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👋 Hello World from Night Shift 🌑 | 👋 Hello World from Night Shift 🌑
What is Night Shift?
Night Shift is a brand new newsletter that talks about the latest news in the technology and programming worlds. Every Friday morning, expect a simple newsletter to come from us with some of the latest news stories and articles.
What to Expect
You can expect a variety of news about tech companies, rumors, programming articles, and other random tech-related content.
We look forward to sharing the latest news with you this Friday! | https://medium.com/drknode/hello-world-from-night-shift-4381b84e89d7 | ['Henry Gruett'] | 2020-12-15 17:36:23.017000+00:00 | ['Technology News', 'Tech', 'Technews', 'Technology', 'Night Shift Newsletter'] |
Function Island: Ok, it’s happening! Everyone stay calm! (Ep. 5) | B1VS Hourglass is the latest expansion and project of Function Island, a project aiming to provide long-lasting, lively smart contracts and Dapps on multiple chains, in a customised and unique fashion. Anyone can join Function Island — those who join the relevant official communities are known as “Islanders”, led by the “Island Chiefs” and the almighty MrFUNCT1ON.
👋 Hello, Islanders!
Yes, you read that correctly! Soon, the all-new “B1VS Hourglass” Dapp is coming to Function Island, deployed on Binance Smart Chain! 🎉
Development and testing is underway as you read this — the team have been working hard in the background, quite heavily on this one! More details will be published and shared closer to the release date — for now though, we think it’s a good idea to get prepared for the new Dapp, should you choose to participate! 💪🏽
The Hourglass smart contract mints “B1VS” on deposit of BNB, and burns “B1VS” when it’s sold, simultaneously distributing a portion of deposits and withdrawals of BNB between all “B1VS” holders. The smart contract incrementally increases the price every time B1VS is bought, and slightly decreases the price every time B1VS is sold.
But wait — there’s more! If you’ve been around crypto for a while now, you’re probably telling yourself you’ve seen this all before — and you’d be right… BUT, Function Island isn’t just bringing an Hourglass to BSC — Alongside the Hourglass is “Gauntlet Mode”! 💪🚀💸
Gauntlet Mode is a special smart contract which enables anyone to:
— Create a Gauntlet and set a number of days until it “unlocks”
— Deposit BNB into it, which actually buys B1VS and locks them inside!
— Earn dividends (and reinvest or withdraw them) with their Gauntlet!
The only things you cannot do until the time is up is sell or transfer the B1VS within — those are held on tight by that iron grip you created! 🤑⛈
➡️ iPhone: TokenPocket is a great choice of wallet application — Non custodial, no KYC, multi-chain, multi-coin, mobile and user friendly. 💪✅
➡️ Android: Much the same — TokenPocket is a good option!
➡️ Desktop: Use Metamask with the RPC settings as linked for the smart chain, or the official Binance wallet extension (available for Firefox and Chrome-based browsers).
☝️ It is not compulsory to use Metamask or TokenPocket — if you have your own method to connect to Binance Smart Chain, feel free to use that. Do be aware though, we as the Function Island Team cannot help you with your wallet-specific issues.
🏆 Download TokenPocket (iOS / Android) : link
🦊 Download Metamask: link
🔗 Connect Metamask to Binance Smart Chain: link
❤️ To be clear, we are still working heavily on D1VS and TRON — this post is a special one, because it’s also the first post of the project expanding to a second blockchain! The island is getting bigger! 🎉🚀
🙏🏽 Thank you all for your continued support of the Function Island project!
Regards,
MrFunction, The Admin Team and the VIP Group | https://medium.com/@functionisland/function-island-ok-its-happening-everyone-stay-calm-ep-5-b8ebf01cfd8 | ['Function Island'] | 2021-02-22 13:44:22.828000+00:00 | ['Solidity', 'Dapps', 'Bsc', 'Crypto', 'Smart Contract'] |
Why Software Architects Are Essential and Why You Need One? | Why Software Architects Are Essential and Why You Need One?
This is the second part of a two-parts article. In case you didn’t, please follow the link below to start from the beginning.
What a Software Architect is?
Photo by Marek Kort on Unsplash
Talking about names and titles, a programmer, software developer or coder is whoever can write software programs. In fact, anybody can code, even children. A software engineer is much more though. She or he is a programmer, but beyond that uses a broad knowledge of computer sciences, best practices, and sound engineering principles along with his/her own experience to design, implement, test, document, deploy and maintain software. As there are many ways to do the same thing, a software architect is a software engineer, but with a broader (not necessarily deeper) knowledge in many areas, who bears the responsibility of designing and maintaining the definitions that will guide the implementation, testing, documentation, deployment and maintenance of a system or systems.
The architect isn’t a type of manager, isn’t the most senior of the senior developers, and surely is not the tech lead. The architect is first and foremost an engineer, a very experienced one. An expert in knowing a broader array of solutions in many areas (programming languages, infrastructure and cloud solutions, development methodologies and paradigms, etc). Not necessarily a specialist in each one, but just enough to reliably quantify the positive and negative impacts of adding something new. The architect also must have a far-sighted vision of how, when and where things could go wrong with the system, in order to preemptively account for them in a consistent prioritization. The architect must be an accountable stakeholder, and the stake to hold is precisely the efficiency and integrity of all the systems that he or she designs. The architect’s primary function is to lay down the rails on which code must be written, software built or purchased, artifacts registered, archived for future use, or deployed. Rails that favor convention over configuration, that define early things that would be expensive to change later. Rails that restrain the team’s freedom of creativity, yes, but in exchange for assured fluidity, predictability, and safety. Rails that keep the code clean.
The architect can’t exist in an ivory tower as I’ve often seen in some companies. The ability to do this job relies strongly in knowing exactly how it is to perform everybody else’s role, to the point of being able to switch places with anyone like an airliner captain. If one can’t know exactly how trivial or tricky some course of action really is, one can’t engage the team, anticipate risks, or assure quality.
Regarding the dev team
Photo by Alex Kotliarskyi on Unsplash
The architect job starts with a proof of concept, encompassing everything from benchmark research, passing through risks and costs, to final deployment. The architect should be the single or lead developer of any POC, because that is the point in time where all existing standards are revised, and all new ones devised. If the team has its own set of components and a corporate framework, that’s the time to extend and abstract details like IO devices, databases, web systems, servers, frameworks, communication protocols, cloud services, everything that needs to exist in order to support the new business cases. Although present in all stages of the development life cycle, it’s in the early stages that the architect adds the greatest value. In a sense, the development team delivers to the client, while the architect delivers to the team.
The goal of the architect is to create a shape for the system that recognizes business rules as the most essential element of the system while making the details irrelevant to that rules. This allows decisions about those details to be delayed and deferred. — Robert C. Martin, Clean Architecture
The job continues throughout all the development life cycle because we humans naturally resist to change. Team members will have doubts, concerns and possibly resentment assimilating new things. The architect needs to be there handling the transaction, fomenting the improvements, demonstrating the benefits, enriching the documentation, building trust and consensus. Sometimes something unpredictable will block the team and the architect must be ready to promptly account for the scenario. The team’s continuous fluidity is the architect’s production environment. The architect sustains on-demand maintenance requests to components, frameworks, interfaces, and documentation so the dev team is free to worry only about business issues.
The job is accomplished with the team’s engagement and enthusiasm. Good leadership skills are paramount to bring the team together around controversial decisions. Although being the one to make the strong calls on system design, the job is to guide, advocate, foment, demonstrate, and convince. Not to dictate. The team has to take part in the decision-making to secure everybody’s ownership. Fail to do so and morale will impact as much as a bad design.
Regarding the board and the clients
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Last but not least is the architect’s role of stakeholder. Words from an architect should carry weight! If the team gives you an estimate longer than you expect, appeal to the architect. If those estimates can’t be squeezed to your satisfaction, assume it as your best truth. Please, remind yourself that an architect sees the feasibility of features and releases in fine grained resolution, and has no greater interest than the product itself. It’s not wise to overrule an architect’s recommendation in order to meet an imposed release date, if it ends up releasing a faulty system.
If you must press for a tighter deadline, compromises can still be made: Shorter paths now in exchange for the correct longer paths later. This is called technical debt, and it should be paid as early as possible. Just remember that everything built on top of a structure in debt can incur in more debt, and it can quickly rot your codebase to a point of no return.
Discerning architects from other engineers
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At this point of the article, you might be asking yourself: Isn’t it the job description and responsibilities of a Tech Lead am I reading? The answer is no. It’s a common misconception. And although those two roles might require similar sets of skills, their focus, breadth, and depth of specialization are quite different. Aside from small companies with greenfield projects (startups), the job of architect could rarely be done by the same professional without considerable conflicts of interest.
The Architect focuses on the system design, which are determined by non-functional requirements; The tech lead focuses on the system behavior, defined by functional requirements. It’s smart to address functional and non-functional requirements separately because while the former comes from the client in a paced almost predictable manner and consistent difficulty level, the later arise from the product’s technological challenges in a less predictable way and can be quite demanding. Both of them work as leaders, but while the tech lead leads by inspiring and helping the team to do the things that should be done in a timely way, the architect leads by building trust and consensus on how things should be done.
In our railroad analogy, the architect lay the tracks in a way that the train reaches all stations the quickest without too many bumps, switches, and turns, while the tech lead drives the train making sure it arrives in all stations on time.
And it’s a full-time job! It can’t be packed in a hat occasionally wore by some other professional with other responsibilities. The architect is usually running against time to make things feasible for the team as fast as possible. When there’s no pressing requirement to deliver, the architect is upgrading the design and documentation to make things easier for the team. If it blissfully gets to a maturity level where everything is as promptly and straightforward as it can be, it’s probably time for optimization, which means upgrading or replacing whole structures.
Mind the knowledge pyramid
ThoughWorker Neal Ford blogged in 2015 about Mark Richard’s Knowledge Pyramid, which is an elegantly simple way to demonstrate in what way engineers and architects’ career long knowledge acquisition differ.
Any individual can partition knowledge in three sections:
Stuff you know as a specialist and keep hands-on practice in order to maintain. This defines your technical depth. Stuff you know you don’t know, but know what kind of problems they solve, might or might not have read some papers, and can deep dive if need be, just not yet. This defines your technical breadth. Stuff you don’t even know you don’t know. This is everything else that exists.
These sections are not static, they shrink as time passes because knowledge in any area rapidly fades into obsolescence as the years go by, and time investment must be allocated to maintain the expertise. The things you know are also the things you must maintain.
For an engineer, and the tech lead is but the chief engineer, the main focus is to expand the top section gaining deeper and deeper knowledge on a technological niche. The deeper the engineer’s technical depth, the greater the value added to the team, regardless of technical breadth. But expanding the depth incidentally also expands the breadth, as more related technologies are encountered and superficially learned just enough to maintain the depth.
For an architect on the other hand, a broader awareness of available technologies and how it can be used to solve specific problems is more valued than a deeper knowledge of each one. It’s more beneficial to know that five solutions exist for a particular problem than to be expert in a single one. The broader the architect’s technical breadth, the greater the value added to the team, regardless of technical depth.
Types of IT Architects
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There are many ways to label an IT-related architect, but all of those names change across only two spectrums: The level of abstraction and the specialization niche.
Concerning levels of abstraction, an architect starts near the code, second only to the dev team. This is the software architect, system(singular) architect or application architect. As the organization grows, more architects might be added to form an architecture team and someone from this team, usually the leader, must detach from hands-on activities to bridge the communication between this team and the business areas, dealing only with high level abstractions and maintaining a roadmap of future changes and upgrades from a business and IT process perspective. This is the enterprise architect, or systems(plural) architect. Occupying a gray area of abstraction between these two, working across all teams, high enough to participate in business discussions, but still hands-on regarding POCs of solutions, there’s the solution architect. As more organizations are turning agile, and thus getting structurally flatter, these distinctions are gradually merging.
Regarding specialization niche, there are the domain architects. Those are solution architects, close to the solution and cross projects, but they focus their technical breadth in a narrower segment of specialization. There are data architects, infrastructure architects, security architects, cloud architects, mobile architects, etc. Few organizations need each one of them, keeping only the ones that are crucial to the business. There are also what I like to call subdomain architects, like AWS architect from cloud domain or android architect from mobile domain. But really, specialize too much and you get yourself a specialist, nor a generalist, which an architect should be.
Poor Architects
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Poor system designs exist not necessarily because of professional ineptness. More often than not, it’s the organization lack of understanding regarding the role of an architect that leaves the professional without options, unable to fulfill the part. I’ll anecdotally list a few of the worst practices:
No architect at all : That’s quite common with small companies that can’t afford such an expensive professional to contribute with “nothing” to the delivery. Maybe the decision-makers really can’t grasp the necessity of an architect, maybe they are just cutting expenses in the beginning while the field is still green. The productivity of an architect-less team is bound to plummet so fast and low, dragging through so many troubleshooting and restarts from scratch, that the inflation in cost-per-release will easily surpass the cost of an architect if it were hired from the beginning in the first place. Very naive approach.
: That’s quite common with small companies that can’t afford such an expensive professional to contribute with “nothing” to the delivery. Maybe the decision-makers really can’t grasp the necessity of an architect, maybe they are just cutting expenses in the beginning while the field is still green. The productivity of an architect-less team is bound to plummet so fast and low, dragging through so many troubleshooting and restarts from scratch, that the inflation in cost-per-release will easily surpass the cost of an architect if it were hired from the beginning in the first place. Very naive approach. Architect is the manager or CTO: I don’t know how or why it happened. Maybe the position of architect became a promotional rank on top of the IT structure and it’s just a name (in this case, see previous item); or maybe the team grew, and the architect just had to assume managerial responsibilities. The thing is that the role of an architect is already a full-time job, and IT management is one of the most stressful time-consuming distracting jobs there are. When someone, who is an architect and also a manager, must decide whether to take care of administrative tasks without which the whole team might be blocked, versus addressing design needs for a team full of engineers, it doesn’t take much to realize that the managerial role will always take precedence. Architecture duties will only take place when there are no pressing management concerns, which is probably never. Also, in this case, see previous item.
I don’t know how or why it happened. Maybe the position of architect became a promotional rank on top of the IT structure and it’s just a name (in this case, see previous item); or maybe the team grew, and the architect just had to assume managerial responsibilities. The thing is that the role of an architect is already a full-time job, and IT management is one of the most stressful time-consuming distracting jobs there are. When someone, who is an architect and also a manager, must decide whether to take care of administrative tasks without which the whole team might be blocked, versus addressing design needs for a team full of engineers, it doesn’t take much to realize that the managerial role will always take precedence. Architecture duties will only take place when there are no pressing management concerns, which is probably never. Also, in this case, see previous item. Architect is the tech lead: As explained previously, those roles require different expertise focus, leadership style, and delivery objectives! The tech lead takes care of the team, while the architect takes care of the product. Whenever the tech lead/architect is pressed to deliver fast, is in fact being discouraged to engage in design activities that might get in the way. And to code without a design leads to decay. Whenever the tech lead/architect receives a great technical challenge that can’t be delegated, aside from the fact that the solution will be biased toward a certain niche, odds are he or she will submerge into lengthy coding sessions, unrelated with the user stories left to the others, leaving the team unsupervised. The team might even be senior enough to fend for themselves, but the tech lead/architect will lose control and start to miss dates. Also, because of morale, sometimes the architect needs to give the team some space for them to accept a hard change and relies on the tech lead to make a stand on the architect’s behalf, something like a good cop/bad cop routine. It’s an impractical dynamic if both are the same person. Resentment against the tech lead for an architecture decision can implode a team from within.
As explained previously, those roles require different expertise focus, leadership style, and delivery objectives! The tech lead takes care of the team, while the architect takes care of the product. Whenever the tech lead/architect is pressed to deliver fast, is in fact being discouraged to engage in design activities that might get in the way. And to code without a design leads to decay. Whenever the tech lead/architect receives a great technical challenge that can’t be delegated, aside from the fact that the solution will be biased toward a certain niche, odds are he or she will submerge into lengthy coding sessions, unrelated with the user stories left to the others, leaving the team unsupervised. The team might even be senior enough to fend for themselves, but the tech lead/architect will lose control and start to miss dates. Also, because of morale, sometimes the architect needs to give the team some space for them to accept a hard change and relies on the tech lead to make a stand on the architect’s behalf, something like a good cop/bad cop routine. It’s an impractical dynamic if both are the same person. Resentment against the tech lead for an architecture decision can implode a team from within. Architecture committee: An architecture committee might work, in case the team or the organization is small enough. It’s a bet. If every single member is committed to putting their egos aside, reaching the best solution for the organization instead of themselves, it should work. But it’ll take precious time from projects in long meetings that raises more questions than answers, and there’ll be no documentation or fine tuning or training because every member has other priorities. The easiest thing to occur is that some members, more prominent than others, will dominate the decisions. Other easy thing to happen is that the decision won’t be the best, because once there’s no one responsible for building consensus, consensus must pre-exist, and it narrows the options.
An architecture committee might work, in case the team or the organization is small enough. It’s a bet. If every single member is committed to putting their egos aside, reaching the best solution for the organization instead of themselves, it should work. But it’ll take precious time from projects in long meetings that raises more questions than answers, and there’ll be no documentation or fine tuning or training because every member has other priorities. The easiest thing to occur is that some members, more prominent than others, will dominate the decisions. Other easy thing to happen is that the decision won’t be the best, because once there’s no one responsible for building consensus, consensus must pre-exist, and it narrows the options. Out of focus architect : Also taken from Neal Ford’s blog about Mark’s Pyramid, there are architects that tries to maintain expertise in a wide variety of areas, succeeding in none of them and working themselves ragged in the process. It might even happen because the architect doesn’t understand his job, but I bet it’s the organization that doesn’t get it and assign to the architect any responsibility that doesn’t seem to have a clear owner, leaving no room for delegation.
: Also taken from Neal Ford’s blog about Mark’s Pyramid, there are architects that tries to maintain expertise in a wide variety of areas, succeeding in none of them and working themselves ragged in the process. It might even happen because the architect doesn’t understand his job, but I bet it’s the organization that doesn’t get it and assign to the architect any responsibility that doesn’t seem to have a clear owner, leaving no room for delegation. Frozen Caveman Antipattern: Also taken from Neal Ford’s blog about Mark’s Pyramid, there are architects who didn’t engage in hands-on activities for years and manifests a stale expertise — the mistaken sensation that outdated information is still cutting edge. Although some enjoyable skill areas will still remain, an architect is as good as his or her knowledge is updated.
Also taken from Neal Ford’s blog about Mark’s Pyramid, there are architects who didn’t engage in hands-on activities for years and manifests a stale expertise — the mistaken sensation that outdated information is still cutting edge. Although some enjoyable skill areas will still remain, an architect is as good as his or her knowledge is updated. Biased architect: Architecture decisions should follow the UNPHAT principle: U nderstand the problem; e N umerate multiple candidates, read its P apers, determine H istorical context, weight A dvantages and then T hink about how well each solution solves the problem. Architects aren’t allowed to worship some FAANG solutions or to decide for a technology just because it’s personally enjoyable. Everybody is allowed to be biased, except when making decisions that will impact everybody else.
Architecture decisions should follow the UNPHAT principle: nderstand the problem; e umerate multiple candidates, read its apers, determine istorical context, weight dvantages and then hink about how well each solution solves the problem. Architects aren’t allowed to worship some FAANG solutions or to decide for a technology just because it’s personally enjoyable. Everybody is allowed to be biased, except when making decisions that will impact everybody else. Weak or indulgent architect: As business areas will naturally be pressing for speed, the architect is the only opposing force pressing for product quality and integrity. Maybe the organization doesn’t grant the proper privileges and you have a weak architect who’s unable to perform this part of the role. Maybe you have an indulgent one, that has proper privileges but is too quick to comply with the organization urgency neglecting to measure and present the risks so as everyone gets compromised. It’s the manager job to deal with desires and expectations, an architect is also an engineer and must address the board and other areas with solid statements based on facts and evidences.
Good Architects
Photo by Jan Huber on Unsplash
Architects are invisible backstage maintainers. The best way to recognize you have good ones is by the absence of the problems they solve, when things are the way they should be.
Product refinement meetings are short: Imagine the situation where your client now decides the system’s profile page must save an image along with the other text data it already does, but the respective microservice has no database or filesystem support because all the I/O is handled solely by stream. It’s not a difficult request, there are actually many ways to put it together. If you don’t have an architect, every engineer will have an idea, make proposes, a few will be singled out by the reputation of whoever put it forward and the team will discuss and draw and discuss and redraw until agreeing on an approach that isn’t necessarily the best but makes everybody happy, because everybody has to stay happy. It’ll probably end up being an amalgamation of the top approaches. And it’ll take time. Lather, rinse, repeat, and instead of a backlog refinement meeting, the topics will digress in a series of never-ending technical brainstorm meetings where little business requirements are discussed. But if there is an architect present, engineers will only have to inquire whether or not the system is prepared, in case it isn’t then when it’ll be, and proceed with business concerns. The client won’t get bored, you won’t get bored, everybody will remain engaged, the team will write all necessary tasks, it’ll come clear for everyone, job’s done, and the meeting ends swiftly and productively. That’s the way it should always be.
You know your numbers: Managers measure productivity, but architects measure indicators like how much of your code is covered by tests, is duplicated, smells bad, or has possible bugs and vulnerabilities. This is obviously not done manually, but by tools that are fit into the continuous integration/delivery process designed by the architect. At any point in time, you’ll know the level of maturity of your overall solution regarding many aspects.
Your productivity ratio is stable: In software development, productivity tends to start high and then drop as much as new features are added to the codebase. It happens because of the aforementioned code decay, since creating something new is easy but adding more features without breaking what was already working is hard. Architects guards the codebase from code decay, and if done properly, adding new features will seldom touch what is already working. Also, nobody from the team has to worry about non-functional requirements, focusing on the functional requirements which are much easier to estimate.
The team is seldom blocked by technical issues: Code rigidity or code fragility, mainly, have a way to surprise engineers with problems that couldn’t be anticipated until when actually writing the code. Then tasks become overdue or might not even be delivered. Justifications are “It was more complicated than I thought” or “I don’t know what happened, I didn’t even touch the part that broke.” Architects guard the codebase against code rigidity or code fragility, avoiding theses kind of problems.
What then?
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Well, assuming you have enough years in the industry, you must have related to many or maybe all the problems presented in this article. And if I did my job well, you were able to visualize the causes behind the consequences you had to endure, the missing cog wrecking the whole machinery. Maybe you were even convinced that this is how things were with IT, and now you know it isn’t.
And if you are part of the privileged ones that get to work in an agile company, where everything runs smoothly and your worst problems are getting well-written user stories from clients, then you now know who is keeping the house of cards from falling.
If you don’t have an architect with you, do hire one with recent hands-on experience, or promote one from the most enthusiastic of your tech leads. If you don’t have enough budget to keep one in addition to a development team, don’t commit the common mistake of demanding software to an architect-less team, it’ll be unmaintainable in no time. Go with a team-less architect. It’s faster to have one release approved for productions than many release-candidates that will have to be refactored. | https://medium.com/@rafaelmedeiros/why-software-architects-are-essential-and-why-you-need-one-4fc0609b9c10 | ['Rafael Medeiros'] | 2020-12-22 07:11:14.488000+00:00 | ['System Design', 'Software Architecture', 'Solution Architect', 'Software Development', 'Software Architect'] |
198 Actions for Peace | 198 Actions for Peace
A peaceful life
Care for your personal wellbeing
Foster healthy habits
1. Keep a healthy diet
2. Be active & move regularly
3. Laugh every day
4. Embrace idle time
5. Find appropriate outlets to express yourself
6. Surround yourself with inspiration
7. Celebrate your accomplishments
8. Take walks
9. Develop a practice of gratitude
10. Get sufficient sleep
Calm your mind
11. Be in the moment
12. Live simply
13. De-clutter & green your spaces
14. Spend time in nature
15. Embrace solitude
16. Be mindful of your media consumption
17. Find/use contemplative practices that work for you
Develop your competency to build peace
Develop your emotional intelligence
18. Pay attention to what you are feeling
19. Build your emotional vocabulary
20. Observe the emotions of others
21. Recognize emotional triggers & patterns
22. Discuss feelings openly
23. Cultivate patience & practice regulating your emotions
Learn about culture, conflict & inequality
24. Learn from a different culture, perspective or worldview
25. Educate yourself about systemic injustice & inequality
26. Learn about the dynamics of conflict
27. Volunteer in support of a social justice cause
28. Critically reflect on privilege & opportunity
29. Reflect on the formation of your worldview
30. Challenge your beliefs & perceptions
Nurture your creative capacities
31. Invite music & art into your life
32. Spend time with creative people
33. Put yourself in situations where you don’t know what is going to happen
34. Develop creative routines & habits
35. Create time & space for creative endeavors
Design your life
36. Explore a range of passions & interests
37. Be intentional with how you spend your time
38. Reduce stressors
39. Check your bias
40. Clarify your priorities; set intensions & goals
41. Focus on what you want (not on what you don’t want)
42. Make decisions based on your intuition
43. Notice/seize/create opportunities
44. Find a mentor
45. Build your life around something you are passionate about
46. Embrace the process
Peaceful relationships
Foster healthy relationships with those around you
47. Be fully present for others
48. Share your time freely
49. Practice deep listening
50. Observe & appreciate the good in others
51. Support others to pursue their dreams
52. Teach children to resolve conflicts peacefully
53. Hold space for those experiencing difficult times
54. Model compassionate & empathetic behavior
55. Share opportunity with persons less privileged than yourself
56. Be a mentor
Transform conflict in relationships
57. Recognize & acknowledge the humanity of others
58. Internalize to find solutions
59. Listen with empathy & practice skillful communication
60. Find common ground
61. Find ways to address grievances
62. Focus on shared interests & needs
63. Build trust & re-imagine relationships
64. Create opportunities for forgiveness, healing & reconciliation
65. Mediate a conflict or open space for dialogue
Build community
66. Find/build a tribe who shares your passion
67. Connect with others based on shared values
68. Get to know people as individuals
69. Be attentive to the needs of community members
70. Facilitate connections amongst group members
71. Take collaborative action on issues you care about
72. Diversify your personal network
73. Build trust where there is conflict or division
74. Find allies within institutions tied to dynamics of war, violence & inequality
75. Form an unconventional coalition
76. Consider the presence & needs of victims, immigrants, refugees & other marginalized communities
77. Celebrate the accomplishments of community members
Peace in spaces and places
Create spaces
78. Create spaces to promote intercultural learning
79. Create spaces to learn about social justice history/issues
80. Create safe spaces, demilitarized zones, sanctuaries or zones of peace
81. Create sacred, quiet or shared spaces
82. Plan exchanges & exposure trips
83. Create public/shared spaces
84. Transfer property to the public domain
85. Design public/community spaces collaboratively
Revitalize spaces
86. Preserve/protect diverse culture/historic sites
87. Reclaim/recreate parks, plazas & walkways
88. Make spaces accessible, inclusive & family friendly
89. Revitalize schools & educational spaces
90. Offer/remake private spaces for public use
91. Create a community garden or green shared spaces
92. Start a mural or community art project
93. Remove monuments to heroes that represent war, empire & oppression
94. Build monuments to peace heroes
Utilize shared spaces
95. Map the natural & cultural assets of your community
96. Make a community newsletter
97. Utilize public spaces for performance, art or activism
98. Share food & culture in public spaces
99. Host public concerts, lectures, films & cultural events
100. Use online spaces for collaborative action & learning
Preserve & protect natural spaces
101. Reduce your carbon footprint
102. Preserve/protect/recover natural environments
103. Defend people harmed by environmental degradation
104. Hold parties liable for environmental destruction
105. Support local, fair trade & earth friendly business
106. Vote/advocate to phase out fossil fuels
107. Promote renewable energy sources
108. Advocate for environmental justice
109. Support ethical & sustainable travel
110. Support innovations in sustainable living
A culture of peace
Dismantle cultures of violence
Make structural & cultural violence visible
111. Break cultures of silence
112. Shine light on the legacy of historic injustice/inequality
113. Research/uncover structural & cultural violence
114. Speak truth to power
Disrupt narratives that rationalize violence
115. Discredit war propaganda & myths that justify violence
116. Demystify threats & promote an understanding that violence is not innate, war not inevitable
117. Expose motivations & deceptive tactics of hate groups, corrupt leaders & others who rationalize violence
118. Disrupt narratives that downplay gender-based violence
119. Deconstruct nationalist ideologies & politics of division
120. Combat hate speech & humanize marginalized groups
121. Challenge gendered & racialized thinking about roles, norms & behavior; deconstruct stereotypes
122. Disrupt neo-colonial mindsets
123. Speak out against misuse of religion for discriminatory purposes, especially within your own faith group
124. Employ creative ways to shame & ridicule cultural norms & behaviors that promote violence & inequality
Build a culture of peace
Promote elements of peace in culture
125. Document peace history; celebrate peace heroes (not war heroes)
126. Harmonize diversity with unity, strength & innovation
127. Promote inclusive group/national identity
128. Reframe justice & equality as issues for everyone
129. Promote the worth, dignity & rights of all persons recognizing unique challenges of marginalized groups
130. Encourage critical reflection on cultural norms, behaviors & attitudes
131. Promote community service & social responsibility
132. Promote the value of characteristics/qualities associated with all gender identity groups
Use culture to bridge divides
133. Celebrate days of peace, human rights & social justice
134. Involve cultural icons in peace actions
135. Publicize symbolic acts of unity, defiance or forgiveness
136. Join/create public prayer, meditation & vigils for peace
137. Plan events collaboratively with diverse groups
138. Honor indigenous knowledge & spiritual wisdom
139. Re-invent language; re-name something
140. Produce/use peace imagery; re-imagine symbols
141. Create rituals that promote peace & tolerance
Teach peace
142. Educate about peace heroes & history; shift the focus from histories of war & violence
143. Teach comparative history
144. Educate about social justice issues past & present
145. Teach to understand the perspective of other cultures & worldviews
146. Teach emotional intelligence
147. Promote critical media literacy
148. Link education & community development
149. Utilize participatory methods & approaches
150. Educate or develop curriculum on themes related to peace, conflict, social justice or human rights
Leverage art & media for peace
151. Use music, performance, poetry, comedy or storytelling to raise awareness of issues or imagine peaceful futures
152. Use sports to bring people in conflict together
153. Dance or craft for a cause
154. Collaborate with diverse artists or musicians
155. Promote freedom of the press & access to information
156. Amplify peace narratives, social justice issues & marginalized voices in diverse media outlets
157. Build characters & storylines that break stereotypes
158. Portray peaceful resolution of conflict in the media
Peace infrastructure
Withdraw resources from war & violence
159. Divert spending on war towards budgeting for peace, social services, arts & culture
160. Boycott or divest from companies, governments, individuals & institutions that promote/profit from war
161. Advocate against the global arms trade, excessive military spending & military aid to entities implicated in crimes
162. Disrupt structures that support war through non-violent protest, non-cooperation & non-violent intervention
163. Change supply & demand of products & services associated with conflict dynamics
164. Reduce benefits for elites in waging/continuing war or violent activities; increase incentives for peace
165. Hold leaders to account for promoting war
Reform structures & institutions
Reform structures tied to the dynamics of war & violence
166. Demilitarize defense & security
167. Promote disarmament, demobilization & reintegration
168. Use military & police for peaceful purposes
169. Demilitarize police & security personnel
Reform structures that produce inequality
170. Advocate for (or create) mechanisms for accountability & transparency; uproot corruption
171. Audit government agencies to ensure balanced delivery of services & contributions to distributive justice
172. Promote mechanisms that support equality in housing & employment; & equal access to justice
173. Confront unjust incarceration practices & mobilize for incisive criminal justice reform
174. Remove obstacles to the upward mobility & self-determination of all peoples
175. Support & protect whistleblowers
176. Transform the dynamics of international aid
Create policies that promote peace, justice & equality
177. Produce tax policies that mitigate excessive wealth & generate funds for social services
178. Produce policies that support equal pay, guarantee dignified work & ensure living wages for all jobs
179. Promote laws for equitable sharing of natural resources
180. Promote policies for equal access to quality education, health care & social services
181. Advocate for corporate social responsibility
182. Create laws that regulate the production & sale of weaponry at the domestic & international levels
183. Reform legal, foundational & policy documents
Transform leadership & decision-making
184. Support/elect leaders that promote tolerance, peace & care for marginalized populations; confront leaders who promote nuclearization & armament
185. Open communication channels between leaders, local communities & marginalized groups
186. Promote egalitarian, democratic leadership structures & decision-making practices
187. Decentralize power & decision-making
188. Ensure equitable representation & meaningful participation of marginalized groups in decision-making
189. Promote collaborative design & management of projects & activities; embed mechanisms for reflection
190. Utilize local/indigenous conflict resolution mechanisms
Build/support peace infrastructure
191. Support the creation (or existing work) of government departments dedicated to promoting peace & justice
192. Create/support a community organization, non-profit or social enterprise working on issues you care about
193. Create/support mechanisms to report, prevent or respond to violence; or an early warning mechanism
194. Create/support structures, institutions & groups that care for marginalized communities & victims of violence
195. Create/support values based programs & projects
196. Build/offer physical structures & spaces to groups working on peace & justice issues
197. Create/support mechanisms of truth & reconciliation
198. Create/join platforms, forums or networks for peace | https://tayloroconnor.medium.com/198-actions-for-peace-44c9cbab8095 | ["Taylor O'Connor"] | 2020-07-21 10:23:25.476000+00:00 | ['Activism', 'Justice', 'Nonviolence', 'Peacebuilding', 'Peace'] |
Stop Filling Up All the Empty Space in Your Life | “Grace fills empty spaces.” -Simone Weil
I’ve been on a road trip with my son and his girlfriend. It’s been amazing and I’m glad I have a relationship with a young adult son who wants to spend double-digit hours in a car with his mom. Like all good vacations, it’s been filled with car music and reminiscing conversations, packed with things to do — this trip complete with an evening concert at the Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado.
Several bucket list items have been checked off and I am enjoying the foray from the beaten path. I’ve been overdue for some inspiration and a much needed time away from my daily routine. There is one part of my routine, however, that I miss and need daily.
It’s my quiet time.
I live in a season in my life where I have the luxury of extended periods of time and quiet — a luxury I never had working full time or caring for young children. I work for myself so I choose the times I want to interact and guard the times I set aside to be isolated and alone.
On a typical day, I spend at least half of it in silence other than the tapping on my keyboard as I write like I am now or the barking beagle who spots a barn cat where she shouldn’t be. I do not turn on the television, radio, news shows, or background music.
I need silence because I need to listen.
Silence provides the gaps in life and the stillness my mind craves.
The spaces matter too
When I am bombarded with constant input my head feels full and stuffed from ear to ear. Thoughts are not my own (and certainly not my muse’s) and my thinking is muddled. The act of receiving good words to write is not about seeking them but listening to them.
I listen, I pay attention to a sentence that shoots fully formed into my mind, I take it down and then listen for where it wants to go next. It’s margin. it’s empty space.
It’s white space, whatever you want to call it, but what I’ve found is that grace fills those empty spaces.
I have no editorial calendar. I have ideas and story starters, but in between the ideas and a finished written product that connects with readers is a vast open space that only grace can fill.
When you think about it, grace is the filler for all we lack. It fills when relationships sustain hurt and a gap is created. Invited, grace can bridge the folded arms and hurt hearts and bring us back to each other. Grace fills the space between the love of a child and parent where words are difficult and perspectives are so polarized they seem almost insurmountable. Grace tethers us without words. It keeps us from floating away from each other.
But grace requires space in which to manifest itself. It’s a lot like letting go. When we refuse to figure out our next step, it is revealed to us.
I once heard a preacher explain theological grace as what fills the gap between God’s ideal for mankind (love without judgment, forgive without measure, and give without reluctance) and our feeble attempts to be like Him.
Wherever you fall short, grace fills the gap — no matter how wide or deep or how far you feel you’ve fallen from the ideal. It is fluid, it is changing, it is versatile, connecting dots and hearts when language cannot match up.
Grace is a love language that cannot be perfected, only received and practiced.
Grace needs empty spaces to show up and so often we lack grace because we try to fill the gaps on our own. We pour in pride — I am right you are wrong, move toward me. We try to bridge with nagging, coercing, manipulating and controlling but the gap only widens, creating unbreachable chasms. We despair and forget to ask for grace.
There is a reason Jesus always asked anyone who approached him with a variation of the question, “What do you want?” Not because he was making them beg, and not to embarrass them, but to reveal that on their own they could not undo the wrong, or tip justice in their favor, or fix a broken body.
By asking for grace we reveal the truth that grace is always what we all need.
Photo by juan pablo rodriguez on Unsplash
I believe that the reason we are a noise-filled, driven society that constantly pumps words into our ears and images into our eyes is because the oldest trick of life still drives us. We’re too proud to sit with gaps.
We believe, beyond the obvious evidence we face daily, that we can fix what’s broken, master our inadequacies, and control our lives. It’s a chimera we stubbornly cling to with boastful words and try to show up when what we need to do is shut up and sit down.
Maybe the reason we’re so afraid of empty spaces, silence, unanswered questions, and blocks of unproductive time is because we still can’t receive grace.
Let grace be enough
Grace is bantered about in certain circles but unless we take time to allow it into our lives it’s just a thing we say without real application. If grace is enough to fill the empty spaces why do we stuff and cram so much into all areas of our lives?
Words, opinions, activities — we surround ourselves with energies that in the long run drain instead of fill and lift. We see any moment of downtime as a lapse in productivity and productivity is just a fancy word for life on the hamster wheel. But it’s addictive and shiny at first and fills our need to think we are important and, well, important people don’t need grace.
The closets are full, calendars crammed, mental space stuffed with nonstop stimulation and information. We’ve forgotten how to be still, our children never experience the freedom of boredom, we book from end to end and write in all the margins. Where can grace live?
“I think we need to learn how to tolerate more empty spaces.” — Sarah Ban Breathnach
Maybe we don’t really need grace if we can fill all the gaps on our own. The be more, hustle-to-get-there lifestyle doesn’t account for grace, does it? It screams you were made for more, set more goals, raise the bar.
You don’t need grace when you’re the craftswoman of your own life.
You do need grace when you’re allowing yourself to be transformed and shaped into the image of a holy God. Grace and space are prerequisites and ongoing requirements in the journey of transformation. God isn’t impressed with resumes.
“Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7 NIV)
Check your gaps, cracks, and spaces. Instead of trying to fill and caulk them, explore what it would be like to acknowledge them and then invite Grace to fill them. | https://medium.com/koinonia/stop-filling-up-all-the-empty-space-in-your-life-56c14a9be1b | ['Mary Gallagher'] | 2019-06-25 01:27:09.895000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Writing Tips', 'Intentional Living', 'Self-awareness', 'Life Lessons'] |
Control and Compliance: How to Define Your Security Posture | Your organization’s security posture refers to the overall strength of your cybersecurity. Security posture involves many things, including your organization’s ability to protect data, apps, infrastructure, and more from breaches and cyber attacks. How should you define your organization’s security posture? Put simply: it’s a combination of control and compliance.
Why is Your Security Posture Important?
How vulnerable is your organization to outside threats? A strong security posture is necessary to detect and prevent intrusions, data breaches, and the theft of valuable intellectual property.
A weak security posture means that your organization is at undue risk of compromise. It’s important to note that a weak security posture puts all of your data at risk, including customer data. It also puts you at risk of being non-compliant with several important laws and regulations regarding data privacy. These regulations detail what data must be protected and, in some cases, how. You need a strong security posture to meet the requirements of these regulations.
Note, however, that your organization’s security posture is continuously changing as new threats emerge and the overall cyber environment evolves. To fully protect your company’s cyber assets, you need to monitor and improve your security posture regularly. You must stay at least one step ahead of cybercriminals who seek to exploit any weaknesses in your cybersecurity net.
Defining Your Organization’s Security Posture
It’s essential to take a disciplined approach when defining your organization’s security posture. Make sure that your cybersecurity program aligns with your organization’s overall goals; it’s vital to have the right security measures in place to protect your existing and planned systems and infrastructure.
Establish a Set of Security Controls
The first step in defining your organization’s security posture is establishing a clearly-defined set of security controls. These controls should align with your security goals and allow you to measure your progress on those goals.
Your security controls should be part of your overall security framework. You can use a common controls framework (CCF) that works with current compliance programs or the industry-standard NIST framework. Select those controls within the framework that most directly impact your organization’s security and exclude those that don’t directly contribute to your security posture. By eliminating unnecessary complexity, a focused set of security controls is easier to manage and easier to scale over time.
To measure the effectiveness of these security controls, establish an appropriate metric. This metric needs to measure and communicate the effectiveness of each control. You can establish this metric by identifying the key performance indicator (KPI) and service level objective (SLO) for each control.
You can then create a simple scale of 1 to 5 that scores all of your controls’ effectiveness. Your most effective controls would rate a 5 on this scale; the least effective would rate a 1.
To calculate your organization’s overall security posture, total the weighted ratings for each of the controls and express that as a percent of the total maximum score (the total number of controls times five). This calculation gives you a percentage-based security assessment, as follows:
90% or higher = strong security posture
80%-89% = could be strengthened
70%-79% = needs work
Less than 70% = requires immediate attention
You can also use this method to evaluate the security posture for each family of controls so that you can focus your attention on specific areas of your cybersecurity. The goal is to determine the current strength of your organization’s cybersecurity.
Ensure Compliance
Merely measuring the state of your security posture is only half of the job. You also need to ensure that your organization’s security measures comply with the controls you’re measuring.
To do this, you need to perform an ongoing series of internal or third-party cybersecurity audits. You can then match the results of these audits with the controls you’ve previously identified. If current performance does not fully comply with your control goals, you know which areas need to be strengthened.
You also need to ensure that your security efforts comply with all necessary legal and industry regulations, such as PCI DSS, HIPPA, and FFIEC. Unfortunately, many organizations are frequently non-compliant — in fact, 66% of organizations surveyed had experienced a compliance violation or lapse in the past three years. Non-compliance can result in hefty fines or even the shutdown of specific aspects of your business, so ensuring compliance is an essential component of your security posture.
Improve Your Security Posture with Wickr’s Secure Collaboration Platform
To strengthen your security posture, you need a secure communications platform for both on-premise and remote workers — such as that offered by Wickr.
Wickr’s collaboration platform offers one-on-one and group messaging, audio and video conferencing, file sharing, and more, all secured with industry-leading end-to-end encryption. Contact us to discover how Wickr can help strengthen your organization’s security posture.
Contact us today to learn more about Wickr’s secure collaboration platform! | https://medium.com/@wickr/control-and-compliance-how-to-define-your-security-posture-92d5138924e9 | [] | 2021-03-12 21:21:44.086000+00:00 | ['Security', 'Wickr', 'Compliance', 'Information Security', 'Cybersecurity'] |
We Need More Sex-Positive Grandmas | I knew the moment that Ricky was standing there, shirtless in just his boxers with the fridge door open what was coming.
Gossipy and domineering town matriarch Connie’s niece Lizzie and server at Jack’s (intriguing man) bar Ricky had sex for the first time. Lizzie said her aunt would be away for a while so they had the house to themselves. Ricky and Lizzie talked about it beforehand, used a condom, and were sweet to each other. After a post-coital snuggle, Ricky went to get her some lemonade. Which was also very sweet.
Of course, in a delightfully dramatic fashion, Ricky closes the fridge door finding himself face to face with Connie. She is absolutely irate and predictably kicks him out of her house, forbidding him from seeing Lizzie again. (Which, have you ever heard of Romeo and Juliet? Or ever been a teenager? There is nothing hotter than being told that you can’t see someone and then seeing that person.)
Which brings me to the scene that actually brought tears to my eyes. We cut to the home where Ricky lives with his grandmother. In their living room, an angry and indignant Connie says, “Your degenerate grandson defiled my niece.” Connie clearly expects that Ricky’s grandma will agree with her as she rattles through the typical sex-shaming language about sin and even uses the phrase “filthy paws.” She also clearly puts 100% of the responsibility and agency on Ricky’s shoulders. This is despite Lizzie being very comfortable with the sexual encounter and confidently acknowledging that they had sex, much to the dismay of her aunt.
Not only is grandma not disappointed in Ricky and rightfully points out that he and Lizzie are both adults, but she says she is proud of him. Grandma is firm, stating, “I know where you’re coming from, Connie. But times have changed.” Connie is unmoved, but the look that Ricky shares with his grandma is beautiful to witness.
Later in the episode, Ricky and his grandma have a tender moment in the kitchen. He thanks her for sticking up for him and she affirms him, “I just spoke the truth… I only want you to be safe and smart. Because I love you.”
Imagine for a moment if we approached our conversations around sex with like a sex-positive grandma, instead of one of shame and fear. Imagine conversations led by love and respect and informed by facts, where young people in our lives feel like they can be honest with us. It never sat right with me that sex was supposed to be this dirty, awful thing I should save for my one true love. Sex-positive grandma didn’t call her grandson filthy for connecting physically with someone he cares about.
Being sex-positive doesn’t mean encouraging risky behavior, but encouraging safe and smart practices around a completely normal human behavior: sex. | https://medium.com/fearless-she-wrote/we-need-more-sex-positive-grandmas-abb3112ac960 | ['Ashley Cleland'] | 2020-12-09 21:40:03.817000+00:00 | ['Sex', 'Sexuality', 'Relationships', 'Family', 'Feminism'] |
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Yuanjie Zhang, Co-Founder of Conflux Network on why every brand should adopt an NFT strategy | Yuanjie Zhang, Co-Founder of Conflux Network on why every brand should adopt an NFT strategy Radicle Follow Dec 30, 2021 · 19 min read
By Jianqian Lin
Building a direct communication channel with your customers: Yuanjie Zhang, Co-Founder of Conflux Network on why every brand should adopt an NFT strategy
NFTs are a great tool to establish a direct channel of communication between your brand and your users. What’s more, the users who purchase your company’s NFTs will help manage your online community as they become increasingly invested in your brand.
In this attention economy, what matters most is the amount of time and energy your users and customers devote to your service products. And NFTs are the greatest attention magnet the web has to offer right now.
Welcome to the first edition of Breaking Through China, Radicle China’s series of interviews with companies at the forefront of the dynamic, disruptive, and fast-growing Chinese startup markets that matter to you. If you are interested in learning more about Radicle China, please reach out to: [email protected]
In our conversation, we cover:
Why global brands like McDonald’s and Oreos chose to work with Conflux?
NFT applications in China and what we can expect to see in the future?
Why is now a good time for brands to implement an NFT strategy?
What are some challenges that brands should consider?
And more.
Enjoy!
— -
As the world of blockchains, cryptocurrency and NFTs continues to evolve at a breakneck pace, so too must the companies building online platforms for fast and secure exchange. Faced with a number of variables, including shifting market expectations and new regulations, these businesses must quickly adjust as they strive to develop a new online infrastructure, often referred to as Web 3.0.
This rings especially true in China, where the recent ban on cryptocurrencies has necessitated a swift but dramatic paradigm shift in the blockchain and crypto sectors. To learn more about the most recent developments there, Radicle’s China Lead, Jianqian Lin, sat down with Yuanjie Zhang — Co-Founder of Conflux Network, the only permissionless blockchain that has achieved full regulatory compliance in China — to talk about where the market is headed and how newcomers to the space can get started.
Yuanjie holds a Bachelor’s Degree from Fudan University and a Master’s Degree from Brandeis University. Before becoming a founding member of Conflux, he worked at Huatai Private Fund of Funds, UNC Endowment Management Company, and Novus in Wall Street. His extensive expertise in investments, capital markets, and business operations made him eminently qualified to speak about the NFT landscape in China, how Conflux participates in it and how brands can work with Conflux.
Conflux Network is actively building a borderless, transactional, and technological ecosystem for globally-minded crypto projects, extending beyond China to North America, Russia, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and the rest of the world. Most recently, they worked with McDonald’s China and Oreos to release NFTs on their blockchain.
What is Conflux Network?
Conflux is a public network, also known as a public chain. Really, it’s a public ledger where people can exchange digital assets and record those transactions. Nowadays, people are frequently exchanging fungible tokens, more commonly known as crypto assets, but non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are also fast-growing in popularity. NFTs can represent a lot of things: art, music, and various types of collections. Between those two — cryptos and NFTs — there’s a vast array of digital assets that are being exchanged and recorded on the public ledger that is Conflux.
In many ways, Conflux is extremely similar to Ethereum, which has surged in international popularity. Conflux, though, distinguishes itself from Ethereum with a significant improvement in capacity. Ethereum only processes 10–20 transactions per second and costs $50–200 per transaction, which is, as I’m sure you can imagine, insanely prohibitive. As it stands, Ethereum can only carry high-value transactions, and that’s preventing its mass adoption. Conflux entered the blockchain space in 2018 to solve these capacity problems.
What does it mean to be a platform that’s achieved full regulatory compliance? What advantages does it give Conflux?
I’d like to talk about compliance from two vantage points.
Let’s start with the technological perspective. Everyone knows that the use of a public chain requires the consumption of computing resources, which we often refer to as “gas.” If you want to use Ethereum, for instance, you have to have some Ether handy to consume as gas. But in order to have Ether in the first place, you have to buy cryptos on an exchange, which requires a fiat on-ramp. This whole process is essentially banned in China, which prevents ordinary users from interacting with the public chain. To work around this ban, Conflux has developed a solution — we call it a “sponsorship mechanism” — that allows any third party to pay for gas on the user’s behalf, instead of making the user pay for it directly.
Let’s use an example. When you use an application on a mobile phone, generally it’s deployed on a cloud computing server. But instead of making the user pay the cloud computing service fee directly, the developers typically pay for it, while the user pays through membership fees, advertisement revenue, or purchase of the application.
In the same way, Conflux’s sponsorship mechanism enables users to forego the computing cost — they no longer have to purchase any cryptos before interacting with the public chain. That’s not to mention the fact that the Conflux Foundation reserved a large number of tokens to compensate the developers who first adopted the Conflux public chain. As long as we’re in the early days of Conflux, even developers don’t have to pay a gas fee — they can simply request a sponsorship from the Foundation. And in the future, once these developers’ applications have been adopted by many users, thereby giving way to a steady revenue stream, they can commercially contract Conflux Foundation or any third-party vendor to deal directly with the cryptos. So we’ve created a platform where developers, applications, entrepreneurs, and users don’t have to transact cryptos directly in order to take part in the blockchain. The Conflux Foundation or any third-party vendors can take care of that while the merchants and the users all operate in a crypto-free environment.
Now, let’s also talk about this from a regulatory perspective. The Conflux team has actually built an excellent relationship with the Chinese government, especially the Shanghai government. Since we continue to keep an open channel of communication with them, the government has no problem with our work as we develop an ecosystem of applications in a sandbox environment. This has given Conflux a tremendous advantage throughout China — we’ve developed a very positive public image nationally, earning coverage from both People’s Daily and Shanghai Weekly newspaper. And as a result, many developers, users, and enterprise clients are more than happy to collaborate with Conflux.
McDonald’s has released a set of 188 NFTs to celebrate its 31st anniversary in the Chinese market.
How is Conflux different from other chains in China? Why do large companies like McDonald’s and Oreos choose Conflux?
First of all, Conflux is actually an open public network. This means it’s an infrastructure that’s not predicated on conventional business priorities, like profit-making or profit-maximizing for shareholders. The clients that have deployed their own NFTs on Conflux are not served by Conflux directly — McDonald’s and Oreos, for instance, are both served by a third-party technology company called CoCafe, which helps their clients deploy on Conflux and then earns revenue from that. We actively encourage these ecosystem companies to figure out a business model through which they can successfully make money. Through Conflux, people are realizing their entrepreneurial goals.
In addition, we’ve launched a platform called TaoPai (淘派), which is similar to eBay or Taobao, that allows people to sell their NFTs or digital collections on the platform as soon as they’ve been onboarded. What’s truly amazing about TaoPai, is that it’s an open-source platform, which means that companies that want to build their own platform — such as a McDonald’s or an Oreos, or even a Starbucks — will have no trouble leveraging the open-source code to develop their own platforms.
Our aim is to build a very open and transparent infrastructure that can be accessed by anyone, anywhere. We’re not going after profits, or even revenue, at the moment. Instead, we’re trying to achieve universal adoption of the Conflux Network. The best way to achieve that is by being open and friendly to new ecosystem partners. If you can make money or attract new clients to our platform, we’re happy to work with you. And that includes everyone, from merchants and enterprises to independent video artists and cartoon makers. Even blind box companies who want to sell their digital blind boxes have a home on Conflux.
Within Conflux, there will be many sections: some larger enterprises will be verified, and individual creators who have a lot of followers on TikTok, Weibo, or Kuaishou will also be verified through our social networking verification mechanism. As long as you have a contingent of people who love your product, service, culture, or artwork, you’ll have no trouble monetizing that on our platforms. That’s the spirit of Conflux — unlike big internet companies, whose bottom line is profit maximization, we offer open infrastructure that enables other people to realize their potential.
The second point I’d like to touch on is technological restriction. To offer NFTs on consortium chains like Tencent or Ant, which is owned by Alibaba, you have to use functions and features that are dictated by the big enterprises that own them. So if they determine that an NFT is not transferable, you’ll have no say in the matter — you won’t be able to trade with other parties. On the Ant and Tencent blockchains, you have to adhere to the demands of the big companies overseeing the blockchain. If they choose to restrict your functions, that’s the end of it.
But on a public chain like Conflux, the developers — not the platform — decide how NFTs can be used for both themselves and their clients. They have independent agency over whether an NFT is non-transferable or transferable after a certain period of time, or whether its transferability is restricted to certain white lists. They’re able to write such features or functions into the smart contracts that come with all digital assets.
Also, a lot of the larger enterprises that own blockchains have other business interests, which often makes them very cautious and conservative when building their platforms. As a result, the larger enterprises are still subscribing to the monopolistic mindset of Web 2.0. They restrict functions and features for new users and prevent NFTs from being shown on other platforms. Every NFT you purchase on Alipay, for instance, which is deployed on AntChain, will only be displayable within Alipay. It’s no different from having a picture in Alipay — the data is completely inaccessible to other developers. Nobody will be able to serve your digital assets except Ali.
But when you’re allowed to treat a picture as your digital asset, not the blockchain’s, it becomes so much more — you can decide how to use it. As long as there are people who would like to serve your NFT, you’ll be able to see it on multiple platforms. And it can serve many functions: trading, social, auctions or even fractions. All of these are allowed by a public chain like Conflux, on which users can decide both how and where they want to interact with the blockchain while exchanging their NFT assets.
Now that’s a huge difference between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, and honestly I think they’re going in two completely different directions: the public chains vs. the consortium chains. It’s two different paths. And gradually the people who work with those big internet enterprises are going to end up on a very narrow path — they’ll only be able to see their pictures in restricted contexts. That’s not to mention that a big enterprise could fail or suffer censure from the government, in which case people’s pictures may just disappear.
It all sounds like these consortium chains are anything but decentralized — users can only display their assets on a single platform. Also, some exciting features like trading transactions and fraction auctions are not permitted on platforms like AntChain and Tencent’s Chain, right?
It’s almost like a dictatorship, don’t you think? It’s not up to you. It’s up to them. And also the data are not accessible to other developers, which means that you can only be served on the platform where you originally bought the asset. If someone has exclusively sold in Ali Pay, for instance, that means he can only be served by other users of the Ali ecosystem. So if you bought your NFTs on Ali Pay, you’ll never be able to see them in Wechat or in Tencent’s ecosystem. That’s Web 2.0, where the big giants are fighting against each other. That’s not decentralized.
If you actively try to prevent your traffic from going to other platforms, then you’re knowingly adopting a monopolistic mindset — at that point, you’re basically treating your users’ data as your own assets, which is flat-out wrong. Digital assets should belong to the people who actually create or purchase them, not to the platforms. And that’s the basic ethos on which Web 3.0 is being built — your data no longer belongs to the Web 2.0 giants. It belongs to you and any developer who would like to serve you, and you have the freedom to choose their service. That’s the open and public infrastructure that a public chain can offer.
We’ve already touched on some NFT applications, such as community building. Can you tell us a bit more about some current NFT applications in China, and what we can expect to see in the future?
Sure. I’d like to give several examples, but first let’s start with the big picture. So many kinds of people and companies are choosing to sell NFTs to their followers, fans, or people who love their products. I believe that the Big Bang of the metaverse just occurred, and NFTs are the elemental particles of this world.
The first example I’d like to share with you is in social networks. Let’s think about today’s most popular social apps, like Wechat and Facebook. You’re basically getting to know people who you’re acquainted with, but not necessarily people who you share hobbies with. Maybe you’re meeting like-minded people on Reddit, or on Douban in China. But no matter what social network you’re on, there are always a lot of bots: fake people and fake accounts. And the more you look into it, the more apparent it becomes that these accounts are just advertising platforms. So instead of meeting people who share interests or hobbies with you, you’re just meeting bots that are built to sell you things.
But now, a new kind of social app is offering a solution to this problem by grouping people based on the NFTs they own. Let’s take CryptoPunks as an example, which everybody knows are extremely expensive today. Whoever does own a CryptoPunks is either an early adopter of NFTs or a super-rich person who bought a CryptoPunk in the secondary market.
So let’s say I offer a chatroom that’s only open to people who are verified through the blockchain as CryptoPunk owners. This means that the people who enter this chatroom will know they’re talking to real people who either share an interest in CryptoPunks or are extremely wealthy. You’re getting in touch with the same people you’re targeting. It’s almost impossible to fake: when NFTs are minted, they come with timestamps that have hash data, and then every transaction is traceable.
Another example I’d like to share with you is a social app similar to Twitter or Instagram that’s being developed exclusively on Web 3.0, which means that you have to log in using your crypto or public chain accounts to use it. Once you’re logged in, you can use an NFT you have as your avatar, just like people who have a verified avatar of a CryptoPunk. Or you can replace your old avatar with a McDonald’s NFT, such as a Big Mac, if you want to let the world know that you’re now a big McDonald’s fan. And while you’re at it, you can share and post your NFT — but only if you actually own it.
All of this marks the new era of Web 3.0, which comes with a new framework for serving and presenting NFTs. These elemental particles are colliding with each other every day and giving way to countless new business ideas. In fact, I foresee a new future in which all Web 2.0 services will be rebuilt on top of these NFTs, leading to a new Web 3.0 regime where users are the true owners of their data. That’s the world I’m hoping for. Social instant messengers and apps like Instagram will only exist at the earliest stages of this rapidly evolving infrastructure. In this new cyberspace landscape, you’ll only have access to a collection of digital assets if you have one of the items in that collection. Now, we’re only in the early days of the metaverse — I believe the Big Bang just happened.
Let’s talk about the differences between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. So as it stands, the only way that you can display a digital asset you own, like a CryptoPunk, as an avatar or label is on unverified platforms like Twitter. You — and anyone else, for that matter — can take a screenshot of your CryptoPunk and post it as your profile picture. Is it true that once we reach Web 3.0, only the owner or authorized users can use that asset in such a way?
That’s right. They can do that, or they can gain exclusive access to a chatroom, or in some cases, they may have restricted access — maybe they’re only allowed to post it or use it as an avatar. I’ve noticed more internet companies, especially startups, which don’t have to worry about their old business model, that are entering the space and helping young people use their NFTs. And that’s exactly where I see the internet going in the coming years — this is just the beginning of the blockchain and Web 3.0. People and companies who adopt these technologies right now are getting in on the ground floor, and the earlier they do, the more leverage they’ll have in the future.
(Sotheby’s Opens Virtual Museum in Decentraland)
You can’t just rely on your old customers, who are gradually dying out. Instead, you need to ask yourself, “How can we attract new, young users?” Well, the bottom line is that young people want to blaze their own trail — they want to be different.
Is now a good time for brands to implement an NFT strategy?
I actually think that now is the perfect time for brands to implement an NFT strategy. Let’s talk about Visa, for instance — they bought a CryptoPunk for somewhere between 50 and 60 Ether, which at the time was equal to about $200,000, right? The whole world reported on it, and people went kind of nuts — “Visa bought a Punk!” All of the people who owned Punks reported on it, all of the crypto people reported on it, and Twitter could not get enough of it. Meanwhile, Visa is getting all of this publicity for $200,000, which is a drop in the bucket for such a large credit card company. Now what’s especially significant about this is the demographic that Visa is reaching. They would like to attract new users, and it’s primarily young people who are interested in this sort of thing. It was, quite frankly, a brilliant move on Visa’s part.
Then there are the two top auction houses in the world, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, which also entered the blockchain space recently. They started to build a cyber virtual exhibition hall in Decentraland, which is a virtual world. Now, none of this costs much for these large enterprises, but it gives them a ton of free publicity, which inevitably attracts these younger audiences. Just like Visa, Sotheby’s and Christie’s are starting to extricate themselves from old money and find sources of new money by involving themselves in young people’s worlds. It’s extremely innovative.
As for all the companies who are not following suit, I would recommend you start expanding your horizons and paying attention to this new movement. You can’t just rely on your old customers, who are gradually dying out. Instead, you need to ask yourself, “How can we attract new, young users?” Well, the bottom line is that young people want to blaze their own trail — they want to be different. In order to pique their interest, then, you need to have new technology, exciting products, or fresh concepts that will catch their attention. With each passing year, young people are spending more and more time on their cell phones. In fact, most of the time, they’re on the internet in some way, shape, or form. They don’t care about physical objects anymore, they actually care more about the virtual world. And that’s why companies are devoting so much of their marketing budgets to the virtual realm.
But listen, it’s not too late — it’s still a great time to get in on the action. Web 3.0 entrepreneurship is only just beginning. And if you get involved now, other companies will build on top of you while the users who already have NFTs stake their claim as the virtual vanguard. Now, every time you want to make a big splash, you can mint a new set of NFTs and get them into the hands of your fans, who are then grateful to be a part of your exclusive community. All of this is to say that entering the space as early as possible will directly benefit your company — CryptoPunk, for instance, is now a classic in the NFT space. All of the people who are actually entering into the space for the first time will buy or auction a CryptoPunk so that they can use it as their avatar and show respect to a classic. If you choose to enter the space earlier, you’ll be amongst the first to catch wind of these fads — more Web 3.0 opportunities will open themselves up to you, and your fans will directly benefit.
At Radicle, we’re doing research on consumer preferences, especially amongst younger generations. What we’ve found is that younger folks are purchasing more from brands whose values they support. We already know that NFTs are an excellent channel to connect and converse with a fanbase — do you think they also convey values that would entice young people to learn more about the brand?
Yes, absolutely. A lot of enterprises are putting more emphasis on post-sale services, and NFTs are a great tool to establish a direct channel of communication between your brand and your users. What’s more, the users who purchase your company’s NFTs will help manage your online community as they become increasingly invested in your brand. In this attention economy, what matters most is the amount of time and energy your users and customers devote to your service products. And NFTs are the greatest attention magnet the web has to offer right now.
Clearly, a lot of brands are starting to build NFT strategies. We’ve talked a lot about the advantages of using NFTs, but can you tell us about some challenges, especially in the earliest stages, that brands should consider?
Sure. Honestly, I think a lot of people misunderstand the nature of NFTs. Some people still think that each NFT has to be attached to a physical object, which isn’t the case at all. An NFT is digitally born on the internet, and it’s in no way dependent on the corporeal world. So people who still define NFTs under the old framework need to start understanding how they actually work, and how they can serve as a great marketing tool amongst younger generations. And that’s a real challenge.
The other misconception that has proven problematic is the idea that NFTs offer a form of IP protection. The fact of the matter is that they don’t protect IP rights in the traditional sense — in fact, the wider your NFT spreads, the more value it accrues. This all completely contradicts the terms on which we’ve come to understand IP over the past century.
Thirdly — and this is especially true in China, where the government is trying to prevent speculation — people who use NFTs as a marketing tool should always keep in mind that trades and exchanges of digital assets within a reasonable price range are okay. But artificially inflating a price is precarious, both financially and legally. If people notice that a company is trading digital assets at extremely high prices, they might start to think that the company is laundering funds. And just like that, a company’s NFT strategy can backfire on them — one second, it’s promoting their public image, and the next, it’s a PR nightmare. This is why I encourage every company to use NFTs to manage their community, from its followers to the people who don’t know much about the company but happen to have adjacent hobbies or interests. Don’t get me wrong — it’s perfectly fine if some people send your NFTs as gifts or conduct exchanges with your NFTs. What I’m warning against is a pump-and-dump scheme. A lot of people get hurt during this kind of speculative process, and that leads to social unease. None of it is good.
Can you tell me more about what’s next on Conflux’s roadmap? What should we expect to see from Conflux in the next quarter or next year?
Great question. In China, cryptos are mostly banned, but NFTs are actually encouraged by the government since they promote cultural content. As a result, we’re expecting NFTs to become a new wave, and the Web 3.0 infrastructure that’s built on top of them represents a whole other wave of entrepreneurship. And that’s where the Conflux ecosystem development will put most of its emphasis in China. We’ll help consumer brands, luxury brands and popular brands build their NFT marketing strategies nationally and take part in the very large and growing Chinese NFT market. It’s always easier to build through us or any third-party vendors than it is to build alone, since we’ve already developed the necessary infrastructure. But if an enterprise does choose to build on its own, we are available to help. In either case, we welcome all types of partnerships in the digital asset ecosystem.
Additionally, we’ll be eagerly supporting many of the Web 3.0 startups that continue to emerge. Some are focused on the social elements, others are involved in building marketplaces, and then a few others revolve around lending and borrowing. There are also some startups that focus specifically on the interface or building the metaverse. There are so many elements of Web 3.0 emerging directly from this ongoing NFT boom.
Since our capacity is about 100 times that of Ethereum, we also expect to work globally with companies in emerging markets, like Africa and Latin America, and help them build financial infrastructure where there is none. We’ll introduce trading platforms, lending/borrowing platforms, and we’ll help them raise money for local businesses. The largest logistics company in Nigeria, GIG Logistics, is actually building their wallet and membership points on Conflux. Banked or unbanked, we’re helping people in emerging markets develop a stable financial infrastructure through public chain technology.
Finally, we’re very excited about our global offshore RMB stablecoin insurance. We’re working on internationalizing the RMB. A lot of people use dollars to transact with China, but this presents a ton of problems. Moving forward, then, more people are going to try to accept RMB, and RMB stablecoins, which are used on the public chain, are actually presenting a faster, more efficient, and cheaper solution than the banks. So our RMB solution and the internationalization of RMBs are another big components of Conflux’s global outlook.
Before we go, is there anything else you’d like to mention about Conflux that we didn’t cover?
Yes. If you’re interested in expanding your brand to China, or getting closer to your consumers and serving them in a post-sale context, please reach out to Conflux. We are happy to help companies build both their NFT and Metaverse marketing strategies. | https://medium.com/radicle/yuanjie-zhang-co-founder-of-conflux-network-on-why-every-brand-should-adopt-an-nft-strategy-655e227c40d0 | [] | 2021-12-30 16:51:00.070000+00:00 | ['Nft', 'Nft Marketplace', 'Blockchain', 'China', 'Crypto'] |
Top 8 Open Source JS Libraries For Data Visualization | This article can be helpful to choose JavaScript charting library for your project.
Photo by Stephen Dawson on Unsplash
There may be times when you want to choose an open source javascript library for plotting charts on your web application and there are a number of libraries out there to choose from.This guide may be helpful in that situation.
I have selected 8 open source javascript libraries and listed below along with their Features, Link to a sample Bar chart developed using respective libraries, Link to other Demo Charts and recommended usage.
I have included only libraries that have seen github commits in last 1 month or less (at the time of writing this article). Also some libraries are built using React JS library.
D3 is abbreviation for Data Driven Documents. This is the library which can be considered as base language for Data Visualization On Javascript Platform. A number of other libraries are built on top of this. It uses SVG elements for plotting. However you can also combine Canvas elements with it [1]. This library has definition of bits and bytes of pure javascript code for creating data visualizations.
Click Here For Sample Bar Chart. | https://medium.com/@bspai/top-8-open-source-js-libraries-for-data-visualization-d1c36fcdb886 | ['Subraya Pai'] | 2021-06-18 18:21:00.207000+00:00 | ['Charts', 'Data Visualization', 'JavaScript', 'Dataviz'] |
What It’s NOT About | It’s not about your meditation posture.
It’s not about a correct mantra.
It’s not about following the rules.
It’s not about your job or career.
It’s not about structure.
It’s not about your daily routine.
It’s not about reading the perfect book.
It’s not about your $25 moleskin journal.
It’s not about setting goals.
It’s not about being part of a select tribe.
It’s not about finding your passion.
It’s not about rebelling against the status quo.
It’s not about helping those in need.
But…
It is about love.
It is about dying to who your ego thinks you are.
It is about surrender and vulnerability.
It is about non-doing and letting God do through you.
When you realize that finding God is less about perfection and more about being wholly imperfect, the Great Opening will begin.
Let’s let the doors open, shall we?
Let’s Fall Inward, Shall We
Do you define yourself as someone who is spiritual but not religious?
If so, you are not alone.
Sign up for my daily email on contemplative spirituality and join over 5,000 seekers who are Falling Inward to [re]discover the power of within.
Click the image below to sign up.
It’s Free and Free(ing)!
It’s Free!
Sign up now! | https://medium.com/fallinginward/what-its-not-about-26b8dca60594 | ['Benjamin Foley'] | 2017-09-06 15:02:13.508000+00:00 | ['Religion', 'Poetry', 'Christianity', 'Spiritual Growth', 'Spirituality'] |
Can We Just All Get Along (Again)? | Photo: Insider
“As I have prayed for my son’s healing, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, I also have been praying, even before this, for the healing of our country…We are the United States. Have we been united? Do you understand what’s going to happen when we fall? Because a house that is against each other cannot stand. To all of the police officers, I’m praying for you and your families. To all of the citizens, my Black and brown sisters and brothers, I’m praying for you. I believe that you are an intelligent being just like the rest of us. Everybody, let’s use our hearts, our love, and our intelligence to work together to show the rest of the world how humans are supposed to treat each other.”
Julia Jackson said those words. Ms. Jackson is the mother of Jacob Blake, the 29 year old man, shot in the back seven times by a police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Her son is fighting for his life and somewhere within her, she found compassion. She could have, but didn’t, call for blood. She rose above the fray. She was not going to be the violence and racist chaos that is America. As was said in Minneapolis weeks back by Kimberly Jones, America is lucky Black people want equality, and not revenge.
We have been here before. Rodney King, still traumatized from the brutal beating he suffered at the hands of four police officers, also made a similar plea for peace as Los Angeles burned in riots when the officers who nearly beat him to death were exonerated. King’s famous “Can We All Get Along Speech?” is similar in tone as Jackson’s but likewise, lost now, in the reality of America’s locked and loaded white supremacist society.
These pleas by ordinary citizens for compassion and even forgiveness and peace was also the story in Charleston, S.C. Dylan Roof, a white supremacist, slaughtered nine black church worshipers inside church as they prayed. Roof, now on death row, was extended forgiveness by some family members of those murdered.
Patience is thin on the forgiveness ideal and the unity question. The killing of Black people is so old of a story now with no sign of it ending that many Black people are fresh out of compassion. Not only do unarmed Black people continue to be shot and killed by police officers but millions of people defend the shootings. They then pivot and trash the victim’s character and spin the killings to fit into a racist, inhumane model for society. White supremacy has rendered any situation incapable of being looked at in a rational manner.
Photo: CBS
The talk now with Jacob Blake is he was shot because he had a knife in his car. A knife? I ask: if Blake had a gun or two guns, and the officers had knives, whose life was in danger? The officers were not in danger. They did the most extreme thing they could have done in that situation.
Racists on social media are already untruthfully spreading dirty rumors that Blake is a pediophile and a child rapist. It is sick and this is a sick society. Defense attorneys for officers in the George Floyd case are now claiming Floyd killed himself with fentanyl. Two coroners have issued findings that counter that idea.
There is a pattern to all of this. Rudy Guiliani when he was mayor of New York City basically invented this tactic. Police shoot someone, go pull their juvenile record. Leak it to the media. Build the thought in the minds of people: this person is less than human. They are not worthy of our care.
It is a sick, sick practice. It is also why, despite the passionate words of Julia Jackson, and the equally important question Rodney King asked, it is hard to embrace what they are saying totally. We understand but they fall short now.
The killing and maiming of unarmed Black people is part of a historical pattern and legacy. It won’t change with kind words. It will change with struggle, civil disobedience and by setting goals to achieve. The energy of the protests is welcome. The issue has been made clear. The U.S. has a P.W. Botha/Jim Crow police system in far too many police departments. It should be dismantled. Something new should come into existence.
Letetra Widman, the sister of Jacob Blake, said it well in the aftermath of the shooting of her brother: | https://briangilmore.medium.com/can-we-just-all-get-along-again-b203e4c5b9fa | ['Bumpy J'] | 2020-08-29 13:10:18.970000+00:00 | ['United States', 'Police Brutality', 'Protest', 'Police', 'Racism'] |
Birthday party decoration. A birthday party is one of the most… | A birthday party is one of the most exciting and amazing time, especially when it comes to the kids birthday party. Be it kid’s birthday party, or anyone’s birthday party, without any doubt, decoration plays a vital role. Birthday decorations are a must in order to make a location look even more vibrant and ready for the celebration. These days themed birthday parties are very much in trend. One can opt for a theme party according to the choice of the birthday girl/boy. According to the experts from Noida tent house, other than the theme party, there is also an option of setting up a party in the color choice of the birthday girl/boy, as this would add up a fun element in the party.
Coming up with a theme party is not that easy as it seems. Many people find it really a daunting task to coordinate everything and set up a theme party without any hassle. Theme parties are found to be successful only when planned and managed by the expert event planners or birthday decorators just like the best party decorators in Noida. For kid’s birthday party, especially a theme party, it is highly important to know which theme he/she would like, or if it is a surprise party, it becomes even more difficult. One can take expert assistance for a successful theme birthday party arrangements and decoration.
Birthday parties are enjoyment and celebration time for the children, especially when it is one of their friends or siblings birthdays. The first thing that they notice at a birthday party is the décor. Thus, the birthday decorations should be done in such a way that they add substance to the party and also meet up the requirements. Not only kid’s birthday party, but decorations play a fundamental role in everyone’s birthday party. Hiring an expert for birthday decoration will ensure unique and creative party themes along with bigger and better ways to celebrate the birthday.
Thus, it is often suggested to leave the responsibility of managing and planning the birthday on the experts and enjoy the celebration. You can also hire the finest birthday planner in Noida for hassle free celebration. | https://medium.com/@aonecelebrationeventspvtltd/birthday-pan-arty-decoration-41baff3a4028 | ['A One Celebration Events Pvt Ltd'] | 2019-02-01 04:34:16.295000+00:00 | ['Tent Provider In Noida', 'Birthday', 'Wedding Flower'] |
BREAKING: Major Chemical Leak In Edison, New Jersey | DEVELOPING: Reports are now coming from the ‘Equister’ Chemicals plant in Edison, New Jersey, of a chemical leak. The plant may be owned by Lyondell Basell Industries, which has a plant in the area, a spokesperson confirmed the company was aware of an incident at a facility, but did not provide details.
Police and fire report a large cloud leaving the facility. The chemical leaked is reported to be ‘Titanium Tetrachloride’, which is “used to make titanium metal and other titanium-containing compounds, such as titanium dioxide, which is used as a white pigment in paints and other products and to produce other chemicals” (CDC).
At least 200+ gallons have leaked and unconfirmed reports say two individuals are injured. The titanium tetrachloride mixed with humidity in the air to form a dangerous cloud; it forms hydrogen chloride which in turn, turns into hydrochloric acid which can cause severe liver and kidney issues.
Evacuations of nearby areas ongoing as some residents are told to shelter-in-place and close all windows and doors.
The toxic cloud from this HazMat incident in Edison, New Jersey is now heading East towards Woodbridge, according to the fire department. Next it could possibly move to Tottenville, Staten Island.
UPDATE: Police now say that the chemical incident is now over and “deemed” safe in Edison, New Jersey, and residents do not need to keep their windows and doors closed and may turn on their air conditioners.
THIS STORY IS DEVELOPING — CHECK BACK LATER FOR UPDATES | https://medium.com/@svnewsalerts/breaking-major-chemical-leak-in-edison-new-jersey-f2f82008f892 | ['Sv News'] | 2020-08-24 04:32:53.897000+00:00 | ['Edison', 'Chemical Leak', 'Titanium Tetrachloride', 'New Jersey', 'Hazmat'] |
An Unruggable Airdrop | An Unruggable Airdrop
When it comes to money falling from the sky, slow and steady always wins the race [img]
The story begins September 16th, when the protocol governing the decentralized exchange Uniswap, launched their governance token, UNI. Faced with a decentralized governance dilemma, they ultimately decided to provide these tokens to those interested in participating in future proposals affecting the Protocol. Once the decision to move towards a truly decentralized protocol was made, Uniswap was confronted with another dilemma, but this time in regards to distribution.
How do you distribute a large number of tokens to a select group of people while minimizing spamming disinterested or abandoned accounts in a cost-effective manner?
Uniswap answers the question above with a Merkle Distributor, but I decided to take things one step further. Read more to see what I did and how I did it, so you may integrate such a tool for your community. In this article, I discuss how Governor DAO replicated this process and introduced a number of elements unseen in any other Merkle Airdrop smart contract to date.
Why Governance Matters
Governance is perhaps the single most important topic in the crypto industry. The reason for this is in order for decentralization to exist in a sustainable manner, there must also exist a set of rules to which all participants must agree, otherwise there truly is nothing to enter into when participants consent to being members of a protocol.
This is the reason why so many tokens can exist without a clear purpose — because purpose has, as of late, come secondary to profits. Those tokens with a coherent purpose tend to succeed simply because inherent in that purpose is the utility of the token.
What do you get from being a participant in Bitcoin?
Being the potential for “gains”, you gain access to a token economy that consists of miners, developers, and users. Each member in this economy has a role and, as such, ought to have a clear understanding of their role and thus their impact on the sustainability of the project (token) in question.
In the case of Governor DAO, the purpose of designing an airdrop was two-fold: one to “unrug” the CBDAO Community and two, to encourage participation in an ecosystem without stakeholders having to provide a direct, upfront, monetary investment. The second component is made possible by a set of configurations I integrated into the MerkleDistributor.sol smart contract, which we will discuss in-depth when reviewing the components of the smart contract itself.
These components are designed to account for (and solve) the misfortune we witnessed with the UNI airdrop wherein which users were rushing to collect on their gains instead of considering the benefit of being an active participant in the ecosystem.
Our Design
As is the case with developing smart contracts of any kind, my recommendation is to truly understand the purpose of your design and thus the elements you need to make the design come to life. In the case of the Governor DAO Airdrop, we had a few goals in mind, but we were unsure about implementation and wanted to construct a cohesive strategy to the benefit of the community, for other projects to replicate.
Photo by Isaac Smith on Unsplash
Harms Mitigation
We needed a means to prevent harm to the community, first and foremost, as it is often the case that airdrop recipients are incentivized to be amongst the first to sell because they were awarded money today at a value that is not guaranteed tomorrow. This is especially true in the case of a new project.
We had to design a solution to mitigate or eliminate the following:
Price Impact : we had to design a mechanism that would prevent a massive “dump” on Airdrop Day, as is typically the case.
: we had to design a mechanism that would prevent a massive “dump” on Airdrop Day, as is typically the case. Bad Actor Security : due to the nature of the airdrop distribution as one with an increasing available amount each day, one could theoretically claim on another’s behalf so as to cut that person off from being able to claim their entire airdrop and have to settle for just a portion.
: due to the nature of the airdrop distribution as one with an increasing available amount each day, one could theoretically claim on another’s behalf so as to cut that person off from being able to claim their entire airdrop and have to settle for just a portion. Hack Insurance : a mechanism that would disallow one bad actor from accessing all of the $2.3M in assets in a hack for themselves.
: a mechanism that would disallow one bad actor from accessing all of the $2.3M in assets in a hack for themselves. Limit Access and Immutability: we need to ensure only those who were rug pulled were provided with an airdrop and that the list cannot change.
Incentives
As with any cogent strategy, a two-pronged approach is vital to ensuring one accounts not just for reasons not to do something but, on the flip side, reasons to do something — aka incentives. We needed to inspire airdrop recipients to not claim (and subsequently dump) what is rightfully theirs. However, we realize penalties without rewards is a bit harsh, especially when doing so to the purported benefit of an entire community that experienced a rug pull event. As such, we hypothesized a number of ways to incentivize not only forestalling one’s tendencies to “dump”, but to encourage users to actually add value to the ecosystems without having the ordinary sense of “skin in the game” via money shelled out to the ecosystem upfront.
We implemented a number of incentives, including:
Incentives to HODL : a reason to wait the full duration of the airdrop in order to secure a more smooth allocation of the reward.
: a reason to wait the full duration of the airdrop in order to secure a more smooth allocation of the reward. Incentives to Trust: we needed participants to believe us when we said the money will be theirs and cannot be scooped up by just anyone, so we identified a trustless manner of verifying claims and that enables anyone to verify that, in fact, only those listed are eligible to receive their share and that each user’s share is limited to only what they are due.
Granted, much more was taken into consideration, but these are a few examples of things that were relevant to us in our design and ones for which we were able to take into account when creating our final Airdrop smart contract.
Our Solution
At first glance, the MerkleDistributor.sol smart contract seemed like a fit solution for us and we considered forking it and calling it a day, but I could not get passed the very-likely scenario that recipients of the airdrop would behave in a self-interested manner. Being an economist at heart (and by degree), I knew there had to be safeguards in place to prevent the former CBDAO Community from being rug pulled (for a second time), but this time rug-pulling themselves.
Photo by Jeswin Thomas on Unsplash
In order to do so, we had to find a way to organically introduce 1.2M+ tokens into the ecosystem, which requires claiming tokens in a manner that smooths distribution. As we all know, Econ101 supply and demand, introducing new supply with demand held constant means “price go down”, so I designed a way to smooth distribution of supply (sell pressure) so as to better align with demand (buy pressure). Doing so would, ideally, enable us to protect the current price, but we needed to also ensure this was at the will of the user and not simply a forced distribution method, which comes with a bad taste in the mouths of those who were promised access to an airdrop in just a matter of a month from our liquidity generation event.
We ultimately decided to modify our original proposal and enable users to make a choice that made the most sense for them.
Are you willing to claim less of your tokens today or wait for later down the line to claim more of your tokens?
While a simple question, a much deeper psychological component is at play here that some may have missed. Users are being provided what they already consider to be “free money”, so if they are highly disinterested in the project’s success and do not believe in its potential, they may leave and take with them a much smaller piece of the pie on their way out. Alternatively, if they believe in the project and are interested in participating in its outcome, then they will stick around. Not only are users incentivized to stick around, but they are also incentivized to add value to the community via contributing to the stack that will inevitably be theirs.
In this way, by allowing members to claim a larger share of what they are due by sticking it out for longer, we manage to organically “unrug” a community while, at the same time, incentivizing the community to make use of the first 90 days of inception to really get their act together and do their absolute best to add value to what very-well may be their last chance to make right all (or more) of they have been wronged. It is my belief that we will rise. | https://medium.com/@soliditywiz/an-unruggable-airdrop-63c2ee9f242d | [] | 2020-12-20 07:07:23.368000+00:00 | ['Gdao', 'Merkle', 'Airdrop', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Defi'] |
Harrappa- Curse of the Blood River: A Book Review | I think as readers and adults we owe it to the society to not just take literature at face value and see it for what it really is. Books like these have a fun, fast paced and a gripping plot line, but they also blur the lines between what is real and what isn’t. The tone of the book plays an important role in how we perceive the story line. And the tone of this book tries to convince you to identify one religion’s triumph over the other.
In today’s political climate, where democracy is on the verge of breaking down in the largest democratic country of the world, it is our responsibility to look beyond what is written and try and understand the usage of words and how they might impact our thinking. Using phrases like “bholenath- another loving name for Lord Shiva” is acceptable only if its counterpart in promoting another religion like this will not face backlash too.
My problem is not with people expressing their opinions about their love and devotion to their own religion. My problem is with their lack of tolerance for opinions opposite to theirs. And in this current atmosphere of political intolerance, books like these subtly push the narrative of Hinduism being the “greater” or “better” religion which is unfair to people of other religions who face backlash for similar expressions of opinions about their religion.
Though, I would say, the book is fast paced, adventurous and fun to read. It reminded me a little bit of the Shiva trilogy because of how similar the writing and narration is but overall, it is a good read if you’re travelling or in a hurry in general. I personally am looking forward to reading the second part when I need a breather from the other heavier books that I generally tend to read. | https://medium.com/@nupurbhise31/harrappa-curse-of-the-blood-river-a-book-review-27398c50e4a4 | ['Nupur Bhise'] | 2021-06-17 11:05:24.894000+00:00 | ['Fiction', 'Book Recommendations', 'Hinduism', 'Politics', 'Mythology'] |
FlutterPub is now CodeChai ☕ | CodeChai Logo
For the past year, me and my partner Danish Amjad have been running FlutterPub publication on the side with our lives. Although this year 2020 have been very hard and challenging due to Covid-19, but we are happy with the progress FlutterPub have made.
With over 13,000 followers and more than 12,000 views a day, this publication has got hundreds of awesome articles on Flutter by amazing writers around the world. But as time passed away, we realized that when there are more active publications about Flutter such as Flutter Community etc. then it doesn’t make sense to have other publication as well. This not only makes confusion for readers but also for writers, who have to decide which publication they want to put their articles in. This may increase competition, but we believe sharing knowledge should not be competitive. Rather it should be more encouraged and friendly. | https://medium.com/codechai/flutterpub-is-now-codechai-91838c00dc11 | ['Wajahat Karim'] | 2020-11-05 12:40:51.231000+00:00 | ['Coding', 'Programming', 'Software Development', 'Flutter', 'Productivity'] |
Big Tech Roundup — What You Need to Know About Congress’ High-Profile Tech Hearing | Big Tech Roundup — What You Need to Know About Congress’ High-Profile Tech Hearing
The House Antitrust subcommittee grilled the CEOs of four of the largest tech companies in a display that showed the preliminary results of their investigation that began in 2019
On July 29th, the House Antitrust Subcommittee brought together the CEOs of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple to examine each company’s dominance in their respective marketplaces. Together, these companies added more than $2 trillion in combined market value during a time when Americans and small businesses have been hit with the worst economic crisis in decades. The shared displeasure of Big Tech brought together congress members from both sides of the aisle in what Rep. Ken Buck called “the most bi-partisan effort that he has been involved within 5.5 years of experience”. How heartwarming to see Big Tech bringing us together in a time when the country is more politically divided than ever.
The hearing wasn’t a surprise. Congress began its investigation into these companies in 2019 and came to well prepared with “millions of pages of evidence” of internal documents and testimonies from market participants. This was a clear improvement from the 2018 hearing in which Senators asked Mr. Zuckerberg if their e-mails in WhatsApp were monitored by Facebook. Despite whether you believe this investigation will create any real change or not, I think we can all agree that there is hope that Boomers may actually understand youth after all. Although we will have to see what the current administration decides to do with TikTok, but I digress.
The choice to question the CEOs of all four companies concurrently, rather than separately, was an interesting one. Scott Galloway commented that this was a major weakness that prevented the committee from going deep enough into any given issue and leaving the American public with general sentiments rather than real conclusions. Regardless, it generally did not seem to detract from the intensity of the hearing which went something like this: Congress asked Tech CEO if the company ever conducted horrible action X. Tech CEO attempted to deflect the question or reiterate their corporate values. Congress revealed they already knew the answer to their question from their investigations and moved to the next question because they were limited in time. A notable exception was Mr. Bezos who mastered the art of simply talking over the questioner.
Google
A major argument against Google was that the company had transformed from “a turnstile to the web into a walled garden which keeps users on Google’s sites” at the expense of other online businesses. As an example, lawmakers highlighted how Google scraped content from Yelp reviews to build its own business and significantly reduce web traffic to Yelp’s website. This example highlights an important question about ethical product development. Part of Google’s mission is to present information in the most useful way. From a user perspective, it’s useful to have information appear directly in the search page. However, it's economically disastrous for underlying websites that provide the data and rely on the web traffic for their business models.
The second major argument was that Google broke its commitment to keep DoubleClick’s user data separate from Google’s user data and effectively “destroyed anonymity on the internet”. Specifically, lawmakers found that merging the two datasets allowed Google to connect user information from Gmail, search history, and location data to users’ browsing data across the rest of the internet collected from DoubleClick cookies. This allowed Google to serve highly targeted ads to increase profit while users had no agency to prevent this intrusion of privacy.
This was a concern ever since Google acquired DoubleClick in 2007. At the time, the FTC conducted an eight-month investigation into the acquisition to determine whether the deal eliminated competition between the two firms in the digital advertising space, ultimately approving the deal. It is difficult to say whether Google’s purchase was anticompetitive after-the-fact because it's unclear if Google’s superior management or the combined firm’s dominant position should be credited for its rise.
Key Takeaways:
Evidence shows situations where Google misappropriated content from other companies to keep users within its websites
Google broke its 2007 commitment to separate Google and DoubleClick user data and infringed on user privacy in order to serve targeted ads
Facebook
Similarly, Facebook was scrutinized for its 2012 acquisition of Instagram which Rep. Jerry Nadler claimed was executed to eliminate competition. As noted by the Verge, Nadler quoted emails from Zuckerberg that revealed Mr. Zuckerberg saw Instagram as a threat that could siphon business away from Facebook. In his response, Mr. Zuckerberg admitted that he believed Instagram was a competitor but asserted Instagram only became the company it is today due to Facebook’s involvement and investment. At the time, Instagram competed with several photo-sharing apps such as VSCO Cam, Path, and PicPLz, none of which have grown to the size of Instagram.
Facebook was also scrutinized about perceived censorship of speech, a topic especially important for the upcoming election. Although Facebook’s stance has been that it “does not want to become the arbiter for truth”, officials pointed to inconsistencies between the company’s stated approach and actual practice. In fact, earlier this year, Facebook was accused of violating its own narrative for its treatment of coronavirus information and far-right conspiracy theorists.
The issue of free speech on social media platforms has been a topic of debate for quite some time. As noted by the American Bar Association, private companies, such as Facebook, are not bound by the First Amendment and are free to limit or control speech to their liking. Although Mr. Zuckerberg has repeatedly asserted that Facebook does not intend to restrict speech on its platform, the company maintains community guidelines that do prohibit some forms of harmful or hateful speech, giving rise to human judgment for edge cases that could be problematic.
Key takeaways:
Evidence showed that Facebook acquired startups for the purpose of eliminating competition (with Instagram being a prime example)
Facebook continues to be investigated for its handling of controversial posts on its platform
Amazon
For Amazon, its relationship with third-party sellers was the main point of contention. Rep. Lucy McBath played a testimony from a third-party bookseller who was allegedly blocked out of the platform, seemingly to stop them from competing against Amazon’s own book sales. For quite some time, Amazon has been accused of systematically taking advantage of third-party sellers and favoring the sales of its own products, even though these third parties often have no other options to turn to.
Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Amazon used data from independent sellers to develop competing private-label products, a practice that prohibited its own policies. In written statements, employees acknowledged several instances that these actions occurred, simply because the policies were not enforced or monitored. Additionally, the company was pushing to have Amazon brands make up 10% of its retail sales by 2022, providing a clear incentive to favor its private-label business. Mr. Bezos explained, “we have a policy against using seller-specific data” but “could not guarantee that the policy has never been violated.” For further reading, Lisa M. Khan lays out the paradox Amazon faces as both a retailer and platform in this detailed article.
Key takeaways:
Amazon was accused of blocking third-party sellers on its Marketplace to favor sales of its own products
Evidence shows that Amazon used data from third-party sellers to develop its own line of competing white-label products, contrary to its own stated policies
Apple
In his testimony, Mr. Cook touted that the App Store was developer-friendly with 84% of apps paying zero commissions, and the remainder paying 15% or 30% of sales depending on the nature of their products. Lawmakers, however, called into question the lack of transparency in Apple’s app review process and lack of consistency in applying commission rates to third-party developers. In fact, their findings showed that developers have no way to know how Apple reviewed apps, and Apple’s decisions to approve or reject apps seemed arbitrarily “made up along the way”. In the EU, lawmakers recently instituted new rules requiring Apple to give developers a chance to appeal decisions to remove apps from the App Store and to provide greater transparency into ranking algorithms. I would expect similar requirements to be implemented in the US as well.
With respect to commissions, evidence showed that Apple made exceptions to its commission structure to favor larger developers, creating an uneven playing field for competition. Further, lawmakers were concerned that there was nothing stopping Apple from significantly raising commissions in the future. In their response, Apple stated that they haven’t changed the commission structure of the App Store since its launch (which is true) because they face fierce competition in attracting developers to the platform (which is laughable). Given that the only other real option to develop mobile apps is Android, its safe to say there isn’t that much “real” competition for talent. For further reading, Ben Thomson posted a fantastic analysis of antitrust issues in Apple’s App Store and how they evolved over time.
Key takeaways:
As the sole gatekeeper between app developers and users, Apple is accused of arbitrarily rejecting apps to benefit itself at the expense of developers
App developers are overly dependent on the App Store, which remains a closed system, giving Apple incentives to arbitrarily raise commissions as high as it wants in the future
Conclusion
The hearing was an opportunity for Congress to reveal the preliminary results of the past 12+ months of investigations rather than a chance to get to the bottom of any particular issue. Compared to earlier hearings, I was pleasantly surprised by the level of knowledge the lawmakers displayed about each of the different platforms, an indication that their investigations may bring forth real actions. However, questioning all four CEOs concurrently left many issues unaddressed due to a lack of time.
For Messrs Pichai, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Cook, the hearing gave insight into the political forces that can reasonably be expected to affect their enterprises over the next few years. Each faces a unique set of antitrust issues stemming from years of market dominance. In the short term, I expect each of these companies to increase their lobbying efforts to persuade lawmakers that they operate competitively in open marketplaces. Over the long term, there are questions about whether these companies can operate as they are currently structured. | https://medium.com/swlh/big-tech-roundup-what-you-need-to-know-about-congress-high-profile-tech-hearing-15634c343da | ['Akhil Agrawal'] | 2020-08-05 18:33:43.143000+00:00 | ['Antitrust', 'Tech', 'Hearing', 'Congress'] |
Become a Writer for Vegan Living | Photo by Annie Spratt
Hello and thanks for taking a look. If you would like to make a tiny bit or a whole bunch of money sharing stories about your vegan lifestyle, I am currently accepting all topics of being vegan as we are a new publication.
Stories published by Vegan Living are owned by the author of the article and will be eligible to earn money. A writer may remove a story from our publication if you wish. However, writers who continually remove stories from our publication without notice will lose the ability to submit.
Submissions must comply with Medium’s Rules, Ad-Free Policy, Content Guidelines, and Curation Guidelines. Stories violating these rules will be reported.
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I prefer submissions to be unpublished but will take previously published articles. Stories published by accident may not be deleted and resubmitted because that is a violation of Medium’s rules on duplicate content.
Finally, I require locked or metered content. This means placing stories behind Medium’s paywall which brings writers the potential to receive compensation through Medium’s Partner Program. This is what we are looking for, so take the steps to get paid.
Send me your Medium handle so I can take a look at your profile and add you as a writer. Once that is done you will be able to submit your stories to the publication. Send your Medium handle to [email protected].
I will read all submissions and get back to you as soon as possible. | https://medium.com/vegan-living/become-a-writer-for-our-new-vegan-publication-vegan-living-2fc02bb4cfad | ['Dan Stout'] | 2021-01-20 19:38:37.113000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Lifestyle', 'Vegan', 'Veganism', 'Writing'] |
The ADHD Medical Student Chronicles: The Pandemic and Me | In some ways, it’s actually been easier than I had initially anticipated. During undergrad, I was forced to memorise every enzyme involved in the Kreb’s Cycle and each step in purine and pyrimidine synthesis. You can imagine my shock and elation then when I found out that I wouldn’t have to remember the intricate details of any of this. Sure, a solid understanding of key steps would still be crucial, but if it meant not using as much brainpower thinking about the dephosphorylation of phosphoprotein phosphatase (yes that is a thing, unfortunately) then I was all for it. Of course in saying that, the occasional leniencies in the depth of biochemistry knowledge required did not really amount to much in the scheme of the overall volume of content and expectations medical students deal with.
In other words, you win some you lose some.
I’m saying all of this to elucidate how you can go into medical school fully aware that it’s ‘like drinking water from a fire hydrant’, and still feel like a husk of your former self only a few months in. You might recognize how time-consuming and demanding the course will be, and still feel like you’re drowning without a life jacket after a few weeks.
I truly believe nothing prepares you for medical school like starting medical school. No matter what sort of academic rigor you’re accustomed to, it is a completely foreign feeling for most — the realization that the knowledge you’re learning will directly contribute to saving someone’s life one day. It’s not something you experience (at least to the same extent) in virtually any other field of study. Of course, this hasn’t been the experience of all my peers though. Perhaps some of them simply aren’t letting on how tiresome the course truly is (these are who we call the gunners — we don’t like them here), but I also know my own set of personal circumstances contributed to the specific fatigue I was experiencing. Because while medical school is exceptionally difficult for anyone, I also happen to be diagnosed with ADHD.
Nothing prepares you for medical school like starting medical school.
I sometimes think there must be more doctors and medical students with ADHD, based purely on how much we tend to crave highly stimulating environments (what could be more adrenaline-inducing than a patient coding on an operating table in front of you?!) but I often imagine (partly in jest) the reason they’re not writing blog posts or vlogging their experiences on YouTube about it is because of how woeful we all are with time-management. For additional context, I once got ready for a 6 pm appointment at 11 am that was ten minutes away and was still late for said appointment. The biting reality, however, is that it’s more likely to be a result of the heavy stigma associated with the label of ADHD in the medical community. It doesn’t just feel like a diagnosis — when you’re pursuing a career as a physician, it can feel like a scandalous act of impropriety that you want to quash all evidence of, or risk being brandished with a scarlet “A” for as long as your peers know you. Even publishing this piece is incredibly daunting — up until now, I’ve been relatively selective with who knows about my diagnosis. This may come as a surprise to people who know me well enough that I won’t shut up about it, but I imagine most people reading this would not know I’ve lived with ADHD my entire life.
That might all sound very dramatic, even for people with ADHD, but in a profession where things are often quite literally life or death, whether someone’s judgment of you is ‘real’ or not is immaterial because every mistake you make still feels more scrutinized than it would if it were anyone else. But perhaps that’s the rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD) of it all.
Unlike many other neurodivergent conditions, a diagnosis of ADHD comes along with specific labels like “lazy, impulsive, uncaring” — all of which actively undermine a doctor’s judgments, skills and capabilities. They certainly aren’t words that inspire confidence in your physician.
In spite of this, there’s stigma pertaining to all neurodivergent people when it comes to medicine; it’s a systemic issue that is evident in AHPRA’s mandatory reporting laws and the high rates of suicide in the profession. However, unlike many other neurodivergent conditions such as depression and anxiety (don’t you worry, I’m not entirely immune to these bad boys either), a diagnosis of ADHD comes along with specific labels like “lazy, impulsive, uncaring” — all of which actively undermine a doctor’s judgments, skills and capabilities. They certainly aren’t words that inspire confidence in your physician, or ones you’d want to be inscribed on your tombstone. To be a physician with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and/or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) doesn’t tend to fare very well in the medical community either.
So after one breakdown too many, you really begin to wonder whether medicine (or insert any career here if you otherwise relate) should even be your true calling in the first place. Not could, but should. I know I can do it — just like I think anyone can get through medical school if they have the will, drive, and passion (and a dash of stubbornness)… but was this the life I really wanted for myself? One where I will likely always be struggling? Always playing catch-up with others? I began to feel as if I loved medicine, but medicine didn’t love me back. What’s worse is that there’s no easily applicable “fix” to my issue either — amongst the worst aspects of my ADHD is the paradoxical way in which stress both overwhelms and fuels me. I require stress to perform at high levels, but it’s an emotionally and physically draining process that feels like an impossible cycle to break out of.
It’s also like I’m fighting a battle from two sides — on one hand, I recognize medical school is difficult for everyone and it can be an active process just trying to keep your head above water. On the other hand, my imposter syndrome has me so afraid that people inherently perceive me as less than capable because of my ADHD that I purposely sabotage myself with an inhuman number (even sans medical school or ADHD diagnosis) of jobs, research positions, and committee roles. This all makes sense to me in my head because if I fail, people can at least empathize that it must have been because of how much I was taking on. And if I don’t fail? Suddenly I’m aspirational. Suddenly I’m the blueprint for “success”. Or so I’ve told myself.
Insane. Unhinged. I’m very well aware.
A visual depiction of me after overwhelming myself with too many responsibilities. Yet again.
The global pandemic has felt like the tipping point for all of this, though. COVID-19 has undoubtedly affected everyone in unique, disparate ways but for myself, it’s internalized this idea that productivity and self-worth are one and the same. In other words, ‘grind culture’ got to me. I became obsessed with the idea of not being seen as mediocre, but the issue was that I was the only one able to define what ‘mediocrity’ was in the first place. Even still, my idea of mediocrity was continually shifting so that I was never in a position to feel comfortable for too long anyway.
I’m sure this sounds foreign to people who aren’t anxious overachievers, but you can blame the lack of dopamine transporters in my brain as well as the expectations I’ve been carrying on my shoulders my whole life from being a first-generation kid of immigrant parents. It was only a few months ago that I overworked myself so much that it physically manifested itself into Bell’s palsy. At least that’s one thing me and Angelina Jolie have in common.
So where does this all leave me? In light of a pandemic that is currently unchanging in predicament and a diagnosis that is lifelong, it seems as if I’ll be stuck living like this for the foreseeable future. While the process of writing this has been clarifying, my fear of failure and Type A personality is unlikely to let up entirely anytime soon. In fact, about a year ago I tried writing and publishing something very similar, which makes me fear this might all be a never-ending cycle even after I graduate. But, if you take anything away from this otherwise digressive (and admittedly whiny) piece, it’s to be kind to yourself. Always.
Ultimately, it does not matter whether you have ADHD (or not), or if you’re a medical student (or not). Becoming kinder to yourself and realizing that often there are limits to your capabilities (I’m sorry, but it’s true!), as well as being able to reflect on your accomplishments while acknowledging them for what they are is something we should all be working towards.
Of course, it’s not always so easy. I often have to actively remind myself to do it, but I’ve come to realise nothing is more important in a time of social isolation, where frequently all we have is ourselves and our thoughts. Maybe all I can do is try, but isn’t that pretty to think so? | https://medium.com/@yousefhakimi/the-adhd-medical-student-chronicles-fad7c8f8e42b | ['Yousef Hakimi'] | 2020-08-06 22:15:45.905000+00:00 | ['Pandemic Diaries', 'Medicine', 'Covid 19', 'Adhd', 'Medical School'] |
Why Crawling Is So Good For The Baby? | Physical benefits
Physically speaking, crawling can make motor skills better — both gross and fine. It can develop overall strength, balance and also make the hand and eye coordination quite good. The posture becomes defined and later when the walking stage comes, the child learns quicker. These skills are helpful in adulthood too — the same skills help in ball games, running and writing and jumping.
Mental skills
Crawling helps a child mentally too! The activity of crawling assists the two sides of the brain to interact with each other. This result in coordination of the two sides, in turn, helping many other daily life activities the baby would be doing later in life. Crawling also promotes risk taking, boosts the confidence and also helps the child understand concept of success and failure.
Visual development
While crawling a child learns the idea of distance between objects and understands concepts of far and near. The understanding of how to reach the object, adjusting eyesight to that object and then finally reaching them develops eyesight and judgment.
Spatial benefits
Problem solving skills are also put to use while crawling! How much distance to cover in lowest time and grab the toy, but there is the dog who’s sleeping in the way and one might get thirsty suddenly, or hurt. Obstacle crossing, speed management and avoiding difficult pathways can be some basic problem solving skills they develop.
Apart from this, there are more benefits which are relevant to the baby’s psychology and social skills. You need not help; the baby will be able to commute to you if he needs you.
They get a lot more freedom too, in order to explore new things and this sparks their creativity and curiosity as well. The observation of surroundings while moving increases the optic flow as well, igniting in the child the sense of direction in order to get back to where he started from. A lot of decision making, focus on the goal and intense emotions define their actions while they are crawling — it is indeed an important skill and a very defining milestone to achieve. | https://medium.com/@garyfan_26522/why-crawling-is-so-good-for-the-baby-316ac85166f0 | ['Gary Fan'] | 2019-08-11 07:46:01.383000+00:00 | ['Baby', 'Motherhood', 'Parenting', 'Children'] |
How To Fall Down | Six months earlier, in July, I lost my ability to walk. It began, appropriately, with hard falls.
First, I tripped on my way up the stairs and thought I was just being clumsy. Two hours later, I fell three steps when my knees suddenly gave out on me, mid-step. I weakened. I could walk from the car to the doctor’s office but I couldn’t walk from the waiting room to the exam room. At the neurologist’s office, I had to hold onto my mother. The doctor admitted me to the neurological floor of the hospital twelve hours later, thinking it was some sort of terrible, degenerative neurological disease.
I had recently survived a systemic crisis in the ICU in UCLA and now I was back home on the Jersey Shore, recovering, improving. I was supposed to concentrate on walking forward and eventually, back onto that plane to graduate school and a new city.
But instead, now I was meeting the neurologist in the ER for a spinal tap. I spent four days in inpatient care. I got all the drugs I wanted. When they scanned my spinal cord and brain, they didn’t find nothing, but it wasn’t anything conclusive.
At first, I was relieved. Then confused. But mostly I was stoned. So very stoned. I began to understand people who shoot up. The way the morphine floated through my veins, that first couple seconds of feeling — they were the greatest of my life. I felt the total absence of physical pain, something I rarely knew as a lupus sufferer with a wrecked body. I didn’t need half as much morphine as they gave me and still I asked for more.
And then they moved me to an inpatient rehab center. I was the youngest patient by decades; a distinction I’m used to. The IV meds stopped and the withdrawal started strong and fast. Headaches, listlessness, depression so acute I could barely swallow without first considering if maybe I should just die first.
I spent three hours a day in physical and occupational therapy, trying to relearn how to lift my hands over my head and how to use the toilet by myself — first, how to do it, and then how to impress the staff enough that they’d clear me medically to go to the bathroom by myself. Before that clearance, though, even peeing required getting the help of a nurse or an aide by pushing the call button. And I had to pee often. My 87-year-old roommate Margo generally didn’t appreciate it.
After a few days, I started sneaking to the bathroom — or as sneaky as one can be in a wheelchair. But even with the modified toilet and its extra arms and extensions, it was so, so hard. It felt like the most physically exhausting thing I’d ever done on my own. I wasn’t some couch potato. I played basketball. I ran competitively. (I’d even run so hard I’d thrown up.) Suddenly, using the toilet was a terrible new struggle.
The gym downstairs was depressing, full of resistance bands and two-pound dumbbells, but there my relative youth shined. My personality came back; I stopped sleeping through activities and social worker interviews and got to work recovering. I Instagrammed it and would think about the surreal juxtaposition of my friends’ pictures of trips to the Hamptons next to those of my summer spent at a rehab hospital on the Jersey Shore. It was hard to accept at the time.
But I was surviving. My pregnant sister brought my two-year-old niece Sadie to see me every few days. Sadie decorated my corner of the room with the stuff my sister let her pick out from the dollar store. A Hawaiian luau dancer hung above my bed and heart-stamped duct tape coated my computer and wheelchair.
I got back to feeling. Feeling in my extremities returned but also feelings in my brain. Patched up with pain pills and Xanax, it started to light up.
I set simple goals and I met them.
And then I tried to put on my shorts by myself and fell out of bed.
A report was written and a fall risk bracelet was slapped on my wrist. But when I walked around the gym, all the old people cheered. We — the therapists and I — decided to try the stairs. I fell. Another report was written. I hid my tears but my red face told the truth. My favorite physical therapist let me sit on the steps, like an inconsolable child, while I gathered all the literal and metaphorical strength in the world to get up only to sit back down again. We would not try again for a few days. | https://medium.com/the-poleax/how-to-fall-down-d27f19187d1c | ['Kelly Bergin'] | 2017-02-03 18:06:40.528000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Chronic Illness', 'Rehabilitation', 'Longreads', 'Memoir'] |
Meet the Sony h.ear on 3 Wireless Noise Cancelling Headphones (WH-H910N) | Meet the Sony h.ear on 3 Wireless Noise Cancelling Headphones (WH-H910N)
The h.ear on headphones have always been about funk and color and at IFA 2019 in Berlin, Sony did not disappoint. Dubbed the h.ear on 3, or as it’s officially known by its sleeker name, the Sony WH-H910N h.ear on 3 Wireless Noise Cancelling Headphones¹, the new series offers a splash of new colors alongside improved tech.
Starting with the latter and working our way back, the h.ear on 3 headphones now offer both Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa as your virtual companion, which can be set and adjusted via the Sony Headphones Connect app on iOS and Android. Either assistant can be summoned by pressing and holding the noise cancellation button.
Speaking of noise cancellation, Sony has improved that aspect of the headphones as well with
dual noise cancellation microphones — one feed-forward and one feed-back — on the surface of the headphones catch more of the ambient sounds of your surroundings, whether it’s in-flight noise, city traffic or office chatter.
If that wasn’t enough, Sony is also introducing Adaptive Sound Control, which can detect the activity you’re partaking in, like “travelling, walking, or waiting” and adjust how much ambient sound makes it through. And if you’re onboard a plane, train, or automobile, by placing your hand over either headphone cup, the noise cancellation will dip to a minimum which will allow you to more easily hear things like announcements.²
For those on the go, the h.ear on 3 offer 35 hours of battery life and when plugged in can get you 2.5hrs worth of charge in just 10 minutes. Unfortunately, the headphones still utilize micro-USB and not USB-C. | https://sonyreconsidered.com/meet-the-sony-h-ear-on-3-wireless-noise-cancelling-headphones-wh-h910n-1b2272387a0f | ['Sohrab Osati'] | 2019-09-10 02:00:49.347000+00:00 | ['Headphones', 'Music', 'Ifa', 'Mobile', 'Home Theater'] |
Day 24 — $1636 USD gained | [vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3"][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1" background_hover_color_opacity=”1" width=”1/1" tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default”][vc_column_text]If you don’t know about the “buy and hold 100 crypto for 5 years ” click here[/vc_column_text][divider line_type=”No Line”][vc_column_text]Day 24, the current gain is $1636 USD or 0.12 BTC
Best coin of the day is Status (SNT) with a gain of 64.65 %, the worst one is Potcoin (POT) with minus 8.17 %
We have a new crypto on our top 5, Request Network (REQ), who gained 54.92 % since yesterday and 459.38 % overall.
Top 5 cryptocurrencies so far :
Verge (XVG) 2252.36 % , from $9.62 to $226.29 Tron (TRX) +1039.57 % , from $10.04 to $114.37 Ripple (XRP) +775.45 % , from $9.75 to $85.34 Cardano (ADA) +597.03 % , from $9.57 to $66.71 Request Network (REQ) +459.38 % , from $9.91 to $55.41
A recap of all the 100 Cryptocurrencies and how they are performing against USD
Balance by day in USD
Balance by day in BTC
[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]
I made a tutorial on how to start your experiment : [insert page=’how-to-run-the-experiment’ display=’link’]
Otherwise in short this is how I started the experiment :
Got $ 1000 USD in Bitcoin from Coinbase (It’s probably the fastest way to get some, they accept debit cards and it’s almost used worldwide)
Used part of the Bitcoins to buy the other cryptocurrencies/altcoins
I used Binance , Kucoin and Hitbtc to buy most of the cryptocurrencies
All the others on Mercatox , Cryptopia
Another part on Bittrex
Added all the trades on Cointracking.info
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3"][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1" background_hover_color_opacity=”1" width=”1/1" tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default”][vc_raw_html]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[/vc_raw_html][/vc_column][/vc_row] | https://medium.com/buyandhold100crypto/day-24-1636-usd-gained-f7790006ac65 | [] | 2018-01-06 19:43:09.442000+00:00 | ['The Experiment', 'Request Network', 'Cardano', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin'] |
7 reasons why for JavaScript | DevSnack #16: A series of articles that follow the 7 reasons format and are meant to be food for thought. They expose different aspects of JavaScript and some of its frameworks: Meteor and MEAN Stack.
#1–7 Reasons Every Programmer Needs to Learn JavaScript
Three things to do in your life: plant a tree, write a book and have a child. According to Dave Bush (@davembush), if you are a programmer you should also include: learn JavaScript.
#2–7 reasons why frameworks are the new programming languages
This post encourages the use of frameworks by providing several reasons why they are the new programming languages. Read this post by Peter Wayner (@peterwayner) and remember “Code is law”.
#3–7 Reasons to Develop Your Next Web App with Meteor
Discover 7 reasons to use Meteor framework in your JavaScript apps in this article written by David Turnbull (@dturnbull).
#4–7 Good Reasons to use MEAN Stack in your next web project
Intended to promote the use of MEAN Stack, a full stack framework for JavaScript which combines Mongo, Express, Angular and Node; this article enlightens us with some of the advantages of using the framework.
#5 — Which do you prefer and why: MEAN stack or MeteorJS?
Not a 7 reasons article but serves as a conclusion to make you think and judge by yourself. This shows an answer to the question provided by Dan Dascalescu (@dandv) about the differences between MEAN and Meteor. | https://medium.com/moove-it/7-reasons-why-for-javascript-17d42692e058 | ['Blog Moove-It'] | 2016-08-04 12:13:58.777000+00:00 | ['Devsnack'] |
Model-Agnostic Local Explanations using Individual Conditional Expectation (ICE) Plots | Model-Agnostic Local Explanations using Individual Conditional Expectation (ICE) Plots
How to Explain and Affect Individual Decisions with ICE Curves
Understanding Machine Learning Decisions
If your loan application is declined, you would probably want to know two things:
Why did I get rejected? What can I do to get approved in the future?
Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels
In other words, the explanation you want is one that is specific to you. In particular, you would want to be educated about how your situation contributed to the outcome, and if possible, do something about it. For example, if your chance of getting a loan greatly increases once you have lived in your current address for over a year, then you can confidently apply again in the future!
This need for an explanation that is meaningful to the individual, or “local explanation” as it’s known, is applicable whether the decision is made by a human or by a Machine Learning algorithm. In the field of Interpretable Machine Learning, there are a number of well-known techniques for explaining individual decisions (e.g., SHAP and LIME). These techniques not only provide innovative ideas for teasing out the reasons behind individual predictions for “black box” Machine Learning models, they also help us understand the results by visualizing them in interesting ways (e.g., see my article on the SHAP Summary Plot).
A popular visualization technique that is not typically associated with local explanations that I think can contribute in this context is the Individual Conditional Expectation¹ (ICE) plot. Traditionally, ICE plots are primarily seen as visualizations for supporting global interpretation; that is, explaining what the model is doing at the population level. However, with some simple modifications in the way they are visualized, I think they can also be valuable at a local explanation level. The advantage of using ICE plots is that it is a simple and easy technique to understand. It also provides an abundance of information that the viewer can use to understand what is going on at the local level and to simulate what may happen if things change.
The goal of this article is to examine how ICE plots can help explain individual decisions and to help illustrate what is needed to affect them. I will first describe the ICE plot in detail (part 1) before using a modified version of it to explore its utility using a couple of examples (part 2).
This article is intended for anyone with a basic understanding of statistics and Machine Learning (ML), and is interested in how visualizations can help explain and affect individual ML decisions.
What is an ICE Plot?
An ICE plot is an extension of a Partial Dependence Plot² (PDP). PDPs visualize how changes in the value of a feature impact the prediction of a ML model. It does this by plotting the average predicted outcomes for different values of a feature you are interested in whilst holding the values of other feature values constant. This is useful because we can then see the relationship between the prediction and the features we are interested in (typically one or two at a time).
For example, we can answer questions such as:
How much inventory of ice cream is needed if the temperature goes up?
What are the average house prices in relation to the number of bedrooms?
The figure shown here is an example of a PDP showing the “RM” (average number of rooms per dwelling) feature from the popular Boston House Price dataset. The x-axis is the average number of bedrooms and the y-axis is the median value in $1000s. The plot is created using the scikit-learn PDP function.
ICE Plots Visualizes Individual Differences
PDPs are simple and easy to understand. However, their simplicity hides potentially interesting relationships between individual instances. For example, if the feature values of a subset of instances trend positive but another subset trend negative, then the averaging process may cancel them out.
ICE plots solve this problem. An ICE plot unpacks the curve that is the result of the aggregation process in PDP. Instead of averaging out the prediction, each ICE curve shows the predictions of varying the feature value for an instance. When they are presented together in a single plot, we can see the relationships between subsets of the instances as well as differences in how individual instances behave.
As shown in the figure below, although the majority of the instances follows the shape of the curve in the PDP shown earlier, there is a small subset at the top of the plot that behaves contrary to the PDP curve; instead of increasing between 6–7 on the x-axis, they actually decrease.
ICE Plot for the “RM” Feature in Boston House Price Dataset
Creating an ICE plot is straightforward. There are a number of packages available (e.g., in Python and R). Of course, it is also possible to create your own.
Using ICE Plots for Local Explanations
ICE plots are traditionally used to understand interactions and differences in data subsets as part of a Partial Dependence (PD) analysis. However, as mentioned earlier, since an ICE plot depict individual observations, there is a potential to use it to focus on a particular instance you are interested in.
Calculating the Values for an ICE Curve
In order to visualize an instance, we need to figure out how to calculate the values of the curve (or be able to locate the instance in a tool that creates ICE plots. E.g., see this tutorial on accessing ICE DataFrame in PyCEbox). Here is a simple example to illustrate the steps for calculating the values of an ICE curve:
1. Find the instance and the feature you are interested in.
2. Find the unique values of the feature.
3. For each of these values, create an instance with the other feature values. In other words, fix the other feature values and permute over the value of the feature of interest.
4. Make a prediction for each of the combinations.
5. Take the predicted values for each instance and plot the curve for the predictions.
ICE Plot for Instance #3 Feature B
Being Mindful of Correlations
A potential problem that needs to be dealt with when using ICE plots (and PDPs) is high correlations between features. This can be problematic in a number of ways:
We could end up with unlikely or impossible combinations of feature values that then get fed into the model. For example, in a dataset that includes the features “Pregnancy Status” and “Gender”, we could end up having a pregnant male being an input combination! It’s difficult to attribute the effect to a single feature (i.e., as a result of “Collinearity” or “Multicollinearity”). In other words, it is hard to know how much of the predictive influence is due to one feature or to another feature.
A number of researchers have pointed out these issues in detail and have suggested various remedial approaches. In practice, there are some simple approaches to deal with highly correlated variables (e.g. aggregation, step-wise elimination). See the following article for detailed examples on how to deal with correlations.
Visualizing the ICE curve
For the purpose of explaining and affecting a prediction, there are a number of different ways to visualize an individual instance. Two main approaches are: | https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-explain-and-affect-individual-decisions-with-ice-curves-1-2-f39fd751546f | ['Wai On'] | 2020-07-19 17:30:52.856000+00:00 | ['Interpretable Ai', 'Explainable Ai', 'Visualization', 'Machine Learning', 'Data Visualization'] |
Ready To Write, I Said! | So, I find myself here at last. In front of my computer and ready to write. Ready to write. Ready to write, I said!
How is it that a person can have such an overactive imagination and yet find it so difficult to put pen to paper, or in this case, cursor to screen? This exercise in writing has been a long time in the making — years, in fact. As someone living with mental illness, I’ve been told countless times that keeping a diary would be helpful, but it’s so difficult. I find it a bit wanky at times. But in recent years, I’ve found myself wanting to help people like me — to help them realise that they’re not alone.
Being a non-professional, that can be tricky. I’m in no position to offer any advice or diagnoses. The only thing I have to offer is my experience, and that, I have found to be invaluable. I gravitate towards people who share their experiences of pain and triumph. And awkwardness — especially awkwardness.
I am one of the most awkward people I know, and while it can be amusing for those close to me (and myself at times), it can also be lonely and humiliating. Self-deprecation is my code, and interacting with others who share my great talent is comforting. So that’s why we’re here (myself and my creative partner-in-crime) — to share our experiences — some dark, some funny, some bizarre.
It’s a mixed bag, really.
We hope you enjoy.
D2 | https://medium.com/@lifeissquarey/ready-to-write-i-said-8a2bbd1fb352 | ['Life Is Squarey'] | 2020-06-23 20:52:15.271000+00:00 | ['Helping Others', 'Mental Illness', 'Mental Health', 'Mental Health Awareness', 'Inspiration'] |
ITC Progress in Technology and Marketing | On the basis of the existing node communication, attributes of generating public and private key pairs as well as light and heavy nodes have been added. Coding debugging to the main chain thread at the networking stage, as well as network interaction between the main chain and nodes have been completed. In next week, transaction and DAG will be added to nodes and the main chain.
Multiple nodes:
Bluetooth communication code among phones and network communication code between phones and servers of our android app haven been realized. And we are optimizing wallet code of ios app.
Announce in advance-ITC technical first draft whitepaper will be list at the end of Jan!
Marketing partnership
ITC listed on
Huobi: https://www.huobi.pro/zh-cn/
Bibox: https://www.bibox.com/
Coinbene: http://www.coinbene.com/#/
CEX.com: https://cex.com/
OKEX.com: https://www.okex.com/
Since Christmas, the price of ITC has been growing straightly. On 12.25, it was only $1.05, market value of circulation was around $50 million. But until 1.4, the price has changed to $6.85, and the market value of circulation have been up to $300 million. In total, price increase over 552% and circulation market value increase over 554%.
Strategic alliance with Acute Angle Cloud
The ITC team announced to join hands with Acute Angle Cloud and the two sides reached a strategic alliance to explore and practice the application of IOT operation system in various industries as well as to promote the innovation and development of blockchain technology.
Strategic cooperation partnership with Adzar Energy
ITC announced to cooperate with Adzar Energy, a leading company of distributed energy overall scheme, to construct the new ecosystem of distributed photovoltaic market. This will not only change the current circulation and transaction modes of clean energy market, but also promote the application of blockchain technology in energy industry.
ITC Received Millions of Investment from Link VC
The ITC (IoT Chain) project announced the acquisition of millions of investments from Lync, and the two sides reached a strategic partnership to jointly build a IoT Chain ecosystem, based on blockchain technology.
Lin Japing also said, ITC, is an exceptional blockchain project in the industry which has already made its first step into the scenario application of the blockchain project. He believes it is very likely to become the key factor in a new round of industry innovation.
ITC and GVE reached a strategic cooperation to jointly promote the development of blockchain
Recently, ITC announced a strategic partnership with GVE’s Global Blockchain Rural Ecosystem. Both parties will join forces to promote the application and popularization of the blockchain. | https://medium.com/iot-chain/itc-progress-in-technology-and-marketing-c7cd7ee5726 | ['Iot Chain'] | 2018-05-03 03:38:05.759000+00:00 | ['Announcements', 'English', 'Iot Chain'] |
HOW A WIN-WIN CRYPTO LOTTERY RAISED $ 200 MILLION AND TURNED OUT | HOW A WIN-WIN CRYPTO LOTTERY RAISED $ 200 MILLION AND TURNED OUT Arezzinskikh Jun 22·7 min read
More articles on: TheDayByDay
In September 2019, the PoolTogether cryptocurrency win-win lottery was launched. Its creators guaranteed that the player would not lose money. Almost a year and a half later, CoinDesk named the project a leader among hundreds of lotteries on the Ethereum blockchain. In June 2021, it was revealed that there is one major player with the highest chance of winning.
“I first came to the crypto industry by buying bitcoin in 2016. It was just as Trump was elected president. I then thought: “Everything will be bad in the world, there will be a lot of instability and unrest. In this case, it would be nice to buy bitcoins, ”said Leighton Cusack, co-founder of the PoolTogether project, in an interview with YouTube channel Show Me The Crypto in May 2021.
PoolTogether is a lottery game that runs on the Ethereum blockchain. The project is developing in the field of decentralized finance (DeFi), the fastest growing sector of the cryptocurrency market, which is not regulated by central banks and other financial institutions. The total amount people have invested in DeFi projects from May 2020 to May 2021 has grown from $ 694 million to $ 115 billion, according to Defi Llama.
There are hundreds of lotteries running on the Ethereum platform. They are often created by programmers at the beginning of their studies, says Dmitry Volkov, CTO of the international cryptoexchange CEX.IO. But Coindesk in mid-February 2021 named PoolTogether the leader among the win-win Ethereum lotteries.
After that, PoolTogether managed to almost double the amount of funds that users invested in the game. Now in the “lottery” fund $ 213 million, follows from the data of DeFi Llama.
Photo by André François McKenzie on Unsplash
How does the crypto lottery work?
Passion and risk without risk
Before getting into blockchain lotteries, Cusack was in a very different business. Together with partner Jason Burkholder in 2011, he founded the Kindrid cloud-based donation service for churches and non-profit organizations. In 2017, Burkholder and Cusack sold the business to Ministry Brands; the parties did not disclose the amount of the transaction. “I have more free time and money. Then, every day, I plunged deeper and deeper into the crypto industry, ”Cusack recalled in an interview with Show Me The Crypto.
In 2019, Cusack went to the ETH Denver hackathon alone. “This was my first cryptocurrency event and I didn’t know anyone, I really didn’t want to go and almost jumped off,” Cusack wrote on his Twitter. By that time, according to him, he had an idea for PoolTogether, which he spoke about at the hackathon. But then he did not even manage to get into the top twenty projects for consideration by the judges. But at the final event, he met other Canadian developers Chuck Bergeron and Brendan Asselstin. Together, they eventually became the co-founders of PoolTogether.
The idea Cusack, as he himself admitted, took from traditional finance. People love to play lotteries, and PoolTogether allows you to experience the fun of the game without risking your money. This lottery is not for people who have a lot of money, he said: “If you can invest $ 10 million in yield farming (platforms for obtaining cryptocurrency on credit or providing loans at interest. — Forbes), most likely, it will be more profitable for you to get it there. 10% of this amount. But if you have $ 10,000, it’s much more attractive to try your chance to win big. “
How it works?
PoolTogether runs weekly and daily draws. Now in the largest pool the prize is $ 55,078. There will be five winners, they will split $ 20,767, and one of them will become the “grand winner” and receive the remaining $ 34,311. He is chosen at random.
A lottery ticket costs 1 stablecoin, for example DAI or USDC, its price is pegged to the dollar and is approximately equal to $ 1. The more tickets a player buys, the more chances to win, there is no purchase limit. By purchasing tickets, the user will receive them in their crypto wallet. The luckiest player ever deposited $ 74 about a year ago and won $ 43,760, Cusack wrote on Twitter this April.
In each drawing, the amount of the prize fund is constantly changing, since at any time a new user can add money to the pool, and someone can take his money. If the user wants to constantly participate in the lottery, he does not need to buy tickets every week — already purchased tickets are automatically transferred to the next drawing until the user withdraws his money. Cusack calls this mechanism reserve.
According to him, in 2020 the size of the winnings from all pools averaged $ 300 per week, now about $ 200,000 per week.
PoolTogether invests the money received from the sale of lottery tickets in Compound Finance, a service for issuing loans on the blockchain. It allows you to “borrow” your cryptocurrency at a certain percentage. Compound rates change automatically based on supply and demand. A month ago, these were double-digit values, says Forbes director of business development Alfa Asset Management (Europe) S.A. Vadim Poghosyan. But now, he said, rates often fall below 5%. PoolTogether keeps the money collected at the drawing on the platform for a week, then takes the profit and pays out the winnings. Compound is considered one of the conservative tools in the DeFi market, says Dmitry Volkov.
In theory, anyone could invest directly in Compound Finance. But in the lottery, the player is counting on future return on investment, Volkov says. “A person invests $ 100 in a debt instrument for one week and intends to make a profit of $ 1 from this with a probability of 100%. But this does not suit him, and he wants to get more profit, albeit with high risks, that is, $ 100 with a probability of 1%. The PoolTogether lottery allows him to do this, ”he said.
The lottery creators cannot independently dispose of the collected cryptocurrency — any changes are agreed with the owners of Pool tokens, which the company released this spring and distributed among the lottery participants. Now ordinary clients have a little more than 80% of tokens, another 12.44% — from consultants and company employees, and the remaining 7.52% — from investors, says the PoolTogether blog. In February 2020, PoolTogether raised $ 1 million in the first round of funding. The largest American cryptoexchange Coinbase took part in it, investing $ 100,000, as well as IDEO CoLab Ventures, DTC Capital and ConsenSys Ventures.
Crisis of the main winner
Cusack has always emphasized that the lottery is a win-win, because all participants will receive their tickets back and can either collect the money or continue playing in the next draws. But in June of this year, the system crashed. It turned out that some participants have a higher chance of winning. A scandal erupted, which forced Cusack to make excuses.
On June 13, user banteg posted on Twitter a message: “Few people know, but we have strategies to win most of the lottery prizes. This has already led to the development of modules that allow pooling lottery tickets. ”
On the same day, Cusack acknowledged the problem in a series of response tweets. It turned out that by that time, Yearn, the DeFi platform, which allows you to put cryptocurrency on a deposit and make money on it, had already been in the game for several months. She became the beneficiary of many lotteries working with DAI stablecoins, including PoolTogether, as she was able to collect 57% of all issued DAI stablecoins — $ 27 million out of $ 47 million. For all other users, this meant only one thing: Yearn has the greatest chances of winning … “They monopolize the odds of winning and marginalize the core value of the protocol,” Cusack wrote.
A couple of days later, in an interview with CoinTelegraph, Cusack revealed that PoolTogether had already agreed that the company would use Yearn as another investment platform. Instead, Yearn — Cusack used a pun here — will not act “like a whale flopping into their pools” towards Pool Together. He also noted that Yearn now has 10% of all Pool tokens issued and the release of new tokens has decreased by 50% in the last month.
What are the other risks
Such lotteries primarily attract newcomers to the cryptoindustry who want to make a big profit with a big risk from their investments, Volkov said. “They may be attracted by the marketing slogan ‘win-win lottery’, and perhaps they just do not realize that they are risking their future profits,” he says.
PoolTogether is open source to any user. And among the risks there is a possible hacking of the system or a scam (fraud), Volkov continues. This has already happened with another crypto lottery SmartBillions — a hacker found a vulnerability in the application code, as a result of which he could constantly win the jackpot. He managed to win only twice, and after that the creators of the lottery unexpectedly withdrew all funds. It turned out that not just a mistake was made in the lottery code, but also deliberately the owners were left with the opportunity to withdraw all funds from the pool, recalls Volkov.
While yield farming projects like Compound pay high, often double-digit commissions, as the system develops, more participants will offer lower commissions, Poghosyan said. Then lottery yields will plummet and the industry will begin to restructure itself under the new rules, he says. | https://medium.com/@arezzinskikh/how-a-win-win-crypto-lottery-raised-200-million-and-turned-out-cbd5c153b0f1 | [] | 2021-06-22 18:15:19.729000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin Mining', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency Investment'] |
2019 May｜街拍特輯 | 台灣的春夏對注重穿搭的人們來說並不是太友善，除了衣服厚薄難以拿捏以外，潮濕悶熱的天氣也使人困擾，但即便如此，還是可以看到屬於春夏的繽紛色系漸漸於街頭現蹤，那麼，就讓我們一同來看看 weirdoll 在五月拍攝的穿搭集錦吧！
1、pinko／freelance／Yumen St.(Expo Dome)
instagram: @pinko_728／photo by Chih Lin
pinko 的穿搭層次感都很豐富，配色也很搶眼，時不時可看見她穿著自製的衣物拍攝穿搭照，讓人懷抱著想買買不到的悔恨按下愛心（？）。
個人覺得這套穿搭中紗裙起了很大的作用，為上下兩件搶眼印花單品添加了完美的平衡感，此外，pinko 在挑選配件上也相當用心，無論是配色還是材質都看得出經過細心挑選。
▥ Hat_ Taobao
▥ Tops_ self-made
▥ Skirt_ used
▥ Shoes_ converse x jw anderson
▥ Bag_ niko and…
▥ Watch_ casio g-shock
2、midori／student／Chifeng St.
instagram: @midori990721／photo by Chih Lin
midori 的穿搭以藍色為基底，除了上衣的版型超優以外，圖騰與圖騰的搭配充滿細節卻又不會過份花俏，私心覺得最亮眼的是東德雨滴迷彩背包，為整體造型增添了不少帥氣感。
▥ Hat_ midori_dayss
▥ Neckerchief_ badana vintage
▥ Tops_ used
▥ Pants_ used
▥ Earrings_ 因為我喝醉了。
▥ Bag_ East German NVA Strickmuster Camp Backpack
▥ Charm_ Disney Gelatoni
▥ Shoes_ midori_dayss
3、8la／motion designer／Zhongshan N. Rd.
instagram: @_8_l_a_／photo by Chih Lin
這幾年選擇極短髮造型的女生越來越多，且無論是中性帥氣、可愛甜美或者簡約俐落的風格都可駕馭（好短髮，不剪嗎？），拔剌的外套配色非常搶眼，反摺寬褲與瑪莉珍馬汀也使整體造型更為俏皮。
▥ Tops_ UNIQLO
▥ Outer_ Reebok
▥ Pants_ used
▥ Shoes_ Dr. martens
▥ Belt_ UNIQLO
4、孟 モン／freelance model／Chifeng St.
instagram: @fanying_c3／photo by Chih Lin
孟孟的穿搭非常可愛，Q Wang 的洋裝在材質及顏色上都很吸睛，2mm 的不對稱異材質耳環也十分有趣。
孟孟目前的身份為旅日的自由模特兒，他提到自己非常喜歡穿著台灣原創設計師品牌：「畢竟，在日本被稱讚穿搭的時候，如果可以說出自己穿著的是台灣的設計師品牌，是一件很讓人開心的事情不是嗎？」
▥ Hat_ カオリノモリ
▥ Dress_ Q Wang
▥ Socks_ +10・加拾
▥ Shoes_ Teva
▥ Bag_ 中川政七商店
▥ Earrings_ 2mm
5、A ee mi／illustrator／Chifeng St.
instagram: @e.e___c／photo by Chih Lin
第一眼注意到 A ee mi 是因為下半身的搭配，絕佳的褲子版型與垂墜感、鞋子設計也十分有趣，不同格紋推疊出絕佳的層次感，至於上衣的部分，Cav Empt 這件T恤的版型與圖騰都為整體穿搭大大加分。雖說台灣夏季天氣炎熱，不少人在此時都會選擇隨手拿一件T恤就出門，但這種時候可正是版型與印花的戰場，挑選單品不可不慎啊！
值得一提的是，A ee mi 同時是一位非常有才華的插畫家，擅長以搶眼的色彩及夢幻的元素來安排構圖，並藉此傳達深刻的理念，非常推薦各位前往他的 instagram 觀看他的作品。
▥ Tops_ Cav Empt
▥ Trousers_ MICHEL KLEIN
▥ Shoes_ Nike
▥ Fanny pack_ A PRANK DOLLY
6、cyrus／hair stylist／Chifeng St.
instagram: @cyrus.siu／photo by Chih Lin
來自馬來西亞的 cyrus 第一眼吸引我們目光的絕對是他的鞋子，螢光撞色實在是可愛到無以復加，身上每項單品的版型都十分優秀，此外，他的飾品搭配也相當有品味，也希望下次 cyrus 來台灣旅遊時能再他相遇。
▥ Tops_ versace
▥ Trousers_ comme des garcons
▥ Shoes_ jw anderson
▥ Rings_ vintage
7、min／aesthetic medicine／Chifeng St.
instagram: @redesired／photo by Chih Lin
背心絕對是夏天穿搭層次感的好幫手，min 的古著背心擁有很特別的綁帶設計，F/CE 腰包微微凸起的紋路具有一種讓人想伸手撫摸的魔性（？），整體造型與 keen jasper rock sp 的搭配也恰到好處。
▥ Tops_ Good on
▥ Vest_ used
▥ Fannypack_ F/CE
▥ Shoes_ keen
▥ Glasses_ KUBORAUM
▥ Watch_ G-shock
8、long／shop staff(KBF)／Zhongshan N. Rd.
instagram: @x_long_long_x／photo by Chih Lin
第一眼看到龍龍就覺得「哇，這飾品搭配也太厲害了吧」，雖然都是風格強烈的飾品，但組合在手上完全不顯突兀，不僅吸睛、更展現了強烈的個人風格。下半身的螢光黃球鞋也是龍龍的穿搭重點，他提到，自己當天只要穿得偏女性化，就會選擇搭配球鞋以達到風格上的平衡。
▥ Dress_ customized
▥ Belt_ KBF
▥ Shoes_ Nike
▥ Bag_ LOUIS VUITTON
▥ Rings_ BEAMS/KBF/vintage
▥ Bracelet_ KBF
9、MM／shop staff(ionism)／Lane 161, Dunhua South Rd.
instagram: @l.g.ymm／photo by Chih Lin
MM 的搭配以全黑為主，用牛仔外套與透膚上衣等異材質來營造層次感，高腰落地褲更顯腿長，全黑的穿搭配上棗紅髮色更是辣度破表(////▽////)
▥ Shoes_ Vii&Co
▥ Ring_ Recovery
10、王花／start-up／Chifeng St.
instagram: @ping0425／photo by Chih Lin
看到王花第一眼是被特別的版型吸引，想著怎麼會有這麼可愛擁有兩片前襟（？）的褲子！定睛一看才發覺除了版型與剪裁以外，選用的布料也有很多小細節，整體的配色也十分和諧。
▥ Shirt_ used
▥ Vest_ Q Wang
▥ Trousers_ Q Wang
▥ Shoes_ New Balance 748
▥ Socks_ Happy Socks
▥ Bag_ soulsis
▥ Bracelet_ Mantraband
11、大頭／graphic designer／Zhongshan N. Rd.
instagram: @chyvon17／photo by Chih Lin
對比色穿搭是很多人不敢輕易嘗試的類型，但其實若搭配得宜，沒有什麼顏色是不能組合在一起的，而除了備受矚目的配色以外，大頭在妝容與髮色的搭配上也非常用心，領口的配件選用領帶而非絲巾或領巾這點相當有趣，樹脂耳環甚至是親手製作的呢！
▥ Tops_ H&M
▥ Skirt_ used
▥ Shoes_ Tokyo Bopper
▥ Tie_ used
▥ Bag_ used
▥ Earrings_ 千雅小姐手作飾品
12、藍波波／service industry／Zhongshan N. Rd.
instagram: @xxboboboblue／photo by David, too
第一眼被藍波波吸引到的就是緞面刺繡包了！刺繡的圖樣與藍色的花襯衫，讓整體造型活潑了起來，隨著夏天到來，花襯衫的旺季也即將開始，要說能替夏天的穿搭增加細節感的單品，花襯衫絕對是我們心中的 TOP5，不論是單穿、外罩還是作為配件都非常實穿。
▥ Tops_ UNIQLO
▥ Outer_ 70s vintage
▥ Shoes_ adidas
▥ Pants_ niko and…
▥ Bag_ 豬肉小姐
▥ Hat_ used | https://medium.com/weirdoll-snap/weirdoll-snap-2019-%E4%BA%94%E6%9C%88%E7%89%B9%E8%BC%AF-4e5ff32f2854 | ['林芝 Chih Lin'] | 2020-05-03 10:39:05.125000+00:00 | ['Fashion', 'Taipei', 'Snap', 'Taiwan', 'Photography'] |
Did Walt Disney create Mickey Mouse? | Did Walt Disney create Mickey Mouse in the 1928 short, Steamboat Willie? Mickey Mouse was created by Ubbe Eert “Ub” Iwerks. Although he is considered a cocreator, Walt stated Ub created the famous Disney character. Ub even animated Mickey Mouse’s first official cartoon, Steamboat Willie.
Ub was forgotten because he was simply too shy to promote himself. I say that Steamboat Willie was Mickey Mouse’s official debut because the character first appeared in Plane Crazy and The Gallopin’ Gaucho several months prior. These animated shorts didn’t do well because Mickey came across as a jerk rather than the lovable character we know him as today. Disney heavily revised the character for Steamboat Willie and Mickey’s legacy was born.
So, it turns out that the understanding that Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse is — well, not entirely true… | https://medium.com/curious-facts/true-walt-disney-created-mickey-mouse-in-the-1928-short-steamboat-willie-392c5865a187 | ['Jacob Vandersluys'] | 2020-12-30 14:59:59.035000+00:00 | ['History', 'Disney', 'Facts', 'Life'] |
A Look Into The Upcoming MLB Season | Due to the outbreak of the coronavirus, the upcoming MLB season looks nothing like seasons past. Though opening day is often set in March or early April, this year’s MLB season won’t kick off before April 9th, if it kicks off at all. Spring break practice games that traditionally take place prior to opening day were scrapped, as a safety precaution.
There are many unanswered questions about the upcoming season. With a projected start date of two weeks later than normal, it has been speculated that the MLB season will be extended to early October, but this has not been confirmed. The late end to the regular season could push the postseason to have an end date of sometime in November. This is cause for concern as many cities across the U.S. are experiencing cool if not cold weather by that time of the year.
Further speculation includes the idea that many stadiums may choose to open late, meaning June or even August. This would push back the 2020 MLB season so far that it wouldn’t end until sometime in 2021.
This would not be the first time that the MLB season has been delayed. Due to the timing of World War 1, in 1918, the MLB season concluded on September 1st. The one World Series in history that was completed within the month of September was when the Chicago Cubs were defeated by The Boston Red Sox. It was the last World Series game one by The Boston Red Sox between then and 2004. In the case of the Chicago Cubs, their next World Series win was in 2016.
The only other MLB season to start two weeks after the originally planned date was in 1972 when players were on strike. This season was shorter than normal, as the first two weeks of games did not get rescheduled. MLB players wouldn’t go on strike again until 1981. At that time, there were no games held between June 11th and August 10th.
With so many unanswered questions about this year’s MLB season, people are wondering if any team will be able to play the entire schedule they were expected to. There are questions as to whether or not this year’s season will even take place.
Originally posted on CharlesHitechew.net. | https://medium.com/@charleshitechew/a-look-into-the-upcoming-mlb-season-10889dc805a5 | ['Charles Hitechew'] | 2020-04-23 16:17:53.214000+00:00 | ['Mlb Season', 'Sports', 'MLB', 'Charles Hitechew'] |
Revising and Editing — Where the Magic Happens | Revising and Editing — Where the Magic Happens
Producing a masterpiece with a sleight of hand
Photo by Dollar Gill on Unsplash
Genuine writers understand that writing grows through a process and with an established procedure, writing becomes tolerable, for many rewarding and when all the steps flow synchronously, exhilarating.
The process varies as a writer matures, but accomplished writers agree that a process exists. The writing process includes five phases: prewriting, writing, revision, editing, and publishing. The first two typically concentrate on creativity and include the recording of thoughts and ideas. Revisions and editing focus on improvements and corrections. Publishing places the polished product in front of the world.
The first draft: one of many
“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something–anything-down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft–you just need to get it down. The second draft is the updraft–you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.” — Anne Lamott in Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on the Writing Life
Once the first draft is complete, writers look at their work and arrive at one of three conclusions: “There, I’ve said it.” “This sucks.” or “Now, it’s time to get to work.”
There, I’ve said it
When a document stops at this stage, the focus is to convey the content to an identified audience. There are some types of writing that end with the draft. For example, when writing is personal or therapeutic, it needs no further action. Or a brief email to a coworker may deliver a message without requiring much development or refinement beyond proofreading.
This Sucks
Sometimes an idea doesn’t work. Instead of proceeding on a topic that holds no future, a writer will file it away for later when inspiration strikes. I call this incubation. Sometimes a subject requires time to brew, sprout, and mature before the ideas can solidify. Writers should be wary though to not critique their writing harshly early in the process because a draft can frequently be massaged into a quality piece when the time is right. Do not throw in the pen too quickly.
Now, it’s time to get to work
However, writers who produce for an audience dedicate attention and energy to revising and editing, refining the content to ensure the finishing touches focus on style, voice, grammar, and punctuation.
Here, the arduous work begins. Revision and editing compel an author to examine the words with a discerning eye and implement changes. To recognize the differences between the two, think of revision as substantial changes and editing as minor, sometimes obscure, changes but acknowledge both significantly impact meaning.
Revision: creating the sloppy copy
Revision is not copying (or typing) the draft, so it looks clean. In fact, when revising the manuscript becomes messy.
Revision is not checking for usage and mechanics. Be careful to not confuse revision with editing. Revising involves making changes; whereas, editing involves making corrections. After writing the draft, it is too soon to perform corrections because during revision sizeable portions of text change. Don’t waste time or energy editing material that may be discarded or rewritten.
“More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn’t say I have a talent that’s special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.” — John Irving
(For readers who continue consuming this article, notice the links to other articles that expand on the skills described. As this article focuses on the importance of revision and editing and the need to address them separately, the links direct you to other articles that provide strategies.)
Begin by reading the words on the page while reminding yourself that writing is a process; this reminder creates an acceptance to change. Revision incorporates the effective concepts of written communication with the goal to develop content, organize structure, create a clear and consistent voice, present vivid word choice, and build fluency.
The list of tasks at this stage require time. No growth occurs without isolated practice of strategies to strengthen the writing. The early drafts show you know how to write; revising proves you know how to write effectively.
Revision requires the author to identify the audience and purpose to critically assess the appropriateness of the voice and style. For instance, the voice of an article about photosynthesis presented to botanists differs from a piece explaining the process to elementary children.
The focus during revision falls on all aspects of the written word and when executed successfully, a writer sees positive evidence of revision.
Increased details and less unanswered questions. (Ask who, what, where, why and when questions to prompt details.)
Powerful vocabulary (Eliminate weak words with the help of a thesaurus.)
Consistent voice throughout the narrative
Vivid descriptions that shows instead of tells (Use each of the five senses to create imagery.)
Dynamic characters who are realistic and relatable
Embed figurative language (Similes, metaphors, alliteration, allusions, etc.)
Limited clichés (Avoid overused expressions and construct an original approach to express old ideas.)
Engaging leads (Capture the reader’s attention with the introduction.)
Fluency (Articulate ideas easily and accurately.)
Variety (Examine word choice and sentence beginnings.)
Well-developed paragraphs (Return to essentials by offering a topic sentence with support.)
Organization (Apply transitions.)
“By the time I am nearing the end of a story, the first part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least one hundred and fifty times. I am suspicious of both facility and speed. Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this.” — Roald Dahl
Editing: preparing the final draft
Most people, through public education, studied language usage and mechanics. However, this generally occurs in isolation from writing. Successful editors transfer skills practiced on worksheets and activities from direct instruction to application. This requires a discerning eye to details. As mentioned, editing involves making corrections.
A writer instinctively edits during all stages of the writing process, but precise attention to details becomes imperative at the end of the process. Allow yourself to say, “I will take care of that at the editing stage.” By ignoring errors when drafting, writers avoid the blocks that stall creative thought.
Once the draft is contextually organized and coherent, editing ensures the writing communicates fluently. Right and wrong answers exist at this stage; know that only the right claims are tolerable.
Check the details with the precision of a scientist peering through a microscope assessing accuracy.
Spelling
Word usage (Particularly inspect homonyms because they may be spelled correctly, but the wrong word is chosen.)
Sentence structure (Eliminate run-on sentences and fragments.)
Punctuation (Pay special attention to commas and apostrophes. They are a writer’s quicksand.)
Possessive nouns
Contractions
Quotation marks
Verb tense agreement
Capitalization
“I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.” — Vladimir Nabokov
Slow and steady wins the race. When writers allow this motto to direct their efforts, when they practice and apply the identified skills of successful authors, the reward will be engaged readers. | https://medium.com/swlh/revising-and-editing-where-the-magic-happens-36d6dd43d547 | ['Brenda Mahler'] | 2020-07-22 15:44:51.854000+00:00 | ['Revision', 'Editing', 'Productivity', 'Writing', 'Writing Tips'] |
I’m OK, But I’ll Take the Money | Terry H. Schwadron
March 14, 2021
There’s a rush of political comment about the wide-sweeping nature of the Joe Biden $1.9 trillion coronavirus aid and economic stimulus bill, a combination of surprise that centrist Biden has emerged as a political progressive and over its reach to offer actual financial help to so many left adrift in the pandemic.
Of course, there has been a rush of Republican criticism too, matching the party’s complete shutout in support. Basically, the GOP position is that we’re offering too much help, spending too much taxpayer money, pushing a “liberal wish list” and, oh yeah, advancing partisan thinking that is not about halting cancel culture, abortion, gun control or cutting taxes.
So, yes, we’ve seen the first GOP lawmakers Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., step forth to take credit for helping restaurants though he opposed the bill. Sen. Mitch McConnell, the minority leader who wants to become majority leader again, noted that we haven’t yet spent all the money raised — and mostly committed over time — from the last bill. One of my favorites so far has been Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., who has sent to governors and mayors what he calls a “simple and common sense” demand for the 50 states to reject the $350 billion in federal stimulus money. He demanded that the money only be used to reimburse specific pandemic-fighting measures, and not for any deeper investments in infrastructure or economic development.
Right, that’s not going to happen.
Uh, No
It took Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, not only to reject the rejection, but to whine that Florida had not gotten enough money from the feds. Now that’s whatever conservatives would call chutzpah.
“The Senate didn’t correct the fact that Florida is getting a lot less than what we would be entitled to on a per capita basis,” DeSantis said. Florida, which has a $2 billion deficit as the result of Covid, is set to receive $10 billion under the plan.
The Florida state Senate Budget Committee Chair Kelli Stargel, another Republican, told reporters that returning the money would only recycle it to New York or California or other hated Blue States.
Talking Points Memo.com noted that some Republican -controlled state houses were seeking to use the stimulus money to finance deep tax cuts. But last-minute changes to the legislation by Senate Democrats prevents that from happening.
The American Rescue Plan bill stipulates that states receiving the money cannot use it to “offset a reduction” in tax revenue due to any law passed during the time that the funds are available — from now until 2024. Lawmakers in Kansas, Michigan, Florida, Georgia, and other states have all suggested that aid to state and local governments could be used to finance state tax cuts. Mississippi and West Virginia are pushing outright elimination of the state income tax.
The question is how far Republicans at the state or federal level will go to keep help from reaching Americans in need.
The Broader Picture
Republican reactions to the bill, in fact, seem to be focusing more on Biden’s nationwide speech Thursday than on getting aid out to individuals and small businesses, on digging in on local efforts to streamline applications for aid, readying school rooms with ventilation issues or stopping coronavirus by widening vaccine and testing efforts. They’d rather we just declare early victory and move on — whether for the sake of politics, economics or convenience.
Instead, commentators from the Right have been focused on Biden’s presentation style, on his occasional stutter, on failing to give enough credit to The Former Guy for investing in faster vaccine development — and on insisting on masks. Rather than celebrate that we were hearing a non-egotistical evaluation of where we stand, we got strained vitriol.
Somehow, even Biden’s statement that if Americans continue vaccinating at current rates, we’ll be in good shape by July 4 is being turned around — into denying Americans’ individualism and dictating when Americans can celebrate safely in small groups. I don’t get it: If we had a broken leg and set it, it would still take a number of weeks to set in a cast. There’s no denial of individualism involved, just medicine. What’s different here?
Here’s Breitbart’s chief editor Alex Marlow: “It seemed like he left out virtually everything other than the guy really likes vaccines and masks. He didn’t talk about personal responsibility. He didn’t talk about the government’s role in any of these anti-science lockdowns. He didn’t talk nearly enough about the fact that we could probably open up all of our schools today. He didn’t talk at all about the fact that this virus came from China. He didn’t talk about the fact that the virus is coming over our borders.”
If you can get by all the partisanship, you might like a thought from Slate: “It seems like some portion of the country is going full-force against public health guidance and another portion is staying very, very cautious, even at the cost of a lot of energy and mental health. I don’t mean to suggest that everyone is either gathering for spitting contests in basements or else hermetically sealed in their living rooms. . . So many people I talk to are living at 90 percent while stressing over that last 10 percent.”
The Republican vision is that individuals will rise to take personal responsibility for all of it without government involvement, as if we’re not still seeing thousands of new pandemic cases while witnessing Spring break beach gatherings and full restaurants in Texas and Florida.
The happy talk in Texas and Florida risks more disease and trouble as the virus mutates. None of it, not ignoring medicine, not jumping the gun for the sake of the economy, not underscoring the need to mobilize — and not the “100% Open” claims of a growing number of states — will fix what’s still dangerous.
##
www.terryscvhwadrdon.wordpress.com | https://medium.com/@terryschwadron/im-ok-but-i-ll-take-the-money-4c36bfd59e4e | ['Terry Schwadron'] | 2021-03-14 11:45:30.855000+00:00 | ['Coronovirus', 'Republican', 'Government', 'Independence', 'States'] |
3 Free Tools to Ensure Color Blind-Friendly Designs | 3 Free Tools to Ensure Color Blind-Friendly Designs
Millions of people suffer from some form of color blindness. Here are 3 tools that will help you be mindful in your designs.
I was talking with a fellow designer recently about a new style guide we are working on. As we were reviewing our color pallet, I mentioned testing for color blind friendliness, since 1 in 12 males suffer from some form of color blindness. My co-worker was shocked. He had no idea that so many people were color blind. I used a tool to show the color difference for the most common case, and we instantly saw quite a few of our lighter colors were indistinguishable. Finding this early allowed us to make important changes to the style guide, which will influence our designs.
After that conversation, I realized it might be helpful to share some tools I use to check if my designs work for people who have any type of color blindness.
#1 Stark
Stark is a Sketch plugin that allows you to preview your work in 8 different types of color blindness. In addition to checking if your designs are color blind-friendly, Stark also contrasts levels if you select two layers. Spark is a new tool for me, but I think it’s really impressive and love the ability to export.
#2 Color Oracle
Color Oracle is an open source project created by Bernhard Jenn and Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso. Now I know the website looks kinda shady but this tool works. Some nice features include keyboard shortcuts, application agnosticism and menu bar access.
#3 Colorblind Web Page Filter
Colorblind Web Page Filter is a web based tool where you can copy a URL and view a side-by-side. You can copy the filter URL, view the side-by-side in full-screen mode and view 4 common types of color blindness. The only problem I have with using this tool is you have to copy a URL, and I prefer to check my designs early in the design process. That being said, you can use Colorblind Web Page Filter to check early prototypes. | https://medium.com/trust-the-product/3-free-tool-to-ensure-color-blind-friendly-designs-28d93cf238d | ['Briana Lauren'] | 2017-05-19 20:35:48.271000+00:00 | ['Accessibility', 'Color Blindness', 'Free', 'Sketch', 'Design'] |
Proteus II | Photo by Lorenzo Herrera
Finally, here we go.
Ben looked down at a worn-out piece of paper. There was a glow in his eye that resembled the sun coming out of an August mist that blanketed the suburbs in the morning.
That fragile paper in his hand was a CD Key — an alphanumeric code that would serve as the redemption to his glory days of gaming. Specifically, it was the key to redownload the game that had started it all for him, Proteus II.
See, nowadays most games will publish onto a client or site that will distribute the game on the Developer’s behalf. Going through a larger platform like this makes it easy to record purchases as publishers will have user logs and digital registrations to ensure that someone who bought the game does, in fact, own it.
Back in the day though, before games were registered to a cloud system and most games required a local download of the game files, games used physical CD Keys to ensure that a person downloading the game did own it. You’d purchase the game, it would come in a disk, and once you popped that disk into your computer you’d be prompted for a CD Key. Upon inputting the unique key, you’d be able to download the game to your computer.
All that being said, Ben was able to find a key for one of his favorite games of all time, Proteus II. It was actually the game that got him into gaming in the first place, a hack-and-slash adventure. You’d fight your way through beasts through various zones such as forests, dungeons, and deserts to obtain the best loot available and forge your way to the top of the leaderboards to become the Ultimate Slayer of Proteus.
Proteus II was roughly fourteen years old. While it was the second installment of the game, there were four more versions of the game available. There was Proteus III, Proteus IV, Proteus V, and Proteus V: The Ultimate Expansion.
The concept of each of the games was the same, hack and slash your way through enemies. But each release boasted a new storyline, updated graphics, new loot, and more characters. In Proteus II you only had a choice of the Warrior, Sorceress, Hunter, or Assassin. In the third installment, you were given the choice of a male or female version of all four of these characters, and they introduced the Druid and Necromancer. In the fourth installment, they changed the storyline and items, but the playable characters remained the same. Ben didn’t ever play Proteus IV, but he heard it was pretty good.
The fifth installment, which came out last year, was one of the biggest game releases of the decade. The team had done a lot of work on the game which included a graphics overhaul, advanced loot systems, branching storylines, and even two more new playable characters — the Shapeshifter and Paladin.
The new changes to the game were great. There were changes in Proteus V that lifetime fans weren’t too fond of. The first was that the game could only be played online.
“To ensure the integrity of the game, and in order to make necessary changes quickly and effectively so that our players can continue to enjoy Proteus V — the game will only be available for online play,” was the general message that the team had given before it was released.
This didn’t bother Ben too much when he was playing Proteus II he mostly played online anyway.
Another change that the community was not very happy about was the addition of real-money purchases in the game. Initially, the game was designed so that players could buy higher tier items from each other via real-money in the game. After some severe backlash prior to the game’s release, the Developers scrapped this feature. What they did keep though, was the ability to buy skins in the game. They stated that the purchase of high tier items could take away from the playability, but as purchases for cosmetics did not detract from the actual play — they would be keeping the function in.
The skins basically allowed you to change how your base character looked. They had skins for the characters themselves, like one that made them look like a robot or even undead. They also had skins that changed what your armor looked like.
Ben wasn’t fond of the skins, but he didn’t mind as they didn’t change how the game was played. He liked how some of them looked so when he bought the game, he purchased a cosmetic bundle that included one for every character as well as several weapons and armor skins.
He decided afterward that he wouldn’t purchase any of the other skins — unless of course, one caught his eye. The game was already $59.99 plus tax. For the bundle, he paid an extra $14.99… plus tax. He figured the extra would help the Developers that he had backed for so long.
Then the expansion came out — Proteus V: The Ultimate Expansion. It was released three months after Proteus V and included new items, two new maps, and a brand new playable character. The gaming community was unhappy about the expansion’s release. They thought that it was a money-grab from the studio and that they could have released it with the base game.
Ben didn’t care all too much. He was excited about the expansion. He went ahead and bought it for $29.99.
By the time the expansion had come out Ben had already completed Proteus V’s main storyline, but he was still looking for better items. He finished the expansion rather quickly and after a while going through the same dungeons simply to get better loot was getting a bit repetitive. He played the game more casually and didn’t care much for the Ultimate Slayer title.
There were quite a few posts online about how Proteus II was making a resurgence. The community was going back to the game as it was one of the premier games of its time. A lot of people grew up on it. A few of Ben’s friends said they were going to go back to it. Ben’s older brother, Jacob, even sparked interest in hopping back on. This is what convinced Ben to go and find his old CD Key.
It would be like the good ole’ days.
Ben thought back on the times when he and Jacob would take turns playing on the family computer. Each of them would have an hour. It didn’t matter who was playing though. Even when it was Jacob’s turn, Ben would sit and watch in awe as his brother roamed the Proteus World and fought his way through new and mysterious dungeons. They would cheer each time one of them obtained new loot. They would go out and buy various guides and booklets which showed you tips on how to advance in the game.
On the weekends, Ben and Jacob would bike to the local internet cafe and use their weekly allowance to play together. Their friends would come as well, and all of them would join the same game. They would spend countless hours playing the game. Ben used to draw each of the characters. Jacob had his drawing hung up in his room for years. It was probably still laying around their parents’ house somewhere.
Ben put the Proteus II disk in the CD drive.
He saw the familiar installer pop up. It asked him for the CD Key. Ben looked down at the piece of paper he had and typed the twenty-five character alphanumeric code.
Success! Installing Proteus II now…
Ben was pretty excited. It wasn’t a massive game, so the download wouldn’t take too long. He went to the kitchen to grab a drink while he waited. When he got back to the computer he was met with a popup above the installer. He noticed that the progress bar hadn’t moved.
Halt. Internal System Error
It was followed by a string of numbers. Ben was a bit confused. He started the download again… and a few minutes later was met with the same error message.
Ben took a swig of his chocolate milk and jumped online to see what the issue was. Surely, if he was seeing the error on his device, someone else would have gotten the same error.
And there it was — pages of forums filled with the same question, “I’ve received an error trying to download Proteus II. What do I do?”
The top result was a forum post with the question on it, followed by a response that looked to be a resolution with steps on how to fix the issue. It had about forty thumbs-ups on it, so Ben figured it was the fix. While he wasn’t the most tech-savvy person, the steps seemed simple enough. He just had to run a few basic commands on his device and then download a couple of files. The issue was that when the game was made, it was made to run on the computers of the time. It wasn’t built to run on the most recent devices.
Ben struggled a bit with getting the installation running. The thread that he was originally looking at was written to help people install and run the game on a specific operating system, he had a different type of computer with a different operating system, so he had to look at a couple of other threads to finally get the correct commands and files together. After two hours of tinkering, he finally got the game installed and running.
Ben finally pressed Play!
The game loaded, and he was on the main menu. His fingers were shaking from excitement. Ben went through the character creation process rather quickly as he wanted to play the game. He chose the online mode as he wanted to play with his brother later. Jacob said he’d be home later that day. Ben was planning on giving him a call so he could help him through the installation process. When he got to character selection that was easy enough. Warrior. Ben always played the Warrior and Jacob played the Hunter, the two went well together. Character name, easy as well. Ben always used the same character name, Benyrael.
He loaded into the first starting zone as a Level 1 Warrior. Ben had to squint at first when the game finished loading. Were the graphics always this bad, or did he remember it differently from when he was a kid? He took his character over to The Shepherd, which was the main narrator of the game who would give you your quests. He could barely read the dialogue. How were these graphics so bad?
Ben shook it off. Going through the storyline and killing monsters would be fun. It was starting to come back to him. There were skeletons right outside of the starting zone that he had to kill. He went and found the first group of them. Benyrael charged forward to the first skeleton and swung his longsword… and it was fairly underwhelming. The combat system definitely did not age well. The animations felt slow, old really. The game seemed to be going at a snail’s pace to Ben.
They definitely refined the combat system in the new ones.
Ben spent about an hour killing skeletons and got a bit tired of it. He was still squinting because of the graphics quality. His character had only progressed seven levels. The max level cap was 80. The game was really more about the end-game, he thought. He decided to leave his current game and see if any higher level characters were hosting power leveling games. Power leveling was when a stronger player helped you through the game so that you could play the end-game content more and play for the best loot.
There was one person hosting a power leveling game. Ben joined, and he and the other player were the only two in the game. It was a Level 67 Sorceress. The Sorceress typed in the chat.
Follow!
Ben followed the character out of the town, but they were heading into the PVP zone. This was the player versus player area where instead of completing the storyline, players dueled each other. Ben thought this was odd as you shouldn’t have to come to this area for power leveling, but followed anyway. As soon as they entered the PVP zone, the other character turned around towards Ben’s character and fired a lightning-bolt which hit Benyrael directly.
Critical Hit popped up on Ben’s screen, and not even a second later his entire screen turned grey and another message appeared.
You have been killed.
Ben was stunned. The other player killed him. He typed in the game chat.
What the hell was that?
The other player responded straight away.
Sorry man just respawn.
Ben wasn’t happy about it. Each time you’re killed a chunk of your gold gets taken away. He didn’t have much as he hadn’t been playing for long, but you need the gold later down the line for items. Ben respawned, and his character came back to life where he had been laying dead previously. As soon as he did he saw a fireball shoot across the screen.
You have been killed.
Another message appeared in the chat.
Haha loser.
You have been booted from this game.
Ben looked at his monitor blankly. He was back at the main menu. His dead Level 7 Warrior seemed to be looking back at him, frowning. Was he frowning? Ben couldn’t tell, the graphics were terrible.
Just then he got a chat message from Jacob.
Hey man, home now. Let’s jump on Proteus II?
Ben responded.
Nah, let’s play the new expansion. Heard they’re going to release new skins next week. Might look into getting them.
Jacob got back to him a couple of minutes later.
Yeah, I already pre-ordered them. Maybe let’s try Proteus II later this week? I’ll try to install it tonight.
Ben didn’t have the stomach to tell Jacob that it wasn’t the game that they remembered from their childhood. Or maybe it was, but things just looked better when you were a kid. | https://medium.com/the-weekly-short/proteus-ii-daa0b740a4ac | ['Parnell Piano'] | 2020-03-24 15:22:29.851000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Short Fiction', 'Fiction Writing', 'Fiction', 'Short Story'] |
Meet the Team: Jordan Watson, Senior Node.js Developer | Our ‘Meet the team series’ offers a glimpse into the daily lives of a variety of team members in different parts of the business.
What do you like most about GoDaddy?
From a tech perspective, working at GoDaddy fits my professional goals and roadmap to work primarily in the JavaScript ecosystem. It’s the language I find most enjoyable and GoDaddy offers an environment to use my skills to build challenging business objectives that are not repetitive. As well the company pushes open-source tech and has built a community around multiple programming languages; to add, the company culture and extreme transparency also makes working at GoDaddy a fun and friendly environment.
I recently became a dad and love that I get to spend time at home.
What drew you to GoDaddy?
GoDaddy always stood out to me as a key player in Domain names (which is obvious) but also watching the company grow and experiencing it from the inside it’s clear, it has become so much more than that. It has enabled so many entrepreneurs to grow their own business and be self-sufficient using the product suite the company offers which to me is brilliant. If a company can do that at the pace it has whilst still offering a fun environment for their employees, that somewhere I want to work.
What makes the GoDaddy Engineering Team unique from others that you’ve worked on?
So, speaking directly based on my team. The fact we work cross regions and cultures whilst being fully remote and some of us never meeting in person. The team culture is phenomenal, we have a motto it’s the “Secret sauce” we can perform our business objectives every sprint whilst goofing around and having fun whilst achieving our goals, and sometimes that can be hard for teams to mature that fast.
Although we are remote, we make time to have team bonding and celebrate each other’s success in and out of the workplace.
Tell us about your new favourite role.
I’ve recently become a dad and being a new dad definitely has its challenges, but I’m one of the lucky ones so far as my son is a fantastic sleeper and happy chap. One of the huge benefits of working remotely with GoDaddy means I don’t miss out on the little moments with my son which I’m forever grateful for.
How have you and the team stayed successful and collaborated whilst working remotely?
The easiest way to make sure collaboration is seamless is to ensure everyone is on the same page. So given the team is remote and across time zones handovers are key, documentation is extremely important combined with the obvious one good communication. Therefore, the level of transparency across teams really helps with this.
In terms of working with one and other break-out rooms, a lot of design meetings are placed appropriately in time zone calendars to ensure the right people are in the “room” to offer professional insights. The whole team doesn’t necessarily need to be there but again everyone is invited. From a high level, these are the most important parts of our team’s success.
If you had to tell future teammates one thing, what it would be?
Be yourself at GoDaddy coming to work and being yourself is the most important thing ever. Hit the ground running be opinionated, you’re here for that reason to share your professional insight and most importantly have fun!
Are you enjoying this series and want to know more about life at GoDaddy? Check out our GoDaddyLife social pages! Follow us to meet our team, learn more about our culture (Teams, ERG’s, Locations), careers, and so much more. You’re more than just your day job, so come propel your career with us. | https://medium.com/@GoDaddyLife/meet-the-team-jordan-watson-senior-node-js-developer-7593f2ffb274 | ['Godaddy Life'] | 2021-09-16 12:06:01.801000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Nodejs', 'Tech', 'Employees', 'Developer'] |
See Green Industrial Co., Ltd.-Implementing a hazardous-substances management system for environmental innovation(旭聚企業股份有限公司) | Purchasing safe, healthy and environmental products has become a common practice for consumers in Europe and the United States. As the largest supplier of natural rubber yoga mats in the world, See Green sees product safety as its number- one priority. With the assistance of ‘Project Rising Star in Green Innovation for SMEs’, See Green invited up-stream suppliers to jointly implement a hazardous-substance management system to adopt a new process protocol ready for increasingly stringent international procurement standards.
See Green is the largest natural rubber yoga-mat manufacturer in the world. With its long-term experience of working with international leading brands, See Green grasps the importance of the intense attention directed to product safety.
Aside from being functional, the yoga mats are also required to be safe and environmental friendly. To make the mats environmentally friendly, See Green has attempted to recycle industrial waste and turn it into safe raw materials to achieve the goal of zero waste and mitigate negative environmental impacts. “To achieve the same profit, treating recycled material takes a lot more effort. But I feel a sense of purpose,” said the Chairman of the board Kao Guang-lung. Many clients from Europe and the United States appreciate the green principles of See Green and are willing to place more orders. Kao has foreseen the future trend of the international market in advance.
The environmental awareness of international buyers also zooms in on the toxic substances in raw materials, handing See Green another challenge to conquer. Project manager Dung Min-Ju explained, “We used to focus mostly on the functionality of materials. Without proper precautions in material control-system management, there might be quality flaws that undermine the increasing heightened material-safety requirements in the international market.”
To improve full-scale material safety and product quality control, See Green participated in the ‘Project Rising Star in Green Innovation for SMEs’ and implemented its hazardous- substances management system. During the management- system reform, supply chain management was another key focus. Suppliers and employees must understand the hazardous-substances control requirements in all materials to secure material safety.
At the same time, See Green underwent product carbon- footprint assessment jointly with its suppliers to find out the hot spots of high carbon emissions to enable further improvements. Holding “simple production” as the business value, and maximizing production with the smallest amounts of resources, See Green infused its operations with sustainability by its development of a hazardous-substance management and carbon footprint assessment, leading the partners of a green supply chain to expand their international competitiveness. | https://medium.com/discover-the-power-of-sustainability/see-green-industrial-co-89610ecd5d94 | [] | 2019-05-28 08:03:56.394000+00:00 | ['Sustainability', 'Economy', 'Environment', 'Sustainable Development', 'Taiwan'] |
MBL snapshot for CBK Airdrop | Hello from MovieBloc Community,
Celebrating the issuance of CBK of Cobak platform, which was acquired by MovieBloc, CBK Airdrop Event will be held for MBL holders to increase MBL’s utility and promote CBK.
CBK will be airdropped to MBL holders according to the number of MBLs held at the time of the snapshot.
Airdrop will be distributed within a week from the snapshot date. The exact date of snapshot and the ratio of the airdrop amount will be announced later.
The snapshot will only be supported through the exchanges.
The list of exchanges will be updated via medium.
On the day and the day before the snapshot, deposits and withdrawals may be restricted on exchanges. Please check the deposit and withdrawal policy of the exchange before making a deposit.
Thank you
MovieBloc Team
MovieBloc.com | Telegram | Cobak Forum | Twitter | https://medium.com/moviebloc/mbl-snapshot-for-cbk-airdrop-8e7bbda79f0c | [] | 2020-12-17 04:26:23.400000+00:00 | ['Moviebloc', 'Snapshot', 'Airdrop', 'Cbk', 'Mbl'] |
Bisk Healthy U & Yoga | Bisk employees enjoy a variety of perks and benefits which include health and wellness initiatives through our Healthy U Team.
Here’s a great video of an employee who tells her story and explains the importance of having these programs.
Enjoy and thanks for sharing Lee. =)
Written by Mark | https://medium.com/lifeatbisk/bisk-healthy-u-yoga-719029c9628c | [] | 2017-01-24 18:53:44.936000+00:00 | ['Tampa', 'Bisk Healthy U', 'Employee Engagement', 'Employee Benefits', 'Company Culture'] |
The Road to the Super Bowl | The most watched television broadcast in the United States is coming up in a week, the Super Bowl.
Superbowl LII- Patriots vs. Eagles. Picture Credits
In this Super Bowl the defending champions, the Patriots, marshelled by the veteran quarterback Tom Brady are pitted up against the 13–3 Eagles led by Nick Foles, a quarterback trying to prove himself.
In Week 17, Nick Foles had an abysmal game. He threw for 39 yards and maintained a 9.3 passer rating. However, in the NFC Conference Championship, the tables turned. He threw 352 yards and maintained 141.4 passer rating in order to decimate the Vikings 38–7. In order for the Eagles to have any chance in this game, Foles needs a repeat of the game against the Vikings.
Tom Brady on the other hand is one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time, and is coming off of orchastrating a miraculous 4th quarter comeback in the AFC Conference Championship to beat the Jaguars 24–20.
It will be up to the Eagles defense to keep the Patriots power-packed offense at bay, and their offense to pick holes in thier injury ridden defense if they hope to topple the defending champs.
This Super Bowl will feature Justin Timberlake in the halftime show.
Sources:
NFL, ESPN, TV Broadcasts, CBS | https://medium.com/newscuts/the-road-to-the-super-bowl-7eaf67922c9a | ['Niraj Shah'] | 2018-01-28 08:15:46.438000+00:00 | ['NFL', 'New England Patriots', 'Super Bowl', 'Philadelphia Eagles', 'Sports'] |
Metatime AMA Recap | Metatime：
Hello everyone, AMA starts now. Metatime’s community ambassador Darkmoon is here with us to answer the questions. I will directly pick questions, and Darkmoon will leave a comment below the question to give an answer. If you still have doubts, please leave more comments below the question.
Question #1： Darkmoon, please briefly describe what kind of platform Metatime is?
Darkmoon：
Metatime is a Web3-based crypto social product deployed on BSC and will expand to multi-chain eventually.
One of the distinctions between Metatime and other crypto social products is that we have introduced TIME as a unit of measurement.
For example: When I read someone’s content, I spend a certain amount of time, and in this product, I also have to pay a certain amount of TIME tokens. At the same time, the content creator will also get a certain percentage of the TIME Tokens paid by the readers.
This is what we think of as a Web3 social product: all users’ time has value, and content that gains users’ attention will gain value.
Metatime：
Question #2: There have been many SocialFi projects emerging recently. What do you think the main distinctive features and advantages of Metatime are compared to them?
Darkmoon：
Our advantages are in several aspects:
1 Completely fair distribution, no team or VC share.
We believe that web3 belongs to the people, not the VCs
2 No guest mode. We have a definition for digital identity: NFT avatar + address + unique nickname. Coupled with the rule of $TIME billing while reading other people’s content, you are not allowed to browse content without logging in. This also means that our users are crypto natives.
3 Metatime is very clear about what to do next. SocialFi will not be a story that repeats the many Gamefi projects that have emerged in the past few months. I mean, social behaviors and social tools as one of the foundations of Web3, it has a large enough value in itself.
There is no need for excessive incentives. When users come here only for token incentives, then their purpose is not for social, which will result in a compromise for the value of the platform. We took this into consideration during the design process.
Metatime：
Question #3: What is the dual-token model of Metatime? What are the use cases of TIME and MATTER?
Darkmoon：
MATTER is collected from Metatime’s task system. Currently, the main tasks include the immersion time on Metatime, your content gaining reading time from others, and reporting inappropriate content, etc. In such cases, MATTER serves as an incentive token.
The value of Matter will come from Metatime’s upcoming feature updates: Tribe, Reputation NFT system, content-as-asset feature, mirroring city, etc.
Metatime：
Question #4: I’d like to know what is the roadmap for 2022 Q1?
Darkmoon：
In 22Q1, We will unlock many new features, including tribe/reputation NFT system.
we also will make the transition to decentralization, and the right of censoring content will be returned to the community.
A new user introduction program will also be implemented in Q1.
You may also check our full roadmap on our website: https://metatime.social/
Metatime：
Question #5：Please give an overview of the feature “Tribe”.
Darkmoon：
Tribe is a new species of social product, a forum-based, blockchain-transformed web 3 application.
Simply put, Any user can create a “Tribe” for any topic after consuming MATTER. Tribes can be set up as paid or free, as determined by the tribe owner. The tribe owner gets the revenue from the content of the tribe, so he will work hard to promote and manage the tribe.
Also, the ownership of the tribe is an NFT, and it can be bought and sold.
This means that the tribe itself can be listed on the secondary market, and the owner of an active tribe with quality content can transfer ownership of the tribe in addition to being rewarded with TIME. Which will greatly increase their motivation to create and maintain an active tribe.
Metatime：
Question #6：We found out the team announced many partners. How will they generate the content in Metatime, and what are the incentives for them?
Darkmoon：
Our partners are required to have NFT to log in to Metatime, just like regular users.
The benefits they can get come from multiple sources: Firstly, it’s obvious the $TIME incentive that their content gets; Secondly, Metatime is a social product that can meet their marketing needs.
In addition, under the mechanism of Metatime, the platform will gradually attract and retain a group of crypto-savvy users with which our partners can have close contact, thus benefiting the development of their projects.
Metatime：
Question #7：What’s the plan about the added value for the first 2000 Avatars? Could the team help share in advance?
Darkmoon：
We certainly have planned well, but I can’t reveal too much right now, stay tuned👀
Metatime：
Question $8：Will the Entry threshold always be so high, because now 10000AF cost $270? How do we achieve the network effect? Will the community threshold be gradually lowered in the later period?
Darkmoon：
“Will the Entry threshold always be so high?”
Of course not, we are a social product and the network effect is exactly what we need.
The current limitations are mainly due to the fact that we are still in beta testing phase, where there are still many necessary features being refined, and features such as tribe, reputation NFT being developed.
But we already have plans to open up the next batch of users to the Metatime product, and we’ll probably announce it in January, stay tuned!
Metatime：
Question #9：How to solve the problem of content supply at the beginning of the community? Make sure the creators are serious about sharing quality content and not getting rewarded with pornographic images, following each other, and other lazy ways.
Darkmoon：
We certainly took this into consideration, and if you look closely you’ll see that there are far less pornographic spam on Metatime in the initial stage than on a competing product that had launched earlier.
The need to consume $TIME in order to use Metatime is the most essential reason why we can keep our content clean in the long run.
In addition to this, the $MATTER incentive for posting quality content and the fact that we have set a reporting task within the task system will also help us achieve this.
Metatime：
Due to time limitations, this AMA will end here. If you have any other questions, you can still leave comments or discuss them in the Telegram group, where our volunteers will also answer them.
https://metatime.social/
Follow us on
Telegram: https://t.me/MetatimeGroup
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Metatime_social
Medium: https://medium.com/@Metatime_social | https://medium.com/@Metatime_social/metatime-ama-recap-357ab3365e11 | [] | 2021-12-31 07:02:50.540000+00:00 | ['Metaverse', 'Blockchain', 'Defi', 'Socialfi', 'Crypto'] |
Ten Machine Learning Algorithms You Should Know to Become a Data Scientist | Machine Learning Practitioners have different personalities. While some of them are “I am an expert in X and X can train on any type of data”, where X = some algorithm, some others are “Right tool for the right job people”. A lot of them also subscribe to “Jack of all trades. Master of one” strategy, where they have one area of deep expertise and know slightly about different fields of Machine Learning. That said, no one can deny the fact that as practicing Data Scientists, we will have to know basics of some common machine learning algorithms, which would help us engage with a new-domain problem we come across. This is a whirlwind tour of common machine learning algorithms and quick resources about them which can help you get started on them.
1. Principal Component Analysis(PCA)/SVD
PCA is an unsupervised method to understand global properties of a dataset consisting of vectors. Covariance Matrix of data points is analyzed here to understand what dimensions(mostly)/ data points (sometimes) are more important (ie have high variance amongst themselves, but low covariance with others). One way to think of top PCs of a matrix is to think of its eigenvectors with highest eigenvalues. SVD is essentially a way to calculate ordered components too, but you don’t need to get the covariance matrix of points to get it.
This Algorithm helps one fight curse of dimensionality by getting datapoints with reduced dimensions.
Libraries:
https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.linalg.svd.html
http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.decomposition.PCA.html
Introductory Tutorial:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.1100.pdf
2a. Least Squares and Polynomial Fitting
Remember your Numerical Analysis code in college, where you used to fit lines and curves to points to get an equation. You can use them to fit curves in Machine Learning for very small datasets with low dimensions. (For large data or datasets with many dimensions, you might just end up terribly overfitting, so don’t bother). OLS has a closed form solution, so you don’t need to use complex optimization techniques.
As is obvious, use this algorithm to fit simple curves / regression
Libraries:
https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/generated/numpy.linalg.lstsq.htmlhttps://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy-1.10.0/reference/generated/numpy.polyfit.html
Introductory Tutorial:
https://lagunita.stanford.edu/c4x/HumanitiesScience/StatLearning/asset/linear_regression.pdf
2b. Constrained Linear Regression
Least Squares can get confused with outliers, spurious fields and noise in data. We thus need constraints to decrease the variance of the line we fit on a dataset. The right method to do it is to fit a linear regression model which will ensure that the weights do not misbehave. Models can have L1 norm (LASSO) or L2 (Ridge Regression) or both (elastic regression). Mean Squared Loss is optimized.
Use these algorithms to fit regression lines with constraints, avoiding overfitting and masking noise dimensions from model.
Libraries:
http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/linear_model.html
Introductory Tutorial(s):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5asL5Eq2x0A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbwSCwoT51M
3. K means Clustering
Everyone’s favorite unsupervised clustering algorithm. Given a set of data points in form of vectors, we can make clusters of points based on distances between them. It’s an Expectation Maximization algorithm that iteratively moves the centers of clusters and then clubs points with each cluster centers. The input the algorithm has taken is the number of clusters which are to be generated and the number of iterations in which it will try to converge clusters.
As is obvious from the name, you can use this algorithm to create K clusters in dataset
Library:
http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.cluster.KMeans.html
Introductory Tutorial(s):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDmNF9JG3lo
https://www.datascience.com/blog/k-means-clustering
4. Logistic Regression
Logistic Regression is constrained Linear Regression with a nonlinearity (sigmoid function is used mostly or you can use tanh too) application after weights are applied, hence restricting the outputs close to +/- classes (which is 1 and 0 in case of sigmoid). Cross-Entropy Loss functions are optimized using Gradient Descent. A note to beginners: Logistic Regression is used for classification, not regression. You can also think of Logistic regression as a one layered Neural Network. Logistic Regression is trained using optimization methods like Gradient Descent or L-BFGS. NLP people will often use it with the name of Maximum Entropy Classifier.
This is what a Sigmoid looks like:
Use LR to train simple, but very robust classifiers.
Library:
http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.linear_model.LogisticRegression.html
Introductory Tutorial(s):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-la3q9d7AKQ
5. SVM (Support Vector Machines)
SVMs are linear models like Linear/ Logistic Regression, the difference is that they have different margin-based loss function (The derivation of Support Vectors is one of the most beautiful mathematical results I have seen along with eigenvalue calculation). You can optimize the loss function using optimization methods like L-BFGS or even SGD.
Another innovation in SVMs is the usage of kernels on data to feature engineer. If you have good domain insight, you can replace the good-old RBF kernel with smarter ones and profit.
One unique thing that SVMs can do is learn one class classifiers.
SVMs can used to Train a classifier (even regressors)
Library:
http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.svm.SVC.html
Introductory Tutorial(s):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHsErlPJWUU
Note: SGD based training of both Logistic Regression and SVMs are found in SKLearn’s http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.linear_model.SGDClassifier.html , which I often use as it lets me check both LR and SVM with a common interface. You can also train it on >RAM sized datasets using mini batches.
6. Feedforward Neural Networks
These are basically multilayered Logistic Regression classifiers. Many layers of weights separated by non-linearities (sigmoid, tanh, relu + softmax and the cool new selu). Another popular name for them is Multi-Layered Perceptrons. FFNNs can be used for classification and unsupervised feature learning as autoencoders.
Multi-Layered perceptron
FFNN as an autoencoder
FFNNs can be used to train a classifier or extract features as autoencoders
Libraries:
http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.neural_network.MLPClassifier.html#sklearn.neural_network.MLPClassifier
http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.neural_network.MLPRegressor.html
https://github.com/keras-team/keras/blob/master/examples/reuters_mlp_relu_vs_selu.py
Introductory Tutorial(s):
http://www.deeplearningbook.org/contents/mlp.html
http://www.deeplearningbook.org/contents/autoencoders.html
http://www.deeplearningbook.org/contents/representation.html
7. Convolutional Neural Networks (Convnets)
Almost any state of the art Vision based Machine Learning result in the world today has been achieved using Convolutional Neural Networks. They can be used for Image classification, Object Detection or even segmentation of images. Invented by Yann Lecun in late 80s-early 90s, Convnets feature convolutional layers which act as hierarchical feature extractors. You can use them in text too (and even graphs).
Use convnets for state of the art image and text classification, object detection, image segmentation.
Libraries:
https://developer.nvidia.com/digits
https://github.com/kuangliu/torchcv
https://github.com/chainer/chainercv
https://keras.io/applications/
Introductory Tutorial(s):
http://cs231n.github.io/
https://adeshpande3.github.io/A-Beginner%27s-Guide-To-Understanding-Convolutional-Neural-Networks/
8. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs):
RNNs model sequences by applying the same set of weights recursively on the aggregator state at a time t and input at a time t (Given a sequence has inputs at times 0..t..T, and have a hidden state at each time t which is output from t-1 step of RNN). Pure RNNs are rarely used now but its counterparts like LSTMs and GRUs are state of the art in most sequence modeling tasks.
RNN (If here is a densely connected unit and a nonlinearity, nowadays f is generally LSTMs or GRUs ). LSTM unit which is used instead of a plain dense layer in a pure RNN.
Use RNNs for any sequence modelling task specially text classification, machine translation, language modelling
Library:
https://github.com/tensorflow/models (Many cool NLP research papers from Google are here)
https://github.com/wabyking/TextClassificationBenchmark
http://opennmt.net/
Introductory Tutorial(s):
http://cs224d.stanford.edu/
http://www.wildml.com/category/neural-networks/recurrent-neural-networks/
http://colah.github.io/posts/2015-08-Understanding-LSTMs/
9. Conditional Random Fields (CRFs)
CRFs are probably the most frequently used models from the family of Probabilitic Graphical Models (PGMs). They are used for sequence modeling like RNNs and can be used in combination with RNNs too. Before Neural Machine Translation systems came in CRFs were the state of the art and in many sequence tagging tasks with small datasets, they will still learn better than RNNs which require a larger amount of data to generalize. They can also be used in other structured prediction tasks like Image Segmentation etc. CRF models each element of the sequence (say a sentence) such that neighbors affect a label of a component in a sequence instead of all labels being independent of each other.
Use CRFs to tag sequences (in Text, Image, Time Series, DNA etc.)
Library:
https://sklearn-crfsuite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Introductory Tutorial(s):
http://blog.echen.me/2012/01/03/introduction-to-conditional-random-fields/
7 part lecture series by Hugo Larochelle on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF3iSJkgPbA
10. Decision Trees
Let’s say I am given an Excel sheet with data about various fruits and I have to tell which look like Apples. What I will do is ask a question “Which fruits are red and round ?” and divide all fruits which answer yes and no to the question. Now, All Red and Round fruits might not be apples and all apples won’t be red and round. So I will ask a question “Which fruits have red or yellow color hints on them? ” on red and round fruits and will ask “Which fruits are green and round ?” on not red and round fruits. Based on these questions I can tell with considerable accuracy which are apples. This cascade of questions is what a decision tree is. However, this is a decision tree based on my intuition. Intuition cannot work on high dimensional and complex data. We have to come up with the cascade of questions automatically by looking at tagged data. That is what Machine Learning based decision trees do. Earlier versions like CART trees were once used for simple data, but with bigger and larger dataset, the bias-variance tradeoff needs to solved with better algorithms. The two common decision trees algorithms used nowadays are Random Forests (which build different classifiers on a random subset of attributes and combine them for output) and Boosting Trees (which train a cascade of trees one on top of others, correcting the mistakes of ones below them).
Decision Trees can be used to classify datapoints (and even regression)
Libraries
http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.ensemble.RandomForestClassifier.html
http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.ensemble.GradientBoostingClassifier.html
http://xgboost.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
https://catboost.yandex/
Introductory Tutorial:
http://xgboost.readthedocs.io/en/latest/model.html
https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.05741
https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.7502
http://education.parrotprediction.teachable.com/p/practical-xgboost-in-python
TD Algorithms (Good To Have)
If you are still wondering how can any of the above methods solve tasks like defeating Go world champion like DeepMind did, they cannot. All the 10 type of algorithms we talked about before this was Pattern Recognition, not strategy learners. To learn strategy to solve a multi-step problem like winning a game of chess or playing Atari console, we need to let an agent-free in the world and learn from the rewards/penalties it faces. This type of Machine Learning is called Reinforcement Learning. A lot (not all) of recent successes in the field is a result of combining perception abilities of a convnet or a LSTM to a set of algorithms called Temporal Difference Learning. These include Q-Learning, SARSA and some other variants. These algorithms are a smart play on Bellman’s equations to get a loss function that can be trained with rewards an agent gets from the environment.
These algorithms are used to automatically play games mostly :D, also other applications in language generation and object detection.
Libraries:
https://github.com/keras-rl/keras-rl
https://github.com/tensorflow/minigo
Introductory Tutorial(s):
Grab the free Sutton and Barto book: https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/~gdicaro/15381/additional/SuttonBarto-RL-5Nov17.pdf
Watch David Silver course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pWv7GOvuf0
These are the 10 machine learning algorithms which you can learn to become a data scientist.
You can also read about machine learning libraries here.
We hope you liked the article. Please Sign Up for a free ParallelDots account to start your AI journey. You can also check demo’s of our APIs here.
Read the original article here. | https://towardsdatascience.com/ten-machine-learning-algorithms-you-should-know-to-become-a-data-scientist-8dc93d8ca52e | ['Shashank Gupta'] | 2018-05-07 12:58:31.423000+00:00 | ['Algorithms', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Towards Data Science', 'Machine Learning'] |
Starting with your college life— This is what you need to know | We all have dreamt of our college life, so here’s something on how you can make your college life interesting.
Photo by Victoria Heath on Unsplash
Starting with a university is always something we look unto at some point in our lives growing up.
Here are some of the tips on how you can make most of the your college days.
Meet people and make friends: Going to the college is the first out of home experience for most of us and we meet a lot of people. So, don’t stop yourself from mingling with people. Talk to them, get to know them. You might find some of the most amazing people you have ever met and some of them might be friends for life.
Find your interests: Colleges opens us to a lot of opportunities — use them to know what interests you and do more of what makes you happy, be it any sport, reading, writing, public speaking or anything of that sort.
Come out of your comfort zone: It’s okay to feel anxious at times, nobody does it well the first time. So give it a shot, you are sure to learn something. You may be overwhelmed at times, do analyze your emotions and ask for help if you need any.
Be organized: You will have a lot on your plate, so it’s better to be organized and prioritize things. Have a to-do list and accomplish your goals accordingly.
Make mistakes: You are just starting up, so take it easy. Make mistakes, but don’t forget to learn from those mistakes.
Grades are important: I wouldn’t emphasize more on the fact that grades are important, and good grades opens us up to a lot of career opportunities. So, don’t neglect them and do maintain decent grades. Having a skill is good, but good grades will act as catalyst to your opportunities.
Travel: Explore places. Travelling unravels a world, you have never known before, and it opens you to a lot of possibilities. When I was in college, I visited a lot of places nearby and I also went out on a trip to explore a far away place with my friends, and it is truly one of the most cherished experiences of my college life.😊
Stay safe: This is the most important of all, do take care of your physical and mental health and avoid things that might land you in trouble.
College days are some of the amazing years of our lives, we learn new things, meet some amazing people, do stuffs together and make memories. Make sure you make most out of it.
All the best to everyone you are set up for their college journey and enjoy!😊 | https://medium.com/@akansha22/starting-with-your-college-life-this-is-what-you-need-to-know-7ef1fb0a92c1 | [] | 2020-12-27 07:16:51.315000+00:00 | ['College Students', 'Happiness', 'College Life', 'College', 'Life'] |
Patience, the secret to life. | I’ve come to realize that patience is the key to the kingdom. Be it in making money, in relationships or at work, without you submitting to time, nothing will work. Nothing at all will ever work out for you if you ain’t patient.
Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash
I’ve been jumping from one opportunity to the other without taking time to really put in the work and I’ve seen my friends excel at what I’ve rejected by giving myself excuses and not putting in the work. Problem with me is, I don’t have the patience to put in the work to learn a particular skill. By not taking the time to learn and practice, I doom myself to failure. It ends no other way really. Submitting to time is the most rewarding thing you’ll ever practice, since perfection is achieved by putting in the work which refers to being patient in everything one does.
As Bruce Lee said, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
He had a really good point there. Josh Kaufman, author of The Personal MBA, says the more time you give yourself to learn a particular skill, the better you get at it. It takes 10,000 hours to become an “expert in an ultra competitive field” but to go from “knowing nothing to being pretty good”, actually takes 20 hours. The equivalent of 45 minutes a day for a month.
I know its really difficult to practice patience, but trust me, once you get into the habit of practicing patience everything just falls in place. So as I turn 26 I want to put in the effort to learn what I’ve neglected, including writing. You’ll have to forgive the mistakes I make in this article because its my first time publishing an article, but in time I know I’ll get better at it.
Photo by qinghill on Unsplash
So challenge yourself today. Let go of the unhealthy habit of trying to learn everything all at once and submit yourself to time as you perfect one. | https://medium.com/@peruroigni/patience-the-secret-to-life-86de8a23fe36 | ['Nobert Muthaura'] | 2020-12-23 19:38:08.195000+00:00 | ['Time', 'Patience', 'Focus'] |
Building security into our deployment service system | Nick DeChant | Pinterest engineer, Infrastructure
We use an in-house deployment service system we built called Teletraan to push new code to Pinners around the world. Our goal for Teletraan is to be as dependable and straightforward as possible to remove any deploy-related issues for engineers. In order to achieve this, we’ve put great effort into keeping our deploy process and system secure.
Before, Teletraan didn’t have native authentication and authorization checks when performing operations, so our products and internal tools were at risk for unintended deploy-related changes across teams. As we continue to quickly grow as an organization, it’s important to have a robust permissions control mechanism to prevent possible poor experiences for Pinners and for our productivity as engineers.
Role-based permissions and access control lists
At Pinterest, deploy security permissions is based on the idea of individual team ownership. It’s important that any sort of permissions system minimally impacts the deploy process for each team, but also protects their service environments from unintended changes.
Our deploy system is a traditional 3-tier system: a front-end web UI, a MySQL backend and a RESTful service in the middle (which is also called Teletraan server). Teletraan server authenticates requests from the web UI and command-line based on three different kinds of tokens: short-lived OAuth tokens, personal long-lived OAuth tokens and Teletraan managed script tokens. Authorization is enforced by checking user roles or team roles against the requirements for a resource they’re requesting.
Teletraan is very flexible in terms of configurations for this. Turning on or off any combination of authentication and authorization is as easy as removing or adding lines in a config file.
Token-based authentication
When users access Teletraan through the web UI, the front-end client will work with our internal OAuth 2.0 server, go through the OAuth v2 workflow and obtain a short-lived token. The web UI will then use this token in HTTP headers for any subsequent calls to Teletraan server. For example, a command-line request to create a deploy with a specific token is described here:
curl -H "Authorization: token <token>" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST https://<yourSite>.com/v1/envs/<environmentName>/<stageName>/deploys/?build_id=12345&description=foo
Additionally, users can obtain long-lived tokens from an OAuth server manually and use them to access Teletraan server through RESTful API calls. Both the short-lived and long-lived tokens are OAuth tokens. Teletraan server will verify these tokens with the OAuth server directly.
Teletraan server also issues and maintains script tokens, which are intended to be used by scripts. Script tokens are not OAuth tokens. Only ADMIN level users in Teletraan can create script tokens for their respective environments.
We plan to open-source Teletraan in the near future, and with that in mind, we made our deploy security model support OpenID Connect. Authenticating using your Google, Amazon or any other OpenID Connect supported login service is easily configurable and works in the same way as querying our internal OAuth servers. All it takes is changing a few endpoint URLs in a config file.
Authorization
Once authenticated, Authorization checks take place against MySQL database roles tables. From command-line, authorization against request requirements are conducted using the same methods.
Authorization levels
We created tiered levels with defined roles, and left them open to change and grow with new roles in the future. Alongside roles we designed a layer of abstraction called Resource which contains information such as an ID and a type. This allows us to apply our permissions design to other applications with different broken-up components such as hosts or groups along with our current use case of Teletraan service environments.
This design provides an effective way to protect our service environments and ensure deploy security. As we continue building our cloud platform, we intend to use this model across all our cloud services.
We’re excited to open-source Teletraan early next year, which will support the access control list model. You can read more about Teletraan as a deployment service system in a previous blog post.
Acknowledgements: Teletraan was built by Jinru He, Linda Lo, Baogang Song and Nick DeChant from the Cloud Engineering team. We’d also like to thank Devin Lundberg from the Cloud Engineering team for his help with security design. | https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/building-security-into-our-deployment-service-system-3d6992cb2584 | ['Pinterest Engineering'] | 2017-02-21 19:23:35.777000+00:00 | ['Teletraan', 'Deploy', 'Security', 'Restful', 'Infrastructure'] |
WaykiChain(WICC) X Binance Chain Airdrop Second Round Result | The second round trading airdrop ends today! It takes five days, some WICC users participated in this event. Thanks for the support from all WaykiChainers! We will also launch more excited and interesting events for community prosperity and WaykiChain ecosystem development, bringing more benefit for global WaykiChainers in the future!
According to the rules of WaykiChain X Binance Chain Airdrop (second round), 21WaykiChainers win WICC rewards! For the fairness and transparency of the event, We strictly followed the rules of the second round activity to choose lucky winners, checked and comfirmed the Twitter address and information in WaykiChain official Telegram group.
Congratulation Winners above! WICC rewards will be sent to your bnb addresses after addresses are comfirmed from you, then you can continue to buy and trade. Do not forget to follow WaykiChain Twitter @wayki_chain and continuously pay attention for our new events and project updates!
Welcome feedback from the community, so please do get in touch. Want to dive in further? Follow WaykiChain on Telegram, Twitter, Reddit and LinkedIn. | https://medium.com/@waykichainwicc/waykichain-wicc-x-binance-chain-airdrop-second-round-result-251359679d47 | ['Waykichain Wicc'] | 2019-09-05 12:50:07.722000+00:00 | ['Binance', 'Airdrop', 'Blockchain', 'Waykichain', 'Wicc'] |
Linking to a Specific Tab in Vuetify.js | Linking to a Specific Tab in Vuetify.js
Store the current tab in the URL, to navigate to it from anywhere else in the app
Photo by Chiara F on Unsplash
I would like to present to you a quick tip about working with the tabs component in Vuetify.js. I sometimes need to navigate to a specific tab in the application or want to share a direct tab link with a collaborator.
In order to achieve this, we need to store the information about the current tab in the URL in the browser address bar. A canonical solution involves using nested routes, but sometimes it’s an overkill to create a separate child page for each tab. Thankfully there’s a simpler approach that I quite often end up using.
TL;DR — go straight to the final code
Simple Tabs
First let’s look at a simple tabs component example:
<template>
...
<v-card>
<v-tabs v-model="tab" background-color="grey lighten-4">
<v-tab>
One
</v-tab>
<v-tab>
Two
</v-tab>
</v-tabs> <v-tabs-items :value="tab">
<v-tab-item>
<v-card-text>
This is ONE!<br>1111111111
</v-card-text>
</v-tab-item>
<v-tab-item>
<v-card-text>
This is TWO!<br>2222222222
</v-card-text>
</v-tab-item>
</v-tabs-items>
</v-card>
...
</template> <script>
export default {
data: () => ({
tab: null
})
}
</script>
Note that we could also mix tabs with tab items in <v-tabs> component for simplicity, but I prefer to separate tabs from tab items for flexibility.
With the above code, the current tab is stored in the tab variable as an ordinal number. The problem with using this number to identify a tab is that the order of tabs can change if we add any new ones in the future.
Named Tabs
Instead of distinguishing tabs by their number, we can use a descriptive name. To achieve this we need to specify a href attribute on the tab and a value attribute on the tab item:
<v-card>
<v-tabs v-model="tab" background-color="grey lighten-4">
<v-tab href="#one">
One
</v-tab>
<v-tab href="#two">
Two
</v-tab>
</v-tabs> <v-tabs-items :value="tab">
<v-tab-item value="one">
<v-card-text>
This is ONE!<br>1111111111
</v-card-text>
</v-tab-item>
<v-tab-item value="two">
<v-card-text>
This is TWO!<br>2222222222
</v-card-text>
</v-tab-item>
</v-tabs-items>
</v-card>
Note that we need to prepend the tab name with a hash symbol in the href attribute (e.g. href="#one" ), but not in the value attribute.
Storing the Current Tab in the URL
In order to store the current tab in the URL, we will use a computed tab property with a setter. Let’s replace our data with:
computed: {
tab: {
set (tab) {
this.$router.replace({ query: { ...this.$route.query, tab } })
},
get () {
return this.$route.query.tab
}
}
}
Note that we are calling $router.replace() instead of $router.push() to avoid storing a visited tab in navigation history and to preserve the back-button functionality.
Now, when we visit the page for the first time, the URL will include the current tab as a query parameter. It will also update this parameter automatically every time we switch the tab.
One last thing — a button linking to a specific tab will simply look as follows:
<v-btn to="/page?tab=one">
Tab One
</v-btn> | https://medium.com/untitled-factory/linking-to-a-specific-tab-in-vuetify-js-d978525f2e1a | ['Jarek Lipski'] | 2020-07-29 10:25:34.033000+00:00 | ['Nuxtjs', 'Web Development', 'UX', 'Vuetify', 'Vuejs'] |
Ōkami HD and cultural wealth | Purifying Japan
Ōkami takes place in Nakatsukuni (ナカツクニ), which means “middle country” or “middle land’, a fictionalized version of Japan, where the parallels between both versions are quite clear, with a variety of localities based on real places of the Asian country. His period in history is unconfirmed, but many assume that his plot fits somewhere during the Kamiyo Era (the age of the gods, in a free translation) or during the Edo Period (1603–1868), a time interval where the country was heavily ruled by the Tokugawa family’s xoguns.
The truth is that a few of this matter, the only relevant information is that several gods and demons, mostly based on the Shinto religion, are directly interfering in the human world and, many years ago, the forces of darkness, commanded by Orochi (ヤマタノオロチ), a creature with eight heads, and the forces of light, represented by Shiranui (不知火) and his companion Nagi (凪), a powerful warrior, have fought a great battle.
As expected, the dark forces were defeated and with that Orochi was imprisoned in a cave sealed with Nagi’s sword. However, about 100 years later, a young man “accidentally” breaks this seal, freeing the forces of darkness once again.
Our heroes, Issun and Amaterasu
And in the midst of all this chaos, created by various demons and curses, that the goddess of the sun, Amaterasu (天照大御神) is awakened, returning to Earth in the form of a beautiful white wolf. To help her in this journey, we have two more characters, Issun (一寸) a rather perverted little artist, and Susanoo (スサノオ) descendant of Nagi and legendary hero, curiously depicted as a rather pot-bellied middle-aged man.
With their divine abilities and with the help of other celestial beings, Amaterasu and Issun begin their long journey throughout Japan, defeating evil creatures, restoring order in the villages, allowing life to flourish again where, today, there are only shadows and death.
Combat
The game has quite simple combat mechanics. Throughout his journey, Amaterasu will face a variety of demons and evil spirits, each with his peculiarity, and during these confrontations, our friendly wolf will be able to perform three main moves: attack, dodge and defend, being possible, in this last action, a counter-attack movement, if the defense has happened at the right time.
Also, the player can improve their skills and unlock new ones in the Dojo of Onigiri-Sensei, a friendly old martial arts master. Still, about combat, Amaterasu has a basic arsenal, composed of three types of weapons, they are reflector, a kind of disk; rosary, which functions as a whip; and the good old sword. Each of these has its characteristics, such as damage and reach, as well as five distinct variations that can be found throughout the campaign.
The differential of Ōkami’s combat lies in his special action, the Celestial Brush, a skill that manifests, in the form of drawings and symbols, the divine powers of the character.
Whenever the brush action screen is activated, the game will be paused and a
canvas will appear, with that the player can paint the symbols he may need
Throughout the main missions, Amaterasu will also release certain guardian spirits who repay her with new painting techniques that, consequently, give her new powers. The Yumigami rabbit, for example, represents the moon, and grants the protagonist the power to decide when it will be day or night; the Phoenix Moegami, another one of these special creatures, grants Amaterasu the power to control the fire and so on.
Besides, this new mechanic also allows us to change certain aspects of the map. For example, to cross large rivers and lakes, Amaterasu can use the Greensprout technique, when making a circle in the water the player makes a water lily sprout that will prevent our protagonist from getting wet. During combat, for example, it is possible to draw a straight line through enemies, which activates the Power Slash, a very effective ability that deals considerable damage to multiple enemies simultaneously.
Each one of these technics is represented by some creature which represents, in a way, an entity present in Shinto, as well as a “sign” of the Asian zodiac
There are about 13 techniques in all, each with its specific effect and design. I believe that it is a great mechanics, very well implemented, since at the same time that it brings some complexity to combat, it also portrays the importance of Sumie-ê (墨絵), brush art, for Japanese culture.
Unfortunately, its use in the current controls, or even in those of the time of its release, such as that of the Playstation 2, may not work in the best way. With very sensitive analogs, the player can make some involuntary mistakes when drawing. But I believe that this is detail present only in the big console versions of the game since in portables, such as Switch, we have tools that allow us to draw more accurately.
Art Direction
For the images used throughout the article, you can get a good idea of the artistic quality present in the game. All its graphic aspects seek to represent traditional Japanese art, with a style that closely resembles watercolor paintings.
Still, about the art style, it can be affirmed that this choice was as correct as possible since everything began to have some timeless aspect, because even after several years, the game remains extremely beautiful, especially during the scenes focused on the environment. | https://medium.com/@guilhermefmota99/%C5%8Dkami-hd-and-cultural-wealth-43eb4c6c74ee | ['Guilherme F. Mota'] | 2020-12-22 15:03:22.390000+00:00 | ['Japan', 'Capcom', 'Hideki Kamiya', 'Game Review', 'Okami'] |
The Latest: How COVID-19 is impacting media, from increases in traffic to layoffs (Mar. 31, 2020) | The Latest: How COVID-19 is impacting media, from increases in traffic to layoffs (Mar. 31, 2020)
Subscribe to The Idea, a weekly newsletter on the business of media, for more news, analysis, and interviews.
THE NEWS
88% of publishers expect to miss their 2020 forecasts this year “because of canceled events, declining ad sales and difficult-to-monetize COVID-19 coverage,” according to a Digiday survey.
Rather than share one particular challenge or success from the past week in this space, we’re going broad and trying our best to summarize the many ways in which the pandemic has impacted the media industry in recent days. Let us know what else you would find useful as the pandemic’s ramifications continue to manifest.
Traffic, engagement, and viewership are up.
Web traffic: Parse.ly found that pageviews increased by 61% in the last two weeks compared to the past seven weeks for sites in its network. As of last week, pageviews increased by an average of 122% at metro newspapers. According to Bloomberg’s CEO, coronavirus coverage is responsible for 30% of its traffic.
Interactions with news stories on social media “increased 56% over the last two weeks, compared to the rest of the year” for 10 major publishers tracked by Newswhip.
News app downloads are up — for news aggregators and digital, radio, and TV news outlets alike, according to Apptopia.
News podcast downloads are generally up — Vox Media’s podcasts and Slate’s podcasts are both being downloaded about 50% more than usual. Daily news podcasts in particular are doing well — Vox’s Today, Explained has seen the biggest increase of all its podcasts. Overall podcast downloads are down about 10% while total unique listeners are down about 20% since the beginning of March, disproportionately impacting true crime podcasts, according to Podtrac.
TV ratings: Both broadcast newscasts and cable news networks have experienced viewership surges, the latter of more than 50%.
Subscriptions are up.
Subscriptions to both U.S. and European publishers rose last week compared to the same time last year, by 63% and 267% respectively, according to Piano. Publishers who have taken down meters for coronavirus coverage have also seen subscriber growth, like The Atlantic and Bloomberg, which had their “single best week[s] of subscriber growth.”
Local news outlets — like The Seattle Times, The Tampa Bay Times, and The Denver Post — also saw between a 2–4x bump in subscriptions. Many of these new subscribers are subscribing before hitting the paywall, and at least one publication has seen churn decrease significantly.
Ad revenues are down.
Digital ad revenue is expected to decline 10% in Q1 at The New York Times compared to 2019. The company expects overall ad declines to be in “the mid-teens.”
Ad-blacklisting for COVID-19 keywords has led to more than two million blocked ads for The New York Times, CNN, USA Today, and The Washington Post.
Events businesses are responding by pivoting to virtual events (like Politico, Axios, Slate, and Bloomberg) and moving out of the live events business entirely, as in the case of O’Reilly Media.
Furloughs, layoffs, and closures are becoming widespread.
Closures/Suspensions: Diocese of Pittsburgh, a 166-year old weekly in Pittsburgh, permanently closed, as did The Waterbury Record, a newspaper in Vermont. Publications like The Stranger in Seattle and The Sacramento News & Review have suspended print publishing.
Print reductions: The Tampa Bay Tribune has reduced print publication days to only Sunday and Wednesday; three newspapers in Vermont have also reduced print frequency.
Layoffs: Nieman Lab counted around 100 local newsroom layoffs as of mid-March, in newsrooms like The Tampa Bay Times and VTDigger. Maven has laid off 31 people, which amounts of roughly 9% of total staff. According to a Digiday survey, 38% of publishers said that they expect layoffs at their publication.
Furloughs: Gannett announced that many staffers would be furloughed through June. iHeartMedia also announced that an unspecified number of employees would be furloughed for 90 days. Lee Enterprises announced employees not subject to pay reductions would be furloughed for the equivalent of two weeks’ pay.
Pay reductions: Publishers including Gannett, Maven Media, Disney, BuzzFeed, Vice Media, Group Nine, Lee Enterprises, and iHeartMedia announced cuts to salaries and benefits.
Executive pay cuts: Vice, Disney, Group Nine, BuzzFeed, Maven, and Lee Enterprises announced that executives would be taking pay cuts or foregoing salaries.
Conversely, BBC News has paused plans to cut 450 jobs, as it had announced in January, given the heightened demands of covering the pandemic.
Governments are taking measures to support the industry.
In the United States, Congress passed a $2.2. trillion CARES Act, enabling outlets with under 1,000 staff to apply to a $300 billion fund.
In Canada, the government is planning to buy $30 million worth of ads to support struggling media businesses.
LOOK FOR
Given the decline in programmatic revenue, how long will publishers who have taken down paywalls around coronavirus coverage keep them down? For example, McClatchy’s per-view rate of revenue “dropped by more than 15% in a single week,” leading it to re-paywall some coverage “as it aims to balance its duty [to] keep people informed with its need to bolster subscriptions.”
How sustainable are the traffic increases? Exhausted audiences might begin avoiding the news — according to Reuters, news avoidance affected a third of people even before the deluge of pandemic coverage.
What other action, if any, will governments take to support news organizations? Some, like Craig Aaron in CJR, have proposed journalism-specific stimulus packages, including direct support for daily and weekly newsrooms and increased funds for public media. Steven Waldman, co-founder of Report for America, and Charles Sennott, CEO of The GroundTruth Project, proposed a public-health ad spending measure like Canada’s of $500 million in The Atlantic. | https://medium.com/the-idea/the-latest-how-covid-19-is-impacting-media-from-increases-in-traffic-to-layoffs-mar-31-2020-1bda8bb5eb7d | ['Saanya Jain'] | 2020-03-31 21:17:46.482000+00:00 | ['Journalism', 'Covid 19', 'Media', 'Podcast', 'The Latest'] |
Random Self Expression | These upcoming paragraphs are not about diagnostic and well-thought synthesis of an circumstance of my self existence, rather it’s more about a search for only self expression itself for that there ain’t no platform in my knowledge that I can only just express without belonging to any category or seeking for approval. I would wish a space just to connect, just to know if someone else feels the same as I do, because I know acknowledging self as unique is bias and blindness at some point.
However feeling of connection always comes with an aim either to date or to be appreciated with shares and likes. I guess we have missed the point how sheer conversation without a concrete statement or logic feels the soul and how human it is. I have never asked how someone feels unless I have something to ask for, if they are not my close friends for a long time. To be honest-as we all should be at least to ourselves- we also have an aim to shot for our friends too. Even if it’s for a coffee to go out to entertain ourselves. This state of mentality is insecure. Not everything has to serve your purpose or to be manipulated as life is just life. Walking is life, smiling to a stranger is life, staying alone is life, pain is life. This idea already became cheesy though. I don’t want to read this commonsense in a yoga lover instagram caption as it also manipulates and have an aim. It wants you to like it and think whoever shared it has inner peace and a whole in person. No. Nobody feels a whole it person, they make believe. And it’s ok to not feel whole in any point in your life. Somebody should tell it out loud. It’s forbidden for mothers to express the feeling of running away, its forbidden for managers to complain about how it is not going as they have planned, it’s forbidden for an officer to feel empathy for a citizen, its forbidden for young adults or adults to say they are lost as they might be judged as incompetent and immature. I know we have our roles. But this has gone too far as we cannot distinguish who we are and what we play for. I can not see where the roles end and where does who we are start or find a space to express it.
We don’t speak about it, only assume about others feelings. We put a lot of effort for assumptions. So much that we listen only to support the thesis we came up with that person. I really think this is very much important. Why do we assume something when we both feel, we both try to react for one another already, when this is the only thing creates any kind of bonding. I really find it difficult to communicate over words as each and every of them lights up a different spot on somebody else due to their own background. We can only get to know someone after around 1 year of communication and only then we can know about their feelings. Once we are convinced about their feelings and intentions that person becomes irreplaceable. Despite what background they come from or how their persona shaped up, it’s really easy to see that if you invest time they become irreplaceable in your life. Some people are bialy selected to be invested and most to be assumed. None of the big connection platforms had the power to change it. Globalization, social media, tech, transportation, easy travel, easy information none of them served for us to enlarge that invested number for people but only these feel the bias p.o.v to grow much more. I find it really bizarre and boring. | https://medium.com/@ilnalcolu/random-self-expression-fe3e077c4b73 | ['Işıl Nalcıoğlu'] | 2020-11-16 22:33:48.763000+00:00 | ['Prejudice', 'Expression', 'Bias', 'Covid Diaries'] |
5 Commonly Accepted Mindsets Confident People Tend to Avoid | For most of my life, I thought of myself as extremely confident. After all, I seemed like a super confident person to everyone around me. Yet, I was full of insecurities. Nose too big, calves too small, and acne that turned my face into a book for blind people. I faked my confidence to distract from them — but you can’t fake true confidence.
Well, you can. You can fake it to the outside world. Even though some people will see through your show, most will regard you as confident if you’re just loud or straightforward enough. But the truth will always come out.
A lack of true confidence holds you back. You overthink, stay silent and small, and are too shy to stand up for yourself or grab the bull by the horns. You miss a bunch of opportunities — dating, jobs, experiences. You feel bad about yourself and you want to be more confident, just like everyone else. However, most people aren’t aware of what it takes to become truly confident.
In his bestselling book, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, Nathaniel Branden explains that confidence is intertwined with your actions in a special way.
It’s cause and result at the same time. The confident person speaks up in a meeting because they’re confident — but they’re also confident because they speak up in meetings. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem.
This reciprocal relationship doesn’t only hold for building confidence, but also for destroying it. If you engage in the wrong behaviors, they undermine your confidence, which causes the wrong behaviors, which undermines your confidence, which…you get the point.
Once I realized I faked my confidence for years, I decided to get rid of the bogus behaviors. Soon enough, people noticed the difference and asked me how I did it. It’s simple — I looked at the genuinely confident people around me and stopped doing what they didn’t.
Will avoiding these behaviors make you more confident overnight? No. Will it keep you from destroying your confidence through the wrong actions and instead help you build it over time by doing the right things? Hell yeah.
Here are the five things the most confident people rarely ever do. | https://medium.com/mind-cafe/5-widely-accepted-things-truly-confident-people-dont-do-737c4184a60 | ['Moreno Zugaro'] | 2020-12-20 16:12:59.615000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Mental Health', 'Confidence', 'Personal Development', 'Psychology'] |
The One — Count ’Em, One — Week When Late-Night TV Went to the Dark Side | Some years ago I was interviewing the singer Jerry Butler, and the conversation turned to the subtle ways in which black artists still faced a harder road than whites.
Besides the segregation of the music industry, which often pushed black artists into the “black” market rather than the larger mainstream “pop” market, Butler explained that black artists had less access to promotional platforms that could expose their music to wider audiences.
Specifically, he cited The Tonight Show.
No offense to its host, he added, that being the legendary Johnny Carson. Nor did Butler suggest the NBC network had a blacklist. So to speak. Butler saw it as more subtle than that.
“They want a show that seems relaxed and friendly,” Butler said. “So they book guests they think Carson will feel comfortable with. People in their circle. People they might play golf with.
“That’s not going to be me.”
The incredible whiteness of late-night television has been a topic of pointed conversation for decades, which lends considerable historical resonance to a new Peacock documentary called The Sit-In, which premieres Thursday on the streaming service.
Harry Belafonte today, talking about his “Tonight” week.
The Sit-In revisits the week of Feb. 5–9, 1968, when Carson went on vacation and the host’s chair was taken by Harry Belafonte.
The guest list was decidedly not the people with whom the NBC bookers were likely to play golf. It included Dr. Martin Luther King, Sen. Robert Kennedy, Nipsey Russell, Paul Newman, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll and more than a dozen others who shared some of Belafonte’s socio-political views in a timeslot that many Tonight viewers were used to seeing as a refuge from the news they heard the rest of the day.
By early 1968 Belafonte was not only a major player in the civil rights movement, but had spoken out against the Vietnam War. This hadn’t negated his reputation as an entertainer with broad crossover appeal, which is the reason he was offered the Tonight gig in the first place, and he says in The Sit-In that he was fine with making entertainment the priority.
At the same time, he says he accepted the offer only after securing the promise that “I be allowed to be myself.”
He had Carson’s blessing, he says, though naturally the guest list was subject to network approval. That probably helps explain why the list did not reach as far as radical voices like a Stokely Carmichael.
Nonetheless, the commentators here agree, Belafonte’s week marked a striking departure for a show that had been — and after Belafonte would continue to be — a soft landing for the day.
It’s only in the last few years, The Sit-In notes, that hosts like Stephen Colbert have given late-night a more overtly political tone. The Sit-In also notes that it would be more than 20 years before late-night got its first full-time black host, Arsenio Hall.
Interestingly, The Sit-In — which was directed by Yoruba Richen and executive-produced by Joy Reid of MSNBC — uses only select and often relatively brief clips from the Belafonte shows themselves. We see short snippets of music and a few questions and answers, mostly with the bigger names like King and Kennedy — both of whom would be murdered within the next four months.
The Sit-In spends more of its time framing the context of February 1968, the start of a year for which the term “contentious” only begins to capture the forces tearing at the fabric of the country.
Belafonte took over Tonight less than a week after the Tet Offensive had shocked more Americans into reassessing the Vietnam War, asking whether the government’s relentlessly optimistic assertions were true.
The Civil Rights movement was splitting into more open factions, putting enormous pressure on Dr. King over his strategy of non-violence and his launch of a Poor People’s Campaign designed to incorporate Latinos, Mexicans, Native Americans and poor whites as well as black folks.
King and Belafonte.
King talks about that with Belafonte. King also makes a couple of jokes, reflecting the fact that Belafonte, like Carson, was using Tonight as a forum in which public figures could relax and perhaps seem a bit more human than they did in their day jobs.
Purely as a host, from the fragmentary evidence here, Belafonte did okay. He had written out his questions and he asked them in an engaging, professional manner. He had a likable style that seemed to make guests feel comfortable talking with him.
He wasn’t Carson. He didn’t have that almost supernatural ease or the well-polished sense of timing.
He did, however, accomplish his goal, which was to open late-night, if only for a week, to people who would ordinarily not have been there.
In the history of late-night and talk television, Belafonte’s week could be seen as an intriguing footnote. It could also be seen, perhaps by someone like Jerry Butler, as a glimpse of what wasn’t. | https://medium.com/the-culture-corner/the-one-count-em-one-week-when-late-night-tv-went-to-the-dark-side-4ad6475b5879 | ['David Hinckley'] | 2020-09-23 16:19:56.287000+00:00 | ['Late Night Tv', 'Martin Luther King', 'Tonight Show', 'Harry Belafonte', '1960s'] |
Why the blockchain is here to stay | Why the blockchain is here to stay
By its very nature, it still matters a lot.
This is a very interesting time for the blockchain.
Bitcoin has surged in popularity in the last few years, leading to other cryptocurrencies (often referred to as altcoins) also seeing huge jumps in value. Ethereum, for example, saw a massive price increase through 2017 and became one of the most well-known altcoins.
Plenty of people have become wealthy as a result of these price fluctuations. Some people buy, wait until it rises in value and then sells. Others will try to trade the market through frequent buying and selling, trying to time each of the dips and rises in value.
As you may know, the last year has not been very positive for this new technology, but only in terms of the price. It might be tempting to believe that the blockchain is no longer relevant, but I think that would be taking a short term view on what is possibly a huge technological revolution.
The market is actually growing fast in many ways. More and more industries are looking into how they too can use it as the benefits are starting to become clearer — even as the price drops.
But to truly understand why it’s likely to be a part of our future, we need to look to its past.
How it all started
Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency and is still the most popular. It started an entire industry of other digital currencies and has challenged all notions of how money and value work.
In January 2009 the first version of Bitcoin was released online by someone known only as Satoshi Nakamoto, whose identity remains unknown. The aim of Bitcoin was to create a new form of money.
While the concept of a digital currency was not new, Bitcoin was unique in that it used the Blockchain — a public ledger containing a record of all transactions, viewable to everyone. The reason why this was a brilliant innovation was that it allowed cryptos to be decentralized.
Decentralization is perhaps the greatest benefit of cryptos since it means that they are not controlled by any single source but rather a network of computers processing all the transactions that get added to the ledger. Anyone can add their computer to the network if it has the required power — this is known as mining and is also how new Bitcoins are released. There is a limit of 21 million Bitcoins that can exist and eventually all of them will be mined.
The fact that it works on consensus is what makes Bitcoin decentralized. The strength of this is that it means no single authority can take control, though there is much debate within the cryptocurrency world about whether or not this is fully achieved since there are large mining pools (groups of people working together and sharing the rewards) processing transactions. Nonetheless, the fact remains that it is possible for the average person to take part in mining if they have the hardware and internet connection.
If decentralization as a concept becomes completely mainstream, it can have an enormous impact on institutions. For most industries, there is right now the need for a central authority to maintain control, but decentralization can change that by instead allowing decisions and changes to be made based on consensus, the same way that Bitcoin works now.
The public ledger also offers far more transparency — all transactions and wallets can be seen. There are many cases where this would be beneficial — for example, it’s easy for people and companies to prove ownership of assets. Likewise, there can be no question whether or not cryptocurrency was sent from one person to another because the transaction can be clearly seen. Even as the transaction is being sent, it’s possible to see in real time what stage they are at.
That is ultimately why Bitcoin as an invention is bigger than just currency — it’s a whole new technology in its own right.
But it was not immediately popular. At first, each Bitcoin was worth very little, but in the years that followed their value started going up considerably as more people began to mine and buy them.
As the demand for Bitcoin grew, exchanges started appearing. The value of cryptos work like stocks and shares — their price is determined by a market of buy and sell orders. Most of this buying and selling takes place on exchanges, which is what the focus of this guide will be. There are other ways to buy cryptos and that will be looked at too, but for a beginner, exchanges are the best way to do so.
Since Bitcoin was made, thousands of other coins/tokens have appeared. Two of the biggest ones apart from Bitcoin (at the time of writing) are Ethereum and Ripple.
Some coins are innovative in that they don’t use the Blockchain at all. IOTA (another very popular coin) uses the Tangle, in which people who start a transaction need to confirm two others. This effectively means that everyone using it is doing some mining, which makes it easier for the network to expand.
Satoshi Nakamoto has not been heard from in years. He stopped posting online in 2010 and exchanged emails with developers just a few times after that. His absence is not necessarily something negative given Bitcoins inherently democratic nature — nobody controls it after all and development has effectively been left with the community. However, Satoshi does still hold a huge number of Bitcoin, which appear to remain unmoved (not used in a transaction).
Free speech
The blockchain as a way to counter online censorship is perhaps one of the uses that have the highest potential, given how contentious this issue has become in the last few years with social networks and other platforms enforcing rules that some disagree with.
They are only able to enforce these rules since it is a centralized system — that wouldn’t be the case in a system run using the blockchain, a technology that long needed a strong use case apart of digital money.
Free speech may be the most important application to truly take the blockchain mainstream. | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/why-the-blockchain-is-here-to-stay-2bf9a50014fa | ['Ethan Banks'] | 2019-01-27 07:58:58.967000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin', 'Ethereum'] |
What changes will ICO face in Thailand: four experts to discuss legislative novelties at Blockchain & Bitcoin Conference | Blockchain & Bitcoin Conference Thailand will feature a panel discussion: four blockchain experts will talk about ICO regulation in Thailand. They will focus on possible changes and laws related to ICOs, which could be adopted in 2018.
The discussion will involve three blockchain experts from Thailand and their colleague from Hong Kong. Experts specialize in various sectors and represents diverse companies, thus the discussion will introduce several views on the blockchain regulation issue.
Discussion participants
Sathapon Patanakua (Thailand), MD and Founder of SmartContract and BLOCK MD, a participant of Thai FinTech Association. He is an entrepreneur with extensive experience; a high-tech enthusiast and one of the early blockchain followers. Patanakua has cooperated with leading industry players in financial and healthcare services as well as policy makers in order to help promoting innovative ideas and technologies.
Dr. Jason Corbett (Thailand), Managing Partner of Silk Legal (a Bangkok-based law company). He is one of the leaders at International Blockchain Consulting Group; an advisor to ICOBox and other ICO projects. He also speaks at many events dedicated to fintech, blockchain, and IT regulation.
Edmund John Lowell (Hong Kong), an entrepreneur living and working in Asia since 2011. Currently, he leads user identification projects at SelfKey Foundation, a fund aimed at supporting new digital identification initiatives, and at KYC-Chain, a service based on distributed ledgers.
Alexi Lane (Thailand), Founder of EVEREX (Thailand). He is a fintech entrepreneur and an investor with over 15 years of experience in capital management. He has developed a blockchain-based microlending platform called Everex that collects and analyzes users’ data and creates appropriate financial offers for them.
A discussion start time and its moderator will be announced soon. Follow the information on the website of Blockchain & Bitcoin Conference Thailand. | https://medium.com/%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%84%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%86%D0%B8%D1%8F-blockchain-%D0%B1%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B9%D0%BD-%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%B8%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B4/what-changes-will-ico-face-in-thailand-four-experts-to-discuss-legislative-novelties-at-blockchain-c5b182bbcbd6 | ['Lidiya Tsenenko'] | 2018-02-22 14:45:51.949000+00:00 | ['Bangkok', 'Conference', 'Bitcoin', 'Thailand', 'Blockchain'] |
ViewComponent: My attempt to answer what value it brings | ViewComponent allows you to write reusable and easy-to-test view components in Rails with pure Ruby.
A bit of history
ViewComponent, formerly advertised as ActionView::Component , was first introduced in Railsconf 2019. I got the impression from the talk that it was planned to be merged into Rails. Then this month when I heard the word that it is " supported natively in Rails 6.1," I thought it'd be available if I upgrade to 6.1. Unfortunately, ViewComponent is still a separated gem and you need to install it manually.
What “supported natively” means is that we can use the gem in Rails 6.1 without a monkey patch. To be exact, any 3rd-party solutions (or any Ruby objects) that have implemented a render_in method can be passed to ActionView render method in Rails 6.1. Check out the original PR for more context.
Even it’s not included in the default Rails stack, it still has great potential. If you haven’t watched any of the Railsconf videos, one thing you should know is that ViewComponent is initiated by Github developers. They have been using this approach to construct their views. In other words, it’s been dogfooded on a large scale website and with a large amount of developers, so I believe there is a bright future. 🙂
Installation
If you’re on Rails 6.1:
gem "view_component", require: "view_component/engine"
…otherwise, you’ll need to put this monkey patch in your application.
How to use
Folder structure
Components are all stored under app/components/ folder. The generator will create corresponding files based on your template engine (ERB, Haml, Slim) and testing framework (TestUnit/RSpec).
bin/rails generate component ModalComponent id
invoke test_unit
create test/components/modal_component_test.rb
create app/components/modal_component.rb
create app/components/modal_component.html.erb
Basic form
Say we’re creating a modal component, and it accepts an id parameter:
# app/components/modal_component.rb
class ModalComponent < ViewComponent::Base
with_content_areas :header, :body def initialize(id:)
@id = id
end
end # app/components/modal_component.html.erb
<div class="modal" id="<%= @id %>">
<div class="header"><%= header %></div>
<div class="body"><%= body %></div>
</div>
Render the component in a parent consumer view, specifying the container id and content:
<%= render(ModalComponent.new(id: "login-modal")) do |component| %>
<% component.with(:header) do %>
Hello Jane
<% end %>
<% component.with(:body) do %>
<p>Have a great day.</p>
<% end %>
<% end %>
Output:
<div class="modal" id="login-modal">
<div class="header">Hello Jane</div>
<div class="body"><p>Have a great day.</p></div>
</div>
The content area (header and body) serves like a callback that the parent caller can pass in what content to render, and the modal component gets to decide the markup. It’s similar to the named slots in Vue.
Note that there is a more advanced Slots API, currently in its second iteration, that is supposed to be the successor to with_content_areas . But it's still experimental, you need to keep in mind that it's subject to breaking changes. (It happened to me during the time I wrote this post, the code I wrote a few days ago is now deprecated. 😅)
Sidecar assets
ViewComponent has a concept of Sidecar assets — views and other assets (CSS, JS) can be placed in the same directory to better encapsulate them.
There are two ways to do this.
Keep only the component Ruby file outside of the sidecar directory:
app/components
├── ...
├── example_component.rb
├── example_component
| ├── example_component.css
| ├── example_component.html.erb
| └── example_component.js
├── ...
2. Keep everything in the same directory:
app/components
├── ...
├── example
| ├── component.rb
| ├── component.css
| ├── component.html.erb
| └── component.js
├── ...
The JavaScript file can also be a Stimulus controller. Take a look at the doc on Sidecar assets (experimental) to learn how to configure Webpack to compile the sidecar assets.
There are more advanced usages:
Conditional rendering
Using helper methods
Rendering collections
before_render hook
Inline component (or template-less component)
Previews (like ActionMailer preview)
Power of composition (render another component inside a component)
Be sure to check out the “ building components” section in the official doc to see more examples.
ViewComponent is said to be inspired by React, so if you have some experience with React/Vue, you may find it relatively easy to shift the paradigm of how to write your view logic in Ruby.
What value it brings
The official site already does a great job of selling its greatness — testing, data flow, performance, and standards.
Here are my takeaways.
On testing
Keeping up the test coverage for every possible path of the view with Capybara feature specs is expensive and impractical. ViewComponent makes it easy to test your view logic. Because it’s so easy and fast, both the physical and mental hurdle is almost gone, I believe more developers will feel encouraged to spec up their view components.
I would even say this will drive better design decisions. When I was playing around writing some tests for an existing application, it provided me the opportunity to scrutinize my view logic with fresh eyes, to question myself, why I had added such logic in the first place, would it be possible to simplify it or remove it all. Because adding a test also functions like “locking in” the feature, I’d like to be certain such logic is needed to justify the effort. I can see it would drive such conversations between developers and designers more and come up with better decisions.
Here is an example from a codebase I worked on, it was a delightful experience of writing the test:
# test/components/comment_preview_component_test.rb require "test_helper"
class CommentPreviewComponentTest < ViewComponent::TestCase
def test_no_comments
answer = create(:answer)
render_inline(CommentPreviewComponent.new(answer: answer))
assert_link "Leave a comment"
refute_link "0 Comments"
end
def test_one_comment
answer = create(:answer)
create(:comment, answer: answer)
render_inline(CommentPreviewComponent.new(answer: answer))
assert_link "Comment 1"
end
def test_more_comments
answer = create(:answer)
create_list(:comment, 2, answer: answer)
render_inline(CommentPreviewComponent.new(answer: answer))
assert_link "Comments 2"
end
def test_duplicated_commenters_avatars
answer = create(:answer)
user = create(:user)
# setup 2 unique commenters for the answer
create_list(:comment, 2, answer: answer, user: user)
create(:comment, answer: answer, user: answer.user)
render_inline(CommentPreviewComponent.new(answer: answer))
assert_selector "img", count: 2
assert_selector "img[alt='#{user.name} avatar']"
assert_selector "img[alt='#{answer.user.name} avatar']"
end
end
On packaging and distribution
ViewComponent is reusable by design. Github’s Primer ViewComponents repo is a good example of how they’ve packaged their design system ( Primer CSS) into a ViewComponent-powered gem.
As for the sidecar assets feature that allows you to bundle JavaScript and CSS together, it’s still experimental, and I don’t know how we can test the JavaScript behavior without sacrificing the speed, but I see great potential in it.
Also, if you happen to use Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js, your HTML markup would work standalone, which makes it much more shareable with ViewComponent. I highly recommend giving these tools a try. 😎
More modern, more powerful
As React and Vue gain more popularity, more and more developers have built the mental model of thinking in the component way. But what Rails provides by default (partial, helpers, layouts) have their shortcomings. I have more than once talked to myself, oh I wish I could just drop in a React component here for this specific view logic, that’d make the code simpler and more elegant.
Finally, now we get the tool!
(There are other libraries solving the view-layer problems such as trailblazer/cells, komposable/komponent, etc. I don’t have enough experience to make the comparison 😳.)
Where to begin
If you want to try out ViewComponent in an existing application, here are some starting points:
Extract UI based components, such as modal, dropdown, etc.
Extract application based components, such as complex views with many inline ruby variables and conditions
Try finding some good candidates and write some tests to feel the joy 😃.
One more thing…
Like the main author @joelhawksley said in one of the Github Issue, ViewComponent probably is not mature enough to be upstreamed yet. It still needs to iterate with the community. In that sense, living in a separated gem makes the feedback loop much faster.
If you were to try it out today, you should be mentally prepared that even though it provides many functionalities, you may need to make more coding decisions at the beginning such as how you want to organize the folder structures, namespaces, naming conventions, where to put certain logics (partial, helper, or ViewComponent object), etc, as real-world code is more complex and sophisticated.
It’d be a good mental exercise, and it’d become easier once we come up with a community best practice. But for now, it’s up to you to make the call. I enjoy this process, but maybe not for everyone. 🙂 | https://medium.com/full-stack-pancakes/viewcomponent-my-attempt-to-answer-what-value-it-brings-4ce4bc5c61f2 | [] | 2021-01-05 04:29:49.720000+00:00 | ['Rails', 'Viewcomponent', 'Rails 6', 'Tutorial'] |
How to build an Angular 8 application with API request in 10 minutes? | Some time ago, I created the first tutorial about React.js where I showed you how to create an easy React.js application using an existing API and Bootstrap for styling. The positive response for this article brought me to the idea of creating a series of simple tutorials on how to build an application with the most popular front-end frameworks. To make it even more helpful for beginners and those who prefer to watch and learn, then read and learn; I also decided to add a Youtube video to every episode.
So, as I already mentioned before, I already created text and Youtube [LINK] tutorials about React.js. After this, I decided to follow with Vue.js, and this is how Vue.js tutorial and Vue js tutorial — How to build application in Vue were created.
Today it came the time to create an article and Youtube episode for the Angular enthusiasts. So, make yourself comfortable, and let’s start with the framework created by Google developers.
Let’s start!
1. Install @angular/cli
This tutorial, we are going to start installing Angular CLI. This tool allows us to create a ready to use application with all the dependencies installed. What’s even greater, Angular CLI will allow us to create ready components and services. So, let’s open the console and use the following command:
npm install -g @angular/cli
After the installation is finished, you should see the information like below:
2. Create a project
So, we already have the tool to build the application, and now we are going to create one. Navigate to the folder where you want to create your app and use the ng command. In my case, the name of the application is „albums”, but you can feel free to name your app as you prefer.
ng new albums
After running the command, you will be asked two questions. First, if you would like to install routing, and the second one, what styles do you prefer, CSS, Sass, Less, etc.
In this case, I selected yes to the first question, and I decided to have CSS for styling.
After creating the project successfully, we are ready to run it.
3. Run the app
To run the application, you need to get the app folder in the console first. In my case, it’s albums. Then type the following command:
ng serve
It may take a few seconds, and after you see a message that it’s compiled successfully, you can check how it works in the browser.
The default port for Angular apps is 4200, but you can customize it if you wish.
Let’s go to the browser and open http://localhost:4200 or your custom port. You should see an application like on the image below:
Great, the first step is done. Now, let’s get into building our app!
4. Create the first component
Let’s open a folder with the application in your favorite code editor. Inside ./src/app folder is our main files app.component.ts and app.module.ts. We want to create our own component right now, but to avoid a crazy mess in the structure of our application, let’s create a new folder called components.
Great, if our folder is ready now, let’s navigate to this folder in your console, and we are going to use Angular CLI to generate the component. For this, we will use the following command:
ng generate component albums
And after a second, our component should be ready. Now, let’s get rid of what we have displayed currently and set the rout to our new component.
5. Setting the first route
Let’s start by removing almost everything from app.component.html file. The only thing we would like to leave there is < router-outlet >, the file should look like this:
<div class="container">
<router-outlet></router-outlet>
</div>
If it’s ready, let’s go to the app-routing.module.ts to set the path for our Albums component. We have to add a new path like in the following code:
const routes: Routes = [
{ path: '', component: AlbumsComponent },
];
After this step, we should see the template of Albums Component in the browser.
6. Creating service and API call
The next thing we would like to do is create an API call. In Angular, we use services to create an Http request, but we also need to import HttpClientModule from @angular/common/http in the app.module.ts file, and let’s inject it in the imports array.
import { BrowserModule } from '@angular/platform-browser';
import { NgModule } from '@angular/core';
import { HttpClientModule } from '@angular/common/http';
import { AppRoutingModule } from './app-routing.module';
import { AppComponent } from './app.component';
import { AlbumsComponent } from './components/albums/albums.component';
@NgModule({
declarations: [
AppComponent,
AlbumsComponent,
],
imports: [
BrowserModule,
AppRoutingModule,
HttpClientModule
],
providers: [],
bootstrap: [AppComponent]
})
export class AppModule { }
Now, let’s create a new folder called services inside ./src/app to keep there our services. If you are ready with the services folder, you can generate new service just like components with the following command (remember to navigate to the folder where you would like your service to be created):
ng generate service <servicename>
In our case, let’s create a service called photos. When it’s ready, open photos.service.ts file and import HttpClient from @angular/common/http. When it’s done inject HttpClient in the constructor like in the code below:
import { Injectable } from '@angular/core';
import { HttpClient } from '@angular/common/http';
@Injectable({
providedIn: 'root'
})
export class PhotosService {
constructor(
private http: HttpClient
) { }
}
Finally, we can create our first API call. As in previous tutorials, I’m going to use www.jsonplaceholder.com API. Let’s create a function that makes an API request and returns it.
getAlbums() {
return this.http.get('https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/albums');
}
7. Call API from component
Let’s continue with calling the API for the data. In the albums.component.ts let’s import the service and inject it to the component in the constructor.
import { PhotosService } from './../../services/photos.service';
import { Component, OnInit } from '@angular/core';
@Component({
selector: 'app-albums',
templateUrl: './albums.component.html',
styleUrls: ['./albums.component.css']
})
export class AlbumsComponent implements OnInit {
constructor(
private photosService: PhotosService,
) { }
ngOnInit() {}
}
We also need to define a property for the albums in our component. Just above the constructor let’s add albums property.
export class AlbumsComponent implements OnInit {
albums;
constructor(
private photosService: PhotosService,
) { }
Now, let’s assign the response from our API to the albums property in the ngOnInit() method.
ngOnInit() {
this.albums = this.photosService.getAlbums();
}
8. Create a template
Now it’s time to display our data, and for that, we need a nice template. To make it easier and faster let’s import Bootstrap in the index.html file.
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Albums</title>
<base href="/">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<link rel="icon" type="image/x-icon" href="favicon.ico">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/4.4.1/css/bootstrap.min.css" integrity="sha384-Vkoo8x4CGsO3+Hhxv8T/Q5PaXtkKtu6ug5TOeNV6gBiFeWPGFN9MuhOf23Q9Ifjh" crossorigin="anonymous">
</head>
If it’s done, let’s open albums.component.html file and create a template like in the following code.
<div>
<h3>Albums collection</h3>
<div class="row">
<div class="col-sm-4" *ngFor="let album of albums | async">
<div class="card">
<div class="card-body">
<a>{{album.title}}</a>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
To add our data to the template we used *ngFor and async pipe. As you probably see, inside the code, there is an element that will be redirecting to the particular album to display photos from this album. To achieve this we need to create another route.
9. Creating route with variable
Inside app-routing.module.ts file, we have to add another route object. In this case, the path will be a string with variable and we will redirect to a particular album by id. Please, update the code as in the example below.
const routes: Routes = [
{ path: '', component: AlbumsComponent },
{ path: 'photos/:albumId', component: PhotosComponent }
];
Now, you should receive an error, because we use a non-existing Photos Component in our path. In this case, we have to create a new component to remove the bug.
10. Create another component
Like before, let’s navigate to the components folder in the console and generate a new component named photos with ng command. If it’s ready your error should no longer be there.
11. Add redirect link
In the Albums component, we left our code unfinished. Let’s get back to the template and update the link as in the code below.
<a routerLink="photos/{{album.id}}">{{album.title}}</a>
Now, let’s apply some CSS code to our template in the albums.components.css file.
h3 {
margin-top: 5%;
margin-bottom: 5%;
}
.card {
margin-bottom: 3%;
}
.card:hover {
background-color: #007bff;
}
.card:hover a {
color: white;
}
.card a:hover {
color: white;
text-decoration: none;
}
Woohoo! The first part of the app is ready. Check out the result in the browser and you should see the app like in the image.
12. Create a second API call
Now we need to start from getting data by album id to our new component. Let’s go back to the photos.service.ts file and create another function.
getPhotos(albumId) {
return this.http.get(`https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/photos?albumId=${albumId}`);
}
13. Get query param from the link
If it’s ready we can use it inside the Photos Component. So, open photos.component.ts file and import Photos Service there as previously in Albums Component and inject it the same way.
import { PhotosService } from './../../services/photos.service';
import { Component, OnInit } from '@angular/core'; @Component({
selector: 'app-photos',
templateUrl: './photos.component.html',
styleUrls: ['./photos.component.css']
})
export class PhotosComponent implements OnInit {
photos;
constructor(
private photosService: PhotosService,
) { }
Now, we will call getPhotos() function in the ngOnInit() method, but don’t forget to initialize the photos’ property above the constructor.
ngOnInit() {
this.photos = this.photosService.getPhotos(albumId);
}
In this step, we clearly need an album id which we can get from the query params in the link. To get access to the params we need to install ActivatedRoute from @angular/router and this we also need to inject in the constructor.
When it’s ready we can initialize another property albumId below the photos property. In the ngOnInit() method let’s assign the id from the URL to this.albumId and let’s pass it to the API URL.
import { PhotosService } from './../../services/photos.service';
import { Component, OnInit } from '@angular/core';
import { ActivatedRoute } from '@angular/router'; @Component({
selector: 'app-photos',
templateUrl: './photos.component.html',
styleUrls: ['./photos.component.css']
})
export class PhotosComponent implements OnInit {
photos;
albumId;
constructor(
private photosService: PhotosService,
private route: ActivatedRoute,
) { } ngOnInit() {
this.albumId = this.route.snapshot.params.albumId;
this.photos = this.photosService.getPhotos(this.albumId);
}
}
We are almost there, the only thing we need to do right now is to create a template for the photos.
14. Create a template
Inside the photos.component.html file let’s add the following HTML code and pass photos with *ngFor.
Here we will also pass this.albumId to display the id of the album.
<div>
<button routerLink="/" class="btn btn-light">Go back</button>
<h3>Album {{albumId}}</h3>
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-3 photo" *ngFor="let photo of photos | async">
<img src={{photo.url}} class="img-fluid" />
</div>
</div>
</div>
The last step is to add some CSS code to make our app pretty.
.photo {
margin-bottom: 3%;
}
h3 {
margin-bottom: 5%;
margin-top: 5%;
}
button {
margin-top: 10px;
}
15. Woohoo!
We are there! Check your app in the browser and try to navigate to the albums and come back. You should be able to see the screens like in the images below.
Albums page
Photos page
Congratulations!
Conclusion
In this article, I’ve created a simple application using Angular 8. To create the app, components, and service I user Angular CLI tool, and we used Bootstrap to make our templates nice and fast. Application has a simple routing to make you familiar with creating routes and REST API request to show you how we manage API calls in Angular. As a result, I got an app with a listing of albums and details page for each of them.
I hope you will find this tutorial helpful and use it as a base for your first Angular application training. If you feel more comfortable with Youtube videos feel free to watch this tutorial here.
Have a nice coding,
Anna from Duomly
This article was originally published at: https://www.blog.duomly.com/angular-tutorial/ | https://medium.com/quick-code/how-to-build-an-angular-8-application-with-api-request-in-10-minutes-628266d05e9 | ['Radoslaw Fabisiak'] | 2019-12-03 18:43:10.333000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Angular', 'Front End Development', 'Coding', 'Tech'] |
Ratatouille is the best movie. | Ratatouille is the best movie. | https://medium.com/@lifestyle.ivy/ratatouille-is-the-best-movie-31453954d62a | ['Ivy Summers'] | 2020-12-25 20:58:19.827000+00:00 | ['Film', 'Ratatouille', 'Movies', 'Disney'] |
Packaging Machinery Market estimated to grow at a CAGR of 5.29% to reach a value of US$73.034 billion by 2025 | Packaging Machinery Market estimated to grow at a CAGR of 5.29% to reach a value of US$73.034 billion by 2025 Market Research Mar 3, 2020·3 min read
press-releases Packaging Machinery Market estimated to grow at a CAGR of 5.29% to reach a value of US$73.034 billion by 2025
Packaging Machinery Market estimated to grow at a CAGR of 5.29% to reach a value of US$73.034 billion by 2025
Packaging machinery market is used to pack the end product or components manufactured across the different industry verticals such as pharmaceuticals, food and beverage and cosmetics among others. The market is poised to grow on account of rising demand for packed commodities due to rising disposable income.
According to the report, the Packaging Machinery Market is projected to increase at a CAGR of 5.29% over the forecast period 2019–2025. The market for packaging machinery is expected to surge during the forecast period as the rapid urbanization and rising disposable income in major developing economies around the world such as China, Indonesia, and India, is further augmenting the demand for packaged goods. As the goods are packed in protective packages, their use is considered safe and also free from damages that occur during the transit of these products. Moreover, growing investments by key players in the market in the form of R&D to bring out the state-of-art packaging solutions and equipment also show the potential for the growth of the market during the next five years. The packaging machinery market is segmented on the basis of machinery type, technology, end-user industry, and geography. On the basis of geography, the Asia Pacific is projected to hold a noteworthy share in the market owing to the fact that continuously rising demand for food, electronics, medical supplies and other packed materials on account of the growing population. The European region is projected to show decent growth throughout the forecast period owing to the strict regulatory environment for the safety of packaged goods.
On the basis of the end-user industry, the market has been classified into cosmetics, chemicals, logistics, food and beverage, pharmaceuticals and others. The pharmaceutical segment is projected to hold a good market share as the growth of the pharmaceutical sectors of numerous countries such as Japan and the United States, due to the rising healthcare sector, growing geriatric population and well-established healthcare industry, which is further propelling the demand for medicines and other medical supplies. Moreover, rising investments by leading pharma companies around the world in the form of facility expansions to uplift their production to meet the growing demand is also expected to augment the market growth opportunities for the coming years. For instance, Merck, a leading pharmaceutical company invested around €63 million as a part of its €1billion investment plan till 2020 for transforming its dedicated packaging and shipping site situated in Darmstadt. The food and beverage is projected to show good growth during the next five years on account of the changing lifestyle of people across the globe which is instigating the demand for ready to eat food and packed food.
The major players covered as part of the report are Syntegon Technology (Bosch Packaging Technology), EDL Packaging Engineers, GEA Group, Barry-Wehmiller, Coesia SpA, Krones AG, Ilapak, and OCME s.r.l among others.
View a sample of the report or purchase complete study at https://www.knowledge-sourcing.com/report/packaging-machinery-market
In this report the Packaging machinery market has been segmented based on the following: | https://medium.com/@knowledgesourcing.marketting/packaging-machinery-market-estimated-to-grow-at-a-cagr-of-5-29-828b6b156cc1 | ['Market Research'] | 2020-03-03 10:29:35.983000+00:00 | ['Market Research', 'Market', 'Packaging Machinery'] |
Simulating self-driving cars using Unity-ML | Most importantly, we need to create an environment that is similar to what the real car would see on the road. The key parts of a simulation environment are:
Real Physics: In order to make the self-driving more realistic, the simulated environment should have the same attributes as in the real world. For instance, the gravity of 9.81 meters per second square applied to the environment, assigning real weights to cars and so on Observation: This part comprises the elements that are present in an environment in which the car needs to consider in order to drive and take appropriate actions. Sensor feed: The car needs to perceive the environment or observation in order to drive. The sensor feed can be obtained from various cameras and LIDAR devices installed in the car.
We will next see three such basic simulation environment that where I am training the cars to be self-driving vehicles.
Self-driving AI-race
The 3D cars learn to drive and race on their own using deep reinforcement learning. After several rounds of training using proximal policy optimization update, the cars can drive themselves to complete the circuit. Each of the cars in this environment weighs 1500 kg and are assigned with wheel colliders. Moreover, it has two reward function. First, if the car manages to drive without colliding it receives a positive reward. Secondly, I have assigned 18 checkpoints in the race track, and if the cars cross them then again a positive reward is given. If you want to create your own Unity-Environment with colliders and checkpoints, then you can have a look in this link.
Self-driving Reacher (Zombie Hunter)
In this video, a car learns to drive using deep reinforcement learning and Unity ML. The environment was created using UNITY 3D, and C# code was used to assign colliders and reward functions. The car receives a positive reward if it gets nearer to the zombies, and the environment is reset if the car goes out of bound. After training for several rounds using proximal policy optimization update, the car learns to reach the target (or to smash zombies). To create a basic car and to make it driveable you can follow this link. In this tutorial, you can learn how to make a very basic car and to control it using your keyboard. Bellow is the controller script that I created to control the car as shown in the video above.
Autonomous navigation using Deepdrive
Deepdrive is a realistic simulator for self-driving cars create by [1]. The observation space of the AI-agent or the car is multidimensional, to name a few, the states consist of image data, depth data, angular velocity and so on. The goal of the car is to complete its lap in minimum time by avoiding accidents. In this project, to train the self-driving car, I am experimenting with several observation states to come up with an efficient model. Moreover, I am using Deep reinforcement learning with Actor-critic approach and Proximal Policy Optimization. You can find more details about the deep-drive environment here.
Next, I will explain how to train a self-driving car in a simulation environment. So, stay tunned.
References: | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/simulating-self-driving-ai-race-using-unity-ml-2ac314f67980 | ['Surajit Saikia'] | 2021-02-14 15:21:39.377000+00:00 | ['Self Driving Cars', 'Deep Learning', 'AI', 'Autonomous Cars', 'Machine Learning'] |
HOW TO BE A MILLIONAIRE IN YOUR 20’S | HERE WE SHARE HOW TO LIVE LIFE IN MOST MEANINGFUL WAY EVEN IN THIS RESTLESS ENVIRONMENT BY APPLYING VERY VERY SIMPLE STEP. | https://medium.com/@meaningfulride/how-to-be-a-millionaire-in-your-20s-d9cd3395ab56 | ['Meaningful Ride'] | 2020-12-22 17:45:11.228000+00:00 | ['Money Mindset', 'Save Money', 'Millionaire', 'Money Management', 'Millionaire Mindset'] |
Biden’s pick for agriculture secretary raises serious red flags | George Goehl | Biden’s pick for agriculture secretary raises serious red flags | George Goehl
Opinion: George Goehl in The Guardian Mon 21 Dec 2020 07.04 EST
It’s unlikely that Joe Biden expected that, of all his cabinet nominees, his choice for US agriculture secretary would cause the most blowback. Yet that is exactly what happened.
The former secretary Tom Vilsack, fresh off the revolving door, is a kind of all-in-one package of what frustrates so many about the Democratic party. His previous tenure leading the department was littered with failures, ranging from distorting data about Black farmers and discrimination to bowing to corporate conglomerates.
Vilsack’s nomination has been roundly rejected by some of the exact people who helped Biden defeat Trump: organizations representing Black people, progressive rural organizations, family farmers and environmentalists. If the Biden team was looking for ways to unite the multi-racial working class, they have done so — in full-throated opposition to this pick.
We remember when Vilsack toured agricultural communities, hearing devastating testimony of big ag’s criminal treatment of contract farmers. He went through the motions of expressing concern, but nothing came of it: the Department of Justice and the Department of Agriculture (USDA) kowtowed to agribusiness lobbyists and corporate interests, squandering a golden opportunity to rein in meat processing monopolies.
We remember when Vilsack’s USDA foreclosed on Black farmers who had outstanding complaints about racial discrimination and whitewashed its own record on civil rights. That’s in addition to the ousting of Shirley Sherrod, a Black and female USDA official, when the far-right media published a doctored hit piece, forcing her resignation.
We remember when Vilsack left his job at the USDA a week early to become a lobbyist as the chief executive of the US Dairy Export Council. He was paid a million-dollar salary to push the same failed policies of his USDA tenure, carrying out the wishes of dairy monopolies. Despite being nominated to lead the USDA again, he’s still collecting paychecks as a lobbyist.
The president-elect should have righted these wrongs by charting a bold, new course for rural communities and farmers in America. Instead, Vilsack’s nomination signaled more of the same from Democratic leadership.
“Democrats need to do something big for rural people to start supporting them again,” Francis Thicke, a family farmer in Fairfield, Iowa, told us recently. “The status quo won’t work, and that’s one reason why Vilsack is the wrong choice.”
Following Trump’s win in 2017, the organization I direct, People’s Action, embarked on a massive listening project. We traveled across rural America — from family farms in Iowa, to the Driftless region of Wisconsin, up the Thumb of Michigan, to the hills of Appalachia — and had 10,000 conversations with rural Americans. When we asked the people we met the biggest barrier to their community getting what it needed, the top answer (81%) was a government captured by corporate power. The Vilsack pick does nothing to assuage these concerns.
As Michael Stovall, founder of Independent Black Farmers, told Politico: “Vilsack is not good for the agriculture industry, period. When it comes to civil rights, the rights of people, he’s not for that.”
Mike Callicrate, a rancher from Colorado Springs, was equally direct. “Vilsack assisted big agribusiness monopolies in preying upon and gutting rural America,” he told us, “greatly reducing opportunities for young people to return and remain on our farms and ranches. His policy led to catastrophic rural decline, followed by suicide rates not seen since the 1980s farm crisis.”
Biden had a chance to finally right some wrongs. Sadly, he missed the mark on this one by a country mile.
* George Goehl is the director of People’s Action | https://medium.com/@dr-cbg/bidens-pick-for-agriculture-secretary-raises-serious-red-flags-george-goehl-712e656fa8c2 | ['Cathy B. Glenn'] | 2021-01-07 23:06:07.835000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Rural American Cultures', 'Agriculture', 'Tom Vilsack', 'Joe Biden'] |
Elixir immutability and data structure | Immutability is a two edged sword, while it is thread safe, more error proof and have others benefits that help builds the foundation of beam. This come with a cost, like everything.
Circular list, graphs, trees with parent and a others data structures can not be build in elixir as in others programming languages.
Per example, imagine a list which: A -> B -> A
Since A links to B, then B needs to exist in advanced, however as B links to A, then B needs to exist in advanced.
Photo by Melani Sosa on Unsplash
It’s a chicken-egg problem. So far, beam does not support quantum superposition, making impossible to reference nonexistent objects. Go ahead and try.
However there are a few workarounds to implement it, one of them is using auxiliary map with id’s to represent link between nodes. Thus every node needs to have a unique identifier.
Per example: Imagine a node with the tuple:
defmodule CircularNode do
defstruct [:content, :id]
end
Now let's create a function named link that will represent a pointer between two nodes.
def link(map, nodeA, nodeB) do
Map.put(map, nodeA.id, nodeB)
end
The function only insert a key with node A id pointing do node B.To iterate over our list, lets write a function next to return the next element from the list.
def next(map, node) do
map[node.id]
end
Everything is in place to create our list:
a = %CircularNode{content: "content a", id: "id1" }
b = %CircularNode{content: "content b", id: "id2"} map=%{}
map = CircularList.link(map, a, b)
map = CircularList.link(map, b, a)
And finally, let's test it: | https://medium.com/@guitcastro/elixir-immutability-and-data-structure-c5f40734d870 | ['Guilherme Torres Castro'] | 2021-04-30 16:40:52.508000+00:00 | ['Immutability', 'Data Structures', 'Programming', 'Elixir', 'Functional Programming'] |
JAPANESE PEOPLE EXPLAINED! [CHAPTER 5] VACATIONS AND WEEKENDS | Why is it that Japanese people don’t take vacations? Or very few vacations?
I have my own theory.
I have lived for the past 10 years outside of Japan, and when I have friends visiting from Japan, I am always surprised at how short they stay in Europe.
When I was living in Paris, a friend of mine from high-school came to visit on a “long weekend”. She caught the flight on Friday evening after work, she arrived in Paris on Saturday morning. We spend Saturday and Sunday together, then she left on Monday afternoon and was back to work on Tuesday. She slept on the plane and went straight to work, after a 12 hour flight.
Another friend flew in from Tokyo to Scotland, and stayed literally for 24 hours to attend a common friend’s wedding.
I can continue making a whole list of some crazy friends coming and going for a very short trip, which I never understood. I need at least 2 weeks stay if I am flying across the world for more than 10 hours in a flight. There are popular tours going from Japan to Los Angeles, for “3 nights 5 days” meaning the 2 travelling days, you are sleeping on the plane.
I gave a thought about why Japanese people like to pack their vacations and do everything on a short trip, and here is what I think.
Japanese people don’t (or can’t) take many days off.
The first obvious reason is that it is hard to take holidays, or let me rephrase it, they have holidays but people don’t want to take them. There are a few long holidays when many companies are closed, and these are during the New Year and one week at in mid august. Then one’s paid holiday generally is about 15–20 days a year.
However, according to Expedia, Japan is the lowest countries of paid holiday usage. This chart shows, that on average, only 50% of holidays were used. It is an improvement compared to 2012, when only 38% of paid holidays were used.
The reason why Japanese workers take only half their paid vacation, according to this article in Nikkei Asia, is that companies are generally understaffed, so the employees can’t take days off, due to too much work that needs to be done.
At the same time, Japan is ranked as one of the worst countries in efficiency. This means that working hours are long, but does not lead to efficient production. This means that productivity is not optimal although the working hours are long.
Another common answer to why Japanese workers don’t take paid vacations was to “keep the paid holiday just in case”. I remember having only 3 days of sick leave a year, so if I got a nasty cold that lasted a week, I will have to use my paid holiday to cover the remaining 2 days or day off.
2) Things work so well that you don’t need long holidays to relax
Another reason why Japanese people take short holidays is because everything functions properly that short weekends can be very refreshing whilst travelling within Japan.
I remember taking short trips to many destinations in Japan, and doing loads. For example, I used to go on weekend ski trips. The trains arrive and depart on time, and there are options to rent everything upon arrival. The food and drinks were all included, and the hotel usually has a hot spring (here you can also check an article about the bath culture in Japan)
I would leave on a Friday evening, and ski for 2 days, returning on Sunday evening.
In Europe, things operate a little differently. It can be difficult to predict the arrival time to the destination because trains are always delayed. Eating cultures are also different and it takes much longer to get food at restaurants. Also, the European believes that a vacation should be much longer than just a “weekend”.
It’s a different mentality, which lead to handle vacations differently. The europeans tend to take longer time off, so often the travelling day will consist of “travelling and arriving to the destination” — unlike the Japanese who will expect to travel and do something else during that day.
If you have a longer holiday, then the activity done on the first day will be less important.
Since the Japanese people go on shorter trips, they will try to pack the days with activities. There are various tour guide services to efficiently take travellers around. I’ve been on a trip to Vietnam with some of my Japanese friends, and it was very efficient. We went to so many places, the schedule was full from morning to the evening. I feel like I’ve been to Vietnam for several days, looking at the amount of activities we’ve done, but it was only a 4 night trip.
I also worked as a tour guide in Paris, taking Japanese people around. I often got overwhelmed looking at the amount of activity they wanted to accomplish in the 5 hours I was paid to show them around. I once took a family to Versailles in the morning and we were back around 2pm, covering most of the ground in Versailles. It is a very large palace, for those of you who’ve never been.
3) The difference in the relaxation culture
The one culture I really miss about Japan, that I won’t be able to find in Europe, is the possibility to get total relaxation in a short amount of time. Such as taking a nice bath at hot-springs or local bath houses (which are called Sento 銭湯・せんとう）or getting a quick massage, even on a massage chair. The day I was leaving Japan, I had some money left in my wallet, and then I found a massage chair at the airport. It was 100 yen for 10 minutes. I believe I sat there for 30 minutes before my flight took off.
Reflexology and acupuncture, are also very popular for a quick recovery.
I think this culture of quick refreshment and relaxation helps to recharge the energy in a quick manner therefore allowing people to manage on shorter holidays.
Since I started living in Europe, I tend to need longer vacations. The physical and mental exhaustion from daily disfunctionality makes you unbelievably tired, especially coming from a very functional country. Living in a stress free environment can allow one to take less vacations. | https://medium.com/@brightestbug/japanese-people-explained-chapter-5-vacations-and-weekends-f9f53b4aa637 | ['Natasha Yamamura'] | 2021-02-04 16:55:16.074000+00:00 | ['Vacation', 'Holidays', 'Culture', 'Japanese', 'Japan'] |
Welcome to the Qsin Finance Community! | Qsin is the native token of the Qsin Finance Platform
This token allows users and the community to get passive income from the various features we offer
This token will also be a governance token for the platform, mean users can submit proposals or vote on existing proposals those who have 100k Qsin tokens have the right to submit proposals for future development of the platform
Here are the details of the Qsin token:
Token Name : Qsin Finance Symbol : Qsin
Token Type : BEP20 (bsc)
Total supply : 22082019 Smartcontract : https://bscscan.com/address/0xd290a8df51c88edef5591d4d24d2afc95c93cd94
Token Allocation:
Airdrop and Community: 20%
Team: 5% (Locked 2 years)
Staking & Farm: 40% (Locked 2 years)
Presale: 10% (Unsold will burn)
Dex Listing: 10% (Locked 2 years)
Cex Listing: 5%
Development: 10%
All details about our products and features will include in our website soon!
Website : Coming soon!
Twitter : https://mobile.twitter.com/Qsinfinance
Medium : https://medium.com/@qsinfinance
Channel : https://t.me/qsinfinanceupdate
Group : https://qsinfinancecommunity | https://medium.com/@qsinfinance/welcome-to-the-qsin-finance-community-bdc6c2b3712c | ['Qsin Finance'] | 2020-12-17 07:06:57.834000+00:00 | ['Bsc', 'Airdrop', 'Presale', 'Defi', 'Bitcoin'] |
At the end of the day, somehow finishing off the office work or burying it for another day, I… | At the end of the day, somehow finishing off the office work or burying it for another day, I finally text her,
‘How was your day?’
Sometimes her reply is instant, sometimes thay take time as she would be chasing her own deadlines.
One such day she replied, ‘Oh! The job is just a support system, the job by itself doesn’t end the day.. The day is yet to start with our loved ones ...’ | https://medium.com/@chinmaya_c_m/at-the-end-of-the-day-somehow-finishing-off-the-office-work-or-burying-it-for-another-day-i-55241753b347 | ['Chinmaya Cm'] | 2020-12-05 08:06:21.616000+00:00 | ['Microfiction', 'Life', 'Feelgood', 'Romance', 'Herwisewords'] |
The Misconception of Introvert (and Extrovert) | Even though introverts need some alone time, that doesn’t mean they hate people. Introverts are humans too, and humans are social creatures. They do love people (well, maybe not all of them, but mostly they do), but they have limited social battery. It gradually decreases by these two things:
Social interactions and overstimulation.
Image from http://still.timothyfulton.com/illustrations/
At the beginning of the day, introverts have 100% “social battery”. Throughout the day, they meet their colleagues, clients, friends, family, random people in the street. Each of their social interaction with them, whether it’s a face-to-face conversation or group gathering, reduces some amount of it.
Overstimulation is a bigger energy-draining source. It includes all of three these things:
1. Being at the center of attention
Being at the center of attention has a lot of versions. Introverts hate all kinds of it. It could be a simple thing. Let’s say introverts were in a cafe. They will not choose the seat in the middle of the cafe and prefer the one in the periphery. It’s because they feel that everyone is watching, which makes them are in the center of attention, while in fact, it doesn’t.
You think that it was absurd, but it just how introverts feel. On a more complex level, public speaking is one of the most common things. It is undoubtedly one of the Introverts’ worst nightmare.
2. Stand in the crowd
A massive crowd somehow give introverts a significant amount of stimulation. It could be parties, concerts, or any other events which involves a lot of people. They will reconsider again and again and again before going to such places.
3. Adapt in an entirely new environment
A new environment means when introverts have to go to the places they have never been before, meet new people, and do new activities. All the new things produce massive stimulation. That’s why they love doing their routine. It makes them safe and lives in peace. On the dark side, it’s harder for them to get out of the comfort zone, compared to the extroverts.
Image from https://www.picklestore.nl/en/pampling-low-social-battery-de-starrykito.html
When the battery goes down to 0% due to two energy-drainer, just like your smartphone, you need to recharge by plugging on your charger. For the smartphone, the charger is the adapter. For the introverts? They charge themselves by being alone.
When they are at 0% condition, they mostly prefer to stay reserved and quiet, desperately waiting that the time passes by until finally, they could go home, craving for solitude. So, next time when you (extroverts) see the introverts are being quiet as fuck, please understand that they need to recharge ASAP.
It goes vice-versa for the extroverts. Their solitude drains their battery, and they feel damn alive when they are meeting people, having a conversation, socializing, or even hanging around near the crowd. | https://medium.com/@axelleonardo8/the-misconception-of-introvert-and-extrovert-78a062be967e | ['Axel Leonardo'] | 2019-06-18 05:59:02.521000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Personality', 'Introvert', 'Self Improvement', 'Personal Development'] |
Shafi.com.bd is an E-Commerce Company. | SHAFI is Your Trusted Brand in Bangladesh E-commerce Business. Stay with Shafi.com.bd “ Happy Shopping “ with SHAFI. Shafi.com.bd is a E-Commerce Company. | https://medium.com/@shafi-global-business/shafi-com-bd-is-a-e-commerce-company-39b0d57fd515 | [] | 2020-12-28 12:10:07.403000+00:00 | ['Online Shopping', 'Happy Shopping', 'Online Business', 'Ecommerce', 'Bangladesh'] |
Fast R-CNN | 1. Introduction
R-CNN is slow. Detecting with R-CNN with VGG16 backbone takes 47 seconds for one image at test time. That makes it unsuitable for low latency applications. So in April 2015 Ross Girshick who was also one of the authors of R-CNN, single handedly proposed a better algorithm, called Fast Algorithm. The research paper can be found here. In this write up, we will get down to the nitty gritty of Fast R-CNN. But before that it is highly recommended to read my previous medium story on R-CNN here, as I will be using a lot of terms and concepts from R-CNN while assuming that you know them well.
CNNs are inherently capable of classifying images. It is helpful to look at R-CNN and Fast R-CNN as methods to extend this inherent capacity of CNNs for detecting objects in an image. Detecting objects means finding out the class of objects along with their actual locations in an image. So it involves classification and localization as well.
Suppose we have three classes of objects. Mountain, sea and building. CNNs can very easily tell us, if an image contains a mountain or not, or if an image contains a building or not. But if we have a sea and a mountain and a building , all in the same image then CNNs can not directly be used for all three objects. In such a case, we can extract regions from an image, that may contain an object and then apply CNN on those regions separately to check if any of those regions contain a sea or a mountain or building. And in a nutshell, that’s what R-CNN does. Those extracted regions ( generally obtained using selective search) which were called region proposals in R-CNN are called object proposals or regions of interest (RoI) in Fast R-CNN. And the entire process of object detection is done more intelligently in Fast R-CNN to give better performance in terms of speed and memory requirement.
2. First Look at Fast R-CNN
Figure 1 : Fast R-CNN overview
Fast R-CNN first computes the feature map for entire input image and then from that feature map, extracts feature vectors corresponding to each RoI using RoI pooling. These feature vectors are then used for classification and localization. Keep an eye on Figure 1 while reading following steps
The input image along with a set of object proposals(also called region of interests) are given as a input to the convolutional neural network (CNN). The CNN, which contains several convolutional and max pooling layers produce a feature map for input image as shown in Figure 1. This way we get one feature map for entire input image and its much smaller in size than the input image because of stride. Next stage is RoI pooling layer. It is different from regular max pooling layer and its job is to extract fixed length feature vectors from feature map. Thus we get feature vectors corresponding to every region of interest. They can further be used for classification and localization. These RoI feature vectors then pass through a sequence of fully connected layers. And the output goes into two sibling output layers/branches : one branch containing softmax layer and the other branch containing bounding box regressor as can be seen in Figure 1. The Softmax branch predicts probabilities of the corresponding RoI belonging to any of the object classes or to the ‘background’ class. In short, this branch performs classification and it finds out the object that is present in corresponding region of interest. The bounding box regressor branch predicts the refined location of object in term of r,c,,h and w; Where (r,c) specifies the coordinates of top left corner of the bounding box for corresponding object and (h,w) are height and width of the bounding box. This stage is necessary because the RoIs given by selective search are not perfect and need refinement.
This completes our high level understanding of Fast R-CNN. If you want to go deeper, follow along……
3. More insights into Fast R-CNN
According to Wikipedia …… While the original R-CNN independently computed the neural network features on each of as many as two thousand regions of interest, Fast R-CNN runs the neural network once on the whole image. At the end of the network is a novel method called ROIPooling, which slices out each ROI from the network’s output tensor, reshapes it, and classifies it. As in the original R-CNN, the Fast R-CNN uses Selective Search to generate its region proposals. This is exactly what we learned in previous section.
3.1 Initializing Fast R-CNN from pretrained network
When a pretrained network like VGG16 is used to initialize Fast R-CNN , then VGG16 is modified in following three ways. Again keep an eye on Figure 1 while reading following points
The last max pooling layer is replaced by an RoI pooling layer. The last fully connected layer and softmax layer are replace with sibling branches of softmax and bounding box regressor. The network is modified to take two inputs: images and RoIs.
Few of VGG16's last layers are fine tuned for transfer learning.
3.2 How does RoI pooling works?
For Fast R-CNN, the input images are resized such that the shorter side becomes 600 pixels. Fast R-CNN can accept input image with any size such that the longer side should not exceed 1000 pixels when the shorter side is resized to 600 pixels.
The convolutional layers do not have any problem with this variable image size. But the output of convolutional layers is of different size for different sizes of input images. And next fully connected layers do not accept input of variable size. So it is necessary to bring the output of convolutional layers to a fix size before feeding it to fully connected layers. This is done by RoI Pooling.
Lets take an example…
Figure 2 : Feature map with variable RoI sizes example
Suppose we give an image and two object proposals as an input to CNN and CNN produces a feature map of size 21 x 16 as shown in Figure 2. There are two boxes(red and blue) in Figure 2. These two boxes correspond to two object proposals. These boxes are of different size and they are much smaller than their corresponding object proposals due to stride. The aim of RoI pooling is to resize them and bring them to a smaller and same size. In our example we will resize both of them to a fix size of 3 x 3. So here H=3 and W=3. How this is done is very interesting….
Figure 3 : RoI pooling for RED RoI
The first step is to divide the RED RoI into a grid having 3 x 3 = 9 bins. The RED RoI is of size 18 x 10 as shown in Figure 2. Because we want to resize it to H x W, we will create bins of height = 18/3=6 and width = 10/3=3. Please note that 10 is not multiplier of 3 and hence bins in last column of grid has more width. On these 9 bins we apply max pool (get one maximum number from each bin) and we get a 3 x 3 resized feature map as shown in the right.
Figure 4: RoI pooling for BLUE RoI
For BLUE RoI also, the first step is to divide it into a grid having 3 x 3 = 9 bins. The BLUE RoI is of size 16 x 13 as shown in Figure 2. Because we want to resize it to H x W, we will create bins of height = 16/3=5 and width = 10/3=3. Please note that 16 and 13 are not multiplier of 3 and hence bins in last row and last column of grid has more height and width respectively. On these 9 bins we apply max pool (get one maximum number from each bin) and we get a 3 x 3 resized feature map as shown in the right.
This is how, in spite of having RoI of variable size, we are always capable of resizing them to same size. Here we have resized them to 3 x 3 but in actual research paper while using VGG16 as CNN the author has resized it to 7 x 7 using RoI pooling. Thus H=W=7. The resized RoI are then flattened and fed to next fully connected layers, whose output goes to two sibling layers as shown in Figure 1.
3.3 Are more proposals always better?
Figure 5 : Performance for various schemes.
The author of Fast R-CNN carried out an experiment where the vary the number of object proposals and check the performance of object detection. The performance for object proposals generated using selective search is shown by solid blue line in Figure 5 and it is observed that the mAP actually goes down when the number of object proposals increase beyond a certain range.
3.4 Softmax vs. SVM
If you remember from my previous story on R-CNN, R-CNN uses number of class specific linear SVMs for classification. Why Fast RCNN uses softmax?
Figure 6 : mAP values for Softmax vs SVMs
Experiments were carried out using networks of small, medium and large size. They are referred as S, M and L respectively. As shown in Figure 6 R-CNN was using SMVs only. But Fast R-CNN when tried with SVMs and softmax, performed slightly better with softmax.
3.5 Comparing R-CNN and Fast R-CNN architectures
For R-CNN, training is a multistage pipeline. It first trains ConvNets followed by SVMs and then followed by bounding box regressor. In Fast R-CNN training is single stage using multi-task loss. Hence it is faster.
In R-CNN all object proposals are separately feed to CNN to get the fixed length feature vectors. Fast R-CNN takes entire image as input, generates its feature map using CNN in one pass and then feature vectors corresponding to each region proposal are extracted from feature map using RoI pooling. Hence it is faster. This is called sharing computation or sharing features.
The features extracted from CNN in R-CNN require hundreds of gigabytes of storage. Fast R-CNN do not need to store any features.
3.6 Comparing R-CNN and Fast R-CNN results
Fast R-CNN trains very deep VGG16 networks 9 times faster than R-CNN.
R-CNN with VGG16 takes 47 seconds to detect objects in one test image while Fast R-CNN takes only 0.3 seconds(Excluding object proposal time).
Fast R-CNN achieves an mAP of 66% on PASCAL VOC 2102 dataset. mAP of R-CNN for same dataset is 62%.
3.7 Drawbacks of Fast R-CNN
Figure 7: Test time comparisons
The speed of Fast R-CNN is limited by the time taken by selective search to generate object proposals.
As can be seen from Figure 7, there is a huge difference in test times of Fast R-CNN with and without considering the time taken by selective search to generate region proposals at test time.
considering the time taken by selective search the test time is 2.3 seconds. Though this is a great improvement over R-CNN, but still Fast R-CNN is not suitable for real time applications
This is the perfect time to start talking about Faster R-CNN , a state of the art algorithm for object detection and semantic segmentation. As the name suggests its faster than the fast R-CNN.
Stay tuned ….. | https://medium.com/@ashutoshmakone/fast-r-cnn-42c8b345d788 | ['Ashutosh Makone'] | 2020-12-09 07:15:20.266000+00:00 | ['Computer Vision', 'Fast Rcnn', 'Object Detection', 'Semantic Segmentation', 'Deep Learning'] |
AWS re:Invent 2020 — Evolution majeure de la facturation de Lambda | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/cloudreach-france/aws-re-invent-2020-evolution-majeure-de-la-facturation-de-lambda-56e249200eb8 | ['Thomas Linck'] | 2020-12-01 19:08:47.959000+00:00 | ['AWS', 'AWS Lambda', 'Reinvent'] |
Thursday Headaches and More | I’m here writing dreading the editing phase of the work I’m doing, and trouble shooting a little. I feel like I’m all ready to start my next book and I’m tired of saying it’s almost done, it is just I want to add more.
To think it’s already December and twenty twenty, or twenty wierdie, is finally almost over. The holidays are among us and people are gathered with their shelter in place buddies. This is interesting but there are multiple stories saying not to congregate today or at all. I wonder if people are going to follow it but I believe it’s not a joke, people should probably do things online.
I’m wondering what can be done or what the ramifications of prolonged time spent indoors. I see people jogging and that’s comforting, I hope to start running again. I wonder what we are missing from this year that we won’t realize for a while. Because usually there’s always something that we learn was accomplished or happened during this time.
I see a lot of people coming together in essential services and that’s reassuring because we are not arguing as much, and more people voted this year. For as weird as the year has been, it’s good to know that we are still optimistic. | https://medium.com/@alanvillarreal/thursday-headaches-and-more-9c547bcefaae | ['Alan Villarreal'] | 2020-12-04 08:04:16.005000+00:00 | ['Book Writing Service', 'Books And Authors', 'Projects', 'Writing'] |
OpenGL in Java: Pipelines & Shaders | OpenGL in Java: Pipelines & Shaders
In another article, I introduced OpenGL and briefly discussed why I chose Java, OpenGL and JOGL. I also presented a working example in Java which would be the equivalent to the first “Hello World” program. The intended example was using old OpenGL syntax, which is easy to understand but not optimised. It is called the “immediate” mode in OpenGL where the drawing commands are submitted directly to the GPU enclosed in glBegin and glEnd blocks.
Since OpenGL 3.3, it is recommended to program OpenGL using what is known as the core language. In this mode, OpenGL is used through compiled GLSL programs which are called shaders. Those shaders are pipelined so we have a chained software flow to get our graphics rendered. The GLSL programs need to be compiled and are often stored in separate files in our source code, as they are a separate programming language on their own.
When programming OpenGL, we are writing pipelined code for the GPU which will run in parallel. This implies that the way we code is different from a regular program. Routines need to be concise and stateless, as execution order is not known. Each pipeline stage operation can not rely on other operation from the same stage. Code must be also compiled and downloaded to the GPU, this is done in runtime.
In this article, we will briefly explain how this pipeline works, how shaders are coded and how vertex coordinates are used. We will use those concepts to draw a square following the complete process. While the example is quite basic, the process reflects how OpenGL is programmed.
Remember that this is not an exhaustive tutorial explaining every OpenGL concept but a material that I have gathered explaining the steps that I have found more complex while learning OpenGL. The focus is doing basic but complete examples which illustrate how to use OpenGL for 2D data visualisation applications. Do not worry if you are unsure on the scope of certain OpenGL keywords, focusing on getting the overall idea on how shaders and the pipeline work will make much easier to learn complementary material. The examples are prepared also to fill in gaps I have found in the most recommended learning materials (which I will revisit at the end of the tutorial series) and to stress on the areas which took me more time to solve.
The Pipeline and the shaders
OpenGL is all about rendering basic shapes defined by their vertexes. If you want to model a 3D dinosaur, it will be likely shaped using really small triangles, so small that will appear to the human edge as a continuous texture.
OpenGL will, therefore, transform sets of vertexes into actual rendered images, and it will do it using what is called shaders. For 2D, it is the same, we are just always drawing on the z=0 plane.
In plain English, this is how it works:
The application (for example Java or C++) will define the points to be used for each shape/primitive to be drawn. It will be just a list of vertexes, so if you want to draw just a triangle three vertexes will be needed for each triangle primitive. The vertex shader program will be executed once for each vertex and it will define the vertexes locations and the basic shape/primitive/object to be drawn. The vertex shader is intended to do operations such as scaling and translation on each vertex. Optionally a geometry shader will translate vertex into shapes. By doing that it would be possible to pass the program the centre of a square and let the geometry shader infer the four vertices of the square. The fragment shader program will be executed once for each pixel to draw and it defines the colour of the pixel.
All shaders are defined and compiled (at runtime) for the graphics card GPU using GLSL language.
The tessellation shader is an optional shader introduced in OpenGL 4 that allows to define and manipulate grids made up of a large number of triangles. It has been incorporated in OpenGL version 4 and it is intended to build things like 3D landscapes.
In this example, we will use a vertex shader, a geometry shader and a fragment shader. The idea is that given a set of coordinates (vertexes) by the application, our GPU will draw squares centred on those coordinates and will draw them coloured as per their location in the window. This is a perfectly valid example which illustrates perfectly how to program OpenGL using “core” mode.
OpenGL pipeline includes several chained steps to generate the rasterized image. Image Source: Khronos Group consortium.
One thing that was novel for me was the concept of shaders being stateless. The idea behind the shaders is that they can be executed concurrently and in any order. This effectively enables to execute by the GPU a large number of shaders (each one processing one vertex/pixel) in parallel. This is the reason why fast response and renderization can be achieved even on high definition displays without affecting the CPU. As a trade-off every shader we code must be stateless and can not depend on other shaders. This implies that the way in which we code the shaders is slightly different from what we are used to do.
Drawing a pixel using shaders and GLSL
The vertex shader
Let’s prepare a program to draw a pixel using a vertex shader and a fragment shader. We will first define the source code which will be allocated in a separate file, which is what you would likely want to do.
Our vertex shader does nothing, it just passes the vertex point to the next shader, but it is still required.
Our first Vertex shader just defines the vertices of a square.
Let’s analyse in detail the source code.
The first line states that we are using OpenGL 3.3 core. We will code for 3.3 even if — at the time of writing this article — OpenGL has reached version 4.6. The reason for doing this is that 3.3 is the first one enforcing core programming and that by doing that we can use old Graphics Cards.
The second line states that we are going to use an input layout variable which we will name it squareCenterPosition, the reason for this name is that in the next example we will use it as the centre of a square. For the moment, just bear in mind that it is just the position for an individual pixel.
The layout clause allows qualifiers to be specified, which in this context defines which position we are using in the vertex matrix. The full specification about what layout qualifiers do can be read on the OpenGL specification page. Be prepared to always check the specification to clarify doubts about code examples.
The variable is of type vec2 defines a two float vector. As we are dealing with 2D, we just need two points. More data could be provided if needed.
The second block is the main function. OpenGL resembles C syntax in many aspects, so shaders will always have a “main” function. In this function, we define the variable gl_Position which has a special meaning in OpenGL. It defines the final position of the vertex. In this case, we define a 4 float vector which includes the 3D coordinates plus a value used for projection. In our case Z coordinate is 0 and the projection value is hardcoded to 1.
This is all we have to do in our vertex shader, which is turning an x/y location into a proper 4 float vector.
The geometry shader
The next shader is the geometry shader. This shader can manipulate vertexes and compute primitives. It is important to understand that GPUs manipulate basic primitives: points, lines and triangles. And that is all.
As an example we will first provide a geometry shader which just generates 4 points around the vertex:
Our first geometry shader receives an input vertex and generates 4 vertexes out of it. Think it as a square generator from its central point.
For the geometry shader, we define layout clauses for both in and out data from the shader. In our shader, we are defining that for each point received we are delivering 4 points. It could be a different case (we will see an example later) and we could be delivering a triangle for each point.
gl_Position is an OpenGL variable used to define the position of a vertex. In this case, we are defining it four times, one per each generated vertex. Notice how we get the input value (gl_in[0]) and translate it with an offset of 0.2 to build each point of our imaginary square. For each point, we invoke EmitVertex() and EndPrimitive() as we are generating 4 primitives of 1 vertex each (a point is still a primitive). Later we will generate four triangles in each location to further illustrate how geometry shaders work.
The fragment shader
Now that we have our pixel defined by the vertex shader, we will code our fragment shader, which again, it is a dumb routine which just draws the pixel in red colour (RGB 1,0,0). The code is as follows:
Fragment shader, it just draws a red pixel.
VBAs and VBOs
Before moving forward into the actual JOGL implementation code let’s revisit what are VAOs and VBOs in OpenGL. A VBO (Vertex Buffer Object) is a buffer stored in the Graphics Card memory which contains data to be operated by the shaders. Being allocated and stored inside the Graphics Card it is much faster than moving data back and forth from the CPU. The idea is that we load those buffers with the rendering data and the buffers are processed by the GPU. Each VBO contains usually data related to an entity. A VBO could contain all the information related to a 3D model of a dinosaur, in 2D, each VBO could, for example, contain the vertexes and necessary info to draw a logic gate or a transistor in an EDA (Electronic Design Automation) CAD program.
A VAO is a superset of VBOs, which means that we need to have at least one VAO. One potential example of VAO usage would be to group all render VBOs of a certain game level in a VAO. By doing that it is easier for the main program to manage which buffers need to be loaded. It is a way to group buffers that are likely to be required at the same time. Basic 2D applications can work with just one VAO. For complex applications, its usage might provide some advantages, especially if you can not put all information in memory at the same time.
The OpenGL Java class
We will create a new class named Window C which contains the three shaders. We will define one VAO and two VBOs, each one will contain one 2D x,y coordinates. We will process both VBOs and we will end up getting two imaginary squares drawn on the screen.
OpenGL class extending JFrame and implementing GLEventListener. It defines one VAO, two VBOs containing just one (x,y) vec2 each. Those vec2 are passed through a vertex, geometry and fragment shader to get imaginary squares drawn around those coordinates.
We will also need our main class:
Main class, it just invokes WindowsC JFrame object.
The result we get is, as expected, the vertexes of two imaginary squares, located each around (0.5,0.5) and (-0.5,-0.5).
Your first program output using Shaders. Notice that all work has been done at the GPU. The application level just defined the centres of our imaginary squares.
Drawing triangles instead of points
Before finishing this example, let’s imagine that we want to draw one triangle at each point instead of the vertexes of an imaginary square. To do that, we just modify our Geometry shader using triangle_strip instead of points as output. Three vertexes need to be defined before calling EndPrimitive().
Modified geometry shader code to draw triangles at each point.
Output of the program with the modified geometry shader.
Summary
While the example is pretty basic, it illustrates the basic workflow for programs using hardware acceleration using OpenGL. It uses the three main steps used in rendering programs: the vertex shader, the geometry shader and the fragment shader. It illustrates how OpenGL programs are concise and not that easy to follow, but at the same time provide great computational power to software, as all graphic drawing efforts are delivered by the GPU. This frees our application and CPU which effectively simplifies the code at that level and boosts performance.
I have intentionally left out any other aspect which would complicate this basic workflow used in OpenGL. Remember that we have defined some coordinates, each coordinate has been stored in a VBO, the two VBOs has been included in a single VAO, the GPU has been coded to use a Vertex, Geometry and Fragment shader and we got our shapes rendered.
In the next articles we will continue covering things like scaling, panning, and debugging (error check at least). | https://towardsdatascience.com/opengl-in-java-pipelines-shaders-907f137c5bd5 | ['Mario Emmanuel'] | 2020-02-07 14:22:19.411000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Java', 'Data Science', 'Data Visualization', 'Graphics'] |
The Crypto Round-Up: September 8th, 2021 | Twitter Campaign Calls Out BTC Fans To Purchase Bitcoin To Support El Salvador
On September 7th, El Salvador has officially declared Bitcoin as a legal tender. A social media campaign on Twitter went around encouraging people to purchase Bitcoin with the hashtag #7SeptemberBuyBTC. This is to show support for the launch of El Salvador’s Bitcoin Law. Read more
Ripple Responds To SEC’s Refusal in the Motion To Compel Pre-Clearance XRP Trading Data
Ripple has filed a response on SEC’s opposition against Ripple’s letter Motion to Compel Sec Employees’ pre-clearance data. This motion to compel will serve as proof that SEC employees had permission to trade in crypto, including XRP and other digital assets. However, SEC argued and refused to provide data because it contains confidential financial details collected by the SEC’s Office of Ethics Counsel. Read more
MicroStrategy Avoids “Multi-Billion Dollar Mistake” By Choosing Bitcoin Over Gold
MicroStrategy, a Nasdaq-listed software company, was able to get away with losing multi-billion dollars. The CEO, Michael Saylor, tweeted last Sunday about choosing bitcoin over gold last year. During the past 12 months, bitcoin returned 376.34% while gold returned –5.88%. Moreover, the return of gold vs. bitcoin was -80% during the last 12 month period. Read more
Panama Introduces A Bill For Crypto Regulation
Following the steps of El Salvador, the Congressman of Panama Gabriel Silva introduced a bill for regulating the use of cryptocurrency. On his social media post via Twitter, he mentioned that the government of Panama is interested in making its country compatible with blockchain, crypto assets, and the internet. Will Panama be the next country to adopt Bitcoin? Read more | https://medium.com/@coinpassglobal/the-crypto-round-up-september-8th-2021-82ca84cf271d | ['Coinpass Global'] | 2021-09-09 10:42:00.020000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency News', 'Ripple', 'Bitcoin', 'Xrp', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
Brain Food | Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash
This is an introduction to what I hope is something I write and publish weekly. I have never really wrote anything outside of the academic context but I do thoroughly enjoy writing in a more general sense. This is the manifestation of that idea and desire, I guess.
Purpose
I initially wanted to start a podcast but I quickly realised I dislike the sound of my voice. Like how it sounds physically, I know, it is some pathetic shit to be worried about, but whatever. Additionally, I struggle with mental health “problems”, such as the occasion suicidal thought or existential crises. Yeah fuck it, I’m going to be super open and honest about that kinda shit via these writings, but do not worry they will not be the main focus of future topics. I’m also currently on anti-depressants and seeing a drug counsellor, so please don’t worry about my mental health, everything is A-OK… I think. Hence, why I started this whole gig, I think it will be super helpful for my “mental health” (whatever those two words mean to you) as I often find ideas and thoughts and insights just bouncing around my tiny little head at 500 mph all at once. Therefore this is the best idea I’ve come up with to get some of those out and heard and seen by other people on the internet. Who knows, it might actually be therapeutic for me, and might relate to some of you out there, or fingers crossed, be somewhat interesting to read on a weekly basis.
Future posts
Before I wrap shit up, I just wanna really quickly just verbalise what my plans for this whole gig are. My main goal and desire is to express and discuss “taboo” and controversial and very divisive topics that one does not normally talk about publicly. The types of conversations you might have with your mates while having a couple of beers, or the ones that you internalise and never discuss to anyone. Some initial ones that come to mind are abortion, capital punishment, LGBT communities, poverty, etc. Please note, that for some of these I will play devil’s advocate and take a position that is completely the opposite of what I believe — a fucked up experiment if you will. I sense that the life perspectives of a 22 year old uni student living in Australia might possibly bring new and refreshing insights to aforementioned topics. Furthermore, there will be some sort of humour involved, I know some of these topics are sensitive and heavy, but I do think incorporating some humour might lift the mood up a little. It is a free service, you’re welcome. Lastly, I will keep these posts relatively short, as who wants to read a 30 minute rant from a 22 year old. Some of these will also have no solution and will just be brain food, I’m not here to solve the world’s problems, I just wanna mention them and poke fun at them (it is a far easier job to do).
Wrapping shit up
If you made it this far, congratulations, your mother would be so very proud of you, treat yourself to a cookie or something. In fact, go tell your mother you love and appreciate her. If your mother happens to not be with us anymore, my sincere condolences, have a cookie instead. Anyways, that’s pretty much what I wanted to say and put out into the world for this week. But stick around for future weeks and topics, and remember if something offends you, it is probably a joke, and you can always just close your eyes and stop reading. I wanted this introductory piece to be short and sweet. But one last thing before we part ways is that “Brain Food” was the title of this one, because nothing else came to mind. Do not worry, future ones will have the topic as the title, it’d be pretty cringe to keep calling it “Brain Food”. Also future posts will probably have TLDR sections for those who like that sort of thing and just want to get an overview of my thoughts of the topic. You can close your eyes now and stop reading. | https://medium.com/@jihunjacobson/brain-food-2d2baccbfd32 | ['Ji Hun Jacobson'] | 2020-12-10 01:34:32.750000+00:00 | ['Humour', 'Thoughts'] |
The Story of My First True Christmas | When did the Christmas Story take hold of me?
One Christmas Eve, we visited a different church in our small town. It was dark when we arrived at the little church.
Haliburton United Church — personal photo
Stained glass windows adorned the walls. We walked in through the narthex at the back of the church.
At the front of Haliburton United church. Personal photo.
A buzz of voices greeted us as we entered. A lovely small woman met us at the door and welcomed us to the Christmas Eve service. We found a seat.
A few people said hello but I will never forget the smile on that lovely woman’s face when she said, “Hello, my name is Eleanor.”
We sang Christmas carols and then it was time for the message. The minister rose and walked to the podium.
Then something happened.
My ears were opened that night. I don’t know what he said exactly but he explained the Incarnation in a way that I had never heard. I was a believer at the time. I had been baptized.
But I didn’t understand that:
God came down to earth. He lived here. He walked among us. He was God incarnate.
That hit me deeply. God loved me so much that He left heaven and the heavenly connection He was used to, to come to His people. To rescue them and me.
From that night on, Christmas Eve has never been the same
I have taken the place of each character from that night.
Mary as she birthed her baby (I felt that one).
Joseph as he admired his new child. (I’ve seen that in my husband’s eyes.)
The Shepherds who were astounded, filled with fear but told not to be afraid (how many times have I felt that?)
The Angel — proclaiming the Good News. (When I sing Christmas songs about the Angels, I am carried to the heavens.)
I have even put myself in the spot of Jesus (I was a baby once).
So much happened that night.
From the star in the sky to the shepherds’ arrival, the Incarnation is the most wonderful story of all.
May I pray for you and me?
Father, thank You for sending Jesus to live on earth, to teach us, to comfort and heal us, to take our sins upon Himself and reconnect us to the Father. We are grateful and happy for knowing Jesus. In His name, we pray. Amen.
Please visit this page: A Free Gift of a Colouring page
Colouring Page by Janis Cox
Another place for free gifts until December 31:
End-of-year Special — Bonus Gifts from now until December 31. | https://medium.com/my-creative-mind/the-story-of-my-first-true-christmas-db8374343121 | ['Janis Cox'] | 2020-12-25 13:07:15.068000+00:00 | ['Christmas', 'Bible', 'Jesus', 'Gifts', 'Christianity'] |
Analytics at Netflix | Netflix is one of the world’s leading internet TV service, whose business model is based on subscription rather than advertising which is typical of traditional television practice. Netflix’s profit is directly proportional to the number of its subscribers. In order for content license payment to be profitable, optimum viewing rates needs to be ensured by Netflix.
Netflix has a large user base of 180 million worldwide streaming subscribers, which enable Netflix to gather a tremendous amount of data. With Netflix brimming with data; it uses data analytics to its advantage in order to gain insights into their customers. This enables Netflix to optimize their marketing and deliver a better product to the customer. Analytics provide Netflix with quantitative data that they need to make better and more informed decisions for their user.
Netflix gathers user data on the basis of age, gender, location, their taste in media etc. By gathering data about consumer interaction Netflix can dive right in the minds of the user to know what they might like to watch even before they finish a show or movie. Netflix knows the time and date a user watched a show, the device used, if the show was paused, does the viewer resume watching after pausing? Do people finish an entire TV show or not, how long does it take for a user to finish a show and so on. Netflix even has the screenshots of scenes users might have viewed repeatedly, the rating content is given, the number of searches and what is searched for. With the help of Data Analytics, Netflix gives meaning to the data collected.
In addition to collecting data on subscriber actions, Netflix also encourages feedback from subscribers in the form of thumbs up/thumbs down system to encourage audience engagement.
Netflix has developed recommendation algorithm which suggests TV shows and movies based on user’s preference. The recommendation algorithm strives to help find a show or movie for the user with minimal effort. It takes into account users interaction with Netflix, other members having similar tastes and preferences and information about titles. Recommendation algorithm accounts for over 80% of the content steamed on the platform.
Netflix tries to retain its subscriber base with the help of the recommendation algorithm. Netflix through the data collected knows how much subscriber need to watch monthly for them to be less likely to cancel the subscription. For example, if Netflix has the data that a user is 75% less likely to cancel Netflix subscription if it watches the content for at least 15 hours a month and if the viewing hours drop below 5 hours then there is 95% chance of the user to cancel their subscription; then Netflix will try to incorporate mechanism which ensure that the user watches at least 15 hours. To ensure that the user continues to watch the show Netflix uses post-play, which automatically plays the next episode of the TV show unless the user opts out of it.
Licensing movies/shows can become expensive sometimes, so Netflix uses data to decide which movie to license. Netflix usually looks for those titles that deliver the biggest viewership relative to the licensing cost. This in turns means that Netflix forgoes title that aren’t quite watched relative to their cost. For this, Netflix ascertains through data the types of movies/shows people enjoy watching.
Data analytics also plays an integral role when the content creators come up with an idea about a new show or a movie. There are loads of data of the content created previously and how users perceived the previous content. Data Analytics helps to suggest possible solutions to the many challenges faced in the planning phase. These challenges could include identifying the shoot locations, time and day of the shoot and more. This enables Netflix to save a significant amount of effort in planning and also reducing cost.
Judicious use of Data Analytics is the main reason for the success of Netflix. Big Data plays a critical role in not just deciding the functioning of Netflix but also presents newer opportunities to grow. Big Data and Data Analytics are such an integral part of Netflix that we may call Netflix as Data Analytics company than a media company. Though still Netflix does not take all its decision based on Big Data as it still relies on human inputs for a lot of decisions. But Netflix’s success highlights the value of data analytics as it provides incredible insights into user’s preferences which allow them to make smart decisions and deliver maximum ROI on their choices. | https://medium.com/techno-economics/analytics-at-netflix-f62385c6ca26 | ['Keshav Aggarwal'] | 2020-12-15 12:43:49.970000+00:00 | ['Big Data', 'Data Science', 'Data Analytics', 'Netflix'] |
Open Office Hours — the 1st Edition Story | Open Office Hours — the 1st Edition Story
Open Office Hours, which took place last week, brought together Australia’s most active technology investors with a diverse array of startups in a collective effort to close the funding gap for early-stage, and in particular, under-represented founders.
To say the response from the Australian startup community has exceeded our expectations would be a massive understatement.
When we first started planning the event, our initial hope was that 20 investors and 20 founders would connect and have a great experience that would open up pathways for broader funding for startups.
We were way off. The Australian community of founders and investors responded with such incredible passion and numbers that we expanded the program.
We ended up with 40 investors (from 30 VCs and angel groups) and 197 ambitious founder applicants, of whom 75 were selected. What better evidence of the need for such an initiative than this overwhelming response from both investors and founders?
Thanks to this collaborative effort, we created 150 connections across 80 hours of mentoring sessions — what our Inclusion Advisory Board member, Shahirah Gardner, likes to call: “The Giant Warm Intro”.
74% of founders who applied for Open Office Hours identified as under-represented in one or more ways including:
🙋🏾♂️ 37% migrant founders
🙋🏼♀️ 27% women founders
🙋🏽♀️ 21% non-anglo founders
🙋🏼♂️ 3% LGBTQ!+ founders
🙋🏻♀️ 2% regional founders
🙋🏽♂️ 1% Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander founders
Founders who made it through had the opportunity to meet remotely with two investors where they could ask for advice on anything, test their pitch or find out about the fundraising process in a supportive, collaborative environment.
Founders who applied but didn’t make it through to this edition of Open Office Hours due to limited capacity will also have a chance to meet investors in the new year.
Outcomes
Following each mentoring session, investors recorded their advice and feedback to help founders on their startup journey.
Investors told us that they could see themselves investing in more than half (53%) of the founders and their startups either now or in the future 💸
Given that the main objective of Open Office Hours is to create more connections and funding opportunities for under-represented founders, we think this is an incredible initial result, but recognise that this is just the beginning.
Following Open Office Hours, Cara Waters spoke to Paul Naphtali from Rampersand about the diversity funding gap in Australia and the work needed to be done by the entire ecosystem to make a change. You can read the full article here. | https://medium.com/rampersand/open-office-hours-the-1st-edition-story-ca38e4ac9864 | ['Taryn Pieterse'] | 2020-12-18 03:29:47.845000+00:00 | ['Startupaus', 'Diversity In Tech', 'Venture Capital'] |
Top 4 Reasons Why Startups Need Branding to Develop Faster | Top 4 Reasons Why Startups Need Branding to Develop Faster
Illustration created by Gabriela Gurgui
A brand is more than a name or a logo, it is a set of perceptions that customers have about your company, or in other words, it is an entire experience you provide for other people. Once you have an innovative idea, it should be sided with an experience in line with customers’ high expectations.
“A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.” — Seth Godin, marketing and leadership expert
Building a lasting impact on your audience
There’s a misconception about the idea that startups should build their brand later on, because branding is a waste of time and money on something they don’t have yet, meaning a developed and successful company.
On the contrary, working with a design agency or a design studio will help you to position yourself in the industry, build the bridge between your product and customers, communicate more efficiently, and identify your customers’ problems. These things will help you to earn a good reputation for you to accelerate your journey to success even earlier, and attract loyal customers along the way.
Here are some of the biggest advantages of investing in branding as a startup.
Illustration created by Gabriela Gurgui
1. Being purpose-driven
Being a purpose-driven company means you’re devoted to your vision. Having a picture of how you could fill a gap in humans’ lives, sometimes just one tiny thing that other businesses are not able to observe.
Having the ‘Why’ In-Mind: Companies that have a substantial brand, never forget why they started and they will continue to take into account their inner reason in every decision they will make.
Pursuing Your Vision: The greatest brands focus on how their company’s future will look like. They have a Vision Statement, that spokes clearly for everybody no matter the profession or status standing.
“Make work life simpler, more pleasant and more productive.” — Slack
Lower Costs: Branding helps the company’s employees align on the same vision and remain engaged, so everyone is more involved in reaching the same goal. It helps you maintain your current staff, without spending so much on hiring.
Illustration created by Gabriela Gurgui
2. Selling the problem, not the product
Usually, startups just try to sell their product without realizing they have to start by making potential customers face their current problems and go back to how their product’s features could resolve those problems. Branding has a great impact on straightening this void, relying on things as copywriting, UX writing, and visual communication.
“Can you answer why people should choose you over your competition? Why are you the best option available? If you were a prospective customer, would you pay attention to the sales or marketing messages you are currently sharing? The best solution without the right message can make it difficult to convert leads.” — Thomas Oppong, founder of Alltopstartups
Finding the Customers that Need the Product: A cohesive brand means you have a strategy behind, that helps you identify a specific niche that you want to sell to. Also, branding agencies make customer research and user testing for analyzing how that type of people respond to your product idea, and if they consider there’s a match between them and your brand.
Seeing Things from Their Perspective: In the digital era, it is much easier for businesses to communicate directly to the customers, and understanding their daily experiences and what they get through. Having a brand empowers you to create a community where people feel free to share openly and frankly about what’s missing in the industry.
Revealing their Pain Points: Empathizing with the customers through your brand aids you to get closer to them and find out how your product could fill their empty spaces. One idea that you could implement earlier, is to include a blog page on your website that educates the customers regarding the hidden problems they might have because there’s a lack of efficient products in the industry.
Illustration created by Gabriela Gurgui
3. Creating brand advocates
Brand Advocates are represented by your loyal customers that are excited with every new feature that you incorporate into your product, and then they’ll spread the news everywhere they can. They are truly important because they are a significant part of your marketing that grow your company’s reputation for free and help you generate new leads.
Putting Forward your Values: Respected companies always sustain important causes such as privacy, constant improvement, diversity. Customers will notice, and they’ll share the things that you believe in with other people too.
Earning Long-Lasting Customers: One of the most interesting parts of branding is the birth of connections with your customers at an emotional level. Humans get attached to the brands that reflect their personalities, the ones that make them recognize themselves inside a social hierarchy.
“Apple aligned themselves with creatives, encouraged their audience to “Change the World” through their creativity, and provided a tool of self-expression to do so, and so they became a “Creator” brand.” — Stephen Houraghan, Founder of Iconic Fox Brand Agency
Collecting Positive Reviews: Brand Advocates leave positive reviews about your product and they get into details about the experience when doing so. The advantage is that you have higher chances to attract new customers because their interest has been aroused. Brand Advocates have a significant impact on your marketing, their reviews being converted to new sales.
Illustration created by Gabriela Gurgui
4. Becoming visible for investors through differentiation
Having a great product is never enough, a startup that puts effort in differentiating from their competitors will not become visible just for their customers, but also for investors or potential partners. Talking about authenticity, it doesn’t mean just an aesthetic website, but having a different tone of voice, or having your own point of view regarding certain global issues.
“With effective branding you will further become visible to the investors and other stakeholders and be a valued firm. This is one big reason why startups should make branding an important component of their overall business strategy.”- Mahesh Nair, founder of Picsdream
Showing that You Care: First of all, showing that you care about your product is being reflected in how you present it to the world. Some startups neglect their websites by not even meeting the accessibility guidelines, taking the risk of not letting people fully understand what they do.
“Most consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. 79 percent of shoppers reported that they will not return to purchase from a laggy website again, and approximately 44 percent will share the poor experience with their friends.” — Maricel Rivera
Distinguishing Your Company: Bringing authenticity on the market will be always rewarded because people appreciate when they see an innovative marketing approach for attracting them.
Using a Free Marketing Strategy: Some of the well-known brands don’t even spend money on marketing campaigns, they rely on their loyal customers for spreading their content online. This may result from having a great brand experience and a hard-working and devoted team in your company.
From day one, Slack has been about selling a solution, not a product. They’ve focused on customer experience, believing that one positive experience does more than a big marketing budget could ever hope to accomplish. As their tagline says, they’re “on a mission to make your working life simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.” Make it all about solving your customers’ pain points. — Eric Siu
Lastly, branding should be a more commonly discussed subject among startups and investors as it occupies an important role in their marketing strategy for getting sales and stirring up consumers’ interest. A product is not enough. | https://medium.com/swlh/top-4-reasons-why-startups-need-branding-to-develop-faster-5c86d9993a43 | ['Andreea Encutescu'] | 2020-12-02 14:03:08.165000+00:00 | ['Branding', 'Brand Strategy', 'Product Marketing', 'Startup Marketing', 'Growth Hacking'] |
Hamburger, Milkshake and a Side of Shame | Photo by Oliver Sjöström on Unsplash
My teenage son is overweight. There, I’ve said it.
It’s not like I haven’t acknowledged it. I’ve talked with my husband about it, my mom, and, of course, my son himself. The important thing, I’ve learned, is to take shame out of the equation when I talk with my son about it.
Yet, I feel ashamed. I feel scared. I feel I have failed my child.
The shame-free talks my husband and I occasionally have with our son, focusing on health, sports, and making better food choices for his brain (he has ADHD), typically result in my son changing his eating habits for a day or so, then returning to his old ways. I think my son wants to change, and I know it’s one of the hardest things he will ever do.
I know because I grew up chubby. Chunky. Overweight. My mother tried to explain this away by telling me that I was “big-boned”. That may have been partially true, but there was not a single bone to be found in my jiggly tummy and stocky thighs.
My parents were busy with full-time jobs, and had a penchant for stocking the pantry with junk food (canned squirt cheese, anyone?) and procuring take-out for most of our dinners. I drank regular Coke regularly, was encouraged to bake brownies and cookies, and fruit was a virtual unknown in our house (save for canned fruit cocktail).
Many of the memories I have from my childhood involve large amounts of (mostly unhealthy) foods. Greasy latkes at Chanukah, sour cream based Jell-o molds and cheese blintze casseroles at Yom Kippur, and mashed potatoes with 2 sticks (!) of butter at Thanksgiving. Every winter, on our family drive to Florida, we would stop at the Shoney’s buffet for breakfast, where we would load up on bacon, pancakes, and the most delicious tiny blueberry muffins. Before Olive Gardens cropped up everywhere, it was a huge treat for us to eat there in Florida. Those meals involved virgin strawberry daiquiris, fettuccine alfredo, and piles and piles of breadsticks. I can even recall the time I got shampoo in my eyes, and the babysitter charged with my care offering me three Hostess cupcakes to stop crying.
Food was a soother, a celebrant, a mourner. It was love from a grandparent, a care package from an aunt and the center of any family get together. Most of my relatives were overweight. My grandmothers, my aunt, my uncle, my mom, my dad. Even the four goldfish I had as pets were chubby and food-obsessed, apparently needing to eat one another in their quest to satisfy their hunger.
Most of these calories were packed onto my “big-boned” frame without care or thought. I could demolish half a bag of chips, half a pan of brownies, or half a liter of Coke without any thought of consequences. I had no reason to think that eating a large movie theater popcorn (with butter, please and thank you) was not one of my better choices. My go-to dinner when dining out with friends? Fried chicken fingers and french fries, of course.
When I look back at pictures of myself in childhood, it’s around 4th or 5th grade that the “chubby me” begins to emerge. It is around that same time that I began to hear the whispers and taunts from other students, pointing out my expanding tummy and round face. It is around this time that I become acquainted with body shame.
It is this teasing and hurt that I want to protect my son from. It is the horrible feeling of being different and the deep shame that accompanies that feeling that I don’t want him to have to deal with. My worry about his weight has some of its roots in health, but for the most part, I do not want my boy to suffer the indignity and humiliation that is being flung at him by fellow students.
For some reason, the town in which we live has an abundance of what I have termed “stick children”. These are scrawny specimens of children who are so thin, their elbows and knees look like giant knobby protuberances on their limbs. These wisps of children look as though they might break in half, should an errant soccer ball come their way. They play multiple sports with ease, flitting about baseball and soccer fields like gangly, lithe sprites.
These stick children are a stark contradiction to the one or two “huskier” kids on their teams — my son being one of them. While the knobby-kneed boys seem to be swimming in their jerseys, my son’s uniform molds somewhat tightly to his body. It is harder for my son to run as fast, to get down to the other side of the court to guard his opponent, to slide into home plate. There is one sport where his size seems to be an asset — football. It is here, in his pads and helmet, that he doesn’t stand out nearly as much. There are no stick children on the football team; they would surely snap if tackled.
In addition to sports fields, the middle school hallways that immediately invite mocking at the slightest hint of “difference” are another source of hurt for my son. Online video game forums, the nearby park, even Zoom breakout sessions — these all provide places for other teens to tear him down. Most days, my son says it doesn’t bother him. Other days, he is angry or teary at some weight-related torment doled out by a compassionless peer.
From time to time, something will land on him that is particularly cruel and this will cause him to commit to making a change in his eating and exercising habits. Sometimes, after a discussion with my husband and me about food choices, moderation, or working out, he will commit to change his habits. Whatever the impetus for change, it generally only lasts a few hours to a day, as though he’s just not ready to make the changes stick.
We don’t badger him about his choices, we don’t nag him to eat more vegetables, we don’t restrict food by not having ice cream or chips or Frosted Flakes in the house. Our reasoning is that he is at an age where he can easily go to the corner store and buy these things on his own, perhaps in bingeable quantities that would be scarfed down under the shadow of shame. By having all kinds of foods in our house, we are trying to show him that there are no such things as “bad foods” and that he can enjoy anything he likes without having to feel bad about himself.
Is it hard to watch him go back and forth from the couch to the pantry, each time holding a handful of chips? Is it difficult to stay quiet when he helps himself to an oversized bowl of ice cream? Is it maddening to watch as he uses his own money to buy himself Panda Express, Chipotle, or McDonald’s for lunch instead of eating the healthier options we have in the house? What do you think?
Do you know how I silently struggle with his choice to eat Ramen noodles, eschewing the fish, brown rice and vegetables that I have made for dinner? How I cringe when he prefers to eat a Gogurt rather than an apple, because he feels like it’s too hard to cut up an apple? How I bite my tongue when he asks his sister to go with him for ice cream after they’ve just eaten a large pizza and breadsticks?
Perhaps I say all of this because just as my son must feel the stares and hear the comments, I feel them, too. I see how other mothers look at my son and then at me, silently wondering how I’ve allowed my son to gain so much weight. I hear the unspoken disgust and questions: Does she just let him eat whatever he wants? Doesn’t she make him exercise? Why doesn’t she try to help him lose weight?
What those mothers may not understand is that, yes, of course I encourage my son to eat healthy and to exercise. Of course, I want him to be healthy and comfortable in his body. We have hired an exercise coach for him and have talked with him about healthy eating choices.
But, I cannot stand over him at every meal and count the calories that enter his body. I cannot tell him that he’d better eat dessert only every other night. I can’t force him to exercise, no matter how I might want him to do so. All of those actions, those comments, they are all a form of control. Control over what he eats, when he eats, how much he eats. Control over exercising and getting outside and slimming down.
I don’t want my relationship with my son to be one of me trying to control these things. I don’t want to have power struggles over calories in and sweat expended. My attempts to control his eating and exercise will only lead him to feel shame. Ultimately, he’s going to eat the way he wants to and exercise when he wants to. My judgments and cajoling and limiting will only result in him eating the way he wants to, but also feeling shame about it.
Hiding candy bars under my mattress, sneaking down to the kitchen after everyone had gone to bed, going to a drive-through and eating and eating and eating alone in a secluded parking lot. That is what I did when I was ashamed of my eating and weight. There was no nagging, begging or pleading that my parents could have used to make me change my habits. It was only once I decided to change, that I wanted to be healthier, that I was ready to commit to a different way of relating to food — it was only then that I became healthier and leaner.
There’s the familiar phrase about “hitting rock bottom” and not being able to change until you’ve hit hit your own personal rock bottom. I hit mine and changed. My husband hit his and changed. Not overnight and not without struggle and hard work. We hope and silently pray that our son will hit his own rock bottom, and from there, begin to put forth the effort and commitment to a healthier lifestyle. It has to come from inside him.
He knows it. I know it. It is not simple. It is not easy. Perhaps suspend judgment, and instead throw some compassion his way. We are all just doing the best we can. | https://medium.com/@yaelrayli/hamburger-milkshake-and-a-side-of-shame-3b40ceb31141 | ['Yael R. Ayli'] | 2021-01-01 21:15:19.599000+00:00 | ['Parenting', 'Teens', 'Shame', 'Body Image'] |
ReapChain Implementation System. Building ReapChain BaaS. | BaaS (Blockchain as a Service) is a cloud computing platform that provides a development environment for blockchain-based software. ReapChain BaaS is composed of 3 parts: Reap SDK, ReapMiddleChain and ReapChain, and Reap Platform. Reap SDK connects and authenticates devices. ReapMiddleChain and ReapChain process and store data. Reap Platform operates and manages of all services by business service providers.
Since ReapChain’s services are provided in BaaS form, it is easy and convenient to integrate blockchain with IoT industry without new hardware adoption or architecture configuration.
★ ReapChain Official Community
Follow the ReapChain official community and have more news!
Homepage: https://reapchain.com/
Telegram (ENG): https://t.me/ReapchainOfficialEnglish
Telegram (KR): https://t.me/joinchat/MbaQ7RaZchMzjAam9yMS0Q
Blog: https://blog.naver.com/reapchain
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ReapChain/
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Partnership and Affiliation Inquiries: [email protected]
Investment and Sale Inquiries: [email protected]
Project Inquiries: [email protected] | https://medium.com/reapchain/reapchain-implementation-system-building-reapchain-baas-f2d4993f608a | [] | 2020-12-15 08:43:35.417000+00:00 | ['Reapchain', 'IoT', 'Internet of Things', 'Blockchain', 'Devices'] |
How to set up a password and backup to secure your Cash App wallet | How to set up a password and backup to secure your Cash App wallet HelpCashApp Apr 1·2 min read
After CAsh App is installed on your Mobile phone, the most important thing to do is to set up security features — including a password and backup for your wallet. You’re able to deposit and withdraw without doing so, but if anyone was to access your Mobile they would be able to send your money anywhere.
Cash-App-Help-Number
There are two ways to back up your wallet on Exodus. Password protection allows users to have security when opening the program. Without the password, anyone who opens your program will have full access to every feature of the Cash App wallet.
Crypto-trading-on-Cash-App
Second, it’s smart to create a 12-word recovery phrase that will allow you to access the Cash App wallet from any mobile device in the future. A recovery phrase allows users to regain access to the Cash App wallet from another location, or in the case that it is lost or uninstalled.
Both security features are the reason you are setting up a Cash App Bitcoin wallet in the first place. Here are the steps to activate them: | https://medium.com/@helpcashappbitcoinsupport/how-to-set-up-a-password-and-backup-to-secure-your-cash-app-wallet-8db50dd1 | [] | 2021-04-01 21:10:29.450000+00:00 | ['Help', 'Customer Service', 'Wallet', 'Bitcoin', 'Cashapp'] |
New ways to make money | When I decided to convert my real people casting company into a platform I had two clear goals in mind.
First I saw an opportunity to make media more authentic and diverse. Battling token diversity and stereotypes created by casting became our mission.
I also saw another side of this opportunity. Oncata can bring more income to people who really need it. Every year we pay thousands of dollars in talent fees. With the rising need of non model or non actors for media content our platform presents a real opportunity for all people to make extra money on the side. In these uncertain times we made it our mission to reach out to those who could use extra help and tell them about our opportunities. Here are 3 easy ways how you can start making extra income with Oncata today.
1 Apply for casting calls
We have casting calls open every week. Currently a lot in the Midwest but we also have an opportunity in Nevada you can apply for. Those job range from $300-$1500 a day and most of them are in person. COVID safety compliance is mandatory for anyone hiring through our platform.
Learn more how Oncata works here.
2 Get your photos commissioned.
Oncata also is a platform where brands can commission photos directly from you. During this time a lot of companies are choosing to pay for home photos and videos. So next time you see a call for user content, send us your pics! Chances are, you can make between $200-$500 from home just by sending us your content.
3 Become an Oncata Connector
We are rapidly growing our community and need people to help us. When you do outreach for us and people mention you as a reference you get paid! It’s $100 guaranteed for outreach and as many people as you can bring, you’ll make $10 for anyone who mentions your name on the form! Apply here. | https://medium.com/@sitora-oncata/new-ways-to-make-money-b9d2909890a2 | ['Sitora Takanaev'] | 2021-01-21 18:22:26.493000+00:00 | ['Make Money', 'Casting', 'Gig Economy', 'Marketing', 'Make Money Online'] |
Gift | Sign up for American Haiku Steamship To Writing History
By American Haiku
Writing takes practice. American Haiku is a great way to put your words from your fingers to your piece of paper. Don't quit, you can do it. Take a look | https://medium.com/american-haiku/gift-c68f638cca1f | ['Sarah E Sturgis'] | 2020-06-13 18:28:24.250000+00:00 | ['American Haiku', 'Birdsong', 'Mindfulness', 'Poetry', 'Gift'] |
Backstage at a funeral | Backstage at a funeral
Whenever I watch a big event happening I always wonder what things look like backstage. That is the most interesting part to me. Today I am “backstage” for a funeral for a young highway patrol officer. When I arrived 5–6 officers were parked in the church lot, some pacing around the cars. Some on their phones. I came in because my role here today is being the BFF to the sister of the deceased. I keep making lots of notes about my experiences these last few days and I imagine there will be future posts about it. Today I am interested in “backstage.”
As I set up a screen and projector to run a slideshow of photographs, that small group of officers came inside too. And they started rehearsing. Together they figured out how many steps stage right to take before the turn. It is theatre. It is dance. I feel so lucky to be witnessing it.
Now there are close to 20 officers. Sometimes they stand around and laugh and tell stories. Sometimes they break from that for that one guy who needs to go over the protocol again. A few moments ago, they all gathered around a phone to watch a YouTube video of a 21 gun salute so that they will remember what to do when they get to the cemetery.
Now they are going over the movements of taking and folding the flag. What words will be said, when do we turn, how do we hold it?
The preparations were interrupted when one officer (I’m sure some of them have higher ranks. I’ve heard “hi captain!”) brought in a small piece of cardboard that looked like it have Velcro straps on it. He went around to each man and gave him a small piece of black cloth that they then helped each other place around their badges to signify the fallen officer.
It was at this moment that it truly felt like backstage for a play production. The community working together to help each other get dressed. These are “big and burly men.” They look so gentle as they lean in to each other to make sure the black stripe is placed properly. They are quiet as they do. It is a sacred act. They seem not to care that I am sitting nearby on the front pew watching. I am the only person here to see it.
What an incredible gift this is. | https://medium.com/@thmcclung/a-witness-b74818685f3a | ['T. H. Mcclung', 'She Her S'] | 2021-09-11 01:23:10.731000+00:00 | ['Funerals', 'Death', 'Daily Blog', 'Police', 'Year 49'] |
Die taz: Sebuah Catatan Harian (7-Habis) 27 November 1991: Akhir dari Sebuah Awal | in Eudaimonia and Co | https://medium.com/literasi/die-taz-sebuah-catatan-harian-7-habis-27-november-1991-akhir-dari-sebuah-awal-426557d80a43 | [] | 2018-06-22 13:11:37.840000+00:00 | ['Privatisasi Media', 'Kooperasi', 'Komersialisasi Media', 'Media Kooperasi'] |
Live your life as if you were a startup | I became interested in startups and how they worked when I was first assigned to be an account executive for APAC online travel startups while working for one of the global travel technology companies in July 2019.
As Sun Tzu said, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles,” although my customers were not my enemies, I desperately wanted to win them over. As a result, I began my research about how startups worked and the best practices they followed. My favorite way to prepare my foundation for something was by reading, so I looked up some book recommendations online and ordered a book that has changed the way I live my life, “The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses” by Eric Ries.
In this book, Eric Ries instilled his experiences of founding (and initially failing) his startup and coaching both big and small enterprises to build a startup mentality following the Lean Startup model. Ries’ Lean Startup model has many interesting sub-components, so I highly recommend you to read the book yourself if you are interested. Although the book’s target readers are entrepreneurs, I think anyone could apply the learnings from the book with their life if they took their life as their startup.
First thing first, what is a startup?
According to Ries, a startup is “a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.”
Despite not being an entrepreneur, I consider my life as a human institution. And similar to a startup, we all know (but sometimes forget), life is “highly uncertain.” There are many unpredictable things in life that we have no control of.
For example, back in 2019, who would have thought about the impacts of COVID-19 on global citizens? Resilience, or the ability to adapt quickly to the changing situation, has been a critical element for people of this era to survive So, if you are still doing okay while reading this article, congratulations! Your startup is still running.
Build-Measure-Learn Feedback Loop Applied to Life
The Build-Measure-Learn Feedback Loop
The core concept of the Lean Startup model is the “Build-Measure-Learn” feedback loop. To start the loop, you will have to build your minimum viable product (MVP), or the basic functioning version of your product, and launch it to the market as quickly as possible in order to measure the outcome and get the customers’ feedback. Through this “validated learning,” or “learning based on empirical data,” you will be able to improve whatever you are building in the following phases.
What I like about this Build-Measure-Learn approach is that it takes failures as necessary steps to progress. It encourages people to start small and continue to improve themselves along the way. Even though you are not perfect, you are good enough to function, and you will be better as time goes by as long as you don’t stop learning and improving yours
Growing up in a very conventional family, I lived my life very carefully and was very afraid to take risks. Back in early 2020, I thought I had a very secure job working for a big multicultural travel technology company until COVID-19 hit, and what seemed to be secure didn’t seem like it anymore.
The most important and challenging step in the Lean Startup model is when you have to decide if you will “persevere,” or continue with the same cause of action, or “pivot,” or change the direction. After thoroughly assessing the impacts that the new pandemic could have on my career in the long run, in May 2020, as the owner of my life startup, I decided to pivot and resigned from my first job at a big company, and moved to an E-commerce startup to learn new things while I could still afford risks.
Since my first pivot, I have gone through a lot and pivoted many times to reach where I am right now. Despite all the hardships, I have never regretted any failures as I took them as lessons learned required to become a better version of myself, personally and professionally.
Although I cannot say that “I have made it” and claim that I am successful in life, I can proudly say that I am enjoying every day of it, knowing that I have tried my best regardless of the given circumstances.
This startup is still running, and because it still is, I am pretty satisfied. :)
Recommended Reading: The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries | https://medium.com/tdg-engineering/live-your-life-as-if-you-were-a-startup-7ad378cd1388 | ['Kawisara W.'] | 2021-09-13 09:32:43.163000+00:00 | ['Agile', 'Enterpreneurship', 'Startup', 'Business', 'Lean Startup'] |
Top 3 of the best 3D printing prototypes | Additive Manufacturing has numerous applications among them the most popular is 3D printing of prototypes. This technology offers you an array of materials, completely innovative design options and, simultaneously the outcomes are quick and affordable. Which are the best and most exciting methods to utilize online 3D printing services to create prototypes? Let’s see!
What are the advantages of 3D printing prototypes?
In addition, Additive Manufacturing is fast and creates the prototypes within a matter of minutes. It’s a huge benefit since it saves time, particularly when you’re trying to prototype. The quicker you are able to experiment with new design ideas more quickly you are able to alter your design and move into the manufacturing process for the final product.
Additionally, it offers an abundance of design and material choices that allows you to adapt the technology and materials to your style and not the reverse. When you print 3D models it is possible to experiment with different materials, including flexible and heat-resistant materials, even metals.
Additive Manufacturing is also great for the production of fixtures and jigs which we’ve already talked about in earlier blog posts. They are crucial components of the device in general and require functional tests to ensure that they perform flawlessly. 3D printing service in india can be used for fast creating new ideas and prototypes to improve the design. Let’s look at some real-world illustrations of 3D-printing models!
Three of the most effective 3D printed prototypes
Have you heard that large companies like Ford already utilize Additive Manufacturing? Its potential for 3D technologies is huge and nobody waits for their competition to benefit from these technologies. It is imperative to keep up with the most cutting-edge technologies in order to remain ahead of the current trend of producing top quality products, the most efficient.
3D printed eyewear
Another sector that is benefiting of Additive Manufacturing is eyewear. Online 3D printing india offers new possibilities with regard to materials, and also make highly precise prototypes, that are ready to test. Also 3D printing prototypes is extremely fast which accelerates the entire process of production. Additive Manufacturing is a fantastic technology, not only for the creation of prototype glasses, but also for actual production.
Full-scale 3D printer furniture prototypes
We’ve already spoken a lot regarding the possibility of printing 3D house models and Architectural models However, the use of 3D printing of prototypes in the area of furniture design is growing at a rapid rate. Through Additive Technologies the designers are capable of creating fully functional prototypes as well as visual models in a matter of hours and then conduct practical tests of the latest methods for finishing the final product.
We aren’t aware of the number of elements that must be considered when designing even basic furniture. For instance, a chair must be comfortable, but it also needs to be considered in terms of dimensions, height, width and weight capacity and the materials. These are only the fundamental requirements. You can understand how crucial the prototyping process is to ensure that the final product is perfect.
Prosthetic arm prototype
The uses that can be made of Additive Manufacturing in the medical field are many. The range of applications is vast, from the 3D printing of and skin and jaws to testing for drugs. Another incredible application is 3D printing models of various prostheses. The design process is certainly an effort, but it will enhance the quality of life in ways you can’t even imagine. There are many factors to be considered including the manner in which the motors will be placed, and how they will control the hand. 3D printing is efficient, quick, and cost-effective. It also lets you quickly test various designs.
Additionally, with the help of Additive Manufacturing technologies, the prosthesis is able to be personalized, ensuring that it is exactly to the specifications as well as the measurements of the person, this is important. 3D scans are used to create the most precise image of the limb, and the socket will be properly fitted, and not cause any discomfort to the patient. Doctors are then 3D printing models and quickly determine which parts need been adjusted.
When should you begin 3D printing your prototypes?
Yes! As you will observe, Additive Manufacturing brings endless advantages to your manufacturing process. From the use of novel materials, the ability to create complicated geometries to shorter production times and cost savings. It’s time to get the most value from 3D printing. Begin with us. It is as easy to upload your 3D image to our 3D printing online service! | https://medium.com/@makenica/top-3-of-the-best-3d-printing-prototypes-3ad7985fdb1a | [] | 2021-10-30 06:19:12.530000+00:00 | ['3d Printing Market', '3d Printing Prototypes', '3D Printing'] |
How Crimson Company maximizes gameplay depth | Crimson Company is quite different from most other card games. In fact, you could make an argument that it’s not really a “card game” at all, but rather a strategy game that happens to use cards as its core elements of gameplay.
This is because the game was designed to maximize strategic depth and make every match as interesting as possible. The following article will try to explain how the game deviates from the traditional “card battling” formula and why!
No (private) decks!
In typical duelling card games, e.g. traditional CCGs such as Magic or Hearthstone, each player brings their own deck to draw from. This often conflicts with the decision-making during a match in several ways:
The decks brought by the players can be of different strength levels. A player who just started their collection will have a weaker deck than a veteran who collected all the rare cards and has a deep understanding of the “meta game”. So a match might be decided before it even began.
One deck might counter the other. Most of the time players go into the match “blind”, i.e. they don’t know which deck their opponent is going to bring. So they can easily run into a situation where one player brings a deck that is designed to counter the other player’s deck. Again, there is a huge impact on the outcome of the match, but no actual in-match decisions have been made yet.
You deck might just “not work” from time to time because you’re just not getting the right amount of “luck of the draw”. You’re drawing all the wrong cards at the wrong time and don’t really have a say in the outcome of the match.
Depending on the deck you’re playing, your strategy can be quite pre-determined and there is little space to deviate match to match.
That’s why Crimson Company gets rid of all of that. Players share a single deck of characters, so you simply can’t get ahead by bringing the stronger cards or countering your opponent’s cards. Neither will you be able to go into a match with a pre-made strategy, as things will change a lot depending on how the duel goes. This means you’ll always have to think on your feet and concentrate on how the cards are revealed during the match.
Of course some cards counter others and some combos are better in certain situations, but all of that depends on your skill and ingenuity as a player, not on factors outside the match itself. Similarly, the order in which cards are revelead changes the framework for your decisions, but never dictates how things go and who will win in the end.
No (hidden) hands of cards!
Most cards games are chock-full of hidden information. Not only do you not know the order of cards in the deck, but players also hold a hand of, usually 5–10, hidden cards. This means that most of the time you’ll have to guess on what they’ll be able to do and play around estimates and percentages.
Crimson Company on the other hand is a game of mostly open information. You can see everything happening on the board (the characters in play) and in the offer (the characters you or your opponent can hire). This increases the strategic depth of the game dramatically as you can never be “surprised” by a card you didn’t even know existed in the context of the current match. You don’t have to focus on learning the meta-game chances of every card’s usage or memorize pre-composed deck lists. Instead you can fully concentrate on what’s happening right there in a match.
At the same time, the game doesn’t turn into an “analysis paralysis” calculation contest either, because there’s still the uncertainty of the deck’s order. You can see the four cards currently on offer and also one upcoming card, but more cards will only be revealed as soon as one has been played.
Contextual valuation!
A standard format for CCGs is to print cards with a set resource cost. For example, a card might cost “3 mana”. This means this card will always cost 3 mana, no matter what the current game state looks like. This way of doing things lends itself well to the meta-game-centric structure. Players can build their deck around specific pre-determined strategies, plan for a certain “total power value” they are going to generate per match. However, this also means matches become much less dynamic than they could, as players have partially solved the decision-making process outside of any match context.
Therefore cards in Crimson Company don’t have fixed costs associated with them. Instead you’ll have to determine a card’s value every time you encounter it: How strong is this card given the game state? You don’t just have to ask yourself how well a card might work for you though, but also for your opponent. Every bid you place on a card is also a chance for your opponent to take it from you for that price.
This means, while there are certain cards that tend to work well together, everything can change depending on how a match goes. Combos can’t be pre-planned, but alaways have to be built on the fly. You don’t solve the game and just go for the “best cards” every time, but you have to re-think every card’s value constantly.
In other words, building up your skill as a Crimson Company player is not about memorizing rules and combinations, but about improving your ability to “read a match” and assess cards in its context. And after all there is basically an unlimited amount of possible variations there to explore! | https://medium.com/@fischerdesign/how-crimson-company-maximizes-gameplay-depth-40396aaad77e | ['Fabian Fischer'] | 2021-01-20 11:45:11.538000+00:00 | ['Mobile Games', 'Game Design', 'Video Games', 'Board Games', 'Card Games'] |
ABFT for Correctness and Liveness | In a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), the consensus algorithm is the method by which the nodes (computers) are able to come to an agreement (consensus) on the order of a set of transactions, and potentially other information such as a timestamp for each transaction. For some consensus algorithms, it is possible to prove that they are Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (ABFT).
For example, the hashgraph consensus algorithm has a proof that it is ABFT. But what does that mean, and what are the practical implications? This blog will explore what an ABFT proof can guarantee about the correctness, finality, and liveness of a consensus algorithm.
Correctness, finality, and liveness
Correctness refers to the ability of a network of nodes to prevent forks developing, where different nodes disagree on the value for which consensus is sought. Correctness is sometimes referred to as safety.
Finality refers to a model of consensus in which, once a node determines a value for which consensus is sought, there is no chance the node will subsequently reevaluate that decision.
Liveness refers to the ability of a network of nodes running a consensus algorithm being able to continue towards establishing consensus for transactions, that is the algorithm’s ability to proceed.
Correctness and liveness are not separable — it is trivial to guarantee correctness if liveness is not a requirement, and trivial to progress towards consensus if correctness is sacrificed.
ABFT Proof
A consensus algorithm will generally make some sort of guarantees over correctness, finality, and safety if certain conditions are true. Generally, the stronger the guarantees, and the fewer and less restrictive the conditions, the more secure the algorithm. A consensus algorithm may have a mathematical proof that makes those conditions clear, and demonstrates how the guarantees emerge.
If a consensus algorithm has an ABFT proof, then there will exist a mathematical proof that if certain conditions are true, then certain results for correctness, finality, and liveness are guaranteed.
The following is one way of writing the conditions and results for a typical ABFT proof:
ABFT Conditions
More than 2/3 of the nodes are honest (non-Byzantine and non-faulty). It is always true that any pair of honest nodes will eventually sync again. An attacker can cause non-honest nodes to violate the protocol in arbitrary ways. An attacker can manipulate the internet in arbitrary ways.
ABFT Results
Every honest node will eventually reach a consensus value on every transaction and that value will not change. Every honest node reaches the same consensus value on each transaction.
There are other forms of ABFT conditions, such as using stake, and requiring that more than 2/3 of the stake be owned by honest nodes. But for simplicity, we will only consider this form of ABFT here.
Condition 1 requires that more than 2/3 of the nodes are non-Byzantine, which means they follow the protocol and do not act maliciously. It also requires that they are non-faulty, which means a node can crash and be offline for a while, but it must eventually come back online and sync with the other nodes. An honest node can’t crash and stay offline forever.
Condition 2 requires that any two honest nodes will eventually sync. And then they will eventually sync again. And so on forever.
Conditions 3 and 4 simply say that an attacker can be powerful enough to completely control nodes and the internet itself, as long as the first two Conditions still hold.
Proofs of this sort also assume that secure cryptography exists. In other words, the attacker can’t break the hash algorithm or the digital signature algorithm.
Result 1 is a guarantee of finality — there is a moment in time when each node knows the consensus value with certainty, and will not thereafter reconsider that value. It’s important to note that Result 1 does not stipulate a particular time frame for honest nodes to determine a consensus value — it says only that honest nodes will eventually do so.
Result 2 is a guarantee of correctness — every node will reach the same conclusion.
The guarantees of results 1 and 2 only apply if the conditions are met. Of course, if all of the nodes are malicious, then they can do anything. But that would violate Condition 1, so the results would no longer be guaranteed. Similarly, if all nodes are unable to communicate with each other, then they won’t be able to come to consensus on anything. But that would violate Condition 2. So, as long as the Conditions are met, the Results are guaranteed, which give strong results for correctness and finality.
An ABFT proof makes different guarantees about liveness than the guarantees it makes for correctness or finality.
There are some broad guarantees that it makes about liveness, and other guarantees that it does not make about liveness. It is useful to go through a number of classes of liveness attacks, and see which are ruled out and which aren’t.
Liveness attacks
A liveness attack is an attempt to prevent honest nodes from reaching consensus.
In general, a liveness attack will consist of one (or a combination) of the following mechanisms:
The attacker is a node, and by refusing to participate in consensus, or by sending messages that break the rules of the protocol, prevents other nodes from reaching consensus.
The attacker prevents honest nodes from participating in consensus. This could take the form of a Denial of Service against one or more honest nodes that consumes the computing resources that would otherwise be used for consensus, or otherwise corrupting the honest node’s computer such that it can’t participate in consensus.
The attacker prevents, or slows, the transmission of consensus messages between honest nodes as those messages travel over the network.
One way to reason about the liveness guarantees an ABFT proof will or will not make is to consider an attacker making a claim about their ability to prevent liveness and to determine if that claim is valid or not.
We will see that an ABFT proof will allow us to refute some claims about liveness attacks, but not others.
Each claimed attack will be labelled as either FALSE or TRUE.
Attack A — Byzantine nodes — FALSE CLAIM
The attacker makes the following claim:
I control malicious nodes that are less than 1/3 of all the nodes, and can direct those nodes to prevent the other honest nodes from progressing towards consensus, either by having my nodes refusing to communicate or otherwise breaking the rules of the protocol. I can freeze the network for as long as the attack continues.
If this claim were true and the attack were possible, it would mean that an attacker could freeze the network’s progress towards consensus for as long as the attack continues, so the network would not be live during that time. And the attack could continue forever, and so freeze it forever, and prevent it from ever coming to consensus.
But the attack is impossible if there is an ABFT proof. Because the ABFT proof says that it will come to consensus eventually. The details of the attack don’t matter. It doesn’t matter how the malicious nodes are violating the protocol. No matter how clever they are, the attack will fail and so the claim is false. The ABFT proof guarantees that.
The attack doesn’t stop the honest nodes from syncing so Condition 2 is true.
Additionally, because less than 1/3 nodes are Byzantine, Condition 1 is true as well.
The ABFT proof then guarantees Result 1, which guarantees that all honest nodes will reach consensus on every transaction.
But the attacker was claiming that they could prevent the above, that is that, if the attack continued forever, the network would be frozen for all time.
Consequently the claim is refuted by the ABFT proof.
Attack B — DDoS against single node — FALSE CLAIM
The attacker makes the following claim:
I can launch a DDoS attack to shut down a single honest node at a time. While a node is being DDoSed, no other nodes can sync with it. I also control malicious nodes (less than 1/3), which know what is going on, and can help me direct the attack to repeatedly change which node is being DDoSed. I can freeze the network for as long as the attack continues.
This is a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The attacker has compromised many computers on the internet, and can use them to flood a single computer with so many packets that it shuts down for as long as the attack continues. It doesn’t matter how clever the attacker is when choosing the DDoS target. It doesn’t matter that the attacker has a malicious node as a spy to help choose that target.
The attack is still impossible. As long as every pair of honest nodes eventually syncs, and more than 2/3 of the nodes are honest nodes, then it isn’t possible for an attacker to freeze the network for as long as the attack continues. Because if it were continued forever, all four Conditions would be true, but the Results would not be true. That’s ruled out by the ABFT proof. So this form of liveness attack is declared impossible by the ABFT proof and the claim must be false.
This is particularly interesting, because the ABFT proof guarantees resilience to a Follow The Leader attack in which the attacker performs the above DDoS attack against different nodes in sequence.
Some consensus algorithms have a ‘leader’, which is one node that is treated differently with respect to contribution to consensus from the other nodes — typically for some period of time. The protocol might have the nodes take turns being leader. Or it might allow one node be the leader until it crashes, then another node is elected to become the new leader. It is possible that some protocols using leaders would be vulnerable to a liveness attack where the leader is DDoSed, and as soon as a new node becomes the leader, the DDoS attack switches to attacking the new leader. That is a Follow The Leader attack. For leader-based protocols in which the leader can be predicted, a Follow The Leader attack could freeze the entire network for as long as the attack continues, while only DDoSing a single computer at a time, and with only a single malicious node acting as a spy.
It is even possible that a protocol vulnerable to such a Follow the Leader attack could have a mathematical proof that it is BFT. But it can’t have a proof that it is ABFT because an ABFT proof would guarantee that it is safe from that attack. This is one important way in which ABFT is stronger than just BFT. A protocol with a BFT proof has guaranteed correctness, but if the proof can be upgraded to ABFT, then the correctness guarantee can be expanded to include some liveness guarantees, as well.
Attack C — Dynamic Partitioning — FALSE CLAIM
The attacker makes the following claim:
I can partition the network, where some nodes cannot sync with other nodes. Unfortunately, I am forced to constantly change the partitioning, so that any two honest nodes are occasionally in the same partition and sync with each other. I have a malicious node to act as a spy and tell me what is going on. I can freeze the network as long as the attack continues.
Again, this attack will fail if there is an ABFT proof.
At a given moment in time, the partition will divide the nodes — potentially into two equal halves such that neither half has the requisite 2/3 honest nodes — even though there are that many honest nodes as a whole.
But, once the partition changes, then the mix of nodes between the two halves will also change. Two nodes that were previously unable to sync will now be able to do so.
Any two honest nodes will eventually be able to sync so Condition 2 is satisfied.
If the attack were continued forever, then all of the Conditions would be satisfied, and so the ABFT proof guarantees Result 1 — which refutes the claim.
Attack D — Static partitioning — TRUE CLAIM
The attacker makes the following claim:
I can partition the network such that 1/3 of the nodes cannot sync with the other 2/3. I can freeze the network as long as the attack continues.
This is an attack on liveness that will succeed, even if there is an ABFT proof.
If the partition does not change, then there always be some honest nodes that are unable to sync with some other nodes during the partition. If the attack were to continue forever, then Condition 2, that any two honest nodes would eventually be able to sync, would be violated.
Consequently, the ABFT Proof cannot guarantee Result 1 and liveness can be compromised by this attack.
In fact, there is a simple math proof that shows no consensus algorithm can be secure in the case where almost 1/3 of the nodes are malicious and an attacker can partition the network. In such a case, you either have to sacrifice correctness or liveness. You can’t have both. In an ABFT algorithm, correctness will be chosen and liveness sacrificed. The network will be frozen until the partition is healed, at which point it will start reaching consensus on new transactions again.
There are many similar attacks that will also be successful on liveness. Such as:
Attack E — Broad DDoS — TRUE CLAIM
The attacker makes the following claim:
I can DoS 1/3 of the nodes and keep then offline for the duration of the attack. I can freeze the network as long as the attack continues.
This attack on liveness also succeeds, for the same reason as above.
Attack F — Malware — TRUE CLAIM
The attacker makes the following claim:
I know of bugs in Linux, Windows, and MacOS that allow me to shut down that computer, and every node runs on one of those operating systems, so I can shut down all the nodes. I can freeze the network as long as the attack continues.
Again, this succeeds for the same reason as above, even if there is an ABFT proof. And it might be better to say it this way:
This liveness Attack F succeeds because it isn’t an attack on the consensus algorithm, and the ABFT proof was only about the resilience of the consensus algorithm.
Attack G — Corrupted node code — TRUE CLAIM
The attacker makes the following claim:
I know of a bug in the code the nodes run, and control a malicious node that can send a special message to any honest node that triggers the bug and crashes the machine. And I can continue to exploit more such bugs as the software is patched. I can freeze the network as long as the attack continues.
Of course, this also succeeds — AFBT proof notwithstanding — because it has nothing to do with the consensus algorithm.
The best solution in the long run is to mathematically prove that the code is correct, with a computer checking the math proof. This is called formal methods. The first step is to formally define the algorithm itself and have a computer check that it is truly ABFT. This was done for hashgraph in Coq. The next step is to expand it so that the computer checks a proof that the implementation code matches the definition. Or have a computer write the implementation code directly from the formal definition (proof by construction). Either way, that is how formal methods can ensure correct software. This can be extended to proving the compiler is correct, the operating system is correct, and the CPU is correct. Research on formal methods is ongoing at all these layers of the stack. But it is not yet in widespread use.
Attack H — Firewall — TRUE CLAIM
The attacker makes the following claim:
I control the internet and can delete every other bit passing through each router on the internet. I can freeze the network as long as the attack continues.
In this case, each pair of honest nodes still manages to send an infinite number of bits to each other. But if they are using TCP/IP, it can’t handle the loss of 50% of the bits in every packet, and so they can never sync. Again, this attack on liveness succeeds, despite the ABFT proof, because Condition 2 fails.
Liveness could be regained by switching to an internet protocol that uses error correcting codes capable of handling the 50% bit loss. But again, it is best described as an attack on something other than the consensus algorithm itself, so the ABFT proof provides no guarantees on liveness here.
Conclusion
For a consensus algorithm, an ABFT proof makes a number of strong guarantees about correctness, finality, and liveness. Each guarantee is limited in some ways, but still broad in other ways.
An ABFT proof makes some broad guarantees about liveness — it rules out a number of liveness attacks that could succeed against some protocols that are only BFT (not ABFT). But there are limits on how much ABFT can say about liveness: it doesn’t help if 1/3 of the nodes are DDoSed or partitioned off. And it doesn’t help with attacks that prevent all the honest nodes from syncing, or that somehow shut down all those nodes. But for attacks on the consensus algorithm itself, the ABFT proof provides useful guarantees related to liveness. | https://medium.com/hashgraph/abft-for-correctness-and-liveness-hedera-hashgraph-b2d76aa36f0c | ['Paul Madsen'] | 2020-02-08 01:39:10.538000+00:00 | ['Distributed Ledgers', 'Hashgraph', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Byzantine Fault Tolerance'] |
Broken, Just A Bit | How do you see yourself? How do you see other people?
We often make judgments of people based on what we see at a first glance. Each person has their own parameters for how they size up other people — whether it be their social media followers, how many times they smile, or the figure of their body.
In the era of social media, it’s easy to construct ideas of people we’ve never met, to fit the puzzle pieces of people’s life stories from the tidbits they share, to make judgments of people’s character from the photos they post. We take a tweet, a post, a story, and use it to craft an image of that person in our mind — how they speak, how they act daily, what their family relationship is like, and more.
It sounds ridiculous, but in a world where we can barely spare more than 10 seconds on one thought, where our limitation is almost exclusively limited to a dimly lit screen, where more interactions happen over cables rather than clubs, it’s difficult to piece together a person’s identity from the various details they’ve shared online.
It’s much easier to take one tidbit of information and use that small tidbit to define a person, both inside and out. | https://medium.com/journal-kita/broken-just-a-bit-3efeefa48c92 | ['Haikal Satria'] | 2021-08-19 15:53:24.830000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Journal Kita', 'Personal Development', 'Writing', 'Musings'] |
Fear or Love — Which Works Better in Marketing? | Arousal
The online world is full of articles condemning fear-based marketing as prone to abuse and a cause of misinformation, and instead, favor a more loving approach. But what does the research say?
According to famed researcher Jonah Berger, author of “Contagious: Why Things Catch On” and many other books, the key question isn’t whether love or fear motivates us more, but whether something arouses us.
In a multiyear study that analyzed which New York Times articles were the most likely to be shared, Dr. Berger found that those that aroused readers the most were the most likely to make the most-shared list. It didn’t matter whether the emotions evoked were positive or negative, just that they made people feel something strongly.
This phenomenon has its roots back in humankind’s earliest days of survival; when we’re excited by something, we need to do something. Run, jump, yell, wave our hands frantically. Another way to think of arousal is like energy. Energy, like feelings such as love or fear, are neither good nor bad; instead, they’re forces of nature — a part of our world.
When a person receives energy, they need to do something with it. In marketing, this often translates to shares. | https://medium.com/better-marketing/fear-or-love-which-works-better-in-marketing-d9527c234b0e | ['Mark Ames'] | 2020-02-11 15:08:22.488000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Social Media Marketing', 'Advertising', 'Digital Marketing', 'Business'] |
History of Graphic Design | Graphic design is simply the art of creating graphics; or producing visuals on a surface. This can be done on canvas, stone, pottery, or — perhaps most commonly recognized today — on a computer screen. With so many different tools to work with, the artistic method of graphic design covers visuals from drawings and symbols to graphs and charts, custom logo design, book cover design, and more.
The history of graphic design stretches so far back that it encompasses the entire history of art. Here’s how graphic design got its origin and developed to where it’s at today.
GRAPHIC DESIGN ROOTS: 15,000–3,600 BC
Graphic design can be traced back to 15,000 BC when the first known visual communications arose. Fast-forward several thousand years, and you’ll discover the Blau Monument. It’s the first known artefact to use both words and pictures on it.
Of course, these designed pieces are far from what we think of as graphic design today; but they helped spark the thought of putting images on surfaces, putting us on the path towards things like drawings, posters, banners, and more.
PAPER AND PRINTING: 105 AD — 1530 AD
The invention of paper in 105 AD by a Chinese man led to the concept of printing. The first illustrations in a printed book followed shortly after, in 1460. Seventy years of printing went by before Claude Garamond opened the very first type foundry — in 1530 — which created and sold fonts to printers.
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION: 1760–1800
The Industrial Revolution hit in the 1760s and guided in a new age for graphic design. Innovative technologies began popping up at an unusual rate; including the method of lithography, which was a printing method that helped decrease costs. The Industrial Revolution also embraced the printing press in 1800, a machine that not only reduced labour by 90% but also doubled the size of paper that could be printed.
GROWTH OF GRAPHIC DESIGN: 1900S
Since the time of the Industrial Revolution, graphic design had been easing its way into business practices, and in the 1900s, its use exploded. With the growth of the advertising industry and colour printing, businesses began creating logos to help brand their company.
Naturally, graphic design became widely used in advertising and other industries, marking beautiful designs on everything from posters to t-shirts, record covers, and more. As computer technology was invented and released throughout the late 1900s, designers began using digital tools — such as Photoshop. These digital tools revolutionized the field.
GRAPHIC DESIGN TODAY
Today, graphic design refers mainly to designing visuals for magazines, books, advertisements, and digital posters. This intensive branch of design involves the art form of communicating ideas through visuals and text. Graphic designers still use drawings and paintings in some cases, but much of graphic design today is completed using digital technologies. These modern graphic design skills can be implemented to custom logo design, book cover design, magazine layouts, billboard advertisements, clothing design, online banner ads, and much more.
Graphic design has been around for quite some time, but as we view it today in the world of business, it’s only been alive for the last hundred years or so. Over those hundred years, graphic design has permeated the space of business and consumerism, grasping our attention, sparking our interests, or sometimes, blending seamlessly into our surroundings. It’s all around us; unless you’re looking for it, you may not realize how often it shows up in your daily life. | https://medium.com/@gvanshika777/history-of-graphic-design-a9acd90373a0 | ['Vanshika Goel'] | 2020-12-21 19:31:06.220000+00:00 | ['History Of Graphic Design', 'Graphic Designer', 'Graphic Design', 'History'] |
2020 & The 6th Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD6) | During the year 2020, two new Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Directives came into force;
1. the fifth AML EU Directive (AMLD5) on the 10th of January 2020, and
2. the sixth AML EU Directive (AMLD6), 3rd of December 2020.
While this new directive, the 6th one, is being introduced, the pandemic is still on, on a global scale and to this day many EU member states have yet to transpose the 5th AML Directive into their national legislation.
The AML Directives aside, 2021 will also introduce major changes in the Capital Adequacy Calculations and the Capital Requirements Regulation through CRR II and CRD V.
All these changes have many investment firms and the investment services industry as a whole, in a state of continuous catch-up with their compliance. This is a familiar theme with new regimes being introduced, each a short time apart from another: such was the case with MiFID II, then MIFIR, the additional transaction reporting requirements in EMIR, the fourth Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD4), and the impactful ESMA product intervention measures.
In this commentary, SALVUS summarizes the fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD5), and then discusses the sixth Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD6) and its impact on the investment and financial services industry. It is worth noting that these two latest AML directives (AMLD5 and AMLD6) are expansions on the scope of the 4th AML Directive-AMLD4.
The 5th Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD5)
The AMLD5 aimed at strengthen the then current Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Combating the Financing of Terrorism (CFT) provisions, and specifically
increase transparency for the ultimate beneficial ownership (UBO) registry. extent the AML regime into Cryptocurrencies to manage and prevent risks arising from virtual currencies. harmonization of the application of enhanced due diligence measures from transactions involving the high-risk third countries. limiting the anonymous use of prepaid cards. grant new powers for financial intelligence units (FIUs). ensure the existence of a centralised national account registry.
The 6th Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD6)
The AMLD6 now aims to empower financial institutions and authorities to do even more in their fight against money laundering (ML) and terrorism financing (TF) by
expanding the scope of existing legislation, clarifying certain regulatory details, and toughening criminal penalties across the Union.
The amendments added in the AMLD6 aim for further transparency across the Union and we explain what is coming along with the AMLD6 below;
#1 Harmonization
The AMLD6 harmonizes the definition of money laundering across the EU with the primary aim being to remove any loopholes in the national legislations across the union. Thus, AMLD6 provides a harmonized list of the 22 predicate offenses that constitute money laundering, including certain tax crimes, environmental crime, and cyber-crime. Cyber-crime is now considered as a predicate offense for the first time.
List of predicated offences
Participating in an organised crime group or racketeering
Human trafficking and migrant smuggling
Sexual exploitation
Illicit trafficking in narcotics and psychotropic substances
Illegal arms trafficking
Trafficking in stolen goods
Corruption
Murder and grievous bodily harm (GBH)
Fraud
Counterfeiting currency
Counterfeiting and piracy of products
Environmental crime
Kidnapping and hostage taking
Robbery and theft
Smuggling
Tax crime relating to both direct and indirect taxes
Extortion
Forgery
Piracy
Insider trading and market manipulation
Cyber crime
Terrorism
#2 Expanded Regulatory Scope
AMLD6 expands the number of offenses that fall under the definition of money laundering, with “aiding and abetting” to constitute money laundering and thus subject to the same penalties and offenses.
* “Aiding” means assisting, supporting, or helping another person to commit a crime.
“Abetting” means encouraging, inciting, or inducing another person to commit a crime.
“Aiding and abetting” is a term often used to describe a single act.
Practically, “aiding and abetting” includes anyone who helps a person launder money. Therefore, the expanded scope includes anyone eliciting money laundering or attempting to launder money.
#3 Extension of Criminal Liability
AMLD6 extends the criminal liability and includes punishment for legal persons, including partnerships. This means that a legal person will be considered responsible for the crime of money laundering if the legal person failed to prevent a “directing mind” of the company from carrying out the illegal activity. Essentially, under the AMLD6 the responsibility is carried over to the senior management and to the employees of the Company.
The extension of criminal liability in this context is intended for introducing accountability of big corporations in the global effort to combat money laundering. Additionally, this extension of criminal liability allows the authorities to manage organizations that do not implement AML/CFT effectively. The punishments and offenses for legal persons vary from temporary restrictions on operations or judicial supervision to permanent closure.
#4 Tougher Punishment
AMLD6 amend the minimum imprisonment infringement from one year to four years for money laundering offenses.
The increased number of years of imprisonment for money laundering and potential financial repercussions are part of the EU’s effort for harmonization across the union. They also reflect the EU parliament’s commitment to stricter enforcement of money laundering rules. It is worth noting that many EU member states have already put in place punishments for money laundering, above the minimum years of imprisonment required by the AMLD6.
#5 Member-state Cooperation
The crime of money laundering may involve dual criminality, which is the principle that a crime may be committed in one jurisdiction before its financial proceeds are laundered in another. AMLD6 addresses the issue of dual criminality by introducing specific requirements for sharing information between jurisdictions so that a criminal prosecution for the connected offenses can take place in more than one EU member state.
The provisions under AMLD6 for dual criminality require the member states to criminalize certain predicate offenses whether they are illegal in that jurisdiction or not, including terrorism, drug trafficking, human trafficking, sexual exploitation, racketeering, and corruption. The member states involved in prosecution shall work together to centralize legal proceedings within a single jurisdiction. The AMLD6 sets out a range of factors for the authorities to consider when deciding how and where to conduct prosecutions, including the victims’ country of origin, the nationality (or residence) of the offender, and the jurisdiction in which the offense took place.
Conclusion
When the AMLD6 becomes national legislation, the investment firms will need to ensure that their AML/CFT programs correspond adequately to the new risk environment. Among others, firms shall establish training for existing and new employees and adjust their AML programs to ensure that employees can detect suspicious activities that may arise from the new predicate offenses.
SALVUS advices investment firms and investment professionals, train personnel, and obtains licenses for its clients, associates, and partners. AML Directives and Regulations are a particular area of our expertise. We remain at your disposal should you have any questions on the new regulatory frameworks, our Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Service, or on how to get successfully prepared for the CySEC AML Certification. Contact us at [email protected] #StayAhead.
Should you be interested to read about Anti-Money Laundering, please visit the selected articles below:
The information provided in this article is for general information purposes only. You should always seek professional advice suitable to your needs. | https://medium.com/@savlusfunds/2020-the-6th-anti-money-laundering-directive-amld6-26c20f3eb151 | ['Salvus Funds'] | 2020-12-09 09:34:03.154000+00:00 | ['Salvusfunds', 'Regulation', 'Amld6', 'Compliance', 'Amld5'] |
The Nexybit Tick Size — Does size matter? | At Nexybit we decided to set the tick price for Bitcoin at $1.
Ticks are the smallest unit for the price of a contract. For instance, if a tick size is $0.1, that would mean the price of a product could only change from $10 to $10.1. Although this may not seem like such a big deal, even these small rules can have a large effect on how prices change in the long run.
Okex ticks are $0.01. At the current price of $8,250 per bitcoin, that means you can trade at almost 1/1,000,000ths of the price! Since the tick prices are so small, despite the huge amount of trading occuring on the exchanges, there are usually gaps between orders on the Bid/Ask orderbook. Bitmex ticks for their Bitcoin contracts are a significantly larger $0.5 and their orderbooks are usually quite full.
The goal of any exchange is to promote price discovery and efficient capital formation. So we asked ourselves how should we decide on our tick size based on these two points? More freedom to choose precise prices on trades have both pros and cons.
A finer tick size theoretically increases the number of price levels available to liquidity providers and it can distribute liquidity onto a finer price grid. This may reduce market depth at the best quotes without reducing total liquidity. Much of the research that took place over the past 20 years looking at the US, Canadian, Hong Kong as well as Tokyo exchanges reported similar findings. However using more sophisticated limit order book data research from Goldstein and Kavajecz(2000) showed the opposite. They showed that the cumulative depth of the order books fell after tick size reductions. Other academic research showed that tick reduction can increases spreads as well.
We decided to follow the later; to increase tick sizes relative to the other exchanges in the market.
Larger tick sizes reduce the complexity of trading as it limits the number of possible price levels. It makes is easier for users to understand market dynamics.
Secondly, larger tick sizes reduce the bandwidth needs of the trading platform. A change in the market price can lead to a price update in many connected products which can be wasteful in terms of bandwidth. This may not seem like an important concept, but every popular exchange has faced downtime and lag when user traffic spikes. Due to the fact that Bitcoin exchanges are natively-digital, users from all around the world can easily access and hence bombard an exchange during times of extreme volatility.
Additionally, Okex and Bitmex have been around for a while and so the contract specifications may have been set in accordance to when Bitcoin prices were much lower. Newer specifications for Bitcoin contracts from CME and CBOE towards the end of 2017 are $5 and $10 respectively.
We believe that prices will stay above the $1,000 mark for the foreseeable future and hence decided on $1 tick sizes that are roughly 1/1,000ths to 1/10,000ths of the price of Bitcoin. This makes the tick size fine enough for accurate hedging/speculation, easy to approach and understand, and provide less strain on our systems. | https://medium.com/nexybit/the-nexybit-tick-size-836d56305084 | [] | 2018-10-30 06:59:32.675000+00:00 | ['Futures', 'Finance', 'Bitmex', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin'] |
PCB Design — A Hobbyist’s Perspective | Being a software engineer by trade, I got into hardware design as a hobby a couple of years ago. By hardware I mean mostly printed circuit boards (PCBs). Having control over both hardware and software is a great way to get creative. I’ve only designed 3 boards so far yet I feel like I already learned a lot in the process. In this post I’m going to share some of the things I learned. That being said, I’m by no means an expert on PCB design nor on electrical engineering — please keep that in mind when reading this.
From Breadboard to PCB
Just like many hobbyists, I started with an Arduino and a couple of components on a breadboard. Once I had a working design, I wanted to integrate it all on one board. This meant first looking at the Arduino board and figuring out which of its components I’d need on my board, too. Then combine that with the components I had on my breadboard. Sounds easy enough and it is actually not that complicated. Since a typical Arduino doesn’t communicate with GHz speeds and it operates on a single voltage only, the actual design of your hardware is bound by few constraints only. Apart from that, the Atmega328 microcontroller of the Arduino Uno is available in a through-hole package, so your whole board can be assembled entirely by through-hole soldering which a lot of beginners tend to find easier than dealing with surface mounted parts.
I did my first board design using Fritzing but quickly moved on to Eagle and ultimately KiCad for my second and third board. KiCad is open-source and works great for simple and even more complicated hobbyist designs.
Creating a board using KiCad (or any software for that matter) typically involves the following steps:
Drawing the schematic — this often includes drawing custom symbols and footprints for the required parts Laying out the design for physical production on a PCB Creating a bill of materials (BOM) Having the PCB manufactured Assembling the board or having it assembled
While I did assemble my first board manually, I had my third board assembled by PCBWay, who also kindly sponsored the fabrication of the board. I did this because the BOM contains a whopping 145 parts with many of them being as small as 0.6mm. PCBWay offers a great turn-key assembly service where they source all the parts and assemble the boards for you.
This was the first time I placed capacitors directly on top of vias on the backside of the board and I wasn’t sure whether it was going to work or not. It did work out just fine as you can see in the picture below.
Assembled board with parts as small as 0.6mm (SMD 0201)
If you’d rather assemble your boards yourself and still want to use surface mounted components you can do so pretty easily at home, too. I did this for my second board using tweezers, solder paste and a cheap toaster oven. That way you can do your own reflow soldering and the results are pretty good if you’re willing to put in the work.
Now, let’s have a closer look at the actual PCB design process since this is the exciting part after all.
Things to keep in mind when designing PCBs
I’m going to list a couple of things I learned to keep in mind when designing PCBs as a hobbyist. The list is in no particular order and depending on the actual project the items may be of varying significance.
Datasheets Are Your Friend
Whether you already know what components you’re going to use or you’re still trying to find the right ones, datasheets are your friend. Datasheets also tend to be these huge and daunting documents but that’s okay — there’s no need to read it all. Depending on your actual goal you’re only looking for a specific section of the datasheet. When trying to find a suitable component, look at the summary at the top of the datasheet. When designing the circuit, look at reference designs and typical applications in the datasheet. When designing your PCB, look at the footprint section of the datasheet. Most of the time, that’s all you need.
The Obligatory Decoupling
This is something people will tell you over and over again and it may easily get overlooked by beginners: All digital and probably most analog ICs needs decoupling from the power source. In simple cases this just means placing a 100nF capacitor as close as possible to the IC’s power input. In more complex cases (e.g. with BGAs) entire networks of decoupling capacitors are required. As always, you can find the necessary information in the chip’s datasheet.
Btw, the picture above shows some of the decoupling capacitors for a single BGA IC.
4 Layers vs. 2 Layers
In terms of hobby designs you can usually achieve a lot with 2 layer PCBs. There are still many good reasons to switch to 4 layers for all but the most simple designs, however. With 4 layers you typically have two signal layers — one at the top and one at the bottom of your PCB — and one of the inner layers dedicated to a ground plane and the other one to a power plane. If required the power plane may be split up into multiple voltage domains.
Compared to a two layer design, this setup simplifies routing because you don’t need to worry about routing your power rails. You’ve got access to the power supply everywhere on your board through vias. On top of that, power and ground planes offer improved signal integrity by optimizing current return paths (see also the next section) as well as additional capacitance (a power plane and a ground plane separated by a dielectric is basically a capacitor).
Return Paths
This is one of the harder concepts to wrap my head around and it only really matters for high speed signals. That being said, high speed doesn’t necessarily mean digital signals in the GHz domain. High speed means rapidly changing signals and a 1 kHz signal can very well be high speed if its raising and falling edges (the change from high to low and low to high) are rapid enough — which is more or less the case with modern ICs anyway. The good news is that if you’re doing a 4 layer design and you route your high speed signals on top of a suitable reference plane (GND is always suitable) then you’ve got your return paths under control. That’s one of the reasons I like doing 4 layer designs. Otherwise you’d need to put more thought into where your return paths are.
Real Estate Is Plentiful
I see this with a lot of boards designed by beginners and I’m guilty of this, too: We tend to spread out our components too generously, leaving a lot of empty board space in between and drawing unnecessarily long traces. Things can be packed up a lot more tidy than you’d think. Of course, if you plan to solder manually or you’re expecting to do a lot of rework, having space to work with is actually benefitial.
Route Important Signals First
When you’ve finished your schematic and you’ve done a rudimentary placement of your components on the PCB, route the most important signals first (e.g. clock signals or communication buses). These signals are the ones most likely to be affected by poor signal integrity and can benefit a lot from having put more thought into their layout. This means keeping the distances short, not using too many vias, and have their return paths under control. Apart from high speed digital signals, analog signals can also be vulnerable to interference.
Trace Width vs. Trace Spacing
How wide does a trace have to be and how far apart should traces be from each other? Well, these questions are partly answered by the manufacturer of your PCB. They will give you a minimal trace width and a minimal trace spacing they can work with. That being said, it’s seldom a good idea to design at the limits of what your manufacturer is capable of.
I’ve seen different opinions on trace widths. Some recommend to have traces as wide as possible to lower their resistance. Then again, wider traces mean less space in between which can cause cross-talk between different signals. As I understand, there are a lot of things to consider when deciding on how exactly your traces are going to look like. Most of it probably doesn’t matter that much for hobbyist boards, anyway. One thing to keep in mind, though: Make sure your traces can handle the amount of current you’re going to put through them. There are free calculators out there to help you calculate trace widths based on current requirements.
Test Points
Adding test points to your PCB isn’t required but it can make your life a lot easier. A test point is usually just a bit of exposed copper (i.e. an unused pad) that gives you quick and easy access to probe signals with your oscilloscope or your multimeter. Make sure to also expose a couple of GND points for reference. I always add test points to every voltage domain to check whether the voltages are correct and stable. On top of this, I usually add test points to clock signals and communication buses. It’s up to you to decide how far you want to go with this — just make sure to give it some thought before sending your design off to be fabricated.
Final thoughts
I’ve not given you a cookbook recipe for PCB design as this would be hard to do anyway, and it would neglect a lot of the creativity you need to put into your own designs.
I still hope the points listed above provide you with enough food for thought for your own hardware endeavors. I also suggest doing more research on the topics you’re most interested in. If you’d like to know more about signal integrity and PCB design in general I highly recommend this YouTube channel.
Also, let me know if you think I missed something important or if I made a mistake. | https://medium.com/@raphaelstaebler/pcb-design-a-hobbyists-perspective-68a3b713c8bc | ['Raphael Stäbler'] | 2021-08-27 13:48:31.477000+00:00 | ['Pcb Design', 'Electronics', 'Makers', 'Engineering'] |
Has coronavirus put unconditional basic income back on the political agenda? | The first proposals for unconditional basic income were made many decades ago, and the idea has been revived in recent years, with discussion and experiments in several countries. But the coronavirus pandemic and the economic depression that is looming as a consequence, has given added urgency to the need to provide a safety net for the many millions of people who will soon find themselves without work, with politicians in the United States — Republican and Democrat — as well as in Europe, as well as the Pope, supporting the idea. The World Economic Forum has been advocating this system for years.
The idea has been connected to initiatives such as the stimulus checks sent by Donald Trump to millions of Americans to avoid recession or the minimum income proposed by Pablo Iglesias, a deputy prime minister in Spain’s left-leaning coalition government, which has led some European newspapers to speculate that Spain might become the first European country to implement a universal basic income system.
The problem with much of the current discussion is that unconditional basic income is intended to cover all types of state aid, even when it is neither basic nor unconditional. Giving money to vulnerable people during a pandemic is obviously a good idea but does not constitute an income (which by definition is regular, not a to a given situation), and is not unconditional (because in order to access it, certain conditions must be met). Neither Donald Trump, Pablo Iglesias nor Luis de Guindos (a former Economy Minister under Spain’s previous, conservative, government, and now vice president of the European Central Bank) are really talking about unconditional basic income, but instead of temporarily helping vulnerable people to weather a deep and lasting recession and avoiding homelessness, which we may or may not support, but I repeat: none of those proposals is unconditional basic income because the money isn’t paid to everybody.
Unconditional basic income must meet three requirements: it must be a permanent payment; secondly, it must be basic, in other words, it must cover people’s basic needs. And thirdly, it must be unconditional, meaning that it has nothing to do with income or people’s vulnerability. It must be given to everybody.
Obviously, those who do not need the money will find that by incorporating an extra source of income they will end up returning their payment via their tax returns. This answers one of the main misunderstandings about unconditional basic income: that there won’t be enough money to pay for it. In reality, in rich countries, what we are talking about is giving money to many people who simply return it to the state a few months later. For those who do need it, universal basic income does away with the countless payments the state makes based on means testing.
The charge that people would just sit around and watch television all day or spend their money on drugs if their basic needs were covered has been rejected by practice. Universal basic income simply increases people’s security and enables them to make better choices, with greater degrees of freedom. It does not generate inflation, although some inflation is not necessarily a bad thing, and when it does, payments are updated accordingly. In the future, with increasingly productive machines, there will be less work than ever. Does it make sense in a highly productive society to increase the number of people in poverty?
The advantage of unconditional basic income over means-tested benefits is that it does away with the stigma of “being on welfare”. Secondly, and most importantly, because a universal payment cannot be used by politicians in the way that President Trump is trying to do by putting his name on the stimulus checks being paid in the United States at the moment; or what countries like Venezuela or Argentina unfortunately do: subsidize certain groups so as to garner their support.
Sadly, that’s one of the reasons so few politicians support unconditional basic income: they have nothing to gain from it directly. They prefer the complex and costly system of cash handouts, which at best are a band-aid solution and at worst, simply keep people in poverty.
If we’re going to talk about universal or unconditional basic income, let’s be clear what we mean, and not compare oranges with apples. | https://medium.com/enrique-dans/has-coronavirus-put-unconditional-basic-income-back-on-the-political-agenda-8ce57dbb2a13 | ['Enrique Dans'] | 2020-04-23 12:22:20.598000+00:00 | ['Economy', 'Basic Income', 'Spain', 'Coronavirus', 'USA'] |
10 Advantages of Social Media Marketing for Your Business | Imagine spending as little as 6 hours a week in order to increase your business’s recognition, traffic, and sales with little to no cost. That’s right! About 90% of marketers claimed that social media generated immense exposure for their company, and that’s only one of its many advantages. Social networks are now a substantial part of every marketing strategy, and the benefits of using social media are so great that anyone not implementing this cost-effective resource is missing out on a phenomenal marketing opportunity. It’s easy to see that social media marketing is a key element for success in marketing and many marketers realize the potential for business growth using the platform. However, some of these professionals are unsure of which tactics to apply and if they are effective. According to Social Media Examiner, about 96% of marketers are currently participating in social media marketing, but 85% of participants aren’t sure which tools are the best to use. With our help, we will diminish the confusion by thoroughly explaining the advantages of using social media to market your business.
1. Increased Brand Awareness
Social media is one of the most cost-efficient digital marketing methods used to syndicate content and increase your business’ visibility. Implementing a social media strategy will greatly increase your brand recognition since you will be engaging with a broad audience of consumers. To get started, create social media profiles for your business and begin interacting with others. Get employees, business partners, and sponsors to “like” and “share” your page. Simply having people interact with your content will increase brand awareness and begin building your reputation as a business. Each post that is shared will be introduced to a new network of individuals, which can lead them to becoming potential customers, and the more people who know about your business, the better. By investing only a few hours per week, over 91% of marketers claimed that their social marketing efforts greatly increased their exposure. There is no doubt that by simply having a social media page your brand will benefit, and with regular use it can generate a wide audience for your business.
2. More Inbound Traffic
Without marketing your business on social media, your inbound traffic is limited to your usual customers. The people familiar with your brand are likely searching for the same keywords you already rank for. Without utilizing social media as part of your marketing strategy, you’ll have much more difficulty reaching anyone outside of your loyal customer circle. Every social media profile you add to your marketing mix is a gateway to your website, and every piece of content you post is another opportunity to acquire a new customer. Social media is a melting pot of different types of people with varying backgrounds and behaviors. With different people come different needs and different ways of thinking. Syndicating your content on as many platforms as possible allows these individuals to organically reach your business. For instance, perhaps someone in an older demographic of consumers will search for your website using a particular keyword on Facebook, but a millennial could begin their search by using a different social media platform entirely, because they search for products totally differently. By marketing on social media you can effectively open your business to a wider variety of versatile consumers all over the world.
3. Improved Search Engine Rankings
Although posting on social media might get your business some site traffic, more effort than that is required to see significant success. Search engine optimization is very important for achieving higher page rankings and obtaining traffic to your business website. While social media doesn’t directly increase search engine rankings, Social Media Examiner states that more than 58% of marketers who have been using social media for one year or longer still see improved search engine rankings. Being able to rank in the top positions for your keywords will revolutionize your traffic and continue to generate positive results for your business. Let’s face it, everyone uses Google to find information, and they likely won’t navigate past page 1 because their answer normally is on the first page of results. If your business website isn’t ranked towards the top of search engine results, you should probably adjust your search engine optimization strategy. To give yourself the best chance of ranking better through social media, create high-quality content that integrates your targeted keywords. Content such as blogs, infographics, case studies, business information, and employee photos will make your business’s social media profile intriguing and credible. Once you begin posting quality content, you’ll begin to build a social media community where followers will “like” and “share” your content. Most importantly, it gives you more opportunities to get in front of industry influencers who will write about your business and provide links back — which will help to directly increase search engine rankings.
4. Higher Conversion Rates
With increased visibility, your business gains more opportunities for conversion. Every blog post, image, video, or comment may lead viewers to your company’s website and increase traffic. Social media marketing allows your business to give a positive impression through a humanization factor. When brands are interactive by sharing content, commenting, and posting statuses on social media, it personifies a brand. People prefer to do business with other people, rather than companies. Over 51% of marketers claimed that taking the time to develop relationships with consumers showed positive results in sales. The better impression you make on a visitor, the more likely they are to think of your business when the need for your product or services arises. Studies have also shown that social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing. When a brand is interactive online, consumers who follow your brand’s accounts often begin to more completely trust the credibility of your business. People use social media platforms to stay connected to their friends, family, and communities. Since people are already talking, why not throw your brand into the mix? More likely than not, they’ll mention your brand to a friend when your products or services are needed, overall providing your business with social proof of its quality. As reported by Social Media Examiner, about 66% of marketers saw lead generation benefits by using social media platforms at least 6 hours per week. Putting your brand in an atmosphere where people are sharing, liking, and talking, can only improve the conversion rates on your existing traffic.
5. Better Customer Satisfaction
Social media is a networking and communication platform. Creating a voice for your company through these platforms is important in humanizing your company. Customers appreciate knowing that when they post comments on your pages, they will receive a personalized response rather than an automated message. Being able to acknowledge each comment shows that you are attentive of your visitors’ needs and aim to provide the best experience.
Every customer interaction on your business’s social media accounts is an opportunity to publicly demonstrate your compassion for your customers. Whether an individual has a question or a complaint, social media allows you to address the matter using interpersonal dialogue. A brand devoted to customer satisfaction that takes the time to compose personal messages will inherently be viewed in a positive light, even if responding to a customer complaint.
6. Improved Brand Loyalty
One of the main goals of almost all businesses is developing a loyal customer base. Considering that customer satisfaction and brand loyalty typically go hand in hand, it is important to regularly engage with consumers and begin developing a bond with them. Social media is not just limited to introducing your brand’s products and promotional campaigns. Customers see these platforms as a service channel where they can communicate directly with the business. The millennial generation is known for being the most brand loyal customers of all. Born between the early 1980’s and the early 2000’s, millennials are the largest generation in US history — and will soon completely consume the market. Studies show that this segment of customers is 62% more loyal to brands that directly engage with them on social media. Since these technology natives require communication with their brands, businesses must implement social media marketing to get the attention of their most influential consumers.
7. More Brand Authority
Customer satisfaction and brand loyalty both play a part in making your business more authoritative, but it all comes down to communication. When consumers see your company posting on social media, especially replying to customers and posting original content, it makes you appear more credible. Regularly interacting with customers demonstrates that your business cares about customer satisfaction, and is available to answer any questions that they might have. Satisfied customers are eager to spread the word about a great product or service and they usually turn to social media to express their opinion. Having customers mention your business on social media will advertise your business, and show new visitors your value and brand authority. Once you obtain a few satisfied customers who are vocal about their positive purchase experience, you can let the advertising be done for you by actual customers who enjoyed your product or service.
8. Cost-Effective
Social media marketing is possibly the most cost-efficient part of an advertising strategy. Signing up and creating a profile is free for almost all social networking platforms, and any paid promotions you decide to invest in are a relatively low cost compared to other marketing tactics. Being cost-effective is such an advantage because you can see a greater return on investment and retain a bigger budget for other marketing and business expenses. If you decide to use paid advertising on social media, always start small to see what you should expect. As you become more comfortable, fine tune your strategy and try increasing your budget. Just by spending a small amount of time and money you can significantly increase your conversion rates and eventually get return on investment on the money you initially invested.
9. Gain Marketplace Insights
One of the most valuable advantages of social media is marketplace insight. What better way to know the thoughts and needs of your consumers than by directly talking to them? By monitoring the activity on your profiles,, you can see customer’ interests and opinions that you might not otherwise be aware of if your business didn’t have a social media presence. Using social media as a complementary research tool can help gain information that will aid you in understanding your industry. Once you gain a large following, you can use additional tools to analyze the demographics of your consumers. Another insightful aspect of social media marketing is the ability to segment your content syndication lists based on topic, and identify which types of content generate the most impressions. These tools give you the ability to measure conversions based on posts on various social media platforms to find the perfect combination for generating revenue.
10. Thought Leadership
Posting insightful and well-written content on your social media is a great way to become an expert and leader in your field. There is no one way to become a thought leader — it requires work that can be supported by online networking tools. To establish yourself as an expert, be sure to utilize social media platforms and build your presence. Be communicative, connect with your audience, share content, and promote your authority. When your social media campaign is aligned with other marketing efforts, your skills will be highlighted and followers will look up to you. Being able to directly connect with your customers creates a relationship that they will value, allowing you to become a notable influencer in your field.
Get Started
It’s clear that social media marketing has its advantages, so if your business doesn’t already have the appropriate profiles, create them! Fill out your business’ information and post some engaging content to begin gaining followers. As mentioned, ask people relevant to your business to “like” and “share” your page to help build your profile. With consistent updating, the right social media marketing strategy will lead to increased traffic, better SEO, higher conversion rates, improved brand loyalty, and much more. There are virtually no reasons not to implement social media into your marketing strategy. Since it is so cost-effective, there is hardly anything to lose. Your competition is most likely already on social media, so don’t let them take your potential customers. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll see growth in your business.
This block is broken or missing. You may be missing content or you might need to enable the original module. | https://medium.com/@servicezoom/10-advantages-of-social-media-marketing-for-your-business-73e546b66a1c | ['Louis Sarkis'] | 2021-01-22 07:03:08.830000+00:00 | ['Social Media', 'Website Design', 'SEO', 'Socialmedia Marketing', 'Website'] |
How To Get More Newsletter Subscribers | How To Get More Newsletter Subscribers
What I’ve learned from building a 25,000 subscriber newsletter.
It’s not easy to get someone to give you their email address.
The last thing most people want is more incoming emails in their life.
But with the right approach you can still build a large and engaged subscriber base.
Here are five keys to getting people to hit that subscribe button, based on my experience growing my For The Interested newsletter to 25,000 subscribers.
1. Promise (and deliver) value.
No one will subscribe to your newsletter as a favor to you — they need to know what’s in it for them.
Your newsletter’s description must express a clear value proposition to give people a reason to subscribe.
Asking people to subscribe to your newsletter solely to get a reminder about your future creations isn’t really providing value to them — it’s actually about providing value to you.
That’s why people rarely subscribe to those kind of newsletters.
Instead, make it clear that your newsletter delivers value.
When I invite people to subscribe to my For The Interested newsletter at the bottom of posts like this one, I promise them tips to produce, promote, and profit from their creations — the description is about THEM, not me.
You want potential subscribers to know what to expect, why they should care, and how subscribing will benefit them.
2. Ask your audience to subscribe.
Don’t assume readers will know you have a newsletter or just “figure it out.”
They won’t.
Be explicit, be obvious, and don’t be shy about asking them to subscribe.
If you’re proud of your newsletter — and you better be or it will never work — then there’s no reason to be hesitant to ask people to check it out.
Feel uncomfortable about it? Then go learn how to get over your fear of self-promotion.
3. Showcase your signup form or call to action.
This seems obvious, but apparently it’s not.
I have conversations with clients all the time who wonder why they don’t get more subscribers and then I look at their website and can’t even find their signup form.
You can’t get someone to subscribe if they don’t see the signup form.
Incorporate your signup forms (and links to them) in places where your audience can’t miss them.
With For The Interested, I plug the newsletter at the bottom of articles on my website and on Medium, in the navigation menu of my site and my Medium publication, and in countless other places.
Make your newsletter impossible to miss.
4. Build trust.
Because so many people and companies abuse the privilege of having access to their audience’s inbox, trust is more important than ever.
People are skeptical when you ask for their email, so the only way to get someone to subscribe to your newsletter is if you first get their trust.
The way to get an audience’s trust is to consistently deliver what you promise, show them you care about them, and provide legitimate value in your interactions.
If you struggle to get your audience to subscribe to your newsletter, it’s often a sign they don’t trust you yet.
5. Create something that aligns with your audience’s interest.
If you make videos about knitting, your audience isn’t going to subscribe to your newsletter about real estate.
The better your newsletter’s content matches the core interests of your audience, the more likely you are to convert them into subscribers.
This means the less defined your niche and the more vague you are about who you aim to reach, the harder it is to attract subscribers.
The better you know your audience and what they value, the better able you are to position your newsletter in a way that compels your audience to invite it into their inbox.
Want more tips to produce, promote, and profit from your creations?
Join the 25,000+ creators who get my For The Interested newsletter. | https://medium.com/an-idea-for-you/how-to-get-more-people-to-subscribe-to-your-newsletter-57007af3f6d7 | ['Josh Spector'] | 2020-01-21 01:24:27.998000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Content Marketing', 'Newsletter', 'Social Media', 'Email Marketing'] |
Feminine Energy | The twinkle in her eye says it all. You think you know her, she smells familiar, floral, clean like linen sheets. Her body language greets you like an old friend. You’ve never met her before now, but she seems to know your every move. You lean toward her and she playfully waits to see how far you’ll come. She is hesitant, an indicator that she may have been injured by a lover’s hands. She allows a hand to dance around her, but not close enough to grasp. Open like the air, but closed like a secret box; We all have our mysteries. She hopes one day you’ll know hers.
She surrounds and intoxicates you now. To be fair, you asked that of her at one point or another. Here she is, unpredictable in her ways. She is beautiful and bold, yet delicate and subtle. She is wonderful and delicious and bitter. Her response is expressive and her words float above the clouds. Her laughter after a joke feels like your cigarette after sex. She celebrates yellow-hued energy that draws you in.
Her existence you’ve fathomed, but have yet to understand. All I ask is that you be gentle, she has been poured into like a glass of water and dumped like yesterday’s trash. She is coveted yet often goes unrecognized. The masculine has not always been so easy on her. Her heart handed back so many times. That twinkle in her eye you saw is a tear morphed to a sparkle. She shines brightest in the dark. | https://medium.com/a-cornered-gurl/feminine-energy-64fba6347e7 | ['Christie Alex Costello'] | 2020-11-02 11:02:36.993000+00:00 | ['Self Love', 'Relationships', 'Love', 'A Cornered Gurl', 'Feminism'] |
The Ugly Truth of Human Behavior | I’m a lover when it comes to humanity. But a blind love is a foolish love, so it’s important to know that humans came with an ugly side:
We are selfish by nature.
Of course you never hear a political candidate saying, “Vote for me so I’ll have power over you,” or a friend telling, “Let me help you so you’ll help me back in the future,” — selfish motives are tucked away on the back of the mind, waiting to make a move whenever needed.
And it’s not limited only to “bad” people after all, this is the game which all people play.
Pieces of evidence from evolutionary psychologists have made it even clearer that we all strive after social status, sexual competition, and try to win others’ minds for power. These are selfish, but in the past, selfishness means survival.
Without further ado, here are the unpleasant — yet crucial — attributes behind our behavior. | https://medium.com/@bandorogunarso/the-ugly-truth-of-human-behavior-ea51f8728509 | ['Bandoro Gunarso'] | 2020-12-29 04:38:03.835000+00:00 | ['Psychology', 'Human Behavior', 'Self-awareness', 'Decision Making', 'Evolutionary Psychology'] |
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