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Monotone | Poetry
Monotone
The Sound of One Note
Photo by Matt Botsford on Unsplash
I should have
Been a singer,
My presence is
Quick with attention.
My writing, my speech,
Everyone mentions the
Way I sound,
Never my words,
My words are just
Utterance of moments,
Like a firefly glowing,
And when crushed, its
Light smeared against the
Concrete,
Resembling chemical waste.
I can’t help that I’m
Well read.
I am an embodiment
Of open water, and I walk
Like the waves.
I’m an open book,
Take my vocal cords,
I’m not a great instrument,
The tuning won’t help,
It’s replacement that will
Suffice, I’m an ungrateful
Mute.
Enne Baker | https://medium.com/scrittura/monotone-143dd2b45d8a | ['Enne Baker'] | 2020-12-31 00:20:02.159000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Poetry', 'Literature', 'Art', 'English'] |
Compaction / Merge of parquet files | Optimising size of parquet files for processing by Hadoop or Spark
The small file problem
One of the challenges in maintaining a performant data lake is to ensure that files are optimally sized for the storage medium.
General rule of thumb being:
Many small files == bad
Small numbers of large files ==better
(…although we can get a bit more scientific on the ideal file size)
Persisting large amounts of small files is a particular issue on HDFS as the namenode takes the strain in memory for tracking every file in the current snapshot.
An example of small files in a single data partition
Small files can often be generated as the result of a streaming process. e.g. If the rate of data received into an application is sub-optimal compared with how frequently the application writes out to storage. It can also be the result of incremental updates into a table partition.
Asides from memory strain, small files also present a major performance hit for read processing as the consumer process will need to spend additional handles for open/closing of many more files than is optimal for reading.
To handle this , it is good practice to run a compaction job on directories that contain many small files to ensure storage blocks are filled efficiently. It is common to do this type of compaction with MapReduce or on Hive tables / partitions and we will walk through a simple example of remediating this issue using Spark.
It is also helpful to not overly partition your data. Shallow and wide is a better strategy for storage of compacted files rather than deep and narrow. | https://medium.com/bigspark/compaction-merge-of-small-parquet-files-bef60847e60b | ['Chris Finlayson'] | 2020-01-29 19:39:27.239000+00:00 | ['Apache Spark', 'Big Data', 'Optimization', 'Apache Hadoop', 'Hdfs'] |
Materialized Views in Amazon Redshift PART1 | Why do we need materialized views in amazon redshift?
In data warehousing, Sometimes you need to query a very large table or the combination of multiple tables like a fact and multiple dim across it for getting the desired aggregated output. These queries are not performative and consume a lot of DB resources.
In BI we use a lot of types of visualization tools like tableau, Quicksight Looker power BI, etc and they have their own caching mechanism but query pattern for each and every dashboard is unique and accessing them each time will trigger the same queries again and again on DB, and caching all these data on a visualization tool server is a bit hard.
(Please note here I am not talking about the data cubes, data extracts which we store on the visualization server but the dashboards which fetch the data directly from the databases. )
To overcome this problem, recently redshift has introduced the support for materialized views so that we can deal with the above scenarios.
Let’s deep dive into Redshift Materialized views.
Materialized views (MV) contains pre-computed results sets. You can create them by issuing a select statement on one or multiple tables in a similar fashion as we create normal views in the databases. But the main difference is that the precomputed results in MVs are not connected with the underlying or base tables.
Let suppose we have a BI dashboard that is slow because every time when user access that particular dashboard it fires quires on DB and uses DB resources.
But we know and can predict the queries behind it as these are repetitive queries, based on those queries we can create MV so that insisted on recalculating everything again in the dashboard. Queries can be pointed to the pre-computed MVs.
Kindly note that we no need to specify the MVs in our queries, redshift does it via AQMVE (Advance Query Materialize View engine)
When redshift gets the query its AQMVE job to predict which MVs have the desired output for that query then it rewrites the query for fetching the data from that MV. If it doesn’t find any MVs for some queries then it goes directly to the tables mentioned in the queries.
Let’s Create the MVs in redshift
I have a table that contains the daily status of all the items which are active and sellable on an online shop.
We want to create a pre-aggregated Mv for our monthly dashboards which use the daily item status table.
CREATE
MATERIALIZED VIEW mv_item_status_monthly
BACKUP YES
DISTSTYLE EVEN
AUTO REFRESH YES
AS
SELECT item_code,
MAX(is_active) is_active,
MAX(is_sellable) is_sellable,
year_month
FROM f_item_status a
INNER JOIN star_analytical.d_calendar b
ON a.period_date = b.date
GROUP BY item_code, year_month;
‘Backup yes’ means this mv is part of a regular or automatic backup of the redshift cluster on S3
You can specify the tableau attributes like diststyle , distkey, and sortkey on MV as they actually store the data like tables.
‘Auto Refresh yes’ Means whenever data is refreshed in the underlying table, MV’s data is updated automatically based on the availability of the resources on the redshift cluster
Dropping an MV is just similar to drop the other objects in DB.
DROP MATERIALIZED VIEW mv_item_status_monthly;
I will cover other operations and what is happing behind MVs in the part of this blog so stay tuned ….! | https://medium.com/@ayushbi/materialized-views-in-amazon-redshift-part1-f3c56b7af9ce | ['Ayush Pareek'] | 2020-12-11 17:10:14.862000+00:00 | ['Redshift', 'Tableau', 'Database', 'Data', 'AWS'] |
Basic Chart of Data Visualization in Tableau | I hope this post can be inspiring and useful, Keep Learning and Improve Skill :) | https://medium.com/@kikicandra2808/basic-chart-of-data-visualization-in-tableau-834db49cafa3 | ['Kiki Candra Mahendra'] | 2020-12-05 02:16:31.188000+00:00 | ['Data Visualization', 'Tableau', 'Business Intelligence', 'Business Analysis', 'Data Analysis'] |
Transition | I absolutely love The Bad Influence, and I also love the challenges these 50-word stories present. Especially since I have no poetic gifts — I have to attempt clever prose.
Who to feature here? God, I love them all. Let’s see . . . well, Jonica Bradley was my inspiration:
Here’s another — perhaps my favorite writer/editor of all, Reuben Salsa (also an opportunity to see the rules for these articles):
I’ll stop with those two because I wanted to say one more important thing. My mind wanders sometimes, and in pops the thought that really, The Bad Influence is actually what Medium should be, and perhaps at times, was in the past. Wouldn’t that be a great spin-off? There are a few other remarkable publications that could join the party. | https://medium.com/the-bad-influence/transition-24deddccf052 | ['Fred Ermlich'] | 2020-12-08 19:12:28.599000+00:00 | ['Microfiction', '50 Words', 'The Bad Influence', 'Transition', 'Thrifty Words Challenge'] |
Trump in Trouble | Image by Jackie Ramirez from Pixabay
This time next week, it might not all be over, but the ingredients will have been assembled, mixed and the cake installed in the oven. Almost all of the votes will be in and most of them counted. Already, over 69 million votes have been cast; more than half the number cast altogether in 2016.
No two-horse race is over until it’s over, but the omens are looking good for Joe Biden.
Paddy Power has Mr. Biden at 5/2 on, his odds hardening from 7/4 on a week ago. President Trump is at 15/8 versus 11/8 a week ago.
FiveThirtyEight (https://fivethirtyeight.com/)(“538”), managed by Nate Silver, is a widely respected website which subjects political prospects and events to statistical analysis. The site bases its presidential election forecast mainly on aggregation of national and individual state opinion poll data with polls being weighted by their quality.
Mr. Silver made his name when he predicted accurately the outcome in every individual state of the 2012 Presidential election. He didn’t do so well in 2016. On election day, 538 projected Hillary Clinton’s prospects of victory at 71.4%
Today, 538 rates Mr. Biden’s chances of victory at 88%. That forecast has inched up steadily from 67% at the beginning of September. This reflects the steady expansion in Mr. Biden’s lead in opinion polls which has averaged around 8–10% nationally through October with the margin a bit tighter in so-called swing states.
There are good reasons for supposing that this year will not be like 2016.
First, Mrs. Clinton’s lead over Mr. Trump in the 538 forecast for 2016 was much more volatile. At the end of July, she was less than 1% in front. Her lead climbed steeply through the first half of August hitting a high point of 89%, slipping back to 55% towards the end of September before rising again to another peak, 88% on 17 October when it began to subside again through to the election on 8 November. Her lead in national opinion polls between mid-October and the election was generally in low to mid single digits.
Second, all the chips fell Mr. Trump’s way in 2016. Mrs. Clinton got almost three million more votes nationwide, a margin of more than 2%; in line with national polls. But she lost narrowly in a cluster of mid-Western states she was expected to win. If an aggregate of less than 50,000 voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had gone to Mrs. Clinton instead of Mr. Trump, she would have won. Because these states were presumed to be safely in the Democrats’ camp, public polling of them was comparatively light and of limited quality with a margin of error of around 5%. 538 projected a Democrat margin of victory of 3–5% across these states. Trump won all three by less than 1 %.
This time, the polling in these states is more frequent and more careful. But only time will tell if fighting the last war better is the right way to fight today’s one. For now though, the indications are that President Trump will not win any state he did not win in 2016 and will lose enough of the ones he won then to lose the election.
Scepticism towards polls as a guide to the outcome is heavily influenced by 2016. Because they allegedly got things “totally wrong” then, polls should be disregarded as an amusing diversion rather than regarded as a reliable indicator. But polls operate within a margin of error, normally around 3%. The national result was well within the margin. The outcome in those key states was 2–3% outside it. So, though polls were certainly not 100% accurate, they were far from totally wrong either.
The polls’ underestimate of Mr. Trump’s performance in 2016 has given rise to the legend of “shy Trumpers”, voters committed to the President but reluctant to reveal this to pollsters or anxious to mislead them. Well, by now, we have all seen a lot of Trump voters on our television screens and very few of them look like shrinking violets. But, if they did feel under pressure to stay silent in 2016, vindicated by the result then, they are under no such pressure now and pollsters are smarter in digging out voters’ true preferences, if not perfect.
We should remember too that 2016 was an outlier in the degree to which the polls got the winner wrong. The last genuine shock result in a presidential election was in 1948 because, since then, results have been broadly in line with polls’ projections. That suggests that polls this time should be more respected (cautiously) than suspected.
The argument about whether Mr. Trump deserves to win is already well tilled ground.
More interesting is why he seems likely to lose, because incumbent Presidents are re-elected more often than they are defeated. During the past 100 years, only 3 sitting Presidents have sought and failed to win re-election having completed a full first term: Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter and George HW Bush.
By contrast, 7 incumbents have won a second term: Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama. Roosevelt won 4 elections, so is an exceptional case. Of the other 6, only one, Ronald Reagan, was succeeded by the candidate of his own party. That is relevant to the assessment of 2016. Hillary Clinton was seeking a third successive Democrat term.
The main reason why Mr. Trump seems to be in trouble is that he has never reached out beyond his committed base, voters likely to stick with him through thick and thin, reckoned to be between 35–40% of the electorate;. On the night of his election in 2016, borrowing from Abraham Lincoln, Mr. Trump said: “Now is the time for America to bind the wounds of division… I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans and this is so important to me.” As a statement of fact rather than criticism, never in his term did he make any serious, sustained effort to give effect to that professed desire.
Instead, Mr. Trump has focused solely on reinforcing the affiliation of those already loyal to him rather than attempting to expand their numbers. Indeed, he built an exclusionary wall around his base with an “If you are not with me, you are against me” message to Americans generally.
That might make sense if his base alone guaranteed a majority in enough states to deliver an electoral college majority again in 2020. Warning lights throughout his term suggested that this was not going to be easy. Within a month of taking office, the President’s disapproval rating rose above 50% where it has stubbornly remained except for a few days in April this year during the early stages of the pandemic. The nationwide mid-term elections for the House of Representatives in 2018 saw a 5% swing to the Democrats on a much higher poll than in 2014.
A second reason why Mr. Trump is in difficulty is that he is just not very good at the job. That conclusion would have been hard to draw definitively from his first three years of office from which his supporters could point to as many achievements in the sense of delivery on his agenda as his detractors could point to shortcomings even on delivering that agenda. “Patchy, but not awful” would be a fair non-partisan summary.
But, for those three years, Mr. Trump was the equivalent of Napoleon’s lucky general. He was presented with no serious crisis where he had no option but to deal with it and for which there was no pre-existing playbook.
The arrival of COVID-19 changed all that. Rather than confronting it with even moderate deliberation and competence, Mr. Trump’s “policy” has been largely one of hoping that it would just go away and leave him alone. Mr. Trump could claim fairly that very few Western governments have been stunningly successful in grappling with COVID-19 but at least they tried and, in doing so, gave the impression of concern for the safety of their citizens. Mr. Trump never hit that bar — and it’s no surprise. His business record has always been patchy too; a yo-yo of ups and downs, trophies and bankruptcies, his wealth almost certainly less than he claims.
The third reason why Mr. Trump is in trouble is that 2020 is not a rerun of 2016.
Joe Biden is not Hillary Clinton. The 2016 election was as much about which of two highly unpopular candidates was less disliked by voters as which of them was more favoured. Today, the President’s net unfavourability rating is around 12%. Mr. Biden’s is less than 2%. Mr. Biden may not be widely loved, but he is not widely hated either. He leaves “room” for the admittedly small cluster of independent and uncommitted voters to opt for him in a way that the President does not. The light imprint of Mr. Biden’s personality has facilitated the presentation of this election as a referendum on the incumbent. The President’s own manifest corruption has hobbled his attempts to affix that label to Mr. Biden. If Joe really is sleepy, it is unlikely that he is crooked.
Mr. Trump no longer has novelty value. The media gave him plenty of free, open air time in 2016 precisely for that reason. Now, they are more challenging. For voters, he is no longer a clean sheet, but has a 4-year record that may be good in parts, but is also smudgy. It is harder for him to project himself as the anti-establishment, anti-elite, swamp draining, non-politician jousting with the antithesis of all that.
While Mr. Trump’s blowhard “in your face” personality may encourage core supporters to go to the wall for him, some support went his way in 2016 despite misgivings about that personality. His lies and bloviating were overlooked as electioneering tactics to be put aside and a more conventional game face of solemnity and seriousness donned once he made it to the White House. It never happened.
Indeed, one of the most remarkable things about Donald Trump is just how unadaptive he has been.
Faced with a choice at any point between adjusting his sails and tightening them more firmly in place, he doubles down rather than reaches out. For example, following the killing of George Floyd, it must surely have been possible to craft a stance that would have been simultaneously respectful of the police but also of the need for reform, rather than bunkering down to a strict “either or” position.
Tactically, in the campaign itself, he has made choices that cut off his nose rather than embellish his face: his aggression during the first debate, his refusal to participate in what was to be the second scheduled debate, his unilateral drawing down the shutters on negotiations with Congress over a second stimulus package. Only in the actual second debate did he rein himself in.
I suspect that this syndrome reflects the bubble of wealth and privilege within which Mr. Trump grew up and has lived his adult life. He has never had to adapt much to those around him in his personal life or to a changing America beyond his threshold.
The great America which Mr. Trump would like to see — again — is the late 1950s, presided over by the genial Republican, Dwight Eisenhower, when the country was broadly at peace and the steady, effortless advance of prosperity and progress engendered widespread contentment. The United States was, “top nation” worldwide, its hegemony driven by a military and industrial infrastructure far ahead of anything elsewhere. It is the America of Mad Men where men were hunters and decision-makers, women were home-makers and demure — who stood by their man even if he didn’t always stand by them. The country was predominantly ethnically European. White fellows ran things and black folks were waiters and elevator operators. Cops were maybe “rough and ready” but fundamentally “straight”.
That picture postcard Pleasantville continues to recede in the rear view mirror. We should know this week whether there are still enough Americans in the right places who think America is or should be as the President might see it to keep him in office.
There is a lot of post-hoc rationalisation about 2016. Mr. Trump eked out a narrow victory against conventional expectation and apparent odds. You pay your money and you take your choice about how much of that was down to dumb luck or sheer brilliance. Lightning doesn’t often strike twice so, if the President wins on Tuesday, I will reluctantly concede that it was all brilliance, even if it that brilliance is revealed only in arrival at the desired destination rather than being apparent through the journey. Otherwise, I will be pleased and relieved that he has lost and that his perceived brilliance was more imaginary than real.
But here’s a thought. Even if President Trump loses this election, by the time the 2024 election rolls around, he will be only five months older than Joe Biden is today. Given his insatiable ego and vice-like grip over the party now, can anyone be sure that he will not seek the Republican nomination in 2024 with a good shot at winning it and the election to follow? | https://medium.com/thehighhorse/trump-in-trouble-73a8ff74dffe | ["Daire O'Criodain"] | 2020-10-28 10:54:06.173000+00:00 | ['Hillary Clinton', 'Donald Trump', 'Joe Biden', 'Nate Silver'] |
5 Scientifically Proven Methods to Increase Productivity at Work | We have all heard of the old aphorism “time is money”, which first appeared in an essay written by Benjamin Franklin in 1748. Although he came up with this iconic quote over 270 years ago, it still holds true today. We attempt to make the most of our time, because we know it will cost us if we don’t. Of course, this statement is particularly true in a business context. Every company wants to work as productively as possible by using the available resources effectively to achieve the desired results fast.
If you are looking for ways to improve productivity in your company, continue reading to find out what workplace productivity really means, how it can be calculated (and why it should be) and what measures can be utilised to drastically improve the level of productivity in your business, no matter the size.
What is Labor Productivity?
Labor productivity is an economic figure that expresses the average work performance of employees in a certain period of time. More precisely, it shows the relationship between the work input and the outcome. Work productivity can be calculated and is commonly used in controlling as well as in personnel and production planning.
How to Calculate Labor Productivity
The following equation can be used to calculate productivity:
Labor productivity = output / input.
Different values can be defined as input: the number of completed orders, the number of employees, working hours, the production quantity or the sales revenue in monetary value. What matters here is that the work results are measurable. Output, on the other hand, can be figures such as added value or sales volume.
For monitoring purposes and continuous improvement of labor productivity, you should conduct this calculation at regular intervals, for example monthly or biannually.
Practical Example for Calculating Productivity
An electric car manufacturer with 10.000 employees produced 100.000 cars last year. Thus, the labor productivity is calculated as follows:
Labor productivity = unit quantity (output) / number of employees (input) = 100.000 cars / 10.000 employees = 10 cars per employee.
Why You Should Calculate the Productivity Level of Your Company
Like almost every other key figure, labor productivity is particularly interesting for comparing your business to others. If your productivity is significantly lower than that of your competitors, this could be a sign that you need to implement changes within your company. However, you should only compare yourself with businesses that are structured or set up in a similar way to yours, otherwise, the result of comparing productivity levels will meaningless.
However, more important than benchmarking is determining whether the labor productivity in your company is developing positively or negatively. By regularly calculating it, you can assess how certain measures affect your business, for example, whether investments in automating processes or more flexible working hours increase the productivity of your employees.
Ways to Increase Workforce Productivity
If you have calculated the labor productivity in your company and come to the conclusion that there is room for improvement, you can develop suitable measures to increase efficiency. To help you to get the most out of your employees and ensure that their productivity is kept to a maximum, I have compiled a list of five scientifically proven ways that will help you do just that.
Remember, heightened productivity is achieved by consistently utilising improvement measures over a long period of time.
Provide Incentives
Higher productivity of employees can be achieved by creating material and psychological incentives for them. Providing lunch at work is a good example of a productivity-boosting measure, as it saves employees countless hours that would normally be spent looking for suitable lunch options while providing nutrients needed for growth, energy and keeping the immune system healthy at the same time.
According to a recent study, free food at work increases the job satisfaction by 67%.
Our online canteen Bella&Bona provides office workers with a variety of healthy and nutritional dishes to choose from, including vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free options. We cook every meal ourselves and deliver it directly to the office. This saves employees time and effort and ensures that they have a convenient lunch experience every day. If you are interested in offering our service as a productivity-boosting benefit, visit the Bella&Bona website for more information or contact us here.
Food benefits have many positive impacts on both the employee as well as the company. Like any other benefit, providing food at work makes staff members feel more appreciative of their employer. However, food benefits also have a direct impact on the physical wellbeing and performance of employees, including fewer sick days and higher productivity. We at Bella&Bona know that what we eat is central to our health. Since we value the health of our customers immensely, our daily lunches are always prepared with high quality, natural ingredients that are filled with nutrients and fresh greens. We are not the only company providing this type of service by the way, here are some alternatives:
2. Offer Flexible Working Hours
Workers want maximum flexibility.
According to Gallup, almost half of the people looking for a new occupation think that flexibility is the most important factor when it comes to job searching.
Providing a flexible work environment does not just make employees happy, it has also been proven to increase productivity. A study conducted in a Fortune 500 company revealed that workers who were placed on a flexibility program were happier at work and less prone to burnout and psychological stress than their coworkers who were not part of the program. They also showed lower absenteeism, worked longer hours and attained better results.
Workplace flexibility includes:
compressed workweeks such as working 40 hours over four days instead of five
remote work opportunities known as work-from-anywhere arrangements
allowing employees to work hours that differ from the normal company start and stop time.
3. Reduce Smartphone Distractions
Social media and email alerts can be a huge productivity killer, as it takes people over a minute (64 seconds, to be exact) to recover from being interrupted by a notification. However, having a no-phone policy is not practical and will most likely not be followed by employees. Instead, try to encourage workers to turn off their personal phones but take regular breaks during which they are free to check their mobiles. This will ensure that the time spent at their desk is more productive.
Images like the one above can be put up around the office to remind employees why they should stay off their phones.
4. Set SMART Goals
Helping employees set and reach goals is a critical part of every manager’s job. Employees want to see how their work contributes to larger corporate objectives and setting the right targets makes this connection explicit for them. When done correctly, setting realistic goals can help improve employee engagement which in turn elevates their performance and benefits the company as a whole, according to recent McKinsey research. Coming up with SMART goals has been proven to boost productivity in many businesses. Here is a quick reminder of what they entail:
Specific: The goal is direct, detailed and meaningful.
Measurable: The goal is quantifiable to track progress and success.
Attainable: You have the resources to attain said goal; it’s realistic.
Relevant: The goal aligns with your company’s mission.
Time-Based: You set a realistic deadline for all tasks.
5. Automate Processes
Particularly for small companies, investing in industry-specific technologies can dramatically improve productivity levels. For instance, smart inventory control systems keep inventory levels low and reduce stock-holding costs. By using effective software or automating processes you relieve your employees, who can thereby concentrate on important manual tasks.
Different businesses require different types of technology, so it is worth to keep track of developments in your industry. Networking through trade shows or online seminars can be beneficial, as software suppliers often make their products available to attendees. You can also research what systems and platforms your competitors are using to narrow your search for industry-specific solutions. | https://medium.com/@bellabona/5-scientifically-proven-methods-to-increase-productivity-at-work-17f15dd0af1 | ['Bella Bona'] | 2020-12-17 06:52:17.488000+00:00 | ['Employees', 'HR', 'Productivity', 'Employee Benefits', 'Human Resources'] |
How to Earn Online | job-Pak | How to Earn Online | job-Pak
Introduction:
Are you are looking for online earning and want to know How to earn online? The easiest way to learn little skills and sell your skill on the international market. Fiverr is the most popular portal for new entrants to earn online. There are many other online portals to earn online such as Guru, Upwork, and People per Hour. Worksome and Writerbay. These all portal can provide you according to skills and speciation. Some portals charge for the bidding process and others are free for the bidding process.
Let’s move toward our core topic How to earn online? Before talking to earn online you must have knowledge of online portal and in this articles, we will discuss Fiverr, and later on, we will discuss some other online portal such as Upwork, People Per Hour, and Guru. For new entrants, it is advisable that make your first profile on Fiver to obtain a little experience with online earning.
For reading the complete article Click: https://job-pak.com/2020/10/25/how-to-earn-online-job-pak/ | https://medium.com/@job-pak2/how-to-earn-online-job-pak-2325deab0673 | ['Mohsin Hassan'] | 2020-12-07 20:20:34.374000+00:00 | ['Online Jobs In Pakistan', 'Job Hunting', 'Job Search', 'Jobs In Pakistan'] |
CPAC — Christians Persecuted Anglo Cult | CPAC — the far far far far right wing festival of white hypocrites, a contemptuous, vicious, miserable our shit don’t stink show.
Ted Cruz was there, of course. He and his bro-beard are the face of CPAC. It’s the only time he ever feels loved because everybody there is just as conniving, shallow, two faced and hateful as he is. He made a joke. He said he hopes PETA supports Republicans now that Democrats want to kill all the cows. Thank you, thank you very much. You’ve been a great audience. Don’t forget to tip the NRA on your way out.
Guns! Guns! Guns! Guns!
Devin Nunes spoke. He wore a Trump tie so long it tickled his very small balls.
The crowd chanted “Build the wall, build the wall, build the wall!” like sports fans do the wave. CPAC set out giant cardboard bricks with their logo on them so attendants could play with them and stack them into walls.
Apparently Democrats are so anti-baby that they yell at their doctors to kill their babies right after they’re born and if they won’t do it then they take them home and kill them themselves. Don Junior and Jerry Falwell Jr are experts on the subject.
Jerry Jr’s wife said that Democrats will start killing their elderly parents now that they kill their own children.
Abortion! Abortion! Abortion! Abortion! Abortion!
Fox News talking head, Michelle Malkin, mocked transgender people. She said she identifies as an American and her “pronouns are U-S-A.” She ranted about immigration too, and slammed “The ghost of John McCain.”
USA! USA! USA! USA!
Fox News investigative reporter, Sara Carter, talked about deadly Skittles parties where kids are invited to a party and asked to help themselves to a variety of multi colored pills in a punch bowl. The ones who get the contraband Xanax smuggled in by illegal immigrants die immediately (emphasis on contraband — prescription big pharma Xanax is OK.) She’s seen so many dead kids that morgues have had to rent freezer trailers to store the overflow. None of that would be happening if it weren’t for the drug cartels.
Drug cartels! Drug cartels! Drug cartels! Drug cartels!
The immigrants are coming for your children! Don’t eat the Skittles! They’re not prescribed!
Sebastian Gorka told the crowd, “They want to take away your pick up trucks, they want to rebuild your home, they want to take away your hamburgers. This is what Stalin dreamed about but never achieved!”
Socialism! Socialism! Socialism! Socialism! Socialism!
Mike Pence basked in his own insincere rehearsed glory (next year I’ll be president…..) and rang the socialism bell saying that we’re going to end up just like Venezuela.
Space Force! Space Force! Space Force! Space Force!
Republican hypocrite fun fact: Every single speaker and attendant at CPAC is a hypocrite. Every. Single. One.
While the parade of fools marched on, the Democrats were fast at work, preparing for new testimony, gathering documents, fighting Trump, and writing and voting on new legislation. Chairman Elijah Cummings of the House Oversight Committee warned the White House that they better give their voluntary cooperation on security clearances or else.
Meanwhile, the former Republican governor of Maine, Paul LePage, said that if we eliminated the electoral college whites would become the forgotten people, Trump’s prototype walls were knocked down in San Diego, and a gun nut in Indiana accidentally shot himself in the balls after this gun slipped out of his waistband.
USA! USA! USA! USA!
Support the Daily Crime Report on Patreon!
The Daily Crime Reports are being published as “quarterly reports” (three month groups) as part of “The Treason Chronicles” on Amazon for Kindle. To purchase one or more quarters, click here. | https://medium.com/@spikedolomite/cpac-christians-persecuted-anglo-cult-864dbed7851 | ['Spike Dolomite'] | 2019-03-02 14:32:43.645000+00:00 | ['Trump Cult', 'Right Wing', 'Republicans', 'Cpac', 'Politics'] |
Discover the hidden treasures of India | Tale of Chitrakote Falls in Chhattisgarh
Rowing boating take you closer to Chitakote falls
This was my second visit to the state of Chhattisgarh. Part of long project we were working on for the state government. I was to spearhead the project and in six months tell beautiful success stories of the work that the governement has done there. Commissioned project to tell 1000 stories in all formats.
Being an explororer soul I was the happinest to take this upon myself, there was no though or worry about how can so many stories be churned out in so little time, that too from a state which is infamous for it’s red corridors (Naxal belt). But my job was to change that perception and show people that the state was on its recovery jounery and many developemental activities are being taken up by the then ruling BJP governemnt.
This time I was accompanied by my favourite colleague Manoj, who happens to be a video journalist. And after a day in Raipur, we were to take off to Dantewada district by road. We started early morning, as travelling post sunset through the forest route was not a good idea. We were accompanied by two friendly governemnt consultants, who would help us with local connects and also help us get interviews with local beurocrats.
We set off in an Innova, I had preconcieved notions about how this state would pan out, was open to exploring the state. Our first stop was Bastar, here we met a few local government volunteers, who would later help us with regional stories. One of the consultants, who was travelling with us kept reminding us that, we need to hurry up otherwise we will miss going to Chitrakote Falls. My mind was focussed on my work and I had seen many beautiful falls in South India and had no great expectations, so missing this would not mean a great lose.
The driver was also a little cautious and informed us that Chitrakote is out of the way and that would delay our journey. But this gentleman was insistent that, if you are in Bastar you cannot miss Chitrakote.
Oh man was he right or what. We finally reached Chitrakote at around 3.30pm. I could see no falls or hear any sound. We parked and I was dead tired by then. We had to walk about half a kilometer and then climb down a rocky hill to get to the elusive Chitrakote. I was tired and a bit hungry, we climbed down and there it was in all its glory, I could not belive my eyes, I was so grateful to our friend for getting us there.
Chitrakote is one of India’s hidden tourism treasures. Located in Bastar district of Chhattisgarh, about 5.5 hour drive from the capital city Raipur. It is a natural waterfall on Indravati River.
Chhaattisgharh has many such hidden treasures but this tops the list, I would recommend you plan well before heading there, as there are not many hotels or restaurants. For that matter anywhere in Chhattisgarh. Getting tips from locals or people who have travelled to teh state is advisable. This state is beautiful in everyway, travel there to know yourself. You can also write to me if you need any help or connections. I have travelled extensively for this project and would be happy to help. | https://medium.com/@dolasamanta/discover-the-hidden-treasures-of-india-690667080676 | ['Dola Samanta'] | 2020-10-09 03:21:13.932000+00:00 | ['Travel Writing', 'Travel', 'India', 'Travel Stories'] |
Connected Buildings — The Next Disruption | These days technology is engrossed in our lives to such an extent that without it we feel helpless. Smart technologies have infested human interventions. Artificial intelligence, Robotics, Blockchain / Smart Contracts, AR / VR, UAV / Drones, Agri-tech, Nanotechnology are disrupting the entire world. Technology is driving our daily lives.
Welcome to the new world where technological innovation is touching lives, and perhaps this is an era which is going to change the world entirely but can our buildings are smarter or can it be smarter?
Connected Building is a smarter way of building management in which building system are integrated through advanced technology such as IoT (Internet of Things ) to monitor and control the building. The seamless connection between different platforms enables system-wide decision making, execution, and optimisation. Modern buildings are complex structures with multiple systems controlling lighting, heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), waste disposal, and security controlled by a single operating system.
System integration within smart buildings also increase sustainability, safety, and productivity, while improving the quality of life for those who work and live inside their walls.
Take an example of a light bulb / Smart bulb or a temperature sensor can connect to the Internet, the market has unleashed a plethora of devices which are much cheaper than its predecessors, and you can monitor what’s happening inside the building through data analysis and mind you these are immensely easier to procure and deploy. Connected building is cultivating the smart building technologies.
In today’s connected world not only can connecting buildings improve energy cost efficiency, but they increase the productivity of operational functions by eliminating recurring work that kills ample amount of time in a day. With Connected Buildings, teams can troubleshoot problems via their web browser instead of always needing to go on-site. Managers no longer have to compile multiple excel spreadsheets to know what is happening inside their building. Architecture and construction teams can use data to size new energy systems without needing to make wild assumptions. These team productivity enhancements are ultimately where the real monetary savings lie.
CONNECTED BUILDINGS DRIVE SMART EFFICIENCY IN THREE CORE AREAS
Connected Buildings power three key systems, which all work together to create opportunities for efficiency. The first is peoplebased efficiency, wherein people connect with the buildings they occupy on a daily basis. Connected Buildings connects operations, finance, and sustainability teams to the building technologies and workforce they rely on every day, empowering them in building management, planning, and tenant engagement. Second is technology-based efficiency, which happens when buildings bring new devices online that use less energy to power themselves. The third is system-based efficiency, which is attained when buildings connect systems within themselves and connect to other buildings. Systems can work together to change their behavior based on what systems around them are doing. Furthermore, newly attainable system-level trends which were previously impossible to ascertain become visible.
CONNECTED BUILDINGS WILL TRANSFORM THE ANATOMY OF AN OPERATIONS TEAM
The advent of easily accessible building data will transform the primary roles within the building operations team. The emergence of datadriven building operations positions seems inevitable, as someone will need to analyze the data and create meaningful strategies based on it. Armed with real-time information, building managers will spend less time out in the field putting out fires, and more time preparing proactive strategies for contingencies. The potential for decreasing the size of on-site maintenance teams is also real, as maintenance programs can be centralized, and workers will become dispatched to problem sites only as needed. For example, one Lucid client views daily energy reports on their browser in the mornings, and sends maintenance staff out only when abnormalities are apparent.
CONNECTED BUILDINGS WILL MAKE OPERATIONS TEAMS CRUCIAL TO THE SUCCESS OF THEIR ORGANIZATION
Building and facilities teams are already critical to an organization’s success, but executives may not recognize the direct impact they have on the bottom line. Connected Buildings will allow building managers to actually demonstrate their value with data. If given enough executive buy-in, building managers using data can make operational roles within companies very strategic, with defined energy savings goals that are newly attainable. Combined with the ability to cut down on maintenance staff through increased productivity, operational teams will be able to contribute to margin by effectively decreasing a company’s operational costs
This is indeed a true disruption as through connected building data become accessible and actionable. Via different devices, you can collect the data to analyze, monitor and decision making. This is indeed a radical way to transform the entire gamut of building management system.
It is just the beginning. This would keep evolving with my blogs.
#SmartBuilding #ComputerVision #FacialRecognition #HomeAutomation #IoT #HVAC #ArtificialIntelligence | https://medium.com/@aditya-patro/connected-buildings-the-next-disruption-9d91ae289a43 | ['Aditya Ranjan Patro'] | 2019-03-13 17:03:11.314000+00:00 | ['Connected Home', 'Connected Technology', 'Connected Devices', 'Internet of Things'] |
Business Life Cycle — 7 Stages and Importance | An independent business is perhaps the dream of many budding entrepreneurs around the globe. By definition, business is the activity of making money by producing or trade of products and even services. A business does not necessarily refer to a company or corporation. It need not have a formal organization or be a part of the corporate world. It can range from a street peddler to a multinational company.
However, broad the spectrum of the scope is all the business pass through more or less the same phases or stages. The prospect of starting and running one’s own business is exciting. Days have come where you can start a business as a teenager. Still, it is important to realize the life cycle of any business to manage the proper functioning.
Types of Businesses:
Sole proprietorship
A one-man business in which the business is owned and operated by an individual, who may hire employees from time to time.
Partnership
A collaboration between two people or companies to start and run a combined business, where each partner receives a certain share of the profit.
Corporation
Though a single person may incept it, the ownership of the business is shared amongst the shareholders who invest in the business. The shareholders then set up a hierarchical business enterprise consisting of various levels of employees managed by a board of directors. However, decision-making is often limited to the single creator of the business concept.
Co-operation
Similar to the corporation, but it involves a group of people with decision-making abilities, who are members and not shareholders. Aimed at economic democracy.
Franchise
A smaller business in which the owner buys the rights to run a business from a parent corporation. Hence, franchises are part of a bigger business, but have the freedom to run their part of the business however they want, but with the permission of the parent company.
Stages
Stage 1: Planning and mapping
Foresight is an important trait in businessmen. The business market is usually an unstable tide, hence being able to plan well in advance about anything and everything, along with the provision of making last-minute alterations is what can keep a business running despite the ups and downs of sales and profit.
Hence, the first step is to study and analyze the scale and scope of the business. Things to consider:
The scope and coverage of your business- in terms of the product or service offered.
The monetary investment you will be capable of arranging.
The work-force required to carry out the required production, execution, or sale
The quantity or quality of the business, that is, which of the above-mentioned category will your business fit into.
Management strategies and work execution
The planning and procuring for a business involves getting the required investment, obtaining legal rights to run the business, recruiting the team of employees, and finding an appropriate set-up to run the business. Another important thing is to map all the possible future scenarios and come up with solutions prior to handle a crisis or loss.
Stage 2: Launch
The first few months or years are the toughest period for a start-up. Despite deliberate planning, a business can flop if the launch and the subsequent preliminary functioning is not right. One should be prepared and actively deal with the diversities that occur when starting a new business.
During the launch phase, the sales are low, and the business may even face losses before the scene can get better. Hence, stocking up enough supplies to get through the launch phase, until the business is somewhat established, is extremely crucial.
Stage 3: Growth
Procuring customers and clients and stepping up the job count is an important part of the growth phase. The lifecycle of most of the business spans the growth phase over the years. In fact, there is never a stagnancy in business; it has the scope to keep growing, provided the necessary materials are available. The growth stage sees the business bloom in terms of profit, job scope, client profile, and public reach. In fact, a successful business is one that statistically shows a 121% profit from what it gained in the launch stage.
Stage 4: Survival and sustenance
Many businesses grow at a rapid rate, seeing tremendous profit and success for a while, but their decline is equally quick. Sustenance is important for a good business. Maintaining the profit percentage, clients count, and job scope, if not an increase, is necessary to run a long-term business.
The problem with frequent fluctuation is that the monetary graph is too steep to make an actual significant gain at the end of the day. All the profit obtained during the peak time is used up in covering the loss during the low phase.
Hence, maintaining a stable business is much better than a hundred jobs at once and then no jobs for a period.
This can be achieved by:
Supervising the management of business
Frequent analysis of the functioning and the income table
Making timely revisions in sales, production, and marketing methodologies.
Evaluating employees performance on a regular basis
Being aware of the changes in the market and the evolution of business supporting technologies, government schemes, and public notions.
“Being aware”- of your business’s performance, of the market situation, of the scenario ahead of you, “being aware” is most essential for running a stable business.
Stage 5: Expansion
Over a period of years, when your business has been very well established and has been making decent or even tremendous profit, with no significant decline in sales, production, or income, it can be an opportunity to think of expanding the forum. This stage is completely optional, though. However, most entrepreneurs are groomed that way, to always try to improve and expand! Hence, it is important to identify the right time to start the phase of expansion. Too early and you might incur loose, too late, and you may not have enough resources to do so. Therefore, the right time is when
Your business is doing pretty well
You have cleanly charted out new ideas and work-plan
The market is conducive; monetary support is sufficient
Probably the competitors are experiencing lose
Or simply when you get the chance to do something bigger, better, or greater.
In fact, expansion can also begin when you notice a stagnancy in your business for over 5 years, with no decline, but saturated gain.
Stage 6: Maturity
Perhaps the most disheartening part of a business lifecycle is the maturity. When you have squeezed out the entire potential of your business when there is perhaps nothing new left to do with the business profile when the business incurs no new clients. It does not mean that the business is facing lose or joblessness, it simply means that the entire scope of the business has been tried and tested. However, most businesses do not even reach this phase; this phase is indefinite, some businesses may face it within a few years, and some businesses may still be a long away from this stage despite running for over 50 years. It is more of a hypothetical concept, where there is no growth, but no decline either.
Stage 7: Pack up
Many businesses skip the previous stage and directly land onto this final phase, where the business has incurred enough lose to lead to its close. When the financial debt is overhead, the workforce is thin, and the sale is bare. This is the realization that the business has outgrown its lifecycle and its time to wrap up.
Conclusion
Hence, these were 7 stages of a business’s life cycle. So if you are planning to start your own venture, make sure that you plan according to the stages mentioned above.
Originally posted at RuhaniRabin.com
Click here if you would like to write at RuhaniRabin.com | https://medium.com/@ruhanirabin/business-life-cycle-7-stages-and-importance-1b534e8d1652 | ['Ruhani Rabin'] | 2019-11-15 03:03:12.910000+00:00 | ['Startups', 'Business'] |
NLP: Text Processing In Data Science Projects | NLP: Text Processing In Data Science Projects
Learn The Data Science Techniques To Process Text To Use For NLP Projects In Python
Once we have gathered the text, the next stage is about cleaning and consolidating the text. It is important to ensure the text is standardised, the noise is removed so that efficient analysis can be performed on the text to derive meaningful insights.
It’s important to note that the cleaning and processing of text is highly dependent on the nature of the NLP project. As an instance for your project, numbers might be important.
This article aims to explain the steps we can perform to clean the text for NLP projects.
Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash
Article Aim
I will explain following key techniques:
Convert Text To Lowercase Tokenise Paragraphs To Sentences Tokenise Sentences To Words Remove Numbers Remove Punctuation Remove Stop words Remove Whitespaces
I will demonstrate how we can achieve the goal by using the NLTK library in Python and the regular expressions. We can install NLTK library using:
pip install nltk
The first task is to normalise the paragraphs of text.
1. Convert Text To Lowercase
The key concept here is to reduce the number of words, in particular if they are same. We can change the casing of the words to ensure every word is in lowercase.
As an instance, “Article” and “article” can be represented as “article”. We can use the lowercase() function of Python to change the casing of the text.
text = 'This is an NLP article of FinTechExplained' lower_case_text = lowercase(text)
print(lower_case_text) #This will print:
#this is an nlp article of fintechexplained
The text we extract from the sources such as documents, are usually represented as groups of sentences (paragraphs).
The next task is to break the paragraphs into sentences.
2. Tokenise Paragraphs To Sentences
I highly recommend the NLTK library in Python to perform tokenisation. We can use PunktSentenceTokenize. It is a pre-trained model of the NLTK library that can perform sentence-level tokenising by determining punctuation and character marking the end of sentence.
import nltk
from nltk.tokenize import sent_tokenize text = 'FinTechExplained aims to explain how text processing works. Once we have gathered the text, the next stage is about cleaning and consolidating the text. It is important to ensure the text is standardised and the noise is removed so that efficient analysis can be performed on the text to derive meaningful insights.' list = sent_tokenize(text)
print(list) #----output---- [
'FinTechExplained aims to explain how text processing works.',
'Once we have gathered the text, the next stage is about cleaning and consolidating the text.',
'It is important to ensure the text is standardised and the noise is removed so that efficient analysis can be performed on the text to derive meaningful insights.'
]
We can see from the code snippet above that the paragraph has been tokenised into sentences.
NLTK supports punctuation and sentence endings for 17 European languages.
Once we have a list of sentences, we need to break the sentences into words.
3. Tokenise Sentences To Words
We can use the TreebankWordTokenizer class of the NLTK library in Python to tokenise the sentences into words.
from nltk.tokenize import TreebankWordTokenizer
tokenizer = TreebankWordTokenizer() text = 'FinTechExplained aims to explain how text processing works. Once we have gathered the text, the next stage is about cleaning and consolidating the text. It is important to ensure the text is standardised and the noise is removed so that efficient analysis can be performed on the text to derive meaningful insights.' print(tokenizer.tokenize(text))
#This will tokenise the sentences into words 'FinTechExplained', 'aims', 'to', 'explain', 'how', 'text', 'processing', 'works', '.', 'Once', 'we', 'have', 'gathered', 'the', 'text', ',' 'the', 'next', 'stage', 'is', 'about', 'cleaning', 'and', 'consolidating', 'the', 'text', '.', 'It', 'is', 'important', 'to', 'ensure', 'the', 'text', 'is', 'standardised', 'and', 'the', 'noise', 'is', 'removed', 'so', 'that', 'efficient', 'analysis', 'can', 'be', 'performed', 'on', 'the', 'text', 'to', 'derive', 'meaningful', 'insights', '.'
Photo by Clément H on Unsplash
If you want to read on how to gather the text from various sources for your NLP project then read:
The next task is to remove the numbers of the text
4. Remove Numbers
This is highly dependent on the project. One of the common tasks is to remove the numbers from the text as numbers are not usually important to text analytics.
We can use the Regular Expression to achieve the goal:
import re
result = re.sub(r'\d+', '', '909FinTechExplained9876')
print(result) # 'FinTechExplained'
Next remove all of the punctuation
5. Remove Punctuation
We also need to remove the punctuation from the text.
import string punctuation = string.punctuation
words = ['You','Are','Reading','FinTechExplained', '!', 'NLP', '.'] clean_words = [w for w in words if w not in punctuation] #it will return
clean_words = ['You','Are','Reading','FinTechExplained', 'NLP']
We can then do a “ “.join(clean_words) to return a clean sentence (if required).
Remove the noise that stop words are adding
6. Remove Stop words
There are many stop words in English as an instance “a”, “an”, “the”, “and”, “but”, “if”, “or”, “because” are some of the common English stop words.
We can remove the stop words by using the NLTK library:
from nltk.corpus import stopwords text = 'FinTechExplained is an important publication'
words = nltk.word_tokenize(text)
stopwords = stopwords.words('english') clean = [w for w in words if w not in stopwords] print(clean)
#This will return an array where stopwords have been removed.
#'FinTechExplained' , 'important', 'publication'
Finally remove the whitespaces
7. Remove Whitespaces
Lastly, I want to demonstrate how we can remove whitespaces such as space, tab, carriage return, line feeds.
We can use the split() along with join() function of the Python programming language. It returns a list of the words in the string.
’’.join(FinTechExplained Is A Publication.
This is about NLP’.split()) #This will return
'FinTechExplained Is A Publication. This is about NLP'
Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash
Summary
This article explained how we can clean the text once we have gathered the text for our NLP project.
It explained following key techniques:
Convert Text To Lowercase Tokenise Paragraphs To Sentences Tokenise Sentences To Words Remove Numbers Remove Punctuation Remove Stop words Remove Whitespaces
Hope it helps. | https://medium.com/fintechexplained/nlp-text-processing-in-data-science-projects-f083009d78fc | ['Farhad Malik'] | 2019-07-30 10:32:53.457000+00:00 | ['NLP', 'Technology', 'Programming', 'Fintech', 'Data Science'] |
Not a pivot, but a pirouette | In the musical 42nd Street, lyricist Al Dubin writes “Until you learn how to sing a new song, go into your dance…”.
I think it’s great advice as we all wait to see what will next unfold.
While I have been finding new songs to sing this year, I have realised that I have not ‘pivoted’ with any particular grace. Instead, I feel as if I have pirouetted — and then some. *Pirouette: to whirl about on one’s toes
2020 has definitely kept me on my toes, so I decided to take time out to reflect on my many pirouettes and what I’ve learned along the way.
I didn’t create 2,000 followers on social media; instead, in the first three months of lockdown I created a series of Facebook lives called “Coffee & Conversation with Simone: Your cup of calm”. During these lives, I told stories, channelled wisdom and extemporised on a wide range of topics for 30–45 minutes, five days a week for 90 days. And I realised it was never about the following, rather it was about being able to hold space and evoke calm for those seeking it.
I watched from the wings, with no little degree of envy, as friends and colleagues created fabulous home studios and garnered virtual audiences and wondered why I didn’t try harder to do the same. Until I realised that my personal and professional stage was transforming into something greater than I could comprehend and that the essence of this transformation required deep reflection and…pausing.
And that, as a conduit and catalyst for transformation, my message was also changing and it was time to honour what needed to be voiced, or not.
Not a pivot, but a pirouette.
I didn’t speak on any of the stages that were planned this year, but I did create and launch my first in-depth online course to great success and wonderful testimonials. And as an unexpected and delightful bonus, embraced the opportunity to share my creativity with those who needed my expertise — with the creation of upwards of forty short courses to date — and which have helped me focus and distill my creative talents in a very different arena.
Not a pivot, but a pirouette.
I haven’t been on social media much since my Facebook live extravaganza, not because I had nothing to say, but rather that there was too much. Too much that wanted to be said. Too much grief to be expressed and ultimately transmuted into wisdom and love. Too much rawness and reality.
So much that was asking to be voiced, and which required a hibernation of sorts, a willingness to be present with all that was, the shedding of the old and embracing the new. Embracing the panoply of talents discovered, uncovered and owned.
Not a pivot, but a pirouette.
A pirouette requires your full commitment to the whirl. To the lift, flow and grace of what is.
At first you will wobble — and that’s okay.
And then, you:
Ground your energy
Shift your stance
Activate your body
Focus your vision
Lift your spirit
Release your intention
and SPIN!
First published on www.simonedehaas.com/blog 17 December 2020 | https://medium.com/@simonedehaas/not-a-pivot-but-a-pirouette-bb70009557c6 | ['Simone De Haas'] | 2020-12-17 04:23:49.776000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Leadership', 'Wisdom', 'Resilience', 'Self Leadership'] |
Mocha Walnut Torte | This very quick torte is unusually light and smooth, with the ground walnuts being barely discernible. It is covered with my favorite icing a heavenly chocolate ganache and the entire torte can be assembled up to 3 days before serving with no noticeable loss in texture or appearance.
SERVES 6 TO 8
5 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 cup walnuts
Вј cup unbleached white flour
2ВЅ teaspoons baking powder
ICING
1ВЅ cups heavy or whipping cream
4 ounces semisweet chocolate, chopped
2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon instant coffee
Chocolate curls for decoration (see Note) (I use a Baker’s German’s sweet chocolate bar)
Preheat the oven to 350В°F. Butter two 8-inch round cake pans and line the bottoms with wax paper, then butter the wax paper.Blend the eggs and sugar very well in a blender or food processor. Add the walnuts and blend until they are very fine. Mix the flour with the baking powder, add to the batter, and blend until smooth.Pour into the prepared pans and bake for 17 to 19 minutes, or until golden on top and springy to the touch. Cool on a wire rack for 5 minutes, then invert the pans and peel away the wax paper. Cool the cakes completely, about 1 hour.Meanwhile make the icing. Combine the cream, chocolate, sugar, and coffee in a medium-size saucepan, and whisking steadily, bring to a boil over medium heat. Remove from the heat as soon as the mixture begins to boil and continue to whisk until the chocolate is melted. | https://medium.com/@plansvegan/mocha-walnut-torte-2a9d7c1855a8 | ['Plans Vegan'] | 2020-07-03 07:09:11.486000+00:00 | ['Foodie', 'Food', 'Dinner'] |
Something rotten in Denmark: sexual assault, harassment, bullying and abuse in the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra | UPDATE: Sebastian Stevensson has taken to Facebook to post “his version” of events. You can view my response (as well as the full contents of his post) here.
While employed by Danmarks Radio Symfoniorkestret, I was repeatedly sexually assaulted by SEBASTIAN STEVENSSON, current principal bassoonist in the DRSO and teacher at the Royal Danish Conservatory of Music in Copenhagen. Sebastian has never shown any indication whatsoever of remorse toward me for his actions against me.
Following my repeatedly refusing his advances, Sebastian Stevensson’s behaviour became increasingly aggressive, ultimately culminating in an unmistakable sexual assault followed by regular verbal, sexual and psychological abuse. When I reported Sebastian to the union representative of the orchestra, I was informed that I was not the first person to report him for sexual abuse of power. I am making public Sebastian Stevensson’s name because I have serious concerns for the safety of his current female colleagues and students, or any other musicians over whom Sebastian Stevensson has held — or will hold — a position of professional power.
Sebastian Stevensson never received any punishment, despite having not denied my allegations, according to the DRSO’s administration. After I pushed the administration — and my colleagues — to handle the situation appropriately, my previously renewed contract in the DRSO was not renewed again. My residence permit in Denmark was tied entirely to my job in the DRSO at the time; thus, I was forced out of the country. My position, for which I had auditioned, was quietly filled by a male student with, to my knowledge, no audition held.
In response to Sebastian Stevensson’s abuse I reported him to the orchestra’s union representative, the Danish Musicians’ Union, the orchestra administration, the Danish police, the Ombudsman for Danmarks Radio, and to the Danish Workplace Safety Authority (Arbejdstilsynet). I have the documentation from each of these reports, as well as witnesses who accompanied me to meetings and can attest to the developments of my case as they took place. Audun Halvorsen and Ole Kristian Dahl (among others) have known about my allegations since 2015. In spite of the fact that my allegations are well known by many musicians at the DRSO and elsewhere, Sebastian Stevensson continues to be promoted as both a player and a teacher.
My intention in sharing this information is to hold Sebastian Stevensson accountable for his actions, to protect his potential future victims from harm, and to call Director KIM BOHR and the DRSO administration to action in the face of an unsafe working environment brought about by Kim’s negligence and willful enabling. As of this writing Sebastian Stevensson has yet to be held to account, and the numerous accounts by other musicians in the attached article strongly indicate that the DRSO continues to be a toxic and dangerous workplace environment.
This Danish news article references the story of my experiences, and those of 7 other people within the DRSO, of sexual assault, harassment, and bullying. Screenshots of the English translation of my story are attached, but I encourage you to translate and read the whole article for yourself.
If you have experienced sexual harassment or assault by Sebastian Stevensson, or anyone in the professional music industry, understand that you are not alone. Please don’t hesitate to contact me. I am here for you, and I will respect your confidentiality.
https://www.information.dk/indland/2020/11/musikere-fortaeller-hverdag-sexchikane-mobning-dr-symfoniorkestret?lst_frnt&fbclid=IwAR1VWvUd4cfHMHdRH1b3ja0T6UM0eRlnSrbUNoN8nRJPpMEHqgBnUInGiGs
NB: There are a few very funny, strange translations:
“He nev me in the ass” = “He pinched my ass”
The part where it says “He asserted that his confession had been obtained through torture and that his confession had been obtained through torture. Information has seen the text message.”, it actually reads:
“ “I have been hitting hard on you, but I only did it because I knew you would be strong enough to decide what is best for you,” he writes. He goes on to say he was “ok” with the conclusion, and hoped that Katelin was too. Information [that’s the name of the news publication] has seen the SMS.”
There’s also a part where it says “musician Katelin Coleman invited him to watch a movie”, which is an unfortunate translation of “the musician [Sebastian Stevensson] invited Katelin Coleman to watch a movie”.
The term “cross-border” is a Danish term that refers to behaviour which “crosses the line” (especially in reference to workplace sexual harassment or bullying).
Lastly, it translates “playing” to “game” a few times, which is actually rather cute. | https://medium.com/@katelin-coleman1989/something-rotten-in-denmark-sexual-assault-harassment-bullying-and-abuse-in-the-danish-radio-542d6283d0b8 | ['Katelin Coleman'] | 2020-12-04 18:21:36.544000+00:00 | ['Classical Music', 'Metoo', 'Misogyny', 'Sexual Assault'] |
What Is A Person? | What Is A Person?
It has to do a lot with the structure of desires, according to the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt.
Illustration by Kika Fuenzalida on mixkit.co
Would you describe yourself as a person? Perhaps you thought “person” is just the single form of people or one individual who belongs to the human species. The philosopher we’ll be talking about today disagrees: He would only attribute the term “person” to you if you are capable of deciding what you want to do, to put it crudely.
Let’s dive deeper into what Harry G. Frankfurt (born 1929) discusses in his article “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person”.
His definition of a “person”
A person is not in a biological sense the single form of people, but a philosophical qualified term for humans, as they are different from (other) animals in the ability of self-determination. The structure of the will is what differentiates persons from other creatures, according to Frankfurt. We as humans are not alone in our motives and desires; But how we structure them is different, he argues.
Only a person can form “second-order desires”.
While he admits that animals can want and choose things to do (what he calls first-order desires), we can also “want what we want”. We are capable to want to have a specific desire (what he names second-order desires).
Humans are capable of wanting different things than what they are actually wanting. No other animal than man seems to self-reflect on their wishes and desires, and it “is manifested in the formation of second-order desires”.
He says that a statement like “A wants X” expresses a first-order desire, while A is a person and X is an action, and it says remarkably little:
“Such a statement may be consistent, for example, with each of the following statements: (a) the prospect of doing X elicits no sensation or introspectible emotional response in A; (b) A is unaware that he wants to X; (c) A believes that he does not want to X; (d) A wants to refrain from X-ing; (e) A wants to Y and believes that it is impossible for him both to Y and to X; (f) A does not “really” want to X; (g) A would rather die than X; and so on.”
Crucial for being a person, however, is his definition of will.
The will is an effective desire. A desire which ultimately leads into an action. The will of a person describes one or multiple desires, which cause the action.
Will “is the notion of an effective desire — one that moves (or will or would move) a person all the way to action.”
So if one says: ”I want that X-ing is my will” it means that exactly this desire — to X — becomes effective, or causes the action.
And the capacity to feel and think this sentence is specifically attributed to persons, according to Frankfurt. He presents a new term for it:
Second-order volition
It means, wanting that one desire becomes the will. In other words, having a second-order desire that wishes that a first-order desire becomes effective, the cause for the action.
The agent who is capable of having second-order desires but can’t have second-order volitions, wouldn’t be a person in his eyes. For this creature, he uses the term: ‘Wanton’.
“The essential characteristic of a wanton is that he does not care about his will.”
A wanton has desires, which move him to act in specific ways, whether or not he wants them to move him or if he would want to be moved by other desires. Frankfurt states that this class of “wantons” contains very young children and all nonhuman animals. However, it may also include some adult humans as well.
The example of two types of drug addicts
The first one is unwillingly a drug addict. He hates his addiction. Although he has the desire to take drugs, he has also another desire to stop taking drugs. These are two conflicting first-order desires.
But he classifies them: He would rather stop taking drugs, and this is his second-order desire. So he wants that the desire to stop being addicted becomes his effective desire, his will. This want can also be described as the second-order volition.
The second type of drug addict is a wanton. He acts according to his first-order desires, “without his being concerned whether the desires that move him to act are desires by which he wants to be moved to act.” He is just incapable of being concerned about what he wants his will to be.
He may have conflicting first-order desires just as the first type of drug addict. But unlike the first type, he doesn’t prefer one desire over the other to be his will. Therefore, he doesn’t suffer from his addiction, as the first type does, when he isn’t able to refrain from taking the drug, although he preferred this desire.
The wanton addict doesn’t (or can’t) care which of the desires wins out: | https://medium.com/philosophy-studios/what-is-a-person-b5458a61e1e6 | ['Katharina E.'] | 2019-10-21 11:48:04.094000+00:00 | ['Human Behavior', 'Harry Frankfurt', 'Philosophy', 'Psychology', 'Desire'] |
Create a grouped bar chart with Matplotlib and pandas | As I was working on freeCodeCamp’s Data Analysis with Python certification, I came across a tricky Matplotlib visualization: a grouped bar chart. I’ve been making my way through the projects, but the guidance is minimal. This is good because it makes you put in the work to arrive at the desired solution, but it is awful if you don’t have much experience with Matplotlib, pandas and Numpy, or even if you’re just having difficulties with the current exercise.
So, I’m writing this article to share my solution on how to create the grouped bar chart from the “Page View Time Series Visualizer” project. I had a hard time understanding how to create this visualization in Matplotlib so I hope this article is enlightening for your data analysis projects.
The data
Since I’m sharing the solution for the certification’s exercise, the demo in this article will use the same data. The data is available in the sample repl.it environment set up by freeCodeCamp for the project.
This page views dataset contains only two columns: one with the date of recording, and another for the page views in that day.
Data preview after loading with pandas
Now that you know what data we’re working with, let’s move on to the data loading and pre-processing code.
Data loading and pre-processing
I will first show you all the code for loading and pre-processing the data, and then explain each step. You can find that code in the code gist below.
Data pre-processing code
The first few code lines are fairly straightforward pandas code: load a CSV file using the read_csv function, then change the data type of a column. In this case, we want the “date” data to be treated as datetime data. Afterwards, we sort the data by the date of page views recording and set that column as the DataFrame’s index. This will help with the transformation’s ahead.
On line 10, we filter the DataFrame to exclude rows in the top and bottom 2.5 percentiles of page views, to remove possible outliers (this is actually a step in the certification’s exercise).
In the last block of code, we finish processing the data by creating a column for the year and month of the recordings. Because we changed the dates to the datetime type, we can extract their year and month by accessing the DataFrame’s index, and then the respective attributes: df.index.year and df.index.month .
Since the months come as integers (1 to 12), we also apply a transformation of mapping those integers to the correct month name, stored in the months list. We can use the months’ integer representation to retrieve the names from the list via index, adjusting for the 0-based indices of Python lists.
On the last line of this first code gist, we change the data type of the “month” column to be Categorical, using the months list’s elements as the categories. This is useful because now “month” stores categories and they keep the order of the months in the months list. In other words, we can properly sort the months from January to December in the DataFrame. However, we won’t need to use another sorting function: Matplotlib will do this on its own when creating the bar chart later.
Data visualization
Now for the data visualization part: shaping the DataFrame into a useful format and plotting the chart.
Data visualization code
(please note this second gist is still part of the previous script, I just split it in two for the explanations)
The first thing we do is to transform the DataFrame into a pivot table DataFrame. In practice, the DataFrame changes from this
DataFrame before the pivot transformation
Where we have the “date” as the index, and columns for the page views, year and month of the recording, into this pivot table:
Resulting pivot table dataframe
df_pivot = pd.pivot_table(
df,
values="page_views",
index="year",
columns="month",
aggfunc=np.mean
)
Recalling the function that creates the pivot table, we have to specify:
The source DataFrame
The column whose values will be put in the cells
The column whose values will be used as the new index
The column whose values will be used as the new columns
The aggregation function to apply to the values in the data cells
In the end, as you can see in the screenshot above, we now have the years as the indices, a column for each month, and the average/mean page views per month and year in each cell. Please note that using an average aggregation function was another specification of the certification exercise. Any aggregation function could have been used.
The DataFrame is now ready for plotting.
On line 17 of the code gist we plot a bar chart for the DataFrame, which returns a Matplotlib Axes object. We use this object to obtain a Matplotlib Figure object that allows us to change the plot’s dimensions. We also change the axes labels afterwards.
At the end of the code gist, we export the plot as a PNG file, using the Figure object.
Resulting grouped bar plot
Conclusion
In summary, we created a bar chart of the average page views per year. But, since this is a grouped bar chart, each year is drilled down into its month-wise values.
It is true this solution is kind of magic, since we simply had to call the plot(kind="bar") method on the DataFrame. However, the trick was to pivot the DataFrame to have the X-axis data in the index and the grouping categories in the column headings. The Y-axis values are the values from the DataFrame’s cells. pandas and Matplotlib are smart enough to understand this, provided the data is in the required shape.
All in all, creating a grouped bar chart with Matplotlib is not easy. The code itself is tricky to get around, as you need to get the DataFrame into a specific shape, something that is not simple if you’re not used to manipulating data. Furthermore, there weren’t that many resources or examples for this, and the solution I found was through this StackOverflow reply.
For comparison and curiosity, take a look into how to create a similar grouped bar chart in Plotly. The plotting function only requires two extra parameters to achieve this visualization and doesn’t require the extra pivotting step.
At any rate, I hope this solution is relevant for you and helps in future Matplolib and pandas work!
Lastly, you can find all the code and resources on my GitHub repository. If you don’t want to visit GitHub, you can find below the complete script. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/create-a-grouped-bar-chart-with-matplotlib-and-pandas-9b021c97e0a | ['José Fernando Costa'] | 2020-11-01 16:22:19.820000+00:00 | ['Data Visualization', 'Data Analysis', 'Data Science', 'Python'] |
carefree-learn: Tabular Datasets ❤️ PyTorch | Why carefree-learn?
If you are familiar with machine learning, you may already heard about scikit-learn and some other automl frameworks. The motivation behind creating carefree-learn was two fold:
Leverage PyTorch in the field of machine learning.
Provide a truly CAREFREE experience for both users and developers.
By saying carefree we mean that both using and developing carefree-learn could be finished in one line of code:
Please refer to Quick Start and Build Your Own Models for more details
You may argue that other libraries, like scikit-learn, also support building models in one line of code. But think about the messy stuffs (such as reading data from files, exploring data, performing data pre-processing, etc.) we need to do before we actually use these libraries, and contributing algorithms to these libraries is often much harder than writing your own ones. In carefree-learn, we’ve tried hard to ease these two procedures for you.
Carefree using
As mentioned, other libraries (e.g. scikit-learn) can often only support numpy arrays or DataFrame as input, and have pretty much constraints (e.g. cannot contain nan values). In carefree-learn, however, we’ve tried hard to help you deal with almost ANY kind of tabular datasets, no matter how dirty and messy it is. This means carefree-learn actually provides an end-to-end pipeline on tabular datasets, including AUTOMATICALLY deal with:
Detection of redundant feature columns which can be excluded (all SAME, all DIFFERENT, etc).
Detection of feature columns types (whether a feature column is string column / numerical column / categorical column).
Encoding of string columns and categorical columns (Embedding or One Hot Encoding).
Pre-processing of numerical columns (Normalize, Min Max, etc.).
Imputation of missing values.
And much more…
Therefore, carefree-learn is possible to procss files directly (file-in, file-out):
This is mainly handled by carefree-data, part of the cf* ecosystem
Please refer to Quick Start for more details.
Carefree developing
Thanks to the great modularization provided by PyTorch, carefree-learn was able to design its (tabular datasets oriented) pipeline in a user-friendly as well as a developer-friendly way.
The basic component in carefree-learn is called a pipe , which corresponds to one of those branches which takes in all / part of the inputs, apply some transform , extract some features with extractor , and then feed the final network ( head ) with these features. Here's an example:
A model with three pipes. Please refer to our document to learn more about pipes.
Since most of the deep learning models (neural networks) used in tabular datasets could be represented with pipe , developers can therefore focus on implementing one of its components (namely extractor and head ), instead of having to care about the whole pipeline.
We’ve provided a detailed documention on how to build your own models, as well as an interesting example to guide you step by step. Please feel free to check them out and enjoy yourself!
Why PyTorch?
The reason why I chose PyTorch has already been mentioned above — it is perfectly modularized and customizable. Another reason is that although deep learning outshines in CV and NLP fields, it is not as popular when it comes to the tabular datasets. We think the main reason is that tabular datasets require so many messy steps before we could actually jump into the algorithm part, and there has not existed a modularized framework to organize these stuffs. That’s why we tried our best to handle all of these for you and hope that it could help you focus on developing the core algorithms. And among the deep learning frameworks, PyTorch was truly the most elegant one and we were deeply attracted by its simplicity and power. Since there lacks a satisfying ‘carefree’ solution for tabular datasets, we decided to take advantage of our knowledges and build one ourselves. So here comes the carefree-learn, which aims to provide out of the box tools to train and develop neural networks on tabular datasets with PyTorch.
Getting Started with Iris
We’ve provided an Installation Guide as well as some real life Examples to walk you through the basic / advanced usages of carefree-learn. We’ve also provided a Production Guide to show how could we pack the whole pipeline in carefree-learn efficiently into a zip file. In this section, we’ll use the famous Iris dataset to demonstrate the power of carefree-learn.
We’ve provided the complete source code here as well as a jupyter notebook here.
Inspect the Iris Dataset
Here are some of the information provided by the official website:
This is perhaps the best known database to be found in the pattern recognition literature. The data set contains 3 classes of 50 instances each, where each class refers to a type of iris plant. Predicted attribute: class of iris plant.
And here’s the pandas-view of the raw data:
We didn’t use pandas in our code, but it is convenient to visualize some data with it though 🤣
You can download the raw data (iris.data) with this link.
Basic Usages
Traditionally, we need to process the raw data before we feed them into our machine learning models (e.g. encode the label column, which is a string column, into an ordinal column). In carefree-learn, however, we can train neural networks directly on files without worrying about the rest:
What’s going under the hood is that carefree-learn will try to parse the iris.data automatically (with the help of carefree-data), split the data into training set and validation set, with which we’ll train a fully connected neural network (fcnn).
We can further inspect the processed data if we want to know how carefree-learn actually parsed the input data:
It shows that the raw data is carefully normalized into numerical data that neural networks can accept. You may also notice that the first elements are not identical with the first line of the raw data, this is caused by the auto-shuffle mechanism introduced in carefree-data.
What’s more, by saying normalized, it means that the input features will be automatically normalized to mean=0.0 and std=1.0 :
This means we first normalized the data before we actually split it into train & validation set.
After training on files, carefree-learn can predict & evaluate on files directly as well. We’ll handle the data parsing and normalization for you automatically:
Which yields
This output may vary due to the randomness.
Benchmarking
As we know, neural networks are trained with stochastic gradient descent (and its variants), which will introduce some randomness to the final result, even if we are training on the same dataset. In this case, we need to repeat the same task several times in order to obtain the bias & variance of our neural networks. Fortunately, carefree-learn introduced repeat_with API, which can achieve this goal easily with only a few lines of code:
With num_repeat=3 specified, we’ll train 3 models on iris.data.
Which yields
This output may vary due to the randomness.
We can also compare the performances across different models:
With models=[“linear”, “fcnn”], we’ll train both linear models and fcnn models.
Which yields
This output may vary due to the randomness, but fcnn should be able to beat linear.
It is worth mentioning that carefree-learn supports distributed training, which means when we need to perform large scale benchmarking (e.g. train 100 models), we could accelerate the process through multiprocessing:
In carefree-learn, distributed training doesn’t mean training your model on multiple GPUs or multiple machines. Instead, distributed training in carefree-learn means training multiple models at the same time. Please refer to our documentation for more details.
With num_jobs=2, we will launch 2 processes to run the tasks in a distributed way.
On iris dataset, however, launching distributed training will actually hurt the speed because iris dataset only contains 150 samples, so the relative overhead brought by distributed training will be too large. Please refer the CAUTION section of our documentation for more details.
Advanced Benchmarking
But this is not enough, because we want to know whether other models (e.g. scikit-learn models) could achieve a better performance than carefree-learn models. In this case, we can perform an advanced benchmarking with the Experiment helper class.
Notice that we specified run_command="python run_sklearn.py" for scikit-learn tasks, which means Experiment will try to execute this command in the current working directory for training scikit-learn models. The good news is that we do not need to speciy any command line arguments, because Experiment will handle those for us.
Here is basically what a run_sklearn.py should look like (source code):
With run_sklearn.py defined, we could run those tasks with one line of code:
After finished running with this, we should be able to see the following file structure in the current working directory:
As we expected, carefree-learn models are saved into zip files, while scikit-learn models are saved into sk_model.pkl files. Since these models are not yet loaded, we should manually load them into our environment:
After which we can finally perform benchmarking on these models:
Which yields
This output may vary due to the randomness.
Seems that scikit-learn models are better than carefree-learn models! This is not surprising because neural networks often require more data than traditional machine learning algorithms. However, we can boost carefree-learn models with AutoML, as shown in the next section.
AutoML on Iris
As mentioned above, carefree-learn is actually a minimal Automatic Machine Learning (AutoML) solution for tabular datasets. Up till now we haven’t mentioned any AutoML stuffs yet, so we’ll illustrate how to perform AutoML on Iris dataset in carefree-learn, as well as how to pack the AutoML results into production.
Since carefree-learn has provided the cflearn.Auto API for out-of-the-box usages, AutoML in carefree-learn could be achieved in two lines of code:
We can make predictions directly with auto.predict :
The accuracy should be around 0.97
And of course, we can compare it with other models:
Which yields
This output may vary due to the randomness.
Bravo! Our AutoML model beats the scikit-learn models 🥳
If we are satisfied with the results, we can pack the models up into a zip file
This will generate a pack.zip file.
which could be used on our production environments / machines easily:
Please refer to our documentation for more details.
Conclusion
Contained in this article is just a subset of the features that carefree-learn offers, but we’ve already walked through many basic & common steps we’ll encounter in real life machine learning tasks. Additional capabilities include Fast Embedding, One Hot Encoding Caching, highly customizable modules, specify / customize optimizers / lr schedulers, export to ONNX, and more.
To learn more about carefree-learn, check out the Examples with jupyter notebooks included, as well as the Developer’s Guide to see how do we customize models with carefree-learn. We sincerely hope that carefree-learn could help you either deal with tabular datasets easier or develop new algorithms on tabular datasets easier, and any contributions to carefree-learn would truly be welcomed. | https://medium.com/pytorch/carefree-learn-tabular-datasets-%EF%B8%8F-pytorch-e329b2f008f2 | [] | 2020-12-23 02:18:03.638000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Automl', 'Tabular Data', 'Deep Learning', 'Pytorch'] |
Transphobia was always going to end up as crude, old-fashioned homophobia | Why does anyone want to be a parent, with all the stress, exhaustion, and often thankless turmoil it can entail? A simple answer is a very basic instinctive urge implanted in our genes to ensure we procreate and ensure the survival of our species, codified in very powerful and often problematic cultural and social expectations which normally revolve around the nuclear family. In any case, it isn’t universal, or certainly doesn’t have an equally powerful hold over every human, and many individuals — in relationships or not, and regardless of sexuality — have happy and fulfilling lives whether they have children or not.
In my own case, like most people, I took it as read that one day I’d be a parent. The slow adolescent realisation that I was in fact gay was so full of panic because it seemed as though something most people take for granted as an inevitable fact (rightly or wrongly) was never going to happen. This was the late 1990s, when the British Social Attitudes Survey revealed far more people believed homosexuality to be “always wrong” than “not wrong at all” and when several anti-gay laws remained in place: Section 28 (which meant no education about LGBT issues at school, apart from a sex education teacher who warned of the dangers of anal sex), no equal age of consent, no civil partnerships, to right to adopt, and a lack of protection from discrimination. Cultural representation of LGBTQ people was very limited, often reducing gay men to one dimensional clowns or as tragic figures with doomed lives. The shadow of the recent HIV/AIDS crisis loomed large. The main insult thrown around the playground — on a daily basis — was “gay” or some more pejorative derivative.
To be gay, it seemed to this closeted teenager (and countless others, as well as as to our tormenters), meant a lifetime of rejection, being treated differently, loneliness, tragedy, and ultimately dying alone. Unsurprisingly, this context helps lead to far higher levels of mental distress and, with it, self-medication in the form of abusive relationships with alcohol and drugs amongst LGBTQ+ people. As a teenager myself, I was prescribed anti-depressants at the age of 16. TV and film portrayals of straight couples and their families — or friends casually talking about one day having kids — inadvertently felt like cruel taunts about a future denied. One of the most baffling — and terrifying elements — of being gay was that you had no roadmap of any description at all. It all seemed to vindicate the prophecy of Lord Arran, who co-sponsored the 1967 Act partially decriminalising homosexuality in England and Wales, who reassured disturbed heterosexuals: “Lest the opponents of the Bill think that a new freedom, a new privileged class, has been created, let me remind them that no amount of legislation will prevent homosexuals from being the subject of dislike and derision, or at best of pity.”
It’s important to clarify here — not least for any young LGBTQ readers — that this is a nonsense. The anti-gay laws have gone, social attitudes have changed, and most gay and bisexual people are much happier when they come out. It would be a deceit, however, not to pretend that there is a very long way to go — or that things are not sliding backwards.
One of the traditional central pillars of homophobia centres on the inability of same-sex couples to reproduce: one, because it makes them threats to the traditional family; and two, because it makes dangers to children. “Since homosexuals cannot reproduce, they must recruit, must freshen their ranks,” wrote anti-gay campaigner Anita Bryant, who led a homophobic campaign in the 1970s called ‘Save Our Children’ (safeguarding children from predatory gay people was always used to legitimise public homophobic campaigns).
As it so happens, LGBTQ people have always found ways to have families. One approach is co-parenting, in which a mix of parents who are not themselves all in the same relationship raise a child or children together.
Which brings on to this weekend’s Twitter storm. Last week, a brilliant gay journalist I follow called Caspar posted one of those Facebook notifications which reveals a status you wrote on the same day however many years ago. In this case, it was Caspar in 2014 excitedly celebrating his coming fatherhood. Caspar, you see, is a co-parent: he raises children with a lesbian couple. To everyone who knows him, he is a model loving father. Other couples have looked to his family as inspiration before having their own children.
Having followed Caspar for many years, having seen him tweet lovingly about his family and children, and frankly seeing him as the sort of father I’d personally like to be, a jokey exchange followed in which he recommended the same set-up.
Two days later, what can only be described as the anti-trans cult jumped on the exchange. Both Caspar and I were misogynists who wished to rent or steal the wombs of women. Caspar’s co-parents were “reproductive workers” and his children were “human commodities”. The percentage who were deliberately conflating co-parenting with surrogacy — a topic which deserves its own separate conversation — or simply did not understand the difference was beyond me; whether they similarly didn’t understand that “broody” in the context of human beings means a burning desire to have and raise children also remains a mystery. In any case, it escalated dramatically: thousands of largely anonymous accounts raining down abuse, up to and including why this “faggot” should kill himself. Caspar had simply tweeted fondly recalling the moment he became a father with two lesbian co-parents, and now his timeline was brimming with strangers denouncing him and his family.
For the anti-trans cult, this moment was a “gotcha” for one reason above all else. Like all mainstream LGBTQ activists, I support trans rights. Showing an inclination to follow Caspar’s co-parenting family model was therefore hypocrisy: “So now he knows what a woman is! WHY DOESN’T HE TRY AND INSEMINATE A TRANS WOMAN!!!” All of a sudden, in their world, cisgender women who cannot reproduce are no longer women. In any case, many of the tweets descended into mocking the very idea of gay men being fathers at all, and was piled on by alt-right types who at least have the honesty to not pretend not to be bigots.
My first interaction with the anti-trans cult was back in February 2015, when I wrote my first column about trans rights, specifically in support of Stonewall’s heroic then-CEO Ruth Hunt making the charity trans inclusive for the first time. My Twitter account was dog-piled for weeks and they have never let me go since. As it happens, I’ve written very few columns in support of trans rights — the last was December 2017 — and have never gone on to TV or radio to discuss it, because I’m cisgender and didn’t feel it was my place to do so. I have consistently supported trans rights on social media because as a high profile LGBTQ columnist, I feel an obvious responsibility to support trans siblings who are going through the same experiences gay people have always endured — demonised as sexual predators and brainwashers of children, lambasted for denying biological reality, forcing the majority to redefine themselves for the benefit of a tiny minority, as well as being weird or creepy fetishes or simply defined by mental illness. Because so few media commentators support trans rights in the UK, this cult have decided I’m one of the Big Bad Bosses of the evil trans rights’ movement who needs to be ceaselessly targeted as such, leaving people like Caspar collateral damage.
At this point it’s important to clarify I’m not their victim — trans people are — and this is simply to illustrate what these people are and how they operate. Transphobic hate crimes quadruped in a half decade; a quarter of trans people have experienced homelessness and one in eight trans employees were physically attacked by a colleague or customer in a 12 month period: and then there’s the discrimination at work, the fear of leaving the house in case of abuse on the streets, the fear even of using a public toilet. Throw in a never-ending media campaign against trans people — which is far from confined to the dominant right-wing press; the government’s use of trans people as a culture war prop; the Labour party’s failure to clamp down transphobia; and the relentless targeting and victimising of any trans person in public life (of whom there are very few indeed), and it is more than understandable that most trans people I know tell me they are looking to leave the country. A British trans woman has already been given refuge in New Zealand because of the climate here.
When I say they’re a “cult”, I mean it in every sense. Having been on their receiving end — the non-stop dogpiling on social media, sending emails pretending to be my dead father, spamming anyone who mentions me on Twitter, constantly trying to get me fired — I’m more than aware they’re obsessive. They’re monomaniacal — their twitter feeds are often full of thousands of tweets about trans people and nothing else; profoundly conspiratorial in outlook; convinced that there is a coming Day of Judgement, when everything they obsessively oppose will collapse like a house of cards, and everyone associated with the evil of trans rights will be condemned; and they despise perceived traitors more than almost anyone. Women who support trans rights are labelled as ‘handmaidens’. When The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood started speaking out in support of trans rights, many of them denounced her as a ‘handmaiden’, too. [EDIT: Many of them also post about how their friends and loved ones have turned their backs on them as they radicalise ever further on trans rights, a hallmark of every cult].
What is abundantly clear is that the anti-trans cult is a case study in online radicalisation: it is a story, in large part, of vulnerable people with an internet connection who have fallen down one too many rabbit holes. It is not to excuse the behaviour of fallen comedy writer Graham Linehan — banned from Twitter last year — to point out that a man spending every hour of every day, including 3am in the morning or on Christmas Day tweeting about trans people was having some sort of crisis. Yet even as his life was clearly falling apart, the cult kept cheering him on.
They claim to speak on behalf of women, even though every poll shows that women are far more supportive of trans rights than men. They are keenly aware that progressive younger people see trans rights as an article of faith. What sustains them is that unlike the US — where there is a consensus ranging from “centrists” and liberals to the left in support of trans rights — in Britain transphobia is perfectly respectable and mainstream. Indeed, amongst much of the British commentariat, transphobia has not only become acceptable, it has become an identifying hallmark of respectability and moderation. Whatever their failings, while US President Joe Biden’s administration introduces trans rights legislation (which led, in Britain, to #BidenErasesWomen becoming the top trend, itself revealing of how bad things are here) while Vice-President Kamala Harris puts her pronouns in her bio, in Britain support for trans rights is often portrayed as a sign of radicalism and indeed extremism.
Which leads us to homophobia. Transphobia is an evil in its own right, but where else was it going to end? It was obvious when anti-trans organisations allied with Tory MPs like David Davies, whose voting record is anti-abortion as well as anti-gay. It was obvious when prominent UK “anti-trans feminists” hooked up with the Heritage Foundation with its long history of agitating against LGBTQ rights. It was obvious when gay supporters of trans rights, like myself, were constantly attacked on social media as threats to children. And it’s very obvious when a queer father co-parenting with a lesbian couple and myself are dog-piled by a cult which is obsessive and it is hateful. The gruesome truth is this: in 2021, in the here and now, there are all too many who simply do not think that LGBTQ people should be parents at all. | https://medium.com/@owenjones84/transphobia-was-always-going-to-end-up-as-crude-old-fashioned-homophobia-a98af68b3a73 | ['Owen Jones'] | 2021-04-06 15:28:04.426000+00:00 | ['LGBTQ', 'Gay', 'Pride'] |
Why I Refuse to Ever Take Another Edit Test | Why I Refuse to Ever Take Another Edit Test
Photo: Nick Youngson/Creative Commons 3
It’s taken nearly 15 years, but I now realize just how good I had it during the first half of my career. I graduated from the University of Florida in Gainesville in May of 1991 with a bachelor’s degree in Magazine Journalism, and by August of the same year, I was an intern at People magazine, nine months away from becoming the youngest person on staff.
Several days after graduation, I packed up my white 1980 Toyota Tercel and drove to Charlotte, North Carolina, to begin my summer internship at the Charlotte Observer. Part of what got me through that long, hot summer working for a satellite Observer paper in Monroe, a town so small at the time it didn’t have a local bar, was the impending realization of my New York City dream. One evening while having drinks with a visiting college friend in downtown Charlotte, I was telling him about my upcoming People gig when a lady sitting beside us interrupted me.
“What? You’re going to be working at People magazine? At your age? That’s the kind of place people spend their entire career trying to get to.”
Her enthusiasm flattered and inspired me. It immediately made me feel better about working for a publication I’d always considered to be my mom’s magazine, terribly uncool. From that moment on, it became more than just an opportunity to move to New York City and be in the center of everything. I started to see it as proof that my potential had been noticed. Surely it would be smooth sailing from there on out.
After turning down an offer to extend my time at the Observer to fulfill my commitment to People, I was on my way. But it wasn’t as smooth a ride as I expected.
Once I was inside the door at People, I had a lot of proving myself to do, especially as a young Black journalist in an industry dominated by White editors. Others may have climbed the ladder faster than I did, but when I left New York City to move to Buenos Aires 15 years after my arrival, I knew I had made it, and as the old saying goes, if you can make it in the Big Apple, you can make it anywhere.
I’d like to think I did, first in New York and later in South America, in Australia, in Asia, in Africa, and in Europe. I spent the first eight years of my professional career at People, where I worked my way up from intern to staff writer. Then I went on to be an editor at Teen People, Us Weekly, and Entertainment Weekly. I made enough of an impression at Teen People to be rehired there three years after leaving, as the second-in-command editor. With each new job offer, I didn’t have to fill out an application or send in my resume. The hiring editors all approached me, and not once during my entire 15-year first run in New York City did any of them ask me to do an edit test.
It wasn’t until I left New York City to live and work on multiple continents as a freelance writer and blogger and as a contributing and staff editor, covering celebrities, entertainment, travel, and later, political and social issues, that edit tests entered my life. The first one I did was for a position as executive editor of Glamour in Australia. I didn’t get the job.
The second one I took, for a digital entertainment editor position in Sydney, had a positive outcome. After I passed the test, which required me to edit three short stories and took about 30 minutes to complete, they interviewed me over the phone, and then flew me from Cape Town, where I was living at the time, to Sydney, to meet me in person. By the time the first of my two flights home landed in Johannesburg the next day, I had received an email offering me the job.
Over the next five years, I built up my resume further. I transitioned from print to digital, compiled a reel filled with samples of my best on-camera interviews and TV appearances, sparred with Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain, wrote and self-published two memoir/travelogues that were Amazon best sellers, edited a Time Out travel book from my couch in Buenos Aires, produced an LGBTQ video series for Thought Catalog during a global pandemic while in lockdown in its epicenter, and became an activist writer whose Variety essay about the harmful history of the word “Dixie” may have encouraged, according to the New York Times and a number of other major publications, the Dixie Chicks to drop “Dixie” and become, simply, the Chicks.
In spite of how hard I’ve worked to become — in the words of several international writers who cited my Variety story when covering the Dixie Chicks-to-the Chicks name change — a “top” U.S. journalist, I’ve never had as hard a time finding another full-time editorial job as I have since returning to the US last year.
In the years between my departure and return, the job hunt and interview process became a far more multi-layered and unwieldly beast than it was back in the days when I was climbing the ladder of success in New York. It’s now so padded I once was interviewed by a website’s editorial assistant after being interviewed by the editorial director for a Senior Editor position. No matter how many questions they ask, how hard you prove yourself, how thoroughly your work has populated the Internet, the edit test is now, apparently, de rigueur.
Here is one I tackled last year for a Senior Editor position at a New York-based website (in addition to two rounds of phone interviews and two in-person ones). It took me a full work day, which I spread out over a weekend, to complete:
1) Pitch 5 news stories the publication did not cover with a headline and two-sentence synopsis, conveying the publication’s particular angle. (Assume all five would be running on the same day.) Please write one of them, keeping it to 500 words or less. 2) Pitch 3 second-day responses to news stories that have a slightly longer lead time and would require additional reporting. Please include a headline for each.
3) How would you rewrite the following three headlines?
4) List any topics/areas of interest/significant people/movements/happenings/trends that you think should be covered by the publication, but you just don’t see covered by competitors. 5) In addition, I had to edit a 1,000-word story.
Even if you ace the edit test, as I was told I did the one above, there’s no guarantee that after you’ve sat though a half-dozen interviews you’ll receive even a courtesy phone call or an email informing you that they’ve gone in another direction. To date, I’ve only gotten one.
Still, I keep trying. Several weeks ago, I applied for a senior editor position at a travel website that was posted on LinkedIn. An HR recruiter soon contacted me to tell me how impressed she and the editorial director were with my resume, and she wanted to set up a preliminary interview.
An hour-long chat with her was followed by a 90-minute Zoom interview, first with the editorial director and then with another person holding the same title as the position for which I was applying, in which I had to recount my career trajectory for the billionth time (as if it isn’t laid out in minute detail in my resume) and answer all the expected questions: Why do you want to work here? What is your editing style? What do you like about our publication? What would you improve? What is a hurdle you’ve faced on the job and how did you overcome it? Did everyone pull these questions from the same “How to Interview” guide?
And of course, there was the dreaded edit test. I was actually a bit surprised when the editorial director bought it up. Usually, they give you the edit test before scheduling multiple rounds of interviews. They’re supposed to be like the initial audition before the call back, so that the job seeker is the only one who ends up wasting their time.
After devoting two and a half hours to grilling and interrogating me, after listening to me expound upon my credentials and throwing 150 minutes worth of questions at me, they still weren’t sure if I could string sentences together effectively or do a job at a no-profile website that, frankly, is not worth the hurdles set up in front of it? To seal the deal, I still would have to complete an “editorial exercise,” as the editorial director called it, probably aware of the increasing stigma around the “edit test,” especially among older, more experienced candidates who are probably more qualified than the people interviewing them.
The Requirements | https://medium.com/@jeremyhelligar/why-i-refuse-to-ever-take-another-edit-test-f956e8d2f552 | ['Jeremy Helligar'] | 2020-12-16 16:31:35.446000+00:00 | ['Edit Tests', 'Job Hunting', 'Journalism', 'Recruitment', 'Writing'] |
The Politics of Science | A Legislative and Political History of OTA
The Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) was established in 1972 after a Congressional review of the four legislative support agencies that had traditionally provided science and technology (S&T) advice to Congress. The Technology Assessment Act of 1972 (P.L. 92–484) effectively moved S&T policy authority out of the nonpartisan scholarship of civil servants and into a framework of political appointees. The law established an Office of Technology Assessment for the purpose of providing within the legislative branch
a new and effective means for Congress to secure competent, unbiased information concerning the physical, biological, economic, social, and political effects of the increasingly extensive and larger applications of technology.
Technology Assessment Board
The Technology Assessment Board (TAB), was designated as the policy-making body of OTA. It was to consist of thirteen members — six House and six Senate of equal numbers of majority and minority Members, and a non-voting director appointed by the Board.
Technology Assessment Advisory Council
The Act also created a Technology Assessment Advisory Council, composed of twelve members — ten members of the public, the Comptroller General, and the Director of CRS. Policy advice functions were designated to the Council, including peer review and recommendations on OTA findings, upon request by the Board.
Role of the Congressional Research Service
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) was authorized “to provide such services and assistance to (OTA) as may be appropriate and feasible. To carry out these objectives, the Librarian is authorized to establish within (CRS) such additional divisions or other organizational entities as may be necessary. The assistance of (CRS) to the Office (OTA) shall include, but is not limited to, all of the services available to Congress. The Board (TAB) and the Librarian of Congress will agree to the method of reimbursement for these services.”
Authorization
OTA was authorized appropriations not to exceed $5 million for FY 73 and FY 74. The OTA board first met in April 1973 and the first OTA director was appointed in October 1973.
Rationale for OTA
By the late 1960s, debates over environmental legislation and Federal support for the development of supersonic transport had heightened Congressional sensitivity to the cultural, environmental, and economic impacts of technological development in America. Congress voiced increasing frustration over the lack of independent analysis available to oversee new and possibly harmful technologies, and Members had become distrustful of Administration oversight. Congress began to search for ways to establish its own analytical resources, which led to a proposal for the establishment of an Office of Technology Assessment within the Legislative branch. Congress designed the OTA to serve two purposes:
To facilitate the S&T policy making process via peer review of developing technologies, and To achieve independence from the Administration’s exclusive technology assessment purview.
Legislative History
The term technology assessment first appeared in a 1966 report issued by the House Science, Research, and Development Subcommittee of the Committee on Science and Astronautics. It proposed a bill to create a Technology Assessment Board, which was later introduced by the Chairman of the subcommittee, Representative Emilio Daddario (D., CT) in March of 1967. This proposal, originally introduced for the purpose of raising awareness of the issue in Congress, was studied over the next three years. From 1967–1970, the Subcommittee examined the mechanism and scope involved in technology assessment, and determined the most effective ways to institutionalize a review process that would be appropriate for legislative applications. The HSRD Subcommittee held seminars and conferences, and commissioned the studies that would lead to the formation of OTA.
Rep. Daddario, who would became the first Director of OTA, met with Librarian of Congress, L. Quincy Mumford, and Director of the Library’s Legislative Research Service (LRS), Lester Jayson to discuss the possible expansion of LRS’s functional capacity so that it could act as a peer review organization under the Legislative Reorganization Act, and to determine whether LRS could provide the necessary expertise under the proposed expansion. Rep. Daddario made it clear that he supported a separate entity:
a new mechanism through which choices can be quickly made, contracts established, and information brought to the Congress . . . an early warning mechanism looking far ahead which can allow us today to legislate on some of the scientific and technical problems which will certainly affect our society.”
He was concerned that the implication of the Library’s witnesses was” that all we need to do is sort of beef up what we are presently doing.”
In late 1969, Mumford and Jayson testified at hearings on the general subject of technology assessment held by the House Science and Astronautics, Subcommittee on Science, Research and Development. Both men questioned the justification for a separative legislative organization. They maintained that performing technological assessment for Congress was clearly consistent with LRS’s charter, and further, that LRS frequently assisted committees in the area of technology assessment in several ways. For instance, LRS provided guidance in structuring S&T hearings, identifying witnesses, evaluating testimony, and preparing reports. As evidence, Jayson provided two lists for entry into the Congressional Record:
A list of topics covered in related LRS reports, and A detailed description of the nature and scope of said reports.
Shortly after the conclusion of the hearings, H.R. 17046 was introduced to create a legislative mechanism to deal with the issue of technology assessment, and the Office of Technology Assessment was created. In May of 1970, hearings were held on H.R. 17046, with Mumford and Jayson testifying again, this time specifically on the legislation under review. Their testimony centered around the relationship between LRS and the proposed OTA, and focused on the need to avoid duplication of services as well as potential conflicts of interest that might develop between the two organizations. While Mumford testified in support of the bill, he reiterated his position that LRS was still capable of handling all of the additional responsibilities that were envisioned for OTA. Specifically, he testified that “the LRS has at least a six year head start in technology assessment work as well as a long tradition of impartial, scholarly service to the Congress. The LRS would need strengthening in organization, staff, and powers to conduct the task successfully. But in the end this might be less costly and duplicative for the Congress, and should also mean less competition for the same limited supply of professional talent experienced in technology assessment matters.” After the hearings concluded, the full Committee on Science and Astronautics made several changes to H.R. 17046, introduced a new bill that incorporated those changes (H.R. 18469), and reported the bill to the House for consideration. In an effort to have the subject considered by the House, the bill was offered as an amending title to the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970. It was ruled not germane on a point of order and no further action was taken on it in the 91st Congress.
The 92nd Congress considered a bill to create an Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). The House version of the bill, H.R. 10243, established as its purpose to “aid in the identification and consideration of existing and probable impacts of technological application.” During the House debate on the bill, a number of members spoke in support of the creation of an Office of Technology Assessment. Moreover, the ranking minority member of the full Science and Astronautics Committee (Rep. Charles A. Mosher) noted that the bill was approved in the full committee without a dissenting vote and had the “unanimous backing of the minority side of the House Science Committee,” as well as support from Senate cosponsors Pastore, Stevens, Kennedy, Allott, and Jordan of North Carolina. Despite Rep. Mosher’s high regard for CRS, his statement of record is clear that neither it nor the Government Accountability Office (GAO) were equipped to handle the new OTA mandate:
To be effective, (OTA) should be separate (from GAO and CRS) … even though the Congressional Library has great competence in many respects, it does not have the type of competence, nor traditionally the thrust, the interests, and attitudes intended by this new legislation….
The bill passed the House by a vote of 256–118, and the Senate passed its substitute version without debate on September 14, 1972. After a one-day Conference Committee session, the Senate version of the bill passed the Senate on September 22 and the House on October 4, 1972. It was signed into law by President Nixon on October 13, 1972 as P.L. 92–484. In 1995, it was defunded by the 104th Congress.
Political History
From its inception, the OTA was under fire by stakeholder communities on multiple fronts. Critics deemed its mandate to be superfluous with the National Research Council and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, not to mention other independent peer review and advisory agencies inside and out of the government. Its funding mechanism was widely denounced as a slush fund for the Library. The political appointees on its Board undermined the credibility of its Advisory Council, even as the content and quality of their work was generally accepted as legit. In particular, Senator Kennedy’s involvement with the OTA was viewed with suspicion, and political rivals spread rumors that he was using its staff to support his personal office.
These tensions intensified over time, and OTA became a target for conservatives, like President Reagan and Rep. Gingrich, as well as a battleground in the struggle over power between the Executive and Legislative branches. Critics from the Administration, Big Science lobby, and academia voiced concerns regarding the conflict of interest inherent in the OTA’s constitution. Even Congressional members raised concerns at OTA’s vague mandate, which could clear a pathway for overreaching powers by the 13 who controlled its Board. By the 1980s, the Council’s science and technology experts, who were tasked with evaluating federally-funded programs and recommending new policy initiatives to the Board, found themselves in a role reversal with OTA’s Members, who had their own political agendas for driving S&T policies, which favored their own constituents and lobbies.
In 1995, under Rep. Gingrich’s leadership and the sweeping budget cuts included in his “Contract with America” initiative, OTA was defunded. Despite years of controversy due to its inherent political conflicts, OTA’s role in institutionalizing technology assessment had earned it enough respect from the science community that its termination inspired vocal protests and appeals for its reinstatement that continue to this day. | https://medium.com/@docfoxrox/the-politics-of-science-55507afb4e0c | ['Agm Fox'] | 2020-12-18 05:01:23.924000+00:00 | ['Library Of Congress', 'Politics', 'Political History', 'Science Policy', 'American History'] |
Install and Configure Jupyter Lab using Miniconda on Ubuntu 18.04 | Install and Configure Jupyter Lab using Miniconda on Ubuntu 18.04
Personally, Jupyter Lab is one of the best tools for learning data science. It’s a simple yet powerful tool to perform data science experiments, developing applications, even though it is not a complete IDE. The best thing for me, that it’s web-based, so when I have this on a server, I can always access it anywhere I want using any device I got (even mobile is possible but, I’m not really want to code in my phone). In this tutorial, I want to show how to install Jupyter Lab step by step.
Download Miniconda
Why miniconda? Miniconda is a smaller version of Anaconda and I think there are some packages in Anaconda that are not necessary for now and as a package manager, Conda can install any package easily. Run the following command to download the miniconda installer.
Install Miniconda
After you finish downloading the miniconda installer, run the installer using the bash command.
bash Miniconda3-latest-Linux-x86_64.sh
Follow the Instructions
Just hit enters and yes to all, unless you really wanna read them. The document mainly explains the terms and conditions, oh ya and there are some packages that contain cryptographic and the document explains about it.
Go to the interactive bash
After the installation, the base conda environment will not be activated directly. So you need to activate it by pressing Ctrl + D or run the following command. Once you activate the conda environment the next time you open the terminal, the base environment will be activated automatically.
. ~/.bashrc
Add Conda forge channel to get the latest update of Conda packages
The default channel used to download packages is the anaconda channel, but the official anaconda package is somehow quite slow in terms of package updates. It’ll be better to use a conda-forge channel because it’s managed by the community and some packages updated faster than the anaconda channel. Here’s the command to add that channel.
conda config --add channels conda-forge
Update all packages in the base environment
After the channel to download the package is added, you can update your package to the latest using the following command.
conda update --all -y
Create a new Conda environment
You may install your packages (JupyterLab) directly to the base environment, but it’s not recommended as it may cause dependency issues, but if you are okay with that you can skip and jump to the next two steps. You can name your environment with any name, but I recommend a short but intuitive name like growth, test, tutorial, or anything. Here’s the command and don’t forget to change the [environment-name] with the desired name for your environment, oh ya and you can remove the brackets, I use them to identify that it is a variable.
conda create -n [environment-name] -y
Activate newly created Conda environment
Once you create the environment, you can activate it using the following command. Usually, the command to activate the newly created environment is displayed in the previous command output.
conda activate [environment-name]
Install Jupyter Lab
As I mentioned above, conda as a package manager can install packages easily including jupyter lab. Below is the command to install the jupyter lab, you can also install other packages using the same command and if you want to do it with multiple packages at once, you can separate each package name with space ( ). You can search for the package name and the channel the package exists from the anaconda.org website.
conda install jupyterlab -y
Generate config file for Jupyter Lab
Once you finish with the jupyter lab installation, you can directly run the jupyter lab from the terminal, but if you run it on the server, it would be better if you set up some configuration for implementation and security purposes. Here’s the command to generate configuration files for the JupyterLab (it’s actually for the jupyter notebook but it also works with the jupyter lab).
jupyter notebook --generate-config
Generate Password for Jupyter Lab
In the configuration file, you’ll configure a password to access the jupyter lab, it’s important as the jupyter lab can access the server file and run ssh through its built-in terminal. As usual, the password has to be hashed, so even if someone can access that configuration file, the plain password can remain unknown. You will generate your hashed password in python. So you can run python and start writing a simple script to generate a password hash.
python
Once you run the python command on the terminal, the terminal will display the python console that you can run a python script for each line of it. Below is the python script to get the password. As usual, the text inside the brackets is the password you want to use, don’t forget to remove the brackets unless you intended with the password inside the brackets. The console will display the output of the hashed password, copy that hashed password as you will have to use it on the configuration step. Once you’ve done, exit the python console using the quit() function.
from notebook.auth import passwd
passwd('[your-password]')
quit()
Open Jupyter Lab config file
As you already created the configuration file, now you have to open it so you can add some configurations to it. You can use any text editor, if you’re using the desktop you may use the GUI text editor, but if you’re using a server, you may have to use the available text editor on the terminal. I personally use nano but some hardcore programmer prefer vim but it’s up to you, as long as you can save and quit the text editor :D.
[text-editor-command-call] ~/.jupyter/jupyter_notebook_config.py
Note: Some people have some difficulties to quit from vim text editors.
Add configuration into the config file
After you open the config file with the text editor, you have to add the following script to the config file. You can put them anywhere in the file as long as it’s not in the comment, but I recommend to put them on top of the file, to make it easier to find when you want to modify it again. As usual again, put your hashed password inside the brackets, if you ask what is the function of the prefix “u” before the password hash, I can tell you that it’s necessary so that the password hash is read as a Unicode and not a literal string.
c.NotebookApp.ip = '*'
c.NotebookApp.password = u'[sha1:hashed-password]'
c.NotebookApp.port = 8888
c.NotebookApp.open_browser = False
Note: If you’re using a desktop, you may want to change the last row into True, as you might want the desktop to open the browser directly after you run the jupyter lab. If you’re using server, you might prefer not to open the browser directly as your server doesn’t have a GUI browser (or at least you cannot open it using your device)
(Optional) Add SSL certificate to the config file
you might want to use an SSL certificate so that you can access the jupyter lab using HTTPS protocol. The certificate will be self-signed, so it might not be detected as a valid certificate by the browser. This part of the tutorial doesn’t provide a way to make the certificate valid, so even if you have set up all the things when you open the jupyter lab from HTTPS, you still face the problem of invalid cert. To create a valid certificate, I recommend you to use Let’sEncrypt, it’s free and trusted, but you need to have a valid domain name in order to get the SSL certificate. Below are the commands to create a self-signed SSL certificate. After you finished with the certificate creation, you have to open the config file again.
mkdir certs
cd certs
openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 365 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout [key-file].key -out [cert-file].pem
cd ~
[text-editor-command-call] ~/.jupyter/jupyter_notebook_config.py
Add the following line of code to the config file. You may locate the certificate path to the safer place and change the permission, but I’ll keep it that way to make things simple. Don’t forget to save it.
c.NotebookApp.certfile = '/home/[username]/certs/[cert-name].pem'
c.NotebookApp.keyfile = '/home/[username]/certs/[key-name].key'
Run Jupyter Lab
After the installation is completed and the configuration is all set up, you can simply run the following command to run the jupyter lab. Once it runs without an error, you can proceed to the next step, but if it returns an error, you must go back and check-in which part you did something wrong, it can be the configuration, or it also can be the installation.
jupyter lab
Open Jupyter lab on https://[your-domain]:8888
As shown in the config file, the port is set up on port 8888 to access the Jupyter lab. you can change the port with any number you want (as long as the system doesn’t restrict them), 8888 is just the default port. Your domain can be localhost or your public IP address. If you skip the SSL part you may open it using HTTP and not HTTPS so, try to open it by removing the “s”.
Access without specifying the port
When you access a website without specifying the port, it doesn’t mean that the service is not located in any port, it means that the service is located in the default HTTP or HTTPS port. The default HTTP port is 80 and the default HTTPS port is 443. But the system usually restricts these ports for non-root users and I don’t recommend you install and run the jupyter lab inside the root user. So, to tackle this problem, we can use authbind to allow a non-root program to run on a restricted port. Below is the list of commands to install authbind and setup port 80 and 443 to get accessed by it.
sudo apt-get install authbind
sudo touch /etc/authbind/byport/80
sudo touch /etc/authbind/byport/443
sudo chmod 500 /etc/authbind/byport/80
sudo chmod 500 /etc/authbind/byport/443
sudo chown $USER /etc/authbind/byport/80
sudo chown $USER /etc/authbind/byport/443
Change port number on the config file
Of course, after you allow the port 80 and 443 to be accessed you need to change the default port used by the jupyter. So you need to open the config file.
[text-editor-command-call] ~/.jupyter/jupyter_notebook_config.py
And edit the following line of code
c.NotebookApp.port = 8888
Into
c.NotebookApp.port = 80
or
c.NotebookApp.port = 443
Run Jupyter lab
As you use authbind to access the 80 and 443 ports, you have to use the authbind command before you execute the jupyter lab command.
authbind --deep jupyter lab
Open JupyterLab on http://[your-domain] or https://[your-domain]
Tara… now open your browser and see that you can access the jupyter lab directly using your domain name without specifying the port number. You may have to open the jupyter lab using a password that you’ve set before.
Keep The JupyterLab running without Terminal on
Sometimes you want to access the jupyter lab anywhere without performing SSH to the server and run the jupyter lab directly. To keep the jupyter lab running without the terminal supervision, you have to “record” the process using a screen. The screen is usually already installed in ubuntu, but for minimal Ubuntu installation, it’s not installed by default, so you have to install it using the following command.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install screen
Once you have run the Jupyter lab, you can close the terminal and the JupyterLab should keep running. The screen can also be resumed, meaning that when you open your terminal and you want to do something with your recorded terminal (let say shut down the JupyterLab) you can run the following command and it’ll resume the recorded terminal.
screen
So, you’ll need to activate the environment that you used to install jupyter lab. Here are the commands.
conda activate [environment-name]
authbind --deep jupyter lab
Once you have run the Jupyter lab, you can close the terminal and the Jupyter Lab should keep running. The screen can also be resumed, mean that when you open your terminal and you want to do something with your recorded terminal (let say shut down the Jupyter Lab) you can run the following command and it’ll resume the recorded terminal.
screen -r | https://medium.com/@faisalmalikwp/install-and-configure-jupyter-lab-using-miniconda-on-ubuntu-18-04-b7abd3f411a8 | ['Faisal Malik Widya Prasetya'] | 2020-10-27 13:08:58.113000+00:00 | ['Miniconda', 'Jupyterlab', 'Ubuntu'] |
3 Simple Steps to a Harmonious Household | Thankfully, we’ve escaped the days when women were confined to housekeeping duties while men got to endure boring meetings in cold rooms. Let’s face it, no one really wins there. Still, everyone deserves the chance for a fulfilling career, which means that the household often becomes a neglected home, waiting patiently while everyone else works to pay for its costs.
If houses were sentient, they’d likely feel a little forgotten, longing for the days when someone was there to enjoy and take care of them. Instead, the residents hustle all day. Even the kids are busy with school and extracurriculars. At best, the house might enjoy the presence a sleeping cat who coats it in shed hair, or a plucky betta who fights with his reflection.
Homemaking seems to be a lost art, and that’s not feminism’s fault. Most of us, all genders, are simply too busy to spend time decorating, cooking, cleaning, and so on. When we need to relax, we simply shove the laundry to the side of the couch and ponder the impending apocalypse.
I’m sure I sound like an angry boomer right now, but last year, I gained a new perspective on what homemaking entails and why it matters.
That’s because I started working from home.
I quickly became frustrated with the perpetual chaos, born of my hectic schedule and my husband’s backbreaking job. Neither of us had the time or energy to devote to homemaking.
Still, the house and its many needs were a point of contention. My husband didn’t quite see the need to wipe down the backsplash or dust the blinds, and I couldn’t seem to understand that cleaning doesn’t need to happen at midnight. I wanted a clean, comfortable home, even though I never made time to relax in it anyway.
For sure, my priorities were out of alignment.
When my husband and I moved to Orlando, we had to leave our spacious home for a tiny apartment that cost twice as much in rent. We downsized a lot but quickly discovered that even the basic living essentials had to fight for space. With little space, the mess compounded. At times, our floor resembled an obstacle course.
I had to make a change. And so we spent a couple of days cleaning and rearranging. It looked so nice when we were done that I pledged to never let it became chaotic again. Along the way, we made some decisions that ultimately worked out for the better.
Here’s what we did. | https://rachelwayne.medium.com/3-simple-steps-to-a-harmonious-household-d632fa6d5a24 | ['Rachel Wayne'] | 2020-01-17 20:34:38.442000+00:00 | ['Organization', 'House', 'Relationships', 'Lifestyle', 'Home'] |
Covid-19 impact: Stretch Marks Treatment Market Size To Reach $3.9 Billion By 2026 | Stretch Marks Treatment Market Growth & Trends
The global stretch marks treatment market size is projected to reach USD 3.9 billion by 2026, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. It is expected to expand at a CAGR of 8.04% during the forecast period. Increasing awareness among women regarding the treating stretch marks caused during pregnancy is significantly driving the growth. Also, the growing prevalence of stretch marks in adolescents and teenagers is predicted to fuel the demand for their treatment.
High number of obese population in North America is majorly driving the market in the region. This is an opportunity for the players for expanding their consumer target and strengthening their market presence. Moreover, the increasing number of key players in the region is another factor driving the competition, thereby positively influencing the stretch marks treatment market.
Growing number of online portals for the sale of topical products for treating stretch marks is another opportunity for the players. The key players can thus, increase their sale through these online portals and expand their product portfolio. Moreover, consumer preference for topical products is augmenting its demand, thus affecting the market.
Rise in the launch of new products and adoption of growth strategies, such as partnerships and innovations are trending in the market. Growing Asia Pacific economies and rise in spending power of consumers in these regions is also influencing the market growth positively.
Request a free sample copy or view report summary:
www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/stretch-marks-treatment-market/request/rs1
Stretch Marks Treatment Market Report Highlights | https://medium.com/ict-market-research-reports/covid-19-impact-stretch-marks-treatment-market-size-to-reach-3-9-billion-by-2026-22862ec9719c | ['Rajesh Varma'] | 2020-08-18 12:04:24.894000+00:00 | ['Global Health', 'Medical Devices', 'Stretch Marks Treatment', 'Medical', 'Covid 19'] |
Bandwidth is the new tool to fight hackers | I am often asked, “How is blockchain different from the other p2p networks that have existed long before?”
To this, my answer is, “Technically, nothing. Economically, everything.”
As soon as the words leave my mouth, a weird expression turns up on their face. I enjoy it for a minute before I start explaining what I meant.
Blockchain is not a new technology
“Every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation.” — Dean Kamen
Before you start sending me hate emails, allow me to explain myself.
Every moving part of the blockchain has existed independently for a long time. We had peer-to-peer networks and cryptography long before blockchain came into the picture. A blockchain is just an arrangement of these technologies. If you are an engineer, you will not find anything new technically in the blockchain protocol.
The difference is that, this time, we have found a way to attach value to the cryptographic and peer-to-peer aspect of the network. Through cryptography and distributed consensus, we can now send virtual money, and we can also exchange value through tokens attached to objects of value.
The economic side of the blockchain makes it different from any other peer-to-peer network.
A decentralized protocol like blockchain is made up of tens of thousands of computers, wherein each of them contributes to the network through distributed authentication, verification and consensus. In return, these nodes are rewarded for their contribution.
As an added resiliency feature, if one computer goes down, the network stays up. If two computers go down, the network stays up. The network stays available until the last computer is standing.
When a tree falls down in a forest, the forest doesn’t cease to exist.
Blockchain is immutable economically, not technically.
What does this have to do with bandwidth?
“Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens.” — Fay Weldon
Which brings us to my main point.
The other side of distributed tech — the “bad” side of it — is that malicious hackers have long been using networks of zombie computers or botnets to execute traffic-based attacks in the form of distributed denial-of-service or DDoS attacks.
The attacks do not come from a single computer that one can simply block, but rather from thousands of devices — usually compromised zombie computers — spread throughout the world. This makes it nearly impossible to track and block all of them.
In October 2016, Dyn, a company that controls an enormous part of the internet’s DNS infrastructure, was hit by the largest DDoS attack the world had ever seen. Over 1.2 Tbps of malicious connections brought down this cornerstone of the internet. Sites including Twitter, Netflix, Reddit, and CNN were all completely shut down for an entire day. Billions of dollars were lost because of that attack.
Blockchain startups like Filecoin and Siacoin have revolutionized hard disk sharing and monetization to create a Dropbox killer. Golem allow users to “donate” their spare computation power to allow others to get access to a distributed and collective powerful supercomputer.
Now, comes bandwidth. | https://medium.com/hackernoon/bandwidth-is-the-new-tool-to-fight-hackers-2980b2e32717 | ['Mohit Mamoria'] | 2017-10-09 10:50:43.055000+00:00 | ['Economics', 'Business', 'Ideas', 'Technology', 'Bitcoin'] |
The easiest way to plot data from Pandas on a world map | This guide is intended to be quick and easy, with the least amount of words and least amount of code, to show you how to plot data from a Pandas object on a world map using Matplotlib and Geopandas libraries.
The python libraries you need to install are pandas, geopandas and matplotlib. You can find the code for this tutorial on github: https://github.com/udiy/blogposts/tree/main/Easy%20map
The data in the Pandas object needs to have location coordinates, which means latitude and longitude. For this article, I am using data about fires in Australia, which can be found here: https://www.kaggle.com/carlosparadis/fires-from-space-australia-and-new-zeland.
The data comes from NASA satellites MODIS instrument, they monitor the fires from space, find acknowledgments at the end of this article. In the data, there’s a column called brightness, which is a measure of the temperature (in Kelvin) of the fire.
Explore data
Let’s see some code now. First, we’ll have a quick look at loading and peeking at the data:
df = pd.read_csv("fire_archive_M6_96619.csv",
usecols=["latitude", "longitude", "brightness",
"acq_date"], parse_dates=["acq_date"]) df.head()
Output of the above code cell
Now let’s plot the data on a scatter plot, latitude on the y-axis, longitude on the x-axis:
df.plot(x="longitude", y="latitude", kind="scatter", c="brightness",
colormap="YlOrRd")
Output of the above cell
Nice. Even without the use of a map, we can see the contours of Australia. Let’s add a map.
Geopandas
Geopandas lets you load the geometry for countries worldwide into an object called GeoDataFrame, which is very similar to pandas DataFrame object. It looks like this:
countries = gpd.read_file(
gpd.datasets.get_path("naturalearth_lowres")) countries.head()
Output of the above cell
Once you have this object you can easily plot a world map, in the same way you would use the plot function in pandas:
countries.plot(color="lightgrey")
Output of the above cell
Since our focus is on Australia, we can slice the “countries” object so it shows us Australia only:
countries[countries["name"] == "Australia"].plot(color="lightgrey")
Output of the above cell
Putting it all together
We’ll now use matplotlib to create a figure, and plot the map and the data together at the same time:
# initialize an axis
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(8,6)) # plot map on axis
countries = gpd.read_file(
gpd.datasets.get_path("naturalearth_lowres")) countries[countries["name"] == "Australia"].plot(color="lightgrey",
ax=ax) # parse dates for plot's title
first_month = df["acq_date"].min().strftime("%b %Y")
last_month = df["acq_date"].max().strftime("%b %Y") # plot points
df.plot(x="longitude", y="latitude", kind="scatter",
c="brightness", colormap="YlOrRd",
title=f"Fires in Australia {first_month} to {last_month}",
ax=ax) # add grid
ax.grid(b=True, alpha=0.5) plt.show()
Output of the above cell
Bonus — Extra Styling
Minor grid
The grid lines correspond to the ticks on both axes. Depending on the zoom level and our target on the map, we might want to add grid lines with smaller spacing, to do that we need to add extra ticks. For styling purposes, I prefer to add minor ticks, this way you can plot the minor grid in a different color, or transparency level. In the example below there is a minor grid with a spacing of 1 degree:
# get axes limits
x_lo, x_up = ax.get_xlim()
y_lo, y_up = ax.get_ylim() # add minor ticks with a specified sapcing (deg)
deg = 1
ax.set_xticks(np.arange(np.ceil(x_lo), np.ceil(x_up), deg), minor=True)
ax.set_yticks(np.arange(np.ceil(y_lo), np.ceil(y_up), deg), minor=True)
ax.grid(b=True, which="minor", alpha=0.25) fig
Output of the above cell
Acknowledgments
We acknowledge the use of data and/or imagery from NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) (https://earthdata.nasa.gov/firms), part of the NASA Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS).
MODIS Collection 6 NRT Hotspot / Active Fire Detections MCD14ML distributed from NASA FIRMS. Available on-line [https://earthdata.nasa.gov/firms]. doi: 10.5067/FIRMS/MODIS/MCD14ML
Disclaimer by NASA: https://earthdata.nasa.gov/earth-observation-data/near-real-time/citation#ed-lance-disclaimer
That’s it, I hope you found this tutorial helpful and enjoyable :) | https://towardsdatascience.com/the-easiest-way-to-plot-data-from-pandas-on-a-world-map-1a62962a27f3 | ['Udi Yosovzon'] | 2021-02-13 15:14:37.673000+00:00 | ['Pandas', 'Geospatial', 'GIS', 'Python', 'Data Analysis'] |
Take a Risk, But Treat it Well | Ideas and thoughts just randomly light up the bulb inside our minds, making the world of business grow wider and bigger day by day. When a business idea is pitched or even just mentioned the first word of response will most definitely be “What about the risk?” … Yes, ‘RISK’ the term so closely related to businesses, that it is one of the elements that define what a business environment consists of. It is quite a common knowledge that; when you are involving yourself in business you are actually involving yourself in high risk, because that is what businesses are all about, they say; higher the risk, higher the profitability.
While it may be true, what we must not fail to understand is that, whatever may be the risk, however big or small, if not foreseen and managed in the right way at the right time, it can lead to fatal consequences for the enterprise as a whole, for what makes the business a higher profitable one is how the management of the enterprise go around these risks making it less of a threat, which is why managements have a risk management system in place for good planning and foreseeing possible obstacles and risks that may hinder the future of the entire business organization.
Now that we have addressed it, let’s delve on it a bit more, as to what exactly is this system of risk management which is termed as ‘Enterprise Risk Management’? and why do we need it?
The term itself may give it away as to what it is and what it aims to achieve.
Enterprise Risk Management is a new and evolving management discipline that involves the process of assessing potential risks to help foresee threats to an organization in all ways that matter, which means a company’s financial wellbeing and operations in the relevant market. The enterprise risk management business strategy identifies and prepares for hazards with a company’s operations and objectives, with the goal to understand the enterprises tolerance for risk and make decisions accordingly after categorizing and quantifying the said risks.
Being a plan-based strategy with an ultimate aim to identify, assess and prepare for any dangers or obstacles that can cause hindrance to the life of the business enterprise; this strategy involves not only looking into obvious risks that lie before you in plain sight, but also look more far ahead and create maximum accurate reports onto likely less obvious potential risks and manage it accordingly to create a good practical plan of action of need arise.
A well-equipped and automated Enterprise Risk Management Software is a manager’s best friend and trusted advisor, for it helps them to see what they can possibly miss out on, literally ensuring no stones are left unturned when it comes to the profitability and life of the enterprise.
To really realize that you are indeed way behind in the market and is terribly missing out, if you do not have strategized Enterprise Risk Management solutions and a good Enterprise Risk Management software, it would be best to keep scrolling to see the benefits of the same listed below, which include;
- Better risk reporting:
Accuracy is the key when it comes to making decisions that can be the answer to the future of the business, where unwanted inappropriate reports of data can cause hindrances to the operations of the business, a well managed Enterprise Risk Management framework creates a platform to erase such possibilities by having an automated template system for reporting that allows the information to be accessed by all departments under one cloud
- Improved data quality:
By eradicating the traditional way of manually recording data, managed Enterprise Risk Management software solutions also removes possibility of mistakes and omissions that may occur, thus improving the quality of the data many times over.
- Reduced insurance premiums:
For companies that need a lot of insurance, Enterprise Risk Management solutions can understandably be used to reduce these premiums. Insurers want to be sure there are controls in place within a company to manage key risks. The more robust the controls, the more likely an insurer will review premiums and reduce prices.
- Increased access to capital:
Organizations that have incorporated a good and effective Enterprise Risk Management framework are more likely to be in a better position to minimize their financial obligation, which in turn increases their goodwill, making it easy to raise finances from more external sources.
- Improve the supply chain:
Enterprise Risk Management software solutions have shown to improve the overall supply chain, i.e., acquisition, inventory, and also go far ahead to even be able to forecast the customer demand in advance to take necessary action for the future.
- Better Productivity:
Perhaps the most likeable benefit of an Enterprise Risk Management system could be that, it being able to forecast possible hindrances that risks that are not favorable to the business, helps to make decisions and plan of actions accordingly, paves way for more and better productivity in the organization.
Not a promise for a worry free line of business that you can run risk free, but an effective management system that helps to identify those risks well in advance and thus possibly increase the life span of your business enterprise, with more productivity and less costs Enterprise Risk Management solutions is truly a management’s best friend. | https://medium.com/@isorobot/take-a-risk-but-treat-it-well-80d735e2a705 | [] | 2021-02-02 09:21:10.887000+00:00 | ['Risk Management Solutions', 'Enterprise Technology', 'Enterprise Software', 'Enterprise Risk', 'Risk Management'] |
My Little Garden 4th Sept 2021 | My Little Garden 4th Sept 2021
This week I’m ‘celebrating’ the end of the school holidays. Of course I love spending extra time with my granddaughters, but after six weeks I’m ready for a little bit more time to myself.
For the last outing of the summer we took the eldest two to the Dunham Massey Ice Cream Farm and the Sunflower Trail they have there. The sunflowers themselves were well past their best but all the other annuals were still very colourful and the girls enjoyed themselves in the maze. Next week it will be back to the school and hopefully a full year of schooling in the classroom.
At home in my garden, there are a few signs of autumn. On the first day of the month, I spotted a squirrel digging up the lawn to bury something. It seems a bit premature for that particularly annoying activity so it probably ‘means something’ like a cold winter is in prospect.
But enough of autumn, because I’m still enjoying summer. My six choices for this week are strictly summery and for the first three I’m celebrating the front garden surviving the trampling of of big footed VM engineers in their latest attempt to solve our internet issues.
Helenium
I had a serious deadheading session about 10 days ago and have been rewarded with lots of new blooms. The variety is ‘Moerheim Beauty’.
2. Rozanne
This is a perfect perennial for a low maintenance front garden. Unlike some geraniums it just carries on flowering right the way through the summer and autumn.
3. Derrick Cook
A spare plant from a job earlier in the summer and a very pretty geranium. It’s grown into a decent sized plant and hopefully it will do well when it wakes up next spring.
4. Handel
I love this rose and I always think it’s late summer flowers are the most beautiful.
5. Frilly Knickers
The latest anemone acquisition is looking very frilly
With the palest of pink ruffles.
6. A star
This Star Dahlia named ‘Honka Fragile’ is certainly trying to be a star of my garden at the moment. It could do with a few more blooms but the ones it’s produced so far are stunning.
The weather forecast for next week sounds pretty good, so I expect I will be spending a few hours in the garden. And as always if you want to find out what’s happening elsewhere around the gardening world, take a look at the blog of The Propagator and the rest of #SixonSaturday gang.
https://thepropagatorblog.wordpress.com/
Thank you for reading and have a great weekend. | https://medium.com/@renaissancegd/my-little-garden-4th-sept-2021-60043d8f6f2 | ['Alison Moore'] | 2021-09-04 05:54:58.126000+00:00 | ['Blogging', 'Garden', 'Gardening', 'Blog', 'Photography'] |
Hong Kong ‘Milkshake Murderer’ Served Her Husband Drug-Laced Milkshakes | Hong Kong ‘Milkshake Murderer’ Served Her Husband Drug-Laced Milkshakes
Hong Kong ‘milkshake murderer’ Nancy Kissel. Photo Source.
By midnight on November 6, 2003, Hong Kong police were investigating a storage room at the posh Parkview apartments complex. They spotted a suspiciously hefty rolled carpet tied with string and bound with adhesive tape. When the police unrolled it, they found what they expected — a dead body. The police knew immediately that the victim had been dead quite a while; the smell emanating from the decomposing body was too strong to be a recent death.
The police’s investigation had been prompted by calls from David Noh, a vice president in Merrill Lynch’s Hong Kong office. He reported his colleague and close friend, Robert Kissel, had been missing for four days.
Within hours of Noh’s call, police went to Robert Kissel’s apartment for investigation. They interviewed Robert’s wife, Nancy Kissel. They asked her about her husband’s whereabouts and had an inquiry into a police report she had filed that morning. In her report, she stated that her husband had beaten her over the past weekend.
Later that evening, the police interviewed the apartment’s maintenance staff and learned that Nancy Kissel had called the management office the day before and requested a carpet moved to her storeroom. The staff said that it was unusually heavy and that it had taken a team of four workmen to move it. Nancy Kissel had said nothing about the storage room, thus the police became suspicious and immediately applied for a search warrant to enter the storage room.
Two hours after Robert Kissel’s body being found, police arrested Nancy Kissel and she was charged with murdering her husband.
Robert Kissel, the victim of his wife. Photo Source.
Road to Becoming a Financial Elite
Nancy and Robert Kissel began dating in 1987 and were married in 1989. While Robert was studying full-time master’s degree in finance from New York University, Nancy, who holds a bachelor’s degree in business and a Masters in design, worked three part-time catering jobs to support him. This highly educated and refined lady deviated from her own career goals to help her husband further his ambitions.
Robert’s wishes came true. He got a job in Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and was assigned to the Hong Kong office. Then in 2000, he hopped to Merrill Lynch, where he was promoted to managing director and head of the investment bank’s Global Principal Investments Division for Asia-Pacific.
The Kissels lived in the Hong Kong exclusive community where they enjoyed the luxury American lifestyles. Despite their wealth, the Kissels were not living in bliss, Robert was on-call to company 24/7 and Nancy was lonely at heart.
Spying Wife’s Personal Email
In 2003, the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) which was similar to today’s COVID epidemic, had struck Hong Kong. While Ms. Kissel and the children had been evacuated to the US, her workaholic husband stayed on for his jobs. They decided to take their children to the family’s vacation home near Stratton Mountain, Vermont.
As the epidemic worsened, it was uncertain when it would be safe to return to Hong Kong. Nancy ordered a home theatre system, figuring that she and her children would be staying at the vacation house for an indefinite duration. The man who sold the equipment sent his brother, Michael Del Priore, to install it for them.
Michael Del Priore, a young and well-built TV repairman who lived in a trailer park in Vermont, kept in touch with Nancy after completing the installation. They talked in depth and Nancy confided in him about her troubles. Their friendship soon turned into romance, and Nancy later admitted to having sex with him three times in her Vermont house.
By the end of the summer, the SARS epidemic had subsided, and Nancy returned to Hong Kong with her children. She kept close contact with Del Priore, calling him frequently. Robert suspected his wife was cheating on him, so he hired a private investigator and installed spy software which monitored her Internet use and copied all her emails to him.
“It’s really hard to talk to you on the phone, but you have to know that I think about you constantly, not being able to talk to you really drives me crazy. Honey, I love you.”
“I love you when you call my name. It makes me melt.”
More and more love messages between the adulterers were disclosed, and some were even erotic, such as discussing sex positions.
It cut Mr. Kissel to the heart that he couldn’t take it anymore. He consulted with his lawyer about divorce and child custody. However, he ignored the legal advice and maintained his will in which he left an estate estimated at USD $18 million to his wife.
The Homemade Pink Milkshake
Forensic tests found traces of four sedative drugs in Robert Kissel’s stomach. Prosecutors said Ms. Kissel had drugged her husband with a spiked strawberry milkshake, before cracking his skull with a heavy statuette.
The Kissels’ neighbor, Andrew Tanzer, testified he had a visit to Kissels’ apartment with his 7-year-old daughter for a play date on November 2, 2003. He was chit-chatting with Mr. Kissel. Meanwhile, the Kissels’ 6-year-old daughter brought out two glasses of homemade strawberry milkshake, one for Tanzer and the other for her father. Tanzer became drowsy and then unconscious after being home at 4 pm. He described the milkshake as “reddish in color, strawberry flavoring…. heavy, sweet, thickened, tasting of bananas and crushed cookies.” Nancy Kissel told Tanzer that it was “a secret recipe” and that the color was to match the spirit of Halloween that had just passed.
Mrs. Kissel was accused of drugging her husband with the pink milkshake spiked with sedatives to render him defenceless, then beating him to death. The prosecutors suggested that she was motivated by a fear of divorce and a desire to secure life insurance payments.
However, Nancy Kissel, who pleaded not guilty to murder charges, told a very different story in court.
Forced Anal Sex for Years of Humiliation
Nancy Kissel’s defence team argued that she was the victim of her violent husband. According to her testimony, her marriage had been deteriorating due to her husband’s growing dependency on cocaine and alcohol. As he became successful in his career, he became more and more physically and emotionally abusive.
With the birth of the first child, Nancy began to gain weight and her breasts sagged. Robert didn’t find her attractive anymore, and he developed a fetish for anal sex. Nancy believed that her husband no longer wanted to see her face during sex. Whenever she refused his demands, he would beat her and force entry on her. His violent penetration often caused her bleeding. This took serious tolls on both her physical and mental health.
“He made me feel like a whore …… I was no longer being like a wife or mother and all that was left between us was sexual violence and a money deal the next morning!”
Nancy Kissel had admitted manslaughter but denied deliberately killing her husband. On the night of November 2, Robert Kissel told her that he had filed for divorce. When she questioned her husband, he was irritated and threatened her with a baseball bat. “I’m going to kill you, bitch!” The couple struggled fiercely, and just then, in her defence, she smashed his head with the metal statuette.
The Verdict
What undermined the defendant’s credibility was her claim that she could not recall what happened in the days following her husband’s death. With respect to all the events between November 2 and 7, she offered similar replies: “I don’t remember” or “I have no recollection”, though a surveillance camera at her apartment building captured her carrying a large object wrapped in a carpet out of the building after her husband’s death.
After a marathon three-month trial, the jury of five men and two women decided on her guilt unanimously. On September 1, 2005, Nancy Kissel was sentenced to life imprisonment. She appealed her conviction, her lawyer arguing that the prosecution had used improper evidence, including hearsay. Besides, there were problems with the original jury instructions. Nancy pleaded her case before Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal. The court allowed the appeal and ordered a retrial.
On March 25, 2011, after months of the retrial, the jury of seven women and two men unanimously found Nancy Kissel guilty of murder and she was again sentenced to life in prison. When she heard the verdict, she looked dazed and her body shook back and forth.
“I have finally fallen into the black hole, a hole so deep that I truly believe I am worthless. I have lost my soul!”
This was written in Nancy’s diary three months before she killed her husband. Unless she was so deliberate that she used the diary as a tool to defend herself in the future court, she had no readers here, only herself, and what she said was from the bottom of her heart.
She had been the most vulnerable woman, but also the most dangerous one. | https://medium.com/chameleon/hong-kong-milkshake-murderer-served-her-husband-drug-laced-milkshake-f72d6c8e00b | ['Adam Novak'] | 2020-12-25 05:01:47.606000+00:00 | ['Hong Kong', 'True Crime', 'Crime', 'Alcohol', 'Drugs'] |
For those who want to shape the world, not just fit in — LIS — a new challenger university in London. | Q. What are your thoughts about existing universities as we know them, recent trends and the near future? Are you feeling pessimistic or optimistic?
We’re optimistic. Whether you’re an established institution with a strong brand or a new challenger, education is an exciting area. In the UK, there’s a growing number of eighteen-year-olds, and more and more of those
eighteen-year-olds want to go to university — people want to learn and universities are a good place to do that. So we believe there will be a strong demand for universities and a need for more university seats. The universities which will do well will offer more choice and be focussed on the teaching and
learning experience of students. As employers look past brand names and test what applicants can actually do, students are going to want to know that universities can teach them something that’s genuinely valuable in the world of work. In which case, universities need to double down on understanding how people learn, by reviewing their teaching methodologies in light of new
developments in cognitive science.
Q. What are your thoughts around challenger universities (institutions radically different from status quo campus-only institutions; trends, types of models you are seeing and prospects for them gaining more traction)
Many challenger universities are focusing on one area, such as Hyper Island on digital or Ecole 42 on programming. The trend seems to be that if you’re starting something new, you focus on a specific area. New providers are particularly interesting when they can influence the rest of the education
system, rather than simply being a small provider influencing a small number of students. If challenger universities are very specialised or doing things differently, other providers might take note and they could start to have a stronger influence on the wider system.
There certainly seems to be overwhelming feedback from students that they want something different in higher education. Some quotes from LIS’s applicants give a flavour as to how passionate they are about a fresh approach;
“LIS have reconfigured my perception of the education system as a whole. It is far ahead of its time and I believe it will be the catalyst that leads to worldwide change in terms of redefining education. It has made me realise that interdisciplinarity is the way forward, as it allows you to see the relevance in every single thing you learn.Therefore, it would be an absolute honour to be a part of the founding cohort. I believe you will not only come out ready to tackle real world problems, but play an active part in revolutionising education.”
- Lois Hill “The world around us is changing faster than we know. This is exactly why I am excited to apply for LIS as it tackles the accelerating problems of today’s society and problems, which will give me not only the education I’m after but an understanding of the modern world.”
- Tomasz Lewandow
Q. Who do you think are the standout examples of challenger universities?
There are some really interesting challengers entering the university space. There’s room for more though. We need to keep encouraging innovation and work together to ensure students have a breadth of choice and learning experiences when choosing where to study. At LIS however, we’re interested in questions surrounding the role of expertise in the 21st century or the value of a polymathic education. To this end, our curriculum is deeply interdisciplinary (more and more, employers are recognising the power of interdisciplinary thinking) and centred around real-world problems
including knife crime, big data, and plastics pollution. The innovative nature of our curriculum has proved attractive to leading academics; we had over six-hundred applications for the first six faculty positions from institutions including Harvard, Oxbridge, and LSE.
Our emphasis on the real-world extends beyond the classroom: LIS students will be introduced to leading organisations, like Virgin and the Met Police, as part of our network of employer organisations. Not only this but LIS teachers and external experts, including academic and industry specialists, are working with us to understand the relevant parts of their disciplines and help
craft a transformational learning experience.
Our admissions process is contextual, and we are looking for a founding cohort of around one hundred students. We will interview every applicant, making conditional offers which take into account a student’s academic achievements in light of their individual backgrounds. We are
working hard to recruit a diverse cohort with a particular focus on widening participation.
Q. What does the optimal challenger university of the future looks like / have?
It’s important to remember that learning is intellectual but it’s also social. When you’re looking for a transformational learning experience it’s going to remain, for a long time, a social one — because we’re human and that’s such an important part of who we are. All of our learning happens in a deeply social way for the first few years of our lives, and it continues that way.
Online platforms are great for studying specific tools and techniques, but the social aspect of learning is still so important. Though it doesn’t have to be an either-or. Challenger universities can have a blended approach where we use technology in more sophisticated ways but hold onto the social aspect of
learning. In terms of content, new universities probably won’t offer a full suite of single subjects. Instead, we’ll see a rich plethora of different HE models — and that’s a good thing. It’s difficult to say what the university of the future will look like because the system needs to provide lots of variety in a
way that it hasn’t been done historically.
What is LIS — Carl Gombrich
Q. Differentiation and brand is important — what niche topics / themes do you find exciting for building new universities around?
For lots of students, the most important thing about going to university is getting a job afterwards. So their preferred university is going to do well if it is porous with the outside world and will stand them in good stead for meaningful work after graduation. Place-based universities are also really interesting — ones that are focussed on transforming their particular local area in a number of different ways.
Q. What as been the biggest risk or challenge in setting up LIS to date and your thoughts around mitigating this?
Regulation (if you want to be regulated) is always hard, but it’s hard for the right reasons. We’re talking about students making decisions that will impact them for the rest of their lives, and that isn’t something that can be taken lightly. We have a responsibility to these students which regulation can help guide.
Q. Why are the most innovative exciting universities moving online and why? What are your general thoughts on the abilities of existing players to successfully re-invent themselves?
Challenger universities are able to start from scratch with no legacy technology — we can decide which tech to adopt that’s going to deliver the best possible experience for students. It’s a chance for us to get creative with technology and see just how much we can do with it.
We’re particularly interested in how tech can give teachers the ability to use their expert judgement in ways which can then be standardised. Take a look at No More Marking, founded by one of our curriculum advisors, which uses technology to aid comparative marking during assessments in school. The software has reduced the workload for teachers, and significantly improves the reliability of marking. It’s clear that education has a long way to go in harnessing the power of teacher experience and judgement, and we think tech can help with that.
Q. If you could recommend one book/article on for founders of other challenger universities then which one?
Range by David Epstein. It’s a book about generalism and the importance of having a broad range of expertise. It’s a great collection of evidence for why it’s important and has profound implications for education.
This interview was kindly given by Chris Persson and Ed Fidoe, co-founders of LIS to Nic Newman, Partner at Emerge Education. | https://medium.com/emerge-edtech-insights/for-those-who-want-to-shape-the-world-not-just-fit-in-lis-a-new-challenger-university-in-234dfc71952c | ['Naxn', 'Nic Newman'] | 2020-03-24 09:01:01.225000+00:00 | ['Founder Stories', 'Edtech', 'Challenger Universities', 'Inspiration', 'University'] |
Systemic Risk | The most likely scenario for Systemic Risk emerging remains that Bank Stocks (like Deutsche Bank) across Europe are correct and that Sovereign Credit prices (meaning government bond yields) are incorrect. In other words, Sovereign Credit yields should be higher in Europe than they are and European Banks prices reflect this fact: that their balance sheets are already insolvent because the mark-to-market impact of more properly priced European Government Debt would wipe out their equity.
If this scenario plays out in a violent, or quick fashion, it seems quite plausible that the European Financial System would collapse as counter-parties refused to transact with one another and the backstop of the ECB itself would be called into question given its own relative instability politically and financially. In such a scenario, it seems that Financial System contagion would spread immediately to the United States (and globally) given the interconnected nature of the Financial Markets.
Unfortunately, sorting through the aftermath of such an event would likely not happen quickly nor efficiently. In Europe, given the many conflicting National Interests and increasing Populism, it seems quite likely it would take weeks if not months to ultimately resolve such a Systemic scenario. If the above scenario happens, the U.S. Financial System would likely need another bail out similar to what it received in 2008, which was $100's of Billions. It seems almost impossible that such a bail out would happen quickly. More likely, it would result in Violent — maybe even physically violent — disputes lasting many weeks, which would lead to the U.S. Financial Markets being shut down. It seems plausible during this time that banks would not be open, even ATM machines might stop working due to a “run” on cash in the short run.
Hopefully, in such a scenario countries like China and Russia would not use the vulnerability of the West to their advantage and move in an aggressive fashion to make military advances, but that also seems possible. Perhaps it would be strategically wise for them to attack when their Western enemies are vulnerable as their Financial Markets come under pressure.
While the collapse of the European Financial System, spreading to the U.S. Financial System, is the most likely Systemic Risk on the horizon it is not the only one. As China’s Economy continues to slow down, causing many industries to suffer, it seems that China is in an increasingly vulnerable position. They cannot afford to allow their Economy to slow too much or the Chinese People might prove to be problematic for their government. Unfortunately, propping up gigantic economies that are dependent on global trade is not always easy, especially when you are in a trade conflict with your largest trade partner. If China is unable to stem the decline of its Economy through its typical financial interventions (stimulus, tax changes, liquidity injections and other approaches), it is difficult to know what the consequences might be. China clearly has a large amount of debt in its financial system, much of which is likely unsustainable nor supported by fundamentals, especially if they slow precipitously. Beyond that, China has clear military intentions such as control of the South China Sea as well as control of Taiwan. It is hard to know whether China would activate a military strategy as an alternative course of action to rally unity in its populous under a slowing financial market scenario, but this also seems plausible.
In other words, there is deep uncertainty regarding China, and there are likely many scenarios where China becomes a source of Systemic Risk.
Beyond these scenarios there are of course other potential Systemic Risks.
Unfortunately, the System is vulnerable to these future Systemic Shocks due to the fact that Systemic Risk was underpriced for the last decade by Central Banks in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis.
What is so staggering about that fact is that we learned in 2008 that Systemic Risk exists. We also learned that one of the clearest ways for it to emerge is if Debt is mispriced at scale in a way that is interconnected across our Financial System.
Leading up to 2008, Corporate Credit, Consumer Credit and especially Mortgate Credit was mispriced across the System. Securitization added leverage to these asset classes in a way that ultimately threatened the viability of the System when prices corrected.
This Cycle is far worse however:
Government Debt prices have been mispriced across markets (in addition to the Corporate Credit and others). There are many ways to envision this but the many Trillions In negatively yielding government debt is the most obvious.
Negatively yielding debt should not exist. This is a fictional creation by Central Banks and represents one of the more. vious distortions created this Cycle.
Unfortunately we are likely nearing the Moment when Systemic Risk emerges causing the financial system to freeze up and markets to fail. It seems quite likely this will occur in 2019, although it could be extended. Time will tell.
Sadly, there seems to be no way around its emergence. It is simply a matter of time. | https://medium.com/odin-river/systemic-risk-df86e1c7e8b4 | ['David Aron Levine'] | 2019-06-26 02:56:10.182000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Economics', 'Finance'] |
What’s going to make you happy? | What’s going to make you happy?
Not your family.
Not your friends.
Not even your partner.
But you.
What is going to make _____(insert your name) happy?
And I’m not talking about irresponsible decisions. I am talking about the ones that silently whisper at your heart towards the end of the day.
Every time I was about to make a decision.
what kind of job should I get ?
Who should I marry?
Should I break up with them?
Should I relocate?
Should I write that book?
All of those decisions I replayed in my mind with the voices of my parents, friends, my lover, etc. echoed back at me.
In the past I would go to friends before hand to tell them my upcoming decisions with some hopes of confirmation that I was doing the right thing. I valued their opinions and their opinions also took some weight over my own. It’s the culture, many of us unconsciously care about what others think-we value it.
Because of the need for approval, my heart had been stuck in a rut for years and for the longest I couldn’t figure out why. It wasn’t until I was sitting down one day telling my homegirls about how I was falling in love with my guy friend. Oh man did I receive a bajillion text messages of mixed advice and a fear slowly anchored into my heart. I nearly stopped being friends with my guy friend.
The responses from my girls disappointed me at first, until I realized why I am seeking confirmation from other people with what I want to do with my heart. They don’t know how I’m feeling. Their experience isn’t my experience. I can take their experience into account, but at the end of the day the decision is mine alone to make and it must be dependent upon me, not anyone else.
All those times I came to my people about my plans for my career choice-my travel plans-my relocation plans-the “ima break up with him” plans, etc…sometimes it took me along time to go through with MY plans because of the responses I would get.
And it’s my fault, because you know what I came to my friends with my plans about what I wanted to do with my life. Do they look like me? No. Many times I came unconsciously, I came in the form of conversation hoping for some form of confirmation. Many of us do that...we go to our friends or trusted loved ones to confirm that the decision we are about to make is the right one. We got to trust our hearts more.
No one knows what’s going to make you happy, but you. No one knows what’s in your heart, but you.
I remember the time I went all the way to another country for a guy I barely knew. One friend of mine was so against that decision. There’s no happy love story through, it didn’t work out, in fact I don’t even think I saw him…but in the end I did it for me. I was tired of always needing the permission of others to do what it was I wanted to do. That trip turned out to be life changing by the way, because I followed my heart and it led me down a path to something greater. I would have missed that moment waiting for the permission of others.
Do what’s best for you and stop letting outside forces control your life.
Everyone’s idea of you is based on their own view of life. Sometimes their ideas for you are based on their own need for control, but that’s a whole other conversation.
Now I’m not saying don’t go to your friends for advice, but at the end of the day it all comes down to your heart. What may not be rational to someone else can very well be rational to you. Our heart is ours alone. Our experiences is ours alone. Those silent whispers tugging on your heart at the end of the day will tell you more than anything outside of you can.
So, What’s going to make ____ (insert your name) happy?
-lateisha | https://medium.com/@aomamegreenpeas/whats-going-to-make-you-happy-7336e42d34ef | ['Aomame Greenpeas'] | 2020-12-20 09:52:33.947000+00:00 | ['Life Choices', 'Spiritual Growth', 'Happiness In Life', 'Culture Change', 'Trust'] |
TRUSTED SOLUTIONS FOR YOUR HOME | Renovating an interior is a big deal and not something to be approached rashly. They form an integral component of any structure, making it look more appealing as well as comfortable. From furniture to flooring, it involves a variety of components responsible for introducing freshness and elegance in houses. Two of such elements playing a similar role of transforming the entire look of an interior are doors and windows and Zen Windows accomplishes this by offering an extensive array of colours, woods, grilles and hardware options that allow you to personalize your Nashville Doors Replacement for the perfect home style you’re looking for. The professionals here go the extra mile to ensure that their clients are satisfied with purchases and the outcome.
What Services Do They Provide?
With a variety of collections and customization options, their efficient team has got reliable products that create the style you’re trying to achieve. They offer a vast multitude of range and options in the following product areas:
l Window Replacement
l Door Replacement
l Shutter & Storm Doors
Their Features
l Experienced & Involved Owner — the company truly cares for its clients and the output they expect and hence works on the basic foundation of guidelines laid down by its owner.
l Value For Money — The company believes in providing unmatched quality for price with the aim of achieving clients’ expectations.
l Experienced Guidance — Their longstanding practice of making products year after year allows them to offer some of the best products.
l Sustainability Guaranteed — Their team deploy a comprehensive strategic approach to driving sustainable improvements across their value chain.
When you choose Zen Windows, not only are you investing in a brand that homeowners agree increases the value of their home, but also a brand that stands behind its products with exceptional service and support. They design with your needs in mind.
So, save money on enhancing home interiors or door window frame replacement by getting in touch with our efficient team and raise the value of your home. | https://medium.com/@zenwindowsnashvillenc/trusted-solutions-for-your-home-8abfaf801a8b | ['Zen Windows Nashville'] | 2019-11-21 10:35:30.844000+00:00 | ['Interior Design'] |
Introducing Seed & STEM | Women & Weed
As the cannabis industry continues to make advances across the nation, I know that I am not alone. Women everywhere are discovering the benefits of hemp and cannabis, not just for consumption but also for the environment and improving the world we live in. From oils to fuels, clothing to building supplies, medicines, and even foods, hemp is indeed a plant of many uses.
Many women are pioneering incredible solutions in the cannabis industry. Others are taking accountability for their health and wellness, while others find ways to live longer in the face of a terminal illness. These are the stories with substance. These are the stories that change perspectives and end stigmas.
In my role as an editor in the cannabis industry, I have met hundreds of women who are leading the charge to bring new light to cannabis consumption. I want to tell their stories.
Relatable, Reliable Product Reviews
No offense, girls, but I don’t want to watch YouTube product reviews that show more of your cleavage than the product. I don’t need scantily clad women in booty shorts and bikini tops selling me products I don’t need, and I definitely don’t want read glowing product reviews paid for by the manufacturer. I want real, unbiased opinions from someone I can trust.
Far too often, people skew their opinions for personal gain. I mean, that’s the whole idea behind celebrity and influencer endorsements, right? Celebrities don’t shoot commercials for free, and influencers don’t mention products for nothin’. However, far too often, opinions are fabricated to make more money.
I won’t do this. In fact, I dropped out of marketing writing because it made me feel ‘icky’ using psychology and emotional manipulation to sell a product. I refuse to endorse a product I haven’t used personally, and I will speak the truth. If I like it, I’ll tell you what I liked. If I don’t like it, I’ll tell you what I didn’t like. But I’ll never sell you a product I don’t personally like and use, and I will disclose all affiliate links that I earn a commission from.
News that Matters
Image from NBC News
If you’re like me, you don’t care whether or not Miley Cyrus is smoking weed or what new CBD product Kim Kardashian is putting in her gift bags. Pop culture is nothing more than brain-numbing fluff designed to keep masses distracted. So, unless Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart announce a secret love-child, I’m really not interested in celebrity news.
On the other hand, I want to know about the politics impacting the cannabis and hemp industries. I want to know about the science and research happening around the world. I want to hear about the companies making a difference in their communities and how cannabis tax dollars are being used around the nation. I want to hear about new products, new processes, new regulations, and new standards.
I want to hear about medical miracles. I want to see how cannabis and hemp are changing our world. I want to hear about the possibilities.
Content for Cutting-Edge Cannabis Consumers
I am a tech-savvy, well-educated, no-bullshit, cannabis-consuming woman. And I am sure there are others like me.
If you’re tired of the same ol’ “Top 10 Reasons You Should be Taking CBD” articles…sick of the bottomless pit of pop culture nonsense… and fed up with fabrications for funding… then pull up your big girl panties and click follow on my new publication, Seed & STEM — no bullshit cannabis news for the more sophisticated consumer.
A few topics coming up: | https://medium.com/seed-stem/introducing-seed-stem-f32608820504 | ['Kristina Etter'] | 2020-12-14 20:09:48.104000+00:00 | ['Cannabis', 'Women', 'Marijuana', 'Cannabis Industry'] |
Several Tips to Breed A Loser of Life | All you need is the seed of a sucker and a series of dysfunctional life events, then the universe will do its job, naturally. Easy peasy!
You might question “What’s the point of having kids? Why should I have one?”.
Oh, God! Seriously, there are people who knows the reason of why they should have kids?! Unbelievable. Irritating. Come on! No one needs to know why you kept your fetus alive (and feed them until they decided to hate you one day). Life is life. Whether if you get them by accident (yes, that one night when you were too drunk and you did it without protection and boom! a little baby is in your womb), or the moment you can’t stand what the society says to not wait until a precise time that you were too old of having a baby. Don’t worry, all your reason is valid.
Now let me give you some tips how to breed (and grow) a total loser of this life (I really, really can’t wait to tell you guys because most of the times, these tips work!)
1. Give your kids REMARKABLE childhood
No one can leave the memories of a childhood, the miserable one of course. The trauma, the competition the parents make to their siblings/other relatives, the experience of witnessing their own parents went to a fight (when your spouse hit you with bare hands like a punchbag or when your spouse calling you by names saying you could not even do a job properly). This is, my friend, the critical time build trust issues in your kids. Who will they run into when they are scared? No one! Because we are making our progress as a failing parents. Because we are emotionally unavailable. Living with the wrong partner or family member is such a waste of time and energy, our child should understand that we cannot be available to them. Now or later.
2. Consider the way you COMMUNICATE
Communication. Very cliche. Aren’t we all sick of this word? We are talking in everyday life, that is communication. Don’t worry, it is all the same. You can be unassertive, and it is still a communication. Hide your feelings, so they will confuse theirs. A time-out will always work. All parents do it, too. And have you ever heard about Silent Treatment? Perfect idea! Let your kids think by themselves about their mistakes.
What is the point of doing A, B, C, D? Don’t tell them, unless it is acceptable by the norms and expectation of the society. Why should they go to school? It is, of course, because the kids at their age go to school, too! Why they cannot leave a class unless they are very sick? Because they will get bad grades and no parents in this world want to see red marks on their kids’ school report by the end of the semester. Seeing your kids comply to the society is such a blessing, right?
3. NEVER invest your time because hey what’s the point of getting jobs. Your deadlines are always there for you!
We all understand your struggles. You have broke your both legs to get your particular dream job, or the job you don’t like but pays you well. That’s completely understandable! We live from paycheck to paycheck, middle-class struggles. You give your sweats and blood and soul to meet the company target, or the boss will spam you e-mails. Deadlines? Who doesn’t love it? It is always there, in the back of your mind, being loyal. And your kids? Don’t mind them, you have someone to handle your kids, right? Your spouse, your parents, your in-law, a friend of yours? They will be okay! Let them bond, no one will replace your title as a parent. It is forever. (Don’t forget to take a me-time while you can, okay? You have worked so hard for your well-being comes first.)
4. BUILD the mindset.
Consistently tell them that life is hard that they need to suffer first before getting the genuine happiness of life. Remember those fairytales? The characters are ALWAYS struggling at the beginning of the story, but look, they always have a happy ending. That’s the fundamental rule of this life. There is always the opposite, hence the black or white; right or wrong; true or false. An absolute. No grey area. And what if the struggle extends? There is always a solution: tell them to be patience. Saying, “Kid, the longer you endure the pain, the greater the pleasure you will get. I learnt it the hard way.” or in any changed words. It will works, your kid will trust you regardless their trust issues. Why? Because you are their parents. Isn’t that lovely?
5. HAVE the talk (but only tolerate few, remember you ARE the parents)
As a parent, we definitely know more than our child (we live longer, though). We also internalized settled values and beliefs. Make your kids have the same values as yours (because it will make your life perfect and easier). People will allow you to decide their future because you are their parents, you fund them. Don’t forget to support your kids to do whatever they are passionate about, as long as it align with the standards of the society. Always recognize their winning (even if it is just a little) that meets your personal expectations and encourage them to earn more. Hard work! Remember, the kid that obey you, never complain, not rebellious, and love doing domestic chores is ALWAYS appealing to another parents. Don’t you want them envy your achievement of having obedient kids?
However, having a kid or two is just like an investment. A losing parent means losing kids too. Have some dignity even to your kids. Long live parenting! | https://medium.com/@vividevita23/several-tips-to-breed-a-loser-of-life-f65cd642ffd | ['Devita Ratna'] | 2020-05-06 10:27:35.723000+00:00 | ['Parenting Advice', 'Sarcasm', 'Family'] |
Stop LA Family Housing from Evicting Project Room Key Residents During Deadliest Month of COVID-19 | Stop LA Family Housing from Evicting Project Room Key Residents During Deadliest Month of COVID-19 Airtel Resident Jan 29·4 min read
Friday, January 29th, 2021
Dear Mayor Eric Garcetti,
LA County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl,
LA County Supervisor Kathryn Barger,
LA City Council President Nury Martinez,
Heidi Marston, Executive Director of LAHSA,
Stephanie Klasky-Gamer, President and CEO, LA Family Housing,
My name is Rebecca and I am a resident living in the Airtel Plaza Hotel through Project Room Key. I was born in Mission Hills, raised in Pacoima, and live in Van Nuys, in Nury Martinez’s district, CD6.
This week, I received my eviction notice from LA Family Housing saying that I have to leave the hotel, and that my only options were to move to a congregate shelter in Hawthorne or return to the streets. I need to leave by this Sunday, January 31st if I am not willing to move into the congregated shelter they offered. No exceptions.
When I got the notice on my door, I was heartbroken and scared. I was also angry and hurt that LA Family Housing gave up on us with no place to go besides shelter. Many people, like myself, are afraid to go inside shelters. As an unhoused woman I have experienced violence and harassment from staff, but especially right now — I am afraid to go in because I do not want to risk getting COVID-19.
Shelters are not a safe option right now because of COVID. We were told that Project Room Key was there to keep us safe, but now they are trying to force us into a situation which could harm or kill us. Many of the Bridge Home Shelters are on lockdown due to COVID outbreaks. Unhoused people like myself are counting on non-congregate housing to keep us safe from COVID-19.
It is irresponsible for LA Family Housing to evict us at the end of the deadliest month of the pandemic.
Even worse is that they would evict us when there is an ACTIVE COVID outbreak going on at the Airtel Plaza RIGHT NOW. One resident’s housing navigator is not coming on site because of the risk. If this is true, then WHY would you close Project Room Key and force us to go to shelters, or out on the streets?
When I am evicted on Sunday, I will be forced back on to the street because I do not believe congregate shelters like the one they are offering is a safe option for any of us during the pandemic.
I am a proud latina mom from the valley who happens to be unhoused. It can happen to any one of us as so many of us in LA struggle to find work, pay our rent, and feed our families. No one should be getting evicted right now. So why are you evicting us? As unhoused people, we are no different than you.
I am fighting for my daughter and having a place to stay gives me a better opportunity to get her back when I go to court next month. Breaking these connections will be a major setback for me. It nearly guarantees that I won’t get her back.
I am fighting to stay in Project Room Key. Are you fighting to keep Project Room Key?
I am also fighting for my neighbors, and the other residents who share my concerns about COVID here at the Airtel Plaza and all remaining Project Room Key sites that are set to close in the coming month.
OUR DEMANDS
We, the remaining residents at the Airtel Plaza Hotel, demand to be allowed to shelter-in-place in a room.
We demand to re-negotiate with LA Family Housing to allow the residents to stay and extend Project Room Key until real options for housing are offered (not congregate shelter).
We demand that you allow the remaining residents to stay in the Airtel and keep Project Room Key open for the duration of the pandemic.
We demand that the city and county of Los Angeles expands Project Room Key and Home Key so more unhoused people can safely shelter-in-place and get permanent supportive housing. There is no shortage of hotels, which means there is no shortage of housing.
We demand no evictions during the pandemic.
There is a storm coming to LA this weekend.
4 unhoused people are dying every day.
LA has more deaths related to hypothermia than San Francisco or New York combined.
We deserve to live. Housing is a Human Right for all.
Please work with us to meet our demands and make sure that no one is evicted. We are waiting for your response.
Sincerely,
Residents at the Airtel Plaza
Fighting for Our Lives,
Our Families,
and the Right to Remain Housed During the COVID-19 pandemic | https://medium.com/@airtelresident/stop-la-family-housing-from-mass-evicting-project-room-key-residents-from-the-airtel-plaza-hotel-26cdb52816f4 | ['Airtel Resident'] | 2021-01-29 21:49:32.393000+00:00 | ['Los Angeles', 'Homelessness', 'Covid 19', 'Eviction'] |
Keto diet for women: How to Start a Keto Diet Plan | The keto diet plan is not designed for long-term weight control, as it puts a lot of emphasis on fats. The ketogenic diet pyramid is based around eating a wide variety of different carbohydrates and proteins. A lot of people don’t like the idea of eliminating carbohydrates from their diet and would rather focus on proteins, so the use of the MOST PROBABLY IMPORTANT carbohydrates are typically ignored in the process. By eliminating certain carbohydrates you can achieve ketosis easily, however this can be quite hard at first as your body gets accustomed to the absence of the carbohydrates you were once consuming.
Many experts agree that the best way to get started with the keto diet plan is to eat vegetables and lean meats. Eating more protein than vegetables (such as lean meats and chicken) helps boost your metabolism to burn fat faster after you stop consuming carbohydrates, which also helps you stick to your diet. Nuts and avocados are good veggies to eat as well because they are rich in mono unsaturated fats that are essential to maintain good health and are not burned off by the liver.
The benefits of eating more protein include muscle building, better digestion, and increased stamina. Nuts and avocados also provide protein, which provides many essential amino acids for the body, and contain medium chain triglycerides (MCT), which are easily metabolized by the liver, allowing them to enter the bloodstream immediately. The benefits of eating more carbs are the ability to control blood sugar, which can also help people lose weight. However, these carbohydrates should only be eaten in small amounts and should only be a supplement to your diet. Eating too many carbs can cause constipation, bloating, diarrhea, and even insomnia. If you have had problems with these symptoms before starting the keto diet plan, then you may want to limit your intake of carbs.
As you learn more about how to start a keto diet plan, you will find the best sources of protein are cheese, eggs, and chicken. Eggs are the most popular source of protein and can be found almost anywhere. Chicken is another highly favored food and can also be found almost anywhere. Both of these meats are lean cuts of meat, which makes them great sources of protein. The most important thing is to make sure that you get enough protein from your diet, as this will help your muscles to grow and create new tissue.
Now that you know how to start a keto diet plan, the next step is to get your food list together. You will need a detailed list of what you will be eating for each day. Include any vitamins and supplements that you may need to take, as well as any other special medications or instructions that your doctor has given you. It is a good idea to keep a food diary so that you can keep track of what you are eating each day. This way you can make sure that you are not getting any unwanted snacks and that you are eating real food.
CKICK HERE FOR MORE DETAILS | https://medium.com/@ashwinp77/keto-diet-for-women-how-to-start-a-keto-diet-plan-916b3eef99ca | ['Health And Wealth'] | 2021-12-21 06:33:01.097000+00:00 | ['Weight Loss', 'Lose Weight Fast', 'Keto', 'Keto Diet For Women', 'Keto For Weight Loss'] |
Give It Away | 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/house-of-haiku/give-it-away-ebd87d6632be | ['Aaron Quist'] | 2020-12-19 04:37:51.891000+00:00 | ['Strength', 'Surrender', 'Haiku', 'Poetry', 'Men'] |
Clubhouse App: why you cannot afford to treat accessibility as an afterthought within inclusion. | Ever since I joined Clubhouse last week I have been asked by several people what my stand is on the lack of accessibility for HoH (hard of hearing) and the deaf community. What a coincidence: the same exact week I gave a talk at the A11y Club Berlin about ‘Designing for the Extremes’ and making anyone into an accessibility Persona. You can also read the article I wrote for the last Global Accessible Awareness Day about this topic (and in German here).
A friend sent me this Instagram video (in German, with German captions) that sparked a passionate conversation at home. I’m guessing this tweet was the origin of the video:
Translated to english: “Great a social media App, that excludes deaf from the start. As if we didn’t have already enough barriers in our society. I only need an iPhone and an invitation, but also no disability. Something else? #clubhouse”
Context
I guess I’m a lucky person who got an invite to Clubhouse before I even heard about it. In case you haven’t heard, Clubhouse is a “new type of social network based on voice drop in conversations. It is audio only and real-time”. It is in its beta phase, and at the moment it is for iPhones and invite only.
Like the app description says, it is audio and real time. Clubhouse does not provide any type of video, text or other options for HoH or deaf people to be part of the conversations taking place on the app.
Facts –
Audio alternative is no “MUST”
First and foremost: There is no legal requirement or regulation that says an audio-only app needs to provide alternative content.
WCAG Criteria does not consider Audio only (Live) captioning an AA success criterium. Most anti-discrimination and procurement laws refer to this standard.
So far there is also no mention of a live Audio alternative being part of the newly published draft for WCAG 3.0
Audio live is triple A (AAA) which means even if you should, you must not provide alternatives. WCAG AA compliance does not mean your product or service is accessible. WCAG compliance is just the bare minimum you have to do.
Lean principles & Accessibility as an afterthought
I mentioned before that I doubt the Clubhouse founders wanted to exclude someone on purpose. They probably followed a Lean start-up principle: fail early and fail often. I also doubt they did proper user research on their user base, or had any colleague with a disability or accessibility (a11y) background.
I base these statements on the lack of preparation for the HoH shitstorm that anyone involved in the a11y or disability community could have seen coming, but also because they didn’t make it accessible for blind people neither.
What better audience for a social media app that uses only voice? Apparently thanks to Apple updates on accessibility, blind people can still join and use the App with some difficulties, but this seems to be just sheer luck.
Back to the lean Agile mentality both Lean Start up and Lean UX principles: i cannot agree more with having a healthy fail culture, but that fail is allowed it also requires a chain of action-reaction. Inaction to “failures” or negative feedback is not a good match to the lean agile mentality.
The thing is, when a whole community that feels discriminated against decides to stands up publicly speak against your products or services, is a tough thing to recover from. You need to act quickly before it gets worse.
Some people are saying to cut some slack as this is only the beta. Before the beta, there was probably an alpha, and
Another Silicon Valley Bros company?
With a quick linkedIn research, anyone can see that this is not the case.
Also in their Community Guidelines they aim to be inclusive. They’re trying, probably doing their best. The problem with how our society understands inclusion is that PwD (People with Disabilities), including people with chronic illness and mental health issues are usually forgotten as well as all intersectionality (i.e. black American blind woman with ADHD). This is not really the CEO nor the developers’ fault, while at the same time, they can do something to fix it.
In their job titles and job posts though, it seems they don’t have any (?) designers or researchers, and there is no mention of accessibility in any of their postings*.
*At the moment of writing this article is they have/offer jobs in Engineering, Trust & Safety and Community success.
Could this shit storm have been avoided?
YES. Let me elaborate.
This is just the BETA version: Dejà vue & lessons from the past
Some are saying this is just the BETA, and thing might change once the app is finished.
The problem with accessibility is this: bolting it on takes a lot more effort (and money) than baking it in. Talking from experience this usually means: if it’s not there at the beginning, it means it was not on scope and had no priority, and chances are really high it won’t make it in at the end. We all know deadlines, pressure and budgets, maybe somebody even fought for accessibility to be included and was even labelled as a trouble maker for that and their advice ignored.
Also this exact same thing happened last June at Twitter. Twitter not being a start up and their audio content being pre-recorded (and other factors) make that worse, but the team at Clubhouse could have seen it coming, only if they were willing to.
Then Covid got worse, and the deaf community after being totally left out from all official video and audio communications, after their work meetings made their lives more complicated, and after not being able to read lips through opaque masks…decided they’ve had enough. People are tired of being left behind and being forgotten even if there is no ill intention. Wouldn’t you?
They are not the target group — but why not?
There are some man-explainers on twitter saying HoH and deaf people (disabled people) are not the target group for Clubhouse. Well, the target group is iPhone users at the moment. And they have the highest percentage of members of the accessibility community of all smartphone makers.
Did you know Apple hires sign interpreters for their stores? They even provide special masks for lip reading to their employees.
Let’s imagine it was on purpose and we put aside social justice, inclusion, etc. do you really think this is a good business decision?
Is an impairment or a disability reason enough to exclude such a representative group?
Does this mean parents and people commuting on public transport who forgot their headsets, or people in really loud environments, are also not part of the target group? Just think about home office and construction workers, barking dogs or screaming children…
What about understanding non native speakers or people with heavy accents? Captions would benefit everyone. Even more if you save the captions in a transcript file that updates automatically. People loosing their network connectivity or people who are interrupted (post, delivery service, call, job, shower, family…) could still be able to follow the conversation. You can delete the transcript file after a room is closed. Before you yell privacy here: anyone can probably record the conversations on Clubhouse if they want to anyhow, even if it is against the ToS. There is always a way.
If you are purposely leaving out so many people out of your “target user base”, you can and will be loosing a lot of money… Anyone would like to do the math here?
People are not disabled, we disabled them with our design decisions — this is part of the social model of disability.
Captions are not a “charity feature for the poor crips”. Captions are a feature all your users benefit from.
But how could it have been avoided?
In the first stages of a project, when you think about who you are designing for, even if you have no accessibility expert on your team (which you should), you can use a Design Thinking Technique called Designing for the extremes. This exercise helps you get yourself out of your comfort zone and think about people and scenarios out of the ordinary. You don’t even need to think about deaf people, but you can think about people commuting to work with no headsets at hand, you can think about parents with light sleeping babies, you can think about people in loud environments (constructions works, barking dogs, loud music…), people multitasking (maybe you need double with a live webinar which does not need 100% of your attention…), maybe you somebody just went out of a concert or a great party and cannot use your voice anymore because you singed so passionately…. there are many many options to find extreme users in each project and scenario, you just need to take some minutes to think for example about what impediments would your users may have while using your products or services.
Kat Holmes has written a whole book about mismatches interactions: “Mismatch. How Inclusion Shapes Design”.
The Microsoft Inclusive design guidelines toolkit example below presents personas under permanent, temporary and situational scenarios. These two sets of mismatches would apply to Clubhouse, hear & speak: | https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/clubhouse-app-why-you-cannot-afford-to-treat-accessibility-as-an-afterthought-within-inclusion-6742ff5df597 | ['Beatriz González Mellídez'] | 2021-02-06 02:35:24.874000+00:00 | ['Innovation', 'A11y', 'Accessibility', 'Inclusion', 'Lean Startup'] |
Speeding up small queries in BigQuery with BI Engine | Speeding up small queries in BigQuery with BI Engine
copy of article published in https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/developers-practitioners/speeding-small-queries-bigquery-bi-engine on 2021–04–01.
A quick and easy way to speed up small queries in BigQuery (such as to populate interactive applications or dashboards) is to use BI Engine. The New York Times, for example, uses the SQL interface to BI Engine to speed up their Data Reporting Engine.
The queries
I’ll use three representative queries on tables between 100MB and 3GB — tables that are typically considered smallish by BigQuery standards. Because BigQuery is a columnar database, I’m reporting only the size of the columns included in the query.
The first involves processing about 400 MB data to find the average cost of a Medicare claim:
COST_BY_STATE="""
SELECT
nppes_provider_state,
SUM(total_drug_cost)/SUM(total_claim_count) AS avg_cost
FROM `bigquery-public-data.medicare.part_d_prescriber_2014`
GROUP BY 1
ORDER BY 2 DESC
LIMIT 10
"""
The second processes a larger table (3GB) to find the average tip for a Chicago taxi based on payment type:
TIPS_BY_TYPE="""
SELECT payment_type, AVG(tips) AS avg_tip
FROM bigquery-public-data.chicago_taxi_trips.taxi_trips
GROUP BY 1
ORDER BY 2 DESC
"""
The third processes a smaller table (100 MB) to find the most polluted sites:
AIR_QUALITY="""
SELECT
site_num,
ANY_VALUE(state_name) AS state,
AVG(aqi) as air_quality_index,
FROM `bigquery-public-data.epa_historical_air_quality.pm10_daily_summary`
GROUP BY site_num
ORDER BY air_quality_index DESC
LIMIT 10
"""
Measuring query performance
To measure the query performance, I’ll run any given query 5 times, taking care to turn off the cache:
from google.cloud import bigquery
from timeit import default_timer as timer
from datetime import timedelta # Construct a BigQuery client object.
client = bigquery.Client() def run_query(query, n=5):
tot_slotmillis, tot_timeelapsed = 0, timedelta(0)
for iter in range(n):
query_job = client.query(query, bigquery.job.QueryJobConfig(use_query_cache=False))
df = query_job.result().to_dataframe() tot_slotmillis += query_job.slot_millis
tot_timeelapsed += (query_job.ended - query_job.started)
print("Job stat: slot_mills={} server_time={}".format(tot_slotmillis/n, tot_timeelapsed/n))
I print out the total resources consumed (slot-milliseconds) and the total time taken by the query on the server.
If you are on a flat-rate pricing (most enterprise customers are), the slot-milliseconds reflects how long your slots are getting used. So, this is a reflection of the cost of the query to you.
The time elapsed is the time spent in computing the results. Note that the server_time is the time taken to process the request (I don’t measure the network roundtrip time because it’s going to be the same whether or not you use BI Engine).
I first ran the three queries without BI Engine (see my notebook in GitHub).
Turning on BI Engine
I then went to the BigQuery web console and created a 10 GB BI Engine reservation (monthly cost: $300):
Why did I pick 10 GB?
One of the key ways that BI Engine speeds up queries on small tables is that it caches the tables in memory. It also does other speedups, but this is the main one. So, you want to provide it enough memory to comfortably hold the tables you will be querying. BI Engine will automatically manage the memory for you.
In my case, the Chicago taxicab query involves 3GB, so I used 10 GB. For the other two queries, 1 GB would have been enough. You can go up to 100 GB, something I’d recommend if you have many concurrent queries on small tables.
You can turn on BI Engine from a script using the Reservations API. Note, however, that it takes a few minutes for the memory to become available, so this is something you should consider doing for a few hours at least, not on a per-query basis.
Turning on BI Engine
Here’s how the 3 queries compared:
As you can see, I got cost improvements of 8x to 20x and timing improvements of about 2x.
Note that some BI Engine capacity is included at no extra cost when you purchase a flat rate reservation–for example, you get 50 GB of BI Engine included for free with a 1000-slot annual commitment. At $30-$300/month, additional BI Engine capacity is a very cost-effective way to make your BigQuery reservations go further, and get a speedup too.
Enjoy!
Next steps
Try it out. My code is on GitHub. You can get the full speedup in your applications provided you are using the query() method in the BigQuery Client API [the insertJob() methods are also accelerated, but not as much]. So, check your code. To learn more about BigQuery, read my book.
Note: The SQL interface to BI Engine is in preview at the moment (March 2021). Contact your GCP sales rep to turn this on in your account. Thanks to Mosha Pasumansky and the BI Engine team for helpful discussions. | https://medium.com/@lakshmanok/speeding-up-small-queries-in-bigquery-with-bi-engine-4ac8420a2ef0 | ['Lak Lakshmanan'] | 2021-04-09 06:16:44.892000+00:00 | ['Data Warehouse', 'Performance', 'Google Cloud Platform', 'Sql', 'Bigquery'] |
Top 5 Skills To Master To Get A Remote Front End Job | Top 5 Skills To Master To Get A Remote Front End Job Mdcomm Jun 8·6 min read
“Design is not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works” -Steve Jobs
From the last decade, advances and the omnipresence of technology have put digitization at the topmost priority for businesses across the world. Now, it’s no longer a question of whether or not you should bring your business onto the internet, rather how well you can do that to ensure optimal user experience. This momentous truth of today’s businesses has made front-end development a decisive element to the success and failure of their online presence. No wonder the average base salaries of front-end developers, a job that was practically nonexistent just a decade ago, is now around 126% that of more conventional jobs like accounting.
Source: glassdoor.com
Pretty exciting huh? Especially so if you have an artistic mind with a knack for programming. Indeed, you’d have a hard time finding a better-suited job to channel your passion for creating scalable outputs and achieve the work Nirvana — Ikigai. That being said, if you’re a recent graduate you may not even know what a front-end developer is, and what the job would actually entail? After all, it’s not a conventional job for which our education system could have prepared you. So to answer the primary question-
Who is a Front End Developer?
A front-end developer is a computer programmer whose primary focus is on the side of a website or application where the user interacts with it — the front end.
To dive a little deeper…
A front-end developer creates the visual aspects of a website, the aspects that the users see and interact with. This includes elements like the layout, navigation bar, buttons, forms, etc. A front-end developer does that by using technical assets like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc (more on this later.)
Era of Remote Job
“One day offices will be a thing of the past” — Richard Branson
Pandemic or not, the advantages of remote work have already outweighed that of working fully in the offices. The pandemic has only hastened up the conversion, and in some cases, forced people to make deliberate efforts to realize the pros of working remotely. That being said, doing a highly collaborative job like front-end development isn’t always as easy to do from remote locations. From unclear communication to inexplicit availability, there are quite a few problems that can adversely impact the easy flow of the task. This is why when it comes to assessing skills for a front-end development job, the requirements are a bit more complex than that of a regular job; which brings us to the question at hand, i.e. what are the top skills for a remote front end developer to get hired.
The top 5 skills that employers are looking for in their ideal remote front-end developer can be majorly divided into two categories, soft skills — which improve your employability across the spectrum, and hard skills, the skills you need to have to be able to do your job.
Soft Skills
1. Communication:
Your communication skills can either make your work more efficient or unnecessarily increase the overheads, especially so when you’re working remotely. As a front-end developer, you’ll be required to liaise with varied members of your team including UX/UI designers, back-end developers, testers, and project managers. And since you will mostly be engaged in written communication, your prospective employer would easily want to assess you for the same.
In any case, written communication strips you from the luxuries of body language and tone of voice to augment your communication. Therefore, it’ll be extremely important for you to hone your writing skills for it to become naturally concise, crisp, unambiguous, and formal. And though communication is essentially a soft skill, you would want to become skilled with the commonly used communication tools like Google meet, Skype, and now Zoom too., to facilitate its practical side as well.
2. Collaboration:
As mentioned above, development is a team’s job, and as a remote front-end developer, you’ll be required to coordinate with your team almost all day. When such is the case, it becomes imperative that you develop and hone your skills of collaboration. In doing so, your communication skills would definitely aid you a great deal, but they alone would not suffice. For better teamwork, you’ll need to learn how to be proactive and prompt.
Working remotely requires a lot more effort to maintain basic coordination than working in an office, and this is why it becomes the responsibility of all the team members, including yourself, to try to always be there when the team needs you. You should also be proactive in managing your time and completing your assigned tasks without constant supervision, all the while fostering a team spirit. And just like communication, there will be certain version control/git tools that you’ll need to master in order for the team collaboration to work in practice.
Hard Skills
3. HTML & CSS:
HTML is a markup language used for making web pages. It is the basic building block of a web front-end and an essential requirement for becoming a front-end developer. CSS or Cascading Style Sheets, on the other hand, is a language used for styling the webpage created with HTML. To take a simple analogy of a room, HTML would be used to create the walls, ceiling, floor, windows, and the door, while CSS would define the room’s theme, including what color the walls will be or the type of flooring material, etc.
And though it’s necessary for front-end developers to have an in-depth understanding of both CSS and HTML basics, they don’t really have to work from scratch with them in a real-life scenario. In almost all the cases, they’ll be hired to work with a framework that will have basic codes written already in them and one will only have to customize or augment those codes as per the project requirements. Two of the most popular such CSS frameworks are Bootstrap and Foundation, and an employer would actively look to hire developers with proven knowledge in either or both of them.
Other than the framework, front-end development has also been majorly simplified with the use of CSS preprocessors. These are the advanced versions of basic CSS, that offer more features to enhance the look and feel of a website whilst also making the entire process much easier for the developers. The popular CSS preprocessors, mastering which can land you a remote job much quicker are SASS and LESS.
4. Javascript:
To use our previous analogy, if HTML and CSS create and thematizes a room, Javascript is the most popular way to make things move about and function in it. Javascript, in short, is a scripting language, the most popular one out there*, that makes elements of the web page interactive (at the user’s end). Some of the most basic Javascript functions that you must have come across include, zooming in effect on hover of eCommerce websites and entering of data into the form, etc.
Source: stackoverflow.com
Now, just like CSS frameworks, some major JavaScript frameworks can make your entire job more efficient. These include Angular Js, ReactJS, Vue.js, Backbone, Ember, etc. While there are many more such frameworks, the five mentioned here are the most sought-after ones, based on which employers hire developers. Other than the framework, you would also like to master Javascript libraries, particularly jQuery, to further strengthen your arsenal with yet another most in-demand skill.
5. Browser Developer Tools
Eventually, all your work will be made available to the users on their web browsers. It is through these web browsers, the users will interact with the webpages, making them the most prominent tool for you to review your work in real-time. To simplify the review job for developers, most of the popular web browsers come equipped with a set of browser developer tools. These tools allow you to check and fine-tune your web pages by testing them right there on the browser. You can insert some tweaks to your half-finished webpage, change some code, in both HTML/CSS and Javascript to see the changes beforehand implementing them to your real code. | https://medium.com/@mdcommm/top-5-skills-to-master-to-get-a-remote-front-end-job-103bc2a3ade1 | [] | 2021-06-11 10:49:56.637000+00:00 | ['Front End Development', 'Skills Development', 'Remote Job', 'CSS', 'HTML'] |
Medium for Android got a new beta-testing community on Reddit | Medium Beta is one of the oldest beta programs around. Medium beta testing community existed in Google+ in 2014 when many popular apps didn’t even think about having a beta release track.
Many things changed since then — Google+ doesn’t exist anymore, Medium got a new logo and app design. If I remember it correctly, the community on Google+ had around 10k ppl in total. The same as many other beta testing communities on Google+, Medium community had to be migrated somewhere and they decided to go with a Reddit community as an alternative to Google+.
Medium beta community on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/MediumApp/
Medium Beta on Reddit
I guess that a decision to use Reddit was made quite after Google+ went down. At this moment, Medium beta community has only 89 members including me.
I think that Reddit is a nice place for a community of beta testers in general and it has all the necessary features.
Medium beta community is styled in Medium colour scheme, it has a pinned link to the beat program on Goole Play on top and it has several flairs to tag your posts with.
The flairs are the following:
Feedback. Can be used for general feedback about the app.
Feature requests. For new features, which you may want to see.
Bugs. Any possible issue or bug can go here.
Announcements. This one is primarily for moderators to announce new updates and changes.
Here is the official announcement message from Medium devs.
Thank you so much for being a Medium user and welcome to /r/MediumApp. The purpose of this subreddit is to help us communicate and collect feedback from our users more effectively. We appreciate and care deeply about issues that are reported here and will make our best efforts to address them in future updates. If you have submitted a post and don’t receive an immediate response, please know that we are trying our best to get to your post along with everyone else’s. While the moderators may not be able to respond to every single post, we will make our best effort to address the most important issues. When an immediate solution isn’t available, we’ll share as much information as we can in regards to the issue being discussed. If you have not yet joined the beta community, please tap on the link on the menu to do so. Thank you again for helping us make Medium better.
Medium Beta community rules:
Be civil. No racist, transphobic, homophobic, or otherwise offensive and hateful comments are allowed here. Please be respectful of everyone. No spam or unrelatable content. Please post things related to Medium. No self-promotion
Medium devs also added a link to this community inside their Android app. You can open app drawer > press settings > press join our community > get redirected to the Reddit community.
Medium Beta UI
By the way — don’t forget to join Reddit Beta if you didn’t already!
Now I am curious to see how will it work for them and what influence will it have on Medium app development.
What is your favourite place for a beta testing community? Some apps are using Reddit, some apps using Telegram or Discord. I definitely like Telegram but other options are quite good as well.
P.S. You can read TestingCatalog on Medium too! Follow TestingCatalog on Medium 📲
Source: Medium blog | https://medium.com/@testingcatalog/medium-for-android-got-a-new-beta-testing-community-on-reddit-5decdd0e41ff | ['Alexey Shabanov'] | 2019-09-12 15:42:23.970000+00:00 | ['Android', 'Médium', 'Android Apps', 'Reddit'] |
Day 314: Trump Just Can’t Let Birtherism or Vote Totals Go | Donald Trump is still obsessed with Barack Obama’s birth certificate and with popular vote counts that showed a nearly three million vote loss to Hillary Clinton last year.
According to The New York Times, Trump constantly harps on both to advisers and elected officials.
In recent months, they say, Mr. Trump has used closed-door conversations to question the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. He has also repeatedly claimed that he lost the popular vote last year because of widespread voter fraud, according to advisers and lawmakers. “One senator who listened as the president revived his doubts about Mr. Obama’s birth certificate chuckled on Tuesday as recalled the conversation. The president, he said, has had a hard time letting go of his claim that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States. The senator asked not to be named to discuss private conversations.
There are an infinite number of problems that Trump could be dealing with to, in some way, help the United States. Instead — no doubt with race playing a factor — Trump is still consumed with thoughts about Obama’s birth certificate and — no doubt with insecurity playing a factor — about popular vote totals from an election more than a year ago.
Both issues are over and put to bed, but Trump can’t seem to follow them there.
314 days in, 1148 to go | https://medium.com/@trumptimer/day-314-trump-just-cant-let-birtherism-or-vote-totals-go-39324004ee7b | [] | 2017-11-29 15:29:32.334000+00:00 | ['Hillary Clinton', 'Barack Obama', '2016 Election', 'Donald Trump', 'Politics'] |
LinkedIn 5 Day Workshop by Vaibhav Sisinty (Review) | LinkedIn 5 Day Workshop by Vaibhav Sisinty (Review)
Score — 5/5
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Introduction
LinkedIn is a place where all teh working professionals connect. LinkedIn is teh place where you can find companies CEO, Founder to MBA graduates. dis is one of teh unique platforms that can be used to find jobs, build a personal brand, or find teh next potential client. Teh thing is most of teh people are still yet to leverage teh full potential of Linkedin for their benefits.
Whenever a person wants to know about you professionally LinkedIn is the platform, looked up for. Your LinkedIn profile is your virtual CV for people to understand. If you are the looking founder of the start-up and looking for the investor for you’re business even dat is possible if you make the right connections. So now I have set the tone of importance for LinkedIn profile optimization. Let’s review the workshop
What is this LinkedIn 5 Day Workshop about?
Online learning platforms like udemy, Skillshare offer online courses dat provide teh flexibility to learn at your own pace. These online courses have a completion rate of about 13% hardly. If you have enrolled in any online course no you have started thinking about it and understand why teh completion rate is only 13%.
This being a workshop is more of active learning where you learn and have to execute to keep wif the batch and the instructor. Active learning is a key part of this workshop. The workshop is spread across 5 days a week. Each video is released of 30–45 mins for learning and a good execution period depends on the pace of the candidate. There is also a holiday in the middle of the workshop so that if you fall behind you have one day to level wif the back.
Well throughout the day you are reminded about you’re task through email which can be helpful at times. In the evening you have live sessions so dat you can clear you’re doubts & queries.
Teh Learning module for each Day in LinkedIn 5 Day workshop
Day 1 — Identifying you’re target audience.
This is the stage where the foundation for the profile is built. At this stage, you need to identify the type of audience you want to attract through content. For a copywriting freelancer his/her target audience will be individuals working in marketing and sales.
— Identifying you’re target audience. This is the stage where the foundation for the profile is built. At this stage, you need to identify the type of audience you want to attract through content. For a copywriting freelancer his/her target audience will be individuals working in marketing and sales. Day 2 — Optimization of you’re LinkedIn profile.
In this stage the real work starts, optimizing the profile by writing proper headlines. To make profiles more attractive you should write what can you do for the business. If you are Digital Marketer you can help the business to generate more leads
— Optimization of you’re LinkedIn profile. In this stage the real work starts, optimizing the profile by writing proper headlines. To make profiles more attractive you should write what can you do for the business. If you are Digital Marketer you can help the business to generate more leads Day 3 — How to increase teh connection and reach the first 5K connection.
Time to skim through teh connections make up till now. Most of teh time half teh connections are not active profile leading to the wastage of connection opportunities. A wise move is to remove those connections and make new connections. Make sure you connect to you’re first 5K target audience this is where teh whole game line.
— How to increase teh connection and reach the first 5K connection. Time to skim through teh connections make up till now. Most of teh time half teh connections are not active profile leading to the wastage of connection opportunities. A wise move is to remove those connections and make new connections. Make sure you connect to you’re first 5K target audience this is where teh whole game line. Day 4 — Holiday ( Day may change accordingly to complete any backlog work)
— Holiday ( Day may change accordingly to complete any backlog work) Day 5 — Content Creation
Content is the king and the differentiator. It is estimated dat only 5–6% of LinkedIn’s audience creates any type of content. LinkedIn Algorithm works in such a way that content creation TEMPhas priority in terms of reach. So if you want to reach start creating
— Content Creation Content is the king and the differentiator. It is estimated dat only 5–6% of LinkedIn’s audience creates any type of content. LinkedIn Algorithm works in such a way that content creation TEMPhas priority in terms of reach. So if you want to reach start creating Day 6 — 3 Hrs live session (No Recording Available)
This is the powerhouse live session. Vaibhav in this LinkedIn workshop session reveals all the tips and tricks dat worked for him. He also provides the connection strategy to be used while connecting wif people
About Vaibhav Sisinty
Vaibhav has spent teh last 7 years of their life building a business, personal brand, and helping businesses in different parts of teh world grow, increase their profitability, and crush their marketing and sales goals. Through teh years, he TEMPhas mastered both teh art and science of launching new products, getting new clients, retaining customers, and scaling.
Started Discovering Android while still a 2nd year engineering student. Grew to over 100k views per month, but shut down after Google banned teh Adsense account. later on Founded CrazyHeads, a digital media agency, with four of his college friends. Which eventually won awards and worked with over 100 clients all over teh world. General Electric invited him as a speaker to their signature event ignITe at just the age of 21.
“Execution is My Secret Mantra ” — Vaibhav Sisinty
Who should enroll?
LinkedIn Statistics
Well, dis LinkedIn 5 day workshop caters to 3 types of audience on teh LinkedIn platform.
Job seekers — Most of teh common things get neglected and at times end up missing out on an opportunity. Teh Workshop helps in understanding teh importance of each of teh parameters and explains teh process behind optimization.
Creating a personal brand — To create a personal brand on teh platform one needs to showcase teh expertise in his /her area. Creating a personal brand, in short, is to make yourself visible on teh platform. Vaibhav himself TEMPhas created a personal brand for himself on LinkedIn is always better to learn from teh best.
Creating a personal brand is always going to be a journey but dis workshop sets you on the right course of action.
Finding the Potential Client — LinkedIn houses CEO, Vice-Presidents, and Managers as well as big companies to a small start-up. Knowing you’re target audience is important or you make a sweep in the crowd and may lose the opportunity to find the potential client. LinkedIn can be very well used to showcase product benefits or the case study of the benefits of existing clients.
The LinkedIn 5 day workshop by Vaibhav Sinsity, very well explains how to present the case studies. Vaibhav himself has landed multiple clients through LinkedIn and also spills out the beans to successfully find the next client effectively.
Is It Really Worth It?
Benefits through the workshop
If teh strategy is adopted properly teh workshops can be useful to make yourself visible to recruiters and may also provide you with job opportunities. Teh people you are looking to create a personal brand can make themselves visible on teh platform or may also position themselves as thought leaders if they have expertise.
Lastly, LinkedIn TEMPhas vast potential to find the client if tapped in properly. As mentioned previously as well, CEO to Manager most of the people are present on the platform who can be the potential client for you’re products or services.
Pros & Cons of teh Workshop
Considering the price of the LinkedIn 5 day workshop it would be really unfair to have huge expectations, but one can definitely find a way around it. Let’s proceed further starting wif the pros.
Pros
If followed step by step results can be seen in a matter of days.
Be from the field of social media or not you are bound to learn something new.
Huge potential to land a job or guaranteed increase visibility of your platform on the profile.
Learn to create a more meaningful network on teh platform and strategy behind content creation.
Cons
Vaibhav Sisinty is not your orthodox teacher. dat is fun so if you like teh traditional learning this may take you a while to get a hold-off.
Regular follow-ups on mail may sometimes make people irritated, but there at times, it is needed.
Results achieved on (Roopesh’s) Personal LinkedIn Profile — Profile view growth — 88%
What is teh cost & where can you find this
Well, dis workshop will cost around Rs 500 ( in INR excluding taxes). dis workshop is of the total value for teh money and having too much expectation is really not fair. Also providing teh live 3 hr session by Vaibhav also included additional bonus & tips is totally a value proposition for Rs 500.
Final Score — 5/5 | https://medium.com/@thedigitalgear1/linkedin-5-day-workshop-by-vaibhav-sisinty-review-4c933c5e405a | ['Digital Gear'] | 2021-03-04 17:51:49.467000+00:00 | ['LinkedIn', 'Lead Generation', 'Growth Hacking', '5 Day Linkedin Workshop', 'Vaibhav Sisinty'] |
All About iOS Animations (Part 1) | Implementing Show Button:
We will do the following things on tap of dotButton —
We will animate top , middle and bottom view from right to left side. We will rotate out dotButton , decrease its alpha from 1 to 0, and finally hide it. We will un-hide, rotate and increase alpha with the crossButton placed on top of dotButton .
Add a target function to dotButton like below:
@objc func onTapOfDotButton() {
showOptions()
}
Now, let’s implement the showOptions function. Implement the following code:
Let’s understand the points mentioned above.
//1 We unhide the crossButton which has an alpha of 0 at this point.
//2 We have an animateKeyframes method which will produce the animation of 0.5 seconds and with 0 delay.
//3 we add our first set of chained animations via the addKeyframe method. Let’s look at its parameters:
withRelativeStartTime : We gave it to 0/0.5 , this is the way of saying this internal animation should start just at the beginning of the total duration of animation we have.
relativeDuration : We gave it 0.3/0.5 , this is the way of saying that to what extend our block should animate with respect to the total time available with us.
animations : Inside this block, we transformed our bottomView to its initial position (to what we gave constraints, fixing it to bottom right).
//4 & //5 We followed the same steps as what we did for bottomView explained in step //3 . The only change is in //4 startTime is 0.1/0.5 and //5 startTime is 0.2/0.5 which gives a delay of 0.1 seconds for both the views to animate, thus helping to create the desired effect. | https://medium.com/better-programming/all-about-ios-animations-part-1-d49a021527 | ['Arjun Baru'] | 2020-12-10 08:56:21.968000+00:00 | ['Mobile', 'iOS', 'Swift', 'UX', 'Programming'] |
Nice article. | Nice article.
A little note regarding using a number as an ID. It's not valid because CSS selector cannot start with a digit, two hyphens, or a hyphen followed by a digit.
If you curious enough here are some links from the Documentation
ID Selectors:
https://drafts.csswg.org/selectors-3/#id-selectors
Valid CSS identifiers:
https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#value-def-identifier | https://medium.com/@konrud/nice-article-5fbdbaa7d5fd | ['Konstantin Rouda'] | 2020-12-04 14:33:49.232000+00:00 | ['Javascript Tips', 'JavaScript', 'Javascript Development', 'HTML', 'CSS'] |
The Dish That I Really Liked — and Just Named | The Dish That I Really Liked — and Just Named
Photo by Author
So recently I wanted to cook and I had no idea what to do. But I had chicken boneless. So I wanted to make something simple. And I got what’s in the photo above.
Its taste is close to grilled chicken and vegetables. Here is a quick method to make it: | https://medium.com/kitchen-tales/the-dish-that-i-really-liked-and-just-named-f4ff015b5ff6 | ['Ibrahim K'] | 2020-12-24 00:55:39.015000+00:00 | ['Dish', 'Food', 'How To', 'Recipe', 'Cooking'] |
Introduction to Test Automation | Automation is the doing the repetitive tasks using the machines as tools reducing the human intervention. Humans are more error prone and less effective.
In definition given in Wikipedia, in software testing, test automation is the special software to control the execution of tests and the comparison of actual outcomes with predicted outcomes.
Benefits of Test Automation
Test automations gives many benefits in various ways. The following are some benefits we can gain by automating testing.
Speedup test execution
Avoid human errors
Unattended execution — human effort is not necessary in execution
Test what manually impossible — ex: higher number of outputs
Improve efficiency of testing and cost
Improves team morale
More time for exploratory testing
Types of Automated Testing
Code-driven — unit tests/TDD
unit tests/TDD GUI(End to end test automation) — UI object property based, image recognition based
UI object property based, image recognition based API/ service test automation — restful APIs, SOAP
restful APIs, SOAP Mobile test automation — Android, IOS, Hybrid
Software Testing Pyramids
Tools and Technologies for Automated Testing
GUI (for Web) — Unified Functional Testing, TestComplete, Selenium, Sikuli, Protractor, Watir
Unified Functional Testing, TestComplete, Selenium, Sikuli, Protractor, Watir Mobile — Appium (FOSS), Calabash, DeviceAnywhere, Perfecto
Appium (FOSS), Calabash, DeviceAnywhere, Perfecto GUI (for Windows) — TestComplete, Unified Functional Testing, Ranorex, Sikuli
TestComplete, Unified Functional Testing, Ranorex, Sikuli API — Unified Functional Testing, SoapUI, Rest-assured, POSTMAN, FitNesse
Test Automation Frameworks for GUI Applications
Data Driven Framework — Data -> Action Script -> Result
Data -> Action Script -> Result Keyword Driven Framework — Keywords -> Driver Script -> Result
Keywords -> Driver Script -> Result Page Object Design — Page Objects -> Test Script -> Result
Page Objects -> Test Script -> Result ATDD (Acceptance Test Driven Development)
Why Automation Framworks?
Framework is supporting structure which something can be built.
Frameworks,
Increase reusability
Increase maintainability
Reduce complexity
Improve reporting
Improve error handling
Improve productivity
To gain the maximum ROI, a person must have a better understanding about the testing pyramid (scope of automation), right automation tools, choose appropriate framework, scripting standards, measure metrics and team.
Introduction to Automation Frameworks Using Selenium Web Driver
Components of Selenium
Radio buttons, drop downs, checkboxes, text fields, buttons, labels, links and any kind of element in the web page are web element locators. Selenium is an open source tool used for test automation in web applications. Selenium is a package with many options. Selenium is widely used for test automations.
Refferences : | https://medium.com/@bimalics/introduction-to-test-automation-f9ae60dd5114 | ['Bimali Wickramasinghe'] | 2021-01-21 17:40:27.419000+00:00 | ['Selenium', 'Software Testing', 'Test Automation Framework', 'Test Automation'] |
How to write fast software | Premature optimisation is the root of all evil
TL:DR
Fast software, means fast enough to solve the problem it was meant to solve, as a result:
Only optimise a piece of software to the point where it is fast enough for the business.
To reach that level of performance, apply the following:
Write your code in a way that prioritises clarity Is it fast enough for the business? If it is fast enough, good, stop. If it is not fast enough, find the bottleneck Weigh up your options, then fix the bottleneck Go back to “Is it fast enough for the business?”
Key to this approach is not attempting to predict where performance bottlenecks will occur and preemptively fix them, instead:
Deploy your software, then find the real bottleneck.
What does “fast” mean?
Fast is talking about the amount of time it takes for software to do some operation.
Importantly, fast is a relative term, there needs to be some other thing that the code is being fast in comparison to.
Saying that a piece of software is fast in isolation does not make sense, it can execute in a set period of time, like 3 seconds, is that fast? I don’t know, what is the context?
Fast for a webserver response? Not really.
Fast for a batch job? Yeah, probably.
Defining fast is then a case of deciding what the thing is that the piece of software is being fast in comparison to. Most of the time, this will mean comparing the time taken by the software with the expectation from the business.
Fast for a human facing webserver response might be less than 100ms.
Fast for a batch job might be finishing in less than 5 minutes.
Fast for a complex business process with human steps might be less than 48 hours.
The critical thing here, is that “Fast” means “Fast enough to solve the business problem”.
The optimisation loop
Once there is a definition of fast, the following process can be used to achieve the goal of “fast software”.
Write your code in a way that prioritises clarity Is it fast enough for the business? If it is fast enough, good, stop. If it is not fast enough, find the bottleneck Weigh up your options, then fix the bottleneck Go back to “Is it fast enough for the business?”
That’s the basic process, so let’s look at each point in a bit more detail.
Write your code in a way that prioritises clarity
I’m a fan of writing code in as simple and clear a way as possible. The first pass of a piece of code I tend to prioritise clarity over speed. This comes from my experience of software usually being more than fast enough, but rarely clear or simple enough for the business.
This step is probably the largest step, it basically covers implementing the entirety of the feature. Everything that comes after this is about analyzing and optimising the code written here.
Is it fast enough for the business?
This is the critical question, not “is it fast enough for you?”, or “is it fast enough for Google / Netflix / Amazon etc.”. The software needs to be fast enough to solve the problem it is trying to solve, beyond that, time spent making it faster is time that could have been spent doing something more useful.
Most of the time the business will not tell you how fast something needs to be. Asking the question “how fast should this be?” is also a dangerous game, because the answer is likely to be “as fast as possible”. Making something as fast as possible is pulling on a string that will pull you down a very deep hole.
So, given that you’re unlikely to get a very clear instruction of how fast something needs to be for the business, how do you know if something is fast enough for the business?
It depends, the easiest way to find out is if the software goes out and nobody complains, then it is probably fine. This is not an ideal situation, but it is the way a lot of software is evaluated to see if it is fast enough. Put it out, it solves the problem, nobody complains about the speed, it’s fast enough, job done.
It is possible to be more proactive in finding out if something is fast enough, if you are writing a website, often users will not tell you if the page loads fast enough or not, they will just leave. This is where using something like Google’s page speed tool can be helpful. They will give you an idea of how fast the page needs to be.
When trying to work out how fast you need to be, it is worth considering the number of users and the time sensitivity of their tasks. As the number of users increases, typically the speed of the software matters more because it affects a lot of people.
Is it a script being written for one user that doesn’t mind waiting 30 seconds?
Is it a webserver that is serving a few hundred users?
Are those users doing something that is time sensitive? — Like talking to a customer on the phone or trying to trying to bid against other people in real time?
Is it a batch process for a large government agency that don’t mind if it takes a week?
Is it a hedge fund where event nanosecond of latency costs money?
Finding out how fast something needs to be can be quite difficult, most of the time people won’t bother and will release and see if it is fast enough. If that is the approach, then at least have some form of monitoring that allows you to see how fast you are actually going.
If it is fast enough, good, stop
The goal of this process is to write software that is fast enough, but no faster than necessary. Once the software has achieved the level of fast enough, stop, move on to writing something else that is going to provide value.
I’m not saying that we slow software down deliberately so that it is just barely fast enough, only that if the software ever get to the point where we can stop working on it, that we take that opportunity.
Optimising software for performance is a process that can eat as much time as you want to dedicate to it. The goal is to not dedicate more time to it than is needed, because that is time that could have been spent working on something else. Engineering time is expensive, you are more valuable if you are working on something that brings the business more value.
If it is not fast enough, find the bottleneck
In the situation where the software that has been written is not fast enough to solve the problem that it is intended for, then we are in the realm of performance optimization.
Any piece of software will have a bottleneck somewhere, if it didn’t it would finish in the same instant that it started. The goal here is to find the current largest bottleneck in the piece of software.
Finding bottlenecks can be quite tricky, I’d recommend getting some help, use tools that are designed for the purpose of debugging performance issues. In Java, there are a bunch of tools that hook into a running Java process to give all kinds of useful information. If you are writing some form of webserver, there are tools like NewRelic (other tools are available) that can provide breakdowns of where you are spending the most time in your code.
There are a lot of different places a bottleneck can hide, for example:
Database — is there a particularly hefty query? Does it have appropriate indexing?
IO — are you trying to read enormous files from the file system? Is it an SSD or a spinny disc?
Network — are you contacting a server a long way away? Sending large amounts of data across the network? Making a lot of round trips to some external service?
Application configuration — how many incoming / outgoing requests can your threadpool handle concurrently? Is the app using recommended production settings? Are you using the values that came as default?
CPU — are you consistently topping out your CPU at 100%? Does your application have the capability to utilise all the CPUs that have been provided to it?
Memory — are you running out of memory? Are you filling up one of the memory generations in particular (for garbage collected languages)?
These are some of the very broad range of possible bottlenecks you can have. There are so many possibilities and they can be so complex, that trying to predetermine which of these is going to be bottleneck is an almost impossible task.
Only try and identify the bottleneck once you know you need to find a bottleneck.
This is partly why premature optimisation is the root of all evil, trying to predict and fix bottlenecks will make the code more confusing and the bottleneck that is fixed is probably not going to be the largest bottleneck, rendering the premature fix mostly useless.
Weigh up your options and fix the bottleneck
So the largest bottleneck has been identified, could be a Database issue, Networking, IO, doesn’t matter. The next step is deciding how to fix it.
Once the problem is clearly identified as a bottleneck, there are probably going to be a few different options on how to fix it.
It could involve adding some caching, indexing, changing the infrastructure, updating the code to make fewer requests.
The key here, is that the conversation on how to fix the bottleneck is only occurring once it has been identified as the largest bottleneck. That conversation happens in the wider context of the piece of software where things like changing the infrastructure are possibilities.
Rather than the majority of performance improvement discussions that happen in reviews on things that are perceived bottlenecks being solved in a very local way.
Once a solution has been decided, make the fix, release, monitor the impact and verify that it did actually solve the bottleneck.
Back to “Is it fast enough for the business?”
One bottleneck down, the next step is not to find the next bottleneck. Next, we need to ask if fixing the most recent bottleneck made the application fast enough for the business.
Then we go back round the loop, fixing bottlenecks until we get to a point where the software is fast enough, then stopping at that point.
Optimising people
Not every business problem needs to be solved with technology. If there is some process that involves human steps and takes 48 hours, where waiting for people makes up 46 of those 48 hours and technology makes up the remaining 2 hours. Optimising the technology part of the process is probably not the bottleneck that needs solving.
However, the same process can be applied (roughly speaking), to people and processes. If you don’t know what the process is, then probably a good first step in speeding it up is understanding what the process is then standardising it.
Once the process is defined, ask if it is fast enough, and go round the loop of finding bottlenecks and fixing them until it is fast enough. Fixing bottlenecks in human processes might involve automation, it might just involve giving someone a second screen or better training.
Summary
The key thing I’d like to get across from this story is:
Only optimise a piece of software to the point where it is fast enough for the business.
Anything beyond that point is a waste of your expensive engineering time.
There are always bottlenecks, the bottleneck in your software is probably not something you can predict, so do not try to predict it.
Deploy your software, then find the real bottleneck.
About the author
Hi, I’m Doogal, I’m a Tech Lead that has spent a bunch of years learning software engineering from several very talented people. When I started mentoring engineers I found there was a lot of knowledge that I was taking for granted that I think should be passed on. These stories are my way of trying to pay it forward.
I can be found on Facebook, LinkedIn or Doodl.la. | https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-write-fast-software-7cb4c10631bf | ['Doogal Simpson'] | 2020-06-05 17:59:21.166000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Technology', 'Optimization', 'Software Engineering', 'Programming'] |
Reverse Bits | Question: Reverse bits of a given 32 bits unsigned integer.
You may view the full question here.
Approach 1: Let’s start with a simple approach.
Step 1: Extract the right most bit in the main number
Step 2: Shift the bits in the main number by one position to the right
Step 3: Shift the bits in the reversed number by one position to the left
Step 4: Append the bit extracted in Step 1 to the partial result generated in Step 3 by doing a bitwise add operation
Repeat these steps until the main number reduces to zero.
The code would look like —
public int reverseBits(int n) {
int rev = 0;
while(n!=0){
//Get the right most bit
int right = n & 1;
//Shift bits to the right by 1
n = n >> 1;
//Add the rightmost bit to the reversed number
rev = rev << 1;
rev = rev | right;
}
return rev;
}
But this code returns the wrong result! For instance,
Input: 00000010100101000001111010011100
Output from Code: 15065253 (00000000111001011110000010100101)
Expected Output: 964176192 (00111001011110000010100101000000)
The problem with the code is that we stop evaluating when the number reduces to zero. In the above example, the input has 6 zeroes in the beginning, which do not get evaluated because the loop condition (n!=0) would cause the while loop to break.
Approach 1.1: There are 32 bits in the unsigned integer we are evaluating. To fix the previous version of the solution, we need to modify the loop condition. We will have to continue to evaluate until all the 32 bits are evaluated.
//Approach 1.1:
//Runtime: 1ms
//Memory usage: 32MB public class Solution {
// you need treat n as an unsigned value
public int reverseBits(int n) {
int rev = 0;
int bitCount = 32;
while(bitCount-->0){
//Get the right most bit
int right = n & 1;
//Shift bits to the right by 1
n = n >> 1;
//Add the rightmost bit to the reversed number
rev = rev << 1;
rev = rev | right;
}
return rev;
}
}
Find more posts here.
Cheers & Chao! | https://medium.com/@monisha.mary.mathew/reverse-bits-b936bee153a0 | ['Monisha Mathew'] | 2019-07-22 00:11:46.883000+00:00 | ['Leetcode', 'Unsigned Integer', 'Leetcode Easy', 'Reverse Bits'] |
What is it REALLY like living in New York City?? | Living in NYC
I moved to the city straight out of college. I’v been here for almost 4 years now, and still fall in love with it every day. It was very easy to adapt to the city and feel at home.
Depending on your industry, it can of course be very competitive, but there are so many jobs available here.
It’s really easy to adapt. There are definitely a lot of smells, grime, noise and overall stimulation. If you get overwhelmed by stuff like that, then just use it as a growing experience for patience.
It’s also fairly easy to meet people and get connected, you just have to be proactive about it.
Apartments
Apartments are a big thing. Not knowing your budget or where your office would be, it’s hard to come up with concrete suggestions. You can definitely find a place on the Upper East Side or Upper West Side, etc. for $1300–1700 w/ roommates.
The further out you go the cheaper it is. There are corners of Queens and Brooklyn where you can find $800–1000 accommodations, but you you’re sacrificing a social life and life quality for sure.
This is an amazing city and there is no place on earth like it. I still get that “rush” feeling when I’m walking down a busy street and look up and see an iconic building and think “dang, I get to live here.” | https://medium.com/@emilysm/living-in-nyc-5e5cad50ecaf | ['Emily Smith'] | 2020-03-03 06:24:52.687000+00:00 | ['NYC'] |
Indonesian president would be the first to receive COVID-19 vaccine | Jakarta, Indonesia.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo has announced that he will be the first person in Indonesia to be the first recipient of COVID-19 vaccines.
“My compatriots and homeland.
Today, after receiving input from the public and recalculating state finances, I hereby say that: the Covid-19 vaccines for all citizens is FREE, a.k.a no fees at all. And I will be the first to receive the Covid-19 vaccine.
So, there is no reason for the public not to get vaccines or to doubt the safety of the Covid-19 vaccines.”
said President Joko Widodo.
This decision was made to prove the vaccine’s safety before the vaccine going out to the public.
Indonesia has received 1.2 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine developed by the Chinese company Sinovac Biotech. | https://medium.com/@kennyrimba/indonesian-president-would-be-the-first-to-receive-covid-19-vaccine-9ab670f54e4 | ['Kenny Rimba'] | 2020-12-20 09:24:13.081000+00:00 | ['Coronavirus', 'Vaccines', 'Indonesia', 'President', 'Covid 19'] |
Why transactional friendships will always fail | So what can we take away from the three forms of friendships?
Well, you can start off by examining the current friendships you have in your life and trying to realise which categories they fall into.
Ask yourself this : is there anyone who you think you can take the friendship to the next level with? If there is, consider the steps you would need to take to start developing a deeper relationship with them as well as what you would need to do to tweak the current dynamics of your friendship.
Then ask yourself again, is there anyone who stunts your growth or stops you from being the best version of yourself? If someone comes to mind, consider enacting a change. Cut them off, or tell yourself not to get any closer to them than you need to be.
Lastly, you should always keep in mind that friendships of virtue don’t come by in a day. To fully have that level of relationship with someone is a lifelong journey of commitment, understanding and infinite patience, but in the end, the results will be so very rewarding.
I think when it comes to friendships, another very very important thing to consider is the stage of life you are at. Personally, as a teen entering adulthood soon, I’ve started to realise that I don’t actually need that many friends, as harsh as it sounds. Over the years, I’ve learnt to be perfectly alright with doing certain things by myself. I can confidently say that I’ve witnessed enough throughout high school — the toxic drama, the popularity chase and social climbers, all of it has only painted the picture clearer for me and I’ve realised that friends come and go.
Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash
It’s inevitable.
While there are a few rare friends that may stay with us throughout the course of our lives, we first need to accept that the person who we currently think means so much to us at this very present moment might not be here anymore in five or maybe ten year’s time. It is crucial that you accept this fact before moving on to thinking more about what we want to get out of our current friendships.
It’s also important to remember that in every new stage of your life, from university to work to (possibly) parenthood, you are bound to meet new people through shared circumstances. Life literally puts you in a room full of people similar to you based on the choices you make. You go to school and befriend your classmates only because of a common reference point, and you’ll most likely form friendships of pleasure, and rarely of virtue.
I think I finally understood this for myself during the Covid-19 pandemic (where everything has been shifted online) and I started to ask myself questions like, “If I didn’t go to school with these people, would I have chosen them as my friends?” or, “If I could pick from the pool of everyone else in the world or country, would I pick these people as my friends?”
Truth to be told, even if you put in your best effort to maintain friendships of pleasure, there is rarely any guarantee that it will last through these major life changes. I honestly have lost contact with most of the people who were once my everything (or at least I though so), and they were people I thought I couldn’t live without back then when I was in middle school.
Sure, naysayers may claim that I just “didn’t try hard enough”, or that I didn’t prioritise my friends, and well, you can see it that way, but just know that even if you put in your utmost effort into maintaining and feeding a friendship with all the care and concern in the world, friendship is a two way effort and can only last forever if it is a friendship of virtue. Ultimately, if things don’t fall into that category and there seems to be no hope of you and your friend’s relationship ever progressing to that stage, then maybe the acceptance of that fact is the best thing you can do for your friendship.
In the end, you must realise that if your friendship is a friendship of virtue, then commitment wouldn’t and shouldn’t even be part of the equation. Both parties in the friendship stand to gain so much valuable insight from each other that your loyalties will almost never falter. Only a high quality friendship, where mutual understanding is established, stands a chance of lasting forever. | https://medium.com/illumination/why-transactional-friendships-will-always-fail-fbb437f09bee | ['Chloe Hill'] | 2020-12-24 05:42:40.397000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Friends', 'Relationships', 'Aristotle', 'Friendship'] |
The Last COVID Article | So is this it? The last COVID column? Remember COVID? It used to be a big thing. Thing faded faster than a Justin Amash presidential bid and was just as politically impactful. It feels like some old memory from high school — did it really happen? Did we really do that stuff? Did I really have a mustache back then?
Sorry Dems, we didn’t all die fighting over the last ventilator. Human colonies still exist in Georgia. Joe Biden re-appeared in public (masked so he couldn’t hack up a new “gaffe,”) Trump is still president, the stores are full again with iJunk from China, and with summer here and any second wave months away, it looks like most Americans are kind of done with this. We tend to binge watch selectively now anyway, and the good part is over.
I found a unique way to reflect on what passed for the last few months. To pass the lockdown time, I bought a Chinese-made streaming device of ambiguous intellectual property rights morality that delivers over 700 free TV stations from around the globe. I built up a little obsession watching COVID news from dozens of countries in English where I could find it, some in languages I knew a little of, some in languages I couldn’t even identify. Grossly unscientific as well as probably a little illegal, but if you watch enough of it the patterns become very, very clear.
No nation on earth tore itself apart over a virus response like the U.S. There was plenty of debate globally over the right thing is to do, but it all appeared intended to be productive and not politically-motivated destructive in nature. Not to say the U.S. media didn’t try to show the leadership they claim the world wants from us; while the BBC headlined new vaccine trials, on behalf of the Indispensable Nation CNN ran a report based on “sources” claiming the four countries which make up Great Britain are at odds with each other over how to respond. CNN then helpfully reminded Americans “Wales and Northern Ireland too often feel like an afterthought.”
In Italy, the news simply reported the Prime Minister announcing “a calculated risk opening in the knowledge that the contagion curve may rise. We have to accept it otherwise we will never be able to start up again. Italy would end up with a strongly damaged economic and social structure if it waited to relax distancing measures until a vaccine becomes available.” Saying the real part out loud like that would have triggered calls for impeachment if not giant cracks in the earth itself in the U.S.
Perhaps most importantly of all, I found no other nation where a large number of people were convinced their leader was literally trying to kill them, to the point news in America is still weeks later falsely reporting Trump wanted people to drink bleach. This is more than just one item on this list. It is the core of America’s failure, the willingness to believe their government is not simply men who make mistakes, but men out to kill them.
No other media did what the NYT did on May 24, just ahead of Memorial Day, devote its front page to the names of COVID-dead Americans, the first front page in four decades to be just words, no photos or graphics. One has to go back to LBJ and the Vietnam War to find something similar — hey hey LBJ how many kids did you kill today? people chanted — holding the president himself directly responsible for the deaths of individual Americans. LIFE magazine later devoted most of an issue to the photos of the men who died in Vietnam one week (which included Memorial Day 1969), a shocking sum of a failed policy. For readers who know history, the NYT stunt’s connection to Vietnam was undeniable. The direct responsibility link seems however more a creation of 2020 than the realization it was in 1969. The media’s intent, however, was unambiguous: he killed them, vote elsewhere.
I also found no other nation where a large number of people were convinced their neighbors were also literally trying to kill them by not wearing masks. In Taiwan the government said people should wear masks, and then distributed them. In other places cops handed masks, not summonses, to people who weren’t wearing one. No one shouted “Burn the witch!”
Americans had to create their own masks via little handicraft projects, and then make heart-felt decisions multiple times a day under the judgment of strangers. Outside the U.S. a mask seemed to just be a mask, whether you were wearing one or not. When I heard the next story was to be about unmasking, the graphic was likely Michael Flynn’s face, not a social media mob with pitchforks out to destroy someone.
No where else did armed protesters challenge their government (American media is however in the global lead on obsession with Hong Kong protesters.)
America is the only place using the virus to justify less public transportation.
With the possible exception of China responding to U.S. criticism (their TV people do not seem happy about this), I could not find any place that made the virus into a signature foreign policy issue. Borders got shut, then opened, as expedients, not as sneaky answers to unresolved immigration policy. Much the same for free college, public housing, social programs, guaranteed income, economic inequality, national service, freedom of religion, right to bear arms, abortion rights, the post office and voting by mail.
No place else seemed so determined to find new crises within the crisis. In America we had a sub-crisis-of-the-week. Not enough tests, not enough doctors, not enough PPE, not enough ventilators, not enough lockdown. And of course each sub-crises came with its own sub-blame game. Nowhere except the U.S. was everything so centered on blame, looking backward.
Swedes had dry daily news conferences that paced like farm price reports. Of course the U.S. press have always been aggressive questioners, but I cannot find anywhere where open mockery and passive-aggressive questions so dominated. This follows through to the “news” itself, so much of which is simply name calling, saying people are bonkers, stupid, mentally ill, incompetent, and lying sacks of crap.
This in turn uniquely spilled over into entertainment. It is very difficult to find anything produced in the last few years in America as “comedy” that is not just name calling and mockery aimed at one side of the political spectrum. I cannot find anywhere outside the U.S. where media stars attack each other, and claim each other distorts the facts to the point they are producing foreign propaganda. You get a little of that during Prime Minister’s question time on the BBC, but they are much more clever. Otherwise, you have to read the lowest of the tabloids for it.
No other nation has a cheerleading squad embedded in its media happy when a possible cure fails. Except when talking about America’s reaction, everywhere else hydroxychloroquine is just another medicine to be evaluated. Hope is rationed in America because it is a political weapon.
I see nowhere else people wish fellow citizens get sick and die to prove a political point — You reopened too soon! You didn’t wear a mask! Your third-party vote killed grandma! I didn’t see elsewhere the U.S.-standard told-you-so story, something with the headline like “Barber Who Defied Lockdown to Cut Hair Tests Positive.” Serves him right, yes?
Racism is not unique to the United States but I cannot locate anywhere else where it is so embedded in the way the nation talked about or dealt with the virus. Same for a search for “communities” hurt more than you in the virus’ Oppression Olympics: LGBT people, immigrants, Asians in general when just Chinese are not enough, special needs kids, a lip-reader who can’t understand masked people, prisoners, various “survivors” of bad things, an endless search for more victimized victims.
At the same time, no one else seems driven to fetishize “heroes,” from cashiers to trash collectors. Same for countries with woman leaders; they don’t make a big deal of it in Germany or New Zealand but the American media sure does. The press in those women-led countries talk about competence in government not gender.
No one else seemed so anxious to both undercount and overcount the virus deaths. A fair number of nations seemed to underplay their death tolls, but nowhere was it both under and over at the same time for such different reasons.
So that’s it for COVID, a good couple of seasons’ worth. Jeez, I gotta get out more.
Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People,Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent. | https://medium.com/@wemeantwell/the-last-covid-article-9ecd02617e15 | ['Peter Van Buren'] | 2020-06-10 12:36:25.283000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'China', 'Media', 'Virus', 'Unblock'] |
The Тragedy of the Climate Change ‘Commons’ | Climate & Sustainability
Climate change is perhaps the most widely-discussed topic of the 21st century. Sadly, the devastation to our planet is increasingly clear. The ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and not enough is being done to prevent further damage.
The Australian ‘Black Summer’ of 2019/20 serves as a stark demonstration of the impact that climate change can have. Fires are a natural part of the Australian weather cycle, but the 2019/20 fire season was far more severe than usual. During the ‘Black Summer’, temperatures in Australia were 1.52 °C above average; 2019 was one of the hottest years on record for the country. It’s easy to see that global warming is among the most significant factors for the increased intensity and frequency of forest fires. The 2019/20 season burnt an estimated 186,000 square kilometres of land, caused at least 34 direct and 445 indirect deaths, and destroyed over 5,900 buildings.
The Severe Impacts and Reasons of Climate Change
Climate scientists have been warning us about global climate change for decades, and its realities are now undeniable. Unfortunately, this is just the beginning. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which consists of more than 1300 scientists from different countries, predicts that these changes are likely to be significant and increase over time. Moreover, the IPCC forecasts a temperature rise of 1.4 to 5.5 °C (2.5 to 10 °F) over the next century.
The future impact of this temperature rise is terrifying. According to some models, natural events such as hurricanes, droughts, and heatwaves are likely to become much more intense. Areas like the Arctic are predicted to become ice-free, resulting in sea levels rising between 30 and 240cm (1–8ft) by 2100. In short, climate change poses perhaps the most significant threat to our way of life and future.
So, who is to blame for the crisis we now face? Which elements demand the most attention? While the myriad factors influencing climate change are multi-faceted and diverse, it would be naïve to overlook the most significant contributor — human activity. Broadly speaking, climate change is influenced by two factors, one is natural and the other is anthropogenic. The latter describes the effects of human activity.
The natural causes of climate change include volcanic eruptions, solar radiation, and changes to the Earth’s orbit. While it can be tempting to cite these natural factors as evidence that global warming is out of our hands, anthropogenic factors are accelerating the process at a rate that could prove fatal. Human activity is driving the climate out of control.
Data shows that although some changes to the climate occurred before the 20th century, the mid-20th century is where we see these changes accelerate most rapidly. The industrial revolution and its consequences for our planet are increasingly apparent.
“Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. — Garrett Hardin
What’s more, altering the natural influences on climate change would be a far greater task than changing human activity. So why then has climate policy at large failed to adequately address the situation? It’s no secret that the threat of global warming is very real, so why haven’t governments and citizens of the world risen to the task? Unfortunately, the status quo has, thus far, reigned supreme.
This article submits that climate change has become a ‘tragedy of the commons’. In the following sections, we will explore this concept and what it means for the future.
Iceland, Melting Ice Sheets. Image by Gabriel Kuettel on Pexels
What Does ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ Mean?
The ‘tragedy of the commons’ is a widely-used concept in economics that describes a situation where a shared resource is exploited to exhaustion. When no single party owns a resource, each individual does their best to exploit it before someone else gets there first. In effect, it’s a race to use, abuse, and exhaust the resource. In this way, a common good can be spoiled through collective action.
The concept was first introduced in 1833 by the British economic writer William Forster Lloyd. The term ‘tragedy of the commons’ was later popularised by American ecologist Garrett Hardin in 1968. While describing the concept, Lloyd introduced a hypothetical example in which he asked: “what would happen if every shepherd, acting in their own self-interest, allowed their flock to graze on the common field?”
In contemporary economics, ‘commons’ refers to any resource which is shared, unregulated and universally accessible. This could be oceans, rivers, ocean fish stocks, or even an office refrigerator.
Within the context of this article, our atmosphere can be considered a ‘commons’. We all have access to it, have a right to enjoy it, but are not individually responsible for its maintenance or health. This shared, and therefore lost, responsibility is a monumental factor in the global climate crisis. Thus, global society is facing ‘the tragedy of the climate change commons’.
The smoke plume of Australian bushfires viewed from International Space Station, 3 January, 2020
The ‘Tragedy of the Climate Change Commons’
Scientists and engineers from around the world monitor the Earth’s climate and weather using several observational systems like satellites, thermometers, and weather balloons. They have collected a huge amount of evidence that the global climate is changing. According to the 2014 National Climate Assessment, the global warming of the past 50 years is primarily due to human activity. Humanity impacts climate change in several ways, but the most devastating factors are deforestation, burning fossil fuels, and pollution.
Between 15–18 million hectares of forest are destroyed each year, the main driver of which remains agricultural expansion. 40% of tropical deforestation that took place between 2000–2010 was used for large-scale commercial agriculture. 30% was for local subsistence agriculture. Other causes of deforestation include the need for building materials and fuel, as well as the clearance of land for use by livestock and crops.
Tropical and subtropical forests suffer more severely from deforestation. One of the greatest victims of this devastating activity is the Amazon rainforest. An area the size of a football pitch is cleared from it every minute, with the majority of the cleared land being used for agricultural use such as the rearing of cattle. This means that forests are also being cut using the slash-and-burn method that involves not only cutting the trees, but also burning the local flora. This contributes far more significantly to wildfires.
2020 Brazil rainforest wildfires. Large smoke plumes are another indicator of deforestation fires. Image was taken by NASA’s Aqua satellite on August 1, 2020.
Another critical factor is the burning of fossil fuels and the resulting pollution. The exploitation of our natural resources for fuel has a severe impact on the global climate. Data shows that climate change since the mid-20th century has been caused mainly by the greenhouse effect. This effect, largely exacerbated by human activity, traps the sun’s rays within our atmosphere, warming the Earth’s surface significantly. Human industrial activities produce heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and nitrous oxide that worsen the natural greenhouse effect and thus contribute to global warming. Measurements of carbon dioxide from the Mauna Loa observatory show that concentrations have increased from about 313 parts per million (ppm) in 1960, to passing the 400 ppm milestone on May 9, 2013. The current observed amount of carbon dioxide exceeds the geological record maxima (~300 ppm) from ice core data.
Scientists have already predicted the severe impacts these changes may cause to our planet in the future. This is why there is so much concern within the scientific community that not enough is being done. The ‘tragedy of the commons’ sees a world that is being eaten alive by culprits who refuse to be the first to stop gorging.
The Way We Harm Our Planet Doesn’t have a Direct Impact on Us
When launching a project, business idea, or something else important, it’s entirely reasonable to assess the potential risks. If no immediate damage is predicted, why wouldn’t you continue? The issue is that in the context of climate change, our individual actions are perceived as inconsequential; even larger activities don’t necessarily yield negative results straight away. The immediate effect of our activity isn’t always perceptible.
In fact, many may outlive the more severe consequences of climate change. Perhaps true tragedy will strike in another 40 years, when many of us are no longer around. In other words, not everyone has to reap what they sow.
People make “smart” individual decisions that end up being “dumb” for all.
Global annual average temperature (as measured over both land and oceans) has increased by more than 0.8°C (1.5°F) since 1880 (through 2012). Red bars show temperatures above the long-term average, and blue bars indicate temperatures below the long-term average. The black line shows atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in parts per million (ppm).
Source: Kenneth E. Kunkel, Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites — NC
The Role of Attribution Bias
Attribution bias is a concept in psychology describing the tendency for people to attribute the behaviour of others to their internal characteristics, while describing their own behaviour in relation to their circumstances. It is particularly relevant when discussing climate change inactivity. People may treat their own climate inactivity with less scrutiny than the behaviour of others.
The following anecdote demonstrates this bias in effect. During climate protests, a protest leader gives a rousing speech on the importance of individual responsibility. They describe how crucial it is that every citizen takes responsibility and stops littering, polluting, and harming the planet. One protester in the crowd is particularly passionate. They clap and cheer in agreement throughout the speech. Once the group begins to disperse, this individual looks around for a place to throw their half-empty water bottle. After finding no suitable bin, they toss the bottle on the ground and shrug. Here we see the attribution bias in full effect. This protestor was more than willing to criticise the behaviour of others while remaining unable to identify those same faults in their own behaviour.
If this individual were to see someone else dropping a water bottle, their response may well have been to criticise them. This article is written, in part, to suggest that this anecdote is one of billions happening across the world. Generally, people readily acknowledge that something must be done, but seem unable to recognise that their behaviour is also at fault.
The Bystander Effect — One Other Reason for Inaction
The bystander effect is another critical factor at play. Picture someone being mugged in broad daylight in a crowded street. It may seem reasonable to assume that the attacker will soon be apprehended by the multiple witnesses of the event. Unfortunately, the bystander effect dictates that the more people who share responsibility for action, the less likely it is that anyone steps up to the plate.
This unfortunate effect also effects global climate change efforts. If everyone is responsible for recycling, picking up litter, and everything in between, then no one is. Once a precedent becomes established, it is much harder to make meaningful change possible. The ‘tragedy of the commons’ means that the status quo is one of environmental destruction.
Governments as Bystanders
Perhaps the most tragic aspect of this problem is the inaction of governments. During the last season of Australian bushfires, many leading scientists criticised the government for not taking any serious action against global warming and climate change. They mentioned that these catastrophic fires should have been a “wake-up call” for the government.
“They’re burying their heads in the sand while the world is literally burning around them and that’s the scary thing. It’s only going to get worse.” — Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a climate scientist “There needs to be increased attention on the impact of climate change and it’s relationship with fire and how that threatens humans as well as nature and the environment.” — Euan Ritchie, a wildlife ecologist at Deakin University
Sadly, this was not the case; any serious actions concerning climate change are yet to be taken. Governments tend to prioritise the economy over everything else. Curbing climate change means reducing the use of available resources and risking a decrease in economic output. Most governments acknowledge that something needs to be done, but none of them want to be the first to disadvantage themselves. The global economy is characterised by competition. That’s the essence of ‘the tragedy of the commons’; unless 100% of governments and a majority of their populations take action, no one will.
How Sensitive is New Zealand to Climate Change?
New Zealand is also facing the consequences of climate change thanks largely to its geographic features. To understand how climate change influences, or may influence, the country, it’s necessary to introduce the key aspects of its society, geography and ecology that are at risk.
As an island nation, New Zealand is particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels. The melting ice caps, rising seas, and warmer temperatures also pose the risk of a change in local water chemistry. This could cause significant damage the country’s rich marine biodiversity. New Zealand benefits greatly from its fishing, aquaculture, marine recreation, and iconic wildlife which makes the threat of climate change particularly terrifying.
The New Zealand population is spread mostly across its coasts and floodplains. The consequences of rising sea levels in this context are obvious. Natural disasters like flooding are already frequent in the country. Over the coming years, many citizens are likely to be displaced. The central areas of the island will have to be repurposed as living spaces. Heritage sites across the country are at risk of being abandoned. It should come as no surprise that these changes could prove devastating to the nation’s economy.
The streets of the North Island town of Edgecumbe in New Zealand, flooded, April 6, 2017. Image Source: voanews.com
One of the most severe consequences of climate change would be the contamination of clean drinking water. Access to freshwater forms a cornerstone of New Zealand’s economy; the looming water crisis could prove devastating. Decreased rainfall, increased droughts, more frequent wildfires, and unprecedented water demand could wreak havoc on the country.
New Zealand’s unique ecosystems are also exposed to danger. There are more than 50,000 endemic species across the island. They are unique to New Zealand and cannot be found elsewhere in the world. Because of the expected climate dangers, these species are at risk of displacement.
The risks outlined above are far from exhaustive; climate change could transform everyday life for many citizens.
What Can We Do?
In recent years, the narrative has shifted from one of prevention to mitigation. Humanity has already set the wheels of climate catastrophe in motion; it’s our job now to slow it down. The additional CO2 in the atmosphere is likely to linger for more than a century. If we were to stop all harmful activities today, we would still face significant challenges. The good news is that if the global effort improves, a significant proportion of the damage can be mitigated.
Alongside mitigating changes must also be policy framed around adaptation. Adaptation here refers to adapting to changes that are already too late to stop. Without both mitigation and adaptation, the outlook is bleak.
So governments, first of all, should take steps to minimise the number of greenhouse gasses that are released by human activity. Furthermore, radical action must be taken to transform our approach to energy production and global consumption.
But along with these actions, each individual should also take responsibility and care for the planet. People must realise that while their decisions appear “smart” today, they may prove “dumb” for all of humanity in the future. Radical change is hard, but everyone on Earth must make difficult, inconvenient choices for the good of our collective future. It’s easy to see the actions of an individual as inconsequential. The actions of 7 billion individuals, though, will forge our path out of the ‘tragedy of the commons’. | https://medium.com/cambium/the-%D1%82ragedy-of-the-climate-change-commons-fa70dd0e9497 | ['Ross Carter-Brown'] | 2020-12-27 03:04:23.852000+00:00 | ['Climate Change', 'Sustainability', 'Bias', 'Psychology'] |
Using AWS Neptune to Visualise Ancient Philosophy | The Inner Citadel
The Inner Citadel by Pierre Hadot is a thorough analysis of The Meditations, the book goes a long way to identifying the relationships that exist between Marcus’s hypomnemata and the dogma of Stoic philosophy. These rules, the three rules of life as Hadot refers to them “correspond to the three activities of the soul: judgment, desire, and impulse; and to the three domains of reality: our individual faculty of judgment, universal Nature, and human nature.”
For Marcus, these rules were a phronetic/ethical process and there is marked similarity between this method of analysis, perspective management, and action and OODA, a more modern decision-making framework.
The table above shows the taxonomy or model that a number of the Meditations can be seen aligning to and the first cut of our dataset will bring these relationships to light and show which meditations apply to which domain.
This dataset alone wouldn’t warrant a graph db but there are further relationships that are interesting to model on top of these, they include the alignment of other author works to the taxonomy (e.g. Epictetus, Seneca to start), and the mapping of relationships that exist between author, dogma, and practices intended to achieve real-world outcomes e.g. “the view from above”. Further, over time methods that originated before Stoicism and can be found after will add another dimension e.g. the Scrum retrospective, the Pythagoreans liked a good retro as did the Stoics, and so on and so forth. Fundamentally ancient philosophies were holistic systems of thought and action and are the cornerstones of much of today’s life, to some extent I believe this can be modeled and so can the synthesis of this knowledge over time.
So the overall vision of this project is to copy someone else’s architecture and use it to visualize a bunch of older dudes’ thought processes and to see how those cornerstones of wisdom synthesized over time. Maybe, we’ll see.
https://aws.amazon.com/neptune/ | https://medium.com/@olirowlands/using-aws-neptune-to-visualise-ancient-philosophy-4ae6f5ee1ead | ['Oli Rowlands'] | 2021-01-09 15:21:24.543000+00:00 | ['Stoicism', 'AWS', 'Lambda', 'Neptune'] |
How I Reduced Docker Image Size from 1.43 GB to 22.4 MB | How I Reduced Docker Image Size from 1.43 GB to 22.4 MB
In 5 Simple Steps
Photo by Guillaume Bolduc on Unsplash
If you are working in web development then probably you already know about the idea of containerization and how it’s so great and everything.
But when working with Docker image size is a great concern. It’s often over 1.43 GB for just the boilerplate project that we get from create-react-app
Today we will containerize a ReactJS application and learn some tricks about how we can reduce the image size and at the same time improve performance.
The tricks will be shown for ReactJS but it’s applicable for any kind of NodeJS application. | https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/how-i-reduced-docker-image-size-from-1-43-gb-to-22-4-mb-84058d70574b | ['Mohammad Faisal'] | 2020-11-11 15:34:57.630000+00:00 | ['DevOps', 'Programming', 'Software Development', 'Docker', 'Coding'] |
“My son is a thug,” the father reportedly told the hitman. “Break his fingers.” | The 75-year-old retiree paid a hitman €2,500 in April to attack his son, a 43-year-old surgeon, and his boyfriend. Neither the suspect nor the victims were identified by authorities.
Homophobic father hired a hitman to break his gay son’s fingers and attack his boyfriend
But the plot was thrown into disarray when the goon, after two weeks of stalking the victim and slashing his car tires, decided the attack was “senseless”, according to a local activist group, via La Repubblica.
He decided to betray the father and revealed the plan to the son.
The father was charged with aggravated assault and stalking by law enforcement in Turin, Italy.
The alleged plot was no isolated incident — he had previously hired goons to beat his son’s partner in February. The boyfriend was rushed to the hospital requiring treatment after the attack.
Animosity had festered between the father and son for years, the police said. When the son came out to his father, he tersely said: “Too bad for the grandchildren,” and denounced him.
Four years ago, at a beach house in France, the son sought to reel in his father as he physically fought with his mother.
The father, as a result, threatened to break the son’s legs — but not before filing a police report claiming he was the victim and that his son had removed some of his teeth during a scuffle. This never occurred, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors added that the son and his mother, ensnared in a culture of fear fostered by the father, had “well-founded fear for their safety and that of the people connected to them, forcing them to alter their habits”. The mother eventually separated from her husband after 42 years of marriage.
The son often changed the locks on his property and travelled with friends for protection, fearing he was being tailed. “Apart from the patients I knew, I was afraid to make visits, never knowing who I might meet,” he added.
In a Facebook post, Turin LGBT+ campaign group Arcigay Torina wrote: “The ruling leads to the closure of a tormented path, in which a parent has become executioner towards their child because they love another man.
“Arcigay Turin expresses all his solidarity with the victim: no person should live in fear due to their sexual orientation and gender identity.”
The group said the case illustrates why lawmakers in Italy must urgently plug the gaps in the country’s stringy anti-discrimination legislation that punishes racial, ethnic and religious hate crimes, among others, but not anti-LGBT+ attacks.
The Italian parliament is currently considering an LGBT+ hate crime bill that would bring it in line with its European neighbours, but far-right parties and religious leaders have expressed virulent opposition to it. | https://medium.com/@nadimu6/my-son-is-a-thug-the-father-reportedly-told-the-hitman-break-his-fingers-62d7fc7038ad | ['Nadim Uddin'] | 2020-12-20 17:38:31.815000+00:00 | ['LGBT', 'Homophobia', 'Gay', 'Fathers'] |
My Christmas Wish for You | Photo by Valentin Petkov on Unsplash
I am here this morning thinking of what I would like to say to you on the Sunday before Christmas.
Our common experience of 2020 has been the unknown, the uncontrollable, and unfathomable. It is a complete upheaval for us because we are used to stability or its veil. Our sense of normalcy has been upended. But for a large part of humanity, this has been their reality. We are now most acutely aware of our desire for health, safety, stability, peace, decency, freedom for our loved ones and ourselves. The same life elements immigrants and refugees have been seeking. And fellow citizens in trying to hold on to their own space within their own home country.
This is not what I write about in the Sunday Newsletter. All of us here are seeking peace. We are looking to calm down anxieties from this illness, the insecurity it brings with it in terms of economy, jobs, quality of life, and relationships. The national and geopolitical aspects occurring now are stressful, to say the least. We have discovered our country is as vulnerable as we are. It is all too much, but there is strength in the peace we seek.
We must, and will, carry on by doing our part. We each decide what our part is. My part is to remain calm, be kind, be as generous as I can be within so many opportunities. To be fair, be courageous, and to stand in my integrity. Be upright about not only my rights but of others’ as well. To be empathetic. To wholeheartedly want for all others the same as I fervently wish for my family.
Christmas has enormous religious, theological significance, but it is also a family story. It is a story of a family running away from danger in their land, seeking refuge for themselves and their soon to be born child. They simply wanted to be safe, have a chance at life and all that entails. They were experiencing fear, insecurity, political problems beyond their control, fatigue.
I know this is like preaching to the choir. Those who get it, get it. Those who don’t most likely won’t. But then, there is faith and experience. Some people do open up and reach out to understand what is uncomfortable for them. Many times the next generation sees and understands what the one before refuses. Here, now, within, I look through myself like one does through drawers. Looking through to find what I can do to make things a little better and a little better next.
I can give encouragement. I can give a moment of peace and solace. I can remind you that you are loved and precious in so many ways. I can try to reassure you that you have been dealing with this day by day, and you will deal with this day by day — therefore, you are capable. And when you have come through the other side, you will be stronger and proud of yourself. You will also, hopefully, most likely, come through with an expanded braver heart.
What can I truthfully say to you this Sunday before Christmas? I can tell you my wish for you on this very particular Christmas eve.
On this Holy Night, I wish for you…
A quiet night to contemplate and pray.
May you feel the Holiness of your Soul and be glad for this.
May you feel the calm and the peace of its eternity.
May you sit with it in beautiful silence.
May you make peace with your vulnerability and feel in your bones those of others as well.
May this expand your Love.
May this fill you with Hope.
May this fill you with Strength.
May you be in awe of Life, of the Heavens, and of Faith.
May you be joyful in your Love of Life, in your Communion with Spirit.
May you be committed to being that Love here on Earth- day by day.
On this Holy Night, may you be the gift born.
From our free Sunday Newsletter 12/20/20 edition aquietthought.com | https://medium.com/a-quiet-thought/my-christmas-wish-for-you-5e193ae725e2 | ['Militsa Cuevas'] | 2020-12-21 23:53:40.073000+00:00 | ['Christmas', 'Family', 'Holiness', 'Gifts', 'Wishes'] |
The Perspex Family | Image by the author.
We’re sitting in a family-oriented restaurant in East Maitland waiting for the drinks to come out, before the already ordered food. At each side of the table there is a large perspex screen on a black frame and stand, in order to stop the transmission of germs across tables, across patrons.
I mention to Alice, across from me, of the novelty of having these screens or windows at either side of the table while dining. It’s almost like being in a car and looking through the glass at the surroundings, safe from the outside world, except every now and then the waiter is allowed in to take the orders or place down the plates of food.
There’s almost a heightened element of voyeurism having these perspex windows — smudged with staff fingerprints — to look out at the public with.
Some people are devoted fans of “people watching”. They love it so much it borders on passion. I have a feeling these clear public barriers would tickle their fancy in a new and fresh way.
Our drinks arrive. Alice’s a Pina Colada, mine a Bacardi with soda and lemon (no limes at this basic family-friendly establishment, just the lime’s slightly inferior but versatile brother: the lemon).
We take a keen sip of our fresh drinks and I can’t help but overhear the conversation from the family of four at the setting through the screen to my left. A familiar little family of four, spat out of the typical societal blue-collar cookie-cutter. Parents — one of each gender — approximately early 40s, and children — both girls — mid to late teens. This family unit so immediate to us is even the most wholesome or “Christian standard” for a lack of other definitions. They’ve got Mum. They’ve got Dad. They’ve got two kids.
That’s in comparison to my own assumptions of what I can also view in the restaurant, other families:
1. In a booth at the front window, there is a lesbian couple, late 30s, with a boy — approx. five.
2. Over Alice’s shoulder, across the way, there is a couple of grandparents with two little kids — a boy and a girl. (The parents are most likely at home trying to get a good fuck in while the spawn can’t interrupt.)
3. Next to them (screen in between), a group of four. All male. Dad is about sixty and grey and bald on top. The sons range from approximately 25 to 21 to 16. Looks like Dad’s night with the kids.
Back to our cookie-cutter family; the ones practically spewed out of the factory with the innocent normalcy of a can of Sprite. The ones with the slightly too aggressive father and the submissive Mum. Their food hasn’t arrived yet. Dad is intermittently sucking on a beer while all three females have glasses of water.
I catch the audio mid-conversation because Dad is unnecessarily raising his voice: ‘And what have you paid for lately?’ His aggression is directed at one of the girls, the eldest. ‘Did you pay for anything over the weekend? No, ya didn’t.’ And he takes a slobbish gulp of his beer.
He’s got himself all frustrated over nothing and he can’t wait for his sirloin steak and chips to come out so he can plough through that without sufficiently chewing it, to follow on to getting the fuck back home to sit on the lounge and drink Extra Drys until his brain goes fuzzy enough to forget that he hates not only his job he has to go to the next day, but also himself.
Though, his biggest short-coming is not that he hates himself or that he’s too selfish to satisfy his wife (she hits the gym daily and just wants to be fucked like the good old days). His biggest short-coming is that he feels the need to spray his spiteful hate onto his innocent and beautiful daughters. He thinks his words will coerce them to take action, get a job and pay rent even though Mum & Dad can easily afford everything. He maybe thinks his own children’s upbringing needs to be just as hard as his own.
Why should they deserve better?
Only, the best way he can try and do it these days is by spouting slices of verbal abuse at them. Not anything close to how his own Dad would whip him with an old pair of suspenders, stinging with the metal clips at the ends. Modern day Dad couldn’t get away with that shit. His only tools for “discipline” lied within verbal and psychological warfare.
The daughters would soak it all in too. Every drop of it. They would never forget the Chief of Arseholes they had to call a household family member.
And that seed of not forgetting would flourish into one or both of the girls unknowingly getting back at Dad — in a kind of rebellion — by going out and getting fertilised by a piece of shit broheim with cheap tattoos, at a friend’s house party. The male kid, Broseph McLazyface wouldn’t have anything planned for the future other than playing video games and getting high, but now he would be faced with the prospect of a soon-to-be-coming child.
He would be the one that would have to get a job.
Nice work, Arsehole Dad; you were practically the crux of getting your own daughter pregnant. Have another beer, congratulate yourself, and get used to the idea of being a grandfather. Or, if you choose not to change your ways, you can be: “Arsehole Grandad”.
Our food arrives at the table and before picking up my cutlery my last thought is of getting up and going around the perspex screen to the table where the family sits. The family of good potential in a perfect world.
I’m grabbing the father by the collar of his faded football jersey, and I’m showing him my best version of a mad-man who means business. I’m getting right up in his face and scrunching his collar in my fists, and I’m telling him to respect his daughters and to tell them he loves them.
Respect them and nurture their interests, because one day… One day they just might change the world. | https://medium.com/wordsmith-library/the-perspex-family-a677fb6d5d2b | ['Ethan Burke'] | 2020-12-14 16:02:46.458000+00:00 | ['Prose', 'Life Lessons', 'Fathers', 'Creative Writing', 'Family'] |
On Smoking | Sorry Mom, I’m a social smoker. When someone offers me a cigarette outside a bar, I’ll take it. I’ve bought more packs of cigarettes than I can count. I’ve bummed more darts than I’ve bought packs, but not more than I’ve given away cigarettes. I used to have a policy where I carried either cigarettes or a lighter, never both at the same time to prevent me from smoking alone, but I’ve long forgone that since I’ve smoked for over four years now, and there is no dependency in sight.
I remember the first cigarette I had. It was at college, and offered to me by a puck bro that I was acquainted with. I remember the exact words: “Hey Zhanger, want a dart?”
All throughout elementary, middle, and high school, I thought smoking was the most ridiculous thing. Why would anyone smoke cigarettes? There was no high, there was a significant cost, and there was the risk of cancer to contend with. The only people who smoked were dumb and addicted. In fact, there was a running joke about smokers, and some of us would imitate the few high school smokers using the most ridiculous slang, among them ‘fag’ and ‘bogie’.
When I arrived at college however, the prevalence of tobacco amazed me. Even more surprising was that no one mocked them or treated them with any sort of derision, despite their clear dependency and the trove of laughable terms they had to refer to the products. Private school beauties hacking darts between whispering sweet nothings. Student housing porches were littered with butts. Puck bros packed chew into their lower lips before class. Even some girls smoked, though none of them used dip unless it was to impress some boy with a flow.
Though it still smelt bad and seemed pointless, it was much more normalized. These weren’t just high school hoodlums, they were university students in my program. So when I was offered my first cigarette at twenty years of age, I took it. It was smoother than marijuana, I had a puff or two, and passed it back to my friend. Cool. I had smoked my first cigarette. And that was the extent of it, the novelty over, until I arrived in Europe.
Everyone smoked in Paris. Before class, during the (smoke) break, and after class. No matter how cold, all the students would hurry outside, and suck on their flimsy hand-rolled cigarettes. The man drinking his coffee at an outdoor café table in the afternoon. The woman drinking her red at an outdoor café table in the evening. The throbbing crowd drinking god-knows-what in the smoking room at a club. And I, oh so badly, wanted to be one of them. I wanted to be all of them.
So I bought my first pack of cigarettes. Then, I started buying my own rolling tobacco and papers. I never got to the point where I could roll one with one hand while using the other to hold onto a pole in the metro; I frankly never even got close. But I was rolling my own cigarettes. I was a student in the courtyard, the man at a cafe, and all too often, the reveler at the club. I was a part of the landscape I admired so much.
It was stranger to roll my own cigarettes in Canada, and people often mistook it for marijuana, which led to much confusion at clubs. The real reason I gave them up was that I discovered menthol cigarettes after leaving Europe. Though illegal in Canada, they were easily acquirable at duty-free stores when crossing borders. For an infrequent smoker like me, a carton would much longer than the following international trip. Plus, they were fun to distribute at parties to the next smoker.
That leaves me with my current drinking accoutrements, a pack of menthols and a book of matches or a Zippo. I rarely smoke if no one else is smoking, but the only thing more fun than offering a minty cancer stick was lighting a Zippo with a click or striking a match with a flick. It’s immensely satisfying to pull out a pack of cigarettes, compact the tobacco by giving it a few firm taps on a hard surface, open the pack of cigarettes, and ease one out with subtle wrist flicks. It’s tremendously gratifying to light someone else’s cigarette with my lighter or a match, cupping the little flame with my free hand to block out elements.
However, there is more to smoking than engaging in this little pantomime. I do enjoy the act of smoking, the feeling of cool smoke slithering down my throat and filling me. It gives me a second breath of life when I’m drinking, but also cuts two ways. A timely cigarette can revitalize and stave off symptoms of drunkenness, but too much and the head rush induces puking all on its own; live by the dart, die by the dart.
There is also an element of nostalgia to consider. I’m a sentimental person, and I’ve always associated Paris with wonder, romance, and youthful liberation. Smoking, by extension, brings me back to Paris. Every drag I take places me on cobblestone streets, outside cafes, and alongside mansard roofs. In a sepia tone, I feel the memories, projected onto a backdrop of translucent white smoke. A simpler time, without inhibition and without regret.
The main reason I smoke however, is because I think smoking is cool. To clarify, I don’t smoke because I think it will elevate others’ opinions of me; I’m aware that the opposite effect is generally true. As I mentioned before, years of government propaganda has rationally and correctly diminished public perception of smoking so much that smokers are no longer even despised, but pitied. After all, it’s the fault of big tobacco and addiction psychology, not people’s choices.
Yet somehow, some way, smoking is still inexorably cool for me. Whether it’s caused by the hangover from noir and neo-noir, or the fetishization for all things Paris, or even the slight flirtation with death, I think smoking is cool. And so when I smoke, I’m not doing so to look cool for anyone else. I’m doing so because I like the idea of smoking. When I picture myself looking outside the window during a rainy day, it’s with a cigarette between my lips. When I envision myself perched on a stoop, limbs splayed languidly waiting for someone, it’s with a a cloud of blueish-grey smoke above my head. The idealized version of me in my head is a smoker. It’s just so cool.
Kids, if you’re reading this, take note of how stupid I sound. I can only convince even myself that smoking is cool when I’m at least slightly inebriated. As it is clearly labeled on any package of cigarettes, tobacco use leads to cancer, teeth discolouration, poor skin, and even erectile dysfunction. Smokers also smell terrible, and government propaganda has now successfully associated smoking with a lower socioeconomic class. Stop smoking. If you don’t smoke, don’t start. Who would rationally think smoking is attractive?
But it’s not rational. The idea of myself as a flâneur, strolling the streets with cigarettes and fire is much too attractive to me. Despite not being addicted to tobacco, I am a slave to nostalgia, sentimentality, and romance. Sometimes, it’s a bit hard to tell which is worse. A cigarette helps me cope with that. | https://medium.com/@chrisreads/smoking-d708108b46d2 | ['Chris Reads'] | 2021-11-12 23:26:06.413000+00:00 | ['Tobacco', 'Smoking', 'Neo Noir', 'Paris', 'Cigarettes'] |
How to Deal With Rejection. NO! How can this small, two lettered… | NO! How can this small, two lettered word cause so much emotional turmoil in our lives? From an early age, we’ve grown to detest this word. Incredibly elaborate plans will be devised just to have a chance at avoiding hearing it. But what is it about the word we hate so much? It’s the feeling we get as a result of the rejection that causes a lasting impression on our minds.
How Rejection Holds Us Back
It’s clear to us from the beginning that rejection is a big part of life. Some of our earliest memories might be from a parent saying no to a request.
I can remember being told no on numerous occasions. At the grocery store, I would always ask my mom for some treats and be immediately rejected. Or when asking to go hang out at a friend’s house or go to a party I was met with a firm, “not gonna happen.”
As we grow older, the rejections become more serious and impactful. A crush rejects an invitation to go on a date, schools do not accept us, and job interviews do not end on a positive note.
Obviously, the early rejections are for our benefit, since our parents know what’s best for us in terms of health and safety. Being told no to those sorts of things are necessary, though they still have an impact on our fear to ask for what we want.
Not only does continuous rejection paralyze us with fear, but it leads to anxiety and other negative consequences. Let’s take a look at some of these in more detail.
One of the main ways rejection holds us back in life is the fear that it causes. Once we are told no, we become fearful of it happening again. The result is an avoidance behavior in which we do not take as many chances.
Fear takes hold even more when the situation you were rejected from has a lot of emotion tied to it. For example, if you finally muster up the courage to go ask out your crush and they tell you to get lost, then you will likely become fearful of ever asking someone out again.
When rejection happens, anxiety can begin to overcome us. This is due to the worry associated with having to feel the devastation of it happening again.
As with fear, anxiety keeps us from taking risks in life. There is a constant concern that someone is going to turn us down. If you are anxious about being rejected, it’s as if you are going through life tiptoeing.
Success happens on the other side of risk. By always being nervous about the possibility of rejection, you’ll be destined to fall short of almost all your goals.
People Pleasing
Once rejection is felt, a person will make many attempts to avoid feeling it once more. This results in people-pleasing behavior, in which we aim to make everyone around us happy.
The belief is that the more we please those around us, the less likely we are to be rejected. However, exhibiting this behavior is not sustainable in the long run.
You will become exhausted from constantly worrying about how to appease those around you. Frustration will ensue as a result of having to always focus on others and never on yourself. Instead of being concerned with our own values and desires, we are obsessed with pleasing others, all to avoid the possibility of rejection.
Avoidance
Avoidance behavior is the culmination of living with fear and anxiety. We desperately cling to the idea of keeping ourselves safe. In reality, if all risky and challenging situations that could result in rejection were avoided, then we would never have to feel that hurt again.
Living this way is not fulfilling and will lead to the regret of never chasing our dreams. Avoidance behavior may seem to be an acceptable solution in the short term for dealing with rejection, but in the long run, it will do more harm than good.
Five Ways to Deal with Rejection
The ways in which rejection holds us back are debilitating and can lead to a life of regret and unfulfilled dreams. It is a fruitless effort, however, to try and eliminate all rejection, since this type of avoidance pattern is one of the main ways it can hold us back.
So how do we go about accepting rejection as a necessary part of life, but at the same time set ourselves up for handling it in a proper manner?
I have comprised five ways that we can better deal with rejection. Each of these will be of great help individually but put together will really aid in turning a normally negative experience into a more positive one.
#1 Take a Step Back
Many times when we are rejected, whether it be from a team we’ve tried out for, a job we’ve interviewed for, or anything else, our response is quick.
Likely, it will be an emotional reaction to the feeling we have of being told no. Sometimes this can manifest in the form of anger, or other times it will result in a deep feeling of sadness and inferiority within ourselves.
In thinking about how to handle rejection in a better way, allowing ourselves to immediately fall into reactionary mode is not what we want to do. Instead, it is best to allow some time to think about and examine the situation.
Upon finding yourself in a situation where you’ve been rejected, you want to first remove yourself as soon as possible. Do not linger, because that gives the emotions boiling up inside of you time to surface.
I believe that no matter what has happened or how badly we feel, there is something positive that can be gained. After stepping back and giving yourself some time, ask yourself these questions:
Was I the right fit for this position/team/opportunity? Did I prepare myself the best I could? Did I really want what I was rejected from? What could I have done differently? Is there another opportunity similar to this one? What lesson can I learn from this experience?
After asking yourself these questions, a situation that normally would have been met with a rash emotional reaction can be turned into an opportunity to grow and improve yourself.
#2 Pay Attention to Your Self-Talk
As soon as a rejection happens, it is easy for our self-talk to turn sour, especially if you are someone who already has a negative internal dialogue.
If you are unfamiliar with what self-talk is, it simply is the way we speak to ourselves on a daily basis. Most people have a pattern of dialogue that goes on, either negative or positive.
Negative self-talk is proven to have a terrible effect on our mental health, including an increase in anxiety and depressive thoughts. However, positive self-talk boosts our mood, improves confidence, and adds to our overall sense of self-worth.
As you can imagine, whenever we are rejected from something we really wanted, it’s easy for our self-talk to become hurtful.
Some common phrases that I have found myself repeating in such a situation include:
“I knew I wasn’t good enough.”
“Why would I think I could get that?”
“I’m a failure.”
“Of course I didn’t get it.”
“It was stupid for me to try.”
Speaking this way to ourselves aids in the process of grief and adds to the already negative feelings we are having. This becomes an addictive cycle of self-pity, that unless met head on will continue to repeat itself.
Instead, what we can do is be prepared for this form of internal dialogue and work to counteract it. As soon as we begin to feel negative self-talk take place, we must immediately cancel it out with a positive statement.
This is not an easy feat, especially with how easy it can be to feel sorry for ourselves. But, if you want to deal with rejection in the best possible manner, paying attention to negative self-talk and turning it positive is an important step.
#3 Avoid the Victim Mentality
After being rejected, it is very easy to develop what is referred to as the victim mentality. This is where you feel as if everyone else is to blame for your misfortune, and there is no point in trying to fix anything since all effort for change will fail.
One of the main reasons for adopting this mindset lies in not wanting to take responsibility for the results in our life.
It’s not easy to be the one responsible for a mishap or negative experience. It’s much easier to just blame other people, protecting our own sense of pride.
When we think like a victim, everything that happens to us is the result of something external, never by our own happening.
If you wish to deal with rejection in a better way, the victim mentality must be avoided at all costs. Once we slip into this pattern of thinking, it can be very difficult to get out of.
By taking responsibility for our lives, we gain the ability to change our circumstances. As long as we hold onto the idea that nothing is our fault, making positive progress in our lives will be incredibly difficult.
Even if you feel that the rejection was not of your doing, take responsibility as if it were. This will put you in the position of power to decide on what your next steps will be, no more wasting time blaming and pointing fingers.
#4 Find Some Positives in Your Life
After being rejected, no matter how strong your mindset is, there will be thoughts of sadness, anger, inferiority, and frustration. These are natural, especially if what you were rejected from meant a lot to you.
But while these feelings are natural, they do not have to last. When we allow these negative emotions to stick around, that is where the victim mentality begins to set in.
What we want to do is work to find some positives in our life.
You’ll want to do this during the time when you are taking a step back from the situation. That is why removing yourself as soon as possible from the environment in which you felt the rejection is vital.
Before you say that you can’t find anything positive about your life, I want you to really think carefully about it.
Everyone can find something positive about their life, no matter how dire their situation appears.
You can write down a list of positives, or just think about them in your head. But it is important you get your mind flooded with positive thoughts in order to counteract the natural negative reaction to being rejected.
#5 Decide Whether to be Tenacious or Let Go
At this point in dealing with a rejection experience, if you’ve adhered to the previous four steps you should be in a good mind frame to decide on your next move.
No matter what the situation was that you got rejected from there are only two options to choose from as to what you will do moving forward; be tenacious or let go.
This can be a difficult call since you do not want to give up too soon on something you want, but also do not want to waste time on a fruitless endeavor.
An example would be a high school athlete who was cut from the varsity team. This person has the choice to work harder over the offseason and try again the following year or decide to let go of wanting to play that sport.
There really isn’t a right or wrong answer here, it all depends on what you want.
If what you were rejected from is really important to you, then keep on pushing. On the other hand, if it isn’t worth the possibility of further disappointment and you wish to move onto other things, then let go.
Summary
Dealing with rejection is something we all must face, especially if we are working towards any kind of progress. It is a natural part of the pathway to success, and those who handle it well have a huge advantage.
If we allow our natural reactions to take control when rejected, it is easy to feel all sorts of negative emotions.
However, by applying the five principles of taking a step back, paying attention to self-talk, avoid the victim mentality, find positives in your life, and decide whether to be tenacious or let go you will put yourself in a great position to turn a negative experience into one of growth and improvement.
How do you normally handle rejection? Do you fall into the victim mentality or do you try and turn it into a learning experience? Please leave a comment below.
I hope this article was helpful and will guide you in dealing with rejection in the future.
Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions or concerns you have regarding dealing with rejection or any other performance psychology topics.
Thank you for reading, and I wish you the best of success in all you do. | https://medium.com/@elistraw/how-to-deal-with-rejection-success-starts-within-6657bd3a52ac | ['Eli Straw'] | 2021-03-05 14:12:41.687000+00:00 | ['Success', 'Rejected', 'Rejection', 'Mindset', 'Failure'] |
Artonorium | My name is Bhavya Pochiraju and I am an aspiring artist born and raised in Vijayawada Andhra Pradesh India. Creative expression is a big part of my life. I have been exploring visual arts during my free time since I could hold a crayon. I promote my artwork virtually on my official website which is Artonorium.in .
I don’t have any particular ‘style’ but am mostly enthused by realism. I am inspired by nature and color which is reflected in my current body of work. I have traveled across South India, which has influenced my creative style and process.
My work has been shown at the Educational Institutions, Exhibitions, and Communities.
I work in many modes and feel this how to the best approach to art-making. I find it easier to work in acrylics, watercolours, and sketches to achieve blends in a unifying completely… I also enjoy working with Pencil Sketch, Quilling, and Mandalas.
So welcome to my website Artonorium.in and enjoy watching my artwork gallery 🙂 | https://medium.com/@artonorium/artonorium-11e5e2cbce88 | ['Bhavya Pochiraju'] | 2020-12-18 06:05:26.847000+00:00 | ['Art Gallery', 'Painting', 'Artonorium', 'Art', 'Hyderabad'] |
Google Cloud Spanner Nodes | As we continue with our exploration of Google Cloud Spanner, I found one concept to stand out, that of nodes.
Typically in cloud computing, an instance is synonymous with a singular virtual machine, and a node is the CPUs, memory, storage and networking underlying that VM. In Cloud Spanner, the relationship still holds, but is more complex due to the nature of instances. Nodes are also directly related to your instance configuration, and thus your scaling, so it is important to have a good understanding, and I explain in more detail below.
Nodes
Cloud Spanner documentation loosely defines a node as a collection of resources, namely CPU, RAM, and 2TB of storage.
This is quite simple, and means that if your database monitoring shows that you are using more resources than is optimal, or that you are running low on storage, you simply need to go into the Cloud Console, and add a node. This will, as per the definition, add more computing and storage resources to your instance.
This is where the Cloud Spanner node differs from the norm, is that adding a node doesn’t just add a single set of compute resources to your instance, but in fact it adds a set of resources to each replica within your instance.
When adding a node to a traditional distributed/clustered database, you are only adding a single computing resource or server to your cluster. As an administrator, you have to manage how that node is used by the database, whether it becomes a new shard, a read-write replica, a read-only replica, a witness replica, a warm failover cluster — depending on the database, the options could be numerous, and administration overhead costly.
icons © Google
In Spanner, the administration is transparent, and the definition of a node therefore encompasses all the resources required to increase the capacity of your instance with a full set of resources, regardless of it being regional or multi-regional, whether it requires read replicas or witness replicas or both.
icons © Google
That is quite a powerful concept, and it speaks to the “fully managed”, “unlimited scale”, and “99.999% availability”. Each addition of a node is automatically managed by the instance and therefore replicated, sharded and essentially used to increase scale in the highly available architecture of Cloud Spanner. In other databases, adding compute or storage necessitates configuration — is it used for primary compute, failover, replication, backup, etc. In Cloud Spanner, you simply click in the Cloud Console to add another node, and everything just happens in the background, your application has more highly available resources as per your instance configuration.
The Cloud Spanner documentation on instances lists all the different instance configurations and explains the difference between the number of replicas you will have depending on your regional configuration.
A quick note on replicas, nodes and instance configurations
Each regional instance has 3 replicas, so each node added to your instance in this case will result in an increase in compute and storage for each replica, so 3 sets. This maintains 99.99% availability, and the stated performance of “up to 10,000 queries per second (QPS) of reads or 2,000 QPS of writes (writing single rows at 1 KB of data per row)”.
Most Multi-region instances have 4 read-write replicas, and one witness replica, so adding a node increases the total compute and storage across all 5 replicas. This allows Cloud Spanner to provide the 99.999% availability. Over and above that, the “nam6” region has 2 additional read-only replicas, and “nam-eur-asia1” configuration spans 3 continents, with 4 additional read-only replicas.
This is quite astounding, as it means that adding a node to your “nam-eur-asia1” instance means that Google provisions 9 sets of CPUs and memory, and 9 sets of 2TB of additional capacity (one for each replica) to support your highly available instance.
These 9 sets of resources are managed in such a way that you not only get replication and fail-over for high availability, but you also get external consistency regardless of the global distribution of both your database and its users. It is worth reading the white-papers and documentation on TrueTime and external consistency if you are interested in understanding how Google uses Paxos engines along with atomic and GPS clocks to manage all these resources AND provide the highest level of consistency available. | https://medium.com/google-cloud/google-cloud-spanner-nodes-8cc38f46ebd1 | ['Ash Van Der Spuy'] | 2020-11-05 17:37:31.949000+00:00 | ['Database', 'Cloud Computing', 'Cloud Spanner', 'Distributed Systems', 'Google Cloud Platform'] |
Seven steps to decide if AI suits your business workflow | By using the right AI technology for your company, you can accelerate your growth. However, business leaders should not forcefully include AI in their operations; instead, they should find specific workflows in which AI can provide maximum value. For example, if you’re in a restaurant company, you might want to use AI to produce weekly analytics by processing electronic bills.
Many executives have a trust issue with up-and-coming technologies like AI about how they fit into their business ecosystem. If you are interested in adopting AI but are not sure whether or not it can fit into your business, below are steps to help kick-start the process of using it in your workflow.
Identify the areas where AI can provide maximum value for your business.
Business is a complex set of intertwined processes that run like a well-oiled machine, so integrating new technology into an existing workflow is not straightforward. Implementing AI comes at a cost and, therefore, value analysis is essential to ensure that your investment gives you maximum returns.
First of all, understand the need for AI in your business. For example, Domino uses AI as part of its infrastructure to boost its pizza delivery.
Real Talk with Data Scientist and Advanced Analytics Manager | skills required for a data scientist
To find out whether your company will benefit from AI, ask yourself a few simple questions:
• What is the size of your company digitized? Company digitization requires the transfer of a raw source of data to a digital format. This can include pictures, numbers, etc. Digitization can help a company to scale. For example, if a shopkeeper sells clothing locally, the reach of the business is limited to a specific demographic. On the opposite, if the shopkeeper wanted to digitize by creating a website, the company could reach out to more customers, sell more clothes, and grow. One example of the potential benefits of digitization is Aim, which saw its stock increase by 66 percent over its 8-year digital transformation initiative.
Digitization brings monetary benefits and helps to track various critical areas of business in order to reduce risks, such as accounting, financial management, inventory management, etc. One will need enormous human capital to carry out all these activities.
AI is efficient when we give it the right amount of digitized data. AI‘s promise lies in discovering secret patterns of data that are not visible to a human being. Digitized data, therefore, plays a vital role in transforming AI sector. If your organization lacks digital data generation, AI may not be needed in the first place.
• What are the different forms of digital data that your company collects, and how do you store it? If AI is a vehicle, then the fuel is the digital data.
• Would AI provides a better return over time for the investment of time and money required?
Speak to your engineers to see how AI can solve your business problems
Unplash
Engineers bring a different perspective to your business challenges and can help with valuable suggestions. Consult your in-house engineers to understand the scope of the particular problem and the timeframe to solve it. It is crucial to take advice before any commitments are made because they know the depth of the problem. They can also help you narrow the reach of AI in your company and help you start the creation process.
Determine the implications of AI for your revenue model.
Revenue is a key indicator of growth for any company. The defined use of AI cases and their expectations should be evaluated in order to ensure that they do not limit long-term development.
Understand the cost implications of AI for your business.
The AI is still in a growing phase. We see major progress and successful research in AI every year. However, it would be naive to regard it as a low-cost proposition. The cost implications depending on your use case, but they won’t come at a low price. The internet, for example, was costly during its development process. If your company can afford an AI-based solution that can offer a decent value proposition and improve performance, you can opt for it.
Find out how AI is going to help the workers.
Employees are vital to the success of every organization. AI will simplify workflows, enhance decision-making, and create knowledge that can allow workers to concentrate on more challenging tasks. For example, in a call center, workers can benefit from AI handling simple language queries without human interference. It can also help to identify and avoid spam calls. Chatbots are another great example that has become the standard in the service industry these days. There are countless possibilities where AI can support and not replace the workforce.
Real Talk with Data Scientist and Reinforcement Learning Lead | skills required for data scientist
Consider the legal and ethical implications of the implementation of the AI.
Keep in mind that AI is a new technology. It is evolving at a rapid pace and can raise some unforeseen challenges and ethical questions. There is an ongoing discussion on the ethics of AI and the extent to which it should be regulated. You need to make sure that your business is not affected by such external forces.
Enhance your learning of AI.
A common misapprehension of AI among business owners is that AI is capable of solving any problem with little or no human interference. The present state of AI is nowhere near general intelligence. To realize the true value proposition of AI in your company, keep up to date with current AI advancements.
Prerequisite for Data Science: It’s Not What You Think It Is | 4000° PLASMA LIGHTSABER BUILD
Initially, spend as little as possible and try to get a working prototype ready. Set short-term targets and assess progress when evaluating an AI solution. It is important to increase your understanding of AI through this process and to have trust once you know its challenges. If you want to accelerate your business growth with AI, you should be willing to learn and adapt quickly to changes.
My advice to you is to be open-minded and think outside of the box while you are looking for a career in data science. It will give you a competitive edge in your career in data science.
Bio: Shaik Sameeruddin I help businesses drive growth using Analytics & Data Science | Public speaker | Uplifting students in the field of tech and personal growth | Pursuing b-tech 3rd year in Computer Science and Engineering(Specialisation in Data Analytics) from “VELLORE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY(V.I.T)”
Career Guide and roadmap for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence &and National & International Internship’s, please refer :
More articles for your data science journey: | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/seven-steps-to-decide-if-ai-suits-your-business-workflow-6b8518969303 | ['Shaik Sameeruddin'] | 2020-10-20 12:41:27.686000+00:00 | ['Data Visualization', 'Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Technology'] |
Cryptology Signs Agreement to Enable Bank Transfer Operations | Breaking news: wire transfers are on! It was a long way to get where we are now. We’ve received many requests to realize bank transfers on Cryptology for topping up and withdrawing funds. Finally, here they are.
We’ve finally reached an agreement with our payment partner so that you can easily deposit and withdraw fiat on Cryptology. Besides, a transfer is available to be carried out right in the application with the lowest commision. We are very excited to share the news with you as this actually means that Cryptology moves toward a completely different level of service. So let’s touch upon the details now.
We provide SEPA bank transfers which covers payments in euro only and stands for Single Euro Payments Area including 28 countries of the European Union, four member states of the European Free Trade Association. Main and most important advantages of wire transfer are high level of security and speed of transfer, i.e. fast access to funds.
In order to deposit EUR via bank transfer you need to choose EUR from “Wallet” tab on our web platform, click on “Bank transfer” and fill the form in. Please be informed that Unlimited verification is required for this transaction method.
Our exchange now supports most popular cryptocurrencies and several tokens which number is being currently increased. This step gives a new impulse to Cryptology making it a comfortable environment for investors and satisfying all their needs.
We are constantly searching for new market prospects and progressive blockchain projects to keep moving as fast as the crypto ecosystem changes.
Enjoy the benefits of fiat operations on cryptology.com. | https://medium.com/cryptologyexch/cryptology-signs-agreement-to-enable-bank-transfer-operations-b7d6d2e30bc3 | [] | 2018-09-07 09:06:24.544000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Ethereum', 'Crypto', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Fintech'] |
The One Ability You Have That Can Change The Game. | I remember the first time I had to face an audience, it was a sermon in my church- I had to give a Sunday school class to an audience of nearly a hundred people. Well not necessarily that I had to, it was more of, I wanted to. Okay, let's backtrack a little to give you some perspective. Up to that point, I've always been haunted by the words of Khalil Gibran;
“You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself, that you truly give.”
At this point in my life, I was constantly soul searching, I wanted to do more with my life. It wasn't about having a good job and a nice place, but what could make me whole and give my life some sense of purpose and meaning. what better way than to go for my passion- speaking and making an impact in peoples lives. But the problem was, I could not talk in front of an audience. I had stage fright- severe stage fright. I am someone you would refer to as socially awkward. In my lone time and in my head, I could give the most powerful and exhilarating speech, but not before anyone, and certainly not before an audience of this size.
At this point, I have talked myself into why I have to. For certain I know I will hate myself and never forgive myself if at least I didn't try. So I allowed my desire to make a difference to outweigh my fear of public speaking. I approached the head pastor and laid down my request, which I knew the outcome beforehand. He has always wanted me to take more responsibility at my local church and he was just excited I finally came through.
“Whatever is worth doing, is worth doing badly until you get it right.” - Les Brown
I knew I was going to flop, and I was ready for it. I may hate myself after I flop- sure! But I will resent myself more if I didn't try at all. So I had one week to prep and put my materials together, which I did diligently. I even went as far as writing an entire speech and an introduction. But I didn't want to speak from the note. I love to speak extemporaneously- from my heart. I took the notes anyway as a safety net. I prepared for the one-hour sermon like a general preparing for war.
Thus came the day, and I was introduced, with my journal and bible in hand, I climbed on the pulpit, opened my bible and journal, lifted up my head to have a look at the audience, and that was when it started- I panicked. Immediately I saw those eyes and faces glued to me, my heart failed me. My mind shut down! I literally can not remember anything at all. Everything I have been studying for the past 7 days, was literally nowhere to be found. I started mumbling some words, which today, I do not remember what the hell I was saying. I felt a lump on my throat, it felt like someone was choking me and my heart rate increased- I am officially in panic mode right now.
“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt
Now I have one thought- turn over to my head pastor and call it quit. But at that moment, something occurred to me, that why don't I just read what I’d already written down on my journal. Somehow this little thought saved me and also saved the day. I turned to my notes and started spilling out what I've written, starting from the introduction. And I kept going, on and on until somehow, my mind began to remember the thoughts and ideas I forgot. That was how I kept talking for the next 60 minutes.
In the end, I got a round of applause and many positive feedbacks, and even though within me, I knew it wasn't great, I learned that it wasn't as bad as I had imagined it. From that time to this very moment, I have given plenty sermons and done numerous speaking engagements that at this point, whenever I have the chance to speak, I usually can't wait to get there and speak, if not for anything but to hear what I have to say. The process of doing it over and over again, failing over and over again, has strengthened my craft, grew my confidence and made me a better speaker. | https://medium.com/illumination/the-one-ability-you-have-that-can-change-the-game-b9aad6ff7903 | ['George Blue Kelly'] | 2020-12-23 15:15:13.076000+00:00 | ['Illumination', 'Life', 'Self', 'Productivity', 'Self Improvement'] |
Surviving Stalin’s and Hitler’s Regimes | The Story of a Young Girl Caught Between Two Totalitarian Regimes
Maria Kiciuk High School Graduation Photo
Seventy-six years ago I was in Berlin and my family worked at the Pertrix factory as Nazi forced laborers. This story is about my family’s experiences, primarily during WWII.
Life in my Village in Western Ukraine
My life story begins in Western Ukraine, in a small peaceful village, surrounded by low lying mountains. Our family consisted of my parents and six children. My parents were farmers, so we all worked very hard. Despite the hard work, I remember my early childhood as a happy one, but all that was about to change.
Looking for a Better Life
Maria’s Parents
My parents were barely seventeen years old when they left Ukraine to escape poverty in their homeland. They met in Yonkers, New York, and were married in a Ukrainian church after immigrating to the United States in 1910. My oldest sister Katrusia was born in Yonkers. Some forty years later four of their children were married in the same Ukrainian church.
Life was good in the United States. My parents worked hard and saved money, but good fortune could not outweigh my mother’s homesickness, so they decided to go back to Ukraine. They now had enough money to buy property in a neighboring village. Little did they know that improving their life would make them a target.
Caught Between Two Totalitarian Regimes
In the fall of 1939, WWII started and the Soviet Communist regime took over Western Ukraine as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This was a treaty between Stalin and Hitler, so for the first two years of the war, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were allies. To this day Russia is attempting to hide this fact by alleging that WWII started in June of 1941.
My Family
Kocur Family 1929 (Left to right back row): Anna, Katrusia, Uncle Mychailo. (Left to right front row): Mother, Theodor, Father, Mykola
By the time the war started, my oldest sister Katrusia was married and lived in a city, quite a distance from our village. My oldest brother Mykola and my sister Anna were in a boarding school. My brother Theodor, my sister Sonia and I were still at home with my parents. I was six years old at the time.
Taken in by Kind Relatives
Western Ukraine, where my family lived was now part of the Soviet Union, or what we later referred to as “The Evil Empire.”
One day in December of 1939, Communist officials came to our home. They told my parents that it was no longer our house. The house and all our property now belonged to the state. There was nothing we could do. We had to leave.
Fortunately, our cousin took us in. It wasn’t easy for him. His house was small. He had his own family and now five more of us. Very soon we understood how lucky we were to have been thrown out of our house. Our fate could have been much worse.
Arrests and Deportations
Gulag — Slave Labor Camp
One night in February of 1940, in the middle of the winter, when the cold was unbearable and the snow was waist deep, my parents heard loud voices outside speaking in Russian, which was unusual in Western Ukraine at the time. My father was sure that they came to get him. The Soviet authorities often arrested people at night.
But we were not on the list that night. That night they took our cousin’s neighbor and his family to Siberia. That same night they took thousands of Ukrainians and shipped them to the Gulags for slave labor where most of them perished from lack of food and shelter.
Still fearful that he might be arrested, my father decided to go to my Uncle Mychailo who lived in a different part of the village, so he plodded through the snow in the middle of the night. As he approached the house, he saw lights on and heard people crying. That night my uncle and his family were taken to Siberia. We never saw or heard from his family again.
“Enemies of the People”
Maria’s sister Katrusia’s home which was seized by the Soviets
From then on people in our village were afraid to help us. They began to understand that in the eyes of the Soviet authorities, we were considered to be “enemies of the people.” This was not only because we were somewhat better off, but more importantly, because my parents were more educated, knew how people lived in the U.S., and could refute Soviet propaganda. No one was allowed to help enemies of the people. Our cousin was now afraid to provide shelter for us. We had to leave.
My parents had to decide what to do next to save their family. They placed each child with a different relative, in a different village or city. I lived with my sister’s in laws. We later found out that the Soviet authorities also confiscated my sister’s house and property so that her family became homeless.
My father found work far away from our village. My mother didn’t have a place to live, so she walked from village to village and spent a few days with each child.
Nazi Invasion of Ukraine
The Soviet Communist occupation was followed by the Nazi occupation. In June 1941 the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union and by the end of November occupied all of Ukraine.
As soon as the Soviets left Western Ukraine, my family went back to our village and reoccupied our house. We didn’t ask anyone for permission and no one told us we couldn’t go back. We now had to work even harder than before to make the farm functional again.
Nazi Occupation of Ukraine
The Eye of War — Ukraine 1941-42 by Dieter Keller
In order to support their military expansion, the Nazis implemented Lebensraum, a policy of conquering territory for German use. In the process they set out to eliminate Jews and turn Slavs into slaves. Jews and Slavic people were considered to be Untermenschen (subhumans).
The Nazis did not want an independent Ukraine. They imprisoned leaders of the independence movement and sent them to concentration camps, where many perished. Others were assassinated by Soviet agents.
Secretly Supplying Food
Jaroslaw Kiciuk, Maria’s husband
The Nazis needed food and raw materials and took as much as they could, creating food shortages, especially in the cities. They did not allow people to bring food from villages. My sister Katrusia and her two children spent one summer with us because they lived in a city and didn’t have enough food.
Jaroslaw, the man I later met and married, tried to help his family. He got a job as a manager of a mill, so he could bring some grain to his family. Because bringing food into cities was forbidden, he had to get off the train two stops before reaching his destination and walk, avoiding main roads so as not to be caught.
Gulag Labor Camp
Mykola Kocur, Maria’s brother
The Nazis also needed workers. They would round up young people and ship them to forced labor camps. More than two million Ukrainians suffered that fate and my brother Mykola was one of them.
For many years we did not know what happened to him. It was only much later we found out that he had been taken by the Nazis and after the war handed over to Soviet authorities as part of repatriation.
The Soviets sent Mykola to Kolyma, a remote region in Siberia beyond the Arctic Circle, known for its harsh climate and its Gulag labor camps, where the mortality rate reached 80% and where millions of prisoners were exterminated during the Stalin regime. There he spent almost ten years working in the gold mines as a slave laborer. He was granted amnesty during the Khrushchev era but was not allowed to return to Ukraine.
Ukraine’s Freedom Fighters
Young people in Ukraine tried to find a way to avoid being taken to Germany as forced laborers. Many of them joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which was formed in 1942 and fought against both the Nazis and the Soviets.
My future husband was one of those freedom fighters. For three years he lived in the forest fighting for Ukraine’s independence. In the summer of 1947, two years after the war ended, a group of about 300 freedom fighters were given the task of reaching the American Zone in Germany in order to inform the free world that Ukraine was continuing its fight for independence.
It took my husband and his group about four months to finally reach the free world. They hid in the woods during the day and walked at night. They ate whatever they could find in the fields. My husband said that the last two or three weeks all they had to eat were grapes. Some of them died along the way, but most of those who had set out from Ukraine reached the American zone and were able to tell their story.
Escape From the Soviet Communists
My family left Ukraine on June 30, 1944 as the Soviet Red Army was approaching once again. One morning, and I remember it vividly, I woke up very early and heard my parents whispering. They were trying to decide what to do. I was only 11 years old, but I dreaded what might happen if we stayed.
Fortunately, my parents decided to leave. It was not an easy decision. My parents were farmers, owned property, farm animals, and a nice house. We had no place to go and no specific plans, yet the decision was made to leave everything and face the unknown in a foreign land. They took a wagon and two horses and left our home and our village, not realizing that it would be forever.
There were six of us — my parents, my brother Theodor, my sisters Anna and Sonia, and I. My parents tried to let my sister Katrusia know that we were leaving, but that proved too difficult to do.
It was summer, so we slept in the wagon. Occasionally, we would find an abandoned house and stay there for a day or two.
Stopped by Nazi Soldiers
Maria, cousin Vasyl, sister Anna
We kept moving west before the approaching front. We were not the only ones trying to escape. Thousands of Ukrainians were leaving their homes and their belongings in an effort to flee, so groups of caravans were formed.
Our journey to freedom ended abruptly when the Nazis confiscated our carriage and horses, put us on freight trains and took us to a forced labor camp, first in Linz, Austria; then we were transported to Berlin.
My sister Anna was put to work in a restaurant in Linz. She was not with us when they took us to Berlin and was left behind. It was only after the war that my father found her through a newspaper ad and my cousin, Vasyl Kocur, brought her illegally from Austria to Germany. Part of our family was reunited once again.
Life in the Forced Labor Camp
One of the Pertrix forced labor camps (Now the Nazi Forced Labor Documentation Center)
I don’t remember much about my life in the forced labor camp in Berlin. I remember that I was always cold and that the food was bad — some kind of broth and a piece of stale bread. There was no privacy of any kind; several families slept in a large room, full of bunk beds. I also remember being afraid of the air raids.
2.2 million Ukrainians worked as Nazi forced laborers. Ukrainians from western Ukraine were forced to wear the symbol P and were often mislabeled as Poles. Ukrainians from eastern Ukraine had to wear the symbol OST and were mislabeled as Russians. Unfortunately this misinformation continues to the present time.
The Red Army was approaching Berlin and we had to flee once again. Somehow my father, God bless his soul, found a way to save his family.
Escape from Pertrix
One of the Pertrix forced labor camps (Now the Nazi Forced Labor Documentation Center)
Early in the morning of February 22, 1945, possibly during an air raid, as the laborers were headed for work, our family crept through a hole in the fence and left the camp. Miraculously, we escaped, just a few days before the camp was bombed and just a few weeks before the Red Army occupied Berlin.
We took a train and headed south in the direction of Bavaria. We stopped in Forchheim, which later became the American zone, and there we worked for various farmers during the planting and the harvesting season. We joined a Displaced Persons camp as soon as the Americans began to organize them.
We felt that we had finally overcome all the obstacles and were now safe. But it wasn’t so.
Policy of Repatriation
Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill at the Yalta Conference in 1945
We had to overcome one more hurdle — the forced repatriation to the Soviet Union. There was an agreement reached by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin at the Yalta Conference that all former Soviet citizens had to go back to the Soviet Union with no regard to individual wishes. Soviet agents were roaming the camps, trying to ensure compliance. My brother remembers that our parents were taken into custody in an effort to force us to go back.
Thousands of people were handed over to Soviet authorities and hundreds committed suicide rather than be forced to go back. Finally, the forced repatriation policy was stopped.
Life in the Displaced Persons Camp
We stayed in Germany four additional years. We were assigned to a Displaced Persons (DP) camp in Erlangen, a beautiful city, not heavily damaged in the war because of its many hospitals and universities. My father worked there for the American army and served as an interpreter when needed.
I have fond memories of my life in the Displaced Persons camp. We had regular church services and a school, which I attended. We had a Scout organization and all kinds of activities that I was involved in. We also had a choir, which I belonged to since I liked to sing.
German Hochschule
Maria, second row, right
In 1948 things began to change. People were leaving the camp and going to different countries. In the fall, there were not enough students to form a class I could attend, so during my last year in Germany I attended a German Hochschule. It was not easy for me because all the subjects were in German. I was excused from Scout and other activities and devoted all my time to studying.
I am sorry I didn’t keep in touch with any of my high school friends, but in the United States I was overwhelmed with new responsibilities and had no time to think about anything else.
Safe at Last
Theodor, Maria, Sonia, Anna with spouses Dorothy, Jaroslaw Kiciuk, Raymond Thomas and Joseph Ivanick
The United States became our new home and we are most grateful for that. The freedoms that non-totalitarian and non-communist countries enjoy should not be taken for granted.
We have often wondered why we were spared. Was it because the repatriation policy was finally terminated? Was it because my father spoke some English and his sister in the United States was ready to sponsor us? Was it perhaps that the person in charge of our camp was a kind-hearted person? This we will never know, but once again our family was saved.
My siblings and I consider it a miracle that we somehow survived the war as well as the Soviet and Nazi occupations.
Kocur Family in Front of Family Home in Yonkers, NY
Siblings Reunite After 50 Years
We were happy to be reunited with our sister Katrusia and our brother Mykola when Ukraine gained independence in 1991, some 50 years after last seeing them. Unfortunately, both our parents died before ever seeing their two oldest children again.
Remembering the Victims
Burial of victims of the Soviet Communist regime
As a newly independent country, Ukraine’s borders opened up and I was able to return for a visit. My husband, who made the trip with two of our daughters, finally met with his brother, who he hadn’t seen in over 50 years.
On this trip in 1992, when visiting my village, my husband and daughters came across a sobering scene. The village was having a funeral for the hundreds of victims of the Soviet regime. Bodies that had been thrown into a pit were dug up, placed in caskets, and properly buried. According to villagers, another 800 or so bodies were buried under the train tracks. Similar funeral processions were held throughout Ukraine. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union people had been too afraid to even mention any of this happened.
My Family in the United States
Kocur Family Reunion Circa 1999
My family, my brother’s, and both my sisters’ families are doing well in the United States.
The Kiciuk Family
Maria with her husband and six children
I am proud to say that my children are fluent not only in English but also in Ukrainian.
Surviving Two Totalitarian Regimes
Jaroslaw and Maria 60th wedding anniversary in 2013
My life story is similar to that of many of my countrymen. It is also rather closely intertwined with the history of my birth country Ukraine, oppressed by the repressive regimes of two terrible dictators of the 20th century — Stalin and Hitler.
Prof. Timothy Snyder, a Yale University historian, states that during WWII, Ukraine suffered more losses than any other European country. If you add to that the losses Ukraine suffered during the Holodomor, the famine genocide perpetrated by Stalin in 1932–1933 which amounted to millions, the losses are staggering.
In his speech to Bundestag on Germany’s historical responsibility, Prof. Snyder stresses that Germany’s responsibility is primarily to Ukraine and not to Russia. All of Ukraine was overrun by the Nazis for the duration of the war, whereas only 5% of Russia was occupied and only for a short period of time. Thus, Ukraine was exploited by the Nazis much more than Russia was.
Dr. Maria Kocur Kiciuk
©Maria Kiciuk. 2021 | https://medium.com/@mskiciuk/surviving-stalins-and-hitler-s-regimes-ce562b16112c | ['Maria Kiciuk'] | 2021-09-17 01:10:02.533000+00:00 | ['World War II', 'Totalitarianism', 'History', 'Survival', 'Communism'] |
Skip a Step | Skip a Step with Lisa Caprelli
I was recently talking to a dear friend Lisa Caprelli. I’ve never actually met Lisa in the real world. She lives in the U.S and I live in Ireland. Nevertheless, she has been a key figure in my development as a writer.
Lisa was the publisher for my book Taking My Life Back. Without her belief that my story was worth telling I doubt my book would be published today.
I recently invited Lisa on the podcast to talk about the work she is doing and she shared some of the life lessons she has learned along the way. Lisa is a published author herself and she is also creating her own empire in the form of Unicorn Jazz.
From talking to Lisa the power of self belief and believing in others again was evident to me. Lisa talked about how meeting people who said good things about her led to her believing that maybe what they were saying about her was true.
I can remember a time when I was scared of the judgement that goes along with writing a blog post or making a YouTube video. I dreaded the thought of other people finding my videos and posts and laughing at me. I dreaded feeling like the ultimate loser, no longer in the classroom among peers but in the real world as an adult who was still plagued by this feeling.
Just one other person believing in me has always been huge for me. It shows to me that maybe I’m not crazy to believe in my talents. It allows me to put aside time and energy to develop my skills. It allows me to ignore the voice in my head that says I am weird, crazy and nobody really gets or likes me.
If you feel you haven’t got this person in your life yet then start with books and podcasts. This is how I started. It primed my mind to be on the lookout for knowledge, wisdom and goodness and increase my chances of seeing it in others when I meet people in the real world. The people are there, sometimes it just takes a little time to break through some of your mind’s conditioning to notice them.
You can check out the full conversation with Lisa here. | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/skip-a-step-dbe3af471a66 | ['Denis Murphy'] | 2020-01-27 06:17:52.913000+00:00 | ['Authors', 'Brands', 'Podcast', 'Creative Writing', 'Creativity'] |
WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF OUR BIRTH? | “Our Birth is a priceless gift and here in this world, every living being in this world is knowingly or unknowingly on a spiritual pilgrimage”
Did you ever think about why were you born or if this life has any meaning?
Every life has two stages:
1. The day we are born i.e., Birth
2. The day we die i.e., Death
We enter into this world when we are weak and helpless, but each of us was born with tremendous potential. Most Certainly, at one time or the other, our parents would have wondered, What will our baby do with his/her life? What kind of person will he/she become in the near future?
In a similar way, we leave this world when we are weak and helpless. As death nears, we typically ponder our past, thinking What did I do with my life? What kind of person was I?
And by the time life ends, We will be stuck with the age-old question -
What is the ultimate meaning of human life?
Why was I even born?
What is the purpose of our birth?
Well, the answer is “Repayment of Karma” maybe.
But why is it that souls do not stick to the spirit world? Why do they enter the cycle of birth and then enter a body? Live life and then get liberated with Sins and Karma back to the Spirit world.
Well, Since the creation began, there has always been two purposes of our birth,
1. Experience
Go through experience. Experiences were created in the form of a physical body i.e., physical creation, and the soul was sent to get that experience.
2. Go Back to the beginning where it all started
Go back to where you started from because, with every new life, your experiences are getting grosser. As times progress, the experiences will get worse and the pain will increase. Only when we choose to go back and start over again with the correct guidance the pain will reduce.
To understand this whole purpose of birth concept in a simple way, we can go with this example,
“We are born; not to be born again….”
“This world is a workshop where a soul is born only to complete the lessons which it failed to learn during its previous visits. Each visit to this workshop, allows us to learn the spiritual lessons, pass the test, and move to a higher class with a more refined intellect and broader consciousness i.e., by gaining experience and going to where it all first began.”
We must always remember that we are all linked to each other through the five elements, collective consciousness, the oneness of the divine.
It is the ego that separates us from others and makes us go through our own personal experiences. It is okay to experience but it is not okay to desire the same experience over and over again which will definitely happen if there is no correct guidance.
As the matter of fact, there is no third purpose of birth.
Any third purpose i.e., relationships, friends, spouses, or children are not going to work. Relationships are frivolous and short-term. They will deteriorate in a few years or maybe a lifetime. But they will definitely be over by the next birth and you will be looking for something different and will experience more pain in the process.
Become aware of the value of human birth. It has been bestowed on each one of us for a specific purpose that we may realize what we are, whence we came, and whither are we to return.
According to me,
We all are born, the basis of our Karma from our past lives, to live a life. So let us make this lifetime fruitful and enjoy it.
With all the pain and the sufferings, and our time here, be a Human. Practice Humanity. Because the end is certainly going to be spiritual — in the spirit world if it exists I suppose.
So do not waste your time thinking about the end i.e., what would happen when we die? How will we shape up in the afterlife?
The afterlife is not going to happen now, so think about what you have now, what made you take this birth.
To enjoy this lifetime,
DO NOT EXPLOIT and certainly DO NOT HARM others.
Live a blissful life. A life that will make you feel proud and good.
Do deeds that will reflect pleasure in the eyes of the unknown.
Rule in a way that others feel blessed with your presence.
This is what is the purpose you have come to fulfill.
“Live this life without any regrets. Do what you want and be with whom you love.
Live this life with content. Live wholeheartedly and fully with honesty and kindness.”
Always remember,
“Life is not meant to be a joke! We must be as conscious, as sensitive, as particular about our time, as we are with our money. We must use time creatively and never forget that every moment is just the right time to do the right thing.”
“With each breath, a precious moment passes by; we have spent one of our precious moments away; what have we done with that golden moment which will never ever be ours again.”
“Life is precious. Let me make the most of it. Let me not go back from this ocean of grace without tasting its sweet waters. Let me not go back exhausted. But let me drink the Divine Nectar and be blessed with bliss and peace!”
Upcoming Post: DREAM CATCHER. | https://medium.com/@pravalika-maturi/what-is-the-purpose-of-our-birth-d3764536308c | [] | 2020-11-05 08:18:41.885000+00:00 | ['Purpose Of Life', 'Death', 'Spirituality', 'Birth'] |
Wise Compassion Versus Idiot Compassion | To be compassionate is to reduce suffering. The suffering of others, as well as ourselves. However, in a bid to practice compassion towards others, we often add to our own suffering instead.
When people take advantage of our proclivity to be compassionate and consequently walk over us, the “compassion” we’re exercising isn’t genuine anymore. It’s no longer regarded as Wise Compassion. Rather, it’s more commonly referred to as Idiot Compassion.
Why we practice Idiot Compassion?
Our fear to avoid conflict is what usually triggers people to practice Idiot Compassion. No one wishes to present themselves as the antagonists in other people’s narratives. So, we opt for the easier choice — we allow them to trample over our heads, and get away with their actions.
The deeper and more subtle reason explaining our tendency to practice Idiot Compassion is our desire to escape our own feelings of inadequacy. We just cannot bear to see our friends and family suffer. So we give in to the voices inside of us which convince us it’s alright to “help” them. But in fact, this form of compassion is largely self-serving. It’s aimed at benefitting ourselves, not the person who’s really suffering. As such, we’ve to learn to focus on the larger picture, and not the short-term benefits we gain from giving in to what other people want.
How to AVOID practicing Idiot Compassion?
Practicing Wise Compassion takes courage. It requires us to discern the true motivations driving our actions. So the next time you’re reaching out to help someone, ask yourself these questions: who are you truly trying to help — the other person or yourself? If it’s the latter, how can I then redirect my focus to the other person instead? These questions shall guide you to make better judgements, and practice Wise Compassion, rather than Idiot Compassion. | https://medium.com/@manuswong/wise-compassion-versus-idiot-compassion-4e81ba975a5e | ['Manus Wong'] | 2021-07-06 13:43:25.744000+00:00 | ['Boundaries', 'Relationships', 'Compassion', 'Advice', 'Kindness'] |
Medium helps me to write every day — and this is wonderful | Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters from Unsplash.
I started to write on Medium for a few weeks. Initially, I wrote especially for my blog, in Italian, every two weeks, but I had never had this burning desire to get in front of my PC to write a new article.
Medium has changed my habits and offers me an arduous, but rewarding, challenge: writing in English and pack away my attention to new ways to explain my world and my love for photography. And this is wonderful.
The need to write has always been part of my indole. During the quarantine, she has grown out of all proportion: an invisible man, who touches my shoulder and remember me to take a seat in my chair and start to give life a new article. A strange sensation but extremely enjoyable.
I never imagined starting to write in a foreign language. It’s so difficult for me because I apprehended to write in a certain way, with a friendly and direct tone, in Italian. Now my Italian readers know me, but report the same writing method in an English context is a hard challenge. Luckily I adore the challenges.
Medium helps me to test myself, with a series of factors that bring me to assume the part of new readers, with an innate curiosity, basic to write an interesting article. Because this platform is different to other social networks: inside we find writers, professionals and amateurs, who know grammar and the essence of writing.
You can know an argument, but if you can’t explain it, you fail, inevitably. This is an unwritten rule, that you apprehend by your first days on Medium.
I feel that I have already improved in my fluency and choice of words — and only a few days have passed since my approach to the platform! This helps me, not only in the English context but in my daily life.
I’m understanding how the platform pushes me every day to inform myself, to grow, from a lot of points of view. The idea to enter in contact with a brilliant community, interested in writing and creativity, satisfies me and carries me to take into consideration the idea to spend a lot of time on this platform.
Now every day I open my laptop and start to write — and this is incredible. Medium has changed my everyday life. I hope that I can give all my self into my articles for this platform.
I took the challenge. Now it’s up to me to highlight myself. | https://medium.com/mediom-works/medium-helps-me-to-write-every-day-and-this-is-wonderful-ce2d07ba4d28 | ['Gianluca De Dominici'] | 2020-12-18 13:07:38.020000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Social Network', 'Language', 'Photography', 'Medium'] |
Why the Porch has Become an Important Part of Your Home Security | In the past, most people thought the locks on their doors and windows were the first line of defense against anyone perpetrating a crime against their property. But it’s clear that home security now needs to extend to the front porch.
In fact, over 35 million Americans have had a parcel stolen — almost all to the hands of porch pirates. These thieves prey on packages left at doorsteps primarily by UPS, FedEx, Amazon and USPS, grabbing them when the opportunity arises whether it is day or night and the recipients are home or not.
So what can be done about this problem? Here are some of the ways it’s being solved.
Security Cameras
As seen in the tweet above a lot of residents have installed doorbell cameras. These products are great at giving you visuals on your entry when you aren’t home, allowing you to know when a package has been delivered or there’s someone on your stoop.
They also let you know when a package has been stolen. This is great proof when contacting the police or the vendor, but it does little to stop the actual theft because most porch pirates don’t care if a house has a camera.
In fact, a by Ben Stickle, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice Administration at Middle Tennessee State University, and his colleagues “did not find thieves were concerned about cameras, as only 8% took any effort to conceal their identity — even when several observed the camera.”
Outside Lights
Another way people try to protect their property is by flooding the front of their home with lights. This can be a great deterrent for all sorts of crimes, from vandalism to burglary. But when it comes to package theft they aren’t the greatest solution.
Proof again comes in the form of Stickle’s study. All 67 of the porch pirate videos he used in his analysis took place during the day. Furthermore, the study reads: “Because most package thefts are occurring during daylight hours, traditional motion lights and other techniques to increase the risk of identification of the thief may not be effective.”
Stickle’s study goes on to say that “fence, gate, visible cameras, residents’ cars on the property, and other environmental factors did not appear to deter any thieves from approaching a residence.”
Package Alarms
Some have become creative in the way they try to thwart theft. Check out this video by LifeHackster on YouTube of an alarm that was set under a package.
Police Sting Operations
There have been a number of attempts by police to nab porch pirates in the act, usually in high-incident areas. ABC News delves into how they do it here:Revenge Efforts
Revenge Efforts
Just go to YouTube and you’ll see several people setting traps and getting back at porch pirates. Perhaps the most famous is Glitter Bomb by Mark Rober. Here’s one of his successful attempts:
A Lockable Package Delivery Box
The best way forward to ensure packages are always protected on the porch is the lockable package delivery box. This security apparatus receives packages in the safest manner possible. Packages can be locked inside by the delivery person and only opened by the rightful recipient who knows the programmable code.
Although these boxes are in the early stages of being adopted by consumers, they clearly provide the peace of mind that Americans are looking for. The leading lockable package box is DeliverySafe , which also protects groceries from spoilage, as well. | https://medium.com/@getdeliverysafe/why-the-porch-has-become-an-important-part-of-your-home-security-4404633e09df | [] | 2021-06-17 13:02:44.635000+00:00 | ['Package Theft', 'Home Security', 'Last Mile', 'Moreatyourdoor', 'Home Decor'] |
Volcano Dreams. Writer Gabrielle Bellot on being trans… | Volcano Dreams
On reclaiming the story of my womanhood
I think this story begins at a bar in Greenwich late last year, when New York was under a record freeze. I was meeting an old friendly African acquaintance I hadn’t seen in nearly a year. Some months before, he had messaged me on social media to say he might be in New York for Christmas and that we should meet if he came; to my surprise, in December, he contacted me again. He was visiting family in Long Island, the message declared, and suggested meeting up, ending with a grinning emoji. I knew, from old gossip with friends to whom he had sent flirtatious texts and DMs, that he seemed to enjoy casual hookups, but he had never shown any interest in me before, and I mused, on occasion, that my being trans had cloaked me with a kind of diaphanous sexual invisibility.
He had contacted just about every other woman in the circles of my old life before my move to Brooklyn— everyone but me, it seemed. I wasn’t particularly attracted to him, though I thought him sweet and funny, and because I was from the Commonwealth of Dominica, I always held a soft spot in my heart for other people from former British colonies in America who understood things Americans often did not — how we spelt words, having digestive biscuits at teatime, teatime in general, the colonial holdovers in many of our governments and institutions. I was disinterested and yet vaguely, stupidly desired his desire, as if that would validate something of my womanhood — no but yes, an in-between uncertainty, like the grey smoky nightmares of a slumbering volcano. Still, I wondered what it would be like if, absurdly, he asked to go back to my place. I was in a dating rut then, feeling lonely, vulnerable, and like I had little future with love due to who and what I was.
I hadn’t really thought we would have sex, but now that we were alone in the bar, he seemed to want it, seemed to exude a hunger that made me swallow more than usual. He had never been with a trans woman, but, he said, grinning in the chiaroscuro light like a hyena, that he wouldn’t mind trying something with me. He told lurid smiling tales about the pythonic dimensions supposedly concealed in his pants; one woman, he insisted, had to tell him to stop because he was simply too monstrous. It was silly, crass braggadocio, but I liked feeling his desire tug at me in the candlelight. When I descended the bar’s stairs into its bathroom, I almost expected him to follow me; if he had, I might have paused, grabbed him, and pulled him in, wrapping a leg around his waist and an arm around the crook of his brown neck.
He had no condoms, so we bought a box together at Target. In my apartment, he suddenly kissed me, eyes glazed. He unzipped his jeans. We undressed over to my room, which held the sad chaos of a shipwreck, hidden, thankfully, by the darkness. I had been with a variety of men, younger and older, and I could tell he seemed nervous. I couldn’t tell if he was shy with me or if such trepidation was his signature, but we continued on. He asked me, again, “how it worked” — how one might have sex with a trans woman. At the bar, I had explained my simple preferences — anal sex — but said it again. Right before anything happened, he told me to lie down with him. He couldn’t do it, he whispered; he didn’t think he could sleep with a trans woman. I stared. My self-loathing and loneliness returned in a swirl. I had been rejected, I realized.
As we lay on my bed in the dark, I started to cry but tried to hide it behind my robe, not wanting him to feel bad, even as I felt like shit. I still think you’re amazing, he said, and we could be friends, which only made my sense that I had been rejected for my body heavier. A sinuous fear had risen back up from the blue pools in me: that my body, by virtue of not being cisgender, was hideous, repulsive, lovable only in evanescent encounters. I had learnt to accept my body as a woman’s, yet the unceremonious rejection hit me hard.
I still walked him back to the subway near Barclays Center and waited to make sure he got on the train. My silence was a thick mist around me, like the dense, white rain-fog high in the Dominican mountains, where the primeval trees and ferns grow to half their normal height, and I knew he felt uncomfortable. Still, I hugged him before he left, texted to make sure he reached home safely, and even apologized for crying, because I have always been the kind of person who feels and desires to take away people’s pain even if it means I begin to sink, like a wood-girl from a lost ship, under the pelagic weight of their hurt.
I cried again at home, hating my body, myself. My body, too ugly, too unruly.
But this isn’t where the story begins. I don’t know how to tell it. I am still trying to find the where and when, though I feel the why all around me.
Stories begin when and where we least expect, like a volcano’s awakening.
My body, I sometimes think, like many bodies, is like Dominica’s. Waitukubuli, the Caribs declared our island before the colonists came, a mountainous world named corporeally: Tall is her body. An unruly island, rainforest one moment, melancholy ramshackle zinc roofs rattling under the metallic drums of rain the next, stunted elfin woodland and lakes that perhaps once knew the world’s earliest reptiles the next, and then patches of sandy scrubland peppered with cacti and agaves and reclusive ethereal scorpions, beaches of nothing but the grey stones a hurricane hurled with its roiling rolling arms like a furious crazed cricket bowler, a rough Atlantic beyond the fins of sharks or whales where fishermen in bright-painted dinghies occasionally venture under the spells of their insomniac mermaid dreams and never return. Dominica’s body changes grandly, wider in potential than a Sargasso Sea, yet she is also one defined whole. Her shifting landscapes, for many who know her, are beautiful.
I wonder about the body.
A body tectonic, geologic, at times, volcanic, voltaic, vulpine, vulgar, geologic in that it follows the logic of the earth, its ceaseless tumult.
I have learnt to embrace the kinky, difficult, tender black curls my mother told me for years represented “bad” hair and which, contrarily, friends often said represented “good” hair, even as they disavowed their own tighter curls. I have learnt to embrace the amorphousness of my ethnicity, whereby I am part-black yet am as often read by strangers as Latina or simply one of an indeterminate brownness. I embrace the expansive pansexuality I denied for most of my life.
Yet I do not always feel whole.
What does it mean when your body cannot be one simple thing, whenever you want it to be? What does it mean when your womanhood, ever in question, terra incognita, is itself in rolling, roiling tumult?
Simple things I cannot do without my body reasserting itself, without my heart beating like hummingbird wings: use a bathroom with slats on the door or slits between door and wall, lest someone look in; try on clothes in a changing room with the same slats; buy a swimsuit to wear at a public beach or pool; speak on the phone without first practicing my voice’s pitch, tone, and resonance, often in panic, and with multiple recordings to listen to; talk to a stranger who offers to buy me a drink because I am pretty, lest he learn what I am; use my Dominican passport, which contains both a name and gender that are not me and yet cannot be changed.
As a trans woman, I sometimes think I’ve experienced puberty twice. That a new life began at the genesis, opening chapter, of transitioning. You have a second virginity to lose, my best friend said with a grin after I came out.
The same body, it turns out, can lose its innocence twice, and more, even as it is also not the same body at all, just as we both are and are not our old photographs and mottling memories.
The body has no simple theology. We reinvent and realign our constellations as we wander; our old sailing stars will not do forever.
Transitioning has taught me that a body can encompass far more than we are usually taught, that there are many architectures of bodies a gender may possess. Some days, I stand, naked, in front a mirror and feel happy, understanding why someone might desire to hold a body like mine in the calm harbour of their arms; on other days, I tilt like a sailor who has not learnt the language of the waves, and feel, despite my self-acceptance, a sharp, funneling frustration.
Perhaps this afflictive uncertainty can be redefined. Uncertainty can ground us, sometimes. We need arrogance in one hand and doubt in the other; we fail ourselves, fall into too zealous a body theology, with too great an imbalance of either.
For a week after the rejection, I fell into a grey, Goethean gloom, the kind of funk everyone could sense with vague dread, like the aspirational dreams of volcanoes. I seemed like I could blow at any moment. This newest, in-the-middle-of-it-all rejection just seemed to confirm, at my emotional nadir, my deep fear of unlovability.
Then I realigned. My body simply is, I reminded myself; I need someone who accepts that. I was still, after years of transitioning, letting others define me, letting others start and end my story. The way to tell the narrative, instead, is by accepting its messiness and, from there, weaving the sail myself.
I rededicated my search, chanting that I had to learn to not just accept but respect myself, curves and voice and curls and all. I would stop thinking of magma and smoke and more, instead, of ocean.
Perhaps self-love means accepting our blue, blue as the colour that is as much depth as lightness, solitude-sadness as mirth, ocean as sky. Self-love means learning the shifting language of a body’s rules — and then when to accept them and when to break them, and finding, through both, the beauty in our landscapes, seascapes, dreamscapes, even our blue deserts.
Self-love is not giving up, even when your body breaks the rules we fear it breaking most. | https://gay.medium.com/the-body-cannot-be-one-simple-thing-e9d9010a75e6 | ['Gabrielle Bellot'] | 2019-04-30 20:56:10.553000+00:00 | ['Self', 'Unruly Bodies', 'Relationships', 'LGBTQ', 'Transgender'] |
About Me — Melissa A. Matthews. I am “likkle but tallawah,” as my… | About Me — Melissa A. Matthews
selfie by author (Melissa A. Matthews)
I’m a 4'9, 90 lb storyteller whose stories and experiences are taller, heavier, and more far reaching than I might have ever imagined.
As a teenager growing up in Brooklyn NY, I thought I’d die at twenty-one. I had a dream in which I watched myself die. I lived with reckless abandon. By the time I was twenty-five , I’d accomplished every goal I’d written down from zero to sixteen. I got a degree in painting, opened an arts nonprofit, exhibited internationally, wrote stories, and sold my art.
I spent my late twenties trying to figure out what a life without striving for those goals would look like. That meant finding love and finding myself in my cultural home of Trinidad and Tobago.
In my thirties, my journey has been defined not by what I do but who I am. I am a woman on a journey toward inner peace and manifestation in all aspects of my life. I exercise everyday, I’m two years into veganism and seven years into owning several businesses with my twin sister and one with my partner.
I am an Afro-Trinidadian American woman living in Trinidad. I am a 35 year old mother, partner, and storyteller. I am one whose stories are written, eaten, listened to, stared at and used to help other people tell their stories.
Mostly to those that know and love me, I am Mel.
I am Melissa A. Matthews, but I don’t tell people what the A stands for and that’s my business. | https://medium.com/about-me-stories/about-me-melissa-a-matthews-789b17c8bb01 | ['Melissa A. Matthews'] | 2020-12-17 06:21:41.510000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Life', 'About Me', 'Love'] |
I wrap my hair, deal with it! | I’ve heard some of the most ridiculous anti-wrap logic from those who either don’t like or don’t understand hair wraps and scarves.
“It’s not sexy in bed.” I don’t quite understand this argument, but I’ve had to discuss this with at least a handful of brothas — one of which was an ex who immediately reached out to snatch it off my head. (The strangest part is I dated a Romanian man at one time who wasn’t even slightly phased by the hair wrap. To him, it was normal, but he’d also dated quite a few sistas before we met.)
Meanwhile I have zip zero problems with doorags and wave caps. Men — specifically black men with waves — should understand hair doesn’t magically do this on its own. There’s a little bit of help needed. And if you want to walk down the street with a woman who has presentable and attractive hair, stop messing with her hair wrap. If she sweats it out — for a number of reasons, possibly because of you — hands off the hair wrap once she actually goes to sleep. You’ll enjoy seeing the hair wrap results during date nights. Don’t be that guy she can hold solely responsible for dry edges and bad hair days. (Side note: I’ve never been a woman who thought pulling hair was cute. It’ll get you cursed out and kicked out quickly though.)
“I don’t understand how you get all your hair under your head.” I watched another co-worker (white and female) stare at me, mesmerized by me wrapping my hair. Her response, “I don’t think my hair could, like, fit underneath a hat.” Now whether she was telling the truth or not, I do not know. It takes time to get any hair, especially thicker hair textures, to get into the habit of wrapping and swirling just how you want it to. But the museum exhibit stare was a bit off-putting, especially with her proudly proclaiming, “I’m glad I stayed after work to see this!” I didn’t even have a comeback for that one, just a “you’ve got to be kidding me” expression.
Photo credit: Mwabonje/Pexels
“Why do you have to go through all that trouble? Seems like too much to do!” It’s no surprise that it was this manager who said this to me. But more importantly, it’s not “all that trouble” if you’ve grown up oiling, braiding, twisting and wrapping your hair. I enjoy my hair. I appreciate the hair growing from my scalp. Therefore, it’s not “all that trouble” to take care of it. You know what I think is a lot of trouble? Washing hair every day. That would drive me nuts, but I don’t give you a hard time about it. You know what texture doesn’t require doing so for everyday maintenance? Ours! And if I’m not asking you to be my beautician, why is this such a point of contention?
To sum it up, whether you agree, disagree or do not understand what a sista is doing with her hair wraps, her scarves, her hats or whatever hair fashion she chooses, as long as it doesn’t have to be done on your head, let’s “wrap” it up on the unsolicited commentary and complaints. | https://medium.com/we-need-to-talk/i-wrap-my-hair-deal-with-it-ea9423fa5f86 | ['Shamontiel L. Vaughn'] | 2020-02-08 21:52:20.423000+00:00 | ['African American Hair', 'Black Hair', 'Style', 'Black Women', 'Hair'] |
The Kids Are Not All Right | Over 4.8 million children have tested positive for covid, 5 times as many kids have tested positive in the past month than any other time. The kids are not all right.
All kids have been traumatized by the pandemic. Some kids more than others because their parents won’t get vaccinated. Those kids are not all right.
Republican governors and MAGAs refuse to protect children. Not only have they have fought hard not to enact any gun safety legislation, they’ve been fighting just as hard to not protect kids from covid. The kids are not all right.
Older kids who are vaccinated and understand how fucked up everything is enjoy the irony of congress members having to go on lockdown at the Capitol on January 6. Now they know what it’s like to be a kid in public school.
Gun related deaths are the second leading cause of death for children in the US. The kids are not all right.
“Republicans think that children being slaughtered in their classrooms with weapons of war is the cost of freedom but that wearing a mask to save lives during a pandemic is too high a price to pay.” — Bradley Whitford
The only time school shootings went down was during the lockdown of 2020. It took a global pandemic to stop them from happening. What are we doing to our kids?
As of midnight, women in Texas can’t have an abortion after 6 weeks because the Supreme Court didn’t intervene. Abortion has essentially been outlawed in Texas. Women will be forced to raise kids they do not want or can’t afford without any help from the state. Those kids won’t be all right.
Also in Texas, the Republicans have passed their voter discrimination bill so Democrats can’t vote. They’ve banned public schools from teaching students that the KKK is wrong and have prevented schools from teaching the history of the Voting Rights Act. Teachers will be fined if they get caught teaching about racism. That’s not right.
In Florida, Governor Death Sentence and the Republicans are ignoring the judge’s ruling that schools don’t have to adhere to their no mask mandate. The Florida Department of Education has started withholding salaries of school board members who oppose the mask mandate ban. This is not only against the law, it endangers children. The kids in Florida are not all right.
In Missouri, there were 128 math, 93 science, 210 special ed, and 92 english teaching positions open right before school started because teachers don’t want to teach in that shithole state.
School has started in many schools across the country but they’re having to shut down as soon as they open because kids are being exposed to covid. Families who have done everything right are being punished for the recklessness of families who refused to do the right thing. It’s like when teachers punish a whole class for the bad behavior of a couple of trouble makers. All the good kids (vaccinated) have to suffer the consequences of the bad kids (unvaccinated.) The good kids can’t be right because the bad kids are wrong.
The US Department of Education is opening civil rights investigations into states that have banned mask mandates as a matter of discrimination against students with disabilities.
Twice as many kids live with just their mom as did in 1968. Women make less than men for the same work which means single parent households are living in poverty. Since Biden’s American Rescue Plan, kids and moms will be all right for the first time in a long time but not for long unless more Democrats are elected and the monthly allowance can be extended.
In contrast, Ivanka Trump’s mom brand is on hiatus while she hides out in Florida. Last year she did a photo shoot to inspire other moms to be creative during the pandemic by showing herself “working” from home — playing in a fort made of blankets with her kids in her mansion, with every hair in place. Ivanka’s kids are the only kids in history whose grandpas were both criminals and one pardoned the other. Those kids ain’t right.
Matt Gaetz and Donald Trump are the epitome of spoiled white boy losers. If you’re rich and white and don’t discipline your kids they could grow up to be president or a member of congress and destroy the country.
Life is so shitty in America that the most educated but lowest paid generation is saying no to having kids. They’re drowning in debt, they don’t make enough money to survive, and they don’t want to bring a child into this world. It doesn’t feel like the right thing to do. On the other hand, Texas will have a population explosion of kids who won’t be all right.
Population growth has slowed in China and the US because of the government. In China, the law tells you how many kids you can have. In the US, the fertile generation is saying no to kids because they can’t afford them and the country is too fucked up to subject a new generation to life here.
Covid kids carry the burden of the pandemic, school shootings, and climate change. The adults in their lives don’t give a shit about them. Their parents are screaming at teachers now about masks, but it wasn’t that long ago that they were screaming at teachers for not doing a better job of raising their kids for them. In a few years those kids will be able to vote. It will be payback time for all of the adults who didn’t treat them right.
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The Daily Crime Reports are being published as “quarterly reports” (three month groups) as part of “The Treason Chronicles” on Amazon for Kindle. To purchase one or more quarters, click here. | https://medium.com/@spikedolomite/the-kids-are-not-all-right-37ae15a02de9 | ['Spike Dolomite'] | 2021-09-01 16:03:30.385000+00:00 | ['Republicans', 'Covid', 'Mask Mandate', 'Abortion'] |
5 Terminal commands every developer should know | Image taken from https://itnext.io/upgrading-bash-on-macos-7138bd1066ba
1. Source command
Source command executes the contents of the file which is passed as the argument to it
Sample
Let’s say we have two Java versions — Java 8 & Java 11
We often switch between the versions by changing the JAVA_HOME in ~/.bash_profile
~/.bash_profile pointing to Java 11
~/.bash_profile pointing to Java 8
If we edit the ~/.bash_profile file, we need to restart our terminal for the changes to reflect
But with source command, we can see the changes reflect in current terminal session itself. Just do | https://medium.com/@iamvickyav/5-terminal-commands-every-developer-should-know-dcdd9710f9b4 | ['Vicky Av'] | 2020-12-24 03:43:14.007000+00:00 | ['Linux Commands', 'Terminal Commands', 'Mac', 'Terminal', 'Macos'] |
Here’s how shopping with MYCoin works in your favour! | There are three aspects to this blog. Buyers, sellers and the platform that connects them.
There are so many cryptocurrencies out there, some promise high returns, while some stability. However, what about the people who wish to spend their dearest cryptocurrencies and buy stuff online? MYCoin International has come with the answer for the above question, by introducing a smart payment platform that lets you use your cryptocurrencies to transact without any hassles.
So, what are the features that make MYCoin International unique. Let’s take a detailed look at the features and their explanation:
Accepting a large variety of cryptocurrencies- Comparing the platform with conventional methods, MYCoin stands testimony to the fact that diversity is appreciated and encouraged here. Crypto coins and tokens can be used to get a lot of services and products.
Comparing the platform with conventional methods, MYCoin stands testimony to the fact that diversity is appreciated and encouraged here. Crypto coins and tokens can be used to get a lot of services and products. Safety is the most dependable feature , and at MYCoin its take very seriously. This is done to avert ubiquitous frauds. The problems people have to face because of hacks and malicious sites can strongly curbed with the advent of blockchain technology. Blockchain is unhackable owing to its transparent and highly secured ecosystem.
, and at MYCoin its take very seriously. This is done to avert ubiquitous frauds. The problems people have to face because of hacks and malicious sites can strongly curbed with the advent of blockchain technology. Blockchain is unhackable owing to its transparent and highly secured ecosystem. Dispute resolution — The resolution of the dispute is again an issue that needs to be taken care of, this ends with MYCoin International. The company has a quick and robust way of dealing with it. At MYCI a dedicated team constantly follows-up with both the buyer and the seller and becomes a seamless bridge between both.
— The resolution of the dispute is again an issue that needs to be taken care of, this ends with MYCoin International. The company has a quick and robust way of dealing with it. At MYCI a dedicated team constantly follows-up with both the buyer and the seller and becomes a seamless bridge between both. Reduced risk for buyers — MYCI’s platform covers many purchases right from a wide range of services to a long list of physical goods. This is possible by bringing trusted vendors to the platform, and vendors are given their payments in fiat currency. This becomes a win-win situation for both the vendors and buyers.
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Telegram : https://t.me/mycoin_international | https://medium.com/mycoininternational/heres-how-mycoin-s-shopping-process-for-you-fae53f770582 | ['Mycoin International'] | 2018-04-19 10:11:09.453000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Mycoin', 'Shopping'] |
Parts of an ending | It was remarkable. Road trips through the southwest have always been. There’s nowhere like the USA, to this visitor, for enjoying a variety of wide open spaces at leisure, and in comfort. Even through the fright of the American election and what it portends.
I never want to leave the USA when my time there is at an end, though this was the first time I found myself simultaneously glad to be doing so. But I’m still drawn. Because of or despite the lack of an inside perspective, the pull is stronger than it’s ever been. | https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/parts-of-an-ending-42759da6b389 | ['Charlene Winfred'] | 2016-12-31 11:15:37.138000+00:00 | ['California', 'Travel', 'USA', 'Photography'] |
What Is an Airdrop & Why Is It Important? | What is an airdrop?
There are few words more exciting in life than the word “free”. When it comes to cryptocurrency, one of the primary ways to get free coins is through airdrops. Simply defined, an airdrop is the giving away of free tokens to cryptocurrency enthusiasts, and is used primarily for marketing purposes by companies to drive awareness for their coin.
Airdrops are typically delivered in one of two ways. The first is through a surprise airdrop, where certain individuals are given tokens in their wallet without knowing in advance. The second is a promotional airdrop, where companies generate attention for their coins by letting users know they will be giving away a finite amount of coins to a lucky few. The latter is typically announced on Twitter or on Telegram, the preferred mode of communication for blockchain startups.
Why perform an airdrop?
There are a handful of reasons why you could benefit from performing an airdrop, most of which center around helping your token stand out given the sheer volume of coins you’re competing against on the Ethereum blockchain alone.
Marketing: By dropping free tokens into people’s wallets, you’ll drum up attention for your coin you may not have had otherwise. Additionally, because crypto is such a tight-knit community, news tends to spread like wildfire thanks to platforms like niche blogs, YouTube channels, newsletters, Steemit, subreddits and more. This makes word-of-mouth marketing a more attainable goal for blockchain startups than it is for other industries.
There are also some external variables at play here that should lead you to invest in airdrops. The main one being Facebook recently calling for a strict ban on the advertising of ICOs on their platform, and other social media networks are bound to follow Zuckerberg’s lead. This limits the number of marketing outlets available to those launching their tokens, making airdrops a hotter commodity than ever before.
Driving Up The Value of Your Coin: Because airdrops lead to a spike in the number of people with your token, it’s only natural for the value of your token to rise as a result no matter if you’re a new company or an established one. Within their airdrops, many companies give out free tokens in proportion to the number of coins a user already owns, causing a spike in the number of coins bought overall.
Rewarding Your Most Loyal Supporters: Airdrops also perform the function of rewarding the people who support you most. Whether the person was an early adopter and holds a large sum of your tokens or if they simply follow you religiously on social media, giving away free tokens is a terrific way for you to build brand loyalty.
How to Perform an Airdrop With FundersToken
Whether you’re a Funder or a business that’s been tokenized using our platform, airdrops can provide you with an enormous benefit when used strategically. Here’s how to get started.
As a Funder: As a Funder, to be eligible to receive any sort of ERC20 tokens through an airdrop on the Ethereum blockchain, you must have an active Ethereum wallet and hold ETH. You should also follow FundersToken’s Telegram channel and Twitter account for live updates on airdrops and much more.
As a FundersToken User: In order to create airdrops for your own business that has been tokenized using FundersToken, all you need to do is to click on the CRM toolsets within our tokenisation platform, select Airdrop, insert the parameters for your airdrop and done. Simple isn’t it? You can also visit the Developer’s Resources on the FundersToken website to get started. From there, the way you promote and conduct your airdrop is completely up to you. Will you give away tokens in proportion to everyone who already holds your coin, or will the tokens be given away at random to drive curiosity and awareness?
Use Cases For Airdrops
While airdrops can benefit companies at any stage of development, there do exist some use cases where they have worked particularly well. For instance, Omisego (OMG) gave away 0.75 OMG tokens for every 1 ETH airdrop participants held in their wallet. This helped to secure the company as one of the top 30 coins based on total market cap. If you’re in a similar position at your company, then consider taking advantage of airdrops.
A Word of Caution
As with everything in business, there are also some caveats you’ll want to consider when it comes to airdrops, whether you’re a user looking to obtain free tokens or a company trying to give them away. This is mainly because of unscrupulous characters using airdrops as a front to hack into people’s wallets. As a best practice, never give away your personal information when signing up for an airdrop, always be sure you own the keys to a secure wallet, and do your research to be absolutely certain the company conducting the airdrop is who they say they are.
From the perspective of a company, there are also a couple things to keep in mind before diving headfirst into airdrops. The first is being aware that airdrops have recently come under government scrutiny, so be extra careful when it comes to knowing the rules and legalities. The next is being cautious of using airdrops to artificially drive up the value of your coin, which has ended disastrously for some companies. For example, an airdrop initially drove up the value of NXT tokens to 6-times more than they originally were worth, only to have it tank considerably soon thereafter.
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With FundersToken and other forward-thinking startups, mainstream adoption of blockchain technology will become more seamless and simple than ever before. While this will lead to an unprecedented amount of benefits for entrepreneurs of all types to take advantage of the technology, it will also inevitably cause the landscape to become crowded than it has been in the past. One of the simplest ways to rise above the competition you’ll be up against is by taking advantages of airdrops. Thanks for reading.
FundersToken: DIY your SMART TOKEN, TOKEN WITH LOGIC
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Learn more about us : https://issuu.com/fstk/docs/funderstoken_welcomepackage | https://medium.com/fstnetwork/what-is-an-airdrop-why-is-it-important-6d6d7d7f5388 | ['Fst Network'] | 2018-06-21 07:01:49.979000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Airdrop', 'Eos', 'Ethereum', 'Bitcoin'] |
How to build a bulletproof product | Usually when I buy a new electrical appliance I expect it to work in more than one specific setting.
What do I mean?
A mixer will work in any kitchen, right? Same thing about TVs and living rooms and electric toothbrushes and bathrooms. Note that I’m not talking about home décor related electrical appliances.
This is called robustness.
So my wife and I bought two nice bedside lamps which we’ve really enjoyed from, until we moved into a new apartment.
One of our two bedside lamps
In our new bedroom, the electricity socket was located behind my wife’s side of the bed, while in the previous apartment it was located right behind the center of the bed.
Now it turns out that my lamp’s power cord is too short!
And if that’s not enough, the switch is located in the center of the cord, which means it is located behind the bed!
If I don’t want to use an extension cord due to safety, it sounds like the only solution is to buy a new lamp and make sure the cord is long enough, huh?
Not for me!
So first of all, I needed to get a new power cord. I recalled that in the past week I saw an old vacuum cleaner near the trash can of our building.
I quickly went downstairs — and it was still there!
Assuming that it’s non-functional if no one took it after seven rainy days — I cut its power cord and took it back home (my dad holds the credit for this idea — I saw him doing that too many times in my childhood).
Next, all I needed to do was to replace the lamp’s power cord with the new one and move the switch to a more convenient and logical place — right next to the lamp base (and not in the center of the cord where I can’t reach it).
I opened the switch and to my surprise it was a soldered switch. Meaning that without a solder, which I don’t have, I can’t modify it.
The existing switch
So I bought a new switch, with screws, for 1.5$.
After making all the modifications I needed, I got a working AND convenient bedside lamp.
It took just about an hour, 1.5$, a little bit of creativity and a lot of willingness to solve this problem and get the job done.
BTW, if the lamp would cost 1.5$ more and had a better design — we’d still buy it! That only shows the power of a proper, user-centered design.
The new switch in its new location, almost done
Why am I telling you this story?
As a Product Manager, I think that this specific product (bedside lamp) had 3 big design flaws:
Power cord length — affects users with distant electrical sockets. Switch location — affects users with hidden/non-reachable electrical sockets. Switch type (soldered, without screws) — affects users that want to modify the cable.
These could be easily avoided if a good user research was performed. This is what happens when developers design a product that is only built to WORK and not to SERVE A NEED.
So if you don’t want unsatisfied users that will ditch your product and look up for alternatives in the first opportunity in which the product won’t work for them, I suggest you to follow the following takeaways:
Perform a THOROUGH user research. Test the hell out of your product. Ask your friends to review it. Giveaway free samples. Do what it takes to get as much feedback as possible. Then implement your insights. Plan for robustness. If the product is intended to be used in different settings and conditions (exotic cases excluded) — make it bulletproof. Plan some space for modifications for the technical user. | https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/how-to-build-a-bulletproof-product-bab5aed5db4 | ['Moshe Etlis'] | 2020-12-24 05:28:11.749000+00:00 | ['Design Process', 'Product Design', 'Product', 'Product Management', 'User Research'] |
Server side pagination using ngx-pagination in Angular and Dot Net Core | In this post i am going to demonstrate a simple example on how to use ngx-pagination for server side paging using Dot Net core as back end and angular.
ngx-pagination is a third party npm library which we can use instead of writing bulk of code for paging operations.Instead of writing messy and repetitive code it helps developers to preserve development time and helps in code reusability.
While developing application with large data set is very important to load only specified data which boosts the overall performance of our application.
To demonstrate the example i am going to create a simple Dot Net Core and Angular application.
At First I created a simple Dot Net Core project using Visual Studio 2019 and added an Employee class. | https://medium.com/@pratikpokhrel51/server-side-pagination-using-ngx-pagination-in-angular-and-dot-net-core-9b5b8fc36b5a | ['Pratik Pokharel'] | 2020-12-18 15:42:33.258000+00:00 | ['Angular', 'Dotnet', 'Linq', 'Angular8', 'Dotnet Core'] |
Kubernetes 에서 Spark 어플리케이션 실행하기 (Kafka helm chart 설치 포함) | Pull an Image from a Private Registry
This page shows how to create a Pod that uses a Secret to pull an image from a private Docker registry or repository… | https://medium.com/@heartsavior/kubernetes-%EC%97%90%EC%84%9C-spark-%EC%96%B4%ED%94%8C%EB%A6%AC%EC%BC%80%EC%9D%B4%EC%85%98-%EC%8B%A4%ED%96%89%ED%95%98%EA%B8%B0-kafka-helm-chart-%EC%84%A4%EC%B9%98-%ED%8F%AC%ED%95%A8-8f47f48419c0 | ['Jung-Taek Lim'] | 2020-12-21 13:13:56.314000+00:00 | ['Kubernetes', 'Spark', 'Kafka'] |
The New Normal — Building Your Network Virtually | I have mentored many people over my career and recently have had the privilege of mentoring a few people who were recent arrivals to Canada. These fine people have come at a most challenging time with many businesses shuttering, most freezing hiring and many working remotely. For a new immigrant trying to get established and meet people in their field it’s quite frankly near impossible.
That got me thinking that we’ve all had to re-imagine our approaches to various business processes and this need to network definitely needed a rethink. How do we continue to establish and build our business networks during and after the pandemic?
There are many reasons why we network: our need for social contact, getting established in a new town, industry or just looking for business opportunities. All of these are great reasons to get out there and all rely on the same fundamental social skills:
· introducing ourselves in a memorable way and
· standing out from the crowd
Sound familiar? It’s all about branding and differentiation. But wait.., now we’ve been thrown this curve ball called COVID-19 and you can’t get out and shake hands and dazzle people with the aura of your magnetic personality. What to do?
Well, the times have changed. The technology we rely has shifted from business cards to on-line profiles, meet-ups have hopefully gone on-line and our on-line persona has become the new first impression. The medium may have changed BUT the basics of networking and meeting people remain the same…same but different.
Below I’ll share with you what I think are the meat and potatoes of business networking and then I’ll expand on how things have shifted as we rely almost entirely on meeting and connecting with people via on-line mediums during this time of COVID-19.
THE BASICS:
1. The More You Give The More You Get — its as simple as giving freely to others and finding out how you can help them. Be a good listener. You’ll be amazed how a virtuous circle will ensue when you help others and the networking connector you will become.
2. Plan and Know Why and How You’re Doing This — like any endeavour, create a plan, a schedule and measurements of success whether that’s landing a job or finding like minded people and organizations in your new city.
3. Test and Iterate — the more at bats you have the more hits you’ll get. Undertake lots of experiments and alter course accordingly. Above all never get discouraged that it’s taking longer to connect with people, especially now.
4. Create a Brand — Your Story, Why You — people remember stories and everyone has one, so get good at telling yours so you stick out from the crowd. Know how you want to be known, be courageous and above all be true to yourself. Shakespeare knew that.
5. Skill to Master — Effective Communication — this is the single most important skill I suggest people master. Your technical skills / background will get you a job, how far you go will depend on how well you can communicate.
6. Learn and share knowledge broadly — add value to the knowledge you share by adding your personal observations or examples. Make sure what you share is aligned to your brand.
DURING A PANDEMIC
1. Skills to Master — Effective VIDEO Communication — just face up to it, you better get good at video. No up the nose shots nor god from above shots, good lighting, a decent camera, clean background and dress appropriately for the situation … from the waist up of course.
2. Learn and Share Knowledge Broadly ON-LINE — create some of your own content using the numerous free content creation tools and platforms out there, don’t just be a re-tweeter. Its easier than you think plus you’ll get better at it the more you try
3. Test and Iterate ON-LINE- its even easier and faster to run experiments and measure success : Likes, followers, new additions to your network. Just make sure you’re running tests and measuring what’s important in order to achieve your goals.
4. First Impressions Still Count — get a professional headshot, not one that looks like you just woke up. Don’t forget to smile, people need to feel your positivity and your headshot is usually their very first impression of you.
5. Brand Consistency -On-line and Off-line — I see this a bunch as we all try and put our best foot forward, but a headshot that is 10 years out of date or a resume that does not align with your actual skills and experience creates this strange dissonance that will work against you. One day your on-line avatar may need to manifest in space-time.
6. Blend Off-line with On-line — sending someone a written thank-you note is a clear level-up play that will create a memorable impression with people you want to connect with. It takes effort and so few people do that these days you’re sure to make an impression.
I hope you can find a nugget or two to put to good use and continue to connect with people who one day you will get to meet face to face AND without a mask.
Cheers. | https://medium.com/@chris-langdon/the-new-normal-building-your-network-virtually-7fa04fc5da18 | ['Christopher James Langdon'] | 2020-12-25 05:58:44.552000+00:00 | ['Mentoring', 'Networking', 'Job Hunting', 'Business Networking', 'Virtual Networking'] |
Investing from a Regenerative Mind | We use the term mind to refer to the totality of conscious and unconscious mental processes and activities, including emotion, reasoning, habit, sensory perception and so on. Regeneration has to do with tapping into the essence of something, enabling its evolution as a result of manifesting itself in a new way that brings new value to a new context. A regenerative mind consciously engages with the inherent regenerative potential of living phenomena, recognizing in them their inherent wholeness, agency, and potentiality.
A Different Approach to Investment
Sidney Cano is part of DUIT, a company dedicated to the creation of guidelines and platforms for transformational investments within a Latin American business ecosystem. The corporate group has built some understanding about the levels of effects that are possible from its efforts and has intentionally directed investments toward projects and businesses with the potential to serve as instruments for socio-ecological change. It has also found it worthwhile to share what it has learned with others who wish to use investment as a way to make a difference in the world.
For almost six years now, Duit has encountered a diverse range of entrepreneurs and business-owners who are seeking ways to increase the beneficial influences they can have on social and natural systems. They nearly always exhibit a genuine desire to do good in the world: “We want to make a difference,” they say. However, these good intentions are rarely matched by an understanding and a process that is sophisticated enough to effect deep change. As a rule, this is because the desire to do good is rooted in an outdated paradigm, one that sees the world anthropocentrically. People who wish to make the world a better place will naturally define and then pursue what they believe to be right and good. But does a forest, or a pod of whales, or a village in some other part of the world define what is “right and good” in the same way?
The same questions arise regarding investment, which in recent years has been undergoing an evolution in how it is conceived. For example, there is a growing understanding that the term need not be applied only to conventional financial instruments that carry an expectation of financial return. Investment can also refer to the commitment (investing oneself) of something other than money (time, energy, effort) with the expectation of worthwhile outcomes. Antony Bugg-Levine and Jed Emerson, leading thinkers in the field of impact investment, point out that: “If impact investing is what we do, blended value is what we produce. Value is what gets created when investors invest, and the recipient organizations pursue their mission. All organizations, for-profit and nonprofit alike, create value that has economic, social, and environmental components.”[i]
This concept of investment is depicted in the following diagram, which shows a variety of beneficial outcomes that can arise as a result of well-designed business activity. Although accurate from one point of view, this way of describing investment impacts is inherently fragmented, acting as if social, economic, and environmental arenas were separable and could operate independently of one another.
Fig. 1 Do-good level of difference
By contrast, impact investment that seeks to work from a Regenerative paradigm is focused on enabling whole-systems actualization. Actualization refers to the process by which the inherent potential within a system becomes manifest or actual. This implies that an impact investment is regenerative when it produces systemic changes or evolution that express new potential for a system as a whole. This is quite different from measuring impacts in terms of shifts in some desirable but narrowly defined metric, such as the number of homeless people who have been provided with shelter.
Redefining impact in terms of systems actualization requires a different orientation to investment. For one thing, it requires looking at systems as wholes rather than as pieces and parts, and it requires understanding the ways that systems are nested one within another. Also, it starts from the nature of a system and asks how it is to evolve, rather than starting from what we want to do to it. | https://medium.com/@sidney-canom/investing-from-a-regenerative-mind-7ffe32ac0162 | ['Sidney Cano'] | 2021-09-07 23:59:50.928000+00:00 | ['Impact', 'Impact Investing', 'Regeneration', 'Regenerative Economy'] |
Moving in and out of industries, the same growth principles apply | After my cross-industry learning article was published and I used the example of entering the swimming industry, I received some questions on why I’d pursue an industry that was female-dominated, a workforce that is casual and workplaces that’ll be non-existant for the next few months.
The opportunity wasn’t swimming as an industry or a career choice, it was a startup — an early stage business… ownership, personal progression, high growth potential, and investors.
I say, cross-disciplinary and cross-industry learning and development gets you innovation. And I don’t think the service offering of business matters, in my experience the same principles of growth marketing and innovation apply in all environments. Every business wants to grow.
Even if a business fails, which I’ve experienced twice — once a prior startup and once a corporate merger, the experience of that is valuable. All businesses can fail. And when they do and when you’re in a startup, the difference is you had ownership, you got personal progression, had the potential, and investment.
As every business is susceptible to disruption and failure and we will need a much more innovation across all industries — right now. In Australia, a lockdown is being extended possibly until October. Taxpayers will carry debt as many more people will lose their jobs. People are going to have to switch jobs and maybe industries… and why not rather than wait for everything to go back to ‘normal’. Will it ever be normal again? In full-time employment, a job is never really secured and your career progression is never really guaranteed.
There is opportunity even in disruption, downturns and seemingly random industries not identified as growth industries. New industries are created — who has seen Tiger Kings on Netflix? It’s a crazy example, but these people made an industry out of slandering one another on social media about their exotic animal zoos in the middle of nowhere.
Wherever there’s this possibility of ownership, personal progression, high growth potential, and investors — people who’ll invest in you by backing you or the entity, there are opportunities. Regardless of the industry, it may not be a huge market or a high growth industry, there is always market share to be had. The same principles of growth marketing will apply and in turn, crossing industries will enable you to innovate elsewhere. Move in and out of industries — don’t be defined by one career in one industry. | https://medium.com/@libbation/move-in-and-out-of-industries-the-same-principles-apply-choose-startups-15a4b6110e4a | [] | 2020-08-19 13:07:03.001000+00:00 | ['Adaptation', 'Startup', 'Change', 'Industry'] |
The Challenge of Improving America’s Eyesight on Issues of Race and Equity | This column originally appeared in The Dallas Morning News.
The fervor for justice that engulfed America’s streets after the killing of George Floyd generated new hope for a change of heart in how white America sees Black America. Yet despite the understandable optimism, there are ample reasons for caution.
As New York Times columnist Charles Blow suggested, converting good intentions into actions that thwart systemic racism begs a kind of empathetic vision white America has typically found in short supply.
In his seminal 1952 novel “Invisible Man,” Ralph Ellison describes the critical defect: it involves “the construction” of people’s “inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality.” When a white person perceives a Black person, Ellison’s narrator says, “they see only … figments of their imagination.”
This matter of vision presents a challenge for those of us training the journalists of tomorrow. The problem begins with the craft’s vaunted role of reporting our world objectively, since “objectivity” often boils down to unquestioned norms in the eye of the beholder. And as Kathleen McElroy, my colleague at the University of Texas at Austin, put it in a recent email: the “concept has been used to further ‘other’ journalists from marginalized groups. We should teach our students to be accurate, fair, fully dimensional and empathetic.” Hear, hear.
Where to find inspiration to meet the moment? In my case, I’ve drawn motivation from an unforgettable teacher who devoted himself to helping students look at the world around them to see where justice isn’t but ought to be.
Ben Yorita taught social studies at Franklin High School in Seattle when I was a senior there in that other tumultuous year of 1968, with its murders of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy and violent collisions in the streets over racial injustice and the war in Vietnam. It was hard, as it is now, to see the future for the chaos.
Franklin harbored a somewhat unique blind spot. A big multiracial, multiethnic school, it was a rarity for its time, with its generous mix of white, Black, Asian and Latinx students. Its halls rang with aspirational energy. African Americans had been elected student body president two years running. Yet racial tensions few could clearly see threatened to shred that remarkable fabric.
Mr. Yorita saw what others couldn’t. “You’re sitting on a keg of gunpowder and you don’t even know it,” he told us one day, as we gabbled about the upcoming senior prom. My classmates and I had grown up with TV images of police billy-clubbing Black freedom-marchers or blasting them with firehoses, but pride in our diversity, it was widely held, offered immunity from such strife.
Mr. Yorita was no stranger to hard-to-see dangers. As a college student of Japanese heritage at the University of Washington, he was out for a Sunday drive in December 1941 when the Japanese Imperial Navy bombed Pearl Harbor.
“We didn’t have the radio on and didn’t know about the attack,” he told an interviewer in later years, “but we knew something was wrong because of all the dirty looks Caucasians gave us. Usually they looked right through us as if we didn’t exist.”
Within a few months, the new scrutiny had sent Mr. Yorita and his family to one of the internment camps that dotted the western states where 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, the large majority of them American citizens, would spend the war years behind barbed wire.
Mr. Yorita had known the sting of racism, but he was blindsided by the cruelty with which white America and hysterical politicians turned on his community as a national security threat. When it came to teaching, his sharp intellect and largeness of spirit allowed him to show that racism and injustice make up a kind of permanent pandemic affecting large swaths of people whose skin color or cultural or religious values differ from their dominant societies.
Little wonder Mr. Yorita focused us on the evolving civil rights movement. We read John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me, the story of a white author who underwent skin treatments to travel the South as a black man. An eye-opener in its day, the bestseller often gave white readers their first inkling that far from Black people exaggerating their plight, as was an article of white belief, they were living it on a daily basis.
But it was Ellison’s Invisible Man that, for me, spoke to chaotic times. I remember stopping on this passage and reading it over and over: “And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.”
At Franklin, the flashpoint came when some 100 activist students bottled up the principal in his office demanding the reinstatement of Black classmates who had been arbitrarily suspended. But it was also a matter of visibility. They wanted to see themselves represented in the creation of a Black history course, the hiring of an African American administrator, and portraits of Black leaders to be displayed in school alongside Benjamin Franklin and George Washington.
The sit-in, the first of its kind in Seattle, unnerved the city’s white establishment. Police arrested several of the organizers and a long court fight ensued, but the event did prompt changes at Franklin and helped fuel a broader push for racial justice.
The suddenness of events had taken Franklin’s diverse student body by surprise, as people headed for the exits and police swarmed. How could our friends do this to us? I remember a classmate saying plaintively.
I was as much a hostage to magical thinking as anyone. The one white player on our basketball team’s otherwise Black starting five, I could, in some respects, see what others couldn’t. Teammates included sons of established working-class families and of middle-class professionals. Others let details slip in the locker room about hard lives in public housing.
I saw how racism could lurk behind Seattle “nice.” One afternoon our team huddled in a visitors’ locker room staring at the N-word scrawled on the chalkboard in a message ordering us to “go home.” Taking the floor in righteous indignation we pulverized the opposing team. Some of that anger helped us cop the city high school basketball championship, the holy grail for an inner-city school.
For all that, I was at a loss to see the depth of discomfort and pain that troubled the lives and friendships I prized. My “objective” working-class view, that hard work and “overcoming differences” inevitably lead to good results, was unsupported by the realities my teammates knew and I didn’t.
It was the kind of white innocence James Baldwin wrote of in his magisterial 1963 book The Fire Next Time: “Many of them, indeed, know better, but … people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and … the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.”
Gentle, rigorous, Mr. Yorita worked to prod our sense of identity and unrecognized privilege. Revelations that go against magical thinking can cut like a knife: that’s why we avoid them at all costs. What motivates the Mr. Yoritas of this world is the knowledge that not to try to move the unseeing majority marks the road to further division and calamity.
Today, Ben, as I can call him now, is 98 and living in retirement. When I phoned him recently to say hello, he sized things up in the pithy style I remember from a half-century ago. The outcry over police brutality will bring measured reforms, he said, but after all these years, “We haven’t even got to the core of the matter.”
It’s a matter of seeing with those inner eyes of ours that, as Ben says, “We’re all human beings.” | https://tdahlby.medium.com/the-challenge-of-improving-americas-eyesight-on-issues-of-race-and-equity-a7450f7f68a1 | ['Tracy Dahlby'] | 2020-07-08 23:25:14.454000+00:00 | ['Social Justice', 'Racism', 'White Privilege', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'George Floyd'] |
8 Mistakes You Should Avoid When Developing New Mobile Apps | Photo by Mega Studio
Developing a successful mobile app requires a proper plan from the beginning including these essential questions: what you need, why you need it, and your target users?
Why Most Mobile Apps Become Failures?
It can be the greatest sense of achievement when turning your own ideas and dreams into a reality;
In the software development industry, this happens daily, dreams are made, however many of these Apps are soon left to rot after being neglected sitting in an application store — this article aims to help you find the most common mistakes that are made and help to avoid them before you run the mobile app marketing campaigns and make your app go viral.
To achieve a high level of interaction and user retention with mobile applications is by no means an easy task. In fact, according to Localytics, the percentage of user abandonment is around 23%. In addition, if an application is opened only once within 7 days, there is a 60% chance that it will never be used again.
A harsh reality perhaps, but it’s a dog eat dog world in the App industry, so, much like Darwin’s theory of Evolution: “If you don’t succeed, you become extinct”. A user can decide an Apps fate, within a matter of seconds, so be cautious to avoid mistakes in developing and marketing your Application, to help guide you away from these mistakes are a few of the most common ones and some tips on how to avoid disaster.
Maybe now you’re curious with questions: Why most of the new mobile app were failures? To answer that question, let’s figure out the main cause.
I. Apps Development Mistakes:
#01. CHOOSING THE WRONG DEVELOPMENT METHOD
When you build your own development process, you will be faced with a challenging mission: deciding to develop a Native App (the original application) or Hybrid App (Cross-platform/future applications). We elaborate more on one of our other posts -Cross-platform vs. Native Mobile App Development.
Native Apps can be costly to develop, although this cost, is often justified with the production of superior user interfaces. Hybrid Apps, the development to completion is often faster and it also can ensure the best overall experience on all platforms. But if you favor the user experience criteria, Native Apps are the way forward.
Although the Native Apps are generally considered the best, it still might not be the right choice for your company. So, make sure you are putting in a healthy amount of time into choosing the correct deployment method.
#02. DO NOT PERFORM THE REVIEW OF THE PLATFORM IN A FULL WAY
iOS, Android: Which platforms are your mobile apps in?
Probably this is a question that everyone must face when starting to build apps, but often they do not have a full analysis of the platforms. There are many things to consider when choosing the platform. According to statistics, iOS is very popular in America, but Android is dominating in the global scope. So, if you intend to publish your mobile apps in many countries, you should consider priorities for Android than iOS. When you choose the platform, please make sure that you have thought about all the possibilities and other options. If you fail to do that, you risk losing a large number of potential customers.
#03. TOO MANY ADDITIONAL FEATURES
A common blunder is that developers do not define a scope for their apps, adding features, seems like a harmless and somewhat good idea, however without a defined scope, features come thick and fast. Soon the project has so many features that the project can become uneconomical and never-ending.
“Mobile users looking for a fast experience, convenient and simple.”
If your mobile apps are crammed with many features, it can be overwhelming for the user. Worsened if the users are not using the latest hardware, adding many features can make your app sluggish on the outdated phone or tablet. This can make your app crash and severely affect the user experience.
Don’t overcomplicate, Instead, focus on a few core functions to charm your users. If you have more time and money, you should use it to enhance the user’s loyalty by refining the core features instead of searching and adding many other features. Another way to optimize your application is to hire a mobile software outsourcing company like Sioux — this Danang based subsidiary of a successful Dutch company, Sioux will help you turn bold ideas into real mobile applications with the greatest quality. Some examples of Sioux’s output is De Heus CMS and Mobile App, S-Hotel, S-farm, Film Mobile App, Amoha…
#04. TOO MANY MOBILE APP ERRORS
Unfortunately, many developers prematurely release their Apps, without the correct due diligence and testing. This is like playing with fire, the App might look great, but only a matter of time before there is a serious flaw and then a bad review soon after. Quality management and testing in the development process crucial stages in the development of applications. The release of your App on the market that lacks testing their performance is not so different from cooking without tasting.
The only way to avoid the risk is always testing the performance and take it into your development process as early as possible. Sometimes, even the most meticulous testing of your apps it can still have some bugs. However, outsourcing your testing to a company like Sioux.
“Why do I need someone to test my mobile app when I can do this alone?”
Of course, you absolutely can do your App testing alone. However, if you value quality and the possibility of time reduction then having a dedicated team of professional testers is for you. In addition to the detection of critical bugs, they also offer important ideas to make your App more user-friendly. For example, they can tell you that your in-app purchases are not well presented or clear to everyone, or even if there is an inappropriate advertisement that could ruin the whole experience of the users. The more people that test your App the nearer to perfection it will be.
The most crucial part of not receiving 1-star ratings on the App stores is to make sure all the critical bugs are ironed out.
#05. INFERIOR USER EXPERIENCE
When you cannot meet the basic requirements, rejection is inevitable. So to compete, your App should be very intuitive, easy to use, and unique. Users can easily evaluate the features of an App:
One of the first they evaluate is the speed of the mobile apps. You should ensure that users can perform multiple tasks in minutes. Otherwise, they will be extremely frustrated and ditch your App.
Another criterion they look at is a quick signup process; when users must work hard just at the login step, they can put off, even before they have used the App for its main purpose. This is similar to first impressions when meeting someone new, if someone is difficult to talk to in the initial introduction, chances are you won’t want to continue speaking to them.
II. Pitfalls in the Mobile Apps Marketing Strategy:
#06. BUILDING A SYSTEM TO ATTRACT USERS, IMPROPERLY
Many Apps cannot attract their target audience. That’s one main reason why these Apps fail. So, you have to always think about the initial user experience and create a smart and efficient marketing process. To be successful, you will avoid confusion and unnecessary frustration when users interact with your App for the first time.
The next step is to build a funnel analysis to help you understand exactly where the users are being lost during the use of the App. This will help you take the steps necessary to fix the problems.
Finally, remember that great user experience must also be based on the data from A/B testing. Do not assume that you already know the answer. Take the test!
#07. UNSTABLE MARKETING PLAN
When you are thinking about the marketing plan for your Apps, Normally, the focus is the number of downloads. However, these figures do not mean that your apps will be successful in the App stores.
Although the landing page is not an effective place for advertising, however, your users will know that there is a mobile application that has been optimized, and now it is available in the store.
Please take a moment to learn about the methods that can make your users discover your products. App stores can be the main method, but many publishers often ignored relevant factors such as the title, description, and keywords.
Since a high percentage of dissatisfied customers seem to leave reviews. If you want to increase the downloads, you need to have good reviews. Therefore, if you do not focus on how to get good reviews, you will lose thousands of potential customers.
#08. FAIL TO BUILD STRONG RELATIONSHIPS
Once your App is installed in the user’s device, “you” are in their pocket. This gives you a great opportunity to connect with your customers and interact with them. Investing in your mobile App and make it possible to connect with your users. Today, the expectations of users are increasing. Users always have problems, questions, and suggestions when using your App. Nowadays Apps often lack a “place” for user dialogue, commenting, or feedback, and this leads to the users extremely disappointed. This also prevents you from knowing the problem to solve.
Let’s consider building a feedback tool in your mobile apps, simplify the feedback process, and listen to your customers before they are disappointed and leave you a bad review. If you do not have time and resources to build such tools, you can search for IT outsourcing services companies like Sioux which can create these tools. | https://denis-nguyen.medium.com/8-mistakes-you-should-avoid-when-developing-new-mobile-apps-12d2c2b39367 | ['Denis Nguyen'] | 2020-10-01 00:43:21.477000+00:00 | ['Market New Mobile App', 'Mobile App Marketing', 'Mobile App Deve Company', 'Product Marketing'] |
The Not-So-Gentle Arts | Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders, 1610 | Rembrandt, Susanna and the Elders, 1647
In reviewing Susanna, it is crucial to review the status of the female model of the seventeenth century. Stigma was attached to any woman willing to submit herself to the prying scrutiny of an artist.
Even if she was representing a biblical, allegorical, or mythological feminine entity or female protagonist, she was still wilfully subjecting herself to the intense physical observation of the male gaze. If posing in clothes involved high risks to a woman’s reputation, one can only imagine what posing nude would do.
Susanna, as most female female biblical characters are described, was a “virtuous Jewish woman” whose story was used to teach that salvation comes to those who put their trust in God. However, Artemisia used the story to stress instead the dark and depraved nature of men, removing divine intervention, and developing political poles of attention. In the center, we have the defendant, Susanna horrified, disgusted, surprised, and above all, angry at the presence of the Elders — whose gaze projects dismissal and prejudice. Artemisia employs complex political pictorial vocabulary through the symbolic use of an art technique known as chiaroscuro, the juxtaposition of light and shade to create dramatic effect.
Rembrandt, who was also a follower of Caravaggio, painted the scene decades after Gentileschi.
His Susanna is cow-eyed and docile in terror. Her gaze is held by the one witnessing her molestation. She is looking at us.
In contrast, Gentileschi’s Susanna is frightened and repulsed by the menacing Elders. Her gaze does not seek out to another, or tilt up to God, but focuses on an object we cannot see — a weapon or escape of her own device.
Her Susanna would become Judith.
Through the absence of allegory and the allusion to Artemisia’s own rape trial, Artemesia’s representation undermines the traditional masculine identity of Divinity, unmasking the masculine identities as occupiers, not dispensers of Justice.
It is this unique viewpoint, a female gaze in the midst of male contemporaries, that gives Gentileschi’s work its full significance. By exploring notions of sexual politics and justice, Artemisia’s work proves its ongoing relevance, reaching far beyond the realm of the Baroque, with a stark reminder of the power of gender across the ages. | https://medium.com/endless/the-not-so-gentle-arts-5570441e847 | [] | 2015-06-10 17:18:43.651000+00:00 | ['History', 'Art', 'Feminism'] |
Simplify Your Life and Add Lightness | Weekend Recharge — CHECK:
https://youtu.be/a1W31hmZBis
Hope you’re all doing super well,
Keith | https://medium.com/@keithhoerling/simplify-your-life-and-add-lightness-4b3cb2f79a32 | ['Keith Hoerling'] | 2020-12-23 06:22:50.308000+00:00 | ['Drones', 'Lotus', 'Cars'] |
Why Does Everything Feel So Hard Right Now If I’m Fine? | A light-skinned woman sits in a half-full bathtub, her face and arms hunched over her knees in sadness. Photo courtesy of Tophee Marquez, Pexels.
There’s a very unique feeling that I’ve come to associate with our new normal now that we’re social distancing long-term and I don’t seem to be alone in this feeling.
It’s the feeling of continuously large, emotional reactions getting squished into a manageable package so that I can function in day to day life. It’s a sense that there is a constant threat surrounding me, followed by a layer of all-encompassing grief and compassion fatigue, all of which is smothered by a blanket of avoidance, dismissal, and critical judgment of myself for struggling when “there’s nothing wrong.” It’s saying, “I’m fine” and your voice is a little too squeaky or a little too loud and you kind of want to cry after you’ve said it.
In addition to the very normal sense of loss of our old world and concrete sources of stress like financial instability, the impossible delegation of labor in a home with children and working adults, or having a loved one hospitalized, there are a few other mental health-related reasons that everything is hard right now that may not be intuitive. Even if you’re technically “fine” right now you might not be feeling so fine and there’s probably a good reason for that.
We Have Lost Access to the State of Autopilot
First, a general overview of how brains work: Our brains, though amazingly complex, are also incredibly lazy. If there is a more resource-efficient way to do something, your brain will find it. Whenever you complete a task, you’re sending a signal down the corresponding neural pathway for that task. Just like how a physical path in a forest gets wider and smoother the more often it’s used, the more often you repeat an action, the stronger that neural pathway gets, which in turn makes it easier for the signal to pass through and the task to be done. The more you do something, the easier it is to do.
When you’ve done a task the same way enough times, the act of doing that task is actually processed differently by your brain: You go on autopilot. When you’re on autopilot, you don’t have to be consciously making all of the choices that the task is made up of. You can zone out and focus on other things while your brain enables you to finish the task unconsciously. This is why, on days you are feeling particularly distracted, you might find that you have driven home from work without much memory of getting yourself there. Your neural pathways related to the skill of driving and following your route home are well-worn enough that you could safely drive on autopilot.
The reason we have autopilot is that our brains only have a limited amount of conscious energy to devote to tasks that require active focus and decision making. Imagine if you had to focus intently on every aspect of tying your shoes and brushing your teeth and putting on your clothes all the time? That would be exhausting, right? The ability to defer certain tasks to autopilot saves your brain a HUGE amount of energy.
A plastic model of a human brain where the cross-section of the interior is shown. Photo courtesy of Robina Weermeijer, Unsplash.
The process of moving a task from conscious focus to autopilot is more casually known as habit building, which takes time and repetition. There’s varying research on how many correct repetitions of a task you need before it’s solid enough in your brain that you can let go (and this number also depends on variables like the complexity of the task etc) but building a new habit takes somewhere in the vicinity of a month of consistently and consciously doing the task correctly. Until the task is solidly in autopilot, you have to work a lot harder to make it happen.
Even more laborious is the process of replacing an old habit. For example, if you have a habit of leaving your dirty plates on the table for days at a time and you want to switch to collecting them and washing them immediately after eating, you not only have to do the conscious work of building the habit to wash the dishes after meals but you also have to override the autopilot that’s already in place from your previous habit. Your brain is REALLY REALLY going to want to default to that old habit of just leaving the dishes on the table because defaulting to autopilot is so much less work.
The large amount of effort required for habit-building and habit-replacing is why when people go on self-improvement kicks and declare they’re going to transform their lives by working out every day, keeping their house clean, eating healthy, learning a new language, all at once, they usually crash and burn. We just don’t have enough conscious energy to maintain the level of activity required to build 20–50 habits at the same time, for more than a few days.
How’s This Info Connected to COVID-19?
When businesses closed and social distancing began, just about every aspect of our lives changed, which also means, almost every routine needed to continue meeting our basic needs also changed. How we buy and cook food changed; how we do our jobs changed; how we socialize and entertain ourselves changed; how we run errands changed. Even the most basic task of walking around in public — continuously altering your path in order to stay 6 ft away from everyone at all times — changed.
A medium-skinned woman wearing a black coat and a medical mask walks through the city and looks thoughtfully as a light-skinned man wearing a mask, talks on a cell phone in soft focus nearby. Photo courtesy of Gustavo Fring, Pexels.
Every one of these changes required us to abandon dozens of solidly autopilot habits and learn equal amounts of brand new habits to adapt to the changes, in a very short amount of time. Unlike that fitness-kick we went through in January, the consequences for failing to adopt these new habits could be deadly, to you or someone you love. You’re not supposed to start twenty new habits at once but we didn’t have a choice.
To make matters worse, we are still actively researching and learning about COVID-19, and each time new information comes out, there are additional changes required of us. After a week of working hard on our new habits, we learn we needed to change these habits or add even more, which repeats again the following week. Any semblance of a routine we build up is immediately disrupted again, giving us no time to relax into any kind of predictability.
Our brains are having to make active, conscious decisions, around the clock, just to handle basic functions.
It. Is. Exhausting.
Habits are Harder for Neurodiverse Brains to Develop
In addition to this baseline exhaustion, if you’re neurodivergent in some way, such as having ADHD, major depression, or if you struggle at all with executive function (the mechanism in your brain that translates the idea that you should do something into the action of doing it) you get an added level of difficulty in developing new habits.
We know dopamine as the “happiness chemical” but it also helps you feel accomplished when you’ve completed a task. In a neurotypical brain, going through a strictly practical and unexciting routine isn’t so bad because you are getting little zaps of dopamine for each task you complete. It’s not fun but you do feel a sense of satisfaction in completing it. In addition, a neurotypical brain releases dopamine in anticipation of completing a task, so you get a hit of dopamine at the start of a task to motivate you to do it and then another hit when you finish it.
But the structure of neurodivergent brains is such that transmitting dopamine is physically more difficult for your brain to do, meaning the threshold to receiving that little boost of motivation is higher. You could go through the same boring routine and get NO dopamine as a reward for completing the same tasks, and instead of getting a sense of accomplished satisfaction, it just feels like a pointless slog. It is way harder to motivate yourself to do a task when you never feel that inner sense of accomplishment, so given the choice, you’re much more likely to opt out of the task if you can.
A dozen large white mugs dirty from coffee, stacked in a disorganized way across a wooden table. Photo courtesy of Izzie R, Unsplash.
This process is also a mechanism that neurotypical folks are totally unaware of in themselves and they simply don’t know what it would be like to complete a task and receive zero dopamine in response. Looking at them breeze through work that you have to fight through, it’s very easy to beat yourself up and assume that the difference between you and a neurotypical person is just self-control. But you cannot simply will dopamine into existence. There are treatments and tools that can help with executive dysfunction but it’s exceedingly rare that “Just push harder” is the tool that works.
Given this added difficulty in making a conscious choice to do an unrewarding action, when you could so easily avoid it and save the mental energy, handling our current barrage of new habits is even more challenging.
Quarantine Can Bear Resemblance to Traumatic Environments
I want to start this section by acknowledging that some people are living in unsafe or abusive situations made worse by the requirement to stay home and that the sheer stress of the practical realities of losing your income, little to no access to child care, and avoiding a potentially deadly threat can be traumatic in and of itself. The following observations are not meant to underestimate the severity of those circumstances and the potential for real trauma in our current reality.
And yet many trauma-survivors who are technically safe are still finding that the current circumstances are triggering memories of their past traumas, even if their finances or access to food and shelter aren’t actually at risk.
Unfortunately, many of the necessary practices during a pandemic mirror the coping mechanisms/circumstances related to trauma and abuse: Extreme isolation, the constant practice of self-denial, the acceptance of your needs going unmet long term, a sense of powerlessness about your external environment, thinking of yourself or your body as a danger you must protect other people from, and having to develop a tolerance to the constant low-level threat to your physical safety, are all common themes in traumatic or abusive experiences.
If your past traumas are getting triggered, it’s likely that your nervous system is in an overactive state which can result in: difficulty concentrating, poor sleep, nightmares, irritation, anger, anxiety, a feeling of being “stuck” or frozen, further isolating yourself from social contact, and aversion toward tasks or activities that just feel like “too much”.
A light-skinned woman sits on a couch dressed in a cozy sweater, shorts, and socks, holding a book in her lap and a cup of coffee in her hand. Photo courtesy of Anthony Tran, Unsplash.
Mental health is a complicated subject in the best of times and during our current crisis, it’s even harder to receive or implement treatment while still maintaining basic life necessities.
I don’t have simple solutions to offer you for these heightened challenges but I do want you to take this information and use it to offer yourself compassion if/when you’re struggling. Our knowledge of how to function in society has not equipped us to handle a pandemic and it’s a little bit like we’re having to start over our lives as adults and start learning how to do everything again from scratch.
So, I encourage you to consciously alter your expectations of yourself to something that reflects our new reality, don’t be afraid to use external tools or ask for help even if you haven’t needed them in the past, and forgive yourself when you aren’t able to meet the same standards that pre-virus you could meet. | https://medium.com/invisible-illness/why-does-everything-feel-so-hard-right-now-if-nothing-is-wrong-e16230a99a80 | ['Kella Hanna-Wayne'] | 2020-04-23 19:02:43.446000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Mental Health', 'Mental Illness', 'Psychology', 'Self Improvement'] |
The 10-Slide Pitch Deck | For founders, the pitch deck is still the canonical way to introduce your startup to investors. As an early-stage investor, I see hundreds of pitch decks each year. Pitch decks are useful because they concisely demonstrate not just what you’re building but why. While subsequent dialogue with the founders is critical for developing a complete view, a pitch deck offers a precise look into the founders’ strategy.
Recognizing that a pitch deck might be many founders’ only shot at capturing an investor’s attention, I am sharing a 10-slide framework for creating a killer pitch deck that investors will love.
The order of these slides is important. Think of your pitch deck like a story: There is a necessary order for setting the context, presenting the villain (the market problem you’re tackling), introducing the hero (yes, that’s you), and proposing a solution. The following sequence is more or less a story arc that could work for most startups. Sidenote: When writing your story, assume your reader (the investor) is moderately familiar with the problem space. (You’re best served by choosing investors who are familiar as they will be the most useful to you as a founder.)
Slide 1: Problem Context
Start by asking the question: What does the reader need to know to understand this problem? Highlight the macro trends that are relevant to your company. These trends should start to answer what is arguably one of the most critical questions: Why now?
Let’s use Twilio as an example. Twilio is a developer tool for embedding telecommunications in an app with a few lines of code. Have you ever received a text message from your favorite food delivery app indicating your food has arrived? Yep, that text was powered by Twilio. The relevant industry trends when Twilio was founded might have been: The number of apps that developers create every year is growing x% annually and set to reach # billion apps by 2024. The % of newly created apps that require telecommunications is n%. Developers are increasingly adopting 3rd-party APIs like Twilio and swiping a credit card to avoid designing what would normally be complex infrastructure.
To an investor, these trends indicate a growing market and the rising class of software buyers that would be relevant to Twilio.
Slide 2: The Problem
Introduce the problem that your startup proposes to solve. Ideally, this problem is measurable because most B2B purchases are empirical decisions: cost reduction, revenue acceleration, process enhancement, and so forth. Measurability is especially vital during category creation. If you aren’t replacing an existing solution or selling a product where the value proposition is already widely accepted, it is hard to anchor value.
You also want to describe the downstream effects of this problem. For example, if your product automatically enforces data quality in data pipelines, the downstream effects of having low-quality data = time spent diagnosing data issues and broken analytics dashboards.
This is also the section where you indicate who experiences this problem. Revisiting the Twilio example, the group experiencing the problem would be application developers building apps that use telecommunications for customer engagement. Being precise is essential because this customer persona will factor into your market sizing later in the deck.
Finally, the problem should be durable — investors need to believe that this problem is growing and relevant for the foreseeable future.
For example, InfiniGrow nicely framed the challenges of marketing budget planning in their seed pitch deck.
Source: InfiniGrow seed deck
Slide 3: Incumbent Solutions
This slide should indicate how the problem is addressed today and why the current solutions are imperfect. If there are category leaders, call them out specifically. Make sure to include substitutes as well. For example, a substitute to Twilio might be push notifications or email. If you can measure the deficiencies, then do so (e.g., “it takes a small team of developers 10 months on average to build telecommunications infrastructure from scratch”).
Tie the incumbent solutions back to the aforementioned trends and how these solutions neglect those trends. If, for example, developers are a rising class of software buyers, but the current tools are hard for developers to adopt, you’d want to highlight this tension.
Indicate any users who may experience the problem that current solutions overlook. Before Salesforce, there was not a viable CRM solution available to small and medium-sized businesses.
If applicable, indicate why the incumbents may not easily solve the problem in the way that it should be. Would doing so cannibalize their own business model? Do they not have experience selling to the new buyer persona (e.g., they sell to CIOs, while developers are the ideal buyer)? Are there software architectural limitations that would mean rebuilding their product from scratch?
Take a look at this problem slide from Fivetran’s Series B pitch deck. Without knowing what “ETL” is, the reader still gathers enough context from this slide to contextualize a solution.
Slide 4: Introduce Your Solution
Focus more on what vs. how (this is especially the case with deeply technical solutions). When introducing your product, indicate how it solves the challenges from the problem slide, resolves the deficiencies highlighted in the incumbent solutions slide, and satisfies the market trends described in the opening slide. For example, if developers are a rising class of buyers, acknowledge how your product is sold and adopted by developers.
Using Fivetran’s deck again, here is the slide that immediately followed the problem slide from above. This slide perfectly resolves the problems stated in the previous slide.
Slide 5: Team
Focus on the background and biographical details that suggest founder-market fit. The fact that you attended Harvard is only relevant if your area of study and/or research directly relates to the product you are building. Many of the founders we meet are previously in roles where they experienced the problem first-hand — share those details. I am not as interested in the places you worked as I am in what you actually accomplished in those jobs. If you built a data system at Netflix and are now building a product that makes it easier for companies to build data systems, then hell yes, I want to know this detail.
Here is the team slide from Cloudera’s pitch deck. Cloudera sells a data platform built on Hadoop technology; notice how strongly the founders' backgrounds correspond to the company they are building.
Slide 6: How You’ll Make Money
Answer these questions: What is your business model? Why is this business model optimal given the product and buyer? Who is your target buyer? This is not a screenshot of your pricing page but rather a summary of the strategy behind your business model. The relationship between your business model and your product should be symbiotic — one serves the other and vice versa.
Slide 7: Total Addressable Market (TAM) Calculation
A quality TAM analysis is bottoms-up vs. top-down. If you are selling data analytics software, do not show me the size of the data market. Investors do not want to see “5% of the data analytics market = $XXX.” This is lazy. 😉
Instead, identify your inputs and “reason up” to calculate the size of your market. First, qualify your ideal customer profile (ICP) because this is the first input to the TAM. Second, indicate how many companies satisfy your ICP criteria. Third, approximate an average of what you can earn from these companies on an annual basis. Multiply these two variables together to determine your TAM.
If there are adjacent markets or product expansion opportunities, indicate how the TAM might expand over time: In 24 months, we will ship these new features, which open our addressable market to include new people, thus increasing the TAM by $X.
Slide 8: How You’re Going to Win
The execution plan ties it all together by indicating how your team will realize the market opportunity. Think of this as the order of operations for company building. It’s useful to present an ~18-month timeline because it demonstrates goal-oriented thinking and a precise blueprint for market execution. These timelines usually highlight leading indicators or, said another way, the “business inputs,” which include product milestones, hiring plans, and market development plans (e.g., release product to 3 design partners).
Slide 9: Current Progress
Show off a little bit. Show the outputs (revenue, adoption, usage, etc.) instead of the inputs (hiring, product development status, founding history, etc.). Investors are testing for progress relative to time spent and expectations given the type of product you’re building. The most sustainable tailwind you can use to stay ahead of the competition at the early-stages is your pace of execution. Founders who demonstrate an efficient conversion of inputs into meaningful outputs can benefit from these tailwinds. As an investor, I want to believe that you can do what you set out to do at a rapid pace.
Slide 10: Fundraising & Milestones
Indicate how much you plan to raise and be precise. As a rule of thumb, you can deviate up to ~10% in either direction (e.g., If your target is $10m, you can suggest $9–11m). Founders who suggest target ranges like “$2–5m” demonstrate a lack of clarity about company-building because these numbers have wildly different implications for the inputs and milestones. Building on this idea, indicate why this fundraising goal is the right amount: We need this many developers to launch this product and validate our hypothesis about the market need.
Milestones are equally as important. Indicate what revenue, customer adoption, and product milestones you hope to achieve. If there are specific roles you intend to hire for, highlight these as well. This detail builds on the idea that investors like founders who are goal-oriented and understand where they are going. People do not win races when they do not know the destination. These goals also demonstrate your ambition and ability to create a viable plan to reach them.
Bonus slide: Dream the dream
While your pitch deck tells a story about the medium-term, it’s interesting to understand what this company could become in the fullness of time. Are there adjacent products? Is this a wedge to a broader market? How will the market change in the next few years in a way that may open the door to more ambitious opportunities? Help us dream the dream as investors, and show us how you can oscillate between the tactics and the bigger picture.
Building the arc of your deck in this way will set you up to deliver a solid pitch. If you are a founder in the early-stage enterprise industry building something awesome, drop me a line here. | https://medium.com/@chsrbrts/the-10-slide-pitch-deck-5c1b94d73bcd | ['Chase Roberts'] | 2020-11-20 12:45:48.136000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Investing', 'Venture Capital', 'Silicon Valley', 'Fundraising'] |
What Kanye’s ‘run’ for President has taught us. | American Politics is incredibly toxic, but it doesn’t have to be. We need to reverse our approach to politics & voting.
I do not own the rights to this awesome image.
You can breathe easy, Liberals. The electoral behemoth that was Kanye West has gone back to sleep, according to reports, and he can no longer steal Black votes from Joe Biden. However, the limited polling data that we have from his brief run shows us that he hurts Trump more than Biden. Just a few days ago, Chance The Rapper caused the Twitterverse to explode when he simply asked people why they supported Joe Biden over Kanye in a hypothetical situation where Trump was guaranteed to be ousted. Kanye is clearly unqualified for office, but why is it such a significant issue to ask how Biden would be better? I believe the answer is simple; we approach voting and politics backward.
Waiting on the World to Change
Joe Biden has over a 90% chance to defeat Donald Trump in November. Even with that, he still has incredibly low enthusiasm numbers. How is it that voters are overwhelmingly displeased with their choices, but simultaneously shunning those that voice their displeasure of our options? Especially given the fact that they had a hand in choosing who would ultimately be Trump’s opponent by way of the Democratic Primary Elections. This is a rather strange phenomenon that has a simple explanation. It seems that American voters haven’t quite grasped the concept that they have the power to shape their politics.
Most voters in the Primary just wanted the person that was best equipped to defeat Donald Trump. Given that Biden is the party’s most recent Vice President, has a 40-plus year career in politics, and has high name recognition as a direct result of the two previous points, he was viewed as the ‘most electable’ candidate. This was a title that was bestowed upon him by the Cable News punditry before he had even entered the race. I think the biggest issue that voters are dealing with now is that they just assumed that this was a fact. Not enough people vetted his track record, or bothered to look into what he proposed to do if elected. Not only that, but what kind of standard is ‘we want to beat the opponent’? Donald Trump is a Republican, so of course the Democrats want to beat him. We need to use this to our advantage. We should make the Democrats propose and later enact policies that will help us in exchange for our votes. We should go to the candidates with a list of demands, but instead, the candidates come to us with what they believe is best.
We should have litmus tests. It doesn’t have to be the same for everyone; in fact, it shouldn’t be the same for everyone, but we the people need to set the starting point. If we forced candidates to lay out, in great detail, their vision for America and refused our support when it didn’t pass our test, what would we be capable of? If we hit the ‘skip song feature’ every time a candidate told us a program that our lives depended on implementing just wasn’t possible, would the mainstream consensus in American politics be to say to your voters what they can’t have? If we thought thoroughly and critically about what we needed in our lives and had constructive conversations with our fellow citizens to reach a consensus, would we need the mainstream media to tell us what was and what wasn’t electable? If you’re unsure, take it from someone who’s done all of those things, we’d drastically change how politicians approach politics. I’ve been in the Organizing sphere for a little under a year, and I’ve seen my local school board go from disregarding school meal policy as unimportant, to making it a top priority in their proposed budget. We have to start taking voting and the political process more seriously, for our lives literally depend on it now. Why do we allow politicians to tell us what isn’t possible? It’s our job to tell them what we want and need. It’s their job to make it happen. If they can’t do that, then why do they need to represent us? | https://proletariatpundit.medium.com/what-kanyes-run-for-president-has-taught-us-69f586aa3543 | ['Michael Daniels'] | 2020-07-16 15:19:59.349000+00:00 | ['Joe Biden', 'Politics', '2020 Presidential Race', 'Kanye West', 'Donald Trump'] |
Introducing a simpler fee structure on Liquid | As we recently announced, we’re about to introduce a new and improved trading fee structure on Liquid.
It’s a simplified, flat fee structure of 0.1% for trades on all crypto, fiat and stablecoin pairs, for both maker and taker spot orders.
Simplifying our fee structure helps us offer attractive utility incentives for QASH token holders. One such incentive is that you will receive a 50% discount on all trading fees by paying in QASH. This reduces the fee from 0.1% to 0.05% (or 5 bps).
Our new fee structure is scheduled to launch on March 20, and will apply to all Liquid users (unless you’re a resident of Japan).
Here’s the full breakdown of all new fees:
Spot orders: a flat fee of 0.1% (or 10bps) for both maker and taker orders.
a flat fee of 0.1% (or 10bps) for both maker and taker orders. Margin orders : a flat 0.1% fee for both opening and closing a margin position
: a flat 0.1% fee for both opening and closing a margin position Trading fee in case of liquidation: in the event of a margin call, an additional trading fee of 0.2% will apply on your liquidated position.
in the event of a margin call, an additional trading fee of 0.2% will apply on your liquidated position. This fee structure applies to all trading pairs, including all crypto, fiat and stablecoins.
You’ll get a 50% discount on the above trading fees (except the trading fee in case of liquidation) if you pay in QASH.
What you’ll need to do next
To launch our new fee structure we’ve updated our Terms of Use. To continue using Liquid, all you need to do is simply log in to your Liquid account and accept the updated terms.
Please note that If you are using our API to trade, you will also have to log in and accept the new terms of use before March 19. Keep in mind that after March 19, you will not be able to use Liquid (including accessing it through API) if you have not accepted the new Terms of Use.
We are confident that our simplified fee structure and discounts will make your overall trading experience on the Liquid platform better, and we are looking forward to bringing you more new features and updates on Liquid in the near future. | https://medium.com/quoineglobal/introducing-a-simpler-fee-structure-on-liquid-1553d9b268f0 | [] | 2019-03-07 14:27:19.103000+00:00 | ['Finance', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Products', 'Blockchain'] |
What is Facebook Ads Coupon? What does it do to the page? | What is Facebook Ads Coupon? What does it do to the page? Evo Blogs ·Oct 26, 2020
I’ve seen a number of people in the e-cab group about Facebook ad coupons, with some of the most interesting and untruthful information. Two important information is that using Facebook’s ad coupons is less rich and harmful to the page. I’m creating this article from my long-term work experience, research and case studies. In this case, I have learnt the experience of 3/4 top coupon seller and users in Bangladesh, and i have spoken to them about it.
Table Of ContentsWhat is Facebook Ad Coupon?How does Facebook’s Ad Coupon work?What is the Ad Coupon validity?Will you get less reach using ad coupon?Frauds on coupons if you buy from persons:Some of the harmful aspects of coupon use:Does the page be damaged if you boost with coupons?
What is Facebook Ad Coupon?
Facebook Ad Coupon is a kind of incentive for page users. It’s a gift from Facebook. Its official name is “Facebook Ad Credit”. It’s a special payment method that allows you to pay for Facebook and Instagram ads.
Facebook offers coupons if you create a new account or a long-term boost off. Also, ad credits are available if you participate in some of the sites or companies that are in partnership with Facebook. For example, Facebook’s own survey work.
Currently, a coupon cannot be purchased or requested directly from Facebook. The primary condition of getting an ad coupon is that an account page must have an admin roll and an any personal ad account. | https://medium.com/@tech2asiabangla/what-is-facebook-ads-coupon-what-does-it-do-to-the-page-dcd21d90f5ba | ['Evo Blogs'] | 2020-10-26 18:14:35.273000+00:00 | ['Coupon', 'Fraud'] |
Laracon tickets are now on sale | Laracon 2016 is scheduled to be back in Louisville KY, July 27th through 29th. The full schedule has yet to be announced but it will include typical sessions like last year with a special day for workshops. Ticket prices are $425.00 if you reserve early, otherwise general admission will cost $525.00.
Confirmed speakers include Taylor Otwell, Chris Fidao, Adam Wathan, Jack McDade, and Evan You.
If you’d like to purchase tickets or submit a talk visit the official Laracon site. If you’d like to see some of the highlights of last years event check out the Laracon 2015 Recap. | https://medium.com/laravel-news/laracon-tickets-are-now-on-sale-81d08ca477d6 | ['Eric L. Barnes'] | 2016-01-06 14:06:18.755000+00:00 | ['Conferences', 'Laravel', 'Laracon'] |
Byte Limes #1: Custom Iterables in JavaScript, Truly Reactive Forms, Auto Prefix Jira Issues to Git commit… | Byte Limes #1: Custom Iterables in JavaScript, Truly Reactive Forms, Auto Prefix Jira Issues to Git commit… Nivrith Gomatam Follow Nov 21 · 2 min read
Hi friend, hope you’re well!
Here are some articles that I think would be worth your time:
Photo by Reid Zura on Unsplash
Wouldn’t it be great if we could use the for…of loop to iterate over our own data structures? In this article, we will learn how to do this…
Read more | https://medium.com/bytelimes/byte-limes-1-custom-iterables-in-javascript-truly-reactive-forms-auto-prefix-jira-issues-to-8fc37f6e9a0d | ['Nivrith Gomatam'] | 2020-11-21 05:06:01.860000+00:00 | ['Software Engineering', 'Programming', 'Software Development', 'Web Development', 'JavaScript'] |
My Experience at Khipu AI 2019 | About Khipu
Khipu, the Latin American conference in Artificial Intelligence, was inspired by Deep Learning Indaba, a meeting that’s been happening since 2017 in Africa. It’s last edition took place in November at the Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad de la República in Montevideo, Uruguay. It was the first time that Latin America hosted an AI event of such scale and importance. Hundreds of researchers and professionals from all over the continent joined together with the purpose of empowering research in the field. An effort that was absolutely necessary.
Area cartogram showing countries rescaled in proportion to their accepted NIPS papers for 2006–2016. (Ref)
To make it happen, a large number of people and sponsors had to get involved. It is well known that being a researcher in a developing country is not easy. In Brazil, for instance, a master’s student monthly salary offered by federal government is equivalent to $350 dollars and for a Ph.D, $520. This makes the academic career very unattractive, to say the least. The emotional and psychological pressure are huge. Very often students get frustrated with their work. They feel alone, they feel the social pressure and they feel undervalued. Not to mention that they always have to answer to the “When are you going to get a real job?” question.
Khipu’s Crowd
Spending a week surrounded by so many interesting people was certainly motivating for each one of us. We felt part of a community. Moreover, it was also very important to be around so many successful researchers. They shared their stories and gave us many advices. A succesful academic career seemed like a less impossible goal and also totally worthy and rewarding. It inspired me to continue with my studies and, more importantly, to share my knowledge with the ones that need it. I felt the importance of sharing my experience with my local community and also of being closer to it. This is how I hope to repay to what I learned at Khipu.
Program
Khipu’s “official” routine happened from 08:30 to 19:00, but had many unofficial events. The schedule basically consisted of theoretical lectures interspersed with Spotlights and Sponsor’s Talks until late afternoon. Afterwards, we had parallel practical sessions in which we had the opportunity to choose between two topics or to participate in the Hackaton.
The program was pretty intense, so I’ll just highlight my favourite moments. To see the whole schedule and have access to videos and slides, please access Khipu’s program.
The first day of Khipu was mostly dedicated to Machine Learning and Deep Learning fundamentals. My favourite part of this day was the practical session of Optimisation for Deep Learning. Of course, I can’t say that I’ve mastered this subject, but I felt relieved because now I feel more confident about hyperparameter tuning for optimisation.
Like I said earlier, Khipu had many unofficial events. The organizers worked very hard to entertain us with multiple surprises. The first day of Khipu ended with a Tango performance at Anfiteatro del Edificio Polifuncional José Luis Massera. It was awesome, and the week was just starting.
My favourite parts of Day 2 were Kyunghyun Cho’s lecture on Recurrent Neural Networks and the panel “How to Write a Great Research Paper” with Nando de Freitas, Claire Monteleoni, David Lopez-Paz and Martin Arjovsky.
The panelists shared precious advices: the tips went from text stylistics to editing in collaboration and guidelines. They also shared examples of great papers to inspire us.
Reinforcement Learning Practical Session
The best moments of Day 3 were related to the topic of Reinforcement Learning. Unfortunately, I arrived at Khipu knowing very little about this subject, but Nando presented an awesome lecture and I got very interested in studying it more deeply. The practical session afterwards fit like a glove.
To finish Day 3, one of Khipu’s major sponsors, Tryolabs, threw a great party at Plaza Mateo Rooftop & Bar.
It was amazing to enjoy such a beautiful sunset and get together with so many great scientists. Those feelings of solitude were far distant by now.
After such amazing three days, I thought it would be very hard for Khipu to continue to surprise us — but I was very wrong.
At Day 4, Chelsea Finn gave a fascinating talk about Robotics and Continuous Control. I’ve always been interested in robots, but my studies took me in a quite distant direction. So it was good to learn more about this subject.
David Lopez Paz gave one of my favourite talks ever. His presentation held my attention from the beginning. I highly encourage you to watch the video. In this talk, David guides us through the history of causality and how it relates to correlation.
The most important slide of David’s talk
The 2nd most important slide of David’s talk
Women in AI hosted by Google
To finish Day 4, Google AI hosted the event Women in AI with the panelists Sandra Avila, Chelsea Finn, Maria Simon, Giulia Pagallo, Guillermo Moncecchi and Nando de Freitas. Remember what I said about that feeling of isolation that researchers often feel? I believe it is much worse when it comes to female researchers. The lack of representative female figures makes it feel like this career is not for us. But the room was filled by amazing women and this motivated me even further.
Now it’s time to talk about the last day of Khipu. It’s tough to choose the best moments of such an incredible day. I’ll start by saying that I was looking forward to watch the parallel session on Advanced NLP with Oriol Vinyals Video, Jorge Pérez Video, Luciana Benotti Video and Lucia Specia Video; and I wasn’t disappointed. It was one of the most important sessions to me since this is my research area. This session basically summarized all the hot topics on NLP right now.
Next, Oriol Vinyals presented the exciting project AlphaStar: StarCraft II using multi-agent RL (Video). By now, I must say that if Khipu would’ve been just this morning, I’d be totally satisfied. But it went on!
During lunch I had the chance to present my poster. It was a great opportunity to talk about my master’s research. Khipu happened two weeks before my defense, so it was the nicest way of concluding this stage of my life. But sadly I didn’t have much time to see other posters that were being presented along with mine.
After lunch we had to choose between two parallel sessions: i) AI for Social Good with Jeff Dean Video, Danielle Belgrave Video, Cecilia Aguerrebere Video Slides, Alejandro Noriega Campero Video, Guillermo Sapiro Video and ii) Life of a ML Startup with Mario Guajardo, Agustina Sartori, Martín Alcalá,
Thiago Cardoso, Matthieu Jonckheere.
I chose to watch AI for Social Good and I was pleased to see that so many researchers are working so hard on social problems.
And finally, the last talk at Khipu: Deep Learning to Solve Challenging Problems with Jeff Dean (Video). Jeff is currently the lead of Google AI and most of his talk's been structured around a publication from 2008 by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in which there was a list of Grand Engineerging Challenges for 21st Century. With this, Jeff introduces this list of 14 problems and mentions that Google is currently working on 10 of them. Nevertheless, he selected 5 of these to share their progress with us, namely: i) Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure, ii) Advance Health Informatics, iii) Engineer better medicines, iv) Reverse-Engineer the brain, v) Engineer the tools for scientific discovery. During his talk, Jeff also communicates that it would be very interesting to see what researchers outside of Google could do with more computational resourcers. And then, once more we've been surprised by Khipu. We got free access to cloud TPUs to support our research. Unbelievable.
After the talk, we've been invited to an awesome closing party with dinner and music from a local band. It happened at Club Uruguay, a club located in a historical neighbourhood in Montevideo (Ciudad Vieja). It was incredible. | https://medium.com/datalab-log/my-experience-at-khipu-ai-2019-ffe13d43f582 | ['Beatriz Albiero'] | 2019-11-28 13:42:12.940000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning'] |
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