the first film in the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise. Gunn was an even bigger risk than Trank who had no real experience in the superhero field other than the black-comedy flop (but still amazing) Super. At least Trank had a proper superhero movie in his locker that was both well reviewed and a box office success.
But the personalities of Gunn and Trank couldn’t be more different and while the Guardians of the Galaxy auteur was a self-confessed comic book fan, Trank hated the genre. Gunn’s enthusiasm can be seen in every aspect of Guardians, from the music, to the visuals, to the humorous script he wrote with Nicole Perlman. Trank shows no such love for Fantastic Four. His script actively subverts the expectations of fans (not in a good way) and he shows none of the visual flair displayed over at Disney in the Avenger’s universe.
The year of release was a problem
The cast in happier times (before seeing the movie)
2015 was an exceptionally bad year for quality movies. While the likes of Mad Max (which itself was subjected to negative rumours before release), Pixar’s Inside Out, and Oscar darling Straight Outa Compton flew the flag for quality cinema, the majority of releases were mediocre at best. This led to an expectation from audiences that the films they paid to see would be disappointing.
But while films like the boring Terminator Genesis, the whitewashing Aloha, and the absolutely disgraceful Inspector Clouseau rip off Mortdecai were terrible, this didn’t stop people going to the cinema. In fact cinema attendance in 2015 were 8% higher than the previous year — a year that saw the release of films in big franchises like the Hobbit and Planet of the Apes trilogies, a new Michael Bay directed Transformers, James Gunn’s Gaurdians of the Galaxy, an X-Men movie, and the first part of the conclusion to The Hunger Games, to name but a few.
Laying the failure of Fantastic Four on the year it was released is way off the mark. People still went to the cinema despite the poor quality of the films on display. Fantastic Four’s problems were far more deep rooted than timing… or were they.
I feel the need… the need to retain movie rights
From its first inception, the 2015 version of Fantastic Four exists not as a legitimate cinematic passion project by Fox or its director, but as a cynical attempt to retain movie rights.
Fox bought the Fantastic Four film rights in 1993 at a time when comic book movies were derided and Marvel Comics were on the verge of bankruptcy. They got lucky. The pittance they paid was not lost on Fox executives and by the turn of the new century the prospect of bank balances flooded with comic book box office returns had them rubbing their hands with glee. But unlike Disney, Fox hadn’t got a plan and other than a couple of decent X-Men films, they failed to find the quality that would keep fans happy.
After the relative failure of 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Fox shelved plans for more films in the franchise and the series seemed dead. That was until Disney gave it some much needed resuscitation when they bought Marvel and launched their own phenomenally successful cinematic universe. Once again emboldened by the prospect of making easy money, Fox rethought its approach.
The problem was, by the time Fox pulled its finger out, the Fantastic Four movie rights were set to return to Marvel. In a desperate attempt to keep them, Fox rushed into production the movie with no real goal. It is perhaps because of this that Trank, a self-confessed Marvel movie hater, was hired with little care or thought for what he would do with the franchise. It was only later in production that the studio realised how unenthusiastic Trank was and by this time wrestling back control was too difficult.
We will never know how Trank’s version of the movie could have turned out. It may actually have been good. But would it have been the type of Fantastic Four experience fans wanted? Not likely.
At the end of the day, neither Trank nor the studio can take full responsibility for the film’s abject failure , but each must take their own share of the blame for how it turned out.
The Fox Factor
We touched on this throughout the article, but it would be remiss to gloss over this aspect of Fantastic Four’s failure. 20th Century Fox are a studio with a long history of meddling in their own franchises. Whether it be the short sighted decision to allow George Lucas to keep the rights to the Star Wars universe because they had little faith in what he was doing, their constant meddling in the Alien films, or even their repeated cancelling of Family Guy only to reinstate the show later on, Fox are a studio with a vast history of trying to destroy what they create.
In the rush to keep up with the Disney’s (and keep the Fantastic Four rights) they failed to do their due diligence on the film. They hired the wrong director, green-lit a script that had little to do with the comics, and pushed ahead with a budget that was woefully inadequate for a film of this type.
By the time they woke up to the problems they’d created, it was too late and all they could do was butcher the film to mitigate costs leading to shonky special effects and a cheap ending bereft of excitement.
DC or Marvel? Who knows?
One of the biggest criticisms labelled at the film is that it is far too bleak and, in some ways, a joyless experience. It followed the trend of the DC movies at the time by taking itself far too seriously. But Fantastic Four isn’t a DC franchise and fans of Marvel movies expect a certain degree of humour and levity in their cinematic experiences.
In the comics the Fantastic Four ‘family’ are a mismatched collection of wacky heroes who go on fun adventures together. They revel in their situation and actively enjoy being heroes. By comparison, the characters in the film appear to hate what has happened to them. They don’t enjoy being heroes and when they are together all they do is bicker and argue.
To top it all off, the actors playing the quartet look like they are enjoying the experience just as much as their onscreen personas. They grunt and grumble their way woodenly through the film’s dialogue looking to all intents and purposes like they hate every part of the experience.
So, it’s the actors’ fault?
It would be easy to lay blame for the films lack of financial and critical success at the actors’ feet, but in Michael B. Jordan and Miles Teller they had two stars on the rise with one (Teller) coming off the back of an Academy Award nomination for his role in the excellent Whiplash. Indeed, the supporting cast were no slouches either, with British actors Jamie Bell and Toby Kebbell rounding out what on paper should have been a great ensemble.
The cast isn’t the problem. With the right material god only knows what they could have produced. But the film gives them so little to work with. The script is poorly written with no meaningful dialogue and the direction is at times sloppy with little flair. You can see the scenes that Trank found interesting, like the standout moment when the quartet find out they have super powers, and those he had little interest in — any of the science-based conversations between the characters. With so little enthusiasm behind the camera and a script that was on paper bare boned, the actors were fighting an uphill battle from the get-go.
The script was the real issue: Characters
Fantastic Four’s script is full of missed opportunities and strange choices. The chemistry between the four lead characters is non-existent and the film gives them no time to develop their relationships.
We are told early on that Reed (Miles Teller) and Ben (Jamie Bell) are lifelong friends but in the course of the entire movie they barely have any scenes together and there is no indication that they really know each other let alone are best buddies. Ben sulks his way through the film with no real purpose other than to look miserable. Reed, on the other hand, is a strange character and while he is painted as a genius his actions, including going on the run ala Bruce Banner but without the motivation, are idiotic.
But the worst character in the film has to be Kate Mara’s Sue Storm. Sue, normally a key player in every Fantastic Four story, is largely redundant for large parts of the film. When the group initially explore Planet Zero (as the film calls the parallel universe they open), she doesn’t even go with them but somehow becomes mysteriously ‘affected’ by accident when they return. She then spends an eternity ‘mastering’ her abilities at the government base (despite telling the government that she wouldn’t work for them), which translates to doing very little. Her dialogue with the other characters is atrocious and though we are supposed to believe she has romantic feelings for Reed, there is little evidence to say she even likes him for the majority of the film. Hell, I don’t remember her having any dialogue with the character of Ben until the very last scenes of the movie.
The only character who has any really interesting story points is Michael B. Jordan’s Johnny Storm who at least seems like he has a purpose, even if said purpose is to accept being a tool for the government agencies. But just like the other characters, we never get any idea of his motivations and the chemistry between him and the other members of the group is non-existent.
The script was the real issue: The plot
Miles Teller staring intensely as Reed Richards
As mentioned previously, the plot of Fantastic Four is bare boned. But even the most paper-thin stories can be interesting in the right hands (look at pretty much every successful horror film). Unfortunately, Fantastic Four never makes any attempt to rise above its poor scripting.
The entire 3 act format is disjointed and rife with continuity errors. The film starts in in 2007 where we meet a young Reed Richards as he is being scolded by a science teacher for misbehaving. What did he do to attract the teacher’s ire? Did he wipe bogeys on his desk or throw a ruler out the window? Hell no. He built an interdimensional portal in the classroom. Such a strange and uncalled for reaction might be forgivable if the film used it to highlight Reed’s personality change in the face of such negativity. But it doesn’t and the film skips to modern day without giving it a second thought.
The interdimensional portal does pay a key part in the film and on return to the present we are treated to a long, long, long (do you get my point) section of the film where Reed and the others create one for real. This would have been a great section to build up the characters and let their relationships grow. But instead we are treated to a series of boring dialogue sequences and some ridiculously intense stares.
Once the portal is active and the gang head to Planet Zero things feel like they are about to get exciting, but they don’t. I may be being a little unfair on this section of the movie as it is by far the best part of the film. Seeing the group get their powers on Planet Zero is one of the few spectacles in the film. But once they have them instead of exploring how the gang adapt, rebel against, and finally accept their new powers, we skip to a year later, missing out on what could have been a hugely entertaining part of the story.
And then instead of building to a rousing finale, the gang meander through melancholy until the newly demented Doom returns to destroy the world for shits and giggles. Did I mention that the script was bare boned?
The script was the real issue: Continuity
As mentioned earlier, the film suffers from a variety of continuity errors that are often jarring and sometimes hilarious. For a film riddled with reshoots, it is perhaps understandable, but the sheer number of issues in Fantastic Four makes you question if the production team really gave a shit in the first place.
Amongst the many humdingers are Sue’s constantly changing hair style and different shades of blonde. In many scenes, her hair changes depending on the view we have of her. Reed’s facial hair is similarly comical and can disappear and reappear depending on which room he is in.
Hell, there are so many continuity issues in the film (such as appearing and disappearing nosebleeds; equations that magically erase themselves from whiteboards; pancakes that change position constantly; and the mystery of where Johnny’s girlfriends have their hands) that I could write a full article on this alone. But I wont because doing so would mean having to watch the film again… anyway, let’s move on.
The final act
Its safe to say that the final third of Fantastic Four is where the real problems start. Up until this point the film is at least interesting, even if it is very un-Fantastic Four like. Trank’s style shines through in the opening acts and his dark stylings are… palatable.
You can almost see the point where Fox took over production and Trank gave up. The final section of the film should be where the spectacle of a superhero movie takes hold. But instead we are treated to more boring dialogue, cheap looking sets, and a generic ending that is about as anti-climatic as you can get.
When the newly armoured Victor Von Doom arrives as the big bad, his entrance is poorly constructed and his destruction via a punch from Ben Grimm is about as piss poor a demise as you can get.
The Doom Criticism
Bi di bi di bi di
Do you know what, I’m going to start this final section of the article by saying how much I like the 2005 film Doom based on the videogame of the same name and starring the ever-dependable Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Karl Urban. Doom is another film that met with much derision on release and was criticised heavily for its schlocky dialogue, hammy acting, and inept script. But that’s exactly why the film is so good. It knows what it is and never hides from it. It is a ridiculous film and by the time Johnson’s Sarge transforms into a monster ripped straight out of a Resident Evil game, you can’t help but smile.
By comparison, when Victor Von Doom appears at the end of Fantastic Four the last vestiges of goodwill towards the film are ripped from you almost as if a demon from hell had reached in and torn them out themselves.
The only real compliment you can give to the film’s antagonist is that he is called Victor Von Doom, something that was up in the air in early cuts of the film.
Doom is about as one note a character as you can get. None of his motivations are explored and his only reason for destroying the world is… a vague hatred of the government. He and the members of the Fantastic Four gang never really engage in any meaningful way until the poorly staged finale and no tension is developed between the characters.
But the worst offence made with the Doom character is in his transformation from soppy scientist to the iconic comic book baddie. Unlike Doom in the comic books who uses intelligence to gain and steal powers, the film’s version is ‘born’ with god-like powers. By doing this the script turns him into another generic cackling villain with no need for smarts. How I would have loved to see the viscously intelligent Doom from the comics spar with our heroes to outwit them rather than mysteriously be able to do pretty much anything he wants with a blank face and creepy voice. The entire look of the character is a travesty and instead of the iconic armour of the comics, we are left with a monster who looks equal parts medical droid from Star Wars and blank-faced Twiki from Buck Rogers (Google it).
In Conclusion
It’s clobberin time
At the end of the day, the 2015 reboot of the Fantastic Film franchise is an abject failure. It is a poorly directed, badly scripted, and under-funded bore fest. And while we can lament the meddling of Fox in the production of the film, can we truly say that Trank’s vision would have been better? I doubt it. Even in the earlier, more interesting scenes of the movie (before the meddling began) there is a distinct lack of character development suggesting that no matter what, this movie, just like its antagonist, was Doomed from the start. | https://theentertainmentpit.medium.com/is-the-2015-fantastic-four-film-really-that-bad-yes-and-heres-why-6d826293111c | ['Ian Ford'] | 2020-11-24 19:44:54.728000+00:00 | ['Fantastic Four', 'Entertainment', 'Comics', 'Film', 'Movies'] |
HR Process Automation Is Transforming Employee Experience with AI-Powered Chatbots | Every 2 out of 3 employees express their frustration at not being able to access or find the relevant policy information in their organization because they are not given or informed where to look up. - Source: Gallup
An alarming fact! A study by the Work Institute further reveals that nearly 40% of new hires leave the company within a year of being hired. One of the key reasons behind this is low engagement due to lack of HR process automation during onboarding. A one-size-fits all approach doesn’t work, you need AI-powered automated HR solutions to create personalized experiences.
Trending Bot Articles:
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Don’t forget to give us your 👏 ! | https://chatbotslife.com/hr-process-automation-is-transforming-employee-experience-with-ai-powered-chatbots-c184073ec95a | ['Enterprise Bot'] | 2020-12-07 15:24:11.955000+00:00 | ['Robot Process Automation', 'Chatbots', 'Conversational Ai', 'Bots', 'Hr Automation'] |
Weekly Report #2 | Hello all and thank you for participating in this amazing project. POSWallet has seen significant growth over the last days and its evolving into the Great Platform that you, all the Crypto Enthusiasts so much need and desire. The team of POSWallet has been working non-stop, in order to prepare and share with you some awesome News and new Features:
POSWallet Android APP
Yeah, believe it, POSWallet will arrive on your Android phone screen very soon! Although more info about it will be posted on a future Weekly Report, i can tell you that it will be a complete Android wallet with many, if not all, the features from POSWallet.com.
POSWallet Exchange
POSWallet Exchange is almost ready and we are running the final tests, in order to ensure maximum safety for the users. POSWallet Exchange will begin with Bitcoin (BTC) and Litecoin (LTC) pairs. Fasten your seatbelts an get ready for some real trading because more pairs are coming with much more coins!
Dividends Payment
Well, there isn’t any Wallet or Exchange out there that pays Dividends to its users…Oh , i’m sorry, POSWallet does that and it does it with style. So, all Dividends will be paid to all POSW Coin holders on Block 130,000! Stay tuned and keep watching your POSWallet account grow!
Livecoin.net Enlisted POSW Coin
POSWallet was accepted in Livecoin, which is one of the Highest Volume Exchanges out there, with almost $3,000,000 of daily volume! Livecoin is supporting POSW Coin with some very attractive Trading Pairs: POSW/BTC (Bitcoin), POSW/ETH (Ethereum), POSW/CRBIT (Creditbit), POSW/ICN (Iconomi). More Hot trading pairs are on the way.
New Improved FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)Page
A new improved FAQ page has been created in order to answer every possible question that our community has. Special thanks goes to those that sacrificed some of their time to ask a FAQ suitable question on POSWallet’s Slack channel!
New Team Page
A POSWallet team page was created, so you can learn more about the core team members of POSWallet. Some limited info is there but more will be added soon.
That’s all for our 2nd Weekly Report, more awesome news soon… And remember: Buy now that it’s Cheap and don’t dump your Precious POSW Coins! See you all on our next Weekly Report. | https://medium.com/weekly-reports/weekly-report-2-1ff5be6edde8 | ['Michael Douranos'] | 2017-02-23 15:24:44.435000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Exchange', 'Altcoins', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
React Component Lifecycle | So…What are the different phases of React component lifecycle?
Check out the interactive diagram here
We are born, grow, and then die. Almost everything follows this cycle in its life, and React components do as well. Components are created (mounted on the DOM), grow by updating, and then die (unmount on DOM). This is referred to as a component lifecycle. The Component Lifecycle is a set of steps that every class-based component goes through when the component is referenced.
There are different lifecycle methods that React provides at different phases of a component’s life. React automatically calls the responsible method according to the phase in which the component is. These methods give us better control over our component and we can manipulate them using these methods.
Lifecycle Methods:
Mounting
Updating
Unmounting
Error handling
Mounting Phase
Mounting a component is like bringing a newborn baby to the world. This is the component’s first glimpse of life. It is at this phase the component is created (your code, and react’s internals) then inserted into the DOM. It consists of the following methods:
constructor() * — previously known as “initialization phase”
This is the very first method called as the component is “brought to life”. The constructor method is called before the component is mounted to the DOM. Usually, you’d initialize state and bind event handlers methods within the constructor method. What’s important to note is that this is the first method invoked — before the component is mounted to the DOM.
render() *
This method is defined in each and every component . It is responsible for returning a single root HTML node element. If you don’t want to render anything, you can return a null or false value. The render method is important to understand since it is the only required method when using a class component. The render() function should be pure, meaning that it does not modify component state, it returns the same result each time it’s invoked, and it does not directly interact with the browser. If you need to interact with the browser, perform your work in componentDidMount() or the other lifecycle methods instead. Keeping render() pure makes components easier to think about.
This method is defined in . It is responsible for returning a single root element. If you don’t want to render anything, you can return a or value. The render method is important to understand since it is the only when using a class component. The function should be pure, meaning that it does not modify component state, it returns the same result each time it’s invoked, and it does not directly interact with the browser. If you need to interact with the browser, perform your work in or the other lifecycle methods instead. Keeping pure makes components easier to think about. componentDidMount() *
This is invoked immediately after a component gets rendered and placed on the DOM. Now, you can do any DOM querying operations.
Updating Phase
A React component “grows”. Better put, the component goes through the updating phase. Here, we get new Props and change State. This phase also allows us to handle user interaction and provide communication with the components hierarchy. The main aim of this phase is to ensure that the component is displaying the latest version of itself. Unlike the Birth or Death phase, this phase repeats again and again. This phase consists of the following methods.
shouldComponentUpdate()
It is invoked when a component decides any changes/updates to the DOM. It allows you to control the component’s behavior of updating itself. If this method returns true, the component will update. Otherwise, the component will skip the updating.
It is invoked when a component decides any changes/updates to the DOM. It allows you to control the component’s behavior of updating itself. If this method returns true, the component will update. Otherwise, the component will skip the updating. componentWillUpdate() — now considered legacy code (don’t use)
It is invoked just before the component updating occurs. Here, you can’t change the component state by invoking this.setState() method. It will not be called, if shouldComponentUpdate() returns false.
It is invoked just before the component updating occurs. Here, you can’t change the component state by invoking method. It will not be called, if returns false. render()
It is invoked to examine this.props and this.state and return one of the following types: React elements, Arrays and fragments, Booleans or null, String and Number. If shouldComponentUpdate() returns false, the code inside render() will be invoked again to ensure that the component displays itself properly.
It is invoked to examine and and return one of the following types: React elements, Arrays and fragments, Booleans or null, String and Number. If shouldComponentUpdate() returns false, the code inside render() will be invoked again to ensure that the component displays itself properly. getSnapshotBeforeUpdate() * Right after the render method is called, the getSnapshotBeforeUpdate lifecycle method is called next. The value queried from the DOM in getSnapshotBeforeUpdate will refer to the value just before the DOM is updated. Even though the render method was previously called. An analogy that may help has to do with how you use version control systems such as git. A basic example is that you write code, and stage your changes before pushing to the repo. In this case, assume the render function was called to stage your changes before actually pushing to the DOM. So, before the actual DOM update, information retrieved from getSnapshotBeforeUpdate refers to those before the actual visual DOM update. The way the getSnapshotBeforeUpdate lifecycle method works is that when it is invoked, it gets passed the previous props and state as arguments.
getSnapshotBeforeUpdate(prevProps, prevState) {
return value || null // where 'value' is a valid JavaScript value
}
componentDidUpdate() *
It is invoked immediately after the component updating occurs. In this method, you can put any code inside this which you want to execute once the updating occurs. This method is not invoked for the initial render.
Unmounting Phase
At this stage, the component “dies”. In React lingo, it is being removed from its world — the DOM. This phase contains only one method and is given below.
componentWillUnmount() *
This method is invoked immediately before a component is destroyed and unmounted permanently. It performs any necessary cleanup related task such as invalidating timers, event listener, canceling network requests, or cleaning up DOM elements. If a component instance is unmounted, you cannot mount it again.
ERROR HANDLING:
Oh, there’s one more phase a React component goes through. Sometimes code doesn’t run or there’s a bug somewhere. The component is going through the error handling phase. Similar to a human visiting the doctor.
As of React 16, errors that were not caught by any error boundary will result in unmounting of the whole React component tree.
static getDerivedStateFromError() *
Whenever an error is thrown in a descendant component, this method is called first, and the error thrown passed as an argument. Whatever value is returned from this method is used to update the state of the component.
componentDidCatch() — will be removed soon
This lifecycle is invoked after an error has been thrown by a descendant component. It receives two parameters:
error - The error that was thrown. info - An object with a componentStack key containing information about which component threw the error.
componentDidCatch() is called during the “commit” phase, so side-effects are permitted. It should be used for things like logging errors.
Recap of Phases:
Mounting — It is at this phase the component is created (your code, and react’s internals) then inserted into the DOM Updating — A React component “grows” Unmounting — Final phase Error Handling — Sometimes code doesn’t run or there’s a bug somewhere
Definitely check out this blog if you’d like to read more!
State and Lifecycle
React.Component
Error Boundaries | https://medium.com/swlh/react-component-lifecycle-c0084e2ca85c | ['Destiny Setzer'] | 2020-09-30 17:24:30.171000+00:00 | ['Coding', 'Coding Interviews', 'Codingbootcamp', 'Web Development', 'React'] |
How to control anger at workplace? | Credits: Imgflip.com
At some point in our professional life we all have felt enraged at our bosses or co-workers, and felt like punching a wall, yell at someone or throw things.
Some of you might have felt very inclined to even assault your co workers-which is very dangerous. But all these aggressive behaviours will provide you with a quick ticket out of the company. Most likely without a full and final settlement...
We all have been there! Sometimes we all have felt so angry at our bosses or co-workers that it ruins our day, mood, work productivity and motivation. Of course you can’t take out anger at your workplace but one can surely employ multiple strategies to lessen the simmering anger.
Feeling angry at workplace is okay, but letting it affect your job is not. We need to use anger management strategies to avoid taking regretful decisions, blaming others or oneself for the wrong, jumping to conclusions etc.
Credits:bpHope.com
Here are some of the techniques that you should have up your sleeve, just in case situations take a tense turn:
1.Take a step away from the situation:
Physically distance yourself from the situation or the premises- go for a walk, listen to songs or watch a light hearted video. These techniques will not only help you to calm down but will also help you focus on the problem at hand with a clear mind. It will give you time to cool off that raging anger and then look for solutions.
You can also practice visualizations where you imagine yourself in a calming setting or revisit a happy memory. There are multiple apps like ‘mind space’ and ‘atmosphere’ which create a setting for you where you can feel at peace and relax using breathing techniques.
2. Acknowledge and accept your emotions:
Don’t feel ashamed to accept your anger. Feeling angry at workplace is normal, feeling angry at someone for the way they acted is normal. Anger is not ‘abnormal’ as labelled by people around you, it is a part of your evolution. It is an emotion which makes you react in a defensive manner to protect your values and yourself- it guards you.
Never push anger under the carpet, as it can blow up at the wrong person at the wrong time. Hear what your anger has to say about the situation, focus on looking at the problem with cool mind and look for the solution.
3. Find a physical outlet:
Physical activities can help you let out anger in constructive ways, e.g. cycling, swimming, running, punching bag exercises, even squeezing a stress ball. Anger isn’t just an emotional response, it is a physical response as well because you can feel your teeth clenching, fingernails digging into your palms and a rush of energy that activates your flight-fight-freeze mode.
Exercising helps you burn off the excess energy and release the stiffness in your muscles due to anger. After exercising you will feel relaxed because of the absence of extra energy, which will give you enough head space to look at the problem at hand with a relaxed mind.
And if you are not the exercising type, there are plenty of break rooms/rage rooms which allow you to break as much stuff as you want, like TV, microwave, fridges etc. It is an extraordinary activity but it has satisfied and calmed many people!
4. Talk to someone who you trust:
Call a friend or talk to someone who is ready to listen to what you have to say, with an open mind. Tell them about what happened, how you feel and how the problem has angered you. Communicating with someone who you trust significantly lowers your anger level because you feel understood, heard and safe.
Venting out alone helps putting a lot of things into perspective and who knows? Maybe your friend or family member could suggest you a different way to look at the problem or offer solutions that did not even occur to you!
5. Recognise your ‘hot buttons’:
Be aware of what triggers your anger and avoid those situations which cause you any discomfort. The trick is being self-aware and either removing yourself from those situations, or planning strategies to overcome that situation without blowing up at the other person. That way your anger will not rise to the point where it triggers you and it will stay under the limit.
6. Treat yourself:
Made it through the day that seemed to be going downhill earlier? Well then, treat yourself! Get yourself a pizza or your favourite food, a spa day or relax in whichever way you want. After all you made it through a tough day and didn’t let anyone else’s problem or irresponsibility affect it! Also celebrate the fact that you weren’t fired. | https://medium.com/@arushib127/how-to-control-anger-at-workplace-920c58a089cf | ['Arushi Bhatnagar'] | 2021-08-28 14:09:42.869000+00:00 | ['Anger', 'Workplace', 'Anger Management', 'Psychology', 'Organisational Psychology'] |
Flink + TiDB: A Scale-Out Real-Time Data Warehouse for Second-Level Analytics | Author: Zhi Qi (Real-time Analytics R&D engineer at PingCAP)
When a data-driven company grows to a certain size, traditional data storage can no longer meet its needs. For real-time business intelligence, you need a real-time data warehouse. Companies can use real-time data warehouses to implement real-time Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) analytics, real-time data panels, real-time application monitoring, and real-time data interface services.
Some people think that a real-time data warehouse architecture is complex and difficult to operate and maintain. Today, I will explain why that isn’t true. Apache Flink is a framework and distributed processing engine for stateful computations over unbounded and bounded data streams. TiDB is an open-source, distributed, Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) database. Thanks to Flink 1.11’s enhanced support for the SQL language and TiDB’s HTAP capabilities, we’ve combined Flink and TiDB to build an efficient, easy-to-use, real-time data warehouse that features horizontal scalability and high availability.
In this article, I’ll describe what a real-time data warehouse is, the Flink + TiDB real-time data warehouse’s architecture and advantages, this solution’s real-world case studies, and a testing environment with Docker Compose.
What is a real-time data warehouse?
Offline data warehouse
In the 1990s, Bill Inmon defined a data warehouse as a subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant, and non-volatile collection of data that supports management decision making. A data warehouse collected data through a message queue and calculated it once a day or once a week to create a report. It was also known as an offline data warehouse.
An offline data warehouse architecture
Real-time data warehouse
As technology improved, people had new requirements such as real-time recommendations and real-time monitoring analysis. The corresponding decision-making period gradually changed from days to seconds. To meet these needs, the real-time data warehouse came into being.
A real-time data warehouse has three main data processing architectures: the Lambda architecture, the Kappa architecture, and the real-time OLAP variant architecture.
The Lambda architecture maintains batch and stream layers, so it costs more to develop than the other two. Compared with the Kappa architecture, the real-time OLAP variant architecture can perform more flexible calculations, but it needs more real-time OLAP computing resources.
The Lambda architecture
The Lambda architecture has a real-time data warehouse and an offline data warehouse, while a stream processing engine directly computes data with high real-time requirements. The Lambda architecture aggregates offline and online results for applications.
Lambda architecture for real-time data warehousing
The Kappa architecture
The Kappa architecture eliminates the offline data warehouse layer and only uses the real-time data warehouse. It unifies computing engines and reduces development costs.
Kappa architecture for real-time data warehousing
The real-time OLAP variant architecture
The real-time OLAP variant architecture transfers part of the computing pressure from the streaming processing engine to the real-time OLAP analytical engine. The result is more flexible, real-time data warehouse computing.
Real-time OLAP variant architecture
Flink + TiDB as a real-time data warehouse
Next, we’ll introduce an example of the real-time OLAP variant architecture, the Flink + TiDB solution for real-time data warehousing.
Flink is a big data computing engine with low latency, high throughput, and unified stream- and batch-processing. It is widely used in scenarios with high real-time computing requirements and provides exactly-once semantics.
TiDB 4.0 is a true HTAP database. In the real-time data warehouse architecture, you can use TiDB as application data source to perform transactional queries; you can also use it as a real-time OLAP engine for computing in analytical scenarios.
Combining Flink and TiDB into a real-time data warehouse has these advantages:
Fast speed. You can process streaming data in seconds and perform real-time data analytics.
You can process streaming data in seconds and perform real-time data analytics. Horizontal scalability. You can increase computing power by adding nodes to both Flink and TiDB.
You can increase computing power by adding nodes to both Flink and TiDB. High availability. With TiDB, if an instance fails, the cluster service is unaffected, and the data remains complete and available. Flink supports multiple backup and restore measures for jobs or instances.
With TiDB, if an instance fails, the cluster service is unaffected, and the data remains complete and available. Flink supports multiple backup and restore measures for jobs or instances. Low learning and configuration costs. TiDB is compatible with the MySQL 5.7 protocol. In Flink 1.11, you can use the Flink SQL syntax and powerful connectors to write and submit tasks.
Let’s look at several commonly-used Flink + TiDB prototypes.
MySQL as data source
By using Ververica’s flink-connector-mysql-cdc, you can use Flink not only as a collection layer to collect MySQL binlog to generate dynamic tables, but also as a stream computing layer to implement stream computing, such as stream join and pre-aggregation. Finally, through the JDBC connector, Flink writes the calculated data into TiDB.
An architecture with MySQL as data source
This architecture is simple and convenient. When you’ve prepared corresponding databases and tables for both MySQL and TiDB, you can write Flink SQL statements to register and submit tasks. You can try this architecture in the section Try Flink + TiDB with Docker Compose.
Connecting Kafka to Flink
If data has been stored in Kafka through other channels, Flink can obtain the data through the Flink Kafka Connector.
If you want to store MySQL change logs or other data sources in Kafka for Flink processing, it’s recommended that you use Canal or Debezium to collect data source change logs. Flink 1.11 can parse these tools’ change logs. You don’t need to implement an additional parser.
TiDB as data source
TiCDC is TiDB’s change data capture framework. It’s an open-source feature that replicates TiDB’s incremental changes to downstream platforms. You can use it to output TiDB change data to the message queue, and then Flink can extract it.
TiCDC outputs TiDB’s incremental changes to Flink
In TiDB 4.0.8, you can connect TiDB to Flink through the TiCDC Open Protocol. In later versions, TiCDC will support the canal-json output format for Flink’s use.
Case studies
Now that we’ve got a basic understanding of the Flink + TiDB architecture, let’s look at some real-world case studies. You might find them inspiring for your own work.
Xiaohongshu is a popular social media and e-commerce platform in China. The Xiaohongshu app allows users to post and share product reviews, travel blogs, and lifestyle stories via short videos and photos. By July 2019, it had over 300 million registered users. In a previous post, a Xiaohongshu engineer discussed why the company chose TiDB and how TiDB’s real-time HTAP capabilities helped manage their data.
In Xiaohongshu’s application architecture, Flink obtains data from TiDB and aggregates data in TiDB. As the following diagram shows:
In the upper left corner, the online application tables perform OLTP tasks.
The TiCDC cluster extracts TiDB’s real-time change data and sends change logs to Kafka.
Flink reads change logs from Kafka and performs calculations, such as joining wide tables or aggregation tables.
Flink writes the results to TiDB’s wide table for analytics.
TiCDC outputs TiDB’s incremental changes to Flink
This process is a closed loop based on TiDB. TiDB transfers subsequent analytic tasks’ JOIN operations to Flink and uses stream computing to relieve pressure.
Currently, this solution supports Xiaohongshu’s content review, note label recommendations, and growth audit applications. It meets the challenge of high-throughput online applications and is running stably.
Beike Finance
Beike Finance is the leading consumer real estate financial service provider in China. It uses AI algorithms to efficiently apply multi-dimensional, massive data to enhance users’ product experience and provide them with rich and customized financial services.
Beike’s data services use Flink for real-time calculation of typical dimension table JOIN operations:
Syncer (a tool that replicates data from MySQL to TiDB) collects the dimension table data from the application data source and replicates it to TiDB. Canal collects the binlog of the application data source’s flow table data and stores it in Kafka’s message queues. Flink reads change logs of the flow table in Kafka and performs a stream JOIN . When the dimension table data is needed, Flink searches TiDB. Flink writes the joined wide table into TiDB for data analytical services.
In this process, the primary tables in the data service can be joined in real time. Then, the service team only needs to query a single table. The Beike data team uses this architecture to develop a system that each core application uses. The data service obtains cross-system data. Beike Finance doesn’t need to develop application system APIs or memory aggregation data code.
PatSnap
PatSnap is a global patent search database that integrates 130 million patent data records and 170 million chemical structure data records from 116 countries. Its users can search, browse, translate patents, and generate patent analysis reports.
When PatSnap replaced their original Segment + Redshift architecture with Kinesis + Flink + TiDB, they found that they didn’t need to build an operational data store (ODS) layer.
As a precomputing unit, Flink builds a Flink extract-transform-load (ETL) job for the application. This fully controls data saving rules and customizes the schema; that is, it only cleans the metrics that the application focuses on and writes them into TiDB for analytics and queries.
PatSnap builds three layers on top of TiDB: data warehouse detail (DWD), data warehouse service (DWS), and analytical data store (ADS). These layers serve application statistics and list requirements. They are based on user, tenant, region and application metrics, as well as time windows of minutes or days. The upper application can directly use the constructed data and obtain second-level real-time capability.
PatSnap data analytics platform architecture
After PatSnap adopted the new architecture, they found that:
Inbound data, inbound rules, and computational complexity were greatly reduced.
Queries, updates, and writes were much faster.
Reasonable data layering greatly simplified the TiDB-based real-time data warehouse, and made development, scaling, and maintenance easier.
This solution met requirements for different ad hoc queries, and they didn’t need to wait for Redshift precompilation.
Currently, PatSnap is deploying this architecture to production. They use it for user behavior analysis and tracking and summarizing the overall data on company operations and tenant behavior analysis.
NetEase Games
NetEase Games, affiliated with NetEase, Inc., is a leading provider of self-developed PC-client and mobile games. As one of the seven largest game companies in the world, it has over 250 games in operation, some of which maintain millions of daily active users. In a post last year, they discussed why they chose TiDB over other MySQL-based and NewSQL storage solutions.
In NetEase Games’ billing application architecture:
Flink writes data from the data source to TiDB in real time.
TiDB serves as the analytics data source and the Flink cluster performs real-time stream calculations on the data to generate analytical reports.
NetEase Games has also developed the Flink job management platform to manage the job life cycle.
NetEase Games’ billing architecture
Zhihu
Zhihu, which means “Do you know?” in classical Chinese, is the Quora of China: a question-and-answer website where all kinds of questions are created, answered, edited, and organized by its user community. As China’s biggest knowledge sharing platform, it has over 220 million registered users and 30 million questions with more than 130 million answers on the site.
In a 2019 post, they showed how they kept their query response times at milliseconds levels despite having over 1.3 trillion rows of data. Their 2020 post described how they used TiDB to horizontally scale Hive Metastore to meet their growing business needs.
As a PingCAP partner and an in-depth Flink user, Zhihu developed a TiDB + Flink interactive tool, TiBigData, and contributed it to the open-source community. In this tool:
TiDB is the Flink source for batch replicating data.
TiDB is the Flink sink, implemented based on JDBC.
Flink TiDB Catalog can directly use TiDB tables in Flink SQL. You don’t need to recreate them.
Try Flink + TiDB with Docker Compose
To better understand our solution, and to test it for yourself, we provide a MySQL-Flink-TiDB test environment with Docker Compose in flink-tidb-rdw on GitHub.
After you start Docker Compose, you can write and submit Flink tasks through the Flink SQL client and observe task execution via localhost:8081.
If you are interested in the Flink + TiDB real-time data warehouse or have any questions, you’re welcome to join our community on Slack and send us your feedback. You can also contact me at [email protected] to discuss questions with me.
More articles for your reference
In this post, Xiaohongshu shares why they chose TiDB and how TiDB’s real-time HTAP capabilities help them manage their data.
This post describes HTAP and how TiDB makes the most of the HTAP architecture.
This is the first paper in the industry on the implementation of a distributed real-time HTAP database. | https://medium.com/@pingcap/flink-tidb-a-scale-out-real-time-data-warehouse-for-second-level-analytics-1a1aad49e056 | [] | 2020-11-23 10:26:22.275000+00:00 | ['Data Warehouse', 'Distributed Systems', 'Real Time Analytics'] |
Lucid dreaming – Cancer, Orphans, God Mothers and Girlfriends | The house looked a little different. As you entered, there was a room to the left and an adjoining bathroom to the right in the lobby leading to the drawing and dining room.
The room didn’t have a balcony ahead of it like the drawing and the TV room. You could directly look down at the people entering the building from the gate. Convenient?
That was my room it seemed. But why was I back there? The downstairs neighbour was back in Patna for a while, and the upstairs neighbours seem to have moved out and put the house on rent.
A young girl and her brother seem to now occupy the house on the second floor and the same maid employed by our house now worked both houses.
And then I draw awareness to myself, I’ve had my breasts removed completely. I now sport a curly bob, which is short for ‘a mess’ on my head. I’m in my night suit and almost as if waking up.
The dog was missing. That beautiful, intelligent, attentive but hyper excited Labrador, Marshal. Probably out with the owners of the house. Was this Sunday? Was he at the daycare?
Who knows?
The story begins with a knock at the door. Lo and behold an old lady with four kids ask for shelter from the police. She says they are her grandkids and that their parents wanted her to leave their house so she left but the kids followed. They didn’t have a moment to spare, her’s and four young pairs of eyes stood there pleading. Hush as a ribbon in the wind. And without thinking twice, I let them in.
Yup, dumb and impulsive to help as always.
They scuttle into my room but I tell them ‘Not here! They can see you from the window here…’ and lead them to the TV room. Since the bathroom is attached, it’s easier to keep them contained there. Because clearly, I’ll have a lot of explaining to do once the owner gets home.
It begins to rain outside.
Pour.
Cats and dogs.
I feel weak, and I pass out cold in my bed. I wake up to the sounds in the kitchen and I see the kids running about the rooms and the old lady in the kitchen. ‘…what’s going on here!?…’ I examine and ask half asleep and alarmed.
‘The kids needed food. They were growing impatient. So I had to do something about it.., I was actually just figuring out what is kept where..’ the women explained.
But then I turn to the two rooms at the end of the hallway. Both stood open. I didn’t remember them being left open. The owner of the house always kept them under lock and key?..
So I say ‘ok’ to the lady and then get hold of the kids and I lead them back into the TV room. ‘Wait, some of the trinkets around the drawing and dining room seem to be missing’ I think to myself. ‘Or am I feeling a little out of place and delusional?’…
I’ve always felt delusional in this house. Something about it has always been unsettling. Why am I even back here? Who in their right minds would let me in here? Let alone give me a room in this house!?
That aside, I switch the TV on and ask the kids to stay there, while I lock the door behind myself. I then go over to the kitchen to help the women prepare some food.
I was never a fan of junk food in the house, always kept frozen fruits, natural made ice creams, syrups, yoghurt, muesli, dry fruits and seeds and freshly cut fruits and vegetables in the fridge that could be cooked into a dish or two at a moments notice. I didn’t like serving food out of packets. Personal touches were important to me. But now I see these things missing. Clearly, for whatever reason I’m here, I’ve not been here long enough.
So I step into the kitchen and ask the lady who is looking through cabinets what she is looking for, to which she replies ‘whatever junk food I can find, the kids are quite finicky….’
So I help her look and we find a full stack of Maggie, Doritos chips, some Real apple juice and we pull it out to prep. Put them into small bowls, plates and glasses and head to the TV room to serve the kids.
I see two of the kids take their food and go sit in the drawing-room. So I head out with them. I try to make small talk, asking if they are fine, if they want something with their food and quickly I see the conversation shift from food to their escape (kids really can’t hide things for long I guess?). The boy starts to explain how his parents were really bad to him and the girl echoes that it was why they left. Her parents didn’t let her go to school even, and they made her do all the housework. So escaping them was inevitable.
I clearly don’t have much to say. I pity them, tell them it’ll all be ok, to eat and to put their plates into the kitchen sink once they are done and to get some rest.
I head to my room where I find one of the children, I am surprised to find this little girl, who has a boy cut and is easily mistaken for a little boy there. ‘I just left her in the TV room with her food!’… But nonetheless, I sit by her on my bed and surprisingly enough she too begins to talk without even being nudged.
‘They didn’t want me.. they made me work at home. Running away was better than staying with them. My fathers younger brother tried to assault me too… I couldn’t take it anymore.. so when granny came to our house.. and asked me to go with her... I said did!’
Ok then… I’m summarising the conversation in my head.. seems the old lady asked them to come along.. not that the children left voluntarily?.. I mean sure they had their reasons…
It hit me simultaneously to go check up on the two rooms that were now open.. so I leave her there in my room and go over…
Something is off. Looks like someone went through the cupboards and bathrooms in a hurry.
Now I have my suspicions up about why the old lady was in the kitchen when I initially woke up.. but there is only one last thing to do, talk to the fourth child. Check if the stories match?
He is sitting in the TV room with the old lady, I decide to lure him out with chocolates. With the abundant supply, I keep hidden in my room at all times. And just as I call out for him, the light goes.
Crap.
It's late evening, it's raining outside still and now the house is dark and the kids have nothing to do but huddle together. And just then the old lady declares she is going to sleep and locks herself inside the TV room.
‘I need to find a way to bring the contents from the two rooms into conversation’… all four kids must be between age 7 and 11… not much you can’t get out of them at their age. Unless of course they are professional con artists and I’m fucked, to begin with.
I don’t know what’s in the two rooms, to begin with, but I do know that the owners keep some pooja stuff, some silver god idols somewhere... if someone was looking for things to con, they would probably pocket those along with anything else of value.
So I bring up the conversation about ghosts. And begin to tell the kids that I’m not the owner of this house.. and how in fact I don’t even believe I’m real.. and seeing things shift from their place and if this is all real?..
I mean common, it's a dumb but easy story to sell with the lights out and my missing hair thanks to chemo and removed breast. If nothing, i do look wild. (I chuckle to myself)
I tell the kids they must pray for their safety, and that of their grandmother.. surely God will protect them! If only they had an idol to worship to…
And the little girl pulls out a silver Parvati idol from her pocket and flashes it to me...
My mind goes numb. …fuck.. what did I miss? Why was I stupid enough to let them in? There are too many of them to monitor and control! Is the grandmother even asleep? Well, kids are quite a way to disarm someone!? Anyone could have gotten this wrong, right? And it's raining outside! And it's also the one day Marshal is not home. Damn.
I leave all of them there in the drawing-room, I tell them to pray while I have to go change out of my night-suit and head to my room to find a phone. That one thing I used to be glued to in my past life! Now I can't bother to keep it at arm's length? Or in my line of sight.. well, I need to do something?
The fourth child, a boy who was eating in the TV room now follows me to my room.
‘Great…’ i think to myself, right when I need to do something and need time to focus.. anyhow, what could this child possibly do?
‘You know right? You know we lied?’ Says the child as soon as we’re in the middle of my room...
‘She’s not really our grandmother.. leave alone our godmother…’
‘In fact, I’m tired of all this and I want to go see my parents.. it has been 2 years.. she threatens to kill us, our parents.. but I think she lies to us.’ he says.
This kid is a little too aware and articulate for his age I think.. he must be 9 I think? So I ask him...
‘How old are you?’
‘11?.. no, 12 I think. I know I look younger... I was the first child she abducted..’ he tells me.
My eyes are focused on his in the dark. I can see his face and his frail body from the street light coming through the windows...
I wonder what the time it is? And I turn my face to the windows for a second and I see the owner and his girlfriend enter the front gate.
‘Whyyyy…!?’ I see them enter the gate and come up...
I tell the child to sit still, that I will help him and the other kids out. And I bolt for the door.
I open as soon as I hear a knock. I block the doorway and say ‘hi!’.
I don’t see his girlfriend. I do see her legs and her heels headed upstairs to the second floor.. ‘oh, so she’s the girl who now stays upstairs?’ I think to myself.
Anyhow.
I tell the owner to step out with me for a minute. I tell him to trust me and to follow my lead. I tell him we need to dial the police and to be welcoming of the kids and women inside the house. And to not be alarmed… come, what may.
Fortunately, he knows what I look like when I’m serious and the fact that I always think very quickly on my feet in moments like these.. and that he has no other choice but to find out what’s going on inside for himself, as I don’t have time to explain further!
I tell him that we needed to go look for something to tie the lady or to put her to deep sleep and needed his help diverting their attention.
Of course, he entered as his charming self. (Why was I even surprised?) and he greeted the children sitting in the dark with his phone torchlight, ensuring they knew he was a friend, safe.
He began engaging with them casually, asking about their well being. I head back to my room and the little boy is still in my room.
Why do I feel like he knows what we’re up to? I suspect it and decide to go with my gut. It tells me that I should tell this kid.
‘We’re going to try to help you… Just as soon as I can find my phone…’ I say struggling in the dark.
‘It's with her.. that’s the first thing she goes for. This light out too was planned. Today the light won't come back for another few hours on I think.”
I’m stunned. They are used to this routine I guess? Oh ok, so going on my hunch I ask the child ‘Any chance you can help me find something to put her to sleep?’
And to my surprise, he pulls out a small veil from his torn short’s pocket.
‘We put most of this on your pillow when we entered the house.. it was my duty.. but I dropped some on the floor so this is all I have left.’
Wow, this was supposed to go a lot more wrong than I had suspected! I seem to have just gotten lucky with waking up when I did and to what I did.
Now, something told me that maybe they had even kept an eye on the house for some time now, waited for a day Marshal was not home. And to my surprise that is exactly what he said next.
“Actually she keeps an eye on houses, especially those on the first floor as they are easy to escape from. And today your dog wasn’t home… and we saw you in this guest bedroom which is usually empty. But we took our chance..”
“Actually, she might have prepped the way down from the TV room, through the balcony by now. No one thinks about people leave while it's raining you see…”
All I can think of while he says this is how much easier I seem to have made their heist (if I may call it that) by actually sending them directly to the TV rooms where the balcony door opens!! Oops.
“Ok, give that bottle to me and go join the others. And wait a minute... I can trust you right?’ I say it and realise what a dumb question that is to ask right now.
The kid nods sideways in the dark and leaves the room. Of course, I understand nothing. These Indian nods make no sense!!
Now I return my gaze to what’s now in my hand. I need to verify if this really is some sort of chloroform but I have no time for that. I find a small cloth and I make a ball out of it and hold it in my hand. This liquid seems lighter than water, maybe if I add it to the cloth right now, it’ll evaporate? Not that I’ve had experience with this?
It's growing darker. We’re losing time.
I head the owner and the kids who are now singing a prayer. I can't help but giggle at the sight and how stupid this tactic is. But I hope they are loud enough to wake up the grandmother.
I go out and take the owners phone and dial the police from my room. And within minutes I come back and tuck it back into his back pocket. Then I gesture to the group to sing louder and move towards the TV room door.
At this point, if the downstairs neighbour was around, she would have come up screaming. But luckily she isn’t here. And just as I think of this, there is a loud banging on the front door.
‘Wait, this is too quick for the police to have arrived?’ The kids go quiet and so does the owner of the house as they turn to the door.
I swiftly move towards the door, the boy moves up behind me and follows me. It's her. The upstairs neighbour aka the girlfriend!
A look of surprise that quickly turns to disgust and then almost settles as anger goes over her face before she realises she’s showing so too many emotions and then makes her expressionless obvious. I guess this is what you call a resting ‘delayed resting bitch face’?
‘What are you doing here? And what charade is this now? Adopting kids now are you?’ She demands to know. And yes those questions sting.
I look down for a second at the boy tugging at my nightshirt. Almost as is wanting me to nod yes to her last question.
‘No, we have guests. And to be honest, I’m not sure why I’m here either. You might as well ask him?’
As soon as I finish the sentence, the owner comes running up to the front door hearing her voice. And takes her outside, shutting the door behind him.
Okay. That was awkward.
I guess it's on me now. I dart back to the TV room’s door. And as I almost reach there I hear it unlatch. ‘Click’...
The cloth and vile are still in my hand. I don’t think I can pour it and shove it to her mouth just yet. And she comes out looking pensive and a little wet.
‘It's getting late, I think the kids and I should leave..’ she exclaims.
‘Oh ok, sure… but how did you get wet?’ I ask her.
‘Did a pipe burst in the bathroom? Or are you feeling unwell? I’m not sure it's a good time, it's raining cats and dogs outside…’ I say. Of course, I was trying to cover my own awareness of the current situation..
“Yes I turned on the shower by mistake.. but I’m fine. We just don’t want to impose... I’m sure the police has left by now..”
I move in closer to her while pouring whatever is left in the bottle onto the small cloth which I think is too small to cover her entire nose but I have absolutely no time to think!
‘No no, it's absolutely fine, do you want me to go fix that shower or get a mop? The kids might slip in the bathroom. Let me get you a mop, it's in the balcony in fact…’ I saw as I close up on her...
And all of a sudden I take the cloth and shove it to her nose. Fuck!!
How long does it take?
Was I supposed to shove this to her nose or her mouth?
Was there enough chloroform?
So many questions and thoughts go running through my head while I’m still stuffing the cloth under her nose.
She seems stunned and remains quiet for almost 5–6 seconds.
And then, the very next moment she falls forward and I barely get out of her way. Her head hits the floor and the three kids begin to scream.
Right then the front door opens and the sound of the police siren approaches the house.
The owner comes in with his girlfriend and he beings to round up the kids while the girlfriend quickly gets a few wire ties from the kitchen and ties down the grandmother’s hands and legs.
Wow, I’m impressed. She thinks on her feet!
The boy who helped me comes to me. ‘Please don’t let them take me. Can you please adopt me? Just say I’m with you, I’ll be out of your hair very quickly..’
I sympathise and tell him I’m sorry but I just can't do it. I don’t know him and I don’t even know myself at the moment either…
The police come into the house with torches. The lady constable rounds up the kids, while the inspector checks up on the grandmother.
‘Yes it's her.. and do we have the boy?’
The lady constable catches hold of the boy who is still staring at me and asks him to move while she confirms it's him.
As the kids and the lady are being moved out of the house the inspector turns to the three of us and says, “You got very lucky. Please check all the valuables in the house. This lady and that boy have been a menace for the last 2–3 years across Delhi NCR…”
“They usually manage to let themselves in on days like this into innocent people’s homes and knock them out cold and rob them blind.”
“Madam, you underwent any operation with anaesthesia recently? Because maybes that’s why you woke up quickly from the chloroform… your body seems to have developed some temporary tolerance to it..” looking at his girlfriend.
She quietly turns her eyes to me while cuddling him.
“Yes. I did.. three in fact..” I responded meeting her gaze and then looking down at my flat chest.
And right then the light comes back on.
“The little boy is quite a menace too.” The inspector continues... “He lures innocent people into a ploy of adoption and then makes with their credit and debit cards in a few days!.. Don’t you dare feel sorry for that bunch. Seems the lady recently abducted some new children to recruit into their operation… nevertheless they will soon be returning to their families.” the inspector continues.
I catch everyone nodding in agreement at this point, including myself, and I snap out and say “Wait! That little girl with a boy cut! She was being assaulted by her father's brother.. hence she went with the lady willingly.. she was not abducted, you might want to look into that.”
Ha, I think to myself... I got that off my chest in time! Imagine what the child might have had to go through if I had missed it!
The inspector nods gives his cap a shake and ask’s the owner to come to the police station to make a statement and to collect whatever trinkets they may find on the children and the lady the next day when it stops raining.
Ok, it's going to be just the three of us.. it hits me. Chills of awkwardness and disgust run down my spine and I make for my room. (So-called)
As soon as I open the bedroom door, I fall into an abyss. What just happened? Where am I?
I wake up.
It seems I had a dream within a dream!!
Now I’m more aware of the fact that I’m sleeping and force myself up by focusing on the sound of the dog barking in my real-life background.
Marshal... I think to myself when I wake up.. oh silly boy.. how much I miss you. My bright, attentive, loving lab... Aw, I guess you’re safe where you are. You have all the love and care you will ever need.
Or maybe I was also thinking of the four kids I left behind in my last life.. the gains and the losses. We cannot compare. We cannot comprehend. And we shouldn’t…
Such is life I guess?
End. | https://medium.com/@balizma/lucid-dreaming-cancer-orphans-god-mothers-and-girlfriends-aa1833e8236a | ['Bhavna Rana'] | 2021-09-09 15:32:20.796000+00:00 | ['Fiction', 'Fiction Writing', 'Narrative', 'Dreams', 'Short Story'] |
Bodegas Matter | The Personal As the daughter of a Bodeguero, bodegas have always played a big part of my life growing up. My parents are immigrants from the Dominican Republic who came to NYC in the late 80s (along with 300,000+ Dominican immigrants who came to the US) and settled in North Jersey.
Like many other immigrant families, bodegas offered my family not only a pathway into the “American Dream” (middle-class-ness), but also a connection to our island and our community.
For me, Dominicans and Bodegas have always gone hand-in-hand, and as gentrification continues to displace and disrupt communities of color in NYC, I want to use the Bodega in Washington Heights as a site for deeper investigation into gentrification and community resistance.
What matters? Bodegas are a space for connection and support, and offer a cultural landing pad and pathway towards social mobility for many immigrant groups. While some might argue that bodegas promote unhealthy and cheap foods in communities of color, the fact is that bodegas have stood strong on corners in underserved and forgotten neighborhoods creating a small life-line to vulnerable communities and create access to culturally specific products and foods. Bodegas are also about more than just food, they are a place where you can find a job, a loan, a plumber, and a honey bun all in one.
The Question
How are bodegas in Washington Heights holding up in the face of gentrification? What can the products being sold tell us how bodegas are adapting and/or resisting gentrification?
The Data There are varying estimates around the number of bodegas in NYC ranging from 10,000 to 12,000. That’s a lot!
I found a cool project where an artist in 2013 mapped out nearly 2000 bodegas throughout NYC by using data from NYS Liquor Authority Office and then verifying through actual humans if the site was in fact a bodega (check out the project here). I am using this user-generated dataset as a starting point to compare and contrast to what’s happening today.
My Idea is to use a combination of google street maps (info + images) and in-person qualitative research to collect and generate new data, while iterating along the process.
Crowdsourcing Information. As someone who didn’t grow up in to NYC, I know I am not an expert on all things Bodegas or The Heights. While I have love for this community, and close relationships with community and folks in the neighborhood, I know I will need experts on my side to guide me and support in this project as collaborators. I will be enlisting a team or “Bodega Brigade”, including myself and some friends from Uptown, to visit a sample size of bodegas to conduct short interviews and collect observational data based on a survey and products being sold.
I’ve developed a community survey to document if the bodega site is still open, if it’s been replaced, who the owners are, how long they’ve been in business, what are their feelings around gentrification and rising rents.
20 responses to IG questions over 24 hours.
So far…With Wenfei’s help, we were able to convert the online data I found from “bodega list” from XML into a shapefile for QGIS. I was able to map out where all the data points exist and isolate Washington Heights.
QGIS Maps: | https://medium.com/data-metrics-and-visualization/bodegas-matter-38e44fda99b | ['Lorena Estrella'] | 2019-11-29 15:18:07.421000+00:00 | ['Mapping', 'Visualization', 'Bodegas', 'Design Process', 'Gentrification'] |
Lessons in Collaboration & Creativity from Thomas Edison | THE IS ACTUALLY ONE OF THE LEAST WELL KNOWN OF ALL FAMOUS PEOPLE, AND MUCH OF WHAT EVERYBODY THINKS THEY KNOW ABOUT HIM IS NO MORE RELIABLE THAN A FAIRY TALE. — KEITH NIER, THOMAS EDISON HISTORIAN
People love building up stories about famous people to legendary status. That’s why we all think that the coldest winter Mark Twain spent was a summer in San Francisco. In reality, studies of his writing indicate that Twain never said it.
On a similar note, it’s difficult to question the epic work ethic of prodigious inventor Thomas Edison. His work has been responsible for thousands of patents and his inventions have had ramifications on how we live and work to this day.
Yet, there is this image of Edison that has long propagated to mythical status around his work. We imagine that he was struck with surges of inspiration and that swell of near-constant ideas was directly correlated to his success as an inventor.
And it turns out that isn’t quite true.
We know because he articulated and captured so many ideas and thoughts into over 3,500 notebooks. A team of researchers at Rutgers has scoured through his notes and discovered very little evidence that proves the electrical confluence of ideas fell from the sky like apples striking Newton’s head, alas, that’s another myth.
After all, Edison did (and, this is true) utter this most famous phrase:
“Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration”
Courtesy of the Edison Papers, Rutgers University
Last week, we chatted with Paul Israel about the work his team at Rutgers has accomplished studying thousands of notebooks Edison accumulated. Today, we dive into some of his notes to explore ways he stayed productive. The themes evident in his notes are relatable and transferable into much of the work we do today, including:
Thinking about the future to imagine how problems can be solved.
Observing the world around you.
Embracing collaboration with fellow colleagues and researchers.
Fostering and embracing creativity.
Drawing inspiration from sketching.
Managing the details of life through lists.
Always Discover
Edison’s penchant for peering into the future was nothing short of remarkable.
Decades before the Wright Brothers completed their first successful flight from Kitty Hawk, Edison was tapping his imagination to map and tinker with ideas about flight in his notepad:
a Paines engine can be so constructed of steel & with hollow magnets . . . and combined with suitable air propelling apparatus wings . . . as to produce a flying machine of extreme lightness and tremendous power.
While he definitely nailed some of his seemingly otherworldly predictions, like the future of flight, he missed a few others. Edison envisioned a world where our books would be plated and printed in copper, mostly because it was more economical.
Regardless, Edison championed thinking about the future and because he took mental risks, he has become a pivotal symbol to innovation — always thinking about how to improve processes or create things that made an impact.
Make Observations
Observation is essential to understanding and creativity. Leonardo da Vinci’s observation of birds in flight inspired drawings for futuristic flying machines. Albert Einstein tried to make sense of theories that were validated by science long after his death.
Edison’s free-flowing imagination was also helped by rigorous observation. He used observational insight to help influence his current projects while balancing other ideas that could potentially be something bigger. On one notebook page he was penciling out diagrams for magnets and printing telegraphy, and a few pages later he was jotting down prognostications on the future of flight.
While working on the phonograph, Edison was shown images from renowned photographer, Eadweard Muybridge. The photos illustrated animals in motion and instantly inspired Edison to think about how those images could be conveyed to people.
Suddenly, the work he was doing with the phonograph created a connection to another project, leading eventually to the kinetoscope and motion picture cameras. In drafts for patents he says, “I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.”
Without Edison’s notebook discoveries by the team at Rutgers, we may never have realized that his observations from a photograph served as the impetus for his work with motion pictures. According to Rutgers professor Reese Jenkins, “If we hadn’t looked at his notebooks and draft caveats,” Jenkins points out, “we’d never know what the original impetus for the idea was.”
Constant Collaboration
If you imagine Edison to be the single most important individual behind his inventions, you’d be mistaken. He was never about individual efforts. Everything about his work was directly connected to other contributors. His success was dependent on their success in the lab.
Long before Steve Jobs had Jonathan Ive, Edison had the vision to pull in the people who could help take ideas to fruition.
He also was known for the ‘midnight lunch’ — an endearing term coined by colleagues who would work on projects late into the night. According to author Sarah Miller Caldicott, Edison would leave the lab around 5 p.m. to have dinner with his family, but would return later to check in on the progress his colleagues. It was then, surrounded by a close-knit group of trusted colleagues and the convivial atmosphere, that collaboration took its most pure and meaningful form in the Edison lab.
At about 9 p.m., Edison would order in food for everyone from a local tavern. For an hour or so, the assembled crew would relax, tell stories, sing songs, and even play music together, before heading back to work until the wee hours of the morning. They connected socially, and created a deeper understanding of each other as people and not just workers. This process of midnight lunch transformed employees into colleagues. It served as the foundation for collaboration in all of Edison’s labs. Through midnight lunch, we see the importance of activities that encourage employees to come together in ways that link work with their social lives. For Edison, midnight lunch was crucially important… creating an environment in which collaboration could thrive. It became a powerful link to Edison’s use of small teams as a driver of innovation success.
Today, the equivalent may be a team putting out an order for late-night pizza while they are working hard on pushing out a release update or finalizing a new product feature.
Edison was always keeping his eyes and ears open, watching what others were doing. When he learned that the competition — in one case, Alexander Graham Bell — was nearing completion of a phonograph, Edison called a confab and his closest colleagues and contributors came to a three-day session to help solve the challenge.
The lessons that Edison can teach us about collaboration are vital and very applicable in today’s work world. Many of the following points were integral to Edison keeping forward momentum on his projects:
Tapping the knowledge of colleagues working in small teams.
Expecting everyone to have equal weight in the lab and share in all active discussions.
Emphasizing the process of discovery and learning over simply producing.
Edison understood that collaboration influences knowledge, which in turn creates tangible assets that can be configured and reconfigured for future projects and inventions.
Ideas & Creativity
Embracing his team’s creativity was a huge asset for Edison. In fact, he encouraged them to contribute ideas, jot down ideas, and sketch out diagrams. The best ideas from his experimenters were identified and developed — keeping creation at a group level rather than favoring individuals.
According to historian Greg Fields, Edison’s keen insight into the creative process was what set his work apart from the rest.
“One of Edison’s greatest overlooked talents was his ability to assemble teams and set up an organizational structure that fostered many people’s creativity,” Fields says.
Draw Your Ideas
Many of Edison’s inventions involved a complex menagerie of parts, machinery, and electrical wizardry. Edison relied heavily on drawings and sketches to help map things out and manage complex concepts in his inventions. They also helped out when it came time to filing for patents.
Courtesy of the Edison Papers, Rutgers University
As Edison pursued the advancement of electricity, his notes and drawings for work on the electric light grew so big they required their own notebook.
Today, there are many scientific links to the power of doodling out ideas by drawing, again showing how well Edison presaged modern productivity methods.
Manage the Things to be Done
And then, of course, there’s one of the world’s most famous to-do lists.
Edison isn’t quite considered the father of the to-do list. But, his lists — especially the four-page ‘things doing and to be done” he created in 1888, established an important system of managing and tracking all the projects he had going on during the opening of his West Orange laboratory and the projects he planned to start.
In the span of a few notebook pages Edison penciled in work he wanted to manage for the cotton picker, the electric piano, ink for the blind, the phonograph, and a chalk battery. While he certainly didn’t complete everything on this massive list, it represented the opportunity to get ideas at many different stages committed to paper.
Courtesy of the Edison Papers, Rutgers University
“He did keep a very careful record of the experimental work. At West Orange, every project was assigned a number. At all of his laboratories, you can find account records and experimental records. He was managing costs, figuring out where things might start to get too expensive,” said Paul Israel.
Courtesy of the Edison Papers, Rutgers University
As we go about our busy days, trying to manage a barrage of media inputs, organize our thoughts, and create our own legacies, the methods of Thomas Edison can serve as a template. They are also a powerful reminder of the power of systematic thinking, teamwork, and, above all, note-taking.
Are you using any of these in your note-taking? If so, Edison would surely be proud. Share your tips and advice for the Evernote community in the comments or on Twitter with #takenote. | https://medium.com/taking-note/lessons-in-collaboration-creativity-from-thomas-edison-598fcf232fa0 | [] | 2017-06-25 17:17:50.977000+00:00 | ['Collaboration', 'Creativity', 'Notetaking', 'Innovation', 'Thomas Edison'] |
The Hero’s Journey- Part 3: The Road Home | Being on a Hero’s Journey is an adventure, an encounter into the unknown. With great risk comes the opportunity for great reward. But what if the journey you are on isn’t into the great unknown? What if the journey is actually into the past, present and future of your school? This is the final of a three-part series.
Photo by BRUNO CERVERA on Unsplash
Out of ashes our heroes emerge, battle worn but with a sense of victory. The team has learned from their mentor, has fine tuned skills to take home and holds a plan for action. There is confidence, fiercely earned amongst our heroes. In order for our heroes to return back to the real world, Campbell tells us that a moment of pause is necessary. Every hurdle takes a toll on our heroes. Our heroes remain humble and cautious for there is still a road yet to be travelled.
Photo by Alessio Lin on Unsplash
Our heroes, arm themselves with the right type of questions they will need to take the road home. Those they left behind or are yet to join our school, will need signs that our heroes are in fact leading the collective towards their common goal. Schools exploring such changes have explored such How Might We… questions as;
How might we develop effective, agentic PYP leadership at our schools? How might we be co-learners with our students through inquiry? How might we support the learning community in understanding agency? How might we help get technologists to talk to teachers and teachers to talk to technologists? How might we better engage our parents with what we really do in our classrooms? How might we create mental space for teachers to get reengaged and experiment, be free to be more creative? How might we help parents understand that how we teach their kids needs to change? How might we help teachers to redefine their role as learners?
These questions allow teams for teachers, leaders, students, parents and board members to explore possible unimagined solutions.
An ambush on our confident heroes!
Our heroes, so very close to home, are hit with a surprise attack. Lurking in the shadows with an unseen challenge. The confidence of having a solid question is only part way to finding the solution. It feels like being back at the beginning, immersing yet again in new research, and seeking insights from the broader community. Our heroes, perhaps for the first time, realize their journey is a creative process. It is revealed that the perfect circle of the Hero’s Journey was not the most accurate image to guide our adventurers after all.
Photo by Ricardo Viana on Unsplash
Our heroes may have been surprised initially but they regained their footing. Their collective years of inquiry teaching and learning with some of the youngest learners has prepared them for this moment.
They are teachers who may be perfectionists, but they have lived it day in day out in their classrooms back home. They have developed the ability to not fear failure and embrace a culture of critique.
The prototyping spirit asks our heroes to hold their ideas lightly. To take this to the next level of change, they will have to allow it to take on a form not previously seen or imagined.
The playful spirit and practice helps our hero’s create, test, fail and repeat. This enables them to see their solutions evolve quickly and cheaply. In a time precious places like schools, this agility helps unburden the stress and fear of failure.
So what does this mean for our schools transitioning, being verified or evaluated?
Seeing the process as a journey may assist the type of buy-in and shared commitment needed. To help avoid the, “here we go again,” mentality, a spirit of adventure will go a long way. The process of accreditation or evaluation is best viewed as an ongoing process but as we have seen, not as a cycle. It is messy and chaotic with peaks and valleys, friends and foes; but always an adventure.
What are the lessons from the Hero’s Journey that will help?
Take the call to adventure – It’s worth it
Take a guide – They are on your side and can equip you with the tools you’ll need
Take a moment to breath – You’ll need time to pause, reflect and reset
Don’t be a lone hero — Be a team
Don’t trust what you think you know — Test assumptions
Don’t think you’ll get it right the first time — Embrace failure
Find your haystack. Design your thinking.
You can catch up on the series here. | https://medium.com/notosh/the-heros-journey-part-3-the-road-home-eb73b0dcc89b | ['Geraldine De Fazio'] | 2019-05-31 15:07:46.828000+00:00 | ['Change Management', 'Leadership', 'Design Thinking', 'The Heros Journey', 'Education'] |
How to speed up data labelling with feature vectors | Large datasets contain loads of valuable information, but you can only use it for supervised learning when all data is labelled. Unfortunately, as you know, labelling can be tedious and slow work. It is not exactly our cup of tea and probably will not be yours either. So, let us speed up the labelling process.
Semi-structured data
At Intrador’s, weakly-labelled data from multiple sources continuously flows into our internal data-enrichment solution. We process thousands of resources per hour and our dataset consists of merely semi-structured data in the form of millions of images of various machines, from tractors and trucks to aircraft and dozers. There is more than just variation in machine type, as some pictures show only machine parts, such as tires, fronts, cabins or the like. It is essential to quickly label those diverse components to keep our dataset clean and optimally useful.
However, we cannot use pre-trained labelling models with standard-specific labels, plus we do not want to train a new one on our company-specific labels, because it would already take far too much time to even prepare for that approach. Luckily, we do not have to.
Intrador’s solution
Instead of training a deep learning machine on company-specific labels, we speed up the process by actively applying predictions during data labelling. More specifically, we use a feature vector to guide the labeller with an analysis of relevance and label suggestions.
The first step is to connect a feature vector to each image. It provides an intermediate representation that can function as direct input by various classification models. Meaning, there is no need to feature the image via convolutional filters in a neural network or such. The feature vector helps training algorithms to screen, filter and structure data quickly.
TensorFlow Hub
We use a pre-trained feature vector instead of training a new one. It saves time and, fortunately, there are good ones available if you know where to look. Well, we perceive that the best place to find such a model is TensorFlow Hub, the self-proclaimed library for the publication, discovery and consumption of reusable parts of machine learning models. It is an excellent open-source initiative.
The right vector
As Big Transfer (BiT) is pre-trained to classify images in large supervised datasets, a BiT set feature vector is an obvious choice. Usually, you use BiT to sort images following the 21,000 ImageNet classes. It often functions as a basic model for transfer learning. We, on the other hand, take it a step back so we can move forward faster: we will directly organise our data with the feature vector’s information.
Note that a Big Transfer feature vector is not the only right fit. Our way to accelerate the labelling process can be executed with any feature vector. Of course, performance depends on the problem you want to solve and the relevance of the chosen feature vector.
Big Transfer M
To optimise calculation speed despite the many dataset images, we use the Big Transfer M-model with the smallest ResNet, the BiT-M R50x1 model. Like all other M-models, it is pre-trained on ImageNet-21k (or Full ImageNet, Fall 2011 release if you prefer). The addition ‘21k’ represents the 21,843 classes on which the model is pre-trained. In comparison, a BiT-s model is trained on the 1k version of ImageNet and therefore identifies only 1,000 classes.
Like all other TensorFlow Hub models, this model is easy to load:
We are running TensorFlow 2.3, to install run ‘pip install -U tensorflow==2.3’
import tensorflow_hub as hub
import tensorflow as tf from PIL import Image
from io import BytesIO
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import requests
Download and load with one command:
module = hub.KerasLayer("https://tfhub.dev/google/bit/m-r50x1/1")
Predicting data
Before starting to predict on the data, we load the existing data. Use our two helper functions to gather image data from an image URL:
def url_to_image(url):
response = requests.get(url)
img = Image.open(BytesIO(response.content))
img = img.resize((256,256))
return img def preprocess_image(image):
img = tf.keras.preprocessing.image.img_to_array(image) / 255
return tf.image.convert_image_dtype(img, dtype=tf.float32)
urls = [
...
]
labels = [
...
]
images = [url_to_image(url) for url in urls]
input_tensor = [preprocess_image(image) for image in images]
Note that the model page of TransferFlow Hub describes the input data to be following the common image input conventions, meaning a signature that takes images as input, accepts them as a dense 4-D tensor of d-type float32 and shape [batch_size, height, width, 3], whose elements are RGB-colour values of pixels normalized to the range [0, 1].
Now, run the module function over the input_tensor to predict the feature vectors:
feature_vectors = module(input_tensor).numpy()
By running the NumPy function, the tensor returns a NumPy array, meaning that we again have organised data we can use for further computation.
Using the feature vector
At this point, a feature vector per image describes the contents of its corresponding picture. We use the vectors to compare the contents of the photos and to detect similarities between them. Best part? We do not even have to train a deep learning model that takes the pixel values as input ourselves. And because the feature vector has size 2048 also more basic machine learning models can calculate any difference and similarity.
To illustrate the effectiveness of this high dimensional vector, we look at its two-dimensional representation with the use of dimensionality reduction algorithms such as PCA and TSNE. We see the groups of image labels reappear as clusters. Note that the feature representation of cars and planes are more distinct than cars and their tires. | https://medium.com/intrador/how-to-speed-up-data-labelling-with-feature-vectors-a80126c9d459 | ['Erwin Van Duijnhoven'] | 2020-10-09 14:22:32.150000+00:00 | ['Tensorflow Hub', 'Image Classification', 'Active Learning', 'Labelling', 'Feature Vector'] |
How to Read a PR Client’s Mind | How many times have you wished that you could indeed read your client’s mind? Or even better, read the mind of the prospective client? I remember pitching a cruise ship line several years ago. They had called me because I had the relevant experience of just recently having launched a new ship.
After the preliminary niceties, it was decided that I would fly out to Seattle to meet with them to present our initial public relations program. But first, I asked if they had a budget. Their response was the dreaded “zero-based budget” which quite frankly means that although they probably do in fact have a budget, they don’t want to tell us because they have the misbelief that we possibly will bring the budget in for less, and then they will have “saved money.” How foolish.
So, to remove the suspense, I didn’t get the piece of business. Why? Because when the client went to the back page budget and saw the total, he screamed, “On my goodness, this is much higher than our budget.” Now, if the potential client had only told me his budget number I would have been able to create the best public relations program at that budget number. But because I couldn’t read his mind, I came in too high and could never salvage the business.
So, what has this taught me? Here is some insight into what potential clients are thinking:
1. Can I trust her? Remember, it’s the presenter, not the presentation that gets you hired. They want you to look them in the eye and make them believe that if they give you their business, that you can truly help to solve their problems, make them richer, sell more product, whatever.
2. Will she be there when I need her? Back in the day, I remember a noted PR firm having mandated that their staff wear pagers even when they went to the bathroom. Today, with everyone’s mania about not going anywhere without their cellphones, the need for a mandate has been eliminated. Clients want to know that they can reach you anytime and anywhere. Yup, I know, that can mean nights and weekends, but if your client has a sudden crises, like a cruise ship fire off the coast of Alaska, they want to make sure that their team is there for them.
3. Will she be the monitor of my money? OK, so you developed a suggested budget but things happen during the implementation of a public relations program whereby you may need to spend additional monies. Don’t be an idiot and spend big money without getting client buy-in. I have never had a client tell me “no” I can’t spend that unanticipated money. I have only seen clients go ballistic when huge, unanticipated expenses come through.
4. Will she make me look like a hero to my boss? Everyone has a boss, even the CEO who just may happen to report to his shareholders. So, when you are hired it is your job to make him look good; to make his superiors believe that hiring a PR firm was a good and meaningful corporate spend. | https://medium.com/@tjsacks/how-to-read-a-pr-clients-mind-dad00c6b4991 | ['T.J. Sacks'] | 2020-12-07 16:20:02.446000+00:00 | ['Clients', 'Public Relations', 'Budget', 'Client Relationship', 'Trust'] |
The Importance of Financial Independence in Women Empowerment | In the words of India’s first and only Nobel Laureate for Economics, Amartya Sen, “Empowering women is key to building a future we want.” The patriarchy of economics takes place around us to such an extent that often we barely even notice its inherent sexism, let alone question it. How many ‘funny’ WhatsApp forwards and magazine jokes do we come across daily that stereotype wives as the spendthrifts? How many jewelry ads and movie clips do we see that paint a picture of women flocking at showrooms, while their husbands, who always pay the bill, sigh in the background? And even if someone does question this internalized dynamic of finance being a predominantly male domain, how often are we fed excuses of so-called ‘balance of power’ in the family.
According to an article from ‘Outlook India’, “Today, only 64% of women globally have access to an account in a financial institution, compared to about 71% of men.” Another article published in ‘The Hindu’, examined this statistic within India and said this, “The 2018 report by the World Economic Forum shows a 66% gender gap in India, in terms of economic participation.” In a country that claims to worship women and prioritize their empowerment, we seem to lag embarrassingly far behind the global average.
But let alone the vision for financial independence, even financial literacy is still a major work in progress, world wide. A quote from an interview published in the ‘Business Today’ journal goes as follows, “Data from the 2017 Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center study on the gender gap in financial literacy showed that only 20% of women understood financial concepts (a lag of 8% compared to men). The gap was wider in more developed countries where the overall financial literacy was high. For example, 70% of women in Canada are financially literate but lag men by 17%.”
Financial literacy and independence among women comes as an essential issue to be addressed in the struggle for gender equality because it doesn’t just affect the women who are put in a position of permanent dependence and lack of self-actualization or self-stability but it also affects the women who do actually earn their own living and are economically independent. These statistics clearly indicate the dire lack of participation of women in the economy. How can we hope to reduce the gender gap and break that glass ceiling if we allow half our population to be represented in such small numbers?
This kind of minimal engagement with finances is especially seen in investments. Investing, whether it be specific schemes in banks, government bonds, chit funds, or even the stock market, continues to be one among the most male-dominated fields in the world. This kind of demographic not only lays the base for large-scale corporate sexual harassment, but it also feeds into patriarchal notions about women being incapable when it comes to investing and financial management. Sallie Krawcheck, CEO of Ellevest, an investment platform that promotes investment among women, had this to say in an interview,
“We blamed women for it for so long. Women didn’t invest as much as men, therefore the reason is that women are risk-averse. There are many articles on it, it is absolutely orthodox…… We are socialized that we are not good with money, that we have to be careful, and that financial planning is difficult- we’re told money is beyond us. Being bad with money is still viewed as a female characteristic…..If we can’t talk about money, how do you know what raise to ask for? How do you know what to invest?”
The problem becomes even graver when we look at the possible repercussions on the lives of financially dependent women when they are put in adverse situations such as divorce, abusive relationships, or the death of the male breadwinner of the family. How does a woman who had hitherto no knowledge of finance be able to support herself and avoid being taken advantage of by commission-seeking financial agents? Statistically, the life expectancy of a woman is far more than that of a man. Then how do we justify the lack of financial literacy and planning or the meager pension schemes meted out for women in the highly-likely event of their having to take care of themselves?
The struggle for economic security and equal opportunity for women is a continuous struggle worldwide, and India in particular has a very long way to go in this regard. The need for it is present in the everyday phrase that women are most often put in a position of using when faced with a financial enquiry or situation, “I’ll have to as my father/husband/son about it.” As Michelle Obama once said, “Every girl, no matter where she lives, deserves the opportunity to develop the promise inside of her.”
Links for articles and interview citations listed below:-
https://www.outlookindia.com/outlookmoney/finance/financially-independent-women-create-an-evolved-and-equitable-society-4471
https://www.thehindu.com/business/why-women-need-financial-planning/article29865628.ece
https://journal.businesstoday.org/bt-online/2019/the-era-of-womens-financial-independence
Pictures from Unsplash | https://medium.com/youth-tamil-nadu/the-importance-of-financial-independence-in-women-empowerment-78fe3e821172 | ['Hima Mouli'] | 2020-12-25 13:28:09.534000+00:00 | ['Women Empowerment', 'Social Change', 'Economics', 'Financial Inclusion'] |
A Piece Torn Out: On Jeff Sharlet’s “This Brilliant Darkness” | Jeff Sharlet This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers. New York: Norton and Company, 2020.
Jeff Sharlet’s This Brilliant Darkness began on Instagram, with a square for an image and only so much text. It began on Instagram because where does one find a place for another kind of thing? Not the combination of words and text, in themselves (that’s been done since there were photographs), but of a shift: in an approach, a career, a life.
I remember reading about Mary Mazur several years ago, shortly after Jeff got to know her, leaned in, took a breath, and made me love her, free as a fish in the aisles of Wal-Mart, midnight, her $50 government gift card a ticket to possibilities undetermined. And his summary: “Here — with a thousand constraints — she sets the terms.” I’m not one to gush over “the sentence,” but I know when a sentence changes me. Not in an altar-call-come-to-Jesus sort of way, but just in the way that you might assume that a thing, once you return to it often enough, has probably changed you. Why? and To what ends? are still as mysterious to me as the moon.
Mary spent her $50 government gift card on an aquarium and 10 fish, which all died because she couldn’t afford the food. She kept them anyways. And those fish — the colors! — slowly warmed to room temperature, just like the frozen seafood she allows to slowly thaw in her bathtub until it’s soft enough to eat. You see, she’d gone in search of a microwave, but the colors! There are things more precious than hot food.
This Brilliant Darkness is a knowing heir to Walker Evans’ and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1938). These are books that stare, unflinchingly, into misery — the wretched churn — and make something beautiful of another’s suffering. They are, moreover, both books of the night: Sharlet, pecking at a laptop after midnight at a local Dunkin Donuts; Agee, furiously scribbling his Alabama fever dream until dawn, his Southern princely elegance revealing itself as desperation strung together with semicolons endless as stars buckling the darkness together page on page world without end amen.
Agee (Agee tells us and then tells us again) was consumed with his incapacity to tell the story, the full story, the totality of the awfulness of the Alabama sharecroppers’ lives, the impossibility of conveying the simultaneity of it all, the malarial water, putrid in the morning, and her face — that face he imagined lying next to him after the orgy, in bed, that thin mattress and the lice — and their rags and the sum of their nothing at all and how the water was still rancid after the cotton sacks bent their backs and the smells were thick like air; but all he had was one word after another and he was only there for part of a summer, after all, and can you imagine it is like this month on month, year on year on year, life on life and the water was rancid and the mud and the lice and the cold and a semicolon;
Agee’s book might be called a failure on its own terms; it’s too consumed with the constraints of the premise of a book itself. Not so with Sharlet. Sharlet gives us only the duration of a snapshot: metaphorically, literally. Often one photograph and a few hundred words — a glimpse/exchange/response. Sharlet isn’t consumed by the partiality. That partiality — the frame, the moment — only exists because something was shared. Until we get more: Charley “Africa” Keunang, killed by the LAPD on Skid Row. We get some 60 pages and, like Agee, know that it’s hardly enough. Still, I want Agee to hear the painful grace of Sharlet’s words: “… and there’s nothing we can do now about the choices that aren’t offered.” This, too, is the terror of the utter ordinariness of another’s life — or their suffering, and is there a difference? Not between life and suffering but between their suffering and my own?
Agee seems not to contemplate this question. He would never be a sharecropper, but he wants you to not look away, to see the ordinary awfulness that can’t be his. The lives and stories in This Brilliant Darkness are closer, the possibility nearer at hand. A former nurse now working a night shift at Dunkin Donuts in order to raise her child during the day; a vet: gentle, shriveled. Because Sharlet eventually lets it slip: his daughter. And I get it: my own daughters; my son. This world of glass. “It could be yours. It’s mine.”
Those who know Sharlet’s other books (The Family; Sweet Heaven When I Die; Radiant Truths) will find moments that feel familiar. The long-form pieces on Russia and Mary Mazur might already be familiar. But I found his style here to be new by comparison. Gone, for the most part, are the lucid descriptive metaphors (i.e., of Doc Boggs’ singing like “a thick-necked tomcat with a broken paw”). And while some passages reflect the shimmer of Agee’s brilliance — “the clutter of our thin plane, the emptiness above,” this is a terse book; the glimpses are heavy enough.
Upon reading Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, I felt I knew no one in the book so well as I knew Agee. But Sharlet can make me fall in love with any stranger, and he’s generally not a writer preoccupied with himself. He does this only with glimpses, revelations. And yet: the suffering is not equivalent (Sharlet’s and the people he introduces us to), nor does it pretend to be, though it doesn’t always make that fact visible. And yet: there is real pain, his own, here: heart attack, death, loss, fear. Nothing extraordinary, mind you, just the stuff that fills the world. In this sense, Sharlet doesn’t follow Susan Sontag’s rather dim estimation that there is nothing we can know of another’s suffering. Instead, he insists that there is empathy, the imagination that it could — and often should — be otherwise. For him. For them, regardless.
Agee tells that he doesn’t want to write, that he only wants Evans’ pictures. And yet: my copy of his book is 471 pages of text. He says that the pictures are more honest. And yet: he tells us about the production, the manufacturing, of how Evans took those pictures as Agee sat awkwardly in the shade of the Alabama summer, the family waiting for the shadows of their raggedness to be captured. I think Agee realizes, in the end, that pictures won’t do, really, because photographs are too static: focused, cropped, selected, ordered; in other words: contingent, partial, framed. What he wants to give us is visceral: “A piece of the body torn out by the roots.” The terseness of Sharlet’s work shows that he took Agee’s advice to heart.
Also by contrast, Sharlet claims no particular artistic merit to his photographs, which were snapped with his cell phone. He seems less burdened by his assumptions about what a photograph is than was Agee before him. Sharlet doesn’t use his images for what Dennis Tedlock calls “photo-writing” (An Archaeology of Architecture); and his isn’t the elliptical lyricism of Teju Cole’s Blind Spot. Instead, Sharlet’s pictures do what they need to do, which is nothing more than to be what they are: evidence of darkness, yes, but also of the eternal semicolons holding it all together. | https://medium.com/@jason-bruner/a-piece-torn-out-on-jeff-sharlets-this-brilliant-darkness-e7761806ca5d | ['Jason Bruner'] | 2020-11-21 15:45:03.787000+00:00 | ['Book Review', 'Review', 'Books', 'Creative Non Fiction'] |
Beauty, fashion and everything in between!: 5 Instagram Worthy Places In Malaysia | Malaysia occupies parts of the Malay Peninsula and the islands of Borneo. It has a diverse culture with a good mixture of Chinese, Indian, and European influences. Recently, I had the chance to tour the beautiful country of Malaysia and there are a lot of beautiful places worth visiting and definitely deserves a spot on your Instagram feed. Sharing with you 5 of the most Instagrammable places in Malaysia which you need to visit at least once in your life!
Petronas Twin Towers
You have never been to Malaysia if you have not visited these twin skyscrapers. Petronas Twin Towers was recognized as the world’s tallest building from 1998–2004 and still holds the title “tallest twin towers” in the world as of writing. This iconic place is located in the heart of Kuala Lumpur.
How to go to Petronas Twin Towers:
Coming from KLIA2, take the bus going to KL Sentral station which cost MYR12 or take the KLIA Line going to KL Sentral for MYR14. I am a fun of long travel given that I don’t have appointments. I always take the bus and it usually takes 45 minutes from KLIA2 to KL Sentral.
From KL Sentral, buy a ticket going to KLCC from Rapid KL LRT. Board the train going towards Gombak and alight at the 5th stop which is KLCC station. The train journey will be around 10–15 minutes. Look for the exit leading you to KLCC and you will immediately see the tall Petronas Tower as soon as you exit from the station. One way ticket is MYR4.30 The Suria KLCC is a mall directly connected to KLCC station where you can do your shopping and food trip.
Penang
Penang is listed as UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site in 2008. If you want to trace back history, get in touch with nature and be amazed by the breathtaking view, then a visit to Penang is a must! Penang is a state in northwest Malaysia whose main islands include Seberang Perai and Penang Island.
Going to Penang can either be by plane, by bus or by car. My Malaysian friend told me that if you have a Philippine driver’s license, you can rent a car and drive on your own. But be careful because, in Malaysia, it’s right-hand drive. If you are taking the bus, you can either get a ride from KL Sentral or at Terminal Bersepadu Selatan (TBS). The earliest bus leaves at 12:15 AM and will take approximately 4–4.5 hours. The fare is MYR35 or more depending on which bus you are taking. Buses are very comfortable because it can be reclined and only have 3 seats per row (one single and the other side have two seats.) Some bus has WiFi on board but it does not have a USB port for charging. If you want meals on board, WiFi and USB port, you may take Aeroline which departs from Corus Hotel and cost around MYR60.
Penang has two terminals namely Butterworth and Sungai Nibong. If you alight at Butterworth, you will need to take the ferry to go to Georgetown. Bus ending in Sungai Nibong will cross the magnificent Penang Bridge so no need to take the ferry. The ferry ride is roughy MYR2–3 and is a 15-minute journey.
George Town is the capital of Penang where you can see a little bit of everything-beach, tall buildings, colorful temples, and mouth-watering food. From Sungai Nibong, you can board on buses with a signboard of Jetty then tell the driver to drop you off George Town. The fare is around MYR2–3 and travel time is estimated at 10–15 minutes. If you are at Butterworth, George Town should be walking distance after the ferry ride.
Penang is filled with colorful murals that are worth every snap. Murals can be found in streets of George Town and will practically see these masterpieces while exploring the town.
Clan Jetties are part of the Penang Heritage Trail. Originally, there were seven jetties until one was caught in a fire and now only have six remaining. Clan Jetties is also in George Town and is open from 9AM-9PM. These water villages are more than 100 years old. Each Jetty is named after a Chinese clan and Chew Jetty is the most tourist-friendly, has the longest walkway and has a temple worth visiting. Entrance is free but you can help the community by buying some souvenir.
Located on a hilltop at Air Itam, Kek Lok Si is the largest Buddhist temple in Malaysia. The complex has 3 zones and the temple grounds consist of the hill entrance, a souvenir shop food and drinks stall, and turtle pond. Entrance is free!
From George Town, Head towards Komtar Central Station and ride either bus 201, 203, 204 and tell the driver to drop you at Kek Lok Si and walk your way towards the temple. Going up can be tiring but the view and the intricate details of the temple is worth every climb. The fare is MYR2–3 and travel time is about 15–20 minutes.
Known to Malays as Bukit Bendera, Penang Hill is a Hill Resort comprising a group of peaks in Air Itam. From the top, you can see the 360 views of Penang.
How to go to Penang Hill:
From Kek Lok Si, ride bus 204 and alight at Penang Hill which is one station away. The fare should not be more than MYR3 and probably a 5–10 minute bus ride. From Penang Hill station, you will have to take a train via the Funicular Railway which has the steepest tunnel truck in the world. The fare is MYR30 and the ride will take approximately 5–10 minutes to reach the top.
Known to many as the Pink Mosque, Masjid Putra is the principal mosque of Putrajaya. Construction of the mosque started in 1997 and was completed in 2 years. The mosque is surrounded by Putrajaya Lake and is made using rose-tinted granite which gives it a pinkish hue.
Before entering the mosque proper, they will give you a pink robe that you need to wear. Entrance is free as well as the use of robes.
From KL Sentral, buy a ticket from KLIA Transit going to Putrajaya Cyberjaya. It is the second station from KL Sentral and travel time is between 15–20 minutes and the fare is MYR14. From Putrajaya Sentral, ride L15 bus and get off at Masjid Putra. Travel time is around 10–15 minutes. You will need to purchase the Putra Pay card from the bus driver which will give you at least 3 rides around Putrajaya.
A limestone hill located in Gombak, Selangor Malaysia, Batu Caves offers a series of caves and cave temples. The most frequented spot at Batu Caves is the world’s tallest statue of Murugan, a Hindi deity. The statue is made of 1550 cubic meters of concrete, 250 tonnes of steel bars and 300 liters of gold paint brought in from neighboring Thailand.
Another famous spot is the colorful 272 flight of steps that leads to the Cathedral Cave or Temple Cave. There are 2 other caves at the base of the hill namely Art Gallery Cave and Museum Cave which houses Hindu Statues and paintings.
The entrance fee to Batu Caves is free but if you want to visit the Dark cave, be ready to shell out MYR30 inclusive of a flashlight, helmet, and a tour guide. There is also a mini zoo with a minimal fee.
Be reminded to wear pants and refrain from wearing too revealing clothes as this is a worship place for Buddhist.
From KL Sentral, go to KTM line and buy a ticket going to Batu Caves and alight at Batu Caves, the last station. Journey to Batu Caves will take around 40 minutes and will cost roughly MYR5.
China Town has always been known for its cheap products, authentic Chinese dishes, and the interesting world of the Chinese community. And China Town in Malaysia is no exemption.
Bursting with life and colors, China Town offers a wide array of products ranging from fashion pieces, accessories, toys, kitchenware and a lot more! Petaling Street is known as the fashion street while Central market has established itself as an art haven where local artists sell their masterpieces and crafts.
Legit Chinese cuisines are almost everywhere so those on diet might find it difficult to resist the urge to go on a food trip.
From KL Sentral take the Rapid KL LRT and head towards Gombak. Go down at Pasar Seni station which is only 1 station away from KL Sentral and will cost roughly MYR2–3 and you should be in China Town in 5–10 minutes. | https://medium.com/@iampinkikay/beauty-fashion-and-everything-in-between-5-instagram-worthy-places-in-malaysia-682691d507dc | ['Paula Cabildo'] | 2020-03-07 23:28:53.309000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Petronas Twin Towers', 'Malaysia', 'Travel Tips', 'Traveling'] |
Retailers: Are Your Customers Shopping Around? | There can be few industries where the need to understand, respond to, and even anticipate consumer behavior is more important than retail. And consumer behavior is changing in unprecedented ways, during the global pandemic.
In a new paper I have written for Mythos Group I consider the importance of understanding the dynamics of consumer behavior as one of five key factors for future retail success, post-COVID-19:
1. Employee and Customer Safety
2. Corporate Restructuring
3. Transition to Digital
4. Supply Chain Resiliency
5. Understanding Consumer Behavior
Understanding Consumer Behavior In Lockdown And Beyond
As COVID-19 related restrictions begin to lift, and pockets of spending return, consumer behavior continues to be driven by new personal circumstances, such as changes in discretionary income, leisure time, and reconsidered values and priorities.
Retail consumer shopping behavior and priorities are evolving and are highly unlikely to snap back to what they were before. By carefully listening to their consumers, retailers can ensure they thrive in the new normal.
Some key behavioral changes to be considered include:
Embracing Digital Commerce And Omnichannel Convenience: With the lockdowns, shuttered stores, and coronavirus related health concerns, many more consumers have embraced digital commerce. Consumers are leveraging the benefits omnichannel has to offer such as contactless payment, multiple touchpoints across platforms and devices, social commerce, virtual consultation, and curbside pickup.
With the lockdowns, shuttered stores, and coronavirus related health concerns, many more consumers have embraced digital commerce. Consumers are leveraging the benefits omnichannel has to offer such as contactless payment, multiple touchpoints across platforms and devices, social commerce, virtual consultation, and curbside pickup. Spending Habits Dictated By Personal Circumstances: With unemployment at an all-time high, consumers’ discretionary spending income has changed, which has influenced their purchasing habits. Consumers are reassessing their priorities, and shopping more consciously — needs vs. wants.
With unemployment at an all-time high, consumers’ discretionary spending income has changed, which has influenced their purchasing habits. Consumers are reassessing their priorities, and shopping more consciously — needs vs. wants. Promoting Local Goods And Products: Consumers are more mindful of what they buy, where they buy, and who they buy from. There is a growing consumer trend to support their local communities; consumers are seeking out goods and essential products from their local markets.
Consumers are more mindful of what they buy, where they buy, and who they buy from. There is a growing consumer trend to support their local communities; consumers are seeking out goods and essential products from their local markets. Shifting Brand Loyalty: Shuttered stores and significant breakdown in the supply chain has forced customers to become more pragmatic. Based on product availability and how the brand is supporting the current crisis, consumers’ brand preferences are changing. As we emerge from the pandemic, these changes may become permanent.
Shuttered stores and significant breakdown in the supply chain has forced customers to become more pragmatic. Based on product availability and how the brand is supporting the current crisis, consumers’ brand preferences are changing. As we emerge from the pandemic, these changes may become permanent. Emphasis On Public Health And Safety: As consumers contemplate where to shop in-store, they are evaluating the emphasis the retailer has put on public health and safety. For example, mandating the use of face masks, providing hand sanitizers, and offering contactless payments and curbside delivery.
Looking To The Future
It would be an understatement to say that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted the retail industry and is reshaping the customer experience. Understanding changing expectations, desires, and behaviors has never been more vital.
Mythos Group’s white paper, Post-COVID-19, Reimagining The Retail Sector, contains more detail on this and other recommendations, and is available to download for free from https://bit.ly/MG-White Papers. | https://medium.com/@mi6uk007/retailers-are-your-customers-shopping-around-b40f70c01717 | ['Amit Patel'] | 2020-09-04 15:43:21.360000+00:00 | ['Post Covid 19 Recovery', 'Consumer Behavior', 'Consumer', 'Retail'] |
Pardon Me While I Blaze Some Trails | #WomenDirect trends on Twitter because of the disproportionate amount of men getting directing gigs. That’s now, in 2020. Now, imagine the year is 1927. In the silent film era and when talkies first began, there were ZERO American women directing films. (French female film director Alice Guy-Blaché is noted as the first female film director and maybe she will inspire my next show, but for now back to trailblazer, Dorothy Arzner.) In her twenty-year, sixteen films, career, Arzner was the only female member of the Directors Guild of America. That’s 20 years of being the only woman in the guild!
Oh man, oh man. Or rather oh woman ,oh woman.
Arzner was an early pioneer during that classic Hollywood time that I so adore. The cars! The quick-witted banter! The hats! And everything looked so cool in black and white. Oh, wait, life was probably in color, just the pictures were in black and white. I don’t know. I wasn’t there.
Anyhow, Dorothy was also an inventor. While she was filming The Wild Party, Arzner used a fishing pole to create what we now know as a boom mic. While Arzner is credited with coming up with that invention, she never took out a patent so someone from a rival studio did. Damn.
Dorothy Arzner with actress, Clara Bow filming, The Wild Party — photo source: Wikimedia commons
Arzner was a lesbian in a time where most people, even in Hollywood, did not embrace such differences so she kept her private life, private. I think it’s pretty kick-ass that she managed to be successful in her career and in her love life. She and choreographer Marion Morgan lived together as a couple for 40 years, until Morgan’s death in 1971. That’s a good run, and by Hollywood standards, a freakin’ miracle.
Gotta love the Arzner.
When I went to work in a studio, I took my pride and made a nice little ball of it and threw it right out the window. -Dorothy Arzner
I’m hopeful about the awareness recent years have brought to the unevenness of things in show biz and everywhere. Stay tuned for more badass women who blazed trails.
The artwork Dorothy Arzner inspired:
Part of all art sale proceeds from my Trailblazing Women series will go to Girls Inc, an organization that advocates on behalf of girls and delivers life-changing programs and experiences.
💌 Sign up for Annie’s monthly newsletter, What I Liked, Wrote & Drew | https://medium.com/cool-awesome-groovy/pardon-me-while-i-blaze-some-trails-ddf84dc4103a | [] | 2020-12-07 17:29:05.890000+00:00 | ['Hollywood', 'LGBTQ', 'Women Empowerment', 'Women', 'Movies'] |
I Exercised 6 Times A Week For Two Months — Here’s What I Learned | Flashback to freezing early last year, and you can imagine how unenthusiastic I was to embark on an eight-week fitness challenge that promised to upend my entire routine. The Deliveroos and Sunday night sofa sessions with three varieties of Lindt that I was using to self-medicate throughout winter were about to be replaced with daily HIIT classes, alcohol abstinence, limited caffeine and virtuous home-cooked meals. But it was too late to back out — a few weeks prior I’d innocently signed up for the F45 Challenge.
For the uninitiated, F45 is a worldwide Australian-born exercise phenomenon that’s spreading like wildfire throughout the UK and Ireland, with studios as far afield as Glasgow, Bath, Bristol, Oxford, all corners of London, and elsewhere, with more set to open this year. (Mark Wahlberg, whose own hardcore workout schedule starts at 2.30am daily, just bought a minority stake in the franchise, so you know it’s serious.) Its USP is its 45-minute circuit classes that combine interval, cardiovascular and strength training to build muscle and fitness. It holds four eight-week challenges a year, which involve training as many times a week as you can manage, while following a meal plan and monitoring your body composition (muscle, fat and more) at the beginning and end. Yeah, it’s a lot.
So why did I sign up? A fitness challenge was high on my goal list for 2019 — I’d never done anything like it and wanted to see how I’d feel, mentally and physically, from sticking to a structured exercise regime. My goal wasn’t to lose weight — if anything, I was keen to put on muscle and spice up my exercise regime while challenging myself. I was stuck in an exercise rut and bored of my unfocused routine — which amounted to a Pilates or kettlebells class here, a 10km run there, a few times a week — and didn’t think it would be much of a sacrifice at a time of year when my social life wouldn’t ordinarily be popping off anyway (I was wrong, but more on that later).
Flash forward to now, just a week after finishing the challenge at F45 Farringdon, the endorphins are settling down and the novelty of being able to guiltlessly sip my favourite gin cocktails is starting to wear off, and I’m in a good position to reflect on what I learned. Whether you’re considering doing the next F45 Challenge or another challenge (like Barry’s Bootcamp’s Face Yourself or Hellweek, the CrossFit Games, or marathon training), or merely looking to hop back on the fitness train for spring, you may find this useful too.
You really do get out what you put in
In a world where everyone’s Instagramming their workouts, and gyms flog their classes with the help of their Herculean superstar trainers’ vast online followings, it’s easy to expect immediate results from the latest fitness trend. I’m as guilty of this as anyone. But the F45 Challenge hammered home the obvious, unglamorous truth: the more sustained effort you expel, the more likely you are to see the outcome you want. The days when I chest-pressed 10kg rather than my safer 8kg were the days I’d leave the studio feeling proudest and most satisfied. “People become braver and push themselves more with weights from week to week,” says Honey Fine, a fitness coach at F45 Farringdon. “They learn that being part of a community allows you to feel comfortable in a safe environment to train, discuss the challenge and their concerns.”
Equally, there’s no getting around the importance of dusting yourself off and trying again when you hit stumbling blocks. “Getting back into the swing of it after a holiday can be tough for people,” Jake Hazell, F45 Farringdon’s studio manager, tells me, and yep, he’s right. In week three, just as I was hitting my stride, I went on a long weekend to Marrakech and everything went out the window (because YOLO and there’s no way I wanted to be That Girl who ruins their boyfriend’s holiday by eschewing the bread basket and leaving him to drink alone). I ditched the meal plan and broke the plan’s no-alcohol rule, and I drank a few other times later on in the challenge and ended up going more overboard than usual because of the novelty of it. While I don’t regret the fun I had (and wouldn’t have done anything differently on holiday), it was tough getting back into the #fitness mindset and annoying knowing I’d undone my progress. The key, though, is picking up where you left off and letting it go. The challenge is hard enough as it is, without the added mental anguish of regretting some fun experiences that can’t be undone.
A support system is surprisingly important
I’m usually an independent exerciser and have no problem motivating myself to work out — the thought of jogging with a friend to “catch up” brings me out in hives — but I seriously underestimated how vital others’ encouragement would be to get me through such a massive lifestyle change. “Team changing, life changing” is the F45 slogan and they’re not just empty words. Complaining about the meals and difficulty of certain classes with the same people each day was cheering. My now-friend Mervet Kagu, with whom I did virtually every class, also describes “the sense of community and support from fellow challengers and the trainers” as her biggest motivation throughout. As someone who usually avoids all eye contact with others at the gym, I surprisingly didn’t mind having to make small talk with fellow challengers at 7am. I was also added to a WhatsApp group headed by the trainer who’d act as my mentor throughout (shout out to Jonah!), which I was grateful for countless times. Once I’d muted it, which I did within five minutes of being added, it was an invaluable source of challenge intel.
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The first two weeks were the hardest for me — the meal plan means no coffee, alcohol or sugar — and on the first day (my first without coffee for at least a decade) I had the worst headache of my life and felt like I was outside my body, looking down on myself. The immediate impact of the cappuccino withdrawal amazed me, but the WhatsApp group told me I wasn’t alone, and I ended up having one of the best sleeps of my life, so it wasn’t all dire.
On top of the support from the Farringdon studio, there was also the global network of F45 studios to get me through. Whatever fitness challenge you’re doing, I’d recommend following others doing the same challenge on social media. Everyone on the F45 Challenge around the world does the same classes each day, and it was helpful looking at others’ versions of the same meals and the classes beforehand. My Instagram feed looked like the inside of a bodybuilder’s kitchen, with all the chicken breasts and protein shakes on the challenge hashtags I was following, and I’d religiously watch the studio’s Instagram Stories for a glimpse of the workout I had to look forward to.
Variety is underrated
While it’s important to be deliberate and consistent in your training, it’s crucial to have diversity within each session (the same goes for healthy eating). The focus of F45’s classes alternates each day: Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are cardio-focused, while Tuesdays and Thursdays are weights-based, and Saturday is a slightly longer class (Hollywood, my favourite) that combines both. Classes are never repeated (and specific exercises are only repeated every now and again) so you never get bored, while recipes on the meal plan aren’t repeated week to week. I realised my diet was extremely lacking in diversity — as a veggie, I leaned heavily towards carbs and wasn’t getting enough protein (I’m now a protein shake addict) — and I was too reliant on caffeine (see: the aforementioned crippling headache). I came away with a cookery book’s worth of recipes that I’ve already been recreating in my post-challenge life.
You have to make sacrifices if you want to see results
Sad but true. Call me a sheep, but I don’t enjoy socialising sober at night when everyone else is drinking. This meant I had to turn down invitations and plans where I knew alcohol would be involved (read: about 80% of them) to stay on track, because I knew I’d be miserable being the boring “healthy” one and having to explain why I wasn’t eating or drinking as normal. (You may find it easier to strike a balance between socialising and a fitness regime, but an all-or-nothing approach sometimes works better for me.) Thus, my social life suffered — badly. During the week I’d spend every evening at the studio, followed by meal prepping for the next day (three meals and two HOMEMADE snacks). Because my fridge is so small I couldn’t make a week’s worth of meals on Sunday like other people. (This being said, I’d never done a weekly online shop before the challenge and it’s a habit I’ll be sticking to because it is, crushingly, cheaper than nightly runs to Tesco Express. My mum was right.)
Fitness apps may have scored a bad rap recently (with critics claiming they’re too number-heavy) but for me, tracking my habits, mood and workouts in the diary section of the F45 Challenge app became a key source of motivation when I was struggling, and I’d eagerly await the “drop” of the following week’s meal plan on Mondays (how’s that for a sorry glimpse into my life?). I stuck to the meal plan pretty staunchly and trained six times a week on average, giving me a huge sense of achievement and satisfaction that I hadn’t felt for ages. It was great having a fitness and nutrition plan laid out for me — it freed up mental space to think about other things.
Nothing’s more important than your mental health
Too much restriction and life admin, I very quickly realised, is terrible for my mental health. In between the alcohol abstinence and nightly meal-prep, there were times when I felt pretty low. Luckily the encouragement from others and the classes themselves were enough to keep me going, but it’s called a “challenge” for a reason: it’s not sustainable long term. A challenge like this (if you’re a fitness fanatic and can afford the hefty £200 a month) is fun, life-enhancing and the health benefits are amazing — by week eight my skin was blemish-free, I felt stronger and I’d shaved a year off my biological age — but it made me realise how much I value alcohol, meals out, and simply doing nothing (that is, not exercising) for my mental health. That being said, I learned you have to get through the lows to properly value the highs — and I’ve already put the dates for the next challenge in my diary. | https://medium.com/@charlenetcrosley14/i-exercised-6-times-a-week-for-two-months-heres-what-i-learned-fab1923a4a03 | [] | 2020-12-08 18:40:26.833000+00:00 | ['Rrr', 'R', 'Nissan Gtr R34'] |
Iteration: How To Move From The Familiar Into The Unknown | What does the path of a vision look like as it mutates from a familiar starting point into a genuinely novel concept? Unless you are part of the creative process, almost 100% of this journey goes unseen. We experience transformative concepts, largely unaware of the immense amount of creative labor that was required to bring them to life. The journeys are hard to recount in full, given the rapid pace, unintuitive, and indirect path that novel concepts take as they chart new territory.
Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau opened the doors of OMA’s design studios in 1995 with the publication of S,M,L,XL, offering rare insights into their creative practices. Soon after, other influential architects, designers, and chefs published equally weighty monographs aimed at exposing the largely unseen, and as a consequence underappreciated, labor of creativity that is required to generate innovative concepts.
The value in these monographs is not in one or two insightful images or passages, but in the overlooked journey that they focus on. Page by page they take the reader on the winding path through the branchings, recombinations, transformations, and dead ends, out of which novel concepts emerge. Vividly illustrating how teams move from initially familiar ideas towards new and previously unimaginable concepts as their journey’s progress. Progress that is illustrated across hundreds of pages, which collectively demonstrate the most important lesson of all: There are no bounded moments of creative genius. Rather, teams are constantly testing small hypotheses to generate new insights. With that information, moving on to the next set of hypotheses, which if successful, collectively evolve into transformative concepts.
The lessons from the monographs extend much further than architecture, design, and cuisine. With consumer behaviors radically shifting, businesses in almost every domain are pressed to reimagine themselves and how they provide value to their customers. Like the architects, designers, and chefs in the monographs pictured above, businesses must navigate through unfamiliar terrain to develop new concepts that better align with the evolving needs, desires, and constraints of their consumers.
We know from experience and decades of research, however, that people systematically underestimate the value of creative perseverance. Outside of a narrow subset of highly innovative organizations, most don’t realize the tremendous amount of labor that goes into developing transformative concepts. As a result, teams often give up before they have generated their best ideas, which emerge through hundreds if not thousands of iterations and permutations. It took Sir. James Dyson, by example, 5,127 attempts to develop the first cyclonic vacuum. This is the norm, not the exception as most of us would like to believe when it comes to developing breakthrough concepts. In other words: innovative ideas rarely spring to life in bounded moments of creative genius, but rather emerge through creative perseverance.
Famed American artist, Chuck Close, describes the labor of creativity this way: “Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work. [With] the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will — through work — bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great idea.” Yet for interesting and evocative things to “grow out of the activity,” it is critical to have a certain degree of creative resilience. Without the capability and willingness to persevere in navigating through the winding and confusing path of innovation, businesses tend to stop short of developing the kinds of products and services that reshape markets and consumer behaviors.
It is now more important than ever to recalibrate our expectations of how transformative concepts are generated. By reframing and developing creative perseverance within the following three areas of our work practices we will be better enabled to generate more interesting and evocative concepts.
Construction Not Search
The notion of “searching” for new concepts is misleading. Transformative concepts that are genuinely novel (i.e., not having previously existed in our imagination or experience) are not out there waiting to be stumbled upon. No matter how hard we search, we will not find them, because the elements that make them up have not yet been brought together. And as hindsight often misleadingly suggests, new associations between ideas are not obvious at the outset of exploration. We only come to know what we are seeking to construct through the process of experimentation and exploration — which is the fundamental paradox of innovation.
So how do you construct the unknown? It starts by shifting our approach to be more experimental. Without a clear path to pursue, we must encourage teams to test hundreds if not thousands of associations between ideas. Rather than searching for something in particular, teams need to expansively survey new opportunity spaces: selecting, transposing, recombining, and transforming ideas as they navigate through it. With every permutation of the evolving concept, teams gain new insights on where to move next and what hypotheses to test. By recalibrating our expectations, we can focus our efforts on constructing novel associations between ideas, rather than endlessly searching for something that does not yet exist.
Generative Guidance Not Failure
“Fail Fast” has become the battle cry of the rapid prototyping movement. While powerful in intent, it is misleading in action when venturing into the unknown. Failure by its very definition occurs when the established criteria for success are not met. It is therefore at odds with the act of exploring for novel associations between ideas. Rather than testing associations with known outcomes, teams explore hypotheses for which outcomes are unknown. Without a clear path to developing innovative concepts, each cycle of hypothesis testing helps the team gain a better sense of the context within which they are exploring and what they are seeking to construct. Dead ends, while frustrating and time-consuming, provide invaluable insights on where not to move and what can be ruled out. Unlike failure that does not move us forward, iteration through progressive hypothesis testing provides us with generative guidance when venturing through the unknown.
Why is making this distinction so important? We know from experience and research that people disproportionally underestimate the value of creative perseverance. As a result, they tend to settle on a few ideas and then obsess about refining them to perfection. Fears that continued exploration will not yield better solutions are often reinforced when the first few attempts lead to dead ends or uninspiring insights. Having “failed fast” in the conventional sense, most teams give up exploration before they have found the most fertile territories to draw ideas from. Shifting our expectations to more accurately align with the reality that it takes hundreds if not thousands of small iterations and permutations, encourages us to keep generating insights — even when the path seems unfertile at first. And let’s face it, failure is demotivating. Thinking about the iterative processes as generative guidance is liberating, because every little step moves us along — even if they are dead ends.
Emergent Not Immediate
Retrospective accounts of how transformative concepts came to life tend to portray them as appearing in bounded moments of insight. This narrative plays into our cultural desire to believe that we are all poised to be struck by creative genius. The reality however is that genuinely novel concepts, like Dyson’s cyclonic vacuum, are emergent. They come to life over thousands of smaller moments of incremental insight — 5,127 in the case of the vacuum — rather than in one or two bounded moments of creative clarity. This is because ideas that do not currently exist in our imaginations or experience require us to construct new frameworks to make sense of them. The more novel a concept is, i.e., being more resistant to fitting with our existing mental models, experiences, and routines, the more work must go into understanding them. Overcoming this resistance is challenging because it requires us to shift our worldviews. And we know from our personal experiences that shifting our pre-conceptions and interpretive frameworks leave us feeling exposed, confused, and frustrated.
So how do you overcome resistance? Rather than asking teams to take one or two giant leaps into the unknown, it is better to recalibrate expectations and encourage them to take hundreds if not thousands of smaller steps. Leaping into the unknown is confusing, and when teams take this approach they tend to retreat to what they are familiar with after a few confusing and disorientating attempts. By embarking on an iterative journey of transposing, recombining, transforming, and deleting ideas, our worldview slowly shifts along the way. As a result, we are better poised to understand and embrace the new assemblage as it emerges. In doing so, teams can successfully move from the highly familiar context that they start in, towards new and transformative territories with confidence and clarity.
If there is one generalizable lesson that can be taken from these monographs, it is the need to build creative resilience into our organizations. For interesting and evocative concepts to emerge from our work, we have to develop the capability and willingness to persevere in incrementally building the creative insights that inspire innovative concepts to emerge. As David Lane and Robert Maxfield state, “the world in which you must act does not sit passively out there waiting to yield up its secrets. Instead, your world is under active construction, you are part of the construction crew — and there [are no] blueprints.” Fostering a culture within your organization that emphasizes and values creative perseverance will allow you to shape emerging consumer demands and behaviors. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/iteration-how-to-move-from-the-familiar-into-the-unknown-c8a7cc108c3a | ['Andreas Hoffbauer'] | 2020-08-26 17:19:17.368000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Innovation', 'Perserverance', 'Hypothesis Testing', 'Iteration'] |
The Watchers | The Watchers
My earliest memory
( Photo by zelle duda on Unsplash)
I remember waking up, I was shivering. Through the bars of my crib, I could see my blanket. It lay on the floor across the room. So did my teddy bear. How did it get there? I was just a baby, and I’d been asleep. Then I saw them.
They stood, quietly. At the foot of my crib, long-fingered bony hands resting motionless on the painted white wood. Their stern, unsmiling faces staring down at me in, disapproving. They wore blue dresses today. The last time, they’d been pink.
Their hair, mousy brown and streaked with silver, was pulled into severe buns at the napes of their necks — their necks, tall and thin, chins up in superiority. The starched collars buttoned up to their throats, ending in slight ruffles.
Why did they stare at me so — unblinking? Had they never seen an infant before? These — these ‘school marms’, almost identical, the three of them. They could have been sisters — and maybe they were. They never spoke. I couldn’t speak — I didn’t know how yet.
I didn’t move — I simply stared back, frozen in fear. Somehow, the thoughts in my mind weren’t those of a one-year-old. They shouldn’t be here, in my room. In the early morning hours. And yet I knew they would come again.
And they did, and every time, I would wake in my crib. Chilled as the air they brought with them. And although nearly four decades have passed, I can still see their gray skin, concaved cheeks, and pinched mouths. I can still remember the cold. | https://medium.com/imperfect-words/the-watchers-72a43da7e83d | ['Edie Tuck'] | 2019-08-29 05:36:27.017000+00:00 | ['Paranormal', 'Supernatural', 'True Story', 'Memories', 'Ghosts'] |
Visualizing Intersections and Overlaps with Python | Venn Diagrams
Let’s start with a simple and very familiar solution, Venn diagrams. I’ll use Matplotlib-Venn for this task.
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib_venn import venn3, venn3_circles
from matplotlib_venn import venn2, venn2_circles
Now let’s load the dataset and prepare the data we want to analyze.
The question we’ll check is, “Which of these best describes your role as a data visualizer in the past year?”.
The answers to this question are distributed in 6 columns, one for each response.
If the respondent selected that answer, the field will have a text. If not, it’ll be empty.
We’ll convert that data to 6 lists containing the indexes of the users that selected each response.
df = pd.read_csv('data/2020/DataVizCensus2020-AnonymizedResponses.csv') nm = 'Which of these best describes your role as a data visualizer in the past year?'
d1 = df[~df[nm].isnull()].index.tolist() # independent
d2 = df[~df[nm+'_1'].isnull()].index.tolist() # organization
d3 = df[~df[nm+'_2'].isnull()].index.tolist() # hobby
d4 = df[~df[nm+'_3'].isnull()].index.tolist() # student
d5 = df[~df[nm+'_4'].isnull()].index.tolist() # teacher
d6 = df[~df[nm+'_5'].isnull()].index.tolist() # passive income
Venn diagrams are straightforward to use and understand.
We need to pass the sets with the key/ids we’ll analyze. If it’s an intersection of two sets, we use Venn2; if it's three sets, we use Venn3.
venn2([set(d1), set(d2)])
plt.show()
Venn Diagram — Image by the author
Great! With Venn Diagrams, we can clearly display that 201 respondents selected A and didn’t select B, 974 selected B and didn’t select A, and 157 selected both.
We can even customize some aspects of the chart.
venn2([set(d1), set(d2)],
set_colors=('#3E64AF', '#3EAF5D'),
set_labels = ('Freelance
Consultant
Independent contractor',
'Position in an organization
with some data
viz job responsibilities'),
alpha=0.75) venn2_circles([set(d1), set(d2)], lw=0.7) plt.show()
Venn Diagram — Image by the author
venn3([set(d1), set(d2), set(d5)],
set_colors=('#3E64AF', '#3EAF5D', '#D74E3B'),
set_labels = ('Freelance
Consultant
Independent contractor',
'Position in an organization
with some data
viz job responsibilities',
'Academic
Teacher'),
alpha=0.75) venn3_circles([set(d1), set(d2), set(d5)], lw=0.7)
plt.show()
Venn Diagram — Image by the author
That’s great, but what if we want to display the overlaps of more than 3 sets?
Well, there are a couple of possibilities. We could use multiple diagrams, for example.
labels = ['Freelance
Consultant
Independent contractor',
'Position in an organization
with some data viz
job responsibilities',
'Non-compensated
data visualization hobbyist',
'Student',
'Academic/Teacher',
'Passive income from
data visualization
related products']
c = ('#3E64AF', '#3EAF5D') # subplot indexes
txt_indexes = [1, 7, 13, 19, 25]
title_indexes = [2, 9, 16, 23, 30]
plot_indexes = [8, 14, 20, 26, 15, 21, 27, 22, 28, 29] # combinations of sets
title_sets = [[set(d1), set(d2)], [set(d2), set(d3)],
[set(d3), set(d4)], [set(d4), set(d5)],
[set(d5), set(d6)]] plot_sets = [[set(d1), set(d3)], [set(d1), set(d4)],
[set(d1), set(d5)], [set(d1), set(d6)],
[set(d2), set(d4)], [set(d2), set(d5)],
[set(d2), set(d6)], [set(d3), set(d5)],
[set(d3), set(d6)], [set(d4), set(d6)]] fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, figsize=(16,16)) # plot texts
for idx, txt_idx in enumerate(txt_indexes):
plt.subplot(6, 6, txt_idx)
plt.text(0.5,0.5,
labels[idx+1],
ha='center', va='center', color='#1F764B')
plt.axis('off') # plot top plots (the ones with a title)
for idx, title_idx in enumerate(title_indexes):
plt.subplot(6, 6, title_idx)
venn2(title_sets[idx], set_colors=c, set_labels = (' ', ' '))
plt.title(labels[idx], fontsize=10, color='#1F4576') # plot the rest of the diagrams
for idx, plot_idx in enumerate(plot_indexes):
plt.subplot(6, 6, plot_idx)
venn2(plot_sets[idx], set_colors=c, set_labels = (' ', ' ')) plt.savefig('venn_matrix.png')
Venn Diagram Matrix — Image by the author
That’s ok, but it didn’t really solve the problem. We can’t tell if there’s someone who selected all answers, nor can we tell the intersection of three sets.
What about a Venn with four circles?
Four circles — Image by the author
Here is where things start to get complicated.
In the above image, there is no intersection for only blue and green. To solve that, we can use ellipses instead of circles.
I’ll use PyVenn for the next example.
from venn import venn sets = {
labels[0]: set(d1),
labels[1]: set(d2),
labels[2]: set(d3),
labels[3]: set(d4)
}
fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, figsize=(16,12))
venn(sets, ax=ax)
plt.legend(labels[:-2], ncol=6)
Venn Diagram — Image by the author
Alright, there it is!
But, we lost a critical encoding in our diagram — the size.
The blue (807) is smaller than the yellow (62), which doesn’t help much in visualizing the data. We can use the legends and the labels to figure what is what, but using a table would be clearer than this.
There are a few implementations of area proportional Venn diagrams that can handle more than three sets, but I couldn’t find any in Python. | https://towardsdatascience.com/visualizing-intersections-and-overlaps-with-python-a6af49c597d9 | ['Thiago Carvalho'] | 2020-12-16 12:46:20.541000+00:00 | ['Data Visualization', 'Python', 'Matplotlib', 'Data Science', 'Editors Pick'] |
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Hire Me on Fiverr :: https://www.fiverr.com/share/PwPkrP | https://medium.com/@zakariyarmamoon7056/i-will-responsive-mailchimp-template-campaign-automation-email-marketing-newsletter-bead5dec009d | [] | 2020-12-21 19:51:59.042000+00:00 | ['Newsletter', 'Email Marketing', 'MailChimp', 'Template'] |
抗疫專家稱疫情比上一波更嚴峻 | A columnist in political development in Greater China region, technology and gadgets, media industry, parenting and other interesting topics. | https://medium.com/@frederickyeung-59743/%E6%8A%97%E7%96%AB%E5%B0%88%E5%AE%B6%E7%A8%B1%E7%96%AB%E6%83%85%E6%AF%94%E4%B8%8A%E4%B8%80%E6%B3%A2%E6%9B%B4%E5%9A%B4%E5%B3%BB-e277a890ed9 | ['C Y S'] | 2020-12-21 02:19:04.221000+00:00 | ['Government', 'Politics', 'Hong Kong', 'China'] |
ByteSize: Setting up with Flask + React Boilerplate | ByteSize: Setting up with Flask + React Boilerplate
Photo by Mirko Blicke on Unsplash
I use Flask and React. A lot.
As I reference setting up an application with them for most of my tutorials, I figured it would be worthwhile to put together a quick instructional for how to get up and running instead of repeating it each time (DRY and all that).
Getting started with React when you’re using Flask can seem a little daunting at first. Between two different package mangers (pip and npm), some customization needed for properly project layout, and a lack of consistent guides, it rarely seems all that straightforward.
I personally use Webpack for my projects, as I find that you don’t have to make as many changes as you do with create-react-app to get setup. If you were interested in learning how to set up with CRA though, Miguel Grinberg has a great tutorial here.
If you were just looking for the code, you can find the repo here | https://medium.com/@spencerporter2/bytesize-getting-to-hello-world-with-flask-react-7548cbf8bfdc | ['Spencer Porter'] | 2020-11-28 00:49:59.956000+00:00 | ['React', 'Programming', 'Python', 'Flask', 'Web Development'] |
What Drives Power Laws in Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital? | Power Law Drivers in Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital
(1) Preferential Attachment
This power law mechanism is commonly expressed in the maxim ‘the rich get richer’. Or if you’re religiously inclined, the Bible says ‘for whoever has, more will be given to them.’
Academics call this phenomenon preferential attachment (or cumulative advantage). It’s when an initial endowment makes subsequent gains more likely. This leads to a privileged position where early wins lead to further benefits that cumulatively add up to an outsized advantage.
I’ve seen this privilege play out in my life in a small way. Getting my first book deal was a low probability event but once that door was open, getting the second, third, and fourth book contracts became more likely.
Preferential attachment isn’t always fair and it contributes to inequalities in the world that I won’t go into here. However, understanding it in the context of entrepreneurship and venture capital can inform strategy.
Preferential attachment in action. Notice how the larger blobs more easily scoop up the smaller ones. Original video here.
We see preferential attachment in entrepreneurship when an ex-Google engineer finds it easier to raise money and recruit talent for their startup because of their pedigree. We also see it in network effects, where each user added to a platform increases the likelihood that other users will flock to it.
Meanwhile in venture capital the best startups preferentially attach to funds which already have success in their portfolio. In other words, success begets more success and as Samir Kaji puts it: “One massive hit is often all it takes to “mint” an investor, regardless of how serendipitous the investment was.”
To benefit from preferential attachment, identify positive feedback loops in your field then look for ways to engineer them to your advantage.
(2) Self-organized Criticality
Despite the unusual name this power law driver is something you’re already familiar with. We see it in ‘overnight success’, which is actually an inaccurate description of something that’s so common in nature that theoretical physicists gave it a technical label 30+ years ago: ‘self-organized criticality’.
This power law mechanism is expressed in snow avalanches, neural networks in the brain, earth quakes, financial market crashes, and even social upheavals. It’s a process where lots of seemingly benign interactions in a complex system can ‘self-organise’ that system to a ‘critical’ state³ such that even the tiniest subsequent input can unexpectedly lead to dramatic change.
A useful analogy here is a pile of rice. If you build one by adding a few grains at a time, most of the grains don’t have much impact. But after a while, adding just one grain of rice can lead to an avalanche.
Video sourced and edited from Andrew Hoffmann
This is similar to overnight success. Except that even though the description suggests instant success from nowhere, most successful people make it only after years of metaphorically adding small grains of rice to a pile of effort.
You can read Sarah’s story here and from this tweet
In startups, getting to product-market-fit is a similar affair. Companies have to iterate continuously until something clicks so that the business can start to scale. Even in later years, those same businesses have to persevere before they can benefit from a step-change in growth.
One example I really like here is that of Microsoft when it was still a startup. In 1980 it secured a landmark contract to supply IBM with an operating system — an event that arguably changed the course of tech history.
However, this event didn’t pop into existence on its own. Lots of prior events had already placed Microsoft at a point of “criticality”. To name but a few:
Bill Gates and Paul Allen had been writing and selling software for almost 10 years already and were well-suited to getting the job done.
Among other reasons IBM had attracted decades of anti-trust investigations against it and to avoid further regulatory scrutiny, it accepted a non-exclusive contract with Microsoft.
The latter point meant that Microsoft was free to sell its software to other computer manufacturers and as PC hardware become commoditised, the business grew without restriction and saw its revenues balloon almost 10x, from $16m in 1981 to $140m in 1985.
Uneventful steps taken frequently can also lead to outsized outcomes in venture capital. Fred Wilson was writing and thinking about bitcoin for years before he met and invested in Coinbase. In fact he met the company because he was willing to persevere through a lengthy office hours session at Y Combinator with 16 startups across 4 hours of back-to-back pitches.
To benefit from self-organized criticality, play the long game and take heed of Seneca’s observation that “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”. Or putting things more poetically:
“Chance can be on our side if we but stir it up with our energies, stay receptive to the glint of opportunity on even a single hair above the underbrush, and continually provoke it by individuality in our attitudes and approach to life.” — James H. Austin in Chase, Chance, and Creativity.
(3) Multiplicative Processes
Power laws also emerge when events are multiplicative instead of additive. One example is word-of-mouth. If you have a fantastic restaurant experience you don’t just tell one other person about it (which would be an additive process). You tell lots of friends who then go on to tell many others too.
Other examples of this process include population growth, the spread of viruses, and rapid wealth accumulation (getting rich through investing is a multiplicative process while building wealth through a salary is additive.)
Multiplicative processes are perhaps the simplest power law generator: a value is multiplied by some variable and the result is further multiplied by another variable. Repeat this process and you get exponential growth.
Viral growth simulation by Grant Sanderson
In startups, hiring a ‘10x employee’ is a multiplicative process. An elite performer can substantially change the trajectory of a business while most hires tend to be additive.⁴ For VCs, blogging is multiplicative networking. Ideas can spread faster online compared to offline 1–2–1 conversations.
To benefit from multiplicative processes, you have to identify and seek out multiplicative factors — much like preferential attachment — then look for ways to engineer them to your advantage. | https://medium.com/venture-capital-research/what-drives-power-laws-in-entrepreneurship-and-venture-capital-51b608f5f203 | [] | 2020-06-22 11:57:30.558000+00:00 | ['Power Law', 'Startup', 'Venture Capital', 'Entrepreneurship', 'VC'] |
Koans as Pointers: Two Monks Roll Up the Blinds | While much has been written about how we cannot understand them intellectually, koans operate on many levels. It is true that the most profound fruit of koan practice can only be tasted in meditative practice and in dokusan with a Zen teacher who has trained with koans. But we can also reflect on koans and harvest some pointers for the Way.
Take Case 26, “Fayen’s Two Monks Roll Up the Blinds,” from Wumen’s Gateless Gate. The central figure, Fayen Wenyi, was a Zen Master who lived and taught in China during the ninth and tenth centuries. For the bulk of his teaching years, he resided at Qingliang Monastery. According to this case, “The great Fayen Wenyi took the high seat before the midday meal to preach to his assembly. Raising his hand he pointed to the bamboo blinds. Two monks went and rolled them up in the same manner. Fayen said, ‘One gains; one loses.’” I like to imagine that as they rolled up the blinds, Fayen saw through the open window a pale moon floating just above the pines.
Fayen saw that there was no difference in the way the monks rolled the blinds, yet he created concepts such as gain and loss out of thin air. Fayen hammered nails into the sky. Still, each monk may have wondered, “which monk am I? Am I the one who gains or the one who loses?” This could have caused quite a crisis for them!
How often do we play such mind-games? As a teacher of high school English, particularly when I was new to the role, how often did I walk away from a lesson and think, “I am quite a good teacher! I really got them involved in the lesson today,” only to walk away from the very next class thinking, “I am such a terrible teacher! My students were obviously bored by the questions I asked!” Which was true?
Each of these senses of self depended on my being a teacher of students. No students, no teacher. And each story I told about myself depended upon my students’ reactions, not on some intrinsic essence in myself. Still, we often trick ourselves into believing in separate, fixed selves when, from the perspective of emptiness, there is no self at all. In an absolute sense, neither monk gains or loses. They are just rolling up blinds. Just this.
When we see that senses of self are only senses of self, they appear as light shows without any real substance, like rainbows made of falling drops of water and angling sunlight. The colors glisten in our eyes, but the rainbow has no essence of its own, like a mirage.
This is Fayen’s invitation: can you too see through gain and loss, winner and loser? Can you see through the rainbow of your self?
In Zen practice, we are invited to see deeply into the great matter of emptiness and form. From the perspective of form, we say that separate things exist. The moon is outside while I am inside. Form, or differentiation, is how we categorize things in the world.
Emptiness, or nonduality, is ironicallly difficult for us to see because we invest great faith in our categorizations of reality. From the perspective of emptiness, things do not exist as separate fixed entities. The moon only glows because of the light of the sun. The moon is stardust. Each being depends on the whole universe to exist and is in fact made of the rest of the universe. Nothing exists separately or independently. The notion of separate existences is an illusion.
This is the insight expressed midway through the Heart Sutra when Avalokiteshvara says to Shariputra, “No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind.” Often the perspective of emptiness is expressed as a negation. As Thich Nhat Hanh explains, there can be no vision without the eye, but there also can be no vision without the object seen and the light refracting off of the object. Vision is not a separate “thing.” In this moment, your vision is made of my words! We cannot explain vision by looking at the eye alone. Thus we can say, “no eye.” There is no separate eye that sees without all the rest of the components of vision, just as there is no self that exists without all of the non-self elements that constitute that self — the air we breathe, the food we eat, the languages we speak, even our ancestors who developed our languages, all of which depend upon the entire universe to exist. So in a very real sense, the “self” is composed of the universe. Dogen famously expressed this insight with his poetic image of the “moon in a dewdrop.” The self is not an isolated being existing inside our little heads. The self is a boundless, dependent arising illuminated by the universe.
To be empty also means that there are no fixed essences anywhere, for everything changes. As Hume, a sneaky Buddhist, illustrates, if perceptions change from moment to moment, there can be no self. What Hume means is that every aspect of the supposed “self” changes from one moment to the next. Sometimes the variation can be quite subtle, so we may not notice the change and therefore think of ourselves as the same person as we were before. But we are not the same person. Hume offers a metaphor from the Ship of Theseus. Imagine a ship traveling across a great ocean, but imagine that the ship stops multiple times along the way to gather food for the next leg of the journey. Each time the ship stops, parts of the ship are replaced. At the first port, the mast and sails are replaced with a similar mast and sails. At the second port, the deck is removed and replaced with new boards. At the third port, many of the boards composing the hull are also removed and replaced, and so forth. By the end of the journey, every board of the ship has been replaced, but for the crew, the ship feels like the same ship. After all, it still has the same name! Our minds and bodies are like the ship of Theseus. The constituent parts — emotions, thoughts, sensory experiences, the cells of our bodies, and even our genes — change over the course of our lives. Were we to place the baby form of ourselves next to our adult selves in the same moment, we would not call the two people the same. So Buddhists say that there is “no self.” There is a person who is becoming, but there is no fixed identity as we often imagine.
When a person practices and touches into the emptiness of forms, it can feel scary. One friend told me that while working with his first koan on retreat in a monastic setting, he began to touch into the groundlessness of our being and became frightened. Rather than pause to acknowledge these feelings, his teacher pushed him, and he felt a hollowness that was so traumatizing that he abandoned Zen. This hollowness was not what we mean by emptiness. But we need to be careful not to push too hard or too fast into recognizing the groundlessness of our being. We can be patient. The lack of intrinsic essence naturally reveals itself to us with time and attention.
Another risk is that when we form ideas about emptiness as a “thing” to be seen, that conception inevitably excludes other aspects of our lives. At the extreme level, one may try to live as a hermit, never using language in the misguided belief that emptiness cannot include any thinking. We can get terribly lost in false ideas of emptiness, where we can be of no benefit and where practice becomes cold, lacking compassion. Rather than caring for those who suffer, we may judge those who suffer as deluded.
While getting lost in emptiness usually is not this dramatic, this kind of attachment to notions of emptiness can become an obstacle. This is why Wumen cautions us in his verse following the case: “When they are rolled up the great sky is bright and clear,/but the great sky still does not match our Way./Why don’t you throw away that sky completely?/Then not a breath of wind will come through.” When the blinds that divide inside from outside, or self and other, are rolled up and put away, the moonlight shines in the dewdrop, and the vastness of our true nature becomes apparent. And, when we finally gain some insight into emptiness, we must then throw away our ideas about emptiness. This is because our understanding of emptiness is not the true, living emptiness, and it will become a hell-cave for us if we are attached to it. We must turn toward forms again to see that emptiness is a dependent arising that does not exist separately from forms. Emptiness is exactly form.
Forms are provisional designations empty of intrinsic essence, but they are not lies. They are “relative truths.” If water is emptiness, forms are the shape of water. To be lost in emptiness means denying the shape water takes as though there were no waves on the ocean. And on a personal level, this often means trying to deny our very human hearts. To be lost in emptiness can mean pretending that grief does not, or should not, arise after we have lost a loved one because “there is no such thing as a separate loved one,” “there is no such thing as grief,” and “to grieve must mean I am deluded and believe in a fixed self where there was none.” Spiritual bypasses deny our human hearts and cause us to repress our feelings, leading to more suffering. Spiritual bypasses can also be shaming. We can blame ourselves for having feelings that we cannot control. We try to cut off these “delusions” with Manjushri’s sword, but this is like cutting an open wound. Our hearts keep hurting even when we give them no home. And ultimately, what we run from controls us. Being attached to false notions of emptiness actually hinders our freedom. “I am empty, so I do not feel sadness.” These conceptions of our “selves” are the opposite of freedom. Freedom is the ability to see what we actually are in any given moment. Though a dependent arising, the moon still shines.
Some years ago, I was divorced, my child was hospitalized multiple times with a life-threatening illness, my mother was hospitalized with Alzheimer’s, my best friend from high school was killed, and one of my high school students committed suicide. A few years later, my mother and father died. Each event fell hard upon the last. My heart filled with dark sadness that sometimes nearly suffocated me. I could find no solid ground on which to stand as so many aspects of my life were stripped away. I felt like a failure in Zen as well, for I could not “Zen my way through” the grief.
Fortunately, my teachers never encouraged me to engage in spiritual bypass. Rather, they simply bore compassionate witness and encouraged me to do the same. They assured me that these painful feelings were not due to a flaw in my practice. Nor was there any fixed self inside of me to take the blame as the “first cause.” Rather, these feelings were the natural result of infinite changing causes and conditions. This was the middle way. My practice, modeled after my teachers’, became bearing witness to what was becoming. And the world rose up to meet me in the form of funerals, hospitals, a lonely apartment, and tears. These were the forms of emptiness. In time, impermanence revealed itself not only as a thief but as a relief. The pain of loss transformed into a new life of shape-shifting joys and sorrows. And I have seen that even pain is without a fixed essence. It waxes and wanes. But the sadness had to be compassionately witnessed to share its wisdom with me.
On the societal level, spiritual bypass is also harmful. It leads to neglect. I had a white student who said that race is nothing but a social construct, so we should just practice not seeing race — a possibility based in privilege. One might call it a spiritual bypass of societal problems. According to the NAACP, African Americans are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites. We can explain countless statistical inequalities like this by arguing that black people are “by nature” worse than white people — a false designation of intrinsic essence — or we can acknowledge that the plight of black people is a dependent arising resulting from a long history of racist policies that have led to unfavorable outcomes for Blacks in America — a dependent arising. Though sometimes painful, bearing witness illuminates how we mutually condition one another’s experiences and inspires us to take action to address injustices and alleviate suffering.
What the seeming polarities of emptiness and form ultimately reveal is a middle way, an embodied realization that though we exist, we do not exist as separate, fixed entities. Moment after moment, we co-create one another.
Believing in a delusion of separateness, Siddhartha’s father tried to sequester Siddhartha behind palace walls where he could not see sickness, old age, and death. He tried to protect Siddhartha from suffering in his kingdom of privilege. But it is impossible to separate ourselves from the world. When Siddhartha lost his innocence and discovered what lay beyond the palace walls, he could no longer hide behind them, for the suffering beings in the world resided in his heart. He instead turned toward suffering in the world and vowed to gain enlightenment for all beings.
On the night of his enlightenment, Buddha faced Mara, who manifested as our human temptations and fears. Buddha’s practice embodied the open-ended question, “what is this?” Rather than believe in the content of his fears, and rather than deny Mara’s existence, Buddha practiced the middle way and simply said, “I see you, Mara.” In bearing witness, Buddha allowed the forms of emptiness to reveal their “suchness,” and Mara’s arrows, neither emptiness nor form, transformed into flower petals. As the morning star arose in the sky, Buddha said, “Together with all beings, I have attained the way.”
Great realization was not the end of Buddha’s journey. In saying he had attained the way together with all beings, Buddha acknowledged that all beings are already saved. All beings are already such, as waves are already water. There are no separate selves anywhere in the universe to save.
Still, Buddha returned to his sangha to enlighten them. This is because even though his sangha mates were Buddhas, they did not realize this. Buddha’s compassion caused him to “throw away the sky,” to throw away attachment to any particular mind-state he might have attained beneath the bodhi tree, so that he could “return to the marketplace” to liberate all beings from suffering.
Buddha was free from attachment to mind-states because “suchness” does not depend on any state of mind. Suchness is all inclusive. Buddha discovered the freedom that does not depend on causes and conditions.
Like the two monks in the koan, Buddha lost and gained. He saw through his sense of having a fixed, separate self, and he gained his freedom, allowing him to return to society to save all beings. Like Buddha, we are called to attain liberation not just for ourselves but for all beings. This is why, in the Mahayana tradition, our practice is to roll up the blinds, behold the empty sky, and throw it away.
The Mahayana tradition is a practice, not just a philosophy. While this essay outlines some of what we may realize, reading is no substitute for practice. To walk the walk, to actually awaken, we need to train with a teacher and sangha. Then these koans really come alive, stone statues dance, and we realize the Buddha Way. | https://mikefieleke.medium.com/koans-as-pointers-two-monks-roll-up-the-blinds-afb7bc5f96fd | ['Michael Fieleke'] | 2019-07-11 04:51:20.117000+00:00 | ['Emptiness', 'Koans', 'Buddhism', 'Zen', 'Nonduality'] |
Has Your Team Harnessed the Power of Healthy Conflict? | It’s pretty natural for business leaders to cringe at the thought of conflict. Management is tough enough without the specter of adding combat to the daily pressures. Yuck. Workdays will be bearable, the thinking goes, if I can just maintain some basic harmony around here.
But there is folly in making harmony a goal. Sure, it can feel right in a certain way. Meetings breeze by. People nod along. You hear short responses like “Yes” and Sure” and “You bet.”
But here is the truth: your people don’t actually agree with each other, at least not as much as they appear to. And often, they don’t agree with you, either. They’re just keeping their disagreement to themselves. That’s because what they are really trying to do is satisfy your need for harmony.
And if you’re honest with yourself, you probably know this already. We’re talking about smart, driven, dedicated people, just like you. You remember when you could see the fire burning in them, the fire you see less often now. Or maybe now, you see that fire only in one-on-one settings, where it periodically erupts in intense bursts.
The people on your team like each other. At least, they seem to, right? But in your heart of hearts, you can tell something is afoot. You can tell that they are bottling up their real beliefs, concerns and aspirations because they are afraid to rock your boat.
In the book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni writes, “When team members do not openly debate and disagree about important ideas, they often turn to back-channel personal attacks, which are far nastier and more harmful than any heated argument over issues.”
Here is what’s your preoccupation with harmony is getting you.
> Disagreement is suppressed, so concerns go unnamed.
> Courageous conversations go un-had.
> Decisions are often made with half-information.
> Systemic ailments typically receive little more than band-aids.
> The most inventive solutions are left on the table for the competition to think up and deploy.
Your team might be plodding along well enough in this manner. But as the world gets crazier, chances are you need more. It’s time to harness positive, healthy conflict to ignite energy, wake up imaginations, and cultivate real trust. You’ll know you’ve done it when the below six dynamics are the rule within your team rather than the exception.
1. Fear of confrontation is checked. You are positively, absolutely certain that neither your nor anyone else’s distaste for confrontation is inadvertently chilling worthwhile debate. You’ve accepted the fact cultivating debate is actually your job. The Good Fight Author Liane Davey says in this Knowledge at Wharton interview, “I always have to tell people that tension and conflict isn’t the antithesis of teamwork. It’s the purpose of it.” You know that smart people respectfully working through disagreement is when the best thinking happens. So you insist on it.
2. Vigorous debate occurs routinely and with grace. Your team members feel encouraged to stand their ground in defense of a well-informed point of view. They are not afraid to let passions show. They are even willing to argue. And they do it constructively. Anne Grady in Entrepreneur writes, “This is about learning to communicate assertively, and it starts with emotional awareness — being aware of emotional triggers or hot buttons that can set us off.” Your teammates focus on the other person’s point, never the other person. They watch their tone of voice. They don’t roll their eyes or shut down when things don’t go their way. And they don’t lose their cool.
3. You trust each other. Once arguments are made, you and your teammates let it all go. Members of your team are willing to defend their point because they are certain it won’t be held against them later. You don’t tolerate backbiting post-debate, and you never indulge in it yourself. There is a team-wide commitment to hugging it out, every time. As the leader, you forego artificial harmony in service to cultivating genuine trust.
4. There are fewer sacred cows. The presence of healthy conflict in your team leaves few places for sacred cows to hide. You and others are encouraged to say what you see. The list of off-limits topics is smaller — tough subjects simply get broached and addressed. Thus precious times and resources are focused on projects that are most consequential.
5. Decisions are more committed. When spirited debates end, you and your teammates go with whatever decision is made, whether or not things fell your way. Everyone enjoys the peace of mind that comes from having said your piece. And because healthy conflict leaves less room for complicity, you are confident there is real commitment when execution time arrives. You and your teammates’ views are laid bare, and your motives are transparent, so it’s easier to identify and address obstacles as they emerge.
6. You hold each other accountable. You and others are free and encouraged to hold each other to task. Questions like “You said you were going to do X, but I’m observing Y. What’s going on?” are exchanged, even among peers who don’t report to one another. Of course, such “accountability questions” convey complete confidence in the listener. They assume positive intent and never accuse. Teammates go out of your way to help each other.
…
Don’t let fear of confrontation stop your business from the routine practice of healthy conflict and the cultivation of trust that accompanies it. Harness it! If you do, you’re leaving far more on the table than you may realize. | https://medium.com/swlh/does-your-team-practice-healthy-conflict-767536d89f6e | ['Shane Kinkennon'] | 2020-07-29 12:21:20.606000+00:00 | ['Conflict', 'Teams And Teamwork', 'Trust', 'Management', 'Leadership'] |
My Therapist’s Best Advice: Care Less | I know what you might be thinking given the title — ‘Care less?? Ya, like I haven’t tried that before.’ [insert mental eye roll here]
I thought the same thing when my therapist first gave me that advice.
What did she mean, “care less”? Didn’t she understand how my anxiety worked? If I could just switch it off and care less, I wouldn’t be talking to her in the first place.
Without context, I think “care less” is so triggering to those of us struggling with mental health concerns because it sounds annoyingly similar to the age-old verbal slap in the face, “just relax”, or even worse, “just calm down”.
*Word to the wise, never (and I mean ever) tell someone with anxiety to “calm down”.
“Care less” doesn’t mean not caring at all.
Think of it as a reminder rather than an impossible order.
As my therapist once explained to me, the phrase isn’t meant to imply that I can (or even should) void myself of any concern or worry at all.
As it turns out, we should be worrying.
According to Kate Sweeny, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside and co-author of “The surprising upsides of worry”, if we were to completely stop worrying, we’d lose not only an extremely effective motivating tool but also a protective emotional buffer. Worry, Sweeny argues, is our mind's way of pointing out what needs our attention most and preparing us for all sorts of bad news.
So, no, “care less” isn’t “don’t worry, be happy” 2.0; it really just serves to emphasize that the things our anxiety fixates on don’t actually require so much of our fixation.
Let’s see an example, shall we?
When my anxiety peaks, am I worried about what my friends say about me after I leave a hangout? Yes. Is a worry like that worth spending my entire subway ride back home picking apart the way I said goodbye? Of course not.
Not only are people probably not talking or even thinking about me (you are always less central to others’ time than you think), but even if they were, so what? You can influence what others think of you, but you can’t decide it; you can’t make up their minds.
The reason our brains get it wrong.
As Psychologist Marcia Reynolds writes in her article Letting Go of Worry on Psychology Today, worry is our brain’s way of protecting us against a perceived threat — only some brains do their job a little too well.
When we’re anxious, our brains are essentially trying to protect us from false, or at least very much exaggerated, threats, Reynolds argues. So, while my social anxiety may be doing an honest job of trying to protect me from the danger of having said something “wrong” to my friends, it ends up blowing the threat way out of proportion. Sure, what you say matters, but it’s hardly ever worth a whole subway ride spent ruminating.
“So care less”, I tell myself. I use it as a reminder that the threat is not as real as it may seem. I take a deep breath, repeat that little phrase in my head like a mantra, and notice as my anxious thoughts lose their power.
“Care less” can be a hard pill to swallow.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent (and continue to spend) a fair amount of your time worrying. Having to swallow the pill telling you outright that a lot of the things you spend your time worrying about are not worth worrying about at all is a tall order.
If “care less” were a physical pill, it’d be a chunky one. Nevertheless, I think it’s important we swallow it.
You may think it’s a futile effort at first, but getting in the habit of reminding yourself that your anxiety blows things way out of proportion — that it makes you invest your energy into caring a lot more than you really need to — you’ll be developing a habit of checking your anxiety.
Anxiety is a state of mind that feeds off of itself in a vicious cycle (illustrated perfectly in this article and diagram here) — without these kinds of mental checks in place, it’ll only run wilder.
“Care less” is not a cure for anxiety (obviously), but it can change the way you see it.
In no world would a simple mantra qualify as a proper “cure” for mental illness.
If you are diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, there are many tried-and-true options to choose from that will help you cope, from cognitive-behavioral therapy to psychiatric medicine — a two-word phrase is not one of them.
Regardless, there are many different levels to coping with and addressing anxiety at varying degrees, and in my experience, small mental reminders like “care less” have done a lot to keep me from spiraling.
“Care less” is a phrase I can use when I feel my anxiety creeping its way from the inside out.
As I notice my mind beginning to get clouded with anxious thoughts, I use this little phrase as a reminder that these thoughts are not a reflection of reality.
“Care less” I tell myself, as I sit on the subway. Then, on the best of days, instead of fixating on whatever anxious thought has crossed my mind, I try to focus on the music playing in my ears instead.
With the music washing over me, and the rhythmic bumps and swaying of the subway lulling me half-asleep, I enjoy a peaceful moment — a moment that would otherwise have been wasted worrying and wondering about something never worth worrying and wondering about in the first place.
That’s the power of “care less”. | https://medium.com/invisible-illness/my-therapists-best-advice-care-less-e8041482bf39 | ['Till Kaeslin'] | 2020-12-16 15:59:41.585000+00:00 | ['Tips', 'Mindset Shift', 'Anxiety', 'Therapy', 'Mental Health'] |
Tracing Cryptocurrency Scammers After Their Exit | 2019 has surprisingly been a prosperous year for scammers and cybercriminals. One of the softest targets for these fraudsters has been cryptocurrencies, as these give them a clean gateway to escape after committing their fraud, easily avoiding the long arms of law enforcement and bank intervention.
A report published by CipherTrace stated that more than $4.25 billion have been stolen from crypto exchanges, users and investors in 2019 so far. These statistics undoubtedly arise fear of cryptocurrency scams among those who are looking to step foot in the industry. You can read more on that by clicking below.
The truth of the matter is that the cryptocurrency industry in and of itself is not a scam. Unfortunately, these inevitable incidents so badly victimize crypto investors that they are gradually making people lose faith in the evolving ‘ Internet of value’. This is a harsh reality that exists due to professional conmen, who tend to take advantage of the anonymous nature of the emerging blockchain technology.
Miguel Cuneta, a featured writer on Medium who’s been building bitcoin and blockchain businesses in the Philippines since 2014, states, “While we think that Bitcoin is here to stay, know that all forms of speculation (stock trading and forex trading for example) carry a lot of risks.”
There are many different ways the fraudsters use to trick the new crypto investors, such as phishing, fraudulent ICOs, malware and Ponzi schemes. But today, we are going to talk about a new form of forgery that’s lurking around in the decentralized crypto world. It is a specific kind of crypto scam that comes with full-fledged planning to vanish away after stealing money from thousands of people.
Many people may have written about cryptocurrency exit scams, but nobody has been able to come up with a solution. The critical thing to learn to be able to stop these scams from recurring is not just identifying red flags at the initial phases, but to know how to trace the activities and whereabouts of the scammers after their ‘exit’. This is the only way the victims can see a chance to get their money back; or at the least, prevent more scammers from infecting the society, thinking they can get away with it.
How does the scam start?
If you’re a cryptocurrency trader, or have been reading about it for a while, you must have heard of fake coins and fraudulent ICOs, whereby a group of people launches a new (fake) coin, and claims to be collecting the funds to start a new project or business with it. In reality, they take the money, let the coin price plummet, shut down any office they have, and run away with all the cash. This is the kind of cryptocurrency exit scam that most people talk about. Blake Miner calls this an ‘ ICO gold rush ‘.
Another kind of exit scam — the one I actually want to talk about today, is when a person or group of people is running a fake cryptocurrency exchange. They may be either calling it a foreign exchange and trading cryptocurrencies secretly through it, or simply announce it as a crypto exchange and act like brokers or ‘businessmen’ (with no real business acumen). These people walk and talk like reputable professionals, and use their outlet to merely separate their customers from any hard-earned money that they bring to them to ‘exchange’. They don’t have a proper verification system in place.
According to Febin John James, a professional writer and blockchain enthusiast, “If the exchange doesn’t have a verification process, it could be a scam.”
These scammers keep looking for a chance to be able to collect enough cash on any given day, so that they shut down the whole thing overnight and deposit the money into their personal bank accounts.
What’s the scammer’s escape strategy?
These scammers are very particular about keeping their identity hidden from the Internet throughout the pre-exit period. They barely promote their ‘foreign exchange’ outlet on any websites or posts. Reason is they plan to re-launch themselves after the theft, and when they do that, they obviously wouldn’t want anyone to be able to trace their past criminal activity. Hence in the first phase of the fraud, they stay low-key.
So where do they go after the ‘exit’? Do they leave the country? Nope. Do they go in hibernation mode for few years? Nope. Do they straight away multiply the money they just stole? Again, nope!
Let me explain one by one why the answer to all these scenarios is no.
Fraudsters are cowards at heart. They don’t have the guts to relocate to another country and start a new life in a completely new environment. Hence, they will stay in their country of origin and just find a new community within the same culture to hide in, by moving to a different town or state.
They wouldn’t hibernate either. Someone who has just made a lot of money without any expertise other than fraud would rather want to flaunt their wealth by buying expensive things and changing their lifestyle.
They would probably like to start a new venture as well. But don’t forget — fraudsters are neither properly educated nor have any skill or expertise to successfully run a business. At the same time, due to lack of any proper or traceable working experience, they wouldn’t be willing to look for a job either. Thus they would end up registering a new company and hiring employees. These kinds of people prefer hiring a bunch of fresh graduates to take advantage of their lack of exposure of the corporate world. They fear hiring clever people who they think can possibly figure out the scam. They will invest all the stolen money, but will not be able to multiply it or make any kind of profit out of it anytime soon.
How can you trace the scammer?
The only industry the scammers have exposure of is the cryptocurrency industry. After being successful in their theft, they would become even more enthusiastic about cryptocurrencies. They would want to do something that’s somehow still related to cryptocurrency. They may not make an attempt to commit the exact same fraud again, but would stick around with cryptocurrencies, trying to do other things with it in the name of their newly registered company.
Scammers would change their own contact details, but would keep the contact details of all their victims with them. When they start a new ‘business’, they would start approaching the same people they cheated with a new name and from new channels. They would handover their precious email list or phone numbers database to a new in-house marketing employee whom they hire, and ask him/her to initiate contact with the ‘company’s customer base’.
Lookout for any spam emails coming to you, asking you to subscribe to a cryptocurrency publication site; or a marketing call asking you to partner with a crypto-related firm you have heard nothing about. These spam emails are not a coincidence. They come to you from somebody who has been successful in fully or partially scamming you in the past, and has kept your email address to trick you with a new story again.
If you are good at investigating about new companies, you may be able to get the scammer’s new contact details. Dig out for the scam company’s registration documents to get the full names and new addresses of its shareholders and directors. The scammer may not put his name in the company’s top management, but his name might appear as a shareholder, a ‘silent partner’ or even a ‘business advisor’ on the company’s website.
Such fraudsters may be able to get away from the government by taking advantage of the decentralized system of blockchain, but they won’t be able to get away for long from a person who’s personally seeking revenge. Catching such thieves is critical to make your contribution to the development and evolution of cryptocurrency as well as blockchain technology.
Don’t let people scam you, steal your money and run away with it. Help the society in making the crypto-world a fraud-free place! | https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/tracing-cryptocurrency-scammers-after-their-exit-2f96032c4ec9 | ['Sana Uqaili'] | 2019-11-06 07:01:27.995000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin News', 'Cryptocurrency Investment', 'Cryptocurrency News', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
How Much Emergency Savings Should I Have? | Life is full of unexpected and unpredictable moments. It can sound strange to prepare for an event that hasn’t happened or may not ever happen. But saving for an emergency fund to cover your expenses when such events occur is a financial habit that every person should regularly practice. More than half of Americans have less than 3 months’ of expenses saved; 28 percent of those people have no emergency savings at all.
The reality is that the majority of debt piled up on people’s shoulders is because of emergency situations. About 15 percent of Americans report feeling as though they will be battling against debt for the rest of their lives. Having an emergency savings account can help relieve the stress of dealing with an unexpected financial situation.
What is an Emergency Savings Fund?
Before you figure out how much emergency savings you need to save, you need to understand the differences between a rainy day fund, and an emergency savings fund.
A rainy day fund covers smaller expenses that don’t occur regularly but are expected, such as various home repairs, car repairs or a co-pay at the doctor’s office.
An emergency fund should be set aside for larger, unexpected financial events that affect your ability to earn income. These events include the sudden loss of a job, or a health event that leaves you unable to work for an extended period of time.
Keep in mind that your emergency fund should be strictly used for emergencies that involve a loss of income, not for large purchases or as a down payment. Your emergency savings fund should be in place to cover your necessary fixed expenses for at least 3–6 months’ time.
How Much Should I Save for My Emergency Fund?
Understanding how much to put in your emergency savings starts with calculating your fixed expenses. A good rule of thumb is to save for at least 3–6 months’ worth of expenses.
Focus on your fixed expenses first, which means tallying up all the expenses that are the same from month to month — things like your rent or mortgage payment, car payment, your Internet bill, and so on. You’ll also want to have a good estimate of other important necessities that you’ll need on a regular basis, such as gas and groceries. Calculate a month’s worth of expenses and then multiply that number by 3 to get your 3 months’ total emergency fund.
You should then set a goal for saving more money on a regular basis. Whether you choose to save weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, you should factor this amount into your budget. It may be worth automating your saving by setting up to split your direct deposit from your paycheck into a savings account. By prioritizing your savings, you are ensuring that this money is set aside for your emergency fund.
Don’t forget to reward yourself when you meet your savings goal and have at least 3 months’ worth of emergency savings. Rewarding yourself for meeting a saving goal is a great way to make it a solid financial habit.
Where Should Keep My Emergency Savings Fund?
When building up any kind of savings, it’s best to keep your money in a low-risk account where the money can be accessed easily so that you can use it at any time. Ideally, you’d want to save your money in a place where it can make additional money, too.
Some people may think that keeping longer-term savings in a 401(k) or similar retirement account is adequate, but the lack of immediate access to this money makes it a poor choice for saving, and you may even lose your principal in a long-term retirement account.
Popular types of savings accounts include certificates of deposit (CDs) or a high-yield savings account. However, these accounts can require minimum balances, can sometimes incur fees if you need to withdraw the cash, or require a period of waiting time before you can access your money.
An alternative is to consider a Klvr Savings account, which keeps your money safe in a liquid account while still accruing interest. You can get rewarded for consistent savings behavior, and even have chances to win larger cash prizes each month, quarter, and year on top of the money you save.
What Happens If I Use My Emergency Savings?
Finally, if there comes a day that you need to dip into your emergency savings account to cover your expenses, be sure to also have a plan in place to replenish this account once everything has settled.
Saving for an emergency savings fund can seem overwhelming but it’s feasible once you put together a plan for consistent saving in a liquid account. With an emergency savings fund in place, you can bring yourself peace of mind that you can handle any unexpected event that rocks your financial situation.
· · ·
Originally published at klvrsavings.com on September 23, 2020. | https://medium.com/klvr/how-much-emergency-savings-should-i-have-a632e7a28e7 | ['Klvr Savings'] | 2020-09-23 19:20:23.546000+00:00 | ['Personal Finance', 'Saving Money', 'Tips', 'Money'] |
ENGIE Energy Access and Energy Web Announce DeFi Crowdfunding Platform to Help Scale Solar, Mini Grids in Sub-Saharan Africa | ENGIE Energy Access and Energy Web Announce DeFi Crowdfunding Platform to Help Scale Solar, Mini Grids in Sub-Saharan Africa Energy Web Follow Jun 17 · 4 min read
Zug, Switzerland and Berlin, Germany — 17 June 2021 — Today nonprofit Energy Web and ENGIE Energy Access — one of the leading off-grid, Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) solar and mini-grid solutions providers in Africa — announced a partnership to accelerate energy access in sub-Saharan Africa through a decentralized finance (DeFi) crowdfunding platform. The DeFi application will be built on the open-source Energy Web tech stack and enable investors to provide microloans that support clean energy deployment.
In 2019, an estimated 580 million people in sub-Saharan Africa remained off grid and in the dark, accounting for three-quarters of the global population without electricity access. After years of steady declines since 2013, that number has risen in 2020 due to the Covid 19 pandemic. Thus rapid deployment of solar home systems (SHSs) and clean energy mini-grids is a crucial humanitarian cause that supports health, quality of life, and economic growth in off-grid regions of the subcontinent.
ENGIE Energy Access integrates and unites ENGIE’s solar home system companies, Fenix International and ENGIE Mobisol, as well as its mini-grids provider, ENGIE PowerCorner, under one entity and one name. “To date, ENGIE Energy Access has served over 1 million customers and 6 million people in 9 countries throughout sub-Saharan Africa. The new DeFi platform in partnership with Energy Web will help ENGIE Energy Access deploy more solar faster, by directly tackling a key challenge: access to low-cost financing,” commented Gillian-Alexandre Huart, CEO of ENGIE Energy access.”
“We’re excited to bring crypto-based decentralized finance to rural electrification in Africa,” said Stefan Zelazny, Head of Software and IT at ENGIE Energy Access and previously CIO at ENGIE Mobisol. “We believe this can accelerate much-needed clean energy deployment throughout the region by connecting impact-oriented investors with unbanked rural customers. Combining the technology that remotely connects and controls our Solar-Home-Systems with the Energy Web Chain will result in the first smart asset-backed NFT where asset use can be controlled via the chain.”
The first phase of this initiative will focus on integrating the Energy Web software tech stack with ENGIE’s platform to further promote rural electrification in Africa. The crowdfunding platform to be developed by Energy Web will allow micro-investors to finance the installation of clean energy assets by staking Energy Web Tokens (EWT), the native token of the Energy Web Chain, in exchange for a fixed interest rate. This setup will unlock capital from the global cryptocurrency market, bringing a significant new source of capital to clean energy deployment in Africa. To help mitigate the risk for everybody involved, the Community Fund of Energy Web will back this first phase of the platform. Giving people in Africa access to new green electricity solutions utilizing the Energy Web DOS is a great first use case for the Community Fund.
In the second phase, Energy Web will work together with ENGIE Energy Access to give a unique decentralized identifier (DID) to each one of the home appliances and rooftop solar deployed by ENGIE. This way, one can directly add credits to the appliances owned by locals to support their access to electricity and its services.
“Creating positive impact in people’s lives is one of our core principles at Energy Web. But the global energy transition must also reach those who don’t yet have access to electricity,” explained Energy Web’s Walter Kok. “We are happy that ENGIE — one of the biggest energy players in the world and one of the founding members of the Energy Web Chain — has embraced the Energy Web technology stack to support such an important mission.”
About ENGIE Energy Access
ENGIE Energy Access is the leading Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGo) and mini-grids solutions provider in Africa, with a mission to deliver affordable, reliable and sustainable energy solutions and life-changing services with exceptional customer experience. The company is a result of the integration of Fenix International, ENGIE Mobisol and ENGIE PowerCorner; and develops innovative, off-grid solar solutions for homes, public services and businesses, enabling customers and distribution partners access to clean, affordable energy. The PAYGo solar home systems are financed through affordable installments from $0.14 per day and the mini-grids foster economic development by enabling electrical productive use and triggering business opportunities for entrepreneurs in rural communities. With over 1,700 employees, operations in nine countries across Africa (Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia), over 1 million customers and 6 million lives impacted so far, ENGIE Energy Access aims to remain the leading clean energy company, serving millions of customers across Africa by 2025.
For more, please visit https://engie-energyaccess.com/
Contact : [email protected]
About Energy Web
Energy Web is a global, member-driven nonprofit accelerating the low-carbon, customer-centric energy transition by unleashing the potential of open-source, digital technologies. We enable any energy asset, owned by any customer, to participate in any energy market. The Energy Web Chain — the world’s first enterprise-grade, public blockchain tailored to the energy sector — anchors our tech stack. The Energy Web ecosystem comprises leading utilities, grid operators, renewable energy developers, corporate energy buyers, IoT / telecom leaders, and others.
For more, please visit https://energyweb.org.
Contact : [email protected] | https://medium.com/energy-web-insights/engie-energy-access-and-energy-web-announce-defi-crowdfunding-platform-to-help-scale-solar-mini-2142029ad84f | ['Energy Web'] | 2021-06-17 07:02:57.433000+00:00 | ['Ew News', 'Africa', 'Solar Energy', 'Crowdfunding', 'Defi'] |
5 examples of soulless Scrum Events | 5 examples of soulless Scrum Events
Scrum events without empiricism are waste
Many people think that Scrum is about rigorously having the Sprint Events. You need to have a Sprint, Sprint Planning, Daily Scrums, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective because the Scrum Guide says so. “The Guide say so” is never a good reason. If this is your reason for having the events then probably they will turn out to be similar to the below examples.
1. Sprint Planning without a goal
The Products Owner brings forward an item that he wants to have picked up because the CEO brought it forward when they talked in the corridor in the morning. Unfortunately this is all the PO knows about it. But it’s urgent, so the team has to work on it now.
Then the IT director chips in. She also has some important items, coming from her list of technical improvements.
The Development Team doesn’t know the inns and outs of the proposed topics. It’s nothing special that these topics come out of the blue. Just like it’s nothing special that they will also have to finish the unfinished things from the previous Sprint. Except for the things that were dropped because they weren’t required anymore.
The Development Team is already happy that the Product Owner and the Director didn’t have their typical priority debate consuming the whole Sprint Planning.
2. Detached Daily Scrum
Daisy starts: “Yesterday I worked on item 123. Today I will continue to work on item 123. No impediments.”
John: “Yesterday I couldn’t work on item 456 because I had to attend all kinds of meetings. Today I will again not work on the item because of an off-site. No impediments.”
Alice: “Yesterday I couldn’t work on item 789 because of the impediment with the access rights. Hopefully I can work on that item today. My impediment is that I don’t have the access rights.”
Rosie: “Yesterday I worked on item 123. Today I will work on item 345. My impediment is that John talks so much.”
Manager: “ Hey wait! Daisy and Rosie are both working on item 123!”
Rosie: “Huh? What? Oh no! Now I wasted my time. You should have updated the JIRA ticket Daisy! It was on ‘to do’ so that’s why I picked it.”
3. Sprint Review falling flat
The team wanted to skip the Sprint Review because they didn’t have something to demo, but luckily a developer is willing to explain where he made some changes in the code and then repeat the Unit Test that he conducted. So the Scrum Master planned a last minute 15 minute demo.
Sadly though the WiFi connection dropped. In the end there wan’t a lot to show. It’s not too bad, because only some of the Scrum Team members joined the demo anyway.
4. Sprint Retrospective complain session
Some of the people from the team like this event. This is their place to blow off some steam. It’s just that no-one is really listening because they have work to finish before the new Sprint starts. It’s seen as vital that velocity goals are met.
What’s also a bit sad is that the complaints are constantly about the same thing, Sprint after Sprint after Sprint.
The team also has some people that want to remove this event from the calendar as it doesn’t add any value. Just like the demo doesn’t add any value.
5. The flexible Sprint
The team decided to extend the Sprint with a week. Not all items were done yet. They feel that they can only have a proper demo when there’s actually something to show.
What was missing in the examples? Empiricism!
Empiricism to the rescue
Empiricism — transparency, inspection, adaptation — is the foundation of Scrum.
All the roles, events and artifact serve empiricism.
“ Other than the Sprint itself, which is a container for all other events, each event in Scrum is a formal opportunity to inspect and adapt something. These events are specifically designed to enable critical transparency and inspection.” — Scrum Guide 2017
The artifacts — Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, Increment — should be completely transparent. Only then the Scrum Team and stakeholders can inspect the artifacts, allowing them to adapt.
Below I show what happens when empiricism is introduced.
1. Sprint Planning with purpose
This is the purpose of the Sprint Planning:
“By the end of the Sprint Planning, the Development Team should be able to explain to the Product Owner and Scrum Master how it intends to work as a self-organizing team to accomplish the Sprint Goal and create the anticipated Increment.” — Scrum Guide 2017
At the Sprint Planning you inspect the Product Backlog to determine what you will do next. There’s only one Product Backlog and the Product Owner is responsible for managing it. This creates transparency.
What adds to the transparency is that the Backlog Items are properly refined so that they are ready for the Sprint. Everyone understands what the items are about and what is required to create a ‘Done’ increment. The Sprint Planning is about defining a Sprint Goal and selecting the Backlog Items that help meet this Sprint Goal.
2. Daily Scrum with focus
This is the purpose of the Daily Scrum:
“Every day, the Development Team should understand how it intends to work together as a self-organizing team to accomplish the Sprint Goal and create the anticipated Increment by the end of the Sprint.” — Scrum Guide 2017
At the Daily Scrum you inspect the Sprint Backlog to determine if you are on track to meet the Sprint Goal. If not then the team decides what to do this day to increase the chances of meeting the Sprint Goal, adapting the Sprint Backlog. This is why it is so important to have an up-to-date easily accessible Sprint Backlog.
3. Sprint Review with feedback
This is the purpose of the Sprint Review:
“During the Sprint Review, the Scrum Team and stakeholders collaborate about what was done in the Sprint. Based on that and any changes to the Product Backlog during the Sprint, attendees collaborate on the next things that could be done to optimize value.” — Scrum Guide 2017
At the Sprint Review you inspect the Increment to see if it meets the expectations and it will allow you to receive feedback for the Product Backlog. Stakeholders and Scrum Team all have an understanding of what the an Increment entails to make informed decisions.
4. Sprint Retrospective with plan for improvements
This is the purpose of the Sprint Retrospective:
“The Sprint Retrospective is an opportunity for the Scrum Team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next Sprint.” — Scrum Guide 2017
At the Sprint Retrospective you inspect the team and adapt the coming Sprint Backlog to add an improvement. Teams actively seek for ways to improve their way of working.
5. Sprint to bring clarity
Although the Sprint is not an event to inspect and adapt (it is the container for the other events) a Sprint certainly helps empiricism.
A Sprint is consistent in length to have the best possible predictability of what a team can do within a week. It also adds to the transparency that stakeholders know when the events take place. Consistency of the Sprint length increases the options to inspect and adapt.
Conclusion
Scrum without empiricism is Scrum without a soul.
There’s no reason to do Scrum if you forget what Scrum is: | https://medium.com/serious-scrum/5-examples-of-soulless-scrum-events-1b7b850668ca | ['Willem-Jan Ageling'] | 2019-10-01 10:21:55.919000+00:00 | ['Serious Scrum', 'Product Management', 'Leadership', 'Agile', 'Scrum'] |
What Is Blockchain | Many people think of blockchain as the technology that powers Bitcoin. While this was its original purpose blockchain is capable of so much more.
Despite the word's sound, there’s not just one blockchain is shorthand for a whole suite of distributed ledger technologies that can be programmed to record and track anything of value from financial transactions to medical records, or even land titles. You might be thinking, and we already have processes in place to track data what’s so special about blockchain.
Let’s break down why blockchain technology stands to revolutionise the way we interact with each other. Reason number one, the way it tracks and stores data blockchain stores information in stashes called blocks linked together chronologically to form a continuous line metaphorically, a chain of blocks. If you change the data, recorded in a particular block, you don’t rewrite it.
Instead, the change is stored in a new block, showing the x change to y, at a particular date and time. Sound familiar. That’s because blockchain is based on a centuries-old method of the general financial ledger. It’s a non-destructive way to track data changes over time.
Here’s one example. There was a dispute between Ann, and her brother Steve over who owns a piece of land, that’s been in the family for years because blockchain technology uses the ledger method.
There is an entry in the ledger showing that Adam first owned the property in 1900. Adam sold the property today 1930, and a new entry was made in the ledger, and so on.
Every change of ownership of this property is represented by a new entry in the ledger right up until and bought it from their father in 2007, and is the current owner, and we can see that history and the register. Now, here’s where things get interesting.
I want the age-old ledger method. Initially, a book that a database file stored on a single system blockchain was designed to be decentralised and distributed across an extensive computer network.
This decentralising of information reduces data tampering and brings us to the second factor that makes blockchain unique, which creates trust in the data before a block can be added to the chain, a few things have to happen.
First, a cryptographic puzzle must be solved, thus creating the block. The computer that solves the puzzle shares the solution to all of the other computers on the network. This is called proof of work. The system will then verify this proof of work.
And if correct, a block will be added to the chain. Combining these tricky math puzzles and verification by many computers ensures that we can trust every block on the chain, because the network, does the trust-building for us.
We now have the opportunity to interact directly with our data in real-time. And that brings us to the third reason blockchain technology is such a game-changer no more intermediaries. When doing business with one another, we don’t show the other person, our financial or business records.
Instead, we rely on trusted intermediaries, such as banks or lawyers, to view our records and keep that information confidential. These intermediaries build trust between the parties can verify, for example, that, yes, and is the rightful owner of this land.
This approach limits exposure and risk and adds another step to the exchange, which means more time and money spent and land title information was stored in a blockchain. She could cut out the middleman.
Her lawyer who would ordinarily confirm her information with Steve, as we now know all blocks added to the chain, has been verified to be accurate and can’t be tampered with. So and can show Steve her land title information secured on the blockchain. And would save considerable time and money by cutting out the middleman.
This type of trusted peer to peer interaction with our data can revolutionise how we access verify and transact with one another. And because blockchain is a type of technology and not a single network. It can be implemented in many different ways.
Some blockchains can be completely public and open to everyone to view and access. Others can be closed to a select group of authorised users, such as your company, a group of banks, or government agencies.
There are hybrid Public-Private blockchains to which private access can see all the data, while the public can see only selections in others, everyone can see all the data, but only some people have access to add new data.
I’ve government, for example, could use a hybrid system to record the boundaries of Ann’s property, and the fact that she owns it, while keeping her personal information private or it could allow everyone to view property records, but reserve to itself, the exclusive right to update them.
It is a combination of all these factors decentralising the data, building trust in the data and allowing us to interact directly with one another and the data that gives blockchain technology, the potential to underpin many of the ways we interact with one another.
Like the rise of the Internet, this technology will bring complex policy questions around governance international law, security, and economics. | https://medium.com/technology-hits/what-is-blockchain-4211ed888d7 | ['Josh', 'Υя_Ωιѕємαη'] | 2020-12-27 16:34:26.119000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Business', 'Blockchain', 'Technology', 'Tech'] |
Can I watch YouTube TV on Fire TV? | Can I watch YouTube TV on Fire TV?
With the NFL season underway, MLB playoffs around the corner, and must see Fall TV premieres in full force, we are excited to announce that YouTube TV is officially available on Fire TV devices including Fire TV Stick (2nd Gen), Fire TV Stick 4K, all-new Fire TV Cube, Toshiba and Insignia Fire TV Edition Smart TVs and more. The YouTube TV app brings 70+ channels of live sports, breaking news, must-see shows and movies from major broadcast and popular cable networks to the big screen. We are excited to give Fire TV fans more choice than ever to watch live TV content on Fire TV.
What is YouTube TV?
YouTube TV is a cable-free live TV experience that brings together all the things you love about live TV, without the hassle of renting cable boxes, scheduling complicated installations or committing to long-term contracts. With YouTube TV you get 70+ channels, from local networks like ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC and popular cable networks like Discovery, TNT, CNN, ESPN, FX and on-demand programming. YouTube TV also has unlimited cloud DVR storage space and you can have six accounts per household, so each member of the family can have their personal DVR and personalized recommendations.
Which Fire TV devices are supported?
The YouTube TV app is now available on Fire TV Stick (2nd Gen), Fire TV Stick 4K, all-new Fire TV Cube, all Toshiba, Insignia, Element, and Westinghouse Fire TV Edition smart TVs and previous generation Fire TV devices including Fire TV Cube (1st Gen), Fire TV (2nd Gen), Fire TV (3rd Gen — Pendant Design). The YouTube TV app is not compatible with Fire TV Stick (1st Gen) and Fire TV (1st Gen).
We heard your feedback, and are so excited to bring the YouTube TV to Fire TV customers in the US, providing more ways to enjoy live TV on Fire TV. | https://amazonfiretv.blog/can-i-watch-youtube-tv-on-fire-tv-4a95287b26de | ['Michael Polin'] | 2019-09-30 16:32:41.573000+00:00 | ['How To Watch', 'Fire Tv', 'Tıp', 'Product Updates', 'TV'] |
My Journey as a Computer Science Engineer | In this article, I am going to share my journey as a Computer Science Engineer. The aim of this article is to give an idea to you about how the life of a typical Computer Science and Engineering student would be and how can we take actions so as to make the journey more interesting and productive towards achieving our goals.
My First Computer 💻
I didn’t know much about computers until I got one when I was in 10th grade. It was in the year 2014. I used it for general purposes such as browsing, preparing PPTs, etc. Not having a proper foundation in Computer Science was a reason for my struggle 😔 during the initial days of my 11th and 12th grade. (I will talk in detail about why I took CS Stream in my 11th grade below).
Courtesy: Tenor
The Inevitable Dilemma
I completed my 10th grade with a pretty good CGPA and the next big thing was to decide the stream that I need to opt for in 11th grade. It was really a tough situation. I was sure that I would opt for the science stream because science was my favorite subject. I was in a dilemma to choose between PCM with Computer Science or PCM with Biology. I think everyone would definitely be able to relate to the cause of this situation. Yes! The cause was relatives. Initially, I had set up my mind to go for Biology. My aim was to become a doctor. My parents were really supportive. But, my parents received various comments from my relatives about the cost that they would need to incur if I pursued medicine. At last, after a lot of discussions, I decided to go for Computer Science.
The taste of school-level Computer Science 👨💻
The initial days of the 11th grade were really tough for me. I struggled a bit in understanding the fundamentals. Fortunately, the CS teacher was really supportive and made sure that students understand and study and don’t just mug up things. The first programming language that we learned was C++. I started loving the language in a few months. I started creating some small projects to get a better understanding and also began to explore various things apart from what was being taught in the class. I was successfully able to submit my final project for 12th grade, in which I created a Payroll Management System. Also, I wasn’t aware of IIT-JEE until I entered the mid-semester of my 11th grade. It was too late for me to join for coaching. But, my mom insisted to join a crash course for a period of one month in an institute in Chennai. I gave the JEE (Mains) exam. After the results were announced, I realized that if I had put even more effort and had joined for coaching during the start of 11th grade itself, I would have definitely qualified. I scored well in a sense that would justify the time and energy spent on the coaching. But was still low to get qualified for advanced, as there is something called the “Caste Reservation System” still prevalent in the society.
Yet another critical situation
I passed my 12th grade with a good percentage and secured 4th rank across all the streams in my school. It was a celebrating moment for us 🥳. Also, it was a critical moment for us to decide which college should I be admitted to. My cut-off was fairly good. I was determined to take up Computer Science as my field of study. We applied for Anna University counseling and after the process, I got an offer to join a reputed college in Chennai.
Courtesy: Reddit
College Diaries 📘
I entered my first year of college in the month of August 2017. It was a very different experience and after a few days, I got adjusted to the environment. We were taught Python during our first semester. I fell in love with Python and the faculty assigned to our class was simply great! I used to clarify all my doubts and became proficient with Python (Intermediate). Whenever I had some doubts, I also used YouTube which proved to be an excellent resource. I also started exploring many other technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Quantum Computing. I created accounts on LinkedIn and GitHub and was active on those platforms. Computer Science had had so much impact on me that I started exploring various different fields and also started making side-projects by then. These side-projects helped me immensely during placements as they posed as a plus factor. I also started to practice on platforms such as HackerRank and it really helped me to have consistent touch in programming. I will share all the resources which were really helpful in improving my knowledge and specifically prepare for my interviews at the end of this article 👇.
So, moving on, 1st year went well and I had the satisfaction that I didn’t waste much time and used the time productively. I eventually started developing an interest in the field of Android Application Development after attending an Android Workshop conducted in college. I started learning in-depth about android using various online resources and published my very first android app onto the Google Play Store. I also got various internship opportunities which helped me to gain industrial exposure and work in a real-world software development environment. After spending almost a year in Competitive Programming, I started focusing more on Development, which at a later stage had serious consequences during my interview preparation.
Read this article in which I have explained in detail the trade-off between these two (Projects Vs Competitive Programming).
Three years went by, I entered into my fourth year (currently in my 7th semester). Placement season began and I was in a state of full anxiety about what is gonna happen. My parents were in full hope that I would get placed early and would be on the list of first placed students. But, that didn’t happen. I struggled a lot and got rejected by many companies. Then I started putting a lot of effort and took a leave from social media as it was a major source of distraction. I managed to grab 3 offers from reputed organizations. It was indeed a great experience. Now you might think, “why did this guy end his story of placement journey so shortly ?“ Wait. Probably I think that would be covered in another article in detail! 😉
Mistakes and Learnings
I highlighted some of the mistakes that I did during this journey. Of course, I learned a lot from those mistakes and tried to improve myself to a large extent. I want to share some tips and some mistakes that you must avoid.
Start early, you will enjoy the journey. You will get a chance to make mistakes early so that you can improve yourself in a better manner. Make friends only with those people that don’t affect your productivity. Don’t be around those people who spread hatred and negativity. There is only one formula that you need to keep in your mind.
If you grind yourself today (work hard towards your goal), you will be happy tomorrow. But if you refuse to work hard and yearn for transient happiness, you will suffer for your lifetime.
My mom’s friend used to say this. It had a great impact on me. These are strong words. This is the ultimate truth of life and the way in which we can perceive what is success in life. 💯
4. Be good. Do good. But don’t be too good. Because, if you are too good, people will treat you as a doormat.
Some of the aforementioned points might seem silly. But they will have such a powerful impact on your life.
Some other important tips:
Maintain a great LinkedIn and GitHub profile Try to keep a balance between Competitive Programming and Project Development. Be consistent. Consistency is the only key to master Data Structures and Algorithms. Start investing some time in contributing to Open Source projects on GitHub.
Learning Resources that I used
HackerRank (Recommended for Beginners) LeetCode (Interview Preparation) GeeksforGeeks (Interview Preparation) Sololearn (To learn a new programming language / Technology) List of YouTube channels (No promotion):
5.1 edureka!
5.2 Telusko
5.3 freeCodeCamp.org
5.4 Tech With Tim
5.5 Computerphile
5.6 Gaurav Sen
5.7 Rachit Jain
As you can see I suffered a bit due to a lack of guidance and support. There were only a few seniors who guided me on this journey. So, please network with a lot of people especially on LinkedIn. So, this was all about my journey as a Computer Science Engineer. I hope you liked it! Dedicated to all the freshers, sophomores, and Juniors. With ❤️ from your Senior!
If you have any queries please post in the comment section below. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Also, if you want to look at my amazing collection of apps developed, don’t forget to check Google Play Store.
Know more about me here.
With that being said, thanks for reading my article, and Happy Coding! | https://medium.com/fnplus/my-journey-as-a-computer-science-engineer-79348d3b6a22 | ['Vaidhyanathan S M'] | 2020-11-24 17:59:43.967000+00:00 | ['Careers', 'Computer Science', 'Engineering'] |
Festival | Festival
Festivals !!!!! I LOVE THE SECOND HALF OF THE YEAR !!!!!Celebration Time !!! Festival Time !!
It’s loaded with Festivals !!! It bring us together, it gives a good time to rejoice and built strong bonds between everyone.
Celebrating festivals is an great opportunity for us to teach our kids about being with everyone, to meet and greet everyone as well as teach them the importance of togetherness. One of the main reasons celebrations are so important is because it reflects an overall attitude of gratitude and enjoying what we have, instead of focusing on what we don’t have or only on what we want in the future.
Festivals are an beautiful way to celebrate our glorious heritage, culture and traditions. They are meant to rejoice special moments and emotions in our lives with our loved ones. They play an important role to add structure to our social lives, and connect us with our families and backgrounds.I mostly enjoy our traditional sweets , the chaklis, the karanjis, the shankarpara, sev and mouthwatering Ladoos !!!!
Family time can serve as an escape from the demands and deadlines of daily life, and is paramount in building strong relationships. The result of such closeness is they can ask for advice, lend a helping hand, and feel the unconditional support and love that is essential for mental health. Family time offers many benefits, including building confidence, creating a stronger emotional bond between family members, improving communication skills, better performance in school and reduced behavioral issues, as well as providing an opportunity to make memories built on fun, laughter and togetherness.
Spending time in everyday family leisure activities has been associated with greater emotional bonding within families. leisure activities, such as playing a board game, watching television together can have a big impact on the overall health of a family.
One of the most important benefits of spending time together during festival get togethers is creating memories that will last a lifetime. Whether it’s playing a game together, attending an event, going on vacation or just sitting in the living room or around the table talking and laughing, positive memories are beloved possessions that give family members a sense of belonging and can help reinforce the importance of family.
Children learn how to behave and communicate by watching their parents interact with each other and others. Family bonding time is a way to model expected behaviors, and spending time together as a family can help parents relate more to their children and open the lines of communication.
It also had a very positive impact on our young adolescents as well. The ones who communicate and spend more time with their extended families and cousins. tend to exhibit lower levels of aggression and antisocial behavior. It’s a wonderful opportunity to Unplug from the digital world. Today’s technology-ridden world makes it easy for families to be present but not engaged.
Reminiscing about special family moments is an essential part of keeping those memories alive. Showcasing old photo albums is a great way to share fun and nostalgic memories, which can help bring your family closer together. Whether it was a trip to the mountains or visiting a nearby museum, discussing and reliving these memorable moments can evoke fond memories and a willingness to create new ones.
Let’s celebrate the festival in the true sense by spreading joy and light up the world of others. Have a happy, safe and blessed Diwali!
Dr. Ushavati Shetty
Principal
Navodaya English High School & Jr. College, Thane
Maharashtra | https://medium.com/@drushavati/festival-28ceb8aab781 | ['Dr. Ushavati Shetty'] | 2021-10-31 07:55:24.984000+00:00 | ['Festival'] |
Nonprofit Journalism Grows Up | If technology destroyed the profit model that supported news, maybe the answer isn’t chasing technology, but dropping the profit model.
From London to Las Vegas, nonprofit outlets are showing that another way is possible.
By Nicole Rupersburg
In the past 20 years, arguably no other industry has been hit harder than journalism. Not even coal. The outlines of the disaster are by now well known: Thanks to plummeting revenues, the ranks of working reporters have been decimated across every news sector. The shuttering of hundreds of dailies has created vast news deserts throughout the country. As surviving legacy papers desperately lurched towards digital, it briefly seemed the new class of digital-first brands — Buzzfeed, Gawker, Vice, Vox — held the keys to the “new media” kingdom. But they too have been hammered by mass layoffs, buyouts, shut-downs, budget cuts, and newsroom closures. So far in 2019, the digital-first media outlets so recently hailed as the future of media have shed 2,100 employees.
The problem is not that digital advertising dollars are down. They are actually way, way up. The problem is that most of the money is going to Google and Facebook. In 2018, Google alone made almost as much money in digital advertising off of the news industry as every single American news media outlet combined. The “new media” upstarts find themselves alongside legacy media institutions fighting to survive against the whims of social media algorithms, digital advertising models that have yet to prove effective, and the FAANGs sinking their teeth into the carcass of the industry.
There is, however, an alternative to trying to solve the puzzle of new profit models: Reject the profit model. This is the strategy of an increasing number of nonprofit newsrooms launching around the country — close to 300 of them and growing, according to the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN). Collectively, INN’s 180 member organizations employee about 3,000 people, including 2,200 journalists, and have a combined annual revenue of nearly $350 million.
Is this the future of news?
**
The concept of the nonprofit newsroom is not new. Organizations like National Public Radio (established 1970) and the Associated Press (established 1848) need no introduction. Long-running investigative journalism organizations include the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting (1977) and D.C.’s Center for Public Integrity (1989).
New York’s City Limits and The Chicago Reporter, outlets that focus on civic and social issues in their cities, have been around since the 1970s, and Mother Jones magazine has been in operation since 1976. Newer outlets like ProPublica, Inside Climate News, and the Texas Tribune were all established in the 2000s, and have already earned significant audiences and reputations for their coverage of policy, government, and other issues in the public interest.
In lieu of advertising, nonprofit newsrooms typically rely on a hodgepodge of funding sources. Christopher Hass, executive publisher of the Chicago-based labor and left-politics magazine In These Times, says their funding breaks down into rough thirds: circulation revenue, grant and foundation support, and reader donations. Reader donations have been part of the publication’s financial model since the beginning. If In These Times does run advertising, usually in the form of partner promotions with book publishers, it constitues a fraction of total revenue.
In These Times, published out of Chicago, has been been a nonprofit journalism pioneer for decades.
“With advertising going digital over the last decade, our ad revenue has declined with everyone else’s,” Hass said. “But that overall impact on our budget was relatively minimal, even as it declined precipitously, because we were never ad-dependent.”
Too often, funding is an “all-or-nothing” situation, whether it’s a traditional news outlet relying on advertising, or a nonprofit outlet relying on foundation funding. “The ideal situation you would want is your foundation built on sustainable revenue that would use grants for special projects, with the understanding that it won’t be there forever,” said Hass.
Having multiple revenue streams, including reader revenue, gives an organization some breathing room, so when donations drop a bit, or a large grant doesn’t get renewed, it doesn’t become a crisis.
Julianne Markow, COO of the Voice of San Diego, said her publication relies on support from donors, individual readers, foundations, corporations, community partners, and earned income from events and other news media partnerships.
This year she expects 65-percent of revenue to come from donors of all membership levels. Anyone who donates $35 or more is considered a “member” and receives additional benefits that include invitations and discounts to member events. There are different memberships levels based on the donation amount.
“Our readers tend to be very engaged citizens who really care about community,” said Markow. “We’re trying to deepen our local support and build intimate relationships with our readers that makes them feel special and makes them want to support us.”
Efforts to diversify revenue streams have been paying off. According to the Institute for Nonprofit News’ 2018 survey report, more than half of news nonprofits reported three or more sources of revenue — an important indicator of financial stability — and a third had four or more. Reader support, including individual donations and membership dues, accounted for 30 percent of revenue, and earned income accounted for 10 percent. That said, nonprofit news outlets still have work to do when it comes to building sustainable reader support and cultivating long-term donors. According to the INN survey, “Individual donors and particularly major donors are relatively undeveloped revenue sources for news nonprofits.”
In Michigan, former newspaper owner Phil Power founded the Center for Michigan in 2005 as a “think-and-do tank” to find reasonable, nonpartisan solutions to major problems facing the state, like road funding and childhood education. To this end, the Center produces the web-based Bridge Magazine as an outlet for Center research and long-form reporting on state policy topics.
The Phil Power Family Foundation contributes $1 million annual to the Center, accounting for about 25 percent of its operating budget. Foundation funding accounts for another 40–50 percent. The remaining portion of the budget comes from reader revenue they are actively trying to increase, according to Bill Emkow, growth strategist for the Center and Bridge Magazine.
In 2018, Bridge was one of 17 nonprofit news organizations invited to participate in the Facebook membership accelerator, a 12-week program sponsored entirely by the social media giant. Emkow jokes that he refers to this as “blood money” in the wake of 2016, a year that saw yet another round of mass layoffs at both of Detroit’s major newspapers, the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News — layoffs that affected him directly.
“I’m obsessed with developing and implementing a news model that works and thrives, especially after having to lay off several people while I was at MLive, and then being laid off myself from the Detroit Free Press,” he explained.
In Michigan, a former newspaperman is bridging research and journalism.
“This nonprofit model seems to be stable, but it’s not yet thriving in most places,” Emkow continued. “For us, after several cycles of funding from the same foundations, they’ll sometimes want to alter what they are underwriting, and that creates a scramble to change on our end — even when we are doing well. So, the only real answer for long-term stability, in my opinion, is growing reader revenue.”
The goal of participating in the Facebook membership accelerator is to develop a membership program that will contribute to paying the bills and stop relying on Google and, ironically, Facebook for page views that don’t pay the bills.
The publication is already seeing tremendous growth in reader revenue, Emkow says. They’re on track to bring in $300,000–400,000 this year, up from $210,000 in 2018. The goal is to have $1 million in reader revenue, and to do so quickly, so they can reduce their reliance on foundation funding.
“After you go through several rounds of funding with the same foundation, it’s harder to write grants. That’s where reader revenue comes in,” he said. “Members truly love the journalism and are willing to pay for it. We don’t need 100 percent of readers to become members; we just need a small percentage to do it, and that’s where sustainability comes in.”
Emkow believes that the shift towards reader support from major news outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post helped “prime the pump” for other news organizations to focus on reader revenue. “The work they did in 2016 really did set people up to support news, and we’re rising in the wake of that.”
A similar story is unfolding at the Nevada Independent, which produces in-depth public policy coverage as well as campaign and political reporting. Its own nonprofit model includes a gold-standard in transparency: every single donor, from $5 individual donations to major corporate bequeaths, is disclosed on their website.
The majority of the NVIndy’s funding has come from corporate sponsors like MGM Resorts International and Switch, but recurring donors are on the rise.
“People I’ve never heard of have become small but recurring donors, and that’s how you become sustainable,” said Jon Ralston, veteran political journalist and founder of the NV Indy.
The publication is currently at about 12 percent “sustaining” revenue, and he would like to get that number up to 25 percent. There are different membership levels based on donation amounts that include perks like free access to premium content and early registration to select events. They’ve recently started applying for grants, and also produce a number of events for earned income and sponsorship opportunities.
“We’re doing more to get more donors and diversify,” said Ralston. “We don’t want to have to worry about a major donor leaving and being forced to close our doors.”
There are other success stories. Perhaps the best-known is the U.K.-based nonprofit Guardian News & Media, which recently announced it has broken even thanksto reader support — a heartening development for news media nonprofits.
**
Andy Hall and his wife Dee J. Hall, both veterans of the Wisconsin State Journal, co-founded the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (WCIJ) in 2008 and began operating the investigative news outlet Wisconsin Watchin January 2009.
When Wisconsin Watch launched, their $150,000 operating budget all came from foundations. Ten years later, foundation funding accounts for about half of their $700,000 budget, a third comes from individual and business donations, and the rest from earned income and sponsorships.
Individual donors have been the fastest-growing segment of their budget in the last few years, sustaining double-digit increases in 2018 to more than $100,000. This year, Hall hopes to hit $200,000. To help them reach this goal, they’ve received training from the Institute for Nonprofit News on major donor development as well as from the same Facebook membership accelerator that Bridge participated in to help them improve their digital infrastructure, branding, and marketing.
Wisconsin Watch operates on a small staff and relies on skilled volunteers as well as student interns and fellows who come in with their own outside funding from sources like Fulbright fellowships and the Department of State’s Edmund S. Muskie Internship Program.
“We’re training the next generation of investigative journalists though internships, fellowships, and classroom collaborations, and some donors are inspired to support us to make sure that there will be more investigative journalists out there keeping watch on the people in power in the future,” said Hall.
The WCIJ also earns revenue through speaking engagements, events, contracted content creation for other outlets like NPR and National Geographic, and, most recently, a partnership with the Associated Press that has made 1,500-word versions of their reports available to AP members nationwide, which has led to a dramatic increase in readership.
“Our goal has always been to make content available to the public wherever public consumes news,” said Hall. “We try to make it as easy as possible for editors to use and share our stories with their audiences.”
Wisconsin Watch offers universal free access, though there is a password-protected side of the site where hundreds of media partners can access reports before they are published.
Wide access is a common feature of the new nonprofit model and a reflection of its animating civic spirit. The Voice of San Diego has no pay wall, Markow said, because “we are a nonprofit and we believe very strongly that everyone should have access to the news.” Ralston said the NVIndy does not and “will never” have a pay wall or run any kind of ads or pop-ups. Emkow, in Michigan, said the Bridge not have a pay wall because “the mission is to “do the research” and “spread it far and wide.” In These Times has no pay wall, either, though they do charge for a subscription-based print magazine.
“[That decision not to have a pay wall] has to do less with economics and more with the mission itself, of being a nonprofit and being a public good,” Hass explained. “We’re trying to create content for diverse communities including working class people, people of less economic means, activists, young people. It seems counter to the mission to prevent those audiences from accessing the content. Readers with means allow us to continue to make this content free and available to those without.”
You would be hard-pressed to find any news nonprofit that does have a pay wall, despite the fact that they all increasingly rely on reader revenue to operate sustainably. To this point, Emkow simply said, “We can generate a lot more revenue out of memberships rather than with a pay wall or even a metered pay wall.”
**
Operating a nonprofit newsroom presents its own challenges, some more obvious than others. There can be fierce competition for foundation support, which many nonprofit newsrooms rely on heavily, and there is no guarantee that any foundation will support any particular outlet indefinitely — which is why there is such an effort underway to grow readership support.
Nonprofits are also not immune to the ebbs and flows of the economy: Hass said In These Times’ most recent struggle came during the Great Recession when foundation endowments were hard-hit and individual donors were able to give less. And nonprofit newsrooms are just as susceptible to the whims of social media algorithms and having to break through the media cacophony to reach readers.
“It’s just a different struggle,” said Voice of San Diego’s Markow. “Being a nonprofit is not a cure-all. There’s nothing magical about it. This organization has spent 15 years cultivating a core group of readers and building those relationships and building that trust.”
**
The “growth spurt” in nonprofit news started about a decade ago — about the same time as the recession, for those keeping score. The average nonprofit newsroom is just eight years old, and it’s just too soon to tell if the nonprofit model will come to dominate hard-hitting, investigative, issue-driven media, though some might argue it already has. According to the INN’s 2018 survey report,” the nonprofit sector generates an outsize amount of…reporting that requires significant investments of time and expertise.”
But if it’s too soon to assess the longevity of the nonprofit model, it is not too soon to root for and do everything possible to cultivate it. As for-profit news institutions continue to downsize and blink out of existence, nonprofits represent a promising path forward to continue producing the investigative journalism that our communities, to say nothing of our national democracy, so desperately needs.
Nicole Rupersburg is a freelance writer who covers the new economy, urban development, and social justice issues, but to some she’ll always be a food blogger. Find her on Twitter @ruperstarski and on Instagram @eatsdrinksandleaves. | https://medium.com/news-to-table/nonprofit-journalism-grows-up-9a7627d7fb17 | ['Pressland Editors'] | 2019-07-16 20:54:52.629000+00:00 | ['Reporting', 'Nonprofit', 'Media', 'Journalism', 'News'] |
Meaning Eventually Finds Its Place In FKA Twigs’ Grandiose Artistic Vision | Meaning Eventually Finds Its Place In FKA Twigs’ Grandiose Artistic Vision
Her latest LP “MAGDALENE” is an interstellar voyage through the dust of the broken heart to the planet of self
During her long-lasting hiatus, the avant-garde pop princess FKA Twigs got crushed by the brutal hands of her troubled relationships — falling in love with the ex-blood sucker Robert Pattinson and splitting with him in a seemingly heart-wrecking manner. Two years following the end of this romance, twigs comes back feeling quite herself and ready to baptise her loyal fanbase in the career-defining shrift.
In the pre-“MAGDALENE” era, British-born singer and songwriter Taliah Barnett took on a cunning challenge to manufacture the new RnB sound — blending her fragile-sounding soprano and the spooky art-house opera inspired imagery with the precision and inanimation of electronic music. Her efforts were met with universal critical acclaim, but looking in retrospect, the alien world twigs built around herself felt overwhelmed by her pompous visionary yet lacking raw human experience.
In this sense, “MAGDALENE” comes through as a true revelation, being an album that runs on the fuel of imaginative lyricism and storytelling. Here, Twigs tries on the image of Mary Magdalene and tells us the love story with her very own Jesus, drawing inspiration from the chants of classical religious music and futuristic electronic sounds.
The album starts with “thousand eyes” and, in an instance, enswathes you with a death-bearing sound of acapella choral signing and thud but heavy background instrumental, serving as a reminder of memorial liturgy music stripped off to its most naked condition. Alongside this soul-shivering melody, Twigs begins her Skaespherean story of spiritual death and thorny resurrection.
If I walk out the door, it starts our last goodbye
If you don’t pull me back, it wakes a thousand eyes
Going forward, the narrative unfurls in a surprisingly cohesive manner, letting Twigs’ vocal arrangements and poetic talent shine the way they’ve never had before. No matter what it is — the antithesis of distorted chest voice and paper-light head voice on “home with you”, or the intimate insight into the secrets of womanhood on “mary magdalene” — Twigs serves us a bowl full of ripe-fruit she religiously gathered at the garden of Eden.
There are many great moments on “MAGDALEN” — either lyrically, sonically or vocally — but the times it ascends to the sky-high levels lie at the intersection of the experimental search Twigs underwent in her previous work and the lucidity of pop-sound she tamed with the help of her fellow co-writers and co-producers. The result of this artistic confluence materialized in “sad day”, which might be remembered as one of the best pop tracks of this decade.
Channelling Kate Bush ethereal timbre, Twigs starts the track by whispering simple yet beautiful lyrics into the isolation of her listener's auricles, and then the melody expands into this epic dance/electronic ballad where Skrillex’s production touch suddenly falls in place and electrifies the record.
Bearing in mind how great the rest of the album is, it’s at best puzzling how “holy terrain” featuring Future made it to the final cut. It’s a commercially-baked, mediocre RnB song made to, perhaps, please the wider audience. A sad but not criminal oversight which gets forgotten as soon as the record ends.
Despite being listed as the sixth track, “fallen alien” comes through as the culminating phase of the narrative. It’s the most experimental track on the album exposing Twigs in her most desperate state. She basically goes on a full-scale jihad against her former lover. Her vocals here are nothing less than transcending: incisive, hysterical, in a good sense of this word, and on the edge of breaking loose into a wild scream.
The last three songs reveal Twigs meditating on the aftermath of relationships and reconciling with the damage left after it. The album ends with the lead single “cellophane”, a beautiful piano ballad which wraps all the memories and feelings into a thin, transparent sheet of regenerated cellulose.
All wrapped in cellophane, the feelings that we had.
It might sound trivial but the beauty of “MAGDALENE” truly lies in the eyes of its beholder. You can try and disentangle it into separate pieces to only be left with the overwhelming layers of artificial noises and digitally-produced sounds. But looking at “MAGDALENE” in its entirety reveals a timeless piece of pop art which was born in a happy marriage of a self-aware artist and her multifaceted talent.
P.S.
You can find me on Twitter and Instagram. | https://tonysolovjov.medium.com/meaning-eventually-finds-its-place-in-fka-twigs-grandiose-artistic-vision-bdfc8627fe53 | ['Tony Solovjov'] | 2020-01-30 09:32:44.502000+00:00 | ['Review', 'Music', 'Art', 'Pop', 'Culture'] |
Transparency as an Engine of Social Change had its First Festival | By Tomás Seballos Vergara.
Representatives from diverse fields such as Ana Tijoux, Imogen Heap, John Elkington, Roberto Manrique, among others, gave life to the first World Transparency Day Festival, shedding light on this value as the central element for the significant changes that our planet needs.
The first World Transparency Day Festival organized by EnlightAID, was held on October 9 with the presence of key stakeholders as well as musicians with digital presence of people from around the world. Key players joined our team aligning in this important instance that sought to confront corruption through the awareness of transparency.
World Transparency Day, an event organized by EnlightAID featured ten world-class speakers such as Roberto Manrique, Imogen Heap and John Enklington, and took place with a large international presence. Together with our founder and CEO Verónica Celis, they shared experiences on the importance of transparency in order to achieve necessary changes for our planet. Also outstanding musicians such as Outernational, Ana Tijoux, Sol Pereyra, Paz Quintana and Doctor Krápula gave life to a digital event that traveled around the world. Speakers from various organizations accompanied EnlightAID on this occasion, such as Ainara Aparici from Fundación Kumelen and Ana Arriagada with Roberto Bruna from the independent media El Soberano.
Artists, economists, musicians and activists gave life to the transformative power of transparency. Climate change, universal access to health care, the guarantee of human rights, among other issues, are goals that governments, organizations and individuals seek to achieve and therefore, the coordination between stakeholders is fundamental.
The problem of the large amount of funds that are lost along the way is one of the conflicts that we seek to solve. Moreover, the United States donated 450 billion dollars in 2019 and, according to the UN, 30% of each donation is lost as a result of corruption. For the same reason, at EnlightAID we believe that corruption is combated through technologies that create real-time reports on the destination of the resources of these donations. This is why World Transparency Day successfully positioned transparency as the main value that, with innovation, aims to make the donation processes visible, and trustworthy, allowing resources to reach their intended destinations.
We have launched the first platform that reports in real time how donations are used. EnlightAID makes it possible for each person to follow the activities of an organization and its team, as well as its statistics and, of course, how they spend their money. Through monitoring we seek to (re)build a relationship based on trust in which each person enjoys the certainty of the destination of their money. Donation translates into action and as a process it is visible thanks to the platform we launched at the first World Transparency Day.
It was with great joy that the festival was held for the re-launch of EnlightAID, a turning point for global transparency as it proposes a paradigm shift in confronting corruption in the world. Join the cause for a more egalitarian, sustainable and transparent planet. Join EnlighAID. | https://medium.com/enlightaid/transparency-as-an-engine-of-social-change-had-its-first-festival-67455af2a809 | ['Tomás Seballos'] | 2021-11-25 12:48:39.003000+00:00 | ['Transparency', 'Festivals', 'World Transparency Day', 'Enlightaid', 'Donations'] |
Are all CNNs created equal? | Motivation: erring is telling
So you want to train a neural network to distinguish puppies from people. Maybe you’d like to train a system that opens the door when your little puppy arrives but keeps strangers out, or you are the owner of an animal farm where you want to make sure that only people can get into the house.
In any case, you take your favourite CNNs (say, ResNet-152 for performance and AlexNet for good old times’ sake) and train them on a puppies-vs-people dataset scraped from the web. You are relieved to see that each of them reach about 96-98% accuracy. Lovely. But does similar accuracy imply similar strategy?
Well, not necessarily: even very different strategies can lead to very similar accuracies. However, those 2–4% that the networks got wrong carry a lot of information about their respective strategies. Suppose AlexNet and ResNet both made an error on the following image by predicting “person” instead of “puppy”:
Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash
Now making this error would be just as sad as this dog looks like, especially since many other puppies were recognised perfectly well, like these here:
You probably know what puppies look like, but aren’t they cute?! Photo by Bharathi Kannan on Unsplash.
Looking at some more images that the networks failed to recognise, you start forming a suspicion: Could it be the case that both networks implemented the classification strategy “whatever wears clothes is a person”? You’ve always suspected AlexNet to be a bit of a cheat — but what about you, ResNet? Is it too much to ask for a bit more depth of character from someone with 152 layers?
Closer inspection confirms: conversely, the networks also misclassified a few people as “puppies” —we leave it to the reader’s imagination how these images may have looked like if the model’s decision strategy relies on the degree of clothing.
Erring is telling, and we can exploit this property: if two systems (e.g. two different CNNs) implement a similar strategy, they should make errors on the same individual input images — not just a similar number of errors (as measured by accuracy) but also errors on the same inputs: similar strategies will make similar errors. And this is exactly what we can measure using error consistency.
Introduced in our recent paper, trial-by-trial error consistency assesses whether two systems systematically make errors on the same inputs (or trials, as this would be called in psychological experiments). Call it an analysis based on trial and error if you like.
Leaving the hypothetical toy dataset (puppies vs. people) aside, how similar are the strategies of different CNNs trained on a big dataset (ImageNet)? And are they similar to human errors on the same data? We simply went to the animal, pardon, model farm and evaluated all ImageNet-trained PyTorch models to obtain their classification decisions (correct responses vs. errors) on a dataset where we also have human decisions for comparison. Here’s what we’ve discovered. | https://towardsdatascience.com/are-all-cnns-created-equal-d13a33b0caf7 | ['Robert Geirhos'] | 2020-07-02 14:11:52.825000+00:00 | ['Deep Learning', 'Human Perception', 'Human Behaviour', 'Metrics', 'Recurrent Neural Network'] |
What About a Stablecoin Built On Top of Bitcoin? | Ethereum is the most widely used technology platform for building stablecoins. Just under two-thirds of all stablecoins (60%) have been built exclusively on top of Ethereum, according to Blockchain.com. Other platforms used for stablecoins include Bitcoin, NEO, and Stellar.
Stablecoins arose because of the volatile nature of other cryptocurrencies. “The first wave of crypto assets, of which Bitcoin is the best known, have so far failed to provide a reliable and attractive means of payment or store of value,” wrote the Bank for International Settlements, an international financial institution owned by central banks. “They have suffered from highly volatile prices, limits to scalability, complicated user interfaces and issues in governance and regulation, among other challenges. Thus, cryptoassets have served more as a highly speculative asset class for certain investors and those engaged in illicit activities rather than as a means to make payments.”
Yet, Bitcoin has often been compared to “digital gold.” Throughout history, gold has been used as money. Bitcoin and gold share many similar attributes. Their overall supply is limited, each can be divided or combined to make different amounts, and both are generally easy to carry around in sufficient amounts for commerce. National governments long pegged their fiat currencies to gold. The Bretton Wood agreement of 1944 established rules for commercial and financial relations between the United States, Canada, Western European countries, Australia, and Japan.
The Bretton Woods system obliged each nation to maintain its external exchange rates within 1 percent by pegging its currency to gold and the ability of the IMF to bridge temporary imbalances of payments.
While Bitcoin’s “digital gold” thesis has captured the public mind, many holders of Bitcoin believe it will appreciate and store value over time, so people spend it less. Stablecoins have proven more attractive for such transactions due to their stable prices.
Bitcoin as Collateral for a Stablecoin
Bitcoin is already heavily embedded in the history of the stablecoin. Tether, established in 2014, is one of the older stablecoins. A ‘tether’ is issued and redeemed via the Omni Layer protocol, which was previously known as Mastercoin, a network built on Bitcoin. Tether is backed by off-chain collateral; that is, US dollars in a bank account.
There are many precedents for a crypto-collateralized Bitcoin. As we went over in our blog, “Stablecoins: What You Need to Know,” a cryptocurrency-backed stablecoin can either be backed by one or a basket of cryptocurrencies. Developers and game theorists stabilize the value of such a stablecoin through mathematics and algorithms.
These types of stablecoins currently require more collateral than, for instance, a US dollar backed stablecoin, making Bitcoin a good candidate as a reserve because of its wide use and a market larger than any other cryptocurrencies.
MakerDAO is the best known project using digital assets as collateral. The project uses ether as collateral and the market value of ether as its value base.
The reason Ethereum has been used mostly for stablecoins, while Bitcoins have not, has to do with the preponderance of smart contracts on Ethereum. Smart contracts can be used to control ether collateral. This function is not inherent to the Bitcoin blockchain.
Such solutions are in the works; most notably, RSK. This smart contract approach taken on Bitcoin involves a second layer built on top of the blockchain. RSK uses the Bitcoin blockchain to custody bitcoins.
This second layer supports the stablecoin asset built based on the Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin, and the second layer solution, RSK, can support more functions than just stablecoins, but a wide range of digital products that mirror their real world financial equivalents. These sorts of products have been termed “decentralized finance.”
RSK writes about a stable value asset that might be issued on RSK, which empowers developers to create assets pegged to fiat currency or other stable commodity through the locking of bitcoin as collateral. Holders of Bitcoin might like this because a stable asset could both minimize risk to volatility and increase demand for Bitcoin, since it is now a reserve currency for a stable asset, too.
“The lock of high amounts of Bitcoin reduces liquidity and therefore contributes to the rise of Bitcoin’s value,” reads the RSK white paper. “However, most importantly, these Bitcoin-backed stable tokens on RSK will enable stable-coin micro-payments which allow billions of inhabitants currently underserved by the legacy financial system to participate in the global digital economy.”
This smart contract functionality on top of Bitcoin makes the bitcoin-collateralized stablecoin possible. Bitcoin is the most liquid cryptocurrency and has the largest value and user base. Its robust mining infrastructure helps ensure its security. A clear monetary policy, with 21 million bitcoins to be mined over time and no more, gives the stablecoin a predictable base upon which to base its value.
Satoshi Nakamoto intended for Bitcoin to be a digital currency, although many today believe it behaves more like a digital gold. Since Bitcoin is traded in a global 24/7 market, its value is considered objective based on supply and demand. A stablecoin could be issued based on this value base.
Over the past ten years, the value base of Bitcoin has grown from zero to $200 billion. It’s also been as high as $400 billion. Yet, concerns over Bitcoin’s price being manipulated undermine it as a base for a stablecoin. The CME uses a composite price by Crypto Facility Group. Bakkt’s planned one-day Bitcoin future is settled physically, and could help to achieve the price objectivity of Bitcoin.
A stablecoin on Bitcoin could create new dynamics for that market. Approximately 2% of Ether is collateralized at MakerDAO. The total value of Bitcoin used to mint stablecoin is estimated at $4 billion.
The Bitcoin-Backed Stablecoin
Bitcoin’s price volatility is likely to remain for possibly decades. Most international transactions will therefore likely take place with USD as the unit of account. Along the path of hyperbitcoinization, when the world voluntarily begins using Bitcoin as both a currency and store of value, we believe a stablecoin based that uses Bitcoin as collateral will provide users ease of use, transparency, decentralization, and censorship resistance.
There are many arguments for a Bitcoin-backed stablecoin. A digital asset-backed stablecoin minimizes the need for a counterparty compared to a stablecoin with its value backed by a bank account.
We’ve therefore developed Dollar on Chain, a stable token pegged to USD Dollar, using RSK network’s native token RBTC, which is pegged 1:1 with bitcoin. In addition, BitPro maintains bitcoin price volatility, while BTCX represent positions on the Money on Chain decentralized derivatives exchange (DEX).
Participants on this network enjoy a decentralized digital asset platform backed with the benefits of Bitcoin, including large value base, network of nodes, and other benefits of the world’s first digital currency.
Learn more by reading our white paper today.
Written by: Justin O’Connell | https://medium.com/moneyonchain/what-about-a-stablecoin-built-on-top-of-bitcoin-fdb163a6b137 | [] | 2019-12-05 20:50:44.786000+00:00 | ['Stablecoin', 'Moneyonchain', 'Volatility', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
Chitti Song Lyrics In Telugu Tenglish And English Jathi Ratnalu Movie | Chitti Song Lyrics In Telugu Tenglish And English Jathi Ratnalu Movie chaitanya Feb 20·3 min read
Chitti Song Lyrics
Producer: Nag Ashwin
Lyricist: Ramajogayya Sastry
Singer: Ram miryala
Music: Radhan
Comedy entertainer ‘Jatiratnalu’ starring Naveen Polisetti, Rahul Ramakrishna and Priyadarshi in the lead roles. Directed by Anudeep KV. Produced by Nag Ashwin under the banner of Swapna Cinema.
Faria Abdullah played the heroine. The movie attracted everyone with its song ‘Chitti Ni Navvante’. Expectations have also been raised that the film will be coming from a prestigious company like Vyjayanti Movies. However, it has been more than a year since the movie started. So many people have forgotten about this.
Chitti Nee Navvante Song Lyrics In Telugu
Chitti ni navvante lakshmi pattase
Pattumani pelinda na gunde khallase
Atta nuvvu girra girra melikalu tirige a oose
Nuvvu naku set ayyavani signal este breking nyuse
Vachesave lainloki vachesave
Chimma cheekatikunna jindhageelona flad laite vesve
Hatheri nacchesve masthuga nacchesave
Black and white lokal gani lokamlona rangulu poosave
Chitti naa bul bul chitti
Chitti na chul bul chitti
Naa rendu buggalu patti muddhulu pettave
Chitti naa jil jil chitti
Chitti na red bul chitti
Na face bukkulo laksha lakulu kottave
Yuddhamemi jaragale sumolevi asaleragale
Chitikelo ala chinni navvutho paccha jenda choopinchinave
Medam elijebeth nee range ayina
Thadu bongaram leni avaara nene ayina
Masugadi manasuke votesave
Bangla nundi basthiki phlaitesave
Theenmar chinnodini dj steppulu aadisthive
Naseeb byad unnodini navabu chesesthive
Athiloka sundharivi nuvvu nuv aaftral o tapori nenu
Google myap ayi nee gundeku cheristhive
Arere icchesave dhillu naku icchesave
Mirfhi bajji lanti laifulo nuvu onian vesave
Arere gicchesave lovvu tyatu gucchesave
Masthu masthu biriyanilo nimbu chekkay halchal chesave
Chitti naa bul bul chitti
Chitti na chul bul chitti
Naa rendu buggalu patti muddhulu pettave
Chitti naa jil jil chitti
Chitti na red bul chitti
Na face bukkulo laksha lakulu kottave
చిట్టి నీ నవ్వంటే వీడియో సాంగ్ జాతి రత్నాలు మూవీ
https://youtu.be/ruWIZcL5T6I
Chitti Song Lyrics In English
Chitti, your smile is Lakshmi Pattase
Fattumani exploded and my heart sank
The cardboard is the one that twists and turns
Breaking news is when you signal that you are set for me
Coming in line
Asawe is the flood light in the mosquito’s darkened life
Hateri Nachchesave Mastuga Nachchesave
The colors of the world are either black and white
Chitti is my bull bull chitti
Chitti is my Chul Bull Chitti
Putting my two cheeks and kissing
Chitty is my Jill Jill Chitty
Chitti is my Red Bull Chitti
Kottave a lakh likes on my Facebook
Sumoles are the only ones who can make war
The green flag was shown with such a small smile on the pinch
Madame Elizabeth is your range though
Even if I am a ropeless noose …
Masugadi Manasuke Otesave
Flightesave from Bungalow to Basti
Teenagers play the DJ steps on the little one
Naseeb is the Nawab who makes the bad one
Atiloka Sundarivi Nuv Aftral O Tapori I
Google Map is what brings it to your heart
Oh no, Dillu gives it to me
In a life like Mirchi Bajji, you are the Onion Esau
Oh no gicchasave lavvu tattoo gucchesave
Nimbu Chekkai Hulchal Chesave in Mustumastu Biryani
Chitti is my bull bull chitti
Chitti Na Chul Bull Chitti holding both my cheeks and kissing me
Chitty is my Jill Jill Chitty
Chitti is my Red Bull Chitti
Kottave a lakh likes on my Facebook | https://medium.com/@chaitanya-smtv/chitti-song-lyrics-in-telugu-tenglish-and-english-jathi-ratnalu-movie-c8fa73142454 | [] | 2021-02-20 02:12:52.749000+00:00 | ['Telugu Movies', 'Telugu Songs', 'Songs'] |
Python Functions for Beginners — An Introduction to Python Functions | We’ll deal with Python functions — an invaluable tool for programmers. The best way of learning is by doing, so let’s create a function and see how it can be applied.
Defining a Function in Python
To tell the computer you are about to create a function, just write def at the beginning of the line. Def is neither a command nor a function. It is a keyword. To indicate this, Jupyter will automatically change its font color to green. Then, you can type the name of the function you will use. For instance, simple, as we will create a very simple function. Then we can add a pair of parentheses. Technically, within these parentheses, you could place the parameters of the function if it requires you to have any. It is no problem to have a function with zero parameters. This is the case with the function we are creating right now. To proceed, don’t miss to put a colon after the name of the function.
Since it is inconvenient to continue on the same line when the function becomes longer, it is much better to build the habit of laying the instructions on a new line, with an indent again. Good legibility counts for а good style of coding!
All right, let’s see what will happen when we ask the machine to print a sentence.
Not much, at least for now.
The computer created the function “simple” that can print out “My first function”, but that was all. To apply the function, we must call it. We must ask the function to do its job. So, we will obtain its result once we type its name, “simple”, and parentheses. See?
Great!
Creating a Function with a Parameter
Our next task will be to create a function with a parameter. Let it be “plus ten” with a parameter ”a”, that gives us the sum of “a” and 10 as a result…
Always begin with the “def” keyword. Then, type the name of the function, “plus ten”, and in parentheses, designate the parameter “a”. The last thing to write on this line would be the colon sign.
Good. What comes next is very important.
Don’t forget to return a value from the function. If we look at the function we wrote in the previous lesson, there was no value to return; it printed a certain statement. Things are different here. We will need this function to do a specific calculation for us and not just print something.
Type “return “a” plus 10”. This will be the body of this function.
Now, let’s call “plus ten” with an argument 2 specified in parentheses.
Amazing! It works.
Once we’ve created a function, we can run it repeatedly, changing its argument. I could run “plus ten” with an argument of 5, and this time, the answer will be 15.
Great!
Pay attention to the following. When we define a function, we specify in parentheses a parameter. In the “plus ten” function, “a” is a parameter. Later, when we call this function, it is correct to say we provide an argument, not a parameter. So we can say “call plus ten with an argument of 2, call plus ten with an argument of 5”.
People often confuse print and return, and the type of situations when we can apply them. To understand the concept better, try to imagine the following.
There is an argument x, which serves as an input in a function, like the one we have here. The function in this case is x plus 10. Given that x is an input, we can think of it as a value we already know, so the combination of x and the function will give us the output value y. Well, in programming, return regards the value of y; it just says to the machine “after the operations executed by the function f, return to me the value of “y”. “Return” plays a connection between the second and the third step of the process. In other words, a function can take an input of one or more variables and return a single output composed of one or more values. This is why “return” can be used only once in a function. Therefore, we can say the concept of a function applies to programming almost perfectly.
There are some extra advantages to consider. You could also assign a more intuitive name to a function — “plus ten” or “addition of 10”, and the function will still run correctly. This is a sign of good design. On a sheet with one thousand lines of code, if you call all your functions x1, x2, x3 and so on, your colleagues will be confused and utterly unhappy.
Naming functions clearly and concisely makes your programming code easy to understand, and it will be accepted as one of good style.
Another Way to Define a Function
There is another way in which you could organize the definition of your function. Start by defining “plus ten” with an argument of “a” and a colon. On the next line, instead of directly returning the value of “a” plus 10, another variable can be created inside the function to carry that value. I will use the name “result” here. I will assign it with the desired value of “a” plus 10.
Let’s check what we just did. If I execute the code in the cell, I will get nothing. Why? Because to this moment, I have only declared the variable “result” in the body of our function.
Naturally, to obtain the desired outcome, I will also have to return that variable.
See? When I call “plus ten” with an argument of 2, I obtain 12. It is all fine again.
“Print” takes a statement or, better, an object, and provides its printed representation in the output cell. It just makes a certain statement visible to the programmer. A good reason to do that would be when you have a huge amount of code, and you want to see the intermediary steps of your program printed out, so you can follow the control flow. Otherwise, print does not affect the calculation of the output.
Differently, return does not visualize the output. It specifies what a certain function is supposedto give back. It’s important you understand what each of the two keywords does. This will help you a great deal when working with functions.
The following could be helpful.
Let that same function also print out the statement “outcome”. If we put down only “return outcome”, and then “return result”, what will we get when we call the function? Just the first object to return — the statement “outcome”.
If, instead, we print that statement and then return ‘result’, we will get what we wanted: the “outcome” statement and the result of the calculation — 12.
This was to show you we can return only a single result out of a function.
Using a Function in another Function
It isn’t a secret we can have a function within the function. For instance, let’s define a function called ‘wage’ that calculates your daily wage. Say you use working hours as a parameter, and you are paid 25 dollars per hour.
Notice I don’t technically need the print command here. I could print out the wage afterwards, but I don’t really need to. So, I’ll proceed this way, just returning the value I need.
When you do well in a day, your boss will be very happy to give a bonus of 50 dollars added to your salary. Hence, I’ll define a “with bonus” function for you. And as a parameter, I will take again the working hours. But this time, I will allow myself to return directly the wage with working hours as an output, which would be the value obtained after the wage function has been run, plus the extra 50 dollars you’ve earned.
This is how the first function is involved in the output of the second one — a function within the function!
Let’s see what the output will be if you worked 8 hours today and the boss was very happy with your performance. Wage with an argument 8, and “with bonus” with an argument 8.
Great! 200 of base compensation and 250 with the bonus!
Combining Conditional Statements and Functions
We know how to work with if statements, and we know how to work with functions. In this lesson, we’ll learn how to combine the two. This is a fundamental concept in programming, so please pay attention! You’ll encounter it quite regularly when coding.
Johnny’s mom told him that, by the end of the week, if he has saved at least 100 dollars, she would give him an extra 10 dollars. If he did not manage to save at least 100 dollars, though, she would prefer not to give him the extra cash.
Clear. Now, let’s define a function called “add 10”, which takes as a parameter the unknown “m” that represents the money Johnny saved by the end of the week. What should we tell the computer to do? If “m” is greater than or equal to 100, then add 10 to the saved amount. If it is not, return a statement that lets us know Johnny should save more.
That is, if “m” is greater than or equal to a hundred, let “m” assume the value of “m” plus 10.
Yes, it is what you saw! We have “m” on both sides of the equation, and that is perfectly fine. As a matter of fact, it is not an equation. Remember that the “equality” sign stands for assigning the expression on the right side to what is written on the left side.
Let’s complete the if-part with “return m”. To sum up, logically, we mention “m” as a parameter. Then, we substitute its value with a value greater than “m” with 10. At the end, we say: from now on, return a value equal to the new “m”.
Finally, in all other cases say, for instance, “Save more!” (Johnny should learn it is a good habit to have some cash on the side, right?)
Let’s see if our intuition was correct. “Add 10” of 110 — good, 120!
And if “m” was equal to 50…? Amazing! Everything is correct!
When you think of it from a logical perspective, it makes sense, doesn’t it? What would you use a computer for — to solve problems for you. And it can do that through functions. You’ll most probably need to ask the machine to execute something if a given parameter is within certainlimits and ask it to execute another thing if the parameter is beyond these limits. Therefore, combining your knowledge about conditionals and Python functions comes right on the money.
Creating Functions Containing a Few Arguments
We are almost there. In this lesson, we’ll learn how to work with more than one parameter in a function. The way this is done in Python is by enlisting all the arguments within the parentheses, separated by a comma.
Shall I call the function we have here for, say, 10, 3, and 2? I get 4.
Seems easy to add a few parameters, right? And it is! Just be careful with the order in which you state their values. In our case, I assigned 10 to the variable a, 3 to b, and 2 to c.
Otherwise, the order won’t matter if and only if you specify the names of the variables within the parentheses like this: b equals 3, a equals 10, and c equals 2.
And of course, we could obtain the same answer — 4!
This is how we can work with functions that have multiple arguments.
Notable Built-In Functions in Python
When you install Python on your computer, you are also installing some of its built-in functions. This means you won’t need to type their code every time you use them — these functions are already on your computer and can be applied directly.
The function “type” allows you to obtain the type of variable you use as an argument, like in this cell — “Type” of 10 gives “int” for integer.
The “int”, “float”, and “string” functions transform their arguments in an integer, float, and string data type, respectively. This is why 5.0 was converted to 5, 3 was converted to 3.0, and the number 500 became text.
Great!
Now, let me show you a few other built-in functions that are quite useful.
“Max” returns the highest value from a sequence of numbers. This is why “Max” returned a value of 30 as an output in this cell. Good.
“Min” does just the opposite — it returns the lowest value from a sequence. So, we get 10 in that cell over here — it is the smallest among 10, 20, and 30.
Another built-in function, “Abs”, allows you to obtain the absolute value of its argument.
Let “z” be equal to minus 20. If we apply the “abs” function to “z”, the result will be its absolute value of 20. See?
Perfect!
An essential function that can help you a great deal is “sum”. It will calculate the sum of all the elements in a list designated as an argument. Consider the following list made of 1, 2, 3, and 4 as its data. When I type “sum list 1”, my output will be equal to 1 plus 2 plus 3 plus 4. The sum of these numbers equals 10.
“Round” returns the float of its argument, rounded to a specified number of digits after the decimal point. “Round” 3.555 with 2 digits after the decimal point will turn into 3.56.
If the number of digits is not indicated, it defaults to zero. 3.2 is rounded down to 3.0. Great!
If you are interested in elevating 2 to the power of 10, you know you could type “2 double star 10”. You can get the same result if you use the “pow” function, which stands for “power”. Write “pow”, and in the “parentheses”, specify the base and the power, separated by a comma. In our case, “2 comma 10”. Execute with “Shift and Enter” and… voilà! 1024!
And what if you wanted to see how many elements there are in an object? The “Len” function, as in “length”, is going to help you do that. If you choose a string as an argument, the “Len” function will tell you how many characters there are in a word. For instance, in the word “Mathematics”, we have 11 characters.
There are many other built-in Python functions, but these are a few examples you will often need to use when programming. | https://medium.com/365datascience/python-functions-for-beginners-an-introduction-to-python-functions-86f8f32573e9 | ['Data Science'] | 2019-05-31 14:07:00.406000+00:00 | ['Python Programming', 'Programming', 'Python', 'Python Functions'] |
Is There a Connection Between Types of Bacteria and the State of Gum Disease? — Savanna Dental | Is There a Connection Between Types of Bacteria and the State of Gum Disease? — Savanna Dental Savanna Dental Dec 13, 2021·5 min read
Recent research has found that a “bacterial signature” exists, which enables scientists to be able to mark a shift from healthy teeth and gums to gum disease. In practice, this will be able to help dentists in knowing the stage of gum disease that a patient is at. Therefore, they will be able to provide improved advice and more accurate treatment.
Japanese researchers from the Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) have found a “bacterial signature” exists. This refers to the researchers finding that they can mark the point that a patient can shift from having healthy teeth and gums to gum disease.
Gum disease continues to affect so many people. As a result, any research that can help prevent, or at least slow the onset of, gum disease, is highly desirable.
In practice, if this research is confirmed as accurate, then dentists and their patients could benefit from increased insight into gum disease and better treatment plans.
What is gum disease?
Gum disease is a very common condition. For example, statistics show that around 90% of the world’s population has a form of gum disease [1].
There are different stages of gum disease. Gingivitis is seen as a rather mild form of gum disease. Periodontal disease is a severe form of gum disease.
Gum disease involves inflammation of the gums. This is caused by a build-up of plaque and bacteria. Plaque develops over a period of time, eventually wearing down tooth enamel. Consequently, tooth decay will develop, hastening gum disease.
An eventual consequence of gum disease is tooth loss, due to the bones around the teeth being too weak. Studies have shown that many bacteria types contribute to bone loss in gum disease [2].
Bacteria is another area of concern for the health of the mouth. Some bacteria can be good for breaking down food. However, the majority of bacteria is bad, and will contribute to gum disease.
Research
Researchers from the TMDU carried out the research, which was published in the journal mSystems [3]. Their study involved 21 patients.
The researchers took plaque samples from three sites within the mouths of the 21 patients. All 21 participants had been diagnosed with periodontal disease [3].
The three sites included one area that was “healthy”, one area that showed signs of gingivitis, and another area that clearly had periodontitis [3].
Researchers then interpreted the results by using a special technique called “metatranscriptomic” analysis [3]. This determined the different types of bacteria at each site.
The results showed that there were indeed clear differences in the level of bacterial composition between the three different sites [3].
Certain types of bacteria that are known to be associated with gum disease were, as predicted, higher in the areas with periodontal disease [3]. For instance, these included eubacterium nodatum and filifactor alocis [3].
What this means
By reviewing these three different sites, researchers were able to identify the key differences between them. Moreover, they were also able to review how different bacteria types affected each area [3].
This enabled the researchers to come up with a “bacterial signature” that should help dentists to identify early signs of gum disease, and provide more accurate recommendations for those who already show signs of gum disease. Finally, it could also help to slow the onset of gum disease.
Lead researcher Takashi Nemoto commented on the findings [4]. He suggested that the changes they observed between each site showed the “shift from health to periodontitis is accompanied by changes in both the structure and the complexity of the bacterial network” [4].
Nemoto said that previous studies had “explored differences in bacterial communities in healthy mouths or those affected by gingivitis or periodontitis” [4]. However, the research from the TMDU was innovative as it analysed how such “communities changed during progression from health to periodontitis” [4].
Researchers continue to find ways to tackle gum disease. Because of how common it is, there is no shortage of effort being put in to trying to improve treatment outcomes.
Thinking points…
1) A bad habit that many people have is nail-biting or chewing on a pen lid. Did you know that these habits involve bacteria coming into the mouth? Anything that goes into our mouths will include bacteria. What habits can you cut out?
2) As this study shows, it is important for gum disease to be picked up on early. At a check-up, a dentist can help to identify if you have signs of gum disease and give advice. Consider making an appointment!
3) If you are particularly concerned about gum disease, or know that you have gum disease, are you aware of scaling and root planing? These treatments involve a deep clean of the gums, and is known to be an effective way of improving gum health.
What we offer at Savanna Dental
Savanna Dental is a dental clinic based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. We provide our patients with a warm welcome, a comfortable experience and advice whenever needed.
We recommend that our patients attend our Calgary-based dental clinic twice a year for a regular dental check-up. When problems are detected, we have many treatments available. For instance, these include cavity fillings and root canals. We also have some cosmetic treatments too!
Importantly, we recommend brushing your teeth at least twice a day and flossing regularly. Moreover, eating healthily and trying to avoid sugary foods and drink is helpful.
In addition, all of our services at our Calgary dental clinic Savanna Dental are in line with the Alberta Dental Fee Guide.
We would love you to visit our Savanna Dental dental clinic in Calgary! You can find out more about us by visiting our website https://savannadentalclinic.ca.
References | https://medium.com/@savannadentalgl/is-there-a-connection-between-types-of-bacteria-and-the-state-of-gum-disease-savanna-dental-3b2b389e8421 | ['Savanna Dental'] | 2021-12-13 23:58:00.920000+00:00 | ['Dental Care', 'Dentistry', 'Oral Health', 'Dental'] |
Weight Loss Psychology | Weight Loss with Mind!
Apply the Psychology of Self-Control to Your Weight Loss Plan and Stick to Your Diet More Successfully!
If you’re struggling to lose weight or stick to a healthier diet, it’s not that you don’t know what you should do — it’s that sticking to your goals and resisting temptation can be more difficult than you thought! This course will show you how to stick to those goals and resist tempting, diet-busting foods and activities through proven mental strategies.
Everything in this course is rooted in tested mental strategies. I’m not just making things up like a lot of health and fitness “gurus.” You’ll learn practical tips taken from rigorous research in psychological science, and you’ll discover how you can easily and effectively implement these techniques.
This course covers three general steps you can take to self-control mastery:
How to effectively plan for opportunities to take actions that help meet your goals
How to rethink temptation in ways that make it less alluring
How to build your willpower and use your self-control strength to resist temptation
By the end of this course, you’ll be able to use simple tricks and techniques to make self-control easier. If you actually apply these strategies and make a deliberate effort to understand their effects, you’ll have a huge advantage when it comes to sticking to your diet, meeting your fitness goals, and leading a healthier lifestyle. Best of all, this course will always be there for you, and you can review the material anytime you need renewed motivation to stay strong.
Using Psychological Science to its Full Potential
You don’t lose weight because you don’t know how!
Everything in this course is rooted in tested mental strategies. I’m not just making things up like a lot of health and fitness “gurus.” You’ll learn practical tips taken from rigorous research in psychological science, and you’ll discover how you can easily and effectively implement these techniques.
This course covers three general steps you can take to self-control mastery:
How to effectively plan for opportunities to take actions that help meet your goals
How to rethink temptation in ways that make it less alluring
How to build your willpower and use your self-control strength to resist temptation
By the end of this course, you’ll be able to use simple tricks and techniques to make self-control easier. If you actually apply these strategies and make a deliberate effort to understand their effects, you’ll have a huge advantage when it comes to sticking to your diet, meeting your fitness goals, and leading a healthier lifestyle. Best of all, this course will always be there for you, and you can review the material anytime you need renewed motivation to stay strong.
And You Can Trust Your Coach!
I’m a trained social psychologist. Not only do I have more than 20 years of experience, but I also teach people in social psychology in real life practice. Moreover, I conduct my own psychological research, so I know a thing or two about how research in psychological science works and what it can tell us.
Don’t miss out on the chance to dive straight into the secrets of self-control success that have until now remained locked in dense academic journals. So enroll now — you’ll be glad you did.
“Make time for it. Just get it done. Nobody ever got strong or got in shape by thinking about it. They did it.”
What you’ll learn
Apply effective strategies to resist temptations and stick your long-term goals.
Make healthier choices by making high-calorie foods less alluring.
Understand the key psychological ingredients that are related to effective self-control.
Are there any course requirements or prerequisites?
You should know what your health goals already are. I’ll show you how to stick to those goals, but your specific goals are up to you!
Who this course is for:
If you’re trying to lose weight but are having trouble sticking to your diet and resisting tempting diet-busters, this is the course you need!
Students of psychology will also get a lot out of this course by understanding the key thoughts that are related to goal conflict.
“Decide. Commit. Succeed.”
Results from enthusiastic participants of the MotivatedFit Program
Since doing this, I’ve known how radical a transformation can be…
Don’t let anyone tell you there’s anything you can’t do!
Doctors, dieticians, the pharmaceutical industry… think about it. Which one of them has a honest interest in you being 100% healthy and in top shape?
Since doing this, I have experienced countless transformations that nobody from the above mentioned professions would have thought possible.
On this page you will find some insight into these transformations. I’m getting so many photos of enthusiastic customers every day that it would be impossible to post them all on the website.
Now scroll through the pictures and listen to the personal statements of the people who have completed the MotivatedFit program.
If that sounds like what you’ve been looking
for…..Then MotivatedFit in 9 Weeks was designed
for you…and you need to read every word
on this page!
P.S. This is my Dad and I transformed his body in just 3 Months at an age of 64!!!
Feel Free To Check out his personal Facebook Page just search for “Peter Giurgiu”
Dear Norbert,
I can’t thank you often enough, after the birth of my fourth child I had reached the peak on the scale by 86 kg’s.
After many diets I did try! I came across your YouTube videos, which were very good, but after buying the “Motivatedfit” Program my life has changed completely.
The knowledge that you share with us in the Motivatedfit Program is priceless.
And I am so infinitely grateful for that, through you I have managed, despite hypothyroidism, to lose 19 kg’s in just 5 months.
And all that in an incredibly healthy way and especially without even got a little bit hungry.
I am now more motivated than ever before to reach my ultimate body shape.
My joy of life is finally back again and my whole environment and especially my family recognised it directly.
Dear Norbert,
I wanted in first place to lose weight, to lose those pounds are right now only the beautiful side effect to me.
When I look at old photos of myself, it reminds me that I don’t want to be that person again.
Physical change is amazing, but transformation of the mind is even greater.
I’ve learned how to love myself and I’ve developed a good relationship with food, which seemed like something I could only ever dream of.
It’s about changing your mindset and focusing on health, not just changing your body to look good.
Thank you so much for the support and your amazing content that change my life in time record!
Dear Norbert,
All the results were only about to take place because I had the right mindset to do exactly what you told me! To put your knowledge and your program into action exactly like it should be and this mindset my mental management was everything!
Everything in every meal, everything in every work out, everything in every day.
And my family got as well that much motivated that my mom did also the program and lose 15 KG :))))
I can’t even tell how happy I am now trough your help and amazing content!
Your videos are so detailed and you explain everything so simple and motivating and mind opening in the same time!
You gave my body and mind like a restart and a new future in a better life with the body i love now!
12 weeks 13 Kg!
8 months after she gave birth to her daughter
9 years back I weighted over 85 Kg and I always tried to get back to my weight of my youth, to around 72 Kg but I failed with all I did, it was always like the Jo-Jo effect was just stronger.
But then 5 months back I found, I think by destiny, one of your videos and that time I just gave bird to my daughter 8 months back and everything becomes more complicated to reach my dream weight!
And just through your personable personality and through your ice cold honesty, based on real facts it made click by me.
I got all the results I wanted through you and will keep going with Coach Norbert.
I will not just do the Motivatedfit program, I live the Motivatedfit program.
- Melanie
52 Kg in 1 YEAR!!!
Mind blowing, this is my favorite result!!!
He not just lost 52 kg’s in one year since he lives in Dubai where is as well my home and we became friends and also we are doing business together in a very successful way.
And of course you can imagine how he feels now and how his life has changed!
No words needed he feels like a new person!
This picture is captured from a story from my I phone! Me and him together at Dubai Mall in Dubai!
31 Kg in just 8 Months!!!
It sounds cheesy, but you really have to find your ‘why.’ Last summer I realized that this year I would turn 45, celebrate my 20th wedding anniversary, and go on a mission trip to Peru.
I knew I had a year to get my act together for myself for the first time since I had kids.
“I didn’t want to be overweight for those milestones and I didn’t want to struggle with dragging my overweight body around the mountains of Peru when I wanted to be there to make a difference in the lives of others.
So, along the way, when my weight loss stalled, I’ve focused on that ‘why’ and it has helped me push through.
— Fatima, 44, lost 31 Kg
‘I remind myself how much progress I’ve made already.’
“My journey to health is about so much more than weight loss. In July of 2016, I was diagnosed with type one diabetes and spent the next year fighting to regulate my blood sugars before discovering the MotivatedFit Program. It flipped my life upside down in the best way possible, giving me a renewed sense of joy and purpose.
“When I feel like quitting, I remind myself of all this journey has given me. I think about how much my mood, quality of life, and health have improved. I also look at before-and-after pictures to show myself how much progress I’ve made. Remembering that I made my own transformation happen empowers me to keep making positive choices.” –Stefanie, 23, lost 22 Kg
‘I focus on feeling confident and capable in my own skin.’
“My motivation doesn’t come from things getting easier, but from knowing that I just keep getting stronger mentally and physically.
Every gym session, healthy meal, and mindful decision toward my health lays a foundation of confidence that makes me feel capable. Now more than ever, I wake up feeling like I’m capable of accomplishing whatever I set out to do and that’s where my motivation comes from.” –Maria, 28, lost 25 Kg
‘I don’t let mistakes totally derail my efforts.’
“My biggest lesson in terms of staying motivated has been to think of diet slip-ups as learning opportunities. There’s no such thing as ‘blowing it for the day,’ and telling yourself you’ll start over again tomorrow, or Monday morning.
“For me, each meal or snack is another opportunity to make a healthier choice, and I try not to let the whole train derail because of one less-than-stellar decision.” –Tania, 34, lost 34 Kg
click here to buy https://bit.ly/38XvrWA | https://medium.com/@narulaa16/weight-loss-psychology-9a79f97a7e8e | ['Akash Narula'] | 2021-01-21 09:32:04.706000+00:00 | ['Workout', 'Health Foods', 'Fitnessmotivation', 'Healthy Lifestyle', 'Weight Loss'] |
12 Quick Tips For Success on Medium | Sometimes you just want some quick and dirty tips without all so much of the extra commentary. Hey, I get it. Hopefully these tips will help you take your work on Medium even further.
Decide first and foremost what Medium success looks like for you.
Want to earn $500 a month? Or reach 20,000 followers? Pick a goal--or a series of goals--to help you focus on what you’re actually trying to do.
Tag each of your stories with five tags.
No, I don’t mean your responses to different stories. Just be sure to give every standalone story that you write five tags to help your work catch more eyes.
Run your story through grammarly before hitting publish.
I didn’t always do this, and yes, I did make a ton of swypos. Awkward. Grammarly won’t catch every error, and sometimes it will amuse you with unnecessary suggestions. But it’s a helpful line of defense at any rate.
Give your stories more obvious titles.
Flowery and creative headlines may not be your friend if you write a lot of essays about life and the issues that matter to you. My top performing headlines are so obvious they’re almost boring. Like “We Don’t Really Know Our Parents Until We Grow Up.”
Don’t fear the use of strong statements or metaphors.
If you’re writing an essay on Medium with strong emotion or emphasis, using metaphors can work for you. Some writers shy away from these for fear that blanket statements might turn readers away. But the right audience will understand nuance. “The Fragile Male Ego Has Ruined Online Dating" doesn’t mean that all men have fragile egos. My target readers get that. So take some risks with your phrasing.
Accept that Medium swings left.
Sorry not sorry? Quality, narrative-driven stories and essays do well here, but I’d say they swing left for a reason.
Business Insider said this about Ev Williams:
He once said of President Trump’s use of Twitter, "It’s a very bad thing, Twitter’s role in that ... If it’s true that he wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Twitter, then yeah, I’m sorry." He had believed that Twitter’s ability to let anyone say anything, to a wide audience, would mean that "the world is automatically going to be a better place." But, "I was wrong about that," he said.
Now you might not be on the liberal spectrum of things, and I don’t think you have to be. But you likely do need to accept that your writing may very well be good for a specific niche--and not Medium members at large.
Give your stories a hopeful ending.
It’s no secret that my work on Medium hasn’t always been so positive. I have written in the midst of great upheaval in my personal and professional life. I’ve opened up a lot about my mental health. But as time has passed, I’ve gotten better at improving my tone. Guess what? Hopeful endings fare better. Readers get more from positive stories than downtrodden ones.
Don’t try to be an expert here. Unless you’re actually, you know, an expert.
There’s nothing wrong with writing about the issues that matter to you, even if you aren’t an expert. The problem is when you pretend to be one. It’s okay to be honest about who you are and why you write what you do. Not everybody cares if you’re an expert, but most readers will care if you’re pretending to be something you’re not.
Quit worrying about your views.
Seriously. Write great content that means something to you. Write great content that other people legitimately want to read because you’re using solid images, clear headlines, and a unique voice. 100,000 views means nothing if those viewers aren’t reading and engaging with your work.
Engage in the community here.
Some top writers on Medium are able to engage a little, and some are able to engage a lot. It might ebb and flow for you, and I think most readers get that. The point is that it helps to take some part in the community that makes Medium so damn special. Foster a little give and take whenever possible.
Learn how Medium works, and then work WITH it.
If you want to be successful on Medium, but you’re constantly complaining about the rules and platform itself, you’ve got to question what you’re really trying to do. It’s much more effective to learn how Medium works and then work with the system instead of complaining that the system doesn’t work your way.
Don’t underestimate the power of curation.
Lindy recently wrote a great piece about everything she’s learned regarding curation through various topics on Medium. Go read her story. Frequent curation can change your life here. It changed mine:
Before frequent curation
3 Months after frequent curation
It pays to familiarize yourself with the curation guidelines and terms. I am not spending much time marketing my work at all. Curation helps my stories reach more readers who are already interested in my topics.
In my experience over the past (nearly) nine-ish months, a person can set an intention for success on Medium and go after it in a strategic way. You’ve just got to be willing to put in the work and the research. My friend Glenna Gill has compared it to AA--if you work the system, it works! | https://medium.com/awkwardly-honest/12-quick-tips-for-success-on-medium-765800d8a3b0 | ['Shannon Ashley'] | 2019-11-23 20:31:22.879000+00:00 | ['Medium', 'Writing', 'Success', 'Writing Tips', 'Goals'] |
Deploy an ASP.NET Core Web App to IBM Cloud Foundry | This guide walks you through the process of deploying an ASP.NET Core 3.1 web app to IBM Cloud Foundry.
Fork this repository to your profile before getting started.
Go to deployment of the app
Follow step by step video of the tutorial
You will deploy an ASP.NET Core web app by using the GitHub asp-net-core-web-app to IBM Cloud Foundry by using continuous integration with GitHub.
The advantage of selecting IBM Cloud for application deployment over AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure is the process is simple, and you don’t need to add a credit card to activate the account.
I created an IBM cloud account, and if you don’t have an IBM Cloud account you can go to this tutorial.
1 — Add manifest.yml to solution directory
Add a manifest.yml to your solution directory as like this this file manifest.yml and push changes to the GitHub repository.
to your solution directory as like this this file and push changes to the GitHub repository. If you are using Lite account the maximum memory limit is 256M . You can use low memory, in this case I use 64M.
. You can use low memory, in this case I use 64M. Push your changes to the repository.
You don’t need to add manifest.yml, if you are using the repository https://github.com/gayanvoice/asp-net-core-web-app.
2 — Build your own toolchain
Go to cloud.ibm.com/catalog and enter “Toolchain”. Select Toolchain card. Scroll down to find Other Templates category and select Build your own toolchain card. Give a Toolchain Name and Select Region. In this case Toolchain Name is asp-net-core-web-app-toolchain and Select Region is Dallas. Refer Figure 1 — Build your own toolchain. Click Create button to continue.
3 — Create Continuous Delivery Service
Go to cloud.ibm.com/catalog and enter “Continuous Delivery”. Select Continuous Delivery card. Select Region, Select a pricing plan, and scroll down to find Configure your resource category. Give Service Name. In this case Select Region is dallas, Select a pricing place is Lite, and Service Name is asp-net-core-web-app-continuous-delivery. The Refer Figure 2— Create Continuous Delivery Service. Click Create button to continue.
4— Add Tool integrations
We have to add GitHub, Eclipse Orion Web IDE, and Delivery Pipeline to the toolchain. You can follow the official doc create-a-custom-toolchain by IBM. You can find asp-net-core-web-app-toolchain under Developer tools in Resources list.
4.1 — Add GitHub Integration
Click Add tool. Search GitHub in the search bar. Click GitHub card. If you haven’t authorized GitHub for IBM. Click on Authorize button. The site will redirect to GitHub and click on Authorize IBM-Cloud button to authorize. Select Existing from Repository type drop down menu. Paste URL of forked repository from your GitHub profile to Repository URL input. Select Enable GitHub Issues option. Click Create Integration button to continue.
4.2— Add Eclipse Orion Web IDE Integration
Click Add tool. Search Eclipse Orion Web IDE in the search bar. Click Eclipse Orion Web IDE card. This tool integration does not require configuration. Click Create Integration button to continue.
4.3 — Add Delivery Pipeline Integration
Click Add tool. Search Delivery Pipeline in the search bar. Click Delivery Pipeline card. Enter Pipeline name. In this case Pipeline name is asp-net-core-web-app-pipeline. Click Create Integration button to continue.
5 — Add Stages to Delivery Pipeline integration
We have to add Build and Deploy to delivery pipeline integration. You can follow the official doc task 3 by IBM. You can find asp-net-core-web-app-pipeline under asp-net-core-web-app-toolchain in Toolchains.
5.1 — Add Build Stage
Click Add Stage. Go to Jobs in MyStage. Click ADD JOB drop down menu. Select Build option. Click Save button to continue.
5.2 — Add Deploy Stage
Click Add Stage. Go to Jobs in MyStage. Click ADD JOB drop down menu. Select Deploy option. Click API key input. Click New+ button on Enter and API key model. Click OK button on Create a new API key with full access model. Click Authenticate button on Enter an API key model. Click Save button to continue.
6— Deploy
You can deploy the app, click Run Stage button in Build MyStage.
I hope you found this Medium guide useful! I will continue to update the steps to it as they are changed by the IBM.
Thanks for reading this article! Leave a comment below if you have any questions. Be sure to follow for the @gayanvoice on Medium and share this post with other programming enthusiasts.
Gayan is a developer and student from Colombo. He shares articles and repositories on ASP.NET Core, Java Spring, and Android. | https://medium.com/@gayanvoice/deploy-an-asp-net-core-web-app-to-ibm-cloud-foundry-f80046927eb6 | ['Gayan Kuruppu'] | 2020-12-11 06:41:30.211000+00:00 | ['Aspnetcore', 'Ibm Cloud', 'IBM', 'Csharp', 'Web Development'] |
Cosmos Cash: A regulatory compliant finance protocol based on the Cosmos SDK | The value of assets secured on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) increases at ever upward rates, particularly over recent months. However, pervasiveness in the general economy is still low for a number of reasons that include:
Understanding the new technology
Financial literacy in the general public
Trust and public perception
Regular readers of the Tendermint blog will doubtless believe that DLT is indeed a tool of public good that can change finance for the better for millions of people. However, to make that transition, appropriate regulation is essential, especially as the technology matures.
To date, jurisdictions are adopting three contrasting approaches toward crypto-assets and crypto-related services, namely:
Proactive approach , adopting regulations addressed to crypto-assets and related services;
, adopting regulations addressed to crypto-assets and related services; Neutral approach , seeking to promote case-by-case assessments on the relevant circumstances and eventually attempting to re-conduct such assets and activities to existing legislation and regulations (mostly within the payment and investment services spheres);
, seeking to promote case-by-case assessments on the relevant circumstances and eventually attempting to re-conduct such assets and activities to existing legislation and regulations (mostly within the payment and investment services spheres); Restrictive approach, seeking to introduce outright bans to crypto-assets and related activities.
With 450 million people and 22% of the global economy, the European Union, along with the US and China, is one of the most significant jurisdictions. To date, it has taken the neutral approach but has adopted a new strategy on digital finance for the EU financial sector. One of the most critical parts of this strategy is new legislation called “Regulation of The European Parliament And of The Council on Markets in Crypto-assets, and amending Directive (EU) 2019/1937”, more commonly known as “MiCA”.
What is Cosmos Cash?
Cosmos Cash, developed by Tendermint Engineering and funded by Interchain Foundation, is a research project into a Cosmos SDK based, regulatory compliant finance protocol that can host tokens backed by a fiat currency (or a digital representation thereof).
Tendermint, together with Amagis Capital and Martin Worner (Confio), have been looking at MiCA with a particular lens on what it means for tokens as a method of payment, particularly e-money tokens. The result of this research constitutes the foundation of the first proof-of-concept of Cosmos Cash that we have built on top of Cosmos SDK and is secured using a Proof Of Authority consensus algorithm. The goal of the application is to re-define how an electronic money institution works by leveraging both the Cosmos SDK and Tendermint Consensus Algorithm.
You may want to read the report of the research and try out the proof-of-concept application. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Is Cosmos Cash a Stablecoin?
No, it is not.
Under MiCA regulations — and based on our legal partners’ considerations — a Cosmos Cash token would qualify as an E-Money token since it holds the following properties:
It is a crypto asset .
. It is an electronic surrogate for coins and banknotes and is used for making payments .
for coins and banknotes and is used for . It maintains a stable value by referring to the value of one fiat currency (1:1 pegging).
So is Tendermint launching an E-Money token then?
No, we are not.
We are engineers. The aim of this project is to develop tools for licensed issuers to easily issue their own e-money tokens. The ultimate aim: bring the benefits of Cosmos SDK-powered technology to the general public.
What’s Next?
The immediate next steps are the technical implementation of the protocol.
By 2022, the time when the MiCA framework is expected to come into force, the Cosmos Cash Proof-of-Concept will be in a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) stage that would be already adjusted to reflect the legislation set forth by the MiCA framework.
The project’s ultimate goal is to bring true liquidity to the Cosmos ecosystem through a reliable, regulatory-compliant protocol that guarantees the same guarantees as the traditional banking sector. | https://medium.com/tendermint/unveiling-cosmos-cash-a-regulatory-compliant-finance-protocol-based-on-the-cosmos-sdk-f287785607a4 | ['Alessio Treglia'] | 2020-12-17 00:25:10.095000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Regulation', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Cosmos Sdk', 'Cosmos Network'] |
This San Francisco Restaurant Offers Global Tastes | 25 Lusk’s New Traveler Menus Offer Jaunts Around the World (With Staycation Vibes)
Photo: Courtesy of 25 Lusk via @25lusk
Reinvention and multiplicity are smart moves in times like these. As international travel remains a struggle, menus that tour us around a region are a gift. Enter 25 Lusk’s new Traveler concept, which kicked off September 1 inside the restaurant and will rotate every six months to a new place in the world, while their casual rooftop menu remains.
The first destination? Mexico. Which is no easy menu to create. Whether you seek Oaxacan or Pueblan moles, Yucatecan poc chuc or Baja fish tacos, no two Mexican states serve the same style of dishes. So they wisely journey across states.
I have a range of memories at 25 Lusk since it opened in 2010, from drinks at the half-underground bar, to brunch on that inviting rooftop.
25 Lusk chef Matthew Dolan says this is a cocktail-centric menu with food pairings, and backing that up, he partnered with none other than Elmer Mejicanos (historically helming the bars of Tony Gemignani’s incomparable North Beach restaurants; currently of Spanish newcomer Red Window). Elmer envisioned the Traveler concept pre-pandemic and his cocktails are a draw alone (more on that in a moment).
But Dolan and the team have assembled a menu of gourmet bar food (shareable, small plates, fun), representing a cross-section of Mexico’s endless edible delights.
I have a range of memories at 25 Lusk since it opened in 2010, from drinks at the half-underground bar, to brunch on that inviting rooftop. But I would posit this menu collab is the best I’ve yet tasted here. CIA-trained (the ultimate cooking school: Culinary Institute of America) Dolan has spent a lifetime cooking from Manhattan to New Orleans and around Europe. But here, he wisely partnered with two of his kitchen staff from Mexico — Eutimio Avila and Jesus Fernando Ake Chan — letting them lead the way in creating regional dishes. Dolan tells me of Lusk’s powerhouse dishwasher, an older woman who perfects their daily-made tortillas and masa like no one else. This is, indeed, a team effort.
25 Lusk’s tlayuda — Photo Credit Virginia Miller
Mejicanos works closely with 25 Lusk bar manager Natalie Lichtman to execute a cocktail menu that is exquisite as it is drinkable and, important in these short-staffed times, recreatable in a timely fashion. Wisely, he steers clear of the obvious agave-only spirits selection or margaritas and palomas to give us a fresh take on Mexican flavors. But take notice of A Clear Classic.
It is, in fact, a Paloma variation, without limiting itself in the name. It’s a blend of tequila, mezcal, clarified grapefruit and lime juices. Carbonated with salt, it drinks light, bright, luxurious, as if a Paloma morphed into a champagne cocktail.
I immediately felt the urge to down a few (but resisted). A light, savory Fruit Stand Margarita (tequila, radish, cucumber, lime, “spicy bits”) is the margarita you didn’t know you needed. Ditto house Tepache Con Ron, Mexico’s fermented pineapple rind drink classic — with the added bonus of rum.
25 Lusk’s Zocalo Martini. (Photo: Courtesy of Virginia Miller)
Numerous standouts do not feature agave/Mexican spirits. Lichtman came up with the Zocalo Martini, working with Mejicanos on its unique cashew-washed gin base, showcasing caju — the fruit of the cashew tree — with blanc (white) and dry vermouths, plum bitters, and an apple slice garnish candied with an almost cashew-brittle-style candy. The cocktail is nutty, complex, boozy yet fruit-forward.
The Volcan de Maracuya cocktail proves how crushable a Scotch cocktail can be in the right hands. Its tropical-sweet-salty contrast of salted maracuja (passionfruit) foam with Scotch and ancho chile-infused Amaro Montenegro takes its place with some of the best refreshings, lighter whisky cocktails I’ve tasted at bars around the world — still too rare an occurrence.
Mexico is the only place I traveled a few times in the initial year of the pandemic (for work and nowhere near beaches, lest you think this was irresponsible vacationing).
Dolan’s menu does, indeed, support and make room for the cocktails to star, though the food is reason enough to visit. I adore elote (on the cob) or esquites (shaved off the cob) Mexican corn dishes. 25 Lusk’s elote asado keeps it classic: a toasted corn cob lightly doused in lime juice, queso fresco, chili powder and cilantro. Their tamal is as comforting as it gets, especially filled with cochinita pibil: the Yucatán Peninsula’s famed slow-cooked pork, marinated in citrus, vivid orange from annatto seeds, wrapped in a banana leaf so it stays tender.
My heart makes a happy leap when I see tlayuda on the menu, a top dish from my beloved Oaxaca, my favorite state to eat in all of Mexico (and as home of the majority of mezcal production, it’s double heaven). Dolan’s tlayuda is smaller and less thin and crispy than the dinner plate-sized, toasted tlayudas I ate around Oaxaca or in California’s best Oaxacan restaurants. But 25 Lusk’s version is elevated and a more approachable portion, topped with a traditional mix of Oaxacan cheese and beans, as well as radish, elote (corn) and tomatoes.
25 Lusk’s tamal wrapped in a banana leaf. (Photo: Courtesy of Virginia Miller)
The most irresistible dish may be the taco transito de lujo, or pigs feet taco. The rich pork fat crunch of pigs feet contrasts with pickled fresno chilis, cabbage and refried black beans. On those dreamy housemade tortillas with killer house salsas, it’s a ridiculously gratifying taco. They also offer cochinita pibil and fried cod tacos, but take a risk and try the pigs feet (you’ll realize that almost all damn parts of the precious pig are delicious).
Cool off with a finish of paleta de Hielo de horchata, aka horchata (spiced rice milk) popsicles fortified with vodka to keep a creamy-yet-icy texture. The paletas (popsicles) are a case in point of just how fun the Traveler menu is.
We don’t yet know the next theme they’ll flip to in less than six months' time, but Dolan and Mejicanos are committed to working with a chef from each of the countries they “travel” through.
Mexico is the only place I traveled a few times in the initial year of the pandemic (for work and nowhere near beaches, lest you think this was irresponsible vacationing). But I miss the freedom of traveling Mexico’s vast regions. We are blessed to live in California, with its roots as part of Mexico and a Mexican population of millions going back to its inception. Authentic, regional Mexican food of every stripe — not to mention the deepest agave spirits selections — is in our blood.
25 Lusk offers a Modern Mexican menu that feels like a gourmet, playful road trip, where distances between states and flavors are blurred. The blurring is especially effective when drinking cocktails of this caliber and crushability.
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Much as I look forward to their next Traveler tour, I hope to experience their Mexican journey a few more times before it’s over. | https://thebolditalic.com/25-lusks-new-traveler-menus-offer-globajaunts-around-the-world-with-staycation-vibes-c2de99f87f1f | ['Virginia Miller'] | 2021-09-12 19:47:59.522000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'San Francisco', 'Food And Drink'] |
Ah, well said! | Ah, well said! We’ve been living off the ego fumes of “saving the world” twice — WWI and II — for more than 100 years. We make movie after movie about our triumphs & use phrases like “the greatest generation” without irony. Those may have been two great moments we had but we’ve had many more wars since then that have ended ambiguously or with us on the losing side — or, like Afghanistan, still continuing because we can’t figure out how to end what we rashly & foolishly started.
We don’t think “the rules” apply to us, or should, so it’s no wonder we make huge mistakes & commit appalling offenses like driving native people off the land & jumping into the slave trade & fighting to maintain our “superiority” over our fellow Americans to this day, usually based on skin color & immigration status, never mind that we’re a nation of refugees.
We got a Donald Trump because we’re him. We are dying in spectacular numbers and living in degradation because we can’t follow rules and we think we shouldn’t have to. We’ve bought our own hype about our specialness & apparently many of us would rather extinguish ourselves & our democracy than let that go.
This pandemic is about the biggest wake up call possible. It’s showing us exactly where we’re fucked up & why. We can change it whenever we want to. The cruel stimulus drama, the totally predictable election drama, the long overdue racial rebellion, the abuse by authority, our willingness to destroy our planet for profit and our greed and money obsession overall: these are all up in our faces now because we’re supposed to be looking at them and, um, changing.
But so far we’re mostly still rebelling & feeling sorry for ourselves. We don’t care to look at the problems we’ve sown throughout our history as a nation. Now that the reckoning has come, we don’t want to face the fact that our suffering is self-inflicted. It ruins the narrative we love about ourselves as exceptional, special, unique, blessed and deserving.
Thanks for this article — it was bleakly funny, and far too true. | https://medium.com/@writingbystarlight/ah-well-said-afb809798903 | ['Laura Federico'] | 2020-12-22 14:43:39.475000+00:00 | ['American Exceptionalism', 'Pandemic', 'Sacrifice', 'American History'] |
My automated RKE update pipeline broke with version 0.2.x — my fault | I’m using an automated build pipeline to install, update and destroy my Kubernetes test-environments based on Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE). This worked perfectly until this week.
Let me shortly explain the important parts of my pipeline before I talk about the details:
checkout the cluster.yml from a git repository extract the kube_config_cluster.yml from the secured repository cache download the latest stable RKE binary from GitHub (I use this in my test environment where I would like to stay updated all the time) run “rke up/remove”
As I said, this worked perfectly for some time now. Earlier this week I pushed a new version of my cluster.yml to update my Kubernetes Cluster to a newer version. The pipeline started and failed some minutes later with the following error:
Failed to bring up Etcd Plane: [etcd] Etcd Cluster is not healthy
I started debugging the issue but I couldn’t find any issues. The whole Kubernetes Cluster including the etcd looked good. After some time I realized that Rancher released a new RKE version 0.2.x. (until now I used 0.1.x but because of step 3 of my pipeline the build run used the latest available stable version). So why does this even matter? With the new version of RKE Rancher introduced a new way to store the cluster state. They moved it from a configmap entry (0.1.x) to a file called cluster.rkestate (0.2.0) which is stored next to the cluster.yml. Because I wasn’t aware of this file my pipeline didn’t store it somewhere and therefore a “rke up” always created a new cluster.rkestate file. which then leads to the issue described above. After changing my pipeline configuration to also cache the state file the updated finished successfully without any issues.
What have we learned from this? Always read the release notes. 😏 | https://medium.com/01001101/my-automated-rke-update-pipeline-broke-with-version-0-2-x-my-fault-959a71a37c0d | ['Nico Meisenzahl'] | 2019-04-12 07:52:53.020000+00:00 | ['Rke', 'Kubernetes', 'K8s', 'DevOps', 'Rancher'] |
How To make Interactive Plot Graph For Statistical Data Visualization Using Seaborn Python library | By- SANDEEP KUMAR PATEL
Seaborn
Seaborn is a Python data visualization library based on matplotlib. It provides a high-level interface for drawing attractive and informative statistical graphics.
For a brief introduction to the ideas behind the library, you can read the introductory notes. Visit the installation page to see how you can download the package and get started with it. You can browse the example gallery to see what you can do with seaborn, and then check out the tutorial and API reference to find out how.
To see the code or report a bug, please visit the GitHub repository. General support questions are most at home on Stackoverflow or discourse, which have dedicated channels for seaborn.
In this article we are trying to create a plot various option available in seaborn library which are provided by the most efficient way to plot and visualisation our data to get away
Timeseries plot with error bands
seaborn components used: set_theme() , load_dataset() , lineplot()
Scatterplot with continuous hues and sizes
seaborn components used: set_theme() , load_dataset() , cubehelix_palette() , relplot()
Small multiple time serie
seaborn components used: set_theme() , load_dataset() , relplot() , lineplot(
Horizontal boxplot with observations
seaborn components used: set_theme() , load_dataset() , boxplot() , stripplot() , despine()
Linear regression with marginal distributions
seaborn components used: set_theme() , load_dataset() , jointplot()
Scatterplot with varying point sizes and hues
seaborn components used: set_theme() , load_dataset() , swarmplot()
Scatterplot with categorical variables
seaborn components used: set_theme() , load_dataset() , swarmplot()
Violinplots with observations
seaborn components used: set_theme() , violinplot()
Smooth kernel density with marginal histograms
seaborn components used: set_theme() , load_dataset() , JointGrid
Annotated heatmaps
seaborn components used: set_theme() , load_dataset() , heatmap()
Plotting large distributions
seaborn components used: set_theme() , load_dataset() , boxenplot()
Scatterplot with varying point sizes and hues
seaborn components used: set_theme() , load_dataset() , relplot()
Stacked histogram on a log scale
seaborn components used: set_theme() , load_dataset() , despine() , histplot()
Paired categorical plots
seaborn components used: set_theme() , load_dataset() , PairGrid , despine()
Plotting on a large number of facets
seaborn components used: set_theme() , FacetGrid
Violinplot from a wide-form dataset
seaborn components used: set_theme() , load_dataset() , violinplot() , despine()
Violinplots with observations
seaborn components used: set_theme() , violinplot()
Bivariate plot with multiple elements
seaborn components used: set_theme() , scatterplot() , histplot() , kdeplot()
Conditional kernel density estimate
seaborn components used: set_theme() , load_dataset() , displot()
For More Details-
Thank You For Your Time…..!!! | https://medium.com/geekculture/python-seaborn-statistical-data-visualization-in-plot-graph-f149f7a27c6e | ['Sandeep Kumar Patel'] | 2021-07-22 07:00:36.117000+00:00 | ['Graphics', 'Seaborn', 'Graphic Design', 'Python'] |
Today, one person used Joya instead of Airbnb — and it’s the greatest success I’ve ever had. Here’s why: | The best part of all? We made someone happy
Today, Airbnb has a market cap of $92 billion, and an estimated 25,000 hosts used Airbnb to take bookings… while I ate my breakfast. But also today, a cash-strapped 4-person start-up from Ontario, Canada, with a market cap of zero, who were crazy enough to launch a tourism start-up during a pandemic, had one person decide that Joya is the best solution for their business. Despite the endless solutions by big tech, and despite all the little hacks someone can piece together to run their business, one person didn’t default to the biggest travel tech company in the world… they decided to use Joya
To me, it’s not “just one”. To me, it is a symbol that hard work, dedication, and relentlessly putting other people before yourself pays off.
3 years ago, we saw an opportunity in the tourism industry to make something better, cheaper, and simpler — something to help hard working tourism business owners and entrepreneurs spend more time doing what they love, and less time and money dealing with all the complex digital tools required to run their business. Running a tourism business is really hard — but despite challenge after challenge, barrier after barrier, and mid-way through a global pandemic that’s devastated the entire industry, we just made life a little easier for one person — and that makes it all worth while.
To me, it’s not “just one”. To me, it is a symbol that hard work, dedication, and relentlessly putting other people before yourself pays off. The biggest win an entrepreneur can ever have, is making someone else happy. Today that happened. And we are really looking forward to tomorrow. | https://medium.com/@whoismahoney/today-one-person-used-joya-instead-of-airbnb-and-its-the-greatest-success-i-ve-ever-had-4566f407a140 | ['Jay Mahoney'] | 2020-12-21 18:03:42.414000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Tourism', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Traveltech', 'Inspiration'] |
Niche selection for Blogging — Top 5000 Niche Ideas(Free) | Selecting a perfect niche for your blog is the most important part of your blogging journey. Also, it is the most difficult part of your blogging journey as well. If you can choose a perfect niche for your blog then half of the war you already won.
Niche selection for Blogging — Top 5000 Niche Ideas(Free)
What is a Niche Selection?
To choose a niche for your blog, the first thing you need to understand is what is a niche? A niche is a particular subject or topic around which you should write your blog and If you want to earn money through blogging I would suggest you choose a micro-niche.
What is Multi-Niche?
Let explain this with an example, So you may want to write a blog about animals, So, in this case, you have a Multi-Niche or topic in which you can write about any animal like Dog, Lion, or Elephant. So technically you have a larger audience but that’s not the case, because to bring the audience to the blog you need to rank on google’s first page. But there are already many big sites are there with much higher authority domain. So either you run a paid ad on Google or find a way to make your domain authority high.
But we all know the best traffic is free traffic and you probably can do nothing about your domain authority. So the solution is Micro Niche
What is Micro Niche?
Micro NIche is the subcategory or topic within a broad category. For example, If you think of the dog as the main category then pug is the micro-niche or sub-category. If you are a tech blogger then Android is your board category and Android 11 will be the micro-niche.
Niche Multi-Niche Or Micro Niche
Of course, you can start your blog with any of these options or even you can start your blog with absolutely no niche. If you have a big team to write on various topics or have a big budget for SEO or paid ads and have experience in blogging. Then you can start a blog with multi-niche or no niche. But If you are a solo blogger with no team and do not want to money on ads. Then Mirco NIche is the best option that you have. With a Micro Niche site, you can quickly build your authority. It also increases your chance to be ranked on the first page of google search results.
5000 Less competition blog niches Ideas
https://besthostingservices.indiannewsking.com/niche-selection/ | https://medium.com/@indiannewsking/niche-selection-for-blogging-top-5000-niche-ideas-free-d1d8d81afa10 | ['Arunava Guha'] | 2021-01-16 16:04:43.621000+00:00 | ['Blogging Tips', 'Blog Niche Ideas', 'Blogging Niche', 'Niche Marketing', 'Blogging Competition'] |
It’s Tuesday — Right?. Another parody by fellow Medium writer… | We are adapting.
We have been for millennia and we will do it over and over again in the millennia to come.
We always have and we will always — adjust and adapt.
Not all is lost.
Though much have been lost, not all is lost.
We are surviving one of our toughest years, getting stronger with each passing day, and we will continue to do so as long as it takes us, which — judging from the news about the vaccine — would no longer take very long.
The end of year is nigh.
Since Christmas is around the corner, I thought it’ll be nice to do another little parody from Joe Váradi. So, without further ado, here’s a little spin — a different take on an eventful year we will soon put behind us:
I hope you like it and have a great… Tuesday? Wednesday?
Have a great day! | https://medium.com/afwp/its-tuesday-right-d151b6606925 | ['Agnes Louis'] | 2020-12-08 16:03:34.558000+00:00 | ['Funny', 'Songs', 'Humour', 'A Few Words', 'Parody'] |
Will Rail Become the Technology of Tomorrow Again? | December 27, 2020 · Trains,Economic Trends,Transportation,Transportation Tech,Travel
Will Rail Become the Technology of Tomorrow Again?
Trains are a fast and efficient way to travel, whether one is going on a luxury vacation, commuting to work, or anything in between. Although an integral way of transportation that has progressed greatly over time, global train technology is rapidly advancing, with the potential to drastically change the entire transportation industry.
Currently, the main advantage of more advanced train technologies is that they are generally better for the climate. In the UK, about 42% of the route miles are electrified, and there is even a line from London to Hampshire operating fully on solar power. Such train routes contribute greatly to the decarbonisation of transportation. However, one drawback of making more route miles electric is the high cost; as International Railway Journal reports, electrifying one kilometer costs from £750,000 to £1 million.
Will the American Railroad Industry Survive Covid?
Robotaxis, Transportation as a Service, and Tesla’s Vision
One potential solution is the advent of hydrogen powered trains, more generally known as hydrail, such as Coradia iLint in Germany or Hydroflex in the UK.
Since hydrail trains don’t require electrifying tracks, they are significantly less expensive to implement. In addition, hydrail trains are more climate conscientious and safer alternatives to diesel powered trains, and one tank of hydrogen can match the distance of one tank of diesel. Moreover, hydrail trains are quieter and have less vibrations than their diesel counterparts.
High-Speed Rail In The US?
There are, of course, obstacles associated with hydrail trains: trains lack the space to store the large volume of hydrogen required. Furthermore, the production of hydrogen currently relies heavily on the usage of fossil fuels, but researchers are investigating production through renewable energy sources, such as electrolysis.
The Chinese High-Speed Maglev Train Could Be Faster Than Airplanes
It is possible to convert electric trains to hydrail, and furthermore, hydrail trains can run on normal track or electric track. Also known as bi-mode, this trait makes hydrail trains very suitable to run during the transition period of electrifying tracks. In addition, electric or diesel trains can be retrofitted and converted to hydrail.
Furthermore, while hydrail already looks to have very promising prospects in Europe, if freight trains, the main type of train in the US, were able to be retrofitted, there would be a hydrail market in the US as well.
Unraveling The Mystery of MH370
The Robotic Future of Trains
Despite not being at the forefront of train technology, the US is steadily advancing its train technology as well. In 2018, new Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) regulations cleared the way for lighter, more modern trains.
This allowed US rail companies to utilize more advanced trains built from lighter materials, improving safety and efficiency. Unlike older models, these new trains are able to run on existing train tracks, meaning a steady transition from outdated trains can be achieved.
Can Japan’s Shinkansen Bullet Train Gain Market Share from Airlines?
The Future of Travel
Considering even more futuristic train technology, Hyperloop, a system of transportation involving low pressure tubing, can potentially transport passengers at 700 miles per hour.
These speeds can be realized due to the reduction of friction from air, or rails, that today’s trains face due to the innovative, low pressure tubes filled with less air andtrackless routes. The development of a Hyperloop system could be revolutionary in our day to day travel, and people could travel across the country for their morning commute.
A version of Hyperloop running from Los Angeles to San Francisco was proposed by Elon Musk in 2018. While such technology may seem far away in the future, it isn’t actually as distant as most think, as early models could be available within the next few years.
India’s Surface Transportation: Future is Intelligent Systems
Japan Is Developing The Future of Transportation
Hyperloop has much potential, as the main cost is the infrastructure of the tubes. This means that once the infrastructure is developed, transportation could be provided at decidedly low costs.
With these new train technologies, the global market for transportation could see a major shift soon. Trains are quickly becoming faster, more efficient, and more environmentally friendly. In the near future, we may see an exceedingly different transportation system all over the world.
China to Showcase First Smart High-Speed Train at 2022 Winter Olympics
Written by Bryan Xiao
Edited by Alexander Fleiss, Calvin Ma, Gihyen Eom & Kevin Ma
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200227-how-hydrogen-powered-trains-can-tackle-climate-change
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44266.pdf
https://www.hsrail.org/new-regulations-allow-stronger-lighter-safer-modern-trains
https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-is-hyperloop-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-future-of-transport/
https://www.railjournal.com/infrastructure/british-electrification-costs-could-be-cut-by-50-says-report/
https://www.globalrailwayreview.com/article/93584/hydrogen-trains-benefits-noise-vibration-reduction/
Read More
The Failure of the German Fleet | https://medium.com/@rebellionresearch/will-rail-become-the-technology-of-tomorrow-again-44787bb84a9e | ['Alexander Fleiss'] | 2020-12-27 20:20:16.932000+00:00 | ['Rails', 'Trains', 'Railways'] |
Dribbble: Social-App-Screen Part-4.1 | I Want to Hear From You
Thank you for reading, I’d love to hear your feedback. Show me some love and give claps. | https://medium.com/@4in1telecommunications/dribbble-social-app-screen-part-4-1-e6a4a54a143 | [] | 2020-12-17 07:04:45.613000+00:00 | ['Swiftui', 'Swift Programming', 'Dribbble', 'Xcode', 'Swift'] |
AVM Android Integration is live for Aion Network | The Pocket team loves celebrating with its peers when they reach their goals, and recently the Aion project has set foot beyond a very special milestone. Doing their part to diminish the gap between mainstream developers and decentralized applications, Aion has successfully forked and expanded upon the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), to create the AION Virtual Machine (AVM).
For developers, this means that they can create and deploy Java smart contracts to the Aion network. For Pocket to keep up with the times while enabling developers to connect any app with any blockchain on any device, we have integrated this feature in the Pocket Android to make it easier to interact with your Java contract.
Having previously received a grant from AION , Pocket developed mobile SDKs in realizing Monster Chase . Both projects lean deliberately toward facilitating the adoption of both users and developers alike. The AVM will introduce the uninitiated to DApp development and ease the transition into censorship-resistant networks into everyday mobile use.
We are happy to continue to build our partnership with the Aion network and team.
If you are curious about what the Aion team is working on lately, check out this latest post from TechCrunch talking about the AVM and their recent listing by Microsoft Azure. | https://medium.com/pocket-network/avm-android-integration-is-live-for-aion-network-1d89ac5cb873 | ['Pocket Network'] | 2019-08-06 16:12:04.050000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Avm', 'Smart Contracts', 'Aion Network', 'Pocket Network'] |
How to create more value at work | So how to validate if you are creating values?
(Here are the 3 tips to help you to create more values as well)
Make sure you know who is going to use your work: Your end-user(s)
Some people just simply do what they are asked to do, or what listed in the job description. This is toxic for your career, and why?
Giving an example: An analyst from the Marketing Department, once asked by the direct manager to create an urgent quarter-end report of the sale conversions, to show to the management board. They need it to make a strategic decision asap for the next quarter with their vendors.
Photo credit: Stephen Dawson from Unsplash
He then worked very hard overnight gathering the data from different sources and developed a report nicely, then he sent it to the direct manager. The next day he got a complaint from the direct manager and he had to rework on it. The reason was that he used all the technical abbreviations inside the reports (which is what he usually does) but the management board could not understand it, he did not put an explanation table for non-technical people to understand what the numbers/graphs mean. So basically they couldn’t understand what his report was about.
Lesson learned: Working hard and harder doesn’t mean you are creating more values. Try to work smart instead, take a step back to understand the requirements and the overall picture before you actually start doing something.
Double-check your work before you deliver it
This is more about carefulness. I know some people never check their work before they deliver it. They are willing to spend a week straight working hard to develop/design something but never ever want to spend 10-15 minutes to just reflect the outcome before pressing the Submit button. Assuming a poster design with grammar or typo on the headlines to be delivered to the shop for printing thousands of copies. What a waste!
Photo credit: SpaceX from Unsplash
Lesson learned: Don’t get too exciting about getting your job done, take a step back before hitting the “Launch” button to double-check your work, you will definitely don’t want your whole effort to be ruined by just a simple small mistake, just don’t let it destroy the value (quality) of your work.
Ask the end-users for their feedback
Have you ever asked the other people how do they use your work? How do they feel? Not many people have the habit to ask the user after they deliver the work.
Photo credit: Amy Hirschi from Unsplash
This is essentially important in retail nowadays, we can somehow relate it with the aftercare service.
Try to ask your manager how easy-to-understand it is by reading your reports?
Ask your users how joyful and convenient it is using your app, do they get any issues?
Ask the audience how informative it is your presentation, can they see it clearly from the distance, is there any ambiguous point you made?
Lesson learned: Keep asking questions to validate if your work is valuable for others, this helps you to keep doing good work or make improvements in the future. | https://medium.com/@kypham/are-you-creating-values-at-work-30212d985830 | ['Ky Pham'] | 2019-11-22 02:35:51.181000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Lifehacks', 'Skills Development', 'Work', 'Self Improvement'] |
Effective Meeting: Practical Guidelines | Effective Meeting: Practical Guidelines
Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash
As more and more people are working from home during the COVID-19 Pandemic, it is becoming common to spend a major portion of the day in meetings, video calls [1].
Effective meetings should deliver clear direction to all involved for the next step. It is important to involve all in the discussion because the assumption is that all members are selected thoughtfully. These are six important things to follow for effective meetings.
Before the start of the meeting, start gently with the light, off-the-topic discussion, imaging as you are coming to the meeting room after fetching coffee.
Purpose
Preparation
Enable participation
Start time/end time
Conclusion
Follow-ups
References | https://medium.com/@imranbangash/effective-meeting-practical-guidelines-8c50051ee1bb | ['Imran Bangash'] | 2020-11-22 13:46:22.596000+00:00 | ['Effectiveness', 'Meetings', 'Covid 19', 'Productivity'] |
Friend and foe: What a Biden presidency may mean for Israel, Iran | After the assassination of Iranian nuclear physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, all eyes are on U.S. President Donald Trump who is known for his aggressive Iran policy. Particularly, Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Iranian agreement signed under his predecessor Barack Obama, which proposed to lift Western sanctions in exchange for stopping Iran’s nuclear program.
Although U.S. President-elect Joe Biden describes Iran as a destabilizing force in the region, he is expected to urge Iran to return to the negotiating table to resurrect the deal with the European Union next year.
Of course, Iran’s reaction is also essential here as this week the Iranian parliament overwhelmingly approved the outline of a bill that aims to counter sanctions against its nuclear program and increase uranium enrichment.
Until the Iranian presidential elections on June 18, 2021, internal and external factors may strengthen the country’s far-right groups and oppositions.
Some retired U.S. generals and ambassadors along with Democratic Congress members have criticized Trump harshly, claiming he has encouraged chaos between the U.S. and Iran and is trying to create trouble for Biden who will take office in January.
It has been accepted, including by the U.S., that Israel was behind the assassination of the Iranian nuclear scientist. But the operation could not have been executed without the knowledge of the U.S.
Here are some clues as to why it seems the U.S. was involved. Firstly, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Israel and other Gulf states to discuss Iran a few days before the attack and said that “all options are still on the table” when it comes to Iran. Secondly, Israeli defense forces raised the alert level due to the possibility of an American attack on Iran. And finally, the U.S. ordered the Nimitz aircraft carrier set to leave the Gulf for India to return to the Gulf just before the Fakhrizadeh assassination. Looking at the above turn of events, it seems likely the U.S. would have been aware of the assassination before it was executed.
Many sources I spoke to in Washington, D.C., said that some Iranians in Iran supported the assassination and a large majority of the Islamic Republic believes that it should be taken as a message to the Iranian regime.
Naturally, there is a relatively high consensus that if Biden were in office he would have not allowed Israel to execute the operation as it is common knowledge that the president-elect looks to soften tensions with Iran, at least diplomatically.
In an interview with the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), Biden stated that the U.S. should not get involved in assassinations and denounced the murder of Iraqi Commander Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in Iraq, saying it was wrong. He criticized Trump, noting that U.S. involvement in assassination operations would only increase tension in the region.
The reality is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not receive the same level of support from Biden as he received from Trump.
Besides his intentions to rejoin the nuclear deal, Biden supports a two-state solution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and supports keeping the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem.
Biden urged Israel to halt all settlement activities in occupied territories and stated that more assistance should be provided to Gaza. According to Biden, the Arab states should normalize their relations with Israel, and he has indicated that he does not support the Israeli government’s plans to annex the West Bank.
The U.S. and Israel have an enduring partnership that touches on every field, and the Netanyahu administration will somehow find a way to get along with Biden.
Softening tension between the U.S. and Iran would be positive for Turkey since it does not want any more regional conflicts. It is my hope that Israel and Turkey can normalize relations for the benefit of both countries and the Middle East.
Looking at history, Turkey has never trusted Iran nor should it, considering Iran’s support of Armenia, the PKK and its Iranian offshoot the PJAK. I would not be surprised to see Biden emulate Obama’s 2013 brokering of peace between Israel and Turkey.
The U.S. government has warned of possible Iranian retaliation on the anniversary of Soleimani’s murder — Jan. 3, 2021.
However, the officials underline that Iran is limited in its options as Biden’s inauguration ceremony will take place approximately two weeks from the date.
In other words, Iran may miss the opportunity to soften tensions with the U.S. once more and evade economic sanctions.
As of 2021, I do not expect to see a flare-up of tensions between the U.S. and Iran under the Biden administration. | https://medium.com/@alicinarcom/friend-and-foe-what-a-biden-presidency-may-mean-for-israel-iran-4fece3303456 | ['Ali Cinar'] | 2020-12-08 13:08:57.820000+00:00 | ['Iran', 'Joe Biden', 'Israel', 'Us Iran Tension', 'United States'] |
How much quality time we must spend with our kids? | What is quality time?
Is it any time spend with our kids?
If your answer is ‘Yes’ then I am sorry to say you are wrong. Quality time is not any time spent with your child. If this would have been the correct answer then we almost spend 15–16 hrs around them.
Quality time is the time dedicated only to kids. No gadgets, no other thoughts, only you and your child or family. It could be as minimum as ½ an hour, but dedicated to kids.
I understand now-a-days life has become very busy, especially when it comes to both parent working. In this dedicating ½ an hour to kids that to without any gadgets or other thoughts is like leading a battle. I further recommend you to bifurcate this dedicated time to kids so that it becomes an achievable task for you. Spending 5–10 mins at a stretch is not at all difficult I suppose. It would just be fillers in your busy schedule.
Recommendations on how to bifurcate the time:
Morning time: Caring Time
One of the most crucial time is the morning time. The time to wake us. At this moment if little love and affection is passed on to our little ones, they feel themselves to be at the top of the world. They develop a sense of existence in parents’ life. They are boosted with positive vibes which remains charged up in them throughout the day. They wakeup with a fresh mind.
Just by dedicating 5–10 mins here would be enough.
सर पर हाथ फेरना
बालो को सहलाना
कमर पर हाथ फेरना
किस करना
जादू की झपी देना
Anything that your child likes
Meal time: Sharing time
Meal could any meal or anyone atleast. It can be breakfast or lunch or dinner time. I would prefer dinner time when all of us can sit together and communicate with each other. We could share what something new, something unusual, something exciting or something wrong happened with us during the day.
This is the time when we can sit peacefully and laugh, share, suggest each other.
There are possibilities where elderly kids may not like to share their experience of the day, don’t panic because this might be new for them, they are not confident how you will react.
Here you have to take initiative and start sharing your experience so that a positive sharing environment is created. Let them complete what they have in their mind, don’t interrupt, don’t predict and most important don’t over react. If you want to put forth your suggestion or you want to pin point at their mistake do it later, this is not the time for it. If reacted immediately possibilities are that the positive environment turns into a negative one.
But for the younger ones the scenario is totally different. They may not have words to express their feelings or sometimes they may even forget their experience, so we as elders we have to help them recall that moment and start sharing about it.
So meal time is not only eating time but also sharing time.
Late afternoon time: Playing time
After resting in the afternoon you can arrange a play time for them, it could be as small as 10–15 mins. During this time you have to be just a listener and kids will be the host. You have to follow all the instructions given to you by your kids. It could be playing silly games or watching their favourite cartoon together or dancing or could be anything. Be prepared.
Kids must be given independence to do what so ever they like to do during this period. They listen to us through out the day, can’t we listen to them for 15 mins.
I am sure ‘Yes, we can.’
Bed time: Motivational time
Just before they actually go to sleep we can spend some motivational time with our kids. We can remind them what all good and appreciable things they have done throughout the day. Make them realize you are very happy for it. Recall them the initiatives they have taken, no matter they have succeeded or not.
To boost their motivation share some Panchatantra Stories or Moral Stories. It is believed, ‘When kids sleep motivated, they wakeup motivated.’
By spending quality time with our kids we help them in their overall development. Being a parent who doesn’t want child’s overall development in just 30 mins.
From today onwards let’s make it a point to spend atleast 30 mins of quality time with our kids.
Whoever agrees show me | https://medium.com/@parentingbyexperience/how-much-quality-time-we-must-spend-with-our-kids-1fabd03db67c | [] | 2020-05-16 08:04:08.783000+00:00 | ['Parenting Tips', 'Quality Time', 'Parents', 'Parenting Advice', 'Parenting'] |
Live life king-size!. “Babumoshai, zindagi badi honi chahiye… | “Babumoshai, zindagi badi honi chahiye lambi nahi.” ~Rajesh Khanna, Anand(1971)
The average human being in India lives for 69.16 years, equivalent to 36350496 minutes or 2181030000 seconds. Wait, did you even count the number of zeroes in that figure? I was more worried about the number of seconds that we live for ourselves. Also, is there any idle value for the same?
Those of us who were lucky to spend a significant amount of time growing under our parents' shelter mostly never realized the essence of life. We speculated that the roadway to success mainly comprises of passing out of school with a heavy percentage, getting into college, and securing a job to settle down in life finally. By the time we were happy about venting out of the “teenage”, we were burdened with a whole new bunch of roles and responsibilities. We tried to cope with our professional and personal lives and desired to balance the two of them. We tried to impress our supervisors, catch up with our friends, please our partners, and gratify our parents all at the same time. Our social gatherings started to look like an escape from reality, breaking free from our lives that we have yearned for so long. But where did we exactly lost ourselves? Where did we go wrong?
This constant need to keep everyone around us happy leaves behind the necessity to bring about peace in ourselves. I think it's time that we stop procrastinating about what could have been done better in situations where we have the option to let it go and hold on to our tranquility. | https://medium.com/@sudipamajumdar18/live-life-king-size-f42b9a8f2d86 | [] | 2020-12-26 20:08:38.311000+00:00 | ['Self', 'Life', 'Lockdown', 'Blog'] |
Blogging Reduces that “Social Distance” Between You and Your Customers | Randy McNeely, who owns the title “Kindness Champion” and also serves as the executive producer of “The Kindness Hunters” TV Show recently shared this thought, “I prefer not to use the phrase ‘social distance’. As social creatures, we are ‘physically distancing’, not ‘social distancing’ thanks to the fact that we live in a digital world.”
Wow! What else would you expect from someone with the title “Kindness Champion”?
This came across as an incredibly positive and “half-full” outlook as we all strive to gain a new normal through these extremely troublesome times. Especially since at one point, business seemed to be changing not only by the day but literally by the hour.
While enduring these current challenges as well as “physical distancing”, maintaining an active level of digital communication brings numerous benefits to you and your team.
Thankfully many options exist for maintaining healthy communication with business and social connections.
As a matter of fact, this is a fantastic opportunity to tackle a new venture for you and your business.
That new venture: Blogging.
Related Article: Seeking Soulmates: Does Your Website Attract Dream Customers?
Blogging Reduces “Social Distance”
Blogging creates an opportunity to share with your staff, customers, vendors, and even your community on how things are going for you and your business.
With a new sense of urgency for virtual and digital engagement, creating a solid blog strategy helps thrust you ahead of the game.
Blog posts can be short and sweet and right to the point.
On the other hand, take advantage of this time to dive into details on steps that your company uses to battle current challenges. Other business owners might find your strategies and tactics extremely valuable.
Plus, a blog also offers the opportunity to basically journal your experiences during COVID-19. Years from now you can look back and think to yourself, “how on earth did I survive that global crisis?”
Blogging can be the voice of your younger self sending messages to your older and wiser self.
The bottom line, blogging offers tremendous value to you, your company as well as your customers.
Once our world returns to health and no longer finds it necessary to “social distance”, you will cherish the fact that you started blogging as a content strategy for your business.
Therefore, let’s dive into potential blog topics to help you get started.
Blogging for Small Business Owners and Manufacturers
Blogging plays a critical role with any B2B marketing strategy.
One major challenge though: Where to start? Creating blog topics that readers find helpful and educational certainly is not an easy task.
Additionally, many small business owners question the value of blogging for their company.
Especially for small business owners and manufacturers.
Common questions asked during discussions with small business owners and manufacturers who are considering blogging:
Who has time to actually blog?
In particular, as a manufacturer or small business owner, what the heck do you blog about anyway?
Does a business truly benefit from blogging?
More importantly will blogging connect with new customers?
Lastly, will blogging actually generate sales?
Truth be told, blogging delivers powerful results for many reasons including the following:
Tremendous SEO Value
Customer engagement
Educate customers
Inform potential prospects on your company, products, and services.
Convert content from blogs into social media posts
Share community activities and events
Offer case studies, success stories, white papers, and resource guides
Related Article: Hey Manufacturers, Being the “Best Kept Secret” is No Longer an Option
Where to Start?
Actually there are tons of blog topics to consider for your customers.
Yet, taking the time and energy to actually sit at a computer and type these thoughts out sounds overwhelming. Daunting. Seems like a waste of time.
I get it. You are BUSY! Constant fires to put out. You have a steady list of issues that need addressing.
Stopping to type out a blog post typically does not make the priority list for most small business owners.
Especially those who lack the experience in creating content. Let alone the desire.
A common response to blogging, “if I wanted to be a blogger, I would have gone to journalism school”.
However, the great thing about blogging, anyone with a computer, laptop, cellphone, or mobile device can now create a voice.
Stepping out of your comfort zone to put your thoughts out on the World Wide Web or the Internet of Things can be intimidating for many.
So, wondering where to start?
For example, find a topic that you are an expert in or where you share a deep passion. Then sit down and just start typing.
Still questioning what blog topics would create the most impact for your business?
The goal here is to help you achieve your goals.
Blog About What You Know Best
A consideration when determining blog topics, pretend your dream customer is standing in front of you (six feet away, of course).
What would you say? How would you describe your business? Can you paint a clear picture of how you can solve their problem?
Otherwise, another scenario, let’s pretend a customer is taking a tour of your facility (six feet apart as well).
During a tour, you will demonstrate why you are the BEST option to provide the solution that this particular customer is seeking? You will show off your amazing team, equipment, machinery, and resources. Well, that’s another potential blog post. Actually, an entire series of blog posts.
The internet makes everyone’s lives more efficient.
Especially since it is unrealistic to stand face to face with every prospect while maintaining a “social distance”
To turn it around, when you are the buyer seeking a new vendor, where do you turn?
In the past, you had to go to trade shows to find the best vendors.
However, conducting a Google search or connecting with new vendors on social media works so much more affordably and efficiently.
Blogging helps you make those valuable and profitable connections.
Related Article: Captain Your Ship! eCommerce Helps You Stay in Your Wheelhouse
Blog Topics for Your Business
Finally, let’s dig into blog topics to launch your blogging journey:
How you started the company Why you chose entrepreneurship Explain the benefits of outsourcing the products and services that you offer Information about your community Start a blog series on your proprietary processes or products Reviews on the equipment and tools that you use Meet the Team: Profile your amazing employees Case studies Customer Service Questions — FAQ’s are excellent blog topics Benefits of Made in USA Recycling Safety concerns in your industry New equipment purchases Updates or improvements on your website as well as progress with internet marketing Engineers in your industry Influencers in your industry Customer testimonials Historical figures in your industry What is (Blank)? — describe the parts that go into your products Explain how your products are made Point out industries that use your products Book Reviews Videos, Videos, Videos — start creating How-To videos of your expertise as blog posts Create Resource Guidebooks Company announcements such as new hires, new efficiencies, new products
Bonus Round of Blog Topics During “Social Distance”
Heroes in your community Steps you took to battle challenges due to COVID-19 Team wins Supply chain solutions Experience with PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) Work from home tips Managing a remote team Essential businesses instituting “physical distancing” in the workplace New digital marketing strategies Zoom: the new gateway of communication for your business
FREE Blogging Resources
Lastly, below includes several outstanding free blogging resources to help you get started: | https://medium.com/@feism421/blogging-reduces-that-social-distance-between-you-and-your-customers-c94a93d6d899 | ['Falconer Electronics'] | 2020-06-10 12:36:19.867000+00:00 | ['B2b Marketing', 'Entrepreneur', 'B2B', 'Manufacturing', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
Seasonal Gifts of the Spirit. | Xmas is a time of good cheer and family get togethers. That is the image. That is the hope and expectations of most people. But what happens if you start to see a different underlying energy to that seasonal activity. A darker side that is also there intrinsically contained within that festivity.
When I grew up, as a child, every Christmas, every birthday, no matter how kind and generous those around me were, my mother always took it away from me. She would say things like ‘aren’t you lucky to have ‘that’, mind you don’t play with it and break it.’ So it sat there unenjoyed- a thing of shame or guilt and an expression of my own unworthiness. That was her intention of course, as someone whose jealousy knew no bounds and whose psychopathic narcissism was completely in control of our whole family.
This was her gift too, a deeply spiritual challenge hidden behind a dark energy of her superficial intention, because it challenged me to look more deeply at those expectations and rituals of various seasons. So please don’t think I am telling any kind of sob story. It has really been a gift, even if it was wrapped in razor wire to begin with.
Photo by Євгенія Височина on Unsplash
Each season brings its own celebrations, and rituals to some extent too. We are all expected somehow to share in the social outpouring of whatever it is meant to be. I have had so many very mixed experiences of all these celebrations that I find myself in early old age not wanting to even acknowledge them anymore. It is as if the joy and excitement has gone completely stale and empty. But I don’t see that as a bad thing, instead I consider it a dropping of the illusion of the purely material world
This slow inexorable decline has been brought about as much as anything by the materialism that surrounds most of them, that and the obligations that are imposed on us all and cause as much distress as any joy they bring. How much stress is caused by Christmas preparations? We have none.
I want to emphasise here that it is not the actual event that bothers me, but what they have mostly all become, at least in my world.
We have stepped back and said ‘no more’ to it all. We have informed all our nearest and dearest that our generosity will continue but will no longer be tied to marketing rituals and expectations. Instead they will be tailored to meet the needs, or pleasures and happiness of those people at random moments through life.
Now we make sure we actually pay attention to what members of our family and close people actually express, mostly unconsciously, and do our best to show our love at those moments. We look and listen deeply to how we might support them most of all. We pay them profound attention.
We have replaced specific ritual days for everyday if you like. At any point, a gift may appear that is just the thing at the right moment, if we know about it.
How much more precious is the unexpected gift or expression of love?
I remember how, after my sons reached the age of not making mother’s day cards at school for me, I asked them not to buy me anything out of duty or a sense of obligation. They complied happily enough.
One year, and decades later, I got a text from them, independently and unbeknownst to each other and quite out of the blue, both telling me how much I meant to them as their mum. Can you imagine how much those texts meant to me? There are no words to describe. Honestly, it was the total best thing that could have happened for me because they both ‘WANTED’ to tell me that and did it simply and in their own way, not commercially or dutifully.
Duty is not love, instead it is obligation and can easily enough be a burden and source of stress too.
My sons are not obliged to love me. I made plenty of mistakes when they were growing up. I gave them the gift of freedom from that but they love me from their own free will. How wonderful that gift is.
My husband and I also made an agreement not to do commercial things like dinner, bought flowers and cards for anniversaries, birthdays, valentines and all the other plethora of ritual invented by the industries that make money out of such things.
As we get older and deeper into our marriage though we are getting more sentimental. In retirement or semi-retirement we have more time too, so we go for a special walk together instead, give each other special time really paying attention to each other and not allowing the rest of our lives to distract from each other as usual.
Someone asked my husband what he was doing for me for Valentine’s day one year and his reply was that every day was Valentine’s day with me. And that is how I feel too. Every day is a special celebration of love and life. Every day is a joyful celebration of how much I love my sons and grandson and friends and other family too. Every day is that celebration, so there is no special day, no single obligatory ritual day in which to celebrate this love and connection. It is present all the time.
One of the lovely rituals we have invented for ourselves as a couple though is to buy or do something special together each year, maybe a trip, or buy a piece of sculpture or art that would normally be out of our budget range. But by not spending money on all the gifts we might have felt obliged to purchase through the year, we can share in something very special that we both will appreciate into the future. And hopefully, if it is a piece of art-work of some kind, it is also something we can leave behind for one of our family members to remember us by. When the time comes, we shall invite them all to pick their favourites and take them before we go, when our lives are reduced by age and increasing decrepitude as to not matter anymore.
In the end materialism is a pointless value system which we have all been brainwashed into believing is the path to happiness. It actually separates us from each other far more effectively, especially on the bigger stage
And I fear that festivities such as Xmas have become much the same thing.
We shall have a lovely family meal if practical, with an aged mother, if she makes it that long, and that is in question at present anyway. Life and death are all part of the same cycle, like winter and summer. | https://medium.com/mindfully-speaking/seasonal-gifts-of-the-spirit-e3178e11e72e | ['Sylvia Clare Msc. Psychol'] | 2020-12-11 12:25:07.292000+00:00 | ['Prompt', 'Celebrations Memories', 'Spiritual Awakening', 'Xmas', 'Love'] |
The leaky boat — A different analogy for technical debt | I’ve come to realize that the analogy behind the term “technical debt” might be somewhat flawed. Technical people understand it, as we live and breathe with it every day, but for manager and other non-technical people I think we’re actually sending the wrong message. I think more companies than ever is a at point with their applications and services where the legacy is taking it’s toll. The way we’re able to manage that going forward can be make or break for a lot of applications, and making sure that the management actually understand this is key for us to even have a chance of dealing with this!
Therefore, lets spend some time delving on words. Debt is a familiar term to most of us, you can bough some now but you must repay it with interest. And the clever girls and guys with economics degrees have about a trillion ways of doing very clever stuff with debt, restructuring, trading, you name it. And that is part of the problem by using that term to describe our technical challenges, as we have very different tools to handle our particular kind of debt.
So let my try out a different analogy. Your application is a boat. And is probably not even a very good boat. Sorry, let’s face it. It’s an old, wooden rowboat or maybe a large, old, battle scared pirate ship. And it leaks, and there is quite a bit of rainwater accumulated. Even if you have a new shine boat, it will become weathered pretty fast when it’s outs on the high seas. What do you do? As the development team, do you keep rowing, adding new features, as the boat slowly fills with more water? Or do you start shoveling water out? Or maybe you start plugging the holes. Or you are probably doing a bit of both, rowing forward while your splashing your feet frantically trying to get rid of at least some of the excess water. What about the applications the development team doesn’t actively maintain, it’s out there and its doing its thing, but no one is really rowing it, or even making sure that there are no leaks or just the passing of time has filled it with rain water.
From a technical point of view the analogy might not be better, or it might not really be a point in making a better analogy, that is not the point. We already understand this. Technical dept is bad, unavoidable and must be dealt with in due time. But our managers and directors without a technical background know the concept debt, and that makes it harder for us to clearly communicate what it is and why we need to spend time, and thus money, on this.
Photo by Daniel Stenholm on Unsplash
Let’s take this further, maybe too far. You are a manager, you are responsible for a couple of development teams. And those teams are each responsible for, let’s say five leaky boats, or apps if you will. You as the manager points the direction you want your fleet of thirtyish boats to go, or what new features needs to be added. In order to accurately understand what your fleet is doing, you must know the state of it, and why some ships move much faster than others.
We can even include the water and weather in this analogy, humor me. Sometimes factors outside our control affects the state of our applications. A heavy shower, our perhaps a new breaking version of your framework of choice is released. And you application that was completely fine, no longer is that new and shiny. Or a storm can create rough sea that test the reliance of your boat and leaves it with some scars after, for example some new GDPR regulations could feel like quite a storm.
We can also add when an application is at a point where we decide, it’s time to start over. Often the development team is set to build the new boat, while still rowing the old one, so at first your trying to build a boat while on a boat. And at some point, hopefully the new boats is lowered into the water, and is dragged after the old boat for a while. Before the roles is reversed, the the new shiny boat is dragging along the old boat. I think its pretty easy to understand that this situation is not optimal and that it will take a while to get up to speed with the new boat, even if it is fast and new and shiny.
And yeah, the sea is production. The sea could be rough international waters, or a small little pond right behind your office complex. I did warn you that I’ve might have gone overboard on this analogy. Oh, and there is pirates (hackers), reefs or skerries (unknown and hidden pitfalls) and sharks (honestly I don’t know yet, leave a comment maybe we’ll figure it out together). | https://medium.com/@lfberge/the-leaky-boat-a-different-analogy-for-technical-debt-489e63e391cd | ['Leiv Fredrik Berge'] | 2020-12-03 13:42:08.681000+00:00 | ['Technical Debt', 'Teamwork', 'Development', 'Team Collaboration', 'Team'] |
How to connect XSplit broadcaster | Yellow Duck is an application that will allow you to live stream to Instagram from your PC machine via XSplit encoder.
Yellow Duck gives you the ability to get your Instagram RTMP URL and stream key, which allows you to stream from external devices.
After you open XSplit click Broadcast — Set up a new output — Custom RTMP.
2. Use “Yellow Duck” as a name. Copy your RTMP URL and stream key from Yellow Duck application to your XSplit RTMP URL and Stream Name fields accordingly. Set Bitrate to 2000, set Audio Bitrate to 128, then click OK.
3. Change scene resolution by clicking resolution text in the top right part of the app.
4. Create a custom resolution of 720x1080 as it’s default resolution of Instagram streams and use it for streaming.
5. Make sure to rotate all your sources clockwise once so it’s more convenient to watch your stream on a mobile device.
6. In order to start the live stream, click Broadcast — Custom RTMP Yellow Duck.
You need to update Stream Key before each stream and start stream only while Yellow Duck application is running. | https://medium.com/yellowducktv/how-to-connect-xsplit-broadcaster-3e6522475020 | ['Yellow Duck'] | 2019-07-24 14:05:09.951000+00:00 | ['Services', 'Live Streaming', 'Xsplit', 'YouTube', 'Instagram'] |
Orphan’s Lament | Six Years of poetry-only publishing, PoetsUnlimited was a diverse, engaging and authentic poetry magazine. For most of that time a daily publication, it was always diverse and original, and free-to-read by all.
Follow | https://medium.com/poets-unlimited/orphans-lament-c41659591f2c | ['Space Age Bonobo'] | 2019-04-19 23:14:19.642000+00:00 | ['2018', 'Poetry', 'Art', 'Mourning', 'Life'] |
GRN1 Cancellation Announcement | Due to a lack of interest and funding, Obelisk has had to cancel the GRN1 project. All who purchased the GRN1 directly from Obelisk will be receiving a full refund for their purchase. Refunds will be provided in the form of BTC equal to the USD value of the amount paid at the time of purchase. If credit was used, the credit will be added to the amount refunded. If coupons were used, the coupons will be returned as coupons.
Obelisk picked Grin as our next mining project because we saw great potential in the coin. There was a lot of early hype, and the social and political fundamentals for Grin’s development appeared to be more decentralized than any other cryptocurrency besides Bitcoin. This was very exciting to us, and is something that we felt made Grin substantially interesting among the newer cryptocurrencies.
An ASIC project is incredibly expensive, and we hit several barriers to getting enough funding to finish the project. One of the biggest barriers was the split block reward. The Grin devs determined that the best approach to creating a healthy mining ecosystem would be to split the block reward three ways, with one chunk going to GPU miners, one chunk going to a lower memory requirement Cucaktoo31 algorithm, and one chunk going to a higher memory requirement Cuckatoo32 algorithm. This split, combined with the fact that the Grin project has yet to gain substantial traction in the cryptocurrency marketplace proved to be an insurmountable barrier.
Of the three algorithms, Obelisk chose to target the the lower memory requirement Cuckatoo31 algorithm, with an intention of making a second generation of hardware to target the Cuckatoo32 algorithm before the transition to Cuckatoo32 kicked in. We felt that this approach would give us the strongest edge over the competing manufacturers. This strategy comes with a protocol enforced deadline though for getting the first generation hardware out, and due to fundraising constraints we were not able to make the deadline. Rather than delaying the shipping date and trying again, Obelisk is forced to abort the nearly complete project.
This is of course a disappointing outcome for Obelisk and its customers, however we are glad to be able to refund all of our customers in full, and we are also glad that we will be able to move on to the next project. | https://medium.com/obelisk-blog/grn1-cancellation-announcement-54782c6e3e83 | ['David Vorick'] | 2019-07-19 19:21:54.955000+00:00 | ['Grin', 'Mining', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin', 'Obelisk'] |
a bike shop | a bike shop
a poem about some bicycles with higher ambitions
.
on unseen wire, tires hang
like fallen halos with no shine
a wish to return to rubber tree
far removed from roads of duty
.
below frames jockey for daylight
after months of hibernating
awakened by fruity bird songs
in vogue with the blossoms of spring
.
a smell of latex aftershave
clings to walls dense with biker tales
the near miss, that perfect gear shift
meeting of man and half-machine
.
each with a dream of open road
miles of roads happy to assist
pushed by breath as gravity resists
each one a world unseen, asleep
. | https://haikulovebites.medium.com/a-bike-shop-18f41c709e4f | ['Haiku Love Bites'] | 2020-01-02 09:53:44.798000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Sports', 'Health', 'Cycling', 'Life'] |
Iran, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix | The greatest asset of the propagandists is your belief that you haven’t been propagandized.
~
Hi my name’s Maga McBootlick. I fight the establishment by cheerleading for the US President, I oppose war by supporting the same Middle East agendas as Dick Cheney, John Bolton and Bill Kristol, and I love the Iranian people so much I want to kill them with starvation sanctions.
~
I can’t believe I’ve spent a week and a half arguing with Republicans who insist that assassinating a nation’s top general is perfectly sane and normal and fine. No, idiots. No.
~
Trump supporters keep telling me how upset they are that I’m dedicating so much time and energy to criticizing his Iran warmongering. The mental irritation you experience when I criticize your president is called cognitive dissonance. It’s what being wrong feels like.
~
Note to the US government: you don’t get to murder civilians with starvation sanctions and then have anyone believe you when you tell them you stand with them. Not a thing.
~
When you target civilians with sanctions with the stated goal of making them so miserable and hungry that they rise up against their government, and then openly urge them to rise up against their government, you are trying to start a civil war. That is the thing you are doing. People should really think hard about exactly what that means.
The US Secretary of State has openly admitted that Iran is being sanctioned not so that its government will change its behavior, but so that the Iranian people will force their government out. This cannot happen without coordinated violence against Tehran, i.e. civil war.
We’ve known for years that the CIA has been ramping up covert operations within Iran. Concerns that the CIA is working to foment violence and disorder in Tehran are not idle speculation. It is most definitely happening. Only question is how and to what extent.
~
Anyone who’s ever escaped from a relationship with a sociopath can see these “We stand with the people of Nation X in rising up against their government” scripts for the imperialist manipulations they are. It’s amazing how many of the people with deep understandings of manipulation are survivors of this type of abuse.
~
After Iran admitted that it downed the Ukrainian plane there were a bunch of establishment narrative managers running around online going “Ha! See?? This proves it’s wrong to doubt us on these things!” Doesn’t work that way, sugar tits. The US government has an extensive history of using lies, propaganda and false flags to manufacture consent for military agendas; skepticism until there’s hard proof is the only sane position in a post-Iraq invasion world.
Always, always remain skeptical of such assertions until clear, doubtless proof is provided. Never let them shame you out of doing so. Their giant “See, we didn’t lie this time!” social media parade actually proves the rule.
~
All the justifications you’ve heard for Trump’s Iran warmongering have been premised upon the assumption that it is entirely right and appropriate for the United States to have a military presence on the other side of the planet in nations that don’t want them to be there.
~
When I say the US government’s claims justifying Soleimani’s assassination are unproven, I always get people telling me that’s because the evidence is classified. Secret, invisible, hypothetical evidence is not evidence, guys. Not as far as public scrutiny is concerned. I’ve explained this to Russiagaters as well.
~
If a known compulsive liar who has deceived you many times in the past told you it was very, very important that you go and murder your neighbor, but he couldn’t show you the evidence proving his claim, would you take him at his word and get your gun? No? Then don’t trust the US government when it tells you something happened requiring military action.
~
Anyone who says a war with Iran could be easily won is either (A) making claims on a subject they know nothing about, or (B) advocating the use of nuclear weapons. Either way they’re not someone you should trust with your car keys.
~
Maybe the dumbest thing in all US politics is the way liberals tend to cheer for regime change in Syria while conservatives tend to support regime change in Iran. In reality it’s the same agenda: they’re just arguing over which government to oust first. Amazing propaganda trick.
Whenever I’m writing against US regime change in Syria it’s a guarantee I’ll spend the day arguing with liberals. Whenever I’m writing against US regime change in Iran it’s guaranteed I’ll spend it arguing with conservatives. Always. Every single time.
~
When the US was preparing to announce its withdrawal from the JCPOA in May 2018 I tweeted, “Make a note of which Trump supporters who were dutiful skeptics about Russiagate and Syria turn into worthless foam-brained sheep about Iran.” Can’t say the results have been especially surprising. Party loyalism is dementia.
~
When analysts accurately predict US military aggression will unite disparate factions against the US, it’s not some kind of psychic magic trick. They’re using the same common sense which says that if you act like an asshole at the pub, everyone in the pub will think you’re an asshole.
~
Those who advance war propaganda are participating in that war just as much as the people who actually go and fight in it. They’re just playing a much safer and more cowardly role.
~
Trump supporters acting like he’s been vindicated for assassinating Soleimani because it hasn’t started a full-scale war are like an abusive husband telling his wife “See? It was fine! Bet you feel stupid for yelling now!” after downing a 12 pack and taking the kids on the freeway in the back of the pickup truck.
~
USA: Want to stop being a sovereign nation?
Iraq: No. Get the fuck out.
USA: [invades, kills a million Iraqis, kills Saddam, tears apart Ba’ath party, tears apart Iraq’s military, installs puppet regime, declares Iraq and USA “partners”] How about now?
Iraq: No. Get the fuck out.
~
Assassinating a nation’s top general after arbitrarily designating him a “terrorist” is just assassinating a nation’s top general with a thin layer of narrative overlay. Yet such is the power of narrative that Trumpites have been regurgitating this exact justification like it’s a real thing.
~
Every single time Trump does something evil I get drooling QAnon cultists telling me to calm down and trust the plan. Every single time, without a single, solitary exception. And his actions get more and more depraved. This is what a propaganda construct looks like.
~
No analyst can name an appropriately comparable US general whose assassination would enrage the public like Soleimani’s did in Iran. This is because hardly any living American can remember a time when their military could be said to have rescued them from an existential threat.
~
Whenever I criticize the US president his supporters come up babbling about how Hillary would have been worse. So? Believing Trump is good because Hillary Clinton is bad is like believing cancer is good because heart disease is bad.
~
America’s two-party sock puppet show is always fake. Always. Buying into any part of it supports the whole fake show. “But the red puppet acts different from the blue puppet!” Yes. That’s how puppet shows work. Characters act different. Cheering for either is endorsing the lie.
You can absolutely make the case that one of the puppets acts less reprehensibly than the other during the show. But the show always ends the same: everyone in the audience gets a punch in the mouth and has to give all their money to the military.
~
The only real “welfare queen” that’s ever existed is the US military. Not even Reagan’s most dementia-addled fantasies ever dreamed up a welfare moocher this minted.
~
MSM can create false narratives without even speaking them explicitly, just by giving a certain impression. After the Iraq invasion 70% of Americans still believed Saddam was responsible for 9/11, just because reporters and politicians kept mentioning the two in the same breath.
~
Schrodinger’s superpower: America is simultaneously (A) an unstoppable military and economic force that ought to be in charge of the entire world, and (B) the poor widdle victim of a big, mean bully on the other side of the planet.
~
It’s crazy how many so-called anarchists wind up advocating the same regime change agendas as the CIA and the US State Department. Like “Yeah I’m so anti-authoritarian I want the single most powerful authoritarian force on the planet to shore up even more control over the world.”
~
The ideologies of fundamentalist Christianity and Zionism have been used to manufacture consent for the movement of far more military firepower than Islam ever has. All religions are ultimately toxic, but only idiots pretend Islam occupies a uniquely violent position among them.
~
“Trump is fighting the Deep State.”
“Really? Why does fighting the Deep State always look exactly the same as advancing the longstanding objectives of neoconservatives and the CIA?”
“It’s called strategy. You must not play chess.”
~
I started this gig around the same time as a few other lefty indie commentators who later ended up going full MAGA. I understand the motivation: abandoning your principles for more mainstream politics is an easy way to get shares and clicks. But it can’t possibly feel good these days.
~
It’s weird how parents and teachers tell kids that fighting is always wrong no matter who started it when we all know damn well the question of who started it is of immense importance in any real conflict.
~
I dislike strangers who condescendingly tell how to do my job.
Nobody knows how to do what I do better than me.
I do me better than anyone else in history.
I am the Michael Jordan of being Caitlin Johnstone.
___________________________
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/iran-and-other-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix-f9d1f94a260c | ['Caitlin Johnstone'] | 2020-01-12 14:44:36.934000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Propaganda', 'Trump', 'News', 'Iran'] |
How to Reduce weight Easily | Easy way to Reduce Belly Fat
Best Way to reduce Belly fat and Expert Advice
Most of the Common People have the question of Easy way to reduce Belly fat but the Answer to this is a Little Tricky Challenging and Losing abdominal fat, or belly fat, is a most common weight loss goal, here is the Answer to the Easy way to Reduce belly fat.
Belly fat is a particularly harmful type. The latest Research suggests strong links with diseases like type 2 diabetes and heart disease
And the Truth is You can measure your abdominal fat by measuring the circumference around your waist with a tape measure. Measures of above 40" which is 102 cm in men and 35" which is88 cm in women are known as abdominal obesity
And For this reason, losing this fat can have significant benefits for your health and well-being for a long run, and most people want to know how to reduce weight. here are few tips to reduce weight.
Here are Top 5 evidence-based ways to lose belly fat.
Numerous studies have indicated that excess sugar in drinks mostly due to the large amounts of fructose, can lead to fat building up around your abdomen and liver.
Foods with high sugars are bad for your health. Eating a lot of these types of food can cause in weight gain.
Studies show that added high sugar has uniquely harmful effects on metabolic health.
Sugar is a half glucose and half fructose. When you eat a lot of added sugar in food and drinks, the liver gets overloaded with fructose and is forced to turn it into fat and the body gains lot of weight.
Liquid sugar is worse and the brain doesn’t seem to register liquid calories in the same way as solid calories, so when you drink sugar-sweetened beverages, you end up eating more total calories.
Protein is one of the most important macronutrient for weight loss.
Research has proven that it can reduce cravings by 60%, boost metabolism by 80–100 calories per day, and help you eat up to 441 fewer calories per day
Protein may be particularly effective in reducing belly fat. One of the study showed that people who ate more and better protein had much less abdominal fat
If weight loss is your goal then adding protein may be the single most effective change you can make to your diet.
As a Best suggestion try increasing your intake of high protein foods such as whole eggs, fish, legumes, nuts, meat, and dairy products. These are the best protein sources for your diet to reduce belly fat.
Eating Lesser carbs is a very effective way to lose fat.
This is supported by numerous studies and has proven that when people cut carbs, their appetite goes down and they lose weight by natural way.
More than 20 randomized controlled studies has already now shown that low carb diets sometimes lead to 2–3 times more weight loss than low fat diets
Studies has shown that comparing low carb and low fat diets indicate that low carb eating specifically reduces fat in the abdomen and around the organs and liver
If the goal is to lose weight fast then some people reduce their carb intake to 50 grams per day. This puts your body into ketosis a state where your body starts burning fats as its main fuel and appetite is reduced.
Exercise is the best things you can do to increase your chances of living a long, healthy life and avoiding disease.
Helping to reduce Belly fat is among the amazing health benefits of exercise.
This doesn’t mean doing abdominal exercises as spot reduction losing fat in one spot is not possible but its Possible. In one of the study, 6 weeks of training just the abdominal muscles had no measurable effect on the waist circumference or the amount of fat in the abdominal cavity.
Exercise also leads to reduced inflammation and lower blood sugar levels and improvements in other metabolic problems associated with excess abdominal fat.
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[email protected] | https://medium.com/@besttopbrands05/easy-way-to-reduce-belly-fat-ec23565110c0 | ['Best Top Brands'] | 2020-12-26 09:52:11.698000+00:00 | ['How To Lose Weight Fast', 'How To', 'How To Reduce Belly Fat', 'Weight Loss', 'Weightloss Foods'] |
CR#6 — The Great Depression. This week our class touched on The… | This week our class touched on The Great Depression. It was a worldwide depression that began in 1929 and lasted a decade. It is a well-documented part of worldwide history though what caused the depression is still debated today. It surely wasn’t just one event, person, or thing. It was a culmination of events that began a chain reaction, which led to a house of cards crashing down. Regardless of the causes, the effect was devastating to the world. America and the world give a large part of the credit of pulling out of the depression to their involvement of World War II. This was a whole decade of suffering and struggling to survive after one of the most prosperous decades in American history. Ten years is a long time and countless life stories can be told during that time. Anyone who could tell us about life during the 30’s is dead now, so to dig 90–100 years back, we need documentation.
There has been much documentation on The Great Depression making it difficult to not find source material. Some areas that might be lacking from early 1900’s and prior are audio and video sources. When searching for sources, primary sources are always the best, followed by secondary sources. Of the wide-ranging types of sources available, it’s difficult to say what is best. An unsolicited photograph with an unwary subject may capture a moment in time that generations can reflect upon and gain a better understanding of an era. These photographs are rare and take patience and, in many cases, bravery to obtain.
But photographers do not have the luxury of waiting around and hoping an era defining photograph “happens.” So, they make it happen. The photographer poses the subject(s), frames the photograph, then edits the photograph during development and finalization. It is the photographers and the publisher’s intention to manipulate an audience. Their goal is to evoke emotions in the audience, which in turn will bring forth a desired response. And it’s not just photographs, and it still goes on today. This has been going on since the advent of the photograph and has been refined to mastery by mass media.
The case study we used was of a photograph. It the photograph known as the “Migrant Mother.” Whether or not you know the name, it is likely you are familiar with or have at least seen the picture. She is posed with 3 of her 9 children. The photograph used was one is a series taken by the photographer as part of a government propaganda program. The mother’s and her children’s’ raggedy clothes and unbathed appearance going along with her worrisome gaze into the distance caused many sympathetic civilians doing better during the depression to fund a relief movement.
Photographs, authentic and those staged, have been able to capture the imagination of its viewers for generations. Many will never have known they had been manipulated. This is the problem with all historical sources we look through today. The intent of the photographer must be questioned. If not the photographer, then the publisher. Is the source material authentic or was it staged for a purpose? If it was staged, did it tell the truth of the situation, was it just dramatized or was it a complete falsehood? In our classroom’s case study, I would consider it a dramatization. The “Migrant Mother” was not doing well, and her family was doing better than some, but she had every right to worry about her and her children’s futures. | https://medium.com/@wthompson-84710/cr-6-the-great-depression-bf286140b48e | ['Bill Thompson'] | 2021-03-08 02:41:26.880000+00:00 | ['Photography', 'Migrant Mother', 'Mass Media', 'Propaganda', 'The Great Depression'] |
The Best Wifi Router Price Specification and Review — GoodsPoints | We’ve been experimenting with several Wifi routers for several days. After testing more than 10 routers over 150 hours, we’ve determined that the best router for wirelessly connecting your laptops, Desktop, and other smart devices. These Wi-Fi devices was faster than anything else we tested at both close and long-range, it’s reliable, and the stress of handling multi wireless devices simultaneously. So let’s look at the details.
The Best Wifi Router Price Specification and Review
The best Wi-Fi Router in the world
TP-Link’s Archer A20 AC4000 is easy to set up and has three wireless bands instead of the usual two, which helps it handle more connections at once. It’s big, but it is our top performer, and it includes advanced features, such as link aggregation, that will appeal to the technically inclined.
TP-Link’s Archer A20 AC4000 Smart WiFi Router -Ultimate Tri-Band Performance Router, VPN Server and Advanced Security by HomeCare. It’s Superior Processing Power 1.8GHz CPU and Gigabit, Beamforming, Link Aggregation.
Ultra-Fast Processing System: An clock Speed 1.8 GHz and 64-bit CPU handles all AC4000 Mbps WiFi Speed: 1625 Mbps on both 5G+ bands and 750 Mbps on 2.4G bands. Bufferless: MU-MIMO, No More Buffering, and Ultimate Tri-Band enable the router to connect more than 10 devices at a time. Secure Your Network: A free lifetime subscription of HomeCare and Malware protects your network from malicious attacks. Easy Setup: By intuitive Phone UI and smart Device your networks is ready to go within a minute. Gigabit Wired Speeds: One WAN and Four LAN Gigabit ports bring wired speeds to the maximum and Link Aggregation even doubles it to 2.4Gbps
Amazon $189.99 eBay US $189.97
Read More: Best pulse oximeter | how it works SaO2 meter | Price & review
It’s most power full and good frequency provider. It’s 4×4 dual-band Gigabit wifi router, It has powerful parental controls, MU-MIMO, It has threat Prevention, Virtual Privet Network (VPN), It has bandwidth management, It has expandable coverage with mesh wifi.
Blazing fast wifi with up to 2.55 Gbps combined wireless bandwidth to supercharge your Internet user experience. Synology RT2600ac is a powerful wireless router for homes and Offices seeking to understand, control, and More secure their network. Its coverage area easily expandable with additional Synology MR2200ac.
If you’re looking to build a robust, non-compromising, secure home network, this is the router to get.
Engineered for performance
The latest 802.11ac Wave 2 standard, RT2600ac enables up to 800 Mbps 2.4 GHz and 1733 Mbps 5 GHz radios, respectively. Its Reach 2 Gbps combined bandwidth with Dual wide area network (WAN) and easily optimize and maintain your Privet network with minimal performance loss even with android app/iOS-based traffic control.
Specification:
1.7GHz Dual-Core CPU, Quad-Stream Powerful WiFi Dual Band and AC2600, Wave 2 With MU-MIMO and Beamforming, Hardware Acceleration Engine Layer 4 & 7.
Read More: An effective way to increase immunity in the human body — Ways to Prevent Corona Virus
Google Nest Wi-Fi Router 2 Pack (2nd Generation) — 4×4 AC2200 Mesh Wi-Fi Routers with 4400 Square fits Coverage Area.
Speed: 802.11a/b/g/n/ac 2.4 GHz/5 GHz dual-band simultaneous, Dual Gigabit Ethernet ports Connectivity, Advanced security chip system, Nest Wifi point with Google Assistant, strictly privacy control.
Read More: The way Artificial Intelligence can destroy us — Stephen Hawking
NETGEAR Nighthawk X10 AD7200 802.11ac/ad Quad-Stream Wi-Fi Router, It has 1.7GHz Quad-core Processor and Plex Media Server.
Fast Wi-Fi performance up to 2500 squire ft wireless coverage area with AD7200 speed (Tri-band up to 800Mbps + 1733Mbps + 4600 Mbps — for 60Gz band devices).
Features:
Its Recommended Up to 45 Devise.
Wired Ethernet ports.
Loaded with advanced technology.
USB connections.
Smart parental controls.
Graphics Coprocessor 1.7 Quad-core. Number of USB 3.0 Ports 2
Read More: Best Video Sharing Site To Earn Money by Uploading Videos — Earn Up To $1000 Per Month
Linksys Mesh WiFi Router for Home AC2200, Future-Proof MU-MIMO Tri-Band fast Wireless Router.
Features:
It provides up to 2,000 Square ft. coverage area.
It’s supported Upto 20+ wireless devices.
Enjoy 4K HD streaming high quality without buffering.
WiFi speeds up to 5 GHz ( 2.2 Gbps, 400 Mbps + 867 Mbps) + (2.4 GHz / 867 Mbps)
ASUS RT-AC5300 Tri-band WiFi Gaming Router, MU-MIMO Superfast, theft, and Ai Protection Lifetime Security. Ai Mesh compatible with Mesh WiFi System.
Feature:
Tri-band technology Dual 5GHz with the latest 802, 11AC 4×4 and coverage area up to 5, 000 square feet.
Its multifunctional printer support (Windows only)
Wi-Fi Speed up to 5300 Mbps.
Very Large Home Wi-Fi Coverage.
It has four Gigabit Ethernet ports.
ASUS Ai Mesh Compatible
Asus Rt-ac3100 Ieee 802.11ac Ethernet US $266.88 | https://medium.com/@nancyflora247/the-best-wifi-router-price-specification-and-review-goodspoints-cbb8dfcda86a | [] | 2020-08-04 19:40:52.798000+00:00 | ['Best Wifi Routers', 'Wifi Router', 'Electronics', 'Wifi', 'Wireless'] |
Intelligent Cryptocurrency | WHY CRYPTOCURRENCY?
intelligent Cryptocurrency is a premium education & community membership to help beginners & advanced get started with cryptocurrencies.
I believe we’re on the cusp of the biggest cryptocurrency bull market we’ve ever seen. Bitcoin has already traded over $23,000 and I believe it’s just the beginning.
But forget about Bitcoin… the time to buy that was months ago when it was still trading under $10,000. Sure, it may still go up to $100,000 in future, but that’s “only” a 5x and it would take ENORMOUS capital to get it to that level.
JOIN INTELLIGENT CRYPTOCURRENCY NOW….
There’s thousands of cryptocurrencies (known as altcoins) and many of these have the potential to massively outperform Bitcoin because they have much smaller market caps. We saw this happen in the 2017 bull market… and I believe it’s about to repeat again in the next 12 months.
Cryptocurrencies give the average person a shot at making life-changing returns without needing large capital to invest or having to be an accredited investor.
We’re talking about the potential to turn $1000 into as much as $10,000, $50,000 or even as much as $277,000. This doesn’t happen every day, but it does happen…
JOIN INTELLIGENT CRYPTOCURRENCY NOW….
Smart investors know that when it comes to investments or life in general, nothing is guaranteed. In fact, anyone who guarantees returns of any kind with 100% certainty is a giant red flag.
Smart investors look for asymmetric bets. This means they look for opportunities that have a downside of what’s invested but an upside that is 10x-100x or more.
Why?
Simple. Investing is a numbers game. Most investors have losing investments on a regular basis. You can’t win them all. But… if for every losing investment you make up for at least 10x on the upside with your winners, you’ll end up very very wealthy.
JOIN INTELLIGENT CRYPTOCURRENCY NOW….
Cryptocurrencies are an asymmetric bet.
You have to be early to be able to realize these returns. If you wait until everyone starts talking about it, it’ll be too late and you’ll be reading the stories about teenage crypto millionaires on the news.
Technical Analysis & Trading Course
Interested in learning how to reach charts and how to trade cryptocurrencies profitably? We got you covered!
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In the members area, you’ll have access to a very detailed and comprehensive course (20+ HD video lessons) about money management, technical analysis and trading.
Dirk has over a decade of experience trading forex, stocks and cryptocurrencies and he shares his insights and best strategies on these topics in a way that’s easy to digest and simple to understand. | https://medium.com/@maryamfatima-24265/intelligent-cryptocurrency-8a9f3270d7d7 | ['Maryam Fatima'] | 2020-12-24 08:04:24.358000+00:00 | ['Online Learning', 'Online Marketing', 'How To Make Money', 'Online Business', 'Affiliate Marketing'] |
How to Build a Node.js Application with Docker | How to Build a Node.js Application with Docker
If you’ve found this article, that means that you have been tasked to setup an application and run it inside of a Docker container. By the end of this article, you will be able to do exactly that.
Before diving into the necessary code, it’s important to understand the underlying problem that containers and Docker solve. Luckily, this problem is simple to understand, and will make our code easier to comprehend.
For readers who are already familiar with Docker and its use case, scroll past the next section.
What is the problem that Containers solve?
Most developers can relate to the following scenario that illustrates the purpose of containers well. A co-worker asks you to clone their GitHub repository in order to help them debug an issue. After you’ve cloned it and installed the necessary dependencies, you find that the application will not run. It’s throwing all sorts of errors, none of which are the problem that your co-worker requested help with.
The problem that you two have just ran into is that of running an application on a different machine with a different environment. No two developers have the same machine. Just because one developer’s application works on their machine doesn’t mean that it will work on your machine, since your machine may have many different attributes in their respective environments, like:
Operating system;
Software version;
Installed dependencies;
The list of differences can go on and on! What is the solution to this problem?
This is where containers are a solution. By packaging code and all of its dependencies into an isolated container, a developer can run that container on any machine and have predictable results, since everything the application needs to run is included in the container.
Once an application is containerized, it can be shared and run on any machine. So, the aforementioned problem of incompatible development environments is solved.
We’ve arrived at the definition of a container: a container is a software unit that packages up code and all of the code’s dependencies so that it can run on any machine.
Let’s translate this definition into a Node.js application; what would the process of packaging up the code and its dependencies be like?
First, the host that will run the application will need the Node.js runtime, so that should be included. Next, we’ll need the actual code that comprises the application, like index.js , and all of the other files that make up the application. We will also need the package.json , as that file defines the necessary dependencies for the application.
Additionally, we will need to define the command(s) necessary to actually run the application.
Now that we’ve seen the problem that Docker containers solve, let’s actually create one for a Node.js application.
Defining the Dockerfile
Go to a new directory and run npm init . This will create a new package.json file for defining an application and its dependencies.
Let’s add a dependency: run npm i express to install express as a dependency. We will use this package to create a server.
Now, create the entry point file for your application. It’s name will be whatever you defined it as during the init setup. On my machine, it’s index.js , so I’ll run touch index.js .
Open index.js and paste the following code:
index.js is just specifying a host and port combination to listen on for requests. When we visit the root, / , we will receive the response on line 11 from the code.
This is enough code to write and test out Docker containers.
In order to spin up a Docker container, we first need to write a Dockerfile which defines the application, its dependencies, and any commands that need to be executed for the application to run. Run the command touch Dockerfile and open it in a text editor.
First, we need to define the base image that will be used to build this container upon.
An image is used to build a Docker container. The image provides the necessary environment for running a particular application or software inside of it as a container. In our case, we are running a Node.js application, so we will need to build from the Node.js image to provide our application with the Node.js runtime. To do that, mimic the following Dockerfile:
We have selected a certain image provided by Node.js. There are many different options; in this case, we opted for a small image of it.
Next, let’s define the working directory inside of the container. This directory will house our application’s code.
Up next is copying the package.json file from the current directory on our machine into the image, and also running npm install to install the dependencies defined in package.json . Since we’ve used the base image of Node.js, NPM is already installed and can be run inside the container.
For this, we’ll use the commands COPY and RUN.
The COPY package.json . will copy the package.json in our current directory to the working directory, /usr/src/app/package.json .
We’re almost done — now, we need to copy the rest of our application’s source code; in this case, it’s just index.js . Define another COPY command for the current directory.
We’ll need to use a new command now, EXPOSE. This command tells the Docker container which port to listen to at runtime. In our case, our application listens on 3000, so expose the same port in the container. In addition to exposing the container’s 3000 port, run the final command to start the application: node index.js .
Before actually building this image and running the container, create a .dockerignore file to define which files from the current directory should be ignored when building the image. This file should exist in the same directory as the Dockerfile.
As it stands right now, the entire directory is getting copied over to the working directory in the image, including the node modules.
This directory can be massive. We don’t want to include node_modules , so add it to .dockerignore .
Building the Image
The Dockerfile is defined, but we still haven’t built the image. In order to run this application in a container, we will need to run the image representing the application. So, let’s build our image from the Dockerfile, and then run the image as a container.
In the current directory, run docker build -t <your_name>/node_app . . The . at the end specifies to check the current directory for a Dockerfile, while the -t <your_name>/node_app gives the image a tag that you can succinctly specify to run the image.
After it has been successfully built, it’s time to run the image as a container. Run the following command: docker run -p 5000:3000 -d <your_name>/node_app .
-p specifies a public port on your machine to map to an internal port in the Docker container. In this case, we map to the port 3000 so that requests to our machine at 5000 will be routed to the Docker container’s 3000 port. -d instructs Docker to run this container as a background process so you can keep operating in the terminal.
Visit localhost:5000 in a browser, and the message ‘Running on Docker!’ should be present.
Conclusion
As one can see, Docker containers give developers immense power by ensuring that we can run any application on any machine.
In this article, we’ve only been exposed to a tiny sliver of Docker’s power. For any readers who want additional work, try the following exercise.
Create an application that uses a Redis instance in some way. Then, define a docker-compose file that can seamlessly run both the application and Redis and allow them to communicate over a shared network.
Good luck and happy coding! | https://javascript.plainenglish.io/how-to-build-a-node-js-application-with-docker-4a0164fdc9ca | ['Jordan Moore'] | 2020-12-11 14:53:22.208000+00:00 | ['Nodejs', 'Docker', 'Software Engineering', 'Expressjs', 'JavaScript'] |
How to make a startup hiring plan | How to make a startup hiring plan
by SignalFire’s Crystal Guerrero, edited by Josh Constine
Headcount is your biggest expense, so it pays to plan ahead. You wouldn’t write code without knowing what you’re building, or make a sales call to a random phone number. It’s the same for recruiting. Mapping out the process means when you need to fill a role or talent falls in your lap, you’ll be ready to hire, smart, and fast.This guide is designed for founders, executives, and recruiters alike to sharpen their hiring skills regardless of budget or team size. Whether you’re a one-person hiring squad, an in-house team, or are working with recruiting contractors, we’ll teach you to:
Develop a short- and long-term hiring plan Approve new roles you need filled Build out your hiring team Divide and assign recruiting tasks Write appealing job descriptions Run consistent, unbiased interviews Launch your recruiting process
When should you develop a recruitment plan?
It’s never too early! Founders and CEOs should ideally start thinking about recruitment plans before they even have the money to pay for the talent. That way they can budget or raise to cover their future burn rates. Many investors like SignalFire prefer pitches that include a hiring plan so they know what funding will go towards and which key roles or weaknesses remain unaddressed. But let’s say that you’re coming to this realization a little later in your company’s history, like once you’ve made your first Talent/HR hire or assigned someone else to take ownership of recruiting like your COO or VP of Finance. You’ll still need to understand the process so you can evaluate your team’s work and align your efforts.
Why focus on recruiting so early in your company’s history?
If you only have a handful of employees, you might be hesitant to spend time at this stage improving your recruiting processes and operations. But founders often spend 70% of their time on recruiting. It’s the only way to actually gain time back by having people to which they can delegate tasks. Unfortunately, the explosion in startup formation has created a talent crunch. That means you can’t just be a great place to work or compensate well. You also have to know exactly who you need, when you need them, and how to run a swift and professional recruiting process to sign them.
It’s an especially tricky challenge because every startup wants to hire amazing talent, demand has drastically surpassed supply, and when you don’t have a process in place, everything is slower and less efficient. The stakes are high at this stage: Each subsequent hire will consider your existing team’s quality and culture when deciding whether to join. Great talent wants to work with and learn from other great talent. Meanwhile, diverse talent may be apprehensive about joining a homogeneous team. Putting in the work now means you won’t be digging yourself out of a hole in the future.
That said, don’t limit yourself to only senior employees at name-brand companies. While you might feel like nabbing some VP from Google means you’ve derisked your company, they can be hard to attract without huge cash compensation, and might not fit into a scrappier culture. Instead, look for first hires who could have made great co-founders.
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3 steps to launch your recruitment plan
Step 1: The approval: What is the process to open a role
You need to institute a standard approval process that happens every time you open a role. This process should apply to all departments and positions at all levels, including full-time regular, part-time regular, and temp positions. This process should account for A) budget and B) resources for someone (e.g. founder, executive, recruiter, hiring manager, or agency) to work on the role, and C) defining the role and responsibilities.
Initiating a hire
The hiring leader discusses new requisition needs with the decision-maker whenever a department has a need to:
Open and recruit for a new position Rehire for a position after a layoff or firing Hire a freelancer, contractor, or other temporary staffer.
The person who makes these approval calls could be the CEO or CFO, depending on your org structure.
Approving roles: A step-by-step guide
Here’s how to go from recognizing a role you need filled to kicking off recruiting. Remember that depending on your team size, the recruiter, hiring manager, head of HR, and even the founder could all be the same person.
The hiring manager emails the decision-maker to request a new open position — this is called a requisition form. You can make this an easy-to-access template and post on your wiki for all hiring managers to access. This should include:
-Is this a new position, refill position, or temp position?
-Title
-Seniority level
-Who the person will report to
-Basic scope of the role/responsibilities/skillset required — attach job description if this is a refill for a past role
-Compensation benchmarks
-The decision-maker approves or rejects If approved, the requisition form is sent to HR (if you are a small team, this step may be handled by finance). It’s helpful to attach a job description at this point if it is available. For help, check out SignalFire’s job description template and our deep-dive into turning role needs into job descriptions later in this chapter. HR/Finance reviews the requisition form to verify that the job’s responsibilities, necessary skills, and compensation match the open role, and suggest edits if necessary. Once approved, HR/Finance updates the compensation benchmark spreadsheet with the new role’s compensation bands and shares with the hiring manager and CEO/Finance for final approval. The recruiter is given all relevant information and begins working with the hiring manager to launch the recruiting process.
For more on job requisitions, check out the Society for Human Resource Management’s approval process.
Compensation benchmarking
How much should you pay a software engineer? How about an intern vs a manager? How should that be divided between salary, bonuses, and equity? And how much equity should you provide in refresher grants over time? These are critical questions for both attracting and retaining talent, but also for hiring planning so you don’t outstrip your runway.
Hypothetical example, not based on real data
This downloadable compensation benchmark spreadsheet and template from Option Impact (dummy data set previewed above) includes recent data on expected ranges for engineering salaries, bonuses, and equity for a variety of seniority levels. While it’s not perfectly up to date and doesn’t take into account COVID-19 or remote work’s impact on compensation, it should give you a foundation for headcount planning. The additional tabs provide templates for building your own compensation workbooks for engineering, product, sales, marketing, and customer support.
You can click File->Download->Microsoft Excel to download the compensation example and templates for your own use. Check out Option Impact’s compensation data services based on 3000 participating companies for more resources like this look at Bay Area startup CEO compensation.
Given COVID-19 is pushing many companies to be remote-first, it may be appropriate to consider compensation changes for employees that move from near your headquarters to lower cost-of-living locations. Payscale’s calculator will show you the change in housing and living costs for moving between different cities.
Payscale’s calculator
Step 2: Headcount and capacity: When to hire
Despite uncertainty, it’s important to maintain both a short- and mid-term hiring plan and document where you stand on recruiting each quarter. Tip: Investors and board members appreciate seeing these quarterly checkups in your updates to them.
If you are fortunate enough to have someone besides a founder leading talent acquisition, it’s important to give them (your recruiter, people ops, HR team) guidelines in the form of a headcount plan and forecast. Like salespeople, recruiters are often working with pipelines and managing connections with job candidates over time, so giving them insight into future hiring needs will help them nurture the right relationships.
There are two major points to consider: headcount planning, which is defined as deciding which new employees you’ll be adding to your organization and the rough timeline this will follow, and capacity planning, which is considering how many roles your recruiter will be able to take on at any given time.
Headcount planning
The budgeting process for new headcount typically happens early in Q4 for the following year. At this point, all new positions are discussed and go through the annual budgeting process for planning and approval.
In many cases, circumstances will dictate additional headcount needs outside of the already approved roles. In this case, there should be a discussion justifying the new approval so that the team is aligned as to why the role is being prioritized over the formerly planned roles. The whole team must understand that the recruiter will not be expected to work on or source candidates for un-approved roles.
The executive team should decide how to prioritize roles — determine which three to five you’d like the recruiter to focus on and what ranking roles come in after that. It’s also a good idea to come up with a plan for handling backfill if an existing team member leaves. Be sure to prepare for scenarios where you need to ramp your headcount plan up or down depending on fluctuations in runway or unexpected cash crunches.
Here are a few points to consider when defining your headcount plan and forecast:
Which people do you need today , in two quarters, in a year, or even later? If you’re looking to hire mostly executives in a short timeframe, you’ll probably want to work with external recruiters from a capacity standpoint. If you only want to hire a few individual contributors, an in-house recruiter should be able to handle that.
, in two quarters, in a year, or even later? If you’re looking to hire mostly executives in a short timeframe, you’ll probably want to work with external recruiters from a capacity standpoint. If you only want to hire a few individual contributors, an in-house recruiter should be able to handle that. What are the salaries for the roles in your short- and mid-term plan? Also, consider how much you should allocate for agency fees or referral bonuses for each role.
for the roles in your short- and mid-term plan? Also, consider how much you should allocate for agency fees or referral bonuses for each role. What’s your estimated time to hire for each role? When will each role be projected to start? How long will it take them to ramp up and become productive?
Capacity planning
You need to develop a realistic workload for your recruiters to avoid burning them out. This is why it’s helpful to create a framework for defining the complexity of roles. For example, recruiting software Greenhouse’s 5-point scale allows you to assign a difficulty index to each role. Roles that are easy to fill or already exist and require little setup (e.g. adding another SDR to your team when you already have one) get a score of 1. Roles that are higher levels of seniority or require specialized skills (e.g. senior software engineers or executives) get a score of 5. Recruiters can typically fill around 12 points a quarter, so using this approach can help create alignment around priorities and realistic expectations.
You’ll want to measure or at least estimate your recruiting yield ratio. This is defined as how many candidates will you need to source and move through each phase of the interview funnel to reach your hiring goals.
Here’s a hypothetical recruiting yield ratio pyramid from Workable, though your numbers will vary widely.
Hiring managers and recruiters will work closely throughout the entire recruiting process (which could be quite lengthy if you’re looking for an especially tough-to-fill role), so they need to be on the same page from the outset. Be sure to spend time defining roles and responsibilities as well as creating realistic expectations about how long different steps will take. Hiring is a full-time job, so factor in all the work!
Check out these resources to learn more about recruiter capacity planning:
Step 3: Roles: Who you need to hire
When considering who to hire, start with the big picture: What’s the ideal composition of your company? What distribution of experience do you need? Then you can zero in on questions like what each incremental hire will bring to the table and how to optimize your hiring order. Your management team should discuss upcoming hiring needs within each management meeting. These conversations should then be factored into the company’s annual hiring plan to make sure that growth projections are being hit and the budget is not being compromised.
When you’re ready to think about individual roles, the hiring manager and recruiter should work together to create a detailed job description. We often recommend asking the hiring manager to articulate their needs for the approval process first and then to go back later with the recruiter to refine them at the start of the search.
Here are the questions that should guide these discussions, both at the leadership and hiring manager levels:
Why are we adding this role?
In what direction will they take the company?
Why are we hiring for this now?
How will this role interact with existing leadership?
What does it mean to be great at this role?
What will their success look like in the first 6 months? The first year?
What companies do we admire? How have they done what they’ve done?
What companies obviously have top talent in this role?
What does the ideal candidate need to have done before in their career?
Who are the people doing this job extremely well right now? Do we know anyone in our network that has a great reputation or could introduce us?
Resources in this section:
External links in this section:
How SignalFire can help
SignalFire’s Director of talent operations & development Crystal Guerrero
Don’t want to handle this all by yourself? Recruiting is SignalFire’s superpower. Our Beacon Talent engine tracks most of the top tech talent in the Western world and can generate reports on the best and most hirable job candidates for any role. SignalFire’s talent program is headed by former Facebook Talent leader Mike Mangini whose team assists our portfolio companies with high-level strategy and on-the-ground recruiting to make sure you score your ideal hires. We made over 1000 job candidate intros to our portfolio companies last year — just one of the reasons we receive a net promoter score of 96 from our portfolio founders, over 85% of whom say we’re their most valuable investor.
For first-time founders and serial entrepreneurs seeking a refresher, we start by offering a program based on my (Crystal Guererro) decade of experience leading talent operations for startups. We partner with founding teams to help them establish a world-class recruitment process. We refer to this as a “recruiting engine” — systems implementation, brand building, role definition, recruitment process, sourcing, interview training, and compensation benchmarking to enable teams to identify, attract, engage, close, and onboard top talent quickly and effectively.
This hiring plan guide is part of our Recruitment Process Optimization program where I work in tandem with our founders and talent teams to devise a comprehensive recruiting strategy, advise on systems development, and aid in recruiting execution via our various individual contributor talent pipelines as well as Beacon Talent. To support this program, the Talent Academy Playbook outlines the nuts and bolts of implementing a well-oiled recruitment machine which is a compilation of best practices and learning from my recruiting career. This should help guide your thinking as it relates to building your talent engine.
Service Level Agreements For Hiring Teams
How to create clear tasks and timelines for everyone who’s involved in the hiring process.
So much of recruiting relies on timing. If you’re too slow to follow up, schedule interviews, or make an offer, chances are that promising candidates will get snatched up by another company. But many steps in the hiring process depend not just on a single person but the coordinated efforts of several people. This is why it’s so important to commit to timelines, deliverables, and success metrics so you can move candidates through the pipeline quickly.
Service Level Agreements (or SLAs from here on out) clearly spell out exactly what each team member is responsible for and the timeframe they have to complete each task. SLAs will help you make more offers, get more candidates to sign, and bring your company that much closer to a world-class team.
Which SLAs should you assign?
The charts below provide an outline of what generally happens in each stage of the hiring process along with some recommended timelines for the recruiter, hiring manager, recruiting team (which may overlap in smaller teams), and the decision-maker (who may be the CEO, Head of Finance, or Head of People). Take a look and consider how these map to the people and processes at your company.
You can use this template below to make your own hiring SLA with tasks each role is responsible for.
How long should it take to complete each task?
Time kills all deals. To put it simply, you want to move as quickly as possible in every stage while accurately assessing candidate value.Still, you need a realistic time frame for each task. These numbers will vary depending on complexity and seniority of the role, the recruiter’s existing bandwidth, etc., so consider them a rough guideline:
Hiring manager completes initial job description: 1 week
Recruiter sources and gathers initial list of candidates: 2 weeks
Hiring manager provides shortlist of candidates to interview: Within 24 hours
Recruiter schedules interviews: Within 24 hours of hiring manager approval
Interview panel provides feedback on candidate: Same day as the interview
CEO/decision-maker approves offer: Within 24 hours
Hold a kickoff meeting with stakeholders to decide which tasks and time frames should be included in your SLAs. Consider how you’ll hold people accountable to them. For example, you may want to incorporate SLAs into their goals or performance evaluations.
Grade your experience
You’ll also want to gather insight from the candidates who are going through this process. A candidate experience survey can help you collect data to identify if there are any slowdowns or inefficiencies they perceived in the process.
You can use Google Forms, Typeform, Survey Monkey, or another survey tool.Here are examples of a candidate experience surveys to get you started. You can see what the survey should look like in PDF form, and copy text from the Google Docs versions to paste into your own surveys:
Defining who you want to hire
Creating a detailed job description that can be used both internally and externally to promote a role.
Your team needs to be able to align around the skillset and qualities that will make someone successful in this role. Otherwise, you’ll be wasting candidates’ time — and your own.
One of the best ways to come to a consensus on your ideal candidate is by crafting a detailed job description. Think of this as a piece of marketing collateral: It should speak directly to candidates and convince them why your company is the perfect place for them. We made this startup job description template to help you out.
Hiring manager kickoff
Before you get started on the actual job description, the hiring manager needs to carefully consider the ideal candidate for this role. What type of company do they currently work for? What are some keywords that define their work to date? What specific work experience and personality traits do they have? We know these are deep questions, which is why we’ve created the Hiring manager kickoff document to walk you through these major categories. Plan to spend about an hour conducting the research and filling out the document, and then you can continue on to the next section. Don’t worry — we’re not going anywhere. This is what we do.
The key elements of a job description
It can be tempting to turn a job description into a wish list of everything your company wants. But if the description seems too broad or demanding, it can scare off applicants. Instead, try to frame your job description in a way that puts the candidate first. Why should they be interested in this role? What will they get, both personally and professionally, by joining your company? This will boost your rate of inbound applications and outbound recruiter response rate.
Here are a few points you should aim to include:
Brief description of the company’s product, purpose, and mission
Traits and work style of who will be successful in the role
Responsibilities of the role and what they’ll spend time doing
Skills and experience required
Challenges they’ll tackle and opportunities for career progression
Employee value proposition explaining the highlights of working at your company
That might seem like a lot to include, but you shouldn’t just lay out a laundry list of prerequisites and projects they’ll work on. Tell them what they’ll actually spend their days doing.Most importantly, you want your job description to be unique. Candidates will likely be comparing yours to several similar roles at other companies and you don’t want to get lost in the crowd. Don’t be afraid to add a little flavor from your work environment and company culture.
Check out SignalFire’s job description template for a deeper look at all the major components. We recommend having hiring managers and recruiters partner on writing this up. Remember that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can recycle some wording from previous job descriptions, especially when it comes to your perks, benefits, and company culture.
A note about inclusive job descriptions
Research has shown that the language in job descriptions can affect how they’re perceived by candidates and discourage certain groups from applying. There are a few steps you can take to create more inclusive job descriptions. Here are a few examples:
Use gender-neutral terms like “they/them”, “applicants” or “the candidate”, not “he or “she”
Avoid gendered or loaded terms like “rockstar” and “dominate”
Limit the external job description to “must-haves” rather than “nice-to-haves”. Men appear to be more likely than women to apply to jobs when they don’t have all the requirements. For internal promotions, Hewlett Packard found men applied when they met 60% of the requirements, but women were much more likely to hesitate unless they met 100% of the qualifications
Cut down on corporate jargon and acronyms
Emphasize your company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion
Highlight your inclusive benefits such as parental leave (which is broader than just maternity leave)
Consider dropping strict education requirements, as this could exclude candidates that were unable to attend university or that could not afford a college degree. Many talented candidates are self-taught or learned their skills through experience
Check out tools like Textio.com that help identify non-inclusive language in your current job descriptions and make recommendations for how to use more inclusive wording
To learn more about inclusive language in your job descriptions, see: 5 Must-Dos for Writing Inclusive Job Descriptions.
Textio‘s unbiased writing tool
Resources in this section:
External links in this section:
Choosing & Training Your Hiring Team
How to train your hiring team to conduct consistent interviews and provide vivid candidate feedback
Anyone who joins your company is going to change the team dynamic, and this is especially true when you’re small and early stage. They’ll be communicating and collaborating with the rest of your squad, so it’s critical to have other team members participate in the interview process and consider who would be the best addition to your company. Plus, interviewing is tough and time consuming. The burden shouldn’t only rest on the hiring manager’s shoulders. Spread the love (or to be more accurate, the workload)!
How to choose your hiring dream team
You’re looking to create the right mix of people who can handle the two major tasks in an interview: the assessment and the sell. You need talented specialists and team leaders who can judge the candidates on the skills required for the role, and evaluate how they’ll add to your culture. Meanwhile, you need friendly and persuasive team members to represent your organization in an authentically positive light, and effectively “sell” the role and your company to convince candidates to accept your offer.
Start by reviewing your job description and outlining the key skills you’re trying to assess. Consider which employees would be well suited to evaluate candidates on these skills. If you’re hiring into an existing team that already has a few members, some should definitely be part of the hiring team. If you’re building out a new team that doesn’t have other members yet, you can pull in leaders from other departments in order to get perspective from people with broader work experience.
You may also want to think about conducting cross-functional interviews to get a better sense of the candidate’s personality and general work style. That means including some interviewers for assessing technical skills, and others to judge culture fit. If you’re still relatively small and your executives have the bandwidth to do so, we recommend having your CEO or co-founder participate in the interview process as well.
In addition to the hiring manager, consider one or two interviewers from the same team, one or two cross-functional interviewers, your CEO or co-founder, and potentially one or two hiring team members who can participate in a more casual way, such as taking the candidate to a [virtual] lunch or coffee, conducting the culture-add interview, or participating in the take-home assignment presentation.
Each interview should include no more than four interviewers. That will keep you from soaking up too much of your employees’ time, and ensure everyone has space to participate. If you find some of your hiring team to be off-putting to candidates, it’s important to pull them out of the process as soon as possible so they don’t scare away hires.
How to train your hiring team
Next, you’ll want to create a training experience so that all interviewers use a consistent process for evaluating and giving feedback on candidates. Even if members of your hiring team have conducted interviews before, you’ll probably want them to participate in order to brush up their skills and align them with your company’s unique process. Interview consistency is key because otherwise you’ll have no way to accurately compare candidates who met with different hiring teams or answered different questions. That can allow too much subjectivity or bias to creep in. Most modern applicant tracking systems will provide a scorecard system to make consistency easier.
Illegal interview questions from TheBalance
Here are a few other topics to consider for your training:
Many companies will hold an in-person interviewer training class on a regular basis (e.g. once per quarter) and may require each new interviewer to complete additional online training courses that cover other topics. Some aspects of interviewing are clear cut: There are questions that you absolutely can’t ask candidates, such as their age, race, ethnicity, gender, religion, disabilities, and marital status, for example (for more on non-compliant interview questions, see this article). But there are also many elements of interviewing that can vary from company to company, including the format and length of interviews and processes for collecting and reviewing feedback. We’ll go deeper into all the questions to ask during interviews in future recruiting guide blog posts.
Be sure to schedule time as soon after interviews as possible to sync up with the interviewing team and confer about the candidate. This lets you have the most vivid discussion possible with impressions fresh in everyone’s mind. It also lets you compress the interviewing timeline so you can make an offer or move on to more candidates as quickly as possible. This is particularly critical after the final interview because delays can cause candidates to lose enthusiasm or let other hirers swoop in.
Remember you don’t need a unanimous decision from the hiring team. You’re not looking for the least offensive average of all skills and traits. You want someone who’s the best in the room at something to help level up your company. Still, you’ll need buy-in from at least the key decision makers and people working closest to the new hire.
We recommend dedicating some of your training time and resources to raising awareness of unconscious bias, which has become a hot topic in the interviewing world lately, and goes hand in hand with creating a more diverse and inclusive company. Everyone has natural preferences which can unintentionally shape their opinions of candidates. These can make it more difficult for people from underrepresented backgrounds to get hired, and wrongly favor candidates with similar work or education histories to founders and early team members. Many companies have begun to offer unconscious bias training to help limit some of this bias and make their hiring practices more inclusive. These two blog posts by the recruiting team at Cockroach Labs are a great introduction to this topic: How We’re Fighting Unconscious Bias and Open Sourcing the Interview to Reduce Unconscious Bias.
To the same effect, you shouldn’t tolerate intolerant behavior from candidates. Remind your hiring team to be on the lookout for culture red flags like inappropriate jokes or casual sexism.
Optimize your hiring team
Once you have created or selected a training program, all interviewers should be required to complete it before participating in the interview process. Send out the message that interviewing is both a big responsibility and a badge of honor (not a chore!) — only high-performing employees who embody the company values should be invited to participate in the process. Remember that the individuals you choose to participate in the interview process are representatives of the company and you should be confident in their evaluation and decision-making skills. Consider if there’s a modest gift or reward you can share with employees for being pulled into the interview process given it will eat up time from their primary role.
After you’ve established a cohort of experienced interviewers, you can also create an interview shadowing process, allowing a fresh group of team members to sit in on interviews with more experienced interviewers. While this involves some extra bandwidth initially, it will ultimately expand your number of available interviewers, allowing people to sub in as necessary when someone is not available. This also helps to avoid interviewer burnout and interview scheduling delays while bringing diversity of perspective to evaluations.
Now you should understand how to develop your hiring plan, approve a new role, build out your hiring team, divide tasks, write job descriptions, fire up a recruiting process, and prepare for interviews. Sign up for our next chapter to learn about the hiring funnel. We’ll explore how to source job candidates and move from initial contact to final-stage interviews. To be invited to the next expert talent council event, email our Director of Talent Operations & Development Crystal Guerrero at [email protected].
Resources in this section:
External links in this section:
General interviewing resources:
Professional interviewing help:
InterviewEdge : Specializes in behavioral interviewing training
Specializes in behavioral interviewing training Recruiting Toolbox: Offers custom-built interviewing workshops
Select International: Helps interviewers improve their structured interview skills
The Lou Adler Group: Provides workshops inspired by its performance-based hiring principles
Compliance trainings, anti-harassment, unconscious bias training, and diversity & inclusion training:
Everfi: HR, compliance, and risk training
Emtrain: Preventing workplace harassment training
Vivid learning systems: Preventing sexual harassment for managers
WILL interactive: Harassment, sexual harassment, and abusive conduct prevention training
Paradigm: Unconscious bias, Inclusion & Belonging, and Inclusive Leadership training
Exponential Talent: Diversity & Inclusion research, strategy, education, coaching and organizational implementation.
Inclusion Ventures: Interactive workshops and training tailored to your organization’s mission and values as it applies to diversity and inclusion.
LifeLabs: Team development, workshops, trainings and coaching for diversity and inclusion
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About SignaFire’s Talent Program
Recruiting is SignalFire’s superpower. Our Beacon Talent engine tracks all the top tech talent in the Western world, and can generate reports on the best and most poachable job candidates for any role. SignalFire’s talent program is led by former Facebook executive recruiter Mike Mangini whose team assists our portfolio companies with high-level strategy and on-the-ground recruiting to ensure you score your ideal hires. We helped make over 1000 job candidate intros to our companies last year — just one of the reasons we receive a net promoter score of 96 from our portfolio founders, over 85% of whom say we’re their most valuable investor. Want to start working with SignalFire’s Talent team? Contact this article’s author, our Director of Talent Operations Crystal Guerrero: [email protected] | https://medium.com/@joshconstine/how-to-make-a-startup-hiring-plan-d596d60deada | ['Josh Constine'] | 2020-12-09 19:02:53.458000+00:00 | ['Hiring', 'Compensation', 'Startups', 'Recruiting'] |
The Boston view — On tools, atlases and cages | A column by Paolo Ciuccarelli
When asked about the most important tools for someone working on data visualization, I often give one of two answers, depending on the context: it’s either “pencil and paper” or “history”. The latter is usually received with more skepticism, being history less obvious as a tool than a pencil. But it’s indeed a very powerful one. No matter what is the questions you are dealing or the insight you are searching for with your dataset, it’s almost certain that someone in the past had a similar issue — and found a solution for it. Unfortunately, history of graphical representation of data is vastly unknown, even if it’s easily and openly accessible through the Web.
One of the online seminars and talks I could attend in these weeks — thankfully not all events are cancelled — was precisely about history and data visualization. Being Michael Friendly and Sandra Rendgen the main speakers, I couldn’t miss it. You can watch it online, so I’ll not write directly about it. I just want to share and recommend here one of the main knowledge sources mentioned in the talk: The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. It’s a vast archive of maps and statistical atlases produced between the 16th and the 21st century, a resource that it’s worth any spare hours you may be able to gain in these days at home — especially, but not uniquely, if you work on data-related fields.
Mouvement Quinquennal de la Population Francaise par Department depuis 1861 jusqu’ en 1881
Anytime I have the chance to browse the Collection, I’m always impressed by the number of visualizations, charts and visual patterns produced a hundred (and more) of years ago that can be hardly found in any report today and may even look original and innovative to an expert reader. The palette of visual patterns and charts proposed by current visual analytic tools may appear reductive when compared to those atlases. So, here is my point: in the quasi-infinite number of potential graphical transformations we may apply to data, we are framed by the often-narrow array of possibilities offered by the tools we use, being also pencil and paper got forgotten. Without a proper educational scaffolding — the one that designers have, for example — it might be very difficult to imagine something that goes beyond what the tools provide. It doesn’t mean that this is always necessary: those palettes of charts and visual patterns have been carefully designed to address the most common analytical tasks. But that’s not always the case: more nuanced needs are emerging — especially for sharing the results of the analytical processes — and our capacity to produce meaning with data could be caged by the limited amount of meanings that the actual tools propose. Navigating the Rumsey collection can be a good way to overcome those limits and expand our horizon.
Statistical Diagram: Mouvement de la Circulation a L’Interieur de Paris, 1860–1900.
Paolo Ciuccarelli
Center for Design, Northeastern University | https://medium.com/the-visual-agency/the-boston-view-on-tools-atlases-and-cages-694c464d53ac | ['The Visual Agency Editorial'] | 2020-04-22 10:44:14.241000+00:00 | ['Dataviz', 'Information Design', 'Design History', 'Charts', 'Data'] |
ElasticSearch: Things you should Know about ES to be Useful | The purpose of this writing is to give basics about ElasticSearch. After completing this 6 mins read, you should feel comfortable about ES architecture, the way it stores the documents, indexing and near realtime search response.
Let’s understand about ES step by step:
1. High level architecture
2. Document storage and indexing
3. Near real-time search
4. Try it on local
Relational databases likes mysql etc. are comparatively slow when it comes to huge data and fetching search results through queries. ES is a document-oriented database, designed to store, retrieve, and manage JSON data. It is schema-less, uses Lucene as a primary data store engine.
ES: High level architecture
ES provides REST APIs to insert / delete / get / search data. The documents are getting stored in ES indices and sharded based on the hash value of document_id. Every shard is actually a Lucene index and store the document in segments. To understand Elasticsearch in detail; we need to understand its core concepts and terminologies.
Index
Index is a logical partition of documents and can be compared to a database in the world of relational database.
The index is a collection of documents that have similar characteristics. For example, we can have an index type for employee data and another one for department information. An index is identified by a unique name that refers to the index when performing indexing, search, update, and delete operations. In a single cluster, we can define as many indexes as we want.
Shards
A shard is a subset of documents of an index. An index can be divided into many shards. They are the building block of Elasticsearch and facilitate scalability part of it.
Sharding allows you to horizontally scale by volume and space; it enhances the performance of a cluster by running parallel operations and distributing loads across different shards. By default; Elasticsearch adds 5 primary shards for an index. This can be manually configured to suit your requirements.
Nodes
A node is a server; it is a single unit of the cluster. If it is a single node cluster; all data will be stored in that single node; else the data will be distributed amongst n nodes which are the part of that cluster. Nodes participate in a cluster’s search and indexing capabilities. Depending upon the type of query fired; they will collaborate and will return the matching response.
Storing documents
An Elasticsearch cluster can contain multiple indices, which in turn contain multiple types. These types hold multiple documents, and each document has multiple fields.
ES usage Lucene as the backend data store and retrieval engine. Lucene’s functionalities can be grouped primarily into two categories: indexing and searching. When a document is getting inserted, diagram below shows the summary of the entire indexing process.
Tokeniser and Analyser used to tokenise and parse the raw text data. And then we have Lucene index package contains classes that records and provides the basic functionalities of inverted indexing, i.e., counting, recording and sorting mechanism of terms of document. It divide document, especially long documents, into several segments, creates sorted inverted index and term metadata, and then merge the sorted segments at the end. Finally, we have the Lucene store package that takes care of the final writing of δ-encoded postings onto the disk.
Lucene performs copy on write when updating and deleting a document. It means the document is never deleted from the index. Instead, it marks the document as deleted and creates another one when an update is triggered. During a merge, Lucene takes 2 segments, and moves the content into a third, new one. Then the old segments are deleted from the disk. It means Lucene needs enough free space on the disk to create a segment the size of both segments it needs to merge.
Searching a document
Search functionality, on the other hand, involves parsing of query, reading the relevant data from disk and returning the results.
The Lucene index provides a mapping from terms to documents. This is called an inverted index because it reverses the usual mapping of a document. The same string in two different fields is considered a different term. Thus terms are represented as a pair of strings, the first naming the field, and the second naming text within the field. Each segment index maintains Term Vectors : For each field in each document, the term vector is stored. A term vector consists of term text and term frequency.
A user expresses an ES query with a simple language, Query DSL. A query examines one or many target values, and scores each of the elements in the results according to how close they match the focus of the query.
Index Versus Index Versus Index: [i] Index (noun): is like a database in a traditional relational database. [ii] Index (verb): To index a document is to store a document in an index (noun). [iii]Inverted index: Indexing a token in order to improve the speed of data retrieval.
Near real-time search
Instead of having to search through the entire document or row space for a given value, the system can find that value in its internal index and immediately know which documents or rows contain it. This, of course, makes querying significantly faster.
In Elasticsearch the data is distributed and stored in different clusters. So when a change is made on an index it may not be readily available; a latency of few milliseconds is expected! New segment is written to the filesystem cache first — which is cheap — and only later is it flushed to disk — which is expensive. But once a file is in the cache, it can be opened and read which makes it searchable.
When to use elasticsearch
1) When we need to manage huge amount of data and search from it quickly.
Enterprise search, site search etc.
2) Geospatial data store: If we have lot of geographical data and want to search nearby locations / places, ES is suited best for the use case.
3) JSON document storage: It’s the basic information unit that can be indexed in ES. Auto complete / suggest / data aggregation can be achieved out of the box.
4) Logging and Analysis along with Logstash
Some real-world examples of organisations that rely on Elasticsearch to search and query data are Wikipedia, StackOverflow, Github, The Guardian etc
Try ES on local machine (Using docker)
The easiest way to understand what Elasticsearch can do for you is to play with it, so let’s get started! Make sure you already have docker installed in your machine.
1. Pull ES image
Pull the specified version and check if the image is present in available images list.
docker pull elasticsearch:6.7.0
docker images
2. Start ES
Elasticsearch instance should be up and running once you execute the following command. Check the cluster info using browser: http://localhost:9200
docker run -p -d 9200:9200 --name=elasticsearch1 elasticsearch:6.7.0
3. Index document
This command will put a document with id=1 in type=detail and index = employee in ES data store.
4. Fetch / search document
The GET command will fetch the employee details having id=1. Search command will try to match the keyword ‘sachin’ in all the available tokens and return the ranked results. Play with indexing more documents and check the results.
curl -XGET localhost:9200/employee/detail/1
curl -XPOST localhost:9200/employee/_search?q=sachin
5. Delete document
Delete won’t immediately deletes a document from the data store. The document is marked for deletion and will be filtered out from subsequent search query results. When merge segments is triggered, ES ignores the deleted documents and create a new segment with merged data. The old segments then gets deleted from the data store. We can also delete a full index or document type using this command.
curl -XDELETE localhost:9200/employee/detail/1
Further Reads
=> https://www.elastic.co/blog/a-practical-introduction-to-elasticsearch
=> https://markheath.net/post/exploring-elasticsearch-with-docker
=> http://elasticsearch-cheatsheet.jolicode.com/
=> http://exploringelasticsearch.com/searching_data.html
=> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPObRc8tHgQ
=> http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/~dell/teaching/cc/book/ditp/ditp_ch4.pdf | https://medium.com/@hansrajchoudhary_88463/elasticsearch-things-you-should-know-about-es-to-be-useful-fbc537a04086 | ['Hansraj Choudhary'] | 2019-03-30 17:17:15.179000+00:00 | ['Search', 'Elasticsearch', 'Lucene', 'Docker', 'Inverted Index'] |
Prayers Ascending | Photo by Holger Link on Unsplash
Prayer was once a light, airy thing to me. It rose and rose until it reached its destination. It was like the smoke from the chimney of our brick fireplace in Ohio. This is what the pastor told us when it was explained to me from the pulpit. He wore the horseshoe of hair on his bald head like a halo.
Unlike the chimney in our Louisiana home where, a few years before, it had filled the entire house with smoke. My older brother insisted on handing my dad his plastic fireman’s helmet before my mom carried us out of the house with a rag over our mouths. Dad had forgotten to open the flue. Instead of the smoke rising, it filled our lungs and choked us.
Even though the north was not known for its old-time Baptist religion my mother found the one Southern Baptist Church in town after we moved from Louisiana. She made sure we attended faithfully. She was adamant we appear in the church directory every year even after my twin brother fainted under the hot white light of the photographer.
He fell from the wooden box he was standing on with a thud on the linoleum. He had locked his knees for too long. I never had this problem. I struggled with balance. Loose knees made me better able to navigate the world if I lost it. A few steps back, and I could regain it. In the directory photo that year I have big, thick glasses and a clip-on tie. I wore it so often I can remember the cool metal clip pressed uncomfortably against my throat.
In the moment when my brother fell I remember praying. I was glad that God could hear my thoughts so I didn’t have to speak them aloud. If even my athletic brother struggled how could I even hope to fare well in the world that was before me?
When he fell I prayed for myself, for my body, glad that it wasn’t me. I wouldn’t recover so quickly and, knowing my mother, we probably would have just left without taking the picture.
Later that year, on Mother’s Day, my twin brother and I would walk down the aisle to “I Surrender All” and accept Jesus into our hearts. After repeating what is commonly called The Sinner’s Prayer, we were part of the club.
Even though I was technically the middle child, one minute older than my fraternal twin brother, my cerebral palsy garnered me more attention — like an award that you’re embarrassed to keep but can’t get away from. | https://medium.com/new-body/prayers-ascending-b08f8d48269 | ['Presley Thomas'] | 2020-03-12 19:39:08.638000+00:00 | ['Disability', 'Essay', 'LGBTQ', 'Memoir', 'Prayer'] |
Canary in a Coal Mine | by Peter Caron
You have certainly seen on a box or bottle somewhere a label which read “inflammable material”.
Does the label mean that the contents can explode in flames? Or does it mean the opposite, that they cannot? If you aren’t entirely sure, don’t worry, many native English-speakers (mistakenly) assume the word inflammable means that contents will not burn. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Light a match next to one and see for yourself. The result of an inaccurate definition is not usually so dramatic as the confusion around flammable/inflammable — which are in fact synonyms, but problems resulting from two people meaning something different when they use a word can have serious consequences. It seems reasonable even in software development that we should agree on definitions at the start of a project rather than be surprised when something blows up — even if the resulting “explosion” is only figurative.
As software developers, it is our job to help companies manage, plan, and orchestrate software development and deployments. One of the key elements on which we base our actions is the development methodology or ways of working that we choose to employ. We also assume that to be successful, our ways of working need to be built on common understandings and implementations of our chosen methodology, for example Continuous Integration (CI). An effective CI methodology, when properly implemented, uses automated tests, practices small commits and encourages continuously refactoring code as a time- and labour-saving practice. However, the devil, as they say, is in the details. An example of an important detail is the disparity of meaning that we often assign to common CI terminology: the words we employ to describe our development practices. Different people mean different things when they seem to be saying similar things. We can call this inconsistency a terminology failure and it constitutes a significant problem in many software development teams. For example, Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment are two concepts in software development that are regularly conflated but whose meanings vary from person to person, depending on who is listening and who is speaking. These are key principles, however, and should have a common definition across the team.
A fuzzy definition of deployment (not only continuous) could easily refer to a change to any environment, test or production. So, when a developer says deployment but means deploy something to staging, whereas a PO hears deployment and thinks to production, i.e. where users can actually see it, the elements are in place for a perfect storm. Obviously then, it is important to agree on a common definition. Because a deployment can mean one or many set or sets of services or one or a set of features deployed to one or many different environments. In a case like that, it is advisable to get that little bagatelle agreed up front. Just as when handling inflammable things, we must be clear about what we mean when we use particular words. Technically, this ambiguity of meaning is referred to as semantic diffusion.
Continuous Delivery, Deployment, and Release
Regularly, I hear these terms used interchangeably which can lead to confusion and ultimately poor quality software. Starting from Humble’s definition, let’s try to pick apart the meanings a bit. Concomitantly with the use of the phrase Continuous Integration usually comes the notion (but usually not the practice) of Continuous Delivery. The two are conflated so often, that they seem to have lost their original sense. The core concept of the latter can be best explained with a question, “why wait for everyone else to finish?” If a feature does not have any dependencies and all the other teams are so slow why not deploy it immediately. That is the simplest explanation of Continuous Delivery. If it is done, don’t sit on it. Deliver it. The question is then, deliver it where? Hopefully, to a production environment. Once continuous deliveries are achieved, Continuous Deployment is only one business decision away. Of course, things are rarely so simple. Even though I may deploy a new microservice to production, it may not be not technically released until other services start using it. For simplicity’s sake, however, let’s settle for the following definition: continuous integration is regular merging of code into a single, common code base; continuous delivery means keeping code in a deployable state and is the natural consequence of CI — if the build and all tests pass, the compiled code is available for deployment to an environment; continuous deployment is automatically deploying that compiled code (continuously delivered from your continuous integration process) to an environment which may or may not be production; and a release is essentially a business decision to enable a feature-set in a production system used by customers usually via a deployment or by enabling feature toggles.
It is an unfortunate truth that most so-called CI systems are far from continuous; pull requests, manual testing and excessively complex, dependent on branch development. All these things slow down the process because they are ultimately detrimental in terms of resources required and time spent. Testing at the end, for example, is far more expensive than tests that run early in the development lifecycle (SDLC); it is both wasteful and ineffective in time and money. As a side note, we sometimes forget that tests exist not to find bugs, but to prevent them from going into production. So too, long-lived branches which require complicated and error-prone merges which increases both the time required to deliver software and raises the chances of introducing bugs. In other words, we spend a lot of time waiting for others to finish.
Continuous Delivery logically should be the end result of a smoothly running, efficient Continuous Integration development process in which many small changes are made, tested, and ready for use. Whether one decides to use them is a deployment decision. Or even a deployment and release decision. Or a business decision. Or all of the above. That decision may be to deploy continuously or at some other cadence.
There are legitimate reasons one might choose not to take that last step from continuous delivery to use continuous deployments irrespective of the target being a web environment or not including some basic requirements for continuous deployment integration.
Making only small changes to code (on short-lived branches) Having sufficient enough automated unit and integration tests to give everyone a warm and fuzzy feeling that the deployment will work Services are independent microservices and not microliths or distributed monoliths Comprehensive and continuous monitoring is in place — and works consistently in all stages of the SDLC Integration and performance testing is automated and complete In-production testing exists — and works
If we agree to these requirements, we have in effect our common definition of continuous deployment. And, the simplest definition of a software release is simply a business-friendly description of a deployment to production. None of the above should be a revelation to anyone familiar with CI/CD practices and is not especially controversial.
A deployment (not continuous) can be a change to any environment, test or production: complete or partial; one feature or many; to different environments or to a single production environment. But at this point common sense starts to, if not unravel completely, then to go off the rails in terms of inconsistent nomenclature. We regularly use terms to describe a couple of different ways to make a software deployment. As with their continuous cousins, we are not always consistent in defining there either.
Releases
A release in our definition means a business decision deployment of one or more features to a production environment. In addition to continuous as discussed above, there are at least four other significant methods used to release software to production environments: big-bang, blue/green, canary, and progressive. Each of these others is common across the industry yet lack agreed upon definitions. Let’s address each in turn.
Big Bang
Like the original one which launched our own Universe, a big bang software release is a launch in which a complete change of the current feature, component or even entire system to something else is attempted. Big bang software releases are often used for developing and deploying operating systems, embedded devices and packaged, end user software — with printed manuals. Suppose you wanted to change a poorly architected system to use the latest greatest REST APIs. You collect all the requirements, plan a brilliant architecture, spend 6–9 months developing and testing and then big-bang deploy to your customers. Imagine that in the morning your applications are all calling APIv1 linked to DB1.0. At the stroke of noon, you throw the virtual switch and bang! all the apps not call APIv2 linked to DB2.0. What could possibly go wrong?
This methodology was (and remains) quite common in many companies and is usually associated with waterfall development. Contrary to some opinions, development which leads to so-called big-bang release does have value and, under certain circumstances has valuable uses, especially in the physical world: software for rocket testing or nuclear power plants where transitional phases are not a viable or cost-efficient option.
Blue/Green
Another common deploy-to-production release strategy uses a blue/green paradigm: a parallel replica of a production environment that can be an ingress gateway or even a simple change to DNS to switch traffic from blue to green. Simple, easy, slow, and expensive. Also, if you have bugs in green, they are released into the wild immediately. This need not be coupled to a waterfall methodology or big-bang release because there is theoretically no lower limit to the time delta between releases: I can as easily blue-green deploy once per day as once per month, quarter or year. Ok, not actually exactly easily, but the point is I don’t have to wait to blue-green deploy. As soon as a feature or service is done, I could deploy it in this way. I am limited only by the cost of continually running dual environments and the willingness of my operations team not to throw up their hands in disgust and quit. References to Blue/Green releases are sometimes used synonymously with A/B testing. Though they share many similarities in practice, they are quite distinct in purpose.
Canary
The metaphors we choose to describe things necessarily shape the way we think about those things, so it’s important that we choose an appropriate metaphor. Industry descriptions of this particular method, so-called canary metaphor vary widely. A canary release is actually a step-child of a blue/green release. Canary releases made to a production environment are a risk-averse way to do a blue-green release. You may have read or heard previous rants by me against canary releases. Canaries, avian and methodological variants alike, are elegant and effective monitoring systems as opposed to testing systems. When birds were used as monitors for noxious gas, nobody sent canaries into mines hoping to find gas. They were controls. Miners did not expect the canary to die each time they went into the mines. The opposite, in fact. Usually, the canary survived. One can only assume that they did not actually want the canaries (or the humans, for that matter) to die. The canary (bird or release) therefore should be to monitor for something — gas or usage patterns: not die or find a bug. Some people might disagree with this conceptualisation and they are free to write their own blog which I will happily read and consider. In the meantime, canary releases are to monitor usage and the uptake of a feature.
I believe that the concept of canary releases has been incorrectly usurped and ultimately corrupted over the years by well-meaning commentators and villainous pundits alike. This may not be entirely fair (but that is sort of expected in a rant, I guess). In any case, I think that in the IT world, the misconceptions surrounding canary release developed in a time when we had to deploy physical servers one at a time. At the time, ramping up physical machines was expensive and blue/green was not a cost-effective option. Imagine trying to sell a purchasing department on the idea of duplicating, say, an entire 100+ server farm so that you could rollback deployments if there were too many bugs released to production. They would think you are crazy and ask “why not release it to production after you find all the bugs?” Well, why not? The answer was to deploy a single server (with the expectation that it would work). But, just in case it failed, we only had one deployed. A canary.
In the mid-2000s, when we (by “we” I mean older folks like myself) began to use virtual servers and then EC2 instances, the costs were still relatively high in terms of hardware requirements, and we could not seriously consider full blue/green releases. Yet, the persistence or pernicious bugs made operations nervous. Risk-averse operations people, because they did not trust the developers to deliver bug-free code, decided to only release one instance into the monolith and find the bugs that they knew were going to be delivered by lazy and shameless developers.
According to Danilo Sato
“Canary releases can be used as a way to implement A/B testing due to similarities in the technical implementation. However, it is preferable to avoid conflating these two concerns: while canary releases are a good way to detect problems and regressions, A/B testing is a way to test a hypothesis using variant implementations. If you monitor business metrics to detect regressions with a canary,1 also using it for A/B testing could interfere with the results. On a more practical note, it can take days to gather enough data to demonstrate statistical significance from an A/B test, while you would want a canary rollout to complete in minutes or hours.”
The key statement is, “canary releases are a good way to detect problems and regressions.” Risk aversion is the primary motivation in this context. As we will see, this is not necessarily synonymous with fast release cycles which can be better served with other kinds of release strategies.
Canary releases in microservice architectures should be limited to business experiments. They are used either as a control (heavily monitored and logged pods) or to try out a new feature in a limited user environment, for example, in a single geographic region with minimal exposure (i.e. every x user gets access to a promotion). It is also possible to use a canary release when the operations team still doesn’t trust the developers’ fancy new algorithm to automatically shut down the nuclear power plant, or to just roll-out a new feature slowly — perhaps a shadow release to allow in-production testing. This is similar, I suppose to what we used to call beta testing. In a microservices world, a canary release that exposes a critical problem in production would be the equivalent of “stop the assembly line,” I have to sneeze. Or the bird died.
Remember, we don’t want the canary to die. We want to ensure the health of the environment before features are deployed to production and monitor them thoroughly in prod. Canary releases are similar to using a staging environment. But different. The difference is that staging environments are usually dedicated to the task; a staging web server never becomes a production server. Ideally, if a service works, activate it in production right away.
I can already hear the naysayers saying “hold on a sec!” They are thinking, “then why do so many writers define canary differently?” Fair question. I think it depends on the context. For example, Susan Fowler says “to counteract any instability introduced by deployment, we can ensure our microservices are deployed carefully with proper staging, canary (a small pool of 2%–5% of production hosts), and production rollouts” Production Ready Microservices, chapter 2. Read her sentence again and you’ll see why I think it is wrong and cannot work well with container-based microservices. Hint: focus on hosts and imagine it’s 1999. Don’t believe everything you read. That being said, Fowler has much sound advice for SRE and development teams and her proposals, even for canary releases, have merit in many contexts and system environments. Nevertheless, what we want is something a bit different. This brings us to the final release strategy I want to discuss, which is a variation on the canary idea but without the negative expectations — in other words progressive releases.
Progressive Delivery
The concept of a progressive pattern or progressive delivery is the alternative (hidden in plain sight) to the challenges implicit in flawed canary releases or clunky blue / green ones with and have the added benefit that you can better guarantee performance at scale. Carlos Sanchez, a Sr. Cloud Software Engineer at Adobe defined progressive delivery this way.
“Progressive delivery is the next step after continuous delivery, where new versions are deployed to a subset of users and are evaluated. in terms of correctness and performance before rolling them to the totality of the users and rolled back if not matching some key metrics.” (Carlos Sanchez, Blog)
There may be only a semantic (or even pedantic) difference of opinion between canary and progressive. But, if that is the case, I prefer to describe experimentation as a canary and the rest as a progressive release. A progressive delivery (to any environment but especially to production) is exactly what it implies; a rollout of services or features progressively either a percentage of total traffic, to selected users, in specific geographic regions, or any combination of the above. Slowly or rapidly, depending on your appetite for risk, rollout to full production in steps — say 1%, 2%, 5%, 20%, 50%, 75%, 100%. The idea is not to find problems but to understand how a service copes with the platform’s requirements in a controlled manner.
The harsh reality of most platforms though is that we need to remember that we still have many services tightly coupled through a monolithic codebase. For that reason, we are unable to do several things: independent deployment of microservices, data decoupling, and continuous integration for example. Our tests are neither robust nor comprehensive enough either to give us a secure feeling that we can deploy to production without going through that extra stage, creating a little Frankenstein-like limited delivery or (gasp) partial deployment. You either deliver/deploy or you don’t. There is no middle ground. Any deployment should be self-contained and therefore “full”. When it is not, and we resort to talking about partial deployments (like what many means by canary), what are we actually doing? Indeed, what are we trying to even say? Are we inherently assuming that these deployments don’t count somehow? Or that they are incomplete? An incomplete deployment. That is, by my reckoning, a failed deployment.
So, is there a role for canary-like releases in our environments? Our staging environment perhaps? Is there even such a thing as a canary release that we can use? Perhaps, but only as long as we use the word in a way that, well, the bird doesn’t die. Or at least not unnecessarily.
Staging or Development Environments
Contrary to some comments I’ve made in public (and in a number of extended rants online) concerning the detrimental impacts of staging environments, my misgivings with this kind of separation of environments is primarily operational: i.e. dealing with things like configuration drift and scalability. Not surprisingly to me, staging as a concept can be compared to the concept of canary releases. I.e., “let’s see if the bird dies when we release it” kind of thing. Unfortunately (for the bird), we expect our little avian helper to die because we believe bugs are inevitable and we willingly send deployments out to die. By this logic, we should keep them as far away from customers for as long as possible and furthermore by pushing software we know or suspect is not ready onto a customer is, by its very concept, flawed. Therefore, we should strive to keep bugs out of production by proper ways of working, design patterns and thorough testing long before they ever reach staging or production.
Does a staging environment have a place in the SDLC? It depends. If it is used as a development environment to which you can deploy your software to see if it works. There are, of course, other ways to employ a development environment in a useful way: Infrastructure as Code (IaC) or h GitOps are two examples. Both approaches offer application deployments and promote services through environments (Development -> Production) sometimes can be a productive step in container-based systems. The environment must be an identical configuration to production though the scale may be less.
Both IaC and GitOps mean that you store the configuration of your declarative infrastructure environment in a version control system. The configuration describes what should be deployed into a given environment. You need to specify the expected state of the environment you want to maintain, leaving it up to your orchestration system and other tooling to achieve that state in a reconciliation loop. In this way, if you have a collection of unstable or coupled macro- or microservices you can run a full, production-like test in staging prior to rollout via a production canary or other method. The key to both processes is that the infrastructure is immutable and you avoid configuration drift.
Continuous Deployment
The next logical step after Continuous Delivery would be to deploy continuously. How do we know when to try continuous deployment? First, we should decide if it is advisable or even possible in our environment. Continuous Deployment is best suited to web environments and probably less optimal for medical equipment software or nuclear reactor cooling systems. Second, we need to make sure we are ready not just technically but also commercially.
If we are still asking questions like:
How can I do continuous deployment as a canary release?
How should we version continuous deployments?
How can I do canary with conflicting versions of deployments?
Can I continuously deploy my mobile apps?
But we cannot answer them satisfactorily, we most likely still have a continuous integration problem, not a continuous deployment opportunity. Continuous Deployment is probably not a viable option for many companies or services and should be only considered after all of the above are well-understood and solved. Sometimes the business will decide that even if the technical teams can deploy continuously, regulatory or marketing requirements (or fissile isotopes like uranium-233) do not make it the right choice.
Final Thoughts
In software development just as in daily life, how we employ words has consequences. Definitions matter. When we don’t establish agreed upon meanings in software development early in the process or we use vague and variable definitions, there will be consequences. There will be impacts — and they will probably not be good ones — on the quality of our product (Jean Paul Sartre wrote: “Chaque parole a des retentissements” — which, loosely translated means “each word has repercussions. I think it is applicable here. Choose your words wisely).
Here are some definitions worth considering when discussing software integration, delivery, deployment or releases:
Problems with canary releases will usually mean that your CI is not working, that services are too tightly coupled or you still have the remnants of a monolithic codebase.
Canary deployments to production are NOT meant to catch bugs! Remember, canary deployments are a risk-averse version of Blue/Green deployments and are most definitely NOT “Continuous Deployment (CD)”.
Continuous Delivery is not Continuous Deployment
Continuous Deployment will not work with monoliths
Canary deployment when used for physical production systems, guided missiles and nuclear power-plants is not a good idea!
Continuous Deployment is primarily intended for web sites, streaming, consumer-facing retail, and rapidly changing systems.
We’ve all heard some version of a well-meaning manager saying, “great, finally we’re doing Agile/CI/DevOps” or some variation followed ominously by “now, how can we publish our roadmap to customers and to commit to the next three years?” But, what a product owner, manager or technical lead might mean by that will not always agree with the definition used by a developer or software architect. Likewise, the phrase Continuous Delivery is similar in at least another respect: Many people push to achieve CD in their company but don’t always understand why they are doing so nor do they perceive the implications for the company or its customers. Teams will certainly suffer the consequences of such misguided enthusiasm so they must be the ones to set realistic expectations for stakeholders: what CI/CD can and cannot do. The definition of these terms like canary, continuous, deployment, release, staging, and a host of others is important. If you cannot agree within your organisation about their meaning, the implementation will probably fail.
I once read that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe reportedly possessed a vocabulary of more than 90.000 words.
So, when that great writer proffered, “if possible, speak a few sensible words”, I think he would have agreed that it makes sense that those sensible words make sense to others. Let’s let the canaries live and agree on a consistent meaning for deliveries and deployment. Otherwise, let’s banish them from software-speak and simply get back to creating great software, delivered at speed. | https://engineering.hellofresh.com/canary-in-a-coal-mine-a61d8964a3db | ['Saskia Leisewitz'] | 2021-06-14 16:39:20.854000+00:00 | ['Development Environment', 'Hellofresh', 'Continuous Delivery', 'Deployment', 'Software Development'] |
Bequest to my grandchildren | Hey everyone! I am one of the many breaking the internet these days with obsessively checking New York Times for updates on the “he who must not be named” virus situation, followed by a Netflix binge watch session in the hopes that fiction will help me cope better with reality. Because, we are living in the times of social distancing. I have always complained to my friends that I don’t have enough tales to tell my grandchildren since I was always the straight A student in school, teetotaller in college, overachiever in my brief stint in corporate and finally am currently a perennially over worked and underpaid PhD student. So, you the the gist, the typical nerd with no “life” what-so-ever and hence no tales of debauchery with underlying lessons on morality. But, tales of social distancing is going to be my bequest to my grandchildren. And hence, I am going to chronicle it here as frequently, accurately and minutely as I can.
Today is technically day 8, but then according to a hindi proverb, it’s morning whenever you wake up. So, let’s restart the clock and count today as day one. I was worried that I would blow up my meagre income on buying kindle books(for those interested in my nerd escapades, follow my insta-blog kindle_o_phile). A good samaritan pointed out that Scribd is offering one month free subscription and I pounced on the opportunity. The adrenaline rush helped me power through a full 300 page book in one day; Queenie by Candice Warty Williams and I am about 25% through my second book, Writers and Lovers by Lily King. So while I binge watch Netflix and bing eat pistacchio flavored ice cream, I am also trying to keep my mind intellectually engaged. In between this, I tried to do some school work, tackling my nemesis, Microeconomics, with very little vengeance. But, from tomorrow I say bring it on Mr. Kenneth Arrow.
There was also a comfort food session of Bhel Puri with my flatmates, from whom its physically impossible to social distance.
Self-reflection of the day: Will I be able to do better in Microeconomics this time since more often than not I attribute my underperformance to lack of dedicated self study time, which seems to be in abundance at the moment. | https://medium.com/@prernam/bequest-to-my-grandchildren-9aa080f77bbd | ['Prerna Mishra'] | 2020-03-23 01:45:36.575000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Journaling'] |
Autumnal Tenderness | Autumnal Tenderness
A Season For Change
The sun slowly fades away,
emitting a rosy glow upon your face,
just the same within my cheeks,
from the warmth of your embrace.
The fragrance of spring’s sweet apples,
lingers gently upon our skin,
while golden blossoms of our love,
bloom so deeply within.
The field’s grass rustles around us,
sunny daisies just tickling us so.
They dance so freely in the wind,
caressing us with every blow.
The night descends a blanket of stars,
twinkling brightly in your eyes.
A spark of desire burns within,
between our hearts and upon our sighs. | https://medium.com/flicker-and-flight/autumnal-tenderness-1d0d8ba4b59a | ['Leah Dedmon'] | 2020-10-09 18:33:36.772000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Nature', 'Relationships', 'Change', 'Love'] |
What was Puccini like? | Puccini in 1924: the year of the composer’s death
Short Biography
Lucca, embedded in the Tuscan hills; renaissance architecture and Puccini. Born there on the 22nd of December 1858, the roots of a quintessentially Italian style are unobscured. Puccini, being of a long line of Luccan church musicians was put to work as an organist at the age of 14, but did not engage with the traditionally insipid catholic style. Instead, discovering the wonders of Verdi upon walking 20 kilometres to his local opera house in Pisa, his dispassion thawed.
Puccini studied composition in Milan from 1880 to 1883. As his first project, he wrote an opera: Le Villi, for a local competition, did not win, did not get mentioned, but was nonetheless approached with staging it by the publisher Giulio Ricordi.
In 1884, he eloped with the already married Elvira Gemignani (née Bonturi), a fellow Luccan.
Elvira was said to be a set, jealous woman- in parallel to Tosca (though without the concordant set of murderous instincts towards Roman police chiefs). In 1891, she heard neighbourhood rumours that Puccini was declaiming himself bored of her. A series of arguments opened up in response. Though Puccini publicly cheated on her later, he paradoxically tried to keep it under wraps from her, but not the entire rest of the public.
After writing Edgar in 1888: a second opera and a second stinker, he finally hit it with the public in 1892 with Manon Lescaut.
Then the behemoths of Bohème, Tosca and Butterfly.
During his lifetime, he amassed a fortune of around 100 million in today’s money, spending it on fast cars; De Dion-Boutons and Fiats, amassing speeding tickets, and a wide portfolio of houses, many around Lucca.
After Il Trittico, his final work was Turandot, which he died before completing after a failed operation for throat cancer.
His Character
Puccini, as his music, was of intense complexity and contradictions. Though the choice of opera was no doubt an inevitably of his nation, training and exposure, the genre seems to suit him uniquely: the incessant returning and re-returning of the same motif; within it uncertainty liberated into highest exaltation, breaking away into shrieks of despair.
Opera is historically the occupation of the middle and upper classes. Given his life dedication to it, you would assume that they were his favourite people. In fact, he was blasé with high society mainly through his distaste for pretension, large social situations, and the urban in general. “He always felt constrained and ill at ease among the bourgeoisie, even in artistic circles”, would “pant for the fragrant woodlands”, “loved hunting and walking alone” and “simply could not bear to live anywhere but the country” as was said.
Puccini, though working for the northern cities, predominantly did not work in them. His primary residence was in Torre del Lago: a sleepy seaside town near Lucca, on the other side backing onto a typically northern lake. Part of his comfort in the country lay in the absence of the pressure of the cities. Puccini “bit his nails during moments of nervous impatience or tormenting doubt”. Speaking publicly “he found the greatest difficulty through stammering”.
Unlike his contemporaries, or indeed most, he prefered to ride on consecutive waves of inspiration, only to sit in idleness until another came along. Tosca took 11 years to write, though half of it constituted artistic clashes. He had an “insuperable tendency to speak his mind.”
Giuseppe Giacosa, his librettist/poet, nicknamed Buddha by him in a quip relating to an abandoned opera project of theirs was introduced to him, along with the partner by Ricordo. Giacosa was some years his senior: always loved by Puccini like an uncle. He would write the words, whilst Luigi Illica worked mainly on the structuring of scenes and dramatic touches: like the Gavotta in Bohème being interrupted by Musetta and the sick Mimí, rather starting with her bedridden, as the composer insisted. Puccini’s relationship with Illica was not comfortable. They liked each other, yet would inexorably digress into arguing, often questioning the other’s artistic validity. Giacosa, one might call mediator over librettist. Given, it is unsurprising that their working relationship did not survive Giacosa’s death.
Much of the time, supposedly quintessentially Puccini dramatic irony is quintessentially Illca. What people often forget about his operas is that they are not only the labour of one man.
Much of the time, supposedly quintessentially Puccini dramatic irony is quintessentially Illca. What people often forget about his operas is that they are not only the labour of one man.
In the evenings, Puccini would compose in the parlour, usually in the society of his “friends, simple men in an atmosphere of unpretentious jollity.” “In such company, he would feel quite at ease”. “He almost always kept his hat on, even in the house, and while working at the piano or his writing-table.” Suddenly having thought of something, Puccini would stop his other task, and then rush to the piano. His teachers in the conservatory emphasised his laziness though it can also be construed as thinking time.
In 1920, Puccini visited Vienna for the German Language premiere of Il Trittico, or rather “Das Triptychon”.
Here is Richard Specht’s account of him:
“He was now resting in an arm-chair, a little weary with a happy sparkle in his fine, dark eyes, veiled from time to time by their heavy lids, and with a pleasant smile on his fastidious mouth, often drawn into an expression of melancholy” “It was a face that need not necessarily have belonged to an artist, though it was unquestionably that of a man of breeding, with an active brain, easily kindled sensibilities, and an eager receptivity, at once shy and conscious
of his own worth, full of strong vitality, sensuous curiosity, and
an instinctive repugnance for all that is vulgar; a man, too, in
whom primitive, popular elements were combined with a subtle
culture, an unconstrained naivety with the acquired exterior- of
a man of the world and a dash of eternal youthfulness that made
an enchanting mixture.”
Puccini spoke French well, but his German was about as good as his English. As a result, he had the same meal the whole time in Vienna because the only words he knew in German were “Koteletts mit Kartoffeln”
There “he was most anxious to acquaint himself more thoroughly with Arnold Schoenberg’s work.” Puccini held a healthy appetite for “present-day musicians” speaking of “Stravinsky and Debussy, who, as he always freely acknowledged, had exerted a decisive influence on his own harmonic and melodic style”. The truth was however that it was Wagner that had the most decisive impact on him. Despite his “unbounded admiration of Beethoven”, his favourite work, was forever Tristan und Isolde.
In Vienna, Specht said of him to have remarked:
“Ah! How hard is my life! And yet to many I seem happy. But my successes? They pass away, and there remains little. They are ephemeral things. Life slips away and descends swiftly towards the abyss.”
By this, Puccini probably did not declare personal unhappiness, but rather a creeping occasional unhappiness at the nihilistic nature of things. His music is full of genuine feeling, eminent among them is melancholy.
It is quite contradictory for maybe the most sincere composer about love to have cheated on his own wife so enduringly. Puccini maintained throughout his life that he loved Elvira dearly, so it is hard to see how he was able to turn a blind eye to the effect that it was having on her. In 1909, spurred on by intense paranoia, Elvira hounded their poor servant girl for having an affair with him, despite evidence to the contrary. The girl eventually committed suicide as a result, leading, as you can imagine, to an unsettled dynamic, eventually a separation. Her reconciliation was an uneasy exchange for legal assistance against the girl’s family.
In his defence, Puccini’s lovers were never chosen shallowly; they were intelligent cultural people. “I need a friend but do not have one,” he said. It is evident that Elvira did not satisfy him fully in some intellectual way. Though they were close, there was a lack of understanding between the two of them, somewhat driven by her comparatively low immagination. Puccini would “exactly calculate and weigh every accent, the value of every note and every nuance of timbre”, all in the pursuit of a point in creation where his sensibilities would no longer bug him over deficiency. His last words were concerning her: “Elvira- poor woman”. Leave no doubt as to where his heart lay. | https://medium.com/@noahbradl3y/what-was-puccini-like-8b9acb81e9ed | ['Noah Bradley'] | 2021-05-27 20:42:53.225000+00:00 | ['History', 'Italy', 'Classical Music', 'Music', 'Opera'] |
A Never-Ending Need For Attention | A Never-Ending Need For Attention
A Narcissistic spectrum
Photo by Chris Ainsworth on Unsplash
From the moment we are born, we humans feel a never-ending need for attention. We are social animals to the core. Our survival and happiness depend on the bonds we form with others. If people do not pay attention to us, we cannot connect to them on any level. Some of this is purely physical-we must have people looking at us to feel alive. As those who have gone through long periods of isolation can attest, without eye contact we begin to doubt our existence and to descend into depression. But this need is also deeply psychological: through the quality of attention we receive from others, we feel recognized and appreciated for who we are. Our sense of self-worth depends on this. Because this is so important to the human-animal, people will do almost anything to get attention, including a crime or attempting suicide.
Look behind almost any action, and you will see this need as a primary motivation.
In trying to satisfy our hunger for attention, however, we face an inevitable problem: there is only so much of it to go around. In the family, we have to compete with siblings; at school, with classmates; at work, with colleagues. The moments in which we feel recognized and appreciated are short-lived. People can largely be indifferent to our fate, as they must deal with their own problems. There are even some who are downright hostile and disrespectful to us. How do you handle those moments when you feel psychologically alone, or even abandoned? We can double our efforts to get attention and notice, but this can exhaust our energy and it can often have the opposite effect-people who try too hard seem desperate and repulse the attention they want. | https://medium.com/passive-asset/a-never-ending-need-for-attention-c6795d90a3f2 | ['Em Hoccane'] | 2020-12-18 21:21:15.137000+00:00 | ['Personal Growth', 'Attention Seeking', 'Life', 'Psychology', 'Philosophy'] |
IT WILL BE SHALLOW VS… | Shallow is just running away from all the songs it has been matched up against so far.
It has beat 3 female singers so far.
Will it face another tomorrow? Go vote now!
All the best,
Jason
P.S. Today is the actual last question of this game. A new game will start tomorrow and start with the championship round of the Best Song tournament! | https://medium.com/daily-emails/it-will-be-shallow-vs-c57b762072b2 | [] | 2018-12-30 15:07:45.883000+00:00 | ['Steem', 'Crowdini', 'Games', 'Steemit', 'Questions'] |
Coronavirus: Kenapa harus bergerak sekarang | Coronavirus - When Should You Close Your Office?
How To Use Coronavirus Work From Home Model If you want to use this model, make a copy. I can't allow editing, as there… | https://medium.com/tomas-pueyo/coronavirus-kenapa-kamu-harus-bertindak-sekarang-a817096b32b2 | ['Cornellius Yudha Wijaya'] | 2020-03-27 18:34:38.990000+00:00 | ['1st', 'Covid 19', 'Indonesia', 'Coronavirus', 'Virus'] |
The Republican Mutiny and 2016 Whataboutism | The Republican Mutiny and 2016 Whataboutism
Left: Donald Trump (Al Drago/Getty Images); Right: Hillary Clinton (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Even after the Electoral College officially proclaimed Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 election on December 14, Donald Trump has continued to insist that he won and that he still has a path to victory. Many Republicans, including elected officials, are continuing to play along and amplify outlandish election-fraud theories. To some “Never Trump” conservatives such as The Bulwark’s Mona Charen, this situation is a clear sign that the GOP is suffering from terminal Trumpism and cannot be saved. Yet other commentators who can hardly be classified as pro-Trump — or even compulsively anti-anti-Trump — have argued that what the Republicans are doing today is basically the same as what the Democrats did after the 2016 election.
Case in point: Noah Rothman’s December 14 Commentary post titled “The Last Time They Tried to Steal an Election.”
I should preface this by saying that I’m a fan of Rothman’s work. He generally doesn’t hold back on criticism of Trump and the Trump administration. His criticism of the Democrats and the left-of-center press is often well-deserved. On December 15, for instance, he correctly chided the media for rushing to compliment Vladimir Putin for finally acknowledging Biden’s victory on a day when breaking news about a massive hack of U.S. government agencies should have made for some very bad press for the man in the Kremlin.
But Rothman’s election-theft piece ultimately founders on moral equivalency.
Granted, it starts out with strong criticism of the Trump team’s attempt to overturn the election. But Rothman argues that, while Trump’s refusal to concede is indeed unprecedented, the effort to invalidate an election is not: “Follow the trail back four years, and we’re reminded of the unrelenting public and private campaign to block Donald Trump’s ascension to the presidency.”
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That campaign in 2016 was an effort to persuade Republican electors not to vote for Trump. As Politico documented, it took some ugly forms, with reports of death threats and other harassment, and a few electors saying they were bombarded with thousands of emails. (Some also complained of aggressive pressure from the GOP to make sure they did vote for Trump.) There was also, as Rothman writes, a push to provide electors with a classified briefing on Russian interference in the election prior to certifying the vote led by Christine Pelosi, daughter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (Rothman does not mention that the younger Pelosi made this request in her capacity as an elector and without any public backing from Pelosi mère.) This effort received support from Hillary Clinton campaign chief John Podesta, giving rise to speculation that the Clinton campaign was questioning the legitimacy of Trump’s victory.
Additionally, according to Rothman:
If this effort had only the tacit endorsement of some of the Democratic Party’s leading lights, it received unqualified support on many of the nation’s most prominent op-ed pages.
As evidence, he cites Washington Post op-eds by Kathleen Parker and Lawrence Lessig urging electors to go rogue, as well as a New York Times op-ed by Columbia Law School professor David Pozen which “noted that there were few state-level legal obstacles and no constitutional impediments before would-be renegade electors” and a column by Paul Krugman saying that the “tainted election… shouldn’t be allowed to cool.”
But that’s a fairly misleading description of both the Pozen op-ed and the Krugman column.
Pozen did not call for electors to nullify Trump’s Electoral College victory; he simply explained that such an action would be legal and difficult to prevent. He also pointed out its considerable dangers:
The fact that an elector can vote her conscience does not necessarily mean she should. The proper course of action depends not only on what Mr. Trump might be like in the White House, but also on what the effects of an Electoral College revolt would be. Mr. Trump’s critics may be overstating or misreading the danger he poses. The effort to thwart his presidency may be so unlikely to succeed, or so likely to cause destructive political alienation and social unrest, that the game is not worth the candle. A failed attempt might only feed Mr. Trump’s paranoia and aggravate his illiberal tendencies.
Pozen’s ultimate conclusion was not that electors should turn against Trump but that this controversy illustrates “the folly of the Electoral College.” If electors are supposed to simply rubber-stamp their state’s popular vote, the institution is pointless; if they can vote their conscience, it’s democracy-subverting.
As for Krugman’s column, “A Tainted Election,” it explicitly stated that “the vote won’t be overturned” (emphasis added). It did argue that Democrats should not treat Trump as a morally legitimate president in the sense of affording him the customary deference and benefit of the doubt.
And Krugman’s argument, in contrast to those made today on behalf of Trump, began from a factual premise: “The C.I.A. determined that hackers working for the Russian government worked to tilt the 2016 election to Donald Trump.” That assessment was subsequently confirmed by reports from Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee. On the other hand, Trump’s claims of mass voter fraud in 2020 are so baseless that his lawyers aren’t even making them in court.
In another misleading passage, Rothman writes that “Democratic campaign attorneys lost most of their many efforts to challenge state-level vote counts” and that “Politico determined that they were ‘winning on optics.’” But the link goes to an article published the day before the election, about Democratic challenges to voting procedures alleged to be unfair or unduly burdensome — not anything to do with the outcome. (The only post-election attempts to challenge the actual vote results came from Green Party candidate Jill Stein.)
So, when all is said and done, Rothman’s claim of an attempted “election steal” in 2016 amounts to ten electors pushing for the Electoral College to annul Trump’s victory; one or two high-level Democratic officials expressing cautious sympathy for this effort; Martin Sheen and some other celebrities making videos urging Trump electors to defect; opinion pieces in prominent publications making the same plea; and an unspecified number of people trying to pressure the electors, sometimes in ways that crossed the lines of civilized behavior. At a stretch, you could also include the Clinton campaign signing on to participate in the Wisconsin recount initiated by Stein.
This is stacked up against :
the president of the United States repeatedly and consistently claiming that he won the election and that his victory was stolen through fraud
over 50 lawsuits trying to get thousands of votes thrown out in several battleground states Joe Biden won
the Republican Attorney General of Texas filing a lawsuit before the Supreme Court to overturn the election results in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania as “unlawful and constitutionally tainted”
the attorneys general of 17 other Republican-led states signing on to the Texas lawsuit (which the Supreme Court ultimately refused to hear)
over half of the House Republican conference — 126 out of 249 members — signing on to a brief supporting the lawsuit
aggressive efforts by Republican legislators in several battleground states to overrule voters from their state and appoint pro-Trump electors by fanning baseless claims of fraud
harassment and threats toward Republican state officials whom Trump supporters accused of complicity in covering up supposed fraud, with at least tacit encouragement by the president, some of his attorneys, and campaign officials
Republicans in six states where Trump has groundlessly disputed Biden’s victory creating “alternate” slates of electors who met and cast their votes for Trump, with encouragement from senior White House advisor Stephen Miller in a Fox News appearance. (In Michigan, the faux electors actually showed up at the state capitol entrance during the certification with the ostensible intent of submitting their votes.)
In other words, there is simply no comparison between the Democratic mutiny in 2016 and the Republican mutiny in 2020 — whether in terms of scope, intensity, or participation by mainstream political figures.
Rothman asserts that, in terms of impact, the Democrats’ tactics in 2016 “were far more successful than what pro-Trump forces have attempted in 2020.” How so? Because there were “two faithless Republican electors in 2016 — more than in any other presidential election since World War II” and one of them, Chris Suprun, briefly enjoyed the spotlight. But it might be helpful to point out that more than twice as many faithless electors defected from Hillary Clinton: one in Hawaii and four in Washington. I’m not sure that qualifies as a Democratic success.
Rothman is correct, I believe, when he says that the effort to hand the election to Trump in 2020 was just as doomed from the start as the effort to block Trump’s path to the White House in 2016. To a large extent, the 2020 election mutiny is theater. When those fake Trump electors showed up at the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing and were turned away, they protested verbally in front of the cameras but did not try to force their way in.
This explains the bizarre fact that while the president and a large portion of his political party are going through the motions of an attempted coup, few people seem very worried and life goes on. You might call it an attempted coup simulation.
But to frame panic about the 2020 election-subversion push and lack of panic about supposedly comparable Democratic efforts in 2016 as a case of double standards misses crucial differences.
It’s not only the size, scope, and support for election challenges, but also the reason for them. In 2020, attacks on the election’s validity have come exclusively from Trump supporters, and they are rooted in baseless claims of election fraud. In 2016, the situation was far more complex. Some of those who wanted the election results to be overturned were not Democrats but anti-Trump conservatives or conservative leaners (such as Parker). Some were not even rooting for Clinton to win: another Washington Post op-ed, by Cato Institute fellow Michael Cannon, argued that the best bet for an Electoral College upset was to get Democratic electors to back a “credible Republican alternative” to Trump (in which case it would take just 38 GOP defectors for that person to become president).
A major objection to Trump’s legitimacy stemmed from the belief that his victory was tainted by Russian interference (not actual vote-tampering so much as shenanigans that may have influenced enough voters to tip the outcome, particularly Wikileaks dumping illegally stolen emails, which fed the belief that Clinton had stolen the Democratic nomination from Bernie Sanders).
It’s true that many Democratic voters falsely believed Russian hackers changed vote totals. A 2018 Economist/YouGov poll found that only 31 percent of Democrats said Russia definitely or probably had not, comparable to just 29 percent of Republicans saying Biden won without fraud in a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. But an average voter saying something to a pollster is quite different from the sitting president saying something to the public as state attorneys general and sitting Congressional Representatives try to get courts to disenfranchise thousands of voters.
What’s more, some of the loudest claims questioning the integrity of the 2016 election came not from Democrats but from Donald Trump. Despite winning the election, Trump insisted — falsely — that millions voted illegally, in an attempt to prove that he actually won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College. He went so far as to set up a special commission to find this alleged voter fraud. As with Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election, the commission investigating 2016 found no evidence of widespread voter fraud and disbanded in 2018.
In his “Tainted Election” column, Krugman wrote that one could move on from the Russian meddling and “normalize the incoming administration” if Trump would act as a “healer” or at least show himself capable of “responsible, restrained behavior.” No such luck, obviously:
What we’re actually getting are wild claims that millions of people voted illegally, false assertions of a landslide, and denigration of the intelligence agencies.
One may agree or disagree with Krugman. But it’s difficult not to admit that pretty much everything Trump foes said about his unfitness for the presidency after his victory in 2016 is validated by his behavior after his loss in 2020.
Did many progressive activists and journalists — and some Democratic politicians — embrace extreme rhetoric and paranoid conspiracy theories in their zeal to delegitimize Trump? No doubt. (Though, as I noted in a recent article, this sort of delegitimization of presidents from the opposing party began much earlier with Bill Clinton, and Trump himself was at the forefront of such an effort during the Obama Administration.) But the Republican “stolen election” mutiny of 2020, however performative, is different not only in degree but in kind.
To obscure this fact by pointing at the Democrats in 2016 is not only false equivalence; it also offers an excuse not to confront the uniquely toxic state of today’s Republican Party. | https://medium.com/@brushleeeee/the-republican-mutiny-and-2016-whataboutism-10214f05854 | [] | 2020-12-18 15:18:44.633000+00:00 | ['Election 2020', 'Whataboutism', 'Trump', '2016 Election', 'Voter Fraud'] |
Sennheiser debuts two new headphones for the U.S. market: The IE 300 IEH in-ear and the HD 250BT over-ear | Sennheiser debuts two new headphones for the U.S. market: The IE 300 IEH in-ear and the HD 250BT over-ear Gina Jan 27·2 min read
World-renowned headphone maker Sennheiser has announced two new models for CES 2021. First, let’s take a look at the IE 300, a new in-ear headphone (IEH), featuring a refined version of the company’s 7mm Extra Wide Band (XWB) transducer, with an optimized membrane foil that minimizes natural resonances and total harmonic distortion, which is specified to be less than 0.08% at 1 kHz/94 dB.
[ Further reading: The best headphones you can buy ]In addition, the space behind the transducer is designed to minimize reflections within the housing, and a resonator chamber in front of the transducer removes masking resonances in the ear canal. The end result is a promised frequency response from 6Hz to 20kHz (no tolerance given). According to Sennheiser, the IE 300 “delivers clear high frequencies with a subtle and warm musicality that brings greater intimacy to vocals.”
Of course, durability and comfort have not been overlooked. The IE 300 comes with several sizes of silicone and memory-foam eartips, because using the right size for your ears is crucial for getting the best sound out of any IEH as well as maximizing noise isolation. Each earpiece features an individually adjustable ear hook for stability, and the included cable is reinforced with para-aramid that can withstand thousands of bend cycles.
The cable is detachable from each earpiece thanks to its gold-plated Fidelity+ MMCX connector that’s seated in a recessed socket for additional strain relief. In addition, you can use an alternate cable, including balanced cables with 2.5- or 4.4mm connectors that are available as optional accessories.
The IE 300 will be available by the end of January for an MSRP of $299.95.
Sennheiser’s latest addition to its wireless-headphone stable is the entry-level HD 250BT, which has been available in Europe since last year but is now coming to the U.S. market. Touted as offering “club sound for everyday life,” the HD 250BT offers 25-hour battery life and Bluetooth 5.0 wireless connectivity with support for high-quality codecs such as AAC and aptX. In addition, you can tailor the sound to your individual tastes with an intuitive equalizer offered by Sennheiser’s Smart Control app.
Sennheiser says this This over-the ear, closed-back headphone offers rugged construction, soft earpads that provide surprisingly effective noise isolation, and intuitive onboard controls. Even better, it’s highly affordable with an MSRP of only $69.95. Like the IE 300, it will be available in the US at the end of January.
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/@gina36631197/sennheiser-debuts-two-new-headphones-for-the-u-s-11b55b8e8115 | [] | 2021-01-27 18:51:14.033000+00:00 | ['Home Tech', 'Cord', 'Security Cameras', 'Deals'] |
Tis’ the Season… Best Practices for Inclusion during the Holidays! | Tis’ the Season… Best Practices for Inclusion during the Holidays!
Lots of cheer and goodwill are being spread in normal fashion, this holiday. Individuals are donating more of their money and time to those less fortunate and in need.
Yet, despite the largest of donations, there still exist insurmountable poverty and equity issues in communities all around us.
And the question remains whether these acts of kindness and gestures really have a lasting impact.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating that we stop contributing to organizations that help impoverished communities or individuals who are in need.
But what I am suggesting may require a bit of introspective thought and consideration.
Some of you may find these questions relatively easy to answer, while others may find themselves in deep thought.
Okay so here it goes…
Think about the last time you hosted a dinner party or holiday celebration of some sort.
You prepared that incredible meal, had your nicest china and glassware, the house had wonderful aromas of holiday cheer and tidings. You were ready!
Now ask yourself, “Who was present in the room at the table?”
Did most of your guest look and sound like you and if so, did you even think to invite others who didn’t?
Have you ever really given thought as to why you “unintentionally” excluded others from your party?
Now think for a moment about a few of the dinner or holiday invitations you’ve recently received and accepted over the last few weeks.
Okay, so now let’s think about the ones you’ve declined.
Focusing on the declines, who were those individuals and what did they look like?
Were they someone you simply hadn’t taken the time to get to know, even though you have been acquainted with them for several years?
Ask yourself, “Why haven’t you taken the time to get to know more about these individuals, just as you did the person you last shared a cup of coffee, tea or lunch with recently?”
Were these acquaintances from a different socioeconomic class, or a different race or culture? Maybe they had a different religion, belief system or they were simply someone with a perspective that was unlike your own?
Please know this mini exchange of informational Q&A is not at all meant to call anyone out or put another on defense. I totally get and realize that ‘we’ as human beings tend to be creatures of habit and in most cases stay within our comfort zones.
Not only is the norm or mode of operation for individuals regardless of your race, culture, religion, class etc. but it becomes a way of life for many, if we are not made aware and put to the test of doing something different.
So this holiday season, I am going to ask that you challenge ‘yourself’ to step out of that circle of comfort by learning more about that individual you’ve known for years, but ‘really’ hadn’t gotten to know; Or for you to say, “yes” to the invitation that you recently declined.
I’m convinced that it’s the sharing of experiences and the exchange of trying something new that often leads to greater growth and acceptance.
I also believe that by doing this small act, you will make more of a substantial long-term impact on our society and community than any monetary donation ever will.
So yes, still give your monetary donations and your time, but also remember to say, “YES,” to the opportunities of connecting with others on a deeper level who may not look, sound, or think exactly like you.
Be BRAVE and begin to bridge the gap in the divide.
Tis’ the Season!
Originally written and published on LinkedIn December 8, 2017 | https://medium.com/@mishonlandry/tis-the-season-best-practices-for-inclusion-during-the-holidays-ee487b3c3bbe | ['Mishon Landry'] | 2021-03-14 12:56:35.092000+00:00 | ['Holidays', 'Diversity', 'Inclusion'] |
THE GODLY-RIP OFF | Commentary:
In this writeup, I try to look at the plan of God through creation and how, for many years, the issue of God’s existence and ways has been a puzzle for me. Every culture and people have had a great description of what they will like their God to be. Yet he seems to pride Himself in his desire to beat our description. He is disrespected by many, appreciated by few. And even after 2000 years of the advent of Jesus Christ, many more seem to demand enough credibility from His Son. Perhaps God has figured out the ways of our expectation and throughout creation revealed Himself in a way that has made intellectuals downplay Him, the arrogant ignore Him and the honourable reject Him. This thought-provoking move of God’s ability to play with the expected and unexpected in time has turned the course of events in History for which many have missed Him and until now after creating a grand universe, many are still searching for Him…..
PreVerse:
The Unpredictable Planner…
The argument of men is He should have been greater
But God has hidden Himself in the cryptography of His own world
We have been played by our perspective
Wronged by our assumptions
We have ignored His life for the delusions of death
And He has played with the chords our pride
For men have sought a God greater as the Hologram of Zeus
Sadly, His plan was to sell to us merchandize we will never buy
For He knew the preference of our undesirable boutique
He has defrauded us with his description
And we have fallen for the Godly-Rip Off
Full Writeup Below:
The Unanticipated King…
We sell a merchandise man have not bought
Its price is not valued by that of the costly marbles of earth but by blood
There goes wine in a bottle of hope
This is fresh air incubated in the tubes of peace
This is God-not-seen, yet searched by the patriots
Discovered by men, yet still unfound
This is the goods we have bought
He is advertisable
He is what we search for, but have never found
He hides Himself in light, yet invisible in darkness
2000 years after his life
His earthly citizenship is still requested for
He is the army commander not reverenced as such
Yeah, we have sought a greater
He is projected as a conquering King
Yet an interviewer of the sick at a brook
There is a solder, marshalling an army with civilians
A shock-of-a-conqueror, subduing Kingdoms with peasants
The Unforeseen Visitor
There goes the Son of a Carpenter
In the house of Simon
Rumoured in the courts of Herod
Yet lying in the fields of Galilee
Found by those that have not searched for Him
While millions crave his attendance
The gemstones of Arabia describe His palace
Yet his role-play seeks neither
He dwells in the hearts of mortal men, the last place we will search for Him
His eyes sees even through the hearts of men, yet he pretends as if he is blind
Seen as a criminal, yet with the trodden the steps of a Saviour
Expected to be immortal but with a 33-year deficit
The Shephard of the field, still wandering through our lives in many homes.
The Unpredictable Designer…
He cuddles a baby to sleep
Yet researched in the Books of the Pharisees
He draws the algorithm of creation, yet his own algorithm seems inverted
For geometry is authored by his hands, pinpointing him at the centre
Scientist keep fighting this out
Yet He pretends as if He was never called
They plea for His answers
Yet He has laid down a lot of questions to discover
See all the debaters argue Him out
They demand his immediate response
He has made himself known to babes
Ignoring the philosophies of Socrates
The Grand Hall reverence His designs
Yet He seems unimpressed with its wonder
Surprising commoner’s banquets with His presence
As if he has never spiralled creation with his hands
Found by a people that have not searched for Him
While many crave His attendance
The Unpredictable Planner…
The argument of men is He should have been greater
But God has hidden Himself in the cryptography of His own world
We have been played by our perspective
Wronged by our assumptions
We have ignored His life for the delusions of death
And He has played with the chords our pride
For men have sought a God greater as the Hologram of Zeus
Sadly, His plan was to sell to us merchandize we will never buy
For He knew the preference of our undesirable boutique
He has defrauded us with his description
And we have fallen for the Godly-Rip Off | https://medium.com/@peeman34/the-godly-rip-off-b757c4cedba0 | ['Bonsu Adjei-Arthur'] | 2020-12-27 14:10:32.510000+00:00 | ['Christian', 'Faith', 'History', 'Science', 'God'] |
The State of Acceleration in Baltimore | A look at the different accelerator programs in Baltimore, and what could be next for Charm City’s acceleration ecosystem
This post is the second in our Gaps series, where we address the shortcomings in Baltimore’s innovation community. Baltimore is our home, and we love it dearly. Nevertheless, at EcoMap our job is to empower ecosystem developers to make better decisions to build a stronger innovation infrastructure.
A few months ago, EcoMap launched our Gaps Series, where we examine different areas of Baltimore’s entrepreneurial ecosystem to see if they are meeting the needs of our city. In our first post, we focused on Baltimore’s Pre-Seed Funding Gap and how we can create more equitable and accessible pre-seed funding sources. Now, we’re turning our attention to local accelerator programs to see how we can better serve entrepreneurs in Charm City.
First, we’ll talk briefly about the importance of Accelerator programs for both helping entrepreneurs launch their ventures, and for fostering dynamic (and well-funded) entrepreneurial communities. Then, we’ll look at Baltimore’s existing accelerator programs in order to identify where the acceleration ecosystem as a whole is falling short.
Finally, we’ll examine where there are opportunities to create new, impactful accelerator programs in Charm City, and discuss exciting news about four local organizations getting $200k in funding from the SBA to implement and supplement their accelerator programs.
The Importance of Strong Accelerator Programs
In order to understand the importance of accelerator programs, it helps to have a clear definition of what constitutes an accelerator in the first place. While definitions vary, the literature typically agrees on four defining characteristics of Accelerators:
Fixed-term, cohort-based programs Include seed investment Provides intense, immersive education and mentorship aimed at helping companies make rapid progress over a short period of time Culminate in a graduation, or Demo Day
The first means that only a certain number of companies are selected for participation in the program, defined by clear start and end dates. The second point, seed investment, is the biggest differentiator between accelerator programs and much more common incubators. The third touches on the purpose of accelerators — to accelerate the startup life cycle by forcing companies to make rapid progress over a short period of time. In order to do this, intensive mentorship, education, and connections are provided. Finally, accelerators typically culminate in a Demo Day, which is focused on helping cohort companies raise additional capital and awareness.
Susan Cohen and Ian Hathaway, on behalf of the Harvard Business Review, made a great graphic underscoring the differences between incubators, angel investors, accelerators and hybrid programs, shown below:
By Susan Cohen for the Harvard Business Review, Adaptations by Ian Hathaway. Read the article here: https://hbr.org/2016/03/what-startup-accelerators-really-do
Now that we understand what accelerators are, we can talk about what they are meant to do. Again leaning on Susan Cohen’s work, which is a comprehensive meta-analysis of studies about accelerator programs, there are a few discrete benefits of bona-fide accelerator programs:
Learning by Doing → entrepreneurship is trial and error; in accelerators, founders have the opportunity to learn — and make mistakes — at a rapid clip Reaching Key Milestones → companies that participate in accelerators reach key milestones quicker, like time to raising venture capital, exit via acquisition, or gaining customer traction Exposure and Connections → accelerators provide both connections to key mentors, experts, and customers as well as media exposure, both of which are vital for early-stage companies Second-Order Benefits on Ecosystem → the presence of accelerators positively benefit their local ecosystems, mostly by attracting more early stage financing, which can be tapped by non-accelerator companies
Why Accelerators Matter in Baltimore
As discussed in the first Gaps analysis, Baltimore has a dearth of pre-seed and seed funding for startups. Early funding is critical in helping companies get off the ground, and without it, many local companies will fail to reach product-market fit, tap into a sustainable market, or beat out competitors.
In many ways, this problem is chicken-and-egg — there are relatively fewer high-growth startups in Baltimore than other ecosystems, so there are less investors to provide early financing; but because there is less early capital, fewer people decide to start or keep their companies here. (Despite this, there has been a ton of great funding news coming out of Baltimore recently).
Likewise, accelerators are a good way to break this cycle. By supporting young companies and attracting additional investors, strong accelerators and the companies coming out of them could very well be the thing that breaks Baltimore’s early-stage-capital paradox. Investors might initially be attracted to the post-accelerator companies, but non-accelerator companies get to tap into the second-order benefits of having more investors around in general.
A Look at Baltimore’s Accelerator Programs
If you go to the EcoMap Accelerator Navigator, you’ll see there are many different resources listed under Accelerators. However, if we remove accelerators that don’t match the criteria above, we are left with far fewer.
Why? EcoMap’s process of adding resources is half-automated, half-human. If we scrape information about a program that calls itself an accelerator, it’ll be bucketed as an Accelerator. When our team reviews it, we make the call whether or not the program meets enough criteria to be considered an Accelerator. We try to walk the fine line between respecting what programs call themselves, and presenting accurate information to entrepreneurs.
In order to account for this, we have filters that help entrepreneurs find what they’re looking for. If we click Only show Accelerators providing capital, we’re left with 10 programs. However, we have another important filter: Remove student-only programs. When it comes to Accelerators, Maryland students are in luck: almost half of all criteria-meeting Accelerators in Baltimore are for students only, with UMD and Johns Hopkins leading the pack.
But what are we left with after applying these filters? Take a look:
In Baltimore, there are only 5 Accelerator programs that provide capital to entrepreneurs and are open to non-student founders.
For a city of only 600,000, 5 isn’t egregiously small, but it is at the lower end. However, when it comes to accelerator programs, details matter — what the programs offer, how many teams they accept, and the type and size of funding they provide are all important criteria for understanding where the gaps may be. In that vein, here’s a look at Baltimores 5 current accelerator programs:
Accepts 10 ventures per cohort
Provides $1,000 in grant funding upfront, with a chance for $25,000 for one venture
Focused on social-impact ventures, accepts all venture types (startup, small business, nonprofit)
Impact + Innovation Forum serves as “Demo Day” at end of 6 month program
Accepts 6–9 ventures per cohort
Provides up to $100,000 in funding in exchange for 8% equity
Focused on socially-conscious ventures, for-profit startups only
Demo Day at end of 4 month program
Accepts 5 ventures per cohort
Provides $5,000-$10,000 in grants with a chance for one venture to win $25,000
Focused on ventures in Agriculture, Aqua-tech, and Enviro-tech
Demo Day at end of 4 month program
* F3 Tech is an Eastern-Shore, not Baltimore-based program
Accepts 5 ventures per cohort
Provides $5,000 in dilutive funding
Focused on creative ventures, can be any type of venture
Possible Demo Day (2019 is first cohort) at end of 12-week program
Accepts 5–6 companies per cohort (yearly)
Provides $25,000 in capital, with chance for one venture to win $100,000
Focused on technology-based, for-profit startup companies
Demo Day at end of 13 week program
Here are some positive takeaways from the information above:
Baltimore has strong support for socially-conscious ventures
Most programs are ~4 months long, and almost all end with a Demo Day
Two of them accept any venture type (not just for-profit startups)
But here’s a closer look at the numbers:
A maximum of ~30 companies in Baltimore can participate in any of these accelerator programs in a given year, assuming 1 cohort/year
Of these, only ~1/3 will walk away with more than $25,000
Only ~5 companies will leave with more than $100,000 for their venture
It’s clear that there are relatively few accelerator spots for all of the different entrepreneurs in Baltimore, but for those who do get in, how are the programs? While our team loves a good look at the data, for something as important as an accelerator, it’s vital that we include information that can’t be found online. For the purpose of this article, we contacted a few cohort members from these programs to gather anonymous feedback on their experience.
We heard a lot of great things about Baltimore’s accelerators, mostly related to the quality of the mentors, education, and connections between cohort ventures. However, the less-positive feedback is enlightening:
Summary of Anonymous Feedback:
The accelerators in Baltimore do not have a strong sales-focus, as compared to other accelerator programs. For ventures operating in a capital-sparse ecosystem, getting early customers can often be the only way to grow
as compared to other accelerator programs. For ventures operating in a capital-sparse ecosystem, getting early customers can often be the only way to grow At least one of the accelerators does not provide funding upfront to all cohort members, which can be hard for the entrepreneur, who has to take time away from focusing on sales to participate in the accelerator
to all cohort members, which can be hard for the entrepreneur, who has to take time away from focusing on sales to participate in the accelerator The connections and networks provided by some of these accelerators are very Baltimore-centric, while cohort companies might be more be helped by connecting with people in other ecosystems
The Demo Days for some of the accelerators can feel more like an idealized graduation, and less like a targeted chance to raise additional capital for their companies
If we are looking to accelerators to help Baltimore address its early-stage capital-gap, current offerings alone are insufficient to fill this hole. While each of Baltimore’s accelerator programs is fantastic on its own, it’s unrealistic to expect them to expand to support Baltimore’s burgeoning entrepreneurial community alone.
Rather, Baltimore needs more accelerator programs.
An Accelerator Opportunity For Baltimore
In smaller entrepreneurial ecosystems, there can be push back about creating more programs instead of expanding the capacity of current ones. This is extremely true when it comes to things like nonprofits, where doubleness in the ecosystem leads to resource strain and reduced efficiency.
However, the best accelerators thrive off their specificity, either for an industry (like healthcare or social impact), or the type of venture they serve (products vs services, hardware vs software, etc). Three of Baltimore’s accelerators focus on social impact, one focuses on agri/aquaculture, and one focuses on technology-enabled products.
What about Baltimore’s other burgeoning industries, like cybersecurity or the life sciences? Baltimore already has a host of incubators that serve these industries, like the CyberHive at bwTech out of UMBC or the LifeBridge Health Bioincubator at Sinai Hospital. It isn’t unrealistic to think that these programs could pivot towards offering bona-fide accelerators as well.
Indeed, that just might be the case…
Thankfully, there’s some big Accelerator news in Baltimore:
Four local just organizations received $50k apiece to implement or supplement their Accelerator programs.
Earlier this month, the SBA announced that $3 million was being provided to 60 different organizations via the Growth Accelerator Fund Competition. Four of these organizations are based in and around Baltimore:
MTech Ventures, an incubator at University of Maryland, College Park F3Tech, the “farm, food, and fish” accelerator mentioned above LifeBridge Health Accelerator Program, coming from the healthcare provider’s new Innovation Team FastForward, the startup division of Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures.
Via Technical.ly Baltimore, the awards are meant for operating capital for the organizations. However, accelerators that received funding are all required to focus at least 60% of their SBA-funded work on supporting entrepreneurs who are socially or economically disadvantaged. That’s big news -we’ll tell you why at the end.
Between these four organizations and exiting Baltimore accelerators, life sciences, technology, and agri/aquaculture are all covered, leaving one big question — Who will take on cyber?
CyberTown, USA (Port Covington) is focused on becoming the “world’s premier technology hub for cybersecurity and data science” — and its being led by DataTribe, a Fulton, MD company coined the Cyber Startup Foundry. Applications for its Second Annual DataTribe challenge closed on October 1st — with $20,000-$2 million in funding on the line, it’s not hard to see this competition becoming a more formalized program in the coming years.
Besides launching new accelerators that focus on sales and provide targeted assistance with post-Demo Day fundraising, what else might be done to supplement Baltimore’s acceleration ecosystem?
Thoughts on a Small Business Accelerator
Accelerators are traditionally meant to serve startups, meaning companies that have a for-profit, high-growth-model and that are targeting a large, national or global market. What you don’t tend to see are accelerators that focus on traditional small businesses, even though small business drives more economic growth in cities than unicorns do.
Why is this? A core reason is that many accelerators make their money by taking equity in their cohort companies. If they do their job well and a cohort company makes it to exit, the accelerator gets money flowing back to them to continue their operations. Other accelerators are extensions of a venture fund meant to both incubate and invest in companies, and have a doubly vested interest in these companies returning capital.
Small Businesses are typically place-based (with exceptions like Sweet Green or Chipotle, both traditional restaurant models that found global growth) and do not target markets large enough to make equity investing make sense. For this reason, and a few others, you don’t see many Accelerators for Small Businesses, if you can find them at all.
However, there is no reason that the four characteristics of Accelerators can’t be applied to small businesses. Unlike startups — who typically fail because they built a product that no sizable market wants, their timing was bad, or hyper-growth burns through their capital — small businesses tend to fail because of lack of working capital or mismanagement. This is exactly the failure type that is easily remedied by intense education, mentorship, and operational capital. Having fixed-term, cohort based programs only increases the exposure that founders get to other founders, whom they can learn from and leverage as connections.
It’s easy to speculate that a small business accelerator program would be beneficial for Baltimore’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, but we’re still left with the question of how does an accelerator pay for itself if it can’t take equity in it’s cohort companies?
Thankfully, Baltimore already has some answers for that. AccelerateBaltimore is run by ETC, which is actually a division of the Baltimore Development Corporation, and is further supported by the Abell Foundation. The existence of AccelerateBaltimore is therefore not contingent on the financial success of its cohort companies per-say.
So there’s one model — create accelerators that are divisions of large and stable organizations and corporations, like foundations, universities, hospitals, or financial giants. Baltimore has strong organizations in every single one of those categories. There are other models that might work as well, like purely non-profit accelerators who fund themselves mostly on grants, or accelerators that participate in profit-sharing with their cohort companies after they turn green.
All of these models opens up the possibility for a small business accelerator that creates a steady flow of successful, profitable small businesses that provide jobs and strengthen local communities. While relatively few ecosystems have embraced the Small Business-Accelerator model, there is nothing stoping Baltimore from leading the way — perhaps new is what we need.
Final Notes On the State of Acceleration in Baltimore
Here’s the lay of the land: Baltimore has many accelerator programs, but only a few that meet the full criteria of actually being an accelerator. The five criteria-meeting, non-student accelerators all receive strong feedback and have high community support, but they do not have enough capacity to serve all entrepreneurs in the city. Entrepreneurs wish to see accelerators with a stronger sales-focus, and ones that provide more support with raising follow-on capital.
In terms of moving forward, we can look to existing organizations to launch accelerators that focus on specific business types or industry areas. Additionally, Baltimore could take a leap and pioneer a model for Small-Business Accelerators that can help support ground-up economic growth in our city.
There are the potential for big moves to be made by the four organizations that received $50k from the SBA to supplement their accelerator programs. But the best part about this news isn’t the funding per-say, it’s the strings that come with it: These programs must now place a majority of their focus on socially and economically disadvantaged founders.
Why is this such important news? Because the third Gap in Baltimore’s entrepreneurial ecosystem is Resources Targeted towards Female and Minority Founders. Read about it here, coming early October. | https://medium.com/ecomap-technologies/the-state-of-acceleration-in-baltimore-72c276f29f51 | ['Pava Lapere'] | 2019-09-30 01:13:21.912000+00:00 | ['Baltimore', 'Accelerator', 'Maryland', 'Innovation', 'Startup'] |
For publishers, the Facebook Freefall continues | Since January, the average amount of engagement brands and publishers are getting with Facebook posts has fallen 20% since the first of the year, according to Buzzsumo. After analyzing 880 million FB posts, Buzzsumo reports that image and link posts had the largest drop off.
Videos now get twice the level of engagement of other posts.
It’s not the first time we’ve seen this trend. Reach for brands and publishers has been on the decline for quite some time. A study by Social flow last year showed a 42% drop off.
“Back in the fourth quarter and through January, media companies were doing phenomenally well,” said Social Flow CEO Jim Anderson in 2016. “Then Facebook made a change to the algorithm.” In May, the publishers in the analysis produced around 550,000 posts — up from 470,000 in April — but overall reach from January to May was off 42% per post. “This is evidence, in part, of Facebook’s algorithmic change,” said Anderson.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t always like to watch video on my phone — especially if I’m doing a quick look while waiting in line. Jordan Teicher Contently poses the question that if this video trend continues, will it force publishers to do video whetehr they want to or not? After all, they are using FB to get people to engage… the more engagement, the more your content is seen. If video is the way to get engagement, it only makes sense to do more of it.
Worth thinking about. | https://medium.com/social-media-growth-hacking-hub/for-publishers-the-facebook-freefall-continues-60d38dff5bae | ['Paul Dughi'] | 2017-08-31 21:41:56.695000+00:00 | ['Digital', 'Marketing', 'Engagement', 'Facebook', 'Social'] |
The Worst PS4 Games: Aces of the Luftwaffe | I’m normally an easy mark for an arcade shooter, or “shmup” as some folks like to call them. Give me a horizontally or vertically scrolling background, a ship or plane of some kind, and hordes of enemies to blow up, and I’ll happily give you hours of my time.
Both the Android and iOS platforms are full of this style of game, featuring original entries and classic arcade ports. Many of the newer titles crafted for mobile play improve the core mechanics with skill trees, endless piles of levels, responsive touch input, and a variety of characters to unlock.
Aces of the Luftwaffe is one such attempt at a progression-infused shmup, developed by Handy Games. It currently sells for $3 dollars on iOS, and has a respectable handful of vertical scrolling stages. Although it takes a little grinding to get to the end (or an infusion of additional real cash), its fun controls and unlocks make it one of many “okay” choices in the portable arcade shooter space. | https://xander51.medium.com/the-worst-ps4-games-aces-of-the-luftwaffe-cec484b26 | ['Alex Rowe'] | 2020-04-30 22:52:01.310000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Technology', 'Mobile', 'Videogames', 'Tech'] |
Albert Murray:The Omni American Interned at Tuskegee | Albert Murray came home to Tuskegee where he will rest in peace with other greats of Tuskegee.
Albert Murray coined the phase Omniamerican as a way to explain the cultural conundrum that the American melting pot is and always has been. He did not like the expression Black American or German American. Murray began with the “basic assumption that the United States is a mulatto culture.”
There was no better way to explain the bastardization of American culture than through the gutteral sounds of jazz music, which he loved and appreciated along with the blues and the classics.
Murray was comfortably at home with Mozart or Count Basie, with Beethoven or Lou Rawls and for the last 43 years of his life he shared his thoughts on what it means to be an American through the idiom of the written word in the rhythm of music.
He was conceived in Tuskegee, Alabama in the year that Booker T. Washington died. But he would not come forth until the following year, two days before Mother’s Day. It was just as well he did not wait for Mother’s Day to make his appearance because between the Friday he was born and the second Sunday in May, his mother and father gave him up for adoption.
Tiny Albert Lee Murray was quickly taken away to a small town outside of Mobile, Alabama where he grew to love books and debating.
During his high school years his biological mother moved to Mobile to be near him. That year Murray earned a scholarship to Tuskegee Normal and Industrial School. When he arrived on campus, his biological father, John Young, had become the foreman of the Tuskegee Power Company, he would visit with his son for the first time.
While at Tuskegee Murray became friends with an upperclassman, two years his senior, Ralph Waldo Ellison,who 15 years later would win the National Book Award for his novel Invisible Man.
Ellison had grown up on the frontier, in Oklahoma City. He had a deep affinity for jazz music. The two men bonded over their love for music and profound philosophical discussions on the nature of every belief system imaginable. They would remain lifelong friends.
Murray was the yin to Ellison’s yang. While Ellison believed the mainstream viewed the invisibility of Black people as a reason not to treat them with common human decency and respect.
Murray’s philosophy would say, au contraire, there are no black or white America, we are all one America. Murray enunciated this view long before a mulatto American President named Barack Obama argued America is not divided by red states or blue states, rather she is unified as the United States of America. And before Ancestry proved that Americans with the whitest of skin could have African and European DNA or the blackest person could be equally Nigerian and Scandinavian.
His message that everybody is related to everybody was not well taken as it came in the height of the movement for Black identity in the early 1970s.
Blacks were removing processed solutions from their hair and wearing their hair naturally, in an afro. Black was suddenly beautiful and Murray came along and said that in fact the slave master and the enslaved had commingled blood and each was as much black as white, thus one American.
The militant Negro intelligentsia felt their message of black empowerment was blunted by Murray’s omniamerican rhetoric. Murray’s posit proved Washington’s contention that Black and white America could co-exist as the hand, while maintaining separate phalanges because the fingers were mere extensions of the one hand.
In 2013, at age 97, Murray died.
Tuskegee University Trustee Board member Irving McConnell attending the interment service for native son Albert Murray. Photo Credit ©2018 Harold Michael Harvey
At the time of his death, he was negotiating with Tuskegee University to house his books. After a series of missteps, a process that began in 1999 under Benjamin Payton, the then university president, became reality today. Payton directed one of his vice presidents, Dr. Charlotte Morris to work out the details. When Payton retired, Morris served as Interim President until the university hired Dr. Gilbert Rochon. She then left the university to attend to her aging mother.
Rochan liked the project, but walked away from his contract after a year on the job. After the university hired Dr. Brian Johnson to replace Rochon, the Murray papers project hit snag after snag. Then the university decided not to renew Johnson’s contract. They brought Morris back as Interim President and the discussions with Murray’s estate were back on track.
Dr. Charlotte Morris, Interim President at Tuskegee University is serving the university for the second time as its Interim President. She worked to bring Albert Murray’s books and ashes back to the place of his birth.Photo Credits ©2018 Harold Michael Harvey
The one constant in all that time was the steadying hand of Tuskegee Interim President Charlotte Morris. One wonders if the university can find a more qualified and capable president to steer the university into the roaring 2020s than Dr. Morris.
For the past four and a half years the remains of the quintessential cultural iconic thinker of the 20th century rested in a pink urn in New York’s Harlem. His estate wrestled with how to ensure the books, which educated Murray’s world view of life on the planet since Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Compromise speech, would be preserved for as long as human history endures. Also, there was now the necessity to find a permanent resting place for Murray’s ashes.
Today, Murray came home to Tuskegee where he was conceived and where his world view was developed. With open arms his Tuskegee family, in a sense, received his mind (books) to be housed in a permanent collection in the Ford Motor Company Library and Learning Resource Center in the Hollis Burke Frissell Building where Murray spent a great portion of his time as a Tuskegee student.
Booker T. Washington resting in power on the campus of Tuskegee University. His Atlanta Compromise address of 1895 inspired Murray’s concept of omni americanism.Photo credits ©2018 Harold Michael Harvey
And his soul (ashes) now rests in the Tuskegee University Cemetery along with other Omni Americans like Washington,George Washington Carver, Robert Russo Moton, Frederick Patterson, Luther Foster, Warren Logan, and Benjamin Payton.
Being a student of Murray’s, I’m writing this piece listening to I’ll wait and Pray by John Coltrane and Bill Evans’ Waltz for Debby. During the internment of Murray’s ashes a soloist under the direction of John Q. Lennard played Duke Ellington’s Come Sunday. At the recessional the Tuskegee University Brass Band marched New Orleans funeral dirge style from the cemetery playing Do Whatcha Wanna, an apropos piece to sum up Murray’s attitude about life.
Tuskegee’s native son, unwelcomed at birth, finally comes “South to a Very Old Place” in the long and winding road of omni history.
Harold Michael Harvey is an American novelist and essayist. He is a Contributor at The Hill, SCLC National Magazine, Southern Changes Magazine and Black College Nines. He can be contacted at [email protected] | https://hmichaelharvey.medium.com/albert-murray-the-omni-american-interned-at-tuskegee-88fa47d33754 | ['H. Michael Harvey'] | 2018-04-10 01:41:31.728000+00:00 | ['African American', 'Jazz', 'Racism', 'BlackLivesMatter'] |
Reflections of a Youth Worker: Critiquing a Volunteer | The volunteer did not seem to realise the subject of receiving feedback was being approached until after he received the complimentary words of his strengths over the week. During the moment of mentioning that I felt the volunteer found it hard to receive critical feedback, I began to get the impression the volunteer was starting to take in what I said. When I mentioned techniques for approaching for using such situations for developments, it seemed he was listening to my suggestions.
However, it was clear that my presumption was wrong as the volunteer was quick to relate it to just one item rather than the entire training in a very defensive manner. He was also very quick to blame any criticism of his workshop on the participants themselves rather than himself and his colleagues. I took note of this as ‘it is always important that we, as youth workers engage in the work of attention, noticing what people say about themselves and how they say it. We must also note how they interact with others and how others respond to them. He was angry at the participants themselves for causing what he considered a failed workshop. The volunteer made a brief comment that may relate to him taking part in the blame but then mentioned something I found quite hard to comprehend. The training course was about the experiential learning cycle however, the volunteer stated that they wanted the information rather than the experience to be the learning point of the workshop. Due to this, I tried to bring in other areas of the volunteers’ workshops that could not be attributed to the participants such as time management affirming that it was visible the time management was not particularly good. I also tried to bring back the idea of the experiential learning cycle by asking if he thought the ‘experience’ was lost due to the overload of information. The volunteer did not see this as the case which not only confused me but ignited demotivation in my work with this volunteer. This upset me as I wanted to help develop the volunteer’s ability in this area.
The Welsh Government states that there is a need to develop a clear coherent qualifications route and continuous professional development framework for those involved in youth work provision.
As I continued to touch on receiving feedback it was clear the volunteer did not want to speak about it, and I felt like we were going nowhere so I summarized the supervision and closed up.
I was trying to approach a difficult topic area through a positive start thinking it would pave the way for dialogue on the volunteer’s issues with receiving feedback. I was wrong, it did not work. The volunteer’s actions and words made it noticeably clear they did not believe they needed nor deserved any form of critical feedback for the training course. Although it seems the volunteer does have a perceived failure of one certain workshop as he related any problems in his work to that session. However, noting that he related these problems to the participants rather than himself, I believe was a manifestation of self-indulgent voyeurism. Where the volunteer became preoccupied with the feeling’s issues involved in a particular situation at the expense of other important aspects.
The volunteer had then put on a very defensive manner that was impossible to work with. I was wondering how to approach the subject that his workshop had not reached the aims of a training course on the experiential learning cycle and how to ask him what he thought about that. Alas, however, I approached the subject it was clear to see the volunteer was angry at the participants and was on full defensive mode.
I tried several approaches of getting the volunteer to question his work, in turn hoping this would allow him to accept other people questions on his work. However, it was clear the volunteer found very few issues in his work, or if he did, did not want to admit them to himself or I. Therefore, it seems may have been battered to close the session sooner and start again another day.
Looking at the approach through a positive start I still believe it to be the best method, it does not guarantee success, but its benefits still out way that of instantly bringing up a difficult topic. I believe I should have taken better note of the volunteer’s actions and words in the beginning and seen it was unlikely for supervision, or at least this topic area, to succeed at the time. It was clear from his anger and defensive manner than he was unable to see other few points let alone relate his work to the aims of the training course.
Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash
“When someone is feeling angry, there is a danger that saying the wrong thing may inflame the situation even further. Words, therefore, have to be chosen very carefully in such situations” — Roger Harrison & Christine Wise
Continuing with several approaches trying to get the volunteer to question his work was the wrong move. Sometimes you need to be able to simply read those you are working with and understand what can be done, and what cannot. The supervision should have been closed up and the topic approached another day in a more relaxed environment. | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/reflections-of-a-youth-worker-critiquing-a-volunteer-7cc7192a4f5d | ['Daniel John Carter'] | 2020-08-02 14:26:24.934000+00:00 | ['Supervision', 'Youth', 'Youth Work', 'Youth Development', 'Education'] |
Elite Dangerous: new voices to keep you company | Elite Dangerous can feel lonely when you’re out there in the Universe. That’s the reason why you should get a crew: Not Elite’s crew, but one that speaks with you. A crew from HCS Voice Packs! There is a new ASTRA voice pack coming.
This week I tried the Virtual Reality version of No Man’s Sky, and while it’s a promising step ahead for the game, I could not stop thinking that I prefer the more realistic approach of Elite Dangerous. So, despite the fact that Elite is now living in a kind of limbo (more about this another day), I opened it, to hear the familiar voice of Carina welcome me, while the grumpy Orion kept saying stuff in the background. These two, if you are familiar with the HCS Voice Packs, are the voices of Marina Sirtis (Counselor Deanna Troi on the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation) and William Shatner (yes, Captain Kirk himself).
Having actors that we know from sci-fi series giving their time and voice to the crew you get to enlist in Elite Dangerous is one of the key aspects of interest of the space simulation, at least for me. I also have Eden (Idun Vik voice) and Vega (voice of Brent Spiner). Eden was my first voice pack acquisition, as I knew the actress voice from the TV series Aber Bergen. Brent Spiner, you all know: is Lieutenant Commander Data in the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation.
One note: Brent Spiner’s voice pack Vega is half price until September 2019, so if you don’t already have him aboard, you might want to pick him up. I’ve Vega in my crew and I must say he is one of the most interesting and surprising characters you can have in the cockpit. Watch the demo of Vega that Obsidian Ant put together — Brent Spiner also performed a set of Stephen Hawking quotes that are included in his voice pack. | https://medium.com/outpost2/elite-dangerous-new-voices-to-make-you-company-c4924ea95edd | ['Jose Antunes'] | 2019-08-15 20:27:56.743000+00:00 | ['Star Trek', 'Space Exploration', 'Space Simulation', 'Elite Dangerous'] |
weight loss motivation | Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash
Weight reduction motivation…how commonly have you been profoundly energetic to get more fit? In the same way as other, numerous individuals, likely a decent number of times.
Why at that point, do our weight reduction endeavors appear to consistently end with similar outcomes? We appear to wind up drained and hungry with insignificant weight reduction, even with work out. At that point, we end up ineffectively inspired, or more terrible yet, we’re left with no weight reduction inspiration left by any means.
The appropriate response is two words — positive criticism. With it you can be relentless in your weight reduction endeavors. Without positive input it likely is just a short time before you are sapped of any inspiration that you had begun with. Also, positive input implies that you’re getting results, acceptable outcomes. You’re getting thinner, feeling better and adhering to your arrangement.
All in all, for what reason do we come up short? Single word, here…DIET! Slimming down for some, individuals implies hardship, appetite and weariness. Saving roused for your activity schedules while battling those three things following a day of work makes practicing somewhat harder. This is the place where weight reduction inspiration starts to come up short.
Before long you lose interest (inspiration!) in working out. You see the weight reduction easing back, or in any event, halting, despite the fact that you are as yet “eating fewer carbs” and as yet denying your assemblage of food. And afterward you figure, “Fail to remember it…it’s not busy. I’ll get back on this stuff later.” And that is it. Another round of weight reduction inspiration squashed and another weight reduction endeavor fizzled. Cheer up! It’s extremely normal and you’re in good company!
Anyway, how would you fix this? Indeed, you definitely know your slimming down and practice consistently appeared to fall flat inevitably. Such a huge number, change your dietary patterns first. Figure out how to put you body into Fat Burning Mode and not Fat Storage Mode. You can do this fair by changing what you eat, when you eat and how you join nourishments in your suppers. It works quick and it functions admirably. It’s not slimming down, either…it’s simply changing what you eat and how you join the nourishments that you eat. When you’re in Fat Burning mode you’ll begin seeing huge changes and the positive input circle will be set and you are on your way:
You will begin getting in shape, much the same as in the past. This is the early sure criticism that makes a big difference for you. Yet, at this beginning phase, it’s simply similar to each other weight reduction endeavor you’ve attempted.
Before long, in any case, you lose more weight. You’ve presently gone past that five or six pounds, so you begin understanding that something is unique. This re-implements your changing dietary patterns. You presently realize that you’re on to something great.
Individuals begin seeing your weight reduction. More certain criticism and more weight reduction inspiration.
You get substantially more out of practicing now and you are not drained constantly. You really have more energy. This is practically completely identified with your new dietary patterns.
As time passes by, you are losing more weight. You fit into garments estimates that you wore years prior. More sure criticism supporting your weight reduction inspiration. You’re currently considerably more propelled to adhere to your new dietary patterns and find out an ever increasing number of how this influences weight gain and weight reduction.
You presently begin losing fat in regions of your body that you recently abandoned long ago…mainly that Tummy Fat and lower muscle to fat ratio. You begin seeing muscles that you haven’t seen for a long time. Once more, this all re-upholds your inspiration to continue practicing and finding out about appropriate sustenance and dietary patterns.
What’s more, still, you are not generally eager, drained and crotchety! Positive criticism re-upholding your weight reduction inspiration.
It’s now that you understand things are a great deal unique this time. You’ve lost more weight than you actually have. You have lost that belly fat and you feel incredible. The best part is that you don’t feel like you’re counting calories and your weight reduction inspiration is similarly as high as it was the point at which you initially began, if not higher.
Positive input prompts more, supported weight reduction inspiration which prompts more supported weight reduction! Everything begins with legitimate nourishment and eating habits…period.
So for long haul weight reduction, you need to change your dietary patterns first and attempt to get your body into Fat Burning Mode. Learn as much as possible about appropriate sustenance and how what you eat influences your glucose and insulin levels. Find out about the glycemic list and glycemic loading…all identifying with glucose and insulin.
This will permit you to lose a ton of weight, keep your weight reduction inspiration unblemished and eventually, improve your general wellbeing and prosperity colossally.
Begin finding out about legitimate nourishment and appropriate dietary patterns now. Win the battle on weight gain, corpulence and muscle to fat ratio, particularly that obstinate belly fat. Put your body into Fat Burning Mode! For an extraordinary source on the most proficient method to do this, see:Burn Fat Better! | https://medium.com/@borriello006/weight-loss-motivation-da77d31254dd | ['Enjoyable Diet'] | 2020-12-27 19:02:42.205000+00:00 | ['Weight Loss Tips', 'Weight Loss', 'Weight Loss Surgery', 'Weight Loss Motivation', 'Weight Loss Supplements'] |
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