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Seduction | Your Turn
Theme: Harmonious
Share your own one-line poem (16 to 30 words) or a Chalkboard Espresso (1 to 15 words) on the theme. Tag your piece in response to this post piece and tag your piece “One Line” or “Chalkboard Espresso” as appropriate. If you have a stand-alone poem, be sure to leave a link in the response section below. | https://medium.com/chalkboard/seduction-d56bf6b9a7f | ['Anna Rozwadowska'] | 2020-12-24 17:04:39.965000+00:00 | ['One Line', 'Harmonious', 'Poetry', 'Poetry On Medium', 'Writing Prompts'] |
You’re too Sweet| Part 4 | Image via Zodiac Reads
Seven months later, I give birth to a healthy little boy, whom I named after my grandfather, Marvin. His last name is my maiden name and no one argues with me.
Now twenty-nine, divorced, and a new mother, I move back home to start a new life. My parents watch Marvin while I work. My boy grows into a healthy young man, loving football and video games. Though I see Jace in every moment of Marvin’s life, Marvin never asks about his dad, so I don’t bring him up.
One fall day of his freshman year of high school, Marvin says, “Mom, this old guy was at football practice today, just watching. When a coach went over to confront him, he said he was looking for me, but I have never seen him in my life.”
I drop the wooden spoon I was using to stir the sauce. I’m making spaghetti after my fourth diet fails. The sauce splatters all over my white shirt. “Why is it always sauce?”
Marvin ignores my question, “Do you know who it is?”
I shake my head and shrug it off, but the next day Marvin comes home with the same story. And the next day and the next. Until Friday night, game night. I sit in the bleachers with my parents and Becky with her family. We watched Marvin score a touchdown, but the team still lost.
I walk down the stairs and wait by the locker room. When Marvin comes out, I hug him and tell him he had a good game. After a few complaints about the complements, Marvin points over my shoulder, “That’s him. That’s the guy.”
Marvin indicates a guy lingering near the bleachers. The man has gray hair, is still trim, and wears a sport coat. A lump forms in my throat. Then the man starts walking toward us. I suck in a few quick breaths.
I calm myself enough to tell Marvin to find his grandparents, giving my son’s hair a good ruffle. He huffs before he goes, but my eyes never leave the man. He stops six feet from me.
“Jace.”
“Hello, Marne.”
Aware of my changed demeanor and appearance, I can’t bring myself to make eye contact with him. I focus on his shoes and notice the detailed stitching in the leather.
“You have got quite the player there.” He finally says.
“Thank you,” I thread my hands together. “What are you doing here, Jace?”
“Fourteen?”
I nod slowly.
He hiccups, “Is he mine?”
I look at Marvin, talking to my grandparents. My dad has a hand on his shoulder and my mom is shaking her head. I close my eyes and nod, bracing for impact.
Image via Author
Click HERE for Part 5! | https://medium.com/@renaenicole1/youre-too-sweet-part-4-3e2d592848c6 | ['Renae Nicole'] | 2021-01-07 16:31:30.459000+00:00 | ['Flash Fiction', 'Storytelling', 'Series', 'Fiction', 'Romance'] |
Solutions for finding an Internship / Placement with Careersaas | Internships are not easy to come by these days. The team behind Careersaas identified this as a key issue in 2019 through their own experience and that of others, and wanted to make Careersaas a solution to the problem.
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Log on today and see for yourself @ app.careersaas.com | https://medium.com/@careersaas/solutions-for-finding-an-internship-placement-with-careersaas-5f520d5d1ed4 | [] | 2020-11-23 10:07:21.467000+00:00 | ['Placement', 'Remote Work', 'Internships', 'Job Search', 'Careers'] |
The Clone Wars episodes you should watch | The Mandalorian is bringing back important characters from The Clone Wars and Rebels. Disney also just announced several new shows/movies featuring key characters from the animated shows. The good news? Both are pretty enjoyable and introduce beloved characters and story arcs. The shows even manage to elevate the prequel movies and have a few moments that may change future viewings of the original trilogy. The bad news? There are plenty of filler episodes that aren’t particularly fun or important, especially early on in both shows. If you have all the time in the world, watch both shows in their entirety. If you want to understand who the new characters are while taking in the best story arcs in the shows without watching every episode, I’ve got your back. I’ll only cover The Clone Wars now but I’ll add a link to the Rebels episodes here when I’ve prepared them.
Four important things to note:
Episodes in The Clone Wars don’t always take place chronologically and Disney have posted an official timeline. The exact timing of many events don’t really matter and it’s obvious when episodes are flashbacks. I’ll be going in the original order of the show except for starting with a season 3 episode that serves as a prequel to the first season 1 episode I’m recommending. The season 3 episode works better as an introduction to some key characters. I am completely omitting episodes I think you really shouldn’t watch. That said, I’m giving the episodes I do list two different tags: one is whether it’s bad, meh, or good and the other is if it’s skippable or essential. You won’t see bad, skippable episodes on the list but you will see bad, essential episodes and good, skippable episodes. Essential doesn’t mean good; skippable doesn’t mean bad. If I say an episode is good but skippable and you like the sound of it, then watch it! Some of my favourite episodes will be listed as skippable. Think of the skippable/essential tag as being about what you have to know for later arcs or for the new shows and The Mandalorian. They might just be essential because of what they mean for the Star Wars universe in general. If you have time I’d recommend watching all the skippable, good episodes plus the essential episodes regardless of their quality. Every episode on this list has a reason for being here. It’s either important, good, or both (or meh which means some people might like it so read my descriptions to get a feel for whether you should watch). The episode numbers for some seasons can differ depending on where and how you’re watching the show. For example, a two-part season opener or finale may be regarded as a single episode on some services or two parts by others. I am going to use the episode numbers from Disney+ as I assume most people reading this will be using that service for The Mandalorian. If you’re watching an episode on another service and it doesn’t seem to match how I described it, we probably fell out of sync earlier in the season. I’ve included episode names to help clear this up. The Clone Wars is fine in season 1 and has a few good episodes in season 2 but becomes more consistent in season 3 and then most episodes are good in season 4 and onward. You’ll see I’m skipping most of season 1. Even if you don’t like the episodes I recommend in seasons 1 and 2, stick with the show for at least a few more episodes because it really does improve. That said if you hate Star Wars generally then you’re probably not going to like The Clone Wars.
The Clone Wars Movie
Skippable
Meh
The movie is really just 2–3 ok episodes glued together and not particularly special ones at that. It does have exciting moments and introduces one of the primary protagonists of the show: Ahsoka. The Clone Wars is as much a story about Ahsoka and the Clones as it is about Anakin and Obi-Wan. Although the movie won’t blow your mind, it’s an ok introduction to the conflict you’ll be following and what Anakin and Obi-Wan are like in the show (Anakin in the show is much better than in the prequel films). If you’re skipping, just know that Ahsoka is a very young but extremely skilled Jedi who has been made Anakin’s padawan against his will. This has been set up by Yoda and others as much for Anakin as it is for Ahsoka. I liked her from day 1 but some people find her arrogant and irritating at first. Stick with her. I think it’s fair to say she’s the heart of the show along with the Clones.
Season 1
Episode 3.1 (yes that’s season 3)
Clone Cadets
Skippable
Good
This is the only time I’m going to give you episodes out of order. The first good episode in Season 1 features Clones and you may be surprised to learn that you’ll remember and root for some of them in later episodes. This season 3 episode is a prequel to that episode and you could leave it until later and view as a flashback but it does a good job introducing key Clone characters. I’d watch it first. Humanising the Clones was one of the goals of the show. One of my favourite clones, Fives, is introduced here.
Episode 1.5
Rookies
Essential
Good
Get to know some of your future favourite Clones or if you watched the prequel then see where they are now.
Episodes 1.19–1.21
Storm Over Ryloth, Innocents of Ryloth, Liberty on Ryloth
Skippable
Good
Some of these episodes are good, some are meh, but it’s worth watching something in season 1 that isn’t a Clone-centric episode. Watching these gives you an idea of how the Anakin/Ahsoka pairing is working out, what conflict in the Clone Wars looks like with clones and Jedi against droid armies, and it introduces characters you’ll see in later seasons and in the Rebels show.
Episode 1.22
Hostage Crisis
Skippable
Good
This heist episode isn’t the typical, epic season finale you might be expecting. That said, The Clone Wars has some of the most iconic bounty hunter characters in Star Wars (we’ve already skipped beloved pirate Hondo but he’ll be back) and this episode introduces Cad Bane. His story continues in the first episodes of season 2.
What did we skip?
I know we skipped loads of season 1 but all you need to know is that General Grievous and various other followers of Dooku and Palpatine are commanding the droid armies of the Separatists. Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Ahsoka kick a lot of ass but will cocky Ahsoka be what Anakin needs to curb his recklessness? Will someone like Anakin make a good teacher for Ahsoka? A very cool assassin and former Jedi called Ventress was introduced but her series 3 appearances will serve just as well as an introduction. A fun pirate called Hondo was skipped but he’s non-essential and will be back.
Season 2
Episodes 2.1–2.3
Holocron Heist, Cargo of Doom, Children of the Force
Skippable
Good
These episodes will feel very familiar if you’ve recently played Jedi Knight: Fallen Order. They’re not essential for later arcs but they feature more Cad Bane and high stakes.
Episode 2.17
Bounty Hunters
Skippable
Good
Speaking of bounty hunters, this is a good Mandalorian-like episode featuring Hondo (who we skipped earlier). It’s a fun episode but totally ok to skip if you’re only here for the bigger picture.
Episodes 2.5–2.8
Point Rain, Weapons Factory, Legacy of Terror, Brain Invaders
Essential
Good
Essential and good? The gang are fighting somewhere that will be familiar to fans of the prequel movies. Good action, beginnings of character development, pew pew, whoosh, buzz, slice.
Episode 2.10
The Deserter
Skippable
Good
I love standalone episodes like this. Totally skippable but I recommend it. The episode introduces a one-off character but it’s really about Rex, who you surely know by now and will be following through more of the show. Some of the most important Clone arcs and the consequences of being a Clone and being in the military (and the interplay between the two) are explored through Rex’s experiences.
Episodes 2.12–2.14
The Mandalore Plot, Voyage of Temptation, Duchess of Mandalore
Essential
Good
Mandalore! You know a word very similar to that! The history of Mandalore can be very confusing so I’m going to take a moment to tell you know what you need to know. Mandalore is an Outer Rim planet and in the ancient past there were proud warrior Mandalorians who fought Jedi using awesome armour and equipment made with an incredible material found on their home worlds. During that time, despite the conflict, there was actually a Mandalorian Jedi and he crafted a very cool lightsaber called the Darksaber. The Jedi used to possess the Darksaber but it was recently stolen.
Now in the present, Mandalore is a pacifist planet where the government and most of the population have abandoned their traditional warrior culture. Mandalore isn’t with the republic or the separatists but is among thousands of independent systems and its leader acts as a the representative of those systems. That’s all you need to know going into this. How we get from a pacifist culture that has forgotten its warrior ways to The Mandalorian featuring one of several surviving warrior clans is something you will uncover throughout The Clone Wars and Rebels.
These episodes are pretty good and give Obi-Wan some more development and backstory.
What did we skip?
Season 2 had some ok adventures but some just don’t stand out, weren’t related to future arcs, or didn’t offer much character development. Episode 4 reveals a spy in the Senate called Clovis. We’ll run into him again much later in the show but he’s not particularly important. All you need to know later is that Padme and Clovis have history and Anakin hates Clovis. However, you would pick that up from the later episodes anyway. If you like kaiju films then episodes 2.18 and 2.19 might be cool but they’re just fine and totally skippable. We actually skipped the finale arc of the season because they’re just ok and the only thing you might be interested in is seeing where young Boba Fett is at this point (remember his father Jango was killed in the prequel films).
Season 3
Episode 3.2
ARC Troopers
Essential
Good
If you’ve been watching every single episode of The Clone Wars then this episode is good but skippable. However, if you’ve been following my guide then I’m calling it essential as this will be your introduction to a cool character named Ventress. Although many episodes are about the Clones, this episode is directly tied to the first episodes in this guide that introduced characters like Fives and 99.
Episode 3.10
Heroes on Both Sides
Skippable
Good
This episode introduces a character who will turn up in future episodes but I intend to label most of those as skippable the same goes here. That said, I strongly recommend this episode if not the others. As the show goes on, it begins to ask bigger questions about the war, the Clones, and the Jedi. If you find yourself sympathising with some of the “enemies” and wondering if the Jedi or the Republic really are the good guys then you’ll enjoy this episode.
Episodes 3.12–3.14
Nightsisters, Monster, Witches of the Mist
Essential
Good
More episodes that will be interesting for anyone who played Jedi Knight: Fallen Order! These are essential Ventress-centric episodes that introduce important characters and begin to set up big story arcs.
Episodes 3.15–3.17
Overlords, Altar of Mortis, Ghosts of Mortis
Skippable
Good
Definitely the weirdest episodes of any Star Wars show. These will be amazing for anyone interested in the more mystical side of the force, the prophecy, the chosen one etc. They have exciting and dramatic scenes so may be worth watching even if that isn’t your thing. Bizarre.
Episodes 3.18–3.20
The Citadel, Counterattack, Citadel Rescue
Essential
Good
An exciting mission but more importantly it introduces a familiar Star Wars character to the show and it’s more than just a fun cameo. This episode is essential for some parts that won’t seem important until much later and for watching Anakin’s take on events and this new person in his life.
Episodes 3.21–3.22
Padawan Lost, Wookie Hunt
Skippable
Good
I really struggled with whether these episodes are skippable or essential. They’re good so watch them anyway, especially if you’re like Ahsoka or believe in her potential as a character. Most of what happens in the episodes aren’t essential to know but may be important if you care about Anakin and Ahsoka’s relationship. A fun cameo too!
What did we skip?
We only skipped some adventures or cameos that don’t really matter or aren’t amazing. There’s nothing particularly important to know going into season 4 as long as you watched the episodes I’ve listed as essential. In my opinion the show gets good from here.
Season 4
Episodes 4.7–4.10
Darkness on Umbara, The General, Plan of Dissent, Carnage of Krell
Essential
Good
Big action, your favourite clones under more pressure than usual, and a dilemma that hasn’t been explored in the show yet. These are good Clone episodes, especially if you like Rex.
Episodes 4.11–4.13
Kidnapped, Slaves of the Republic, Escape from Kadavo
Skippable
Good
Skip these if you’re in a rush but I’d recommend watching if you’re interested in seeing another side of Anakin, seeing Obi-wan and Ahsoka out of their comfort zones in different ways, and getting an introduction to Ahsoka’s people. These episodes don’t really matter going forward but they’re worth watching if you like the characters. There’s a lot of slavery in these episodes.
Episode 4.14
A Friend in Need
Skippable
Meh
If you skipped episode 3.10, Heroes on Both Sides, then you can skip this too. If you watched that episode and want to see more of Lux Bonteri then go ahead. You’ll be rewarded with some cool action scenes but it’s just an ok episode and not essential. Lux will be back again. This episode does give you more Death Watch, and we all love everything Mandalorian, but they’ll be back very soon and their shenanigans here can be skipped.
Episodes 4.15–4.18
Deception, Friends and Enemies, The Box, Crisis on Naboo
Skippable
Good
Obi-Wan goes undercover among bounty hunters and things go very wrong. Totally skippable as they don’t affect any future arcs but a lot of people love these episodes. I think they’re good but don’t like them as much as others seem to. Watch if you’ve got the time.
Episode 4.19
Massacre
Essential
Good
The only other essential episodes so far in season 4 were for Clone character development. This is the first essential episode this season about other key characters and must be seen before the season finale, events throughout future seasons, and the Rebels show.
Episode 4.20
Bounty
Skippable
Good
This episode and the next two all follow on from the events of the previous episode but this one is skippable unless you want to see more Ventress and where Boba Fett is now. It’s good but unrelated to where the arc set up by the previous episode is going.
Episodes 4.21–4.22
Brothers, Revenge
Essential
Good
You must watch these season finale episodes. They will eventually lead to a place where several arcs from the show and movies come together and to the eventual creation of relationships, partnerships, and rivalries that will persist through much of the show. The first episode of season 5 is the next is this arc.
What did we skip?
We skipped fewer episodes this season, which means the quality is improving but also there are more episodes related to ongoing arcs. Most of the episodes skipped were average, standalone adventures with little character development. If you skipped episode 4.14, the 2nd episode with Lux Bonteri, you’ve missed seeing where Death Watch were at but that shouldn’t matter now.
Season 5
Episode 5.1
Revival
Essential
Good
If you’ve watched the essential final episodes of season 4 then you know why you have to watch this one. Building from the events in this episode will have big consequences later.
Episodes 5.2–5.5
A War on Two Fronts, Front Runners, The Soft War, Tipping Points
Skippable
Meh
I’d only recommend these episodes if you’ve been following all the Lux Bonteri episodes and want to see where it leads. They’re just ok and skippable and only remain on my list because you might want to see what happens with Lux. Also there’s a character introduced that you may know from the Rogue One movie or the Jedi Knight: Fallen Order video game but it’s not a big deal to skip.
Episodes 5.6–5.9
The Gathering, A Test of Strength, Bound for Rescue, A Necessary Bond
Skippable
Good
Not essential but good episodes if you like Ahsoka, Anakin, and younglings.
Episodes 5.14–5.16
Eminence, Shades of Reason, The Lawless
Essential
Good
Don’t skip. These episodes build from the finale of last season, the Mandalore characters, and more. I could see these forming a decent season finale if it weren’t for what comes next!
Episodes 5.17–5.20
Sabotage, The Jedi Who Knew Too Much, To Catch a Jedi, The Wrong Jedi
Essential
Good
You have to watch these. They’re really good and absolutely essential not just for the show but the characters you will see in Rebels, The Mandalorian etc. Some huge things happen and there are really exciting action sequences and dramatic encounters.
What did we skip?
This is another improved season where we didn’t skip much. As with most of Star Wars, things go very meh as soon as George Lucas is involved in the writing, directing etc. We skipped some R2-D2 episodes Lucas prepared so go back and check them out if you’re a big fan of everyone’s favourite beep boop buddy but if you know Star Wars then you know it’s best when George provides the ideas and others do the execution. If you’ve been watching the Ahsoka/Lux Bonteri episodes but skipped episodes 5.2–5.5 then you just need to know he no longer matters and you’re done with that arc.
Season 6
Episodes 6.1–6.4
The Unknown, Conspiracy, Fugitive, Orders
Essential
Good
These are among my favourite Clone episodes and are essential if you care about the overall story of the prequel films and the events that lead to the original trilogy. Even if the show has failed to interest you in the lives of the Clones or to make you care for some of key Clone characters, these episodes are essential viewing as part of the Star Wars saga. There’s a fun droid I like in here too.
Episodes 6.5–6.7
An Old Friend, The Rise of Clovis, Crisis at the Heart
Skippable
Good
Skippable but among the better mid-season 6 episodes. We skipped an episode in season 2 that revealed a spy in the Senate called Clovis. Padme and Clovis know each other well and Anakin hates Clovis. He turns up here sparking a three-episodic arc that’s worth watching if you like Republic/Separatist politics and seeing what Anakin is like getting closer to the end of the Clone Wars.
Episodes 6.8–6.9
The Disappeared: Part 1, Part 2
Skippable
Meh
I was going to omit these episodes but decided some of you might like them. They feature a team-up nobody wanted but actually works better than you might expect: Mace Windu and Jar Jar Binks. You may have noticed Jar Jar has featured very little in the episodes I’ve listed here but it wasn’t because I hate the character; he just isn’t used much in the best episodes. Here Mace Windu investigates some puzzling disappearances and there’s a perfectly believable reason why Jar Jar is involved in the adventure. If you don’t find Jar Jar as annoying as most people do, you might enjoy his interactions with another character here. That said if you hate him then you’ll still hate him. An important character from previous episodes shows up.
Episodes 6.10–6.13
The Lost One, Voices, Destiny, Sacrifice
Skippable
Good…? Maybe? Or Meh? Yikes
I’ve left these on the list because they end season 6, they were the end of The Clone Wars show for a long time until Season 7 popped up recently, and they explain why Yoda suddenly comes out with “hey, Obi-Wan, I’ve been chatting with force ghosts because it turns out they’re totally a thing and I’ll teach you how that works” at the end of Revenge of the Sith. The good news is that these are weird Yoda-centric episodes that focus on the Force (living force vs cosmic force) and reference various characters and events from other sources. The bad news is that George Lucas is clearly behind these and it’s not a particularly exciting way to end a season, especially given how the last two seasons ended. I knew it was a Lucas episode as soon as I realised the location Yoda goes to and that he takes R2-D2. Watching Lucas episodes often means leaves you scratching your head about moments in the movies that feel like contradictions. Watch if you’re a big Star Wars fan but know you’re getting into a slow, mystical, Yoda episode. Alternatively if you’ve wondered what would happen if Yoda took LSD then you’re in luck.
What did we skip?
This is the only season so far where I included every episode but there are certainly some you can skip, especially everything between and including 6.5–6.9 (Clovis and Jar Jar episodes). In fact, I’d say the only essential episodes were the four that made the conspiracy arc that starts the season and even then it’s essential viewing for Star Wars fans in general more than it’s essential viewing for understanding the new characters in The Mandalorian etc. If you did skip the two Jar Jar episodes (6.8–6.9) then you might want to know that Mother Talzin was defeated (I think) but it doesn’t really matter.
Season 7
Episodes 7.1–7.4
The Bad Batch, A Distant Echo, On the Wings of Keeradaks, Unfinished Business
Essential
Good
Like last season we’re starting with some Clone episodes. For The Clone Wars as a standalone show these are good and I recommend watching them but they’re skippable. However, one of the recent Disney announcements was a Bad Batch show or movie (I can’t remember which) so I‘m listing these as essential as you might want to be familiar with what makes the Bad Batch different. These are emotional Rex episodes and I’d watch them.
Episodes 7.5–7.12
Gone with a Trace, Deal No Deal, Dangerous Debt, Together Again, Old Friends Not Forgotten, The Phantom Apprentice, Shattered, Victory and Death
Essential
Good
Remember Ahsoka? Arguably the main protagonist of this show? Here’s where she’s at! The first of these episodes (7.5–7.8) are just decent but the final few are great. For that reason I’ve listed them all as Good but just know the quality improves throughout. The first episodes are essential because you really want to know what’s happening with Ahsoka going into the finale, into watching Rebels, and into watching current and upcoming Star Wars shows/movies including one literally called “Ahsoka”. The ok episodes are reintroducing Ahsoka and her situation after her huge decision in season 5. The final four episodes (7.9–7.12) are great and must be watched.
Congratulations! You made it through The Clone Wars and hopefully took the route that gave you memorable characters and interesting world-building without too many headaches! I’ll write another one of these for Rebels though that show has fewer standalone episodes and more character development so there will be less skipping. I’ll add a link right here and at the top of this page when the Rebels page is ready.
Let me know on Twitter (@GeneticJen) how you find the show and if you agree/disagree with any of my recommendations. | https://medium.com/@geneticjen/clone-wars-episode-guide-db0740df1234 | ['Jennifer Harrison'] | 2020-12-17 09:16:27.392000+00:00 | ['Clone Wars', 'Star Wars', 'Mandalorian', 'The Mandalorian', 'Ahsoka Tano'] |
Rejoice! New Year’s Eve is cancelled — here’s everything we don’t have to do this year. | Look, there are three great truths in this life.
We live. We die. New Year’s Eve is almost always dogshit.
So rejoice, friends. The most expensive anti-climax of the year is illegal. You might think it’s a shame, that you ‘enjoy’ clubbing, that the months of pre-night out lobbying from the influential members of your friendship group are part of ‘democracy in action’, but you are, I’m sorry to say, wrong.
If you remove the detrimental impact this will have on the arts and hospitality industries, this is good news for everyone involved. Think of the money you’ll save. Think how much more likely you’ll be to complete your new year’s resolutions if you don’t go into 2021 £300 poorer and with the biggest hangover of the year.
Think about all the things you won’t have to do. Think. About. It. The list is endless. And by endless, I mean 5. And so:
1. Find someone to kiss
11.59pm on the 31st December is many things. It is the last minute of the year. It is a chance to reflect with pride and regret, to look forward with hope and worry, to -if you’re into that sort of thing- get caught up in one truly inclusive moment with the ones you love.
“Happy New Year, pal”
It is not the film The Purge but on the common rules of snogging decency. It wasn’t ok to kiss your friends on the mouth at 4.30pm on a Wednesday in October and it isn’t ok now.
Essentially, you can have a year off from desperately trying to snog your mates. Result! For everyone! So take that frantic, smooch seeking energy and spread it out across the year. It’ll probably come across as a sort of confident charm when divided by 365 and you’ll end up in a loving but ultimately doomed relationship.
2. Avoid someone looking for someone to kiss
[11.59pm, 2019, 31st December, your hometown, a disco]
There he is (and statistically, it is a he), standing on the edge of the dance floor. The countdown begins:
“10!” He steps on to the floor.
“9!” He winks with one and a half eyes at you.
“8!” He pulls out a chapstick and applies so much it looks like he’s preparing his lips for an ultrasound.
“7!” He aims the chapstick at you like a pistol and fires it off.
“6!” He blows the top like it’s a smoking gun and holsters it in his bum-bag.
“5!” You turn to see if anyone else is available for you to snog. Everyone else is gearing up for snogs elsewhere. Shit.
(Fun fact: 95% of all NYE snogs are done to avoid snogging somebody else.)
“4!” For one brief second, the strobe catches him and he looks good, handsome even. You realise, shit, this is it, he’s the one, how have I never seen this before? I love him. I. Love. Him. Oh my god, I need to..
A visual aid.
“3!” The strobe catches him again and the thick layer of chapstick on his lips looks like the jelly on the meat of a pork pie. You think, no, probably not actually.
“2!” You pull out your phone. Your dad texted you at 9.45pm “happy nw yr 0f 2 bed nw lol best dad”.
“1!” You scream: I have to take this! Holding your phone backwards and upside down to your ear, you sprint from the dance floor.
“Happy New Year!!!” Alone in the smoking area, you pray for a global pandemic in 2020 so you don’t have to go through this shit again.
3. Paying to go to a pub
“That Red Stripe will be £37. Thank you muchly”
The NYE economy, like a motorway services or an airport, rests on one simple principle: you have no choice but to pay.
Just as somehow it makes sense to spend £1.25 on a Greggs steak bake in Bristol city centre and £45 on one at Moto Severn View Services, logic dictates that a pub I would normally enter free of charge now demands £18 entry just because they’ve put the music on a bit louder and the barman is wearing some novelty sunglasses.
This year, forgo that rip off. Call your living room something funny like ‘The Covid Arms’ or ‘the Prince of Covid’, make a little sign, drink cans out of pint glasses.
Then ‘come home from the pub’ i.e. take the sign down. Put in ‘the call’, stop pouring the cans into pint glasses and set about righting the world’s wrongs/talking about your emotions with an astonishing level of sincerity for approx. 6–8 hours.
4. Going to a nightclub you’re far too old or young to be in
Pubs aside, NYE nightlife caters exclusively for the under 25s and the over 40s. Your 2 options are broadly thus:
I got 4 texts suggesting we go here in 2019.
£75 to go to a super club for an incredibly high concept apocalypse themed fancy dress night like 1980s High School Zombie Apocalypse or The Roaring 20s Nuclear Apocalypse. You will go and bump into a minimum of 10 of your younger siblings’ friends. They will play a song you don’t recognise at midnight and everyone will go mad and you’ll pretend you know it too. You will learn 6 new pieces of slang and misuse 4 of them that very evening. You will feel like a fraud. £40 (£55 with mezze platter and 2 glasses of ‘bubbles’) to go to a city centre restaurant that has pushed the tables to the side and will play a collection of ‘world’ music for 2 hours before someone puts a Motown Gold compilation on until they kick out at 2am. You will go and bump into a minimum of 15 of your friend’s parents. They will play Celebration by Kool & the Gang at midnight and the mums and dads will go fucking bananas. Your future will terrify you.
“Hello officers, yep, just me here.”
So, do something age appropriate this year and sit in your lounge listening to all the music you listened to as a teenager. Sing along so loudly the neighbours call the police because they think you’re having a party. Then when the police arrive it’s just you, surrounded by 8 Tyskies, screaming along to The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance. Heaven.
Then, next morning, spend all that money you saved on some practical footwear or pay off some of your credit card.
5. Staying up past midnight
I like to celebrate NYE Iranian style. By that I mean counting down at around 8.30pm Greenwich Mean Time. “Why are you going to bed at 11pm?” idiots ask. “It’s 2.30am in Tehran and I am pooped. Now I bid you شب بخیر,” this genius replies.
A ‘joke’ explained.
Admittedly, this approach isn’t for everyone. Some people are night owls. I am not a night owl. I am a day pig. I’m up at 6am. Is that to be productive or is it because there’s only so long you can stare at the ceiling ? Who can truly say? Either way, this piggy’s up and sniffing for activities. Ready to seize the day in his limp, exhausted trotters.
Just let me rest.
NYE is a challenge for the day pig. Especially a day pig pushing 30 who is writing this at 10.45am and is frankly already exhausted. The pressure to stay up is a lot of weight on his muddy, sleep deprived shoulders. Let him skulk off to bed or doze right there on the sofa. He’s had a long day.
The point is, go to bed when you want this year. Oink. Oink. | https://medium.com/@hpughwaters/rejoice-new-years-eve-is-cancelled-here-s-everything-we-don-t-have-to-do-this-year-773205aa751f | ['Harry Pugh'] | 2020-12-14 12:23:59.711000+00:00 | ['Funny', 'New Years Resolutions', 'Christmas', 'Comedy', 'New Years Eve'] |
Be the Stillness | I think therefore I write. I have an MA in Creative Writing. I write fiction and short thought pieces. There is more about me and my other work on LinkedIn.
Follow | https://medium.com/house-of-haiku/be-the-stillness-8ad40013c738 | ['David Hope'] | 2020-11-16 11:54:17.228000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Nature', 'Stillness', 'Haiku', 'Zen'] |
醫院＆診所都需要的專屬線上預約 / 網路掛號 系統！ | 免費的跨平台線上預約排程系統，同時支援網頁版以及行動裝置
Oh, Instagram, the source of inspiration for countless millennials, a visual gem and the perfect “look at how cool I… | https://medium.com/simplybooktw/%E9%86%AB%E9%99%A2-%E8%A8%BA%E6%89%80%E9%83%BD%E9%9C%80%E8%A6%81%E7%9A%84%E5%B0%88%E5%B1%AC%E7%B7%9A%E4%B8%8A%E9%A0%90%E7%B4%84-%E7%B6%B2%E8%B7%AF%E6%8E%9B%E8%99%9F-%E7%B3%BB%E7%B5%B1-542035888538 | ['Simplybook.Me'] | 2020-12-08 11:57:39.507000+00:00 | ['Simplybook', '五分鐘打造專屬預約系統', 'Productivity', 'Medical', 'Simplybookrecommend'] |
Depression matters! | The persistent feeling of sadness and loss, in other words a killer in oneself. People nowadays don’t take mental health as seriously as it should be. It’s either one of two options, “You’re just an attention seeker” or “Suck it up buttercup” The people who don’t suffer from it don’t understand, it takes everything you have and feel away till you either overcome it or give up.
My battles of depression got me to overcome some fears, but also hit rock bottom. I wish there was a way to cure it completely, but once you have it, it never goes away. You spend your whole life over thinking, feeling like your not good enough, and always scared to get hurt. You push yourself away from reality, thinking you’re doing a favor for everyone. But honey, you’re only hurting yourself. I grew up in a split family kind of situation. Lived with my mother who was an addict (still is) on weekdays, and I lived with my father on some days and weekends. I was never allowed to voice over my opinions, or emotions. I had no one to talk to but those free counsellors, which in my case they never helped me in what I needed. All I needed was someone to just hold me and tell me it was going to be okay.
With my mothers abusive ways and also my fathers, I learnt to keep to myself and only speak when spoken. I was always scared, no matter where I was that someone was going to hurt me. This went on for a few years, until I was taking away from my mother. At the time, I was so hurt and lonely without her, but as I got older I ended up hating her for what she did to me. (That’s for another story) I was then living with my father full time. Though I love my father with all my heart, and he is a super amazing dad. There were some challenges between him and I. You could call it really tough love. Details will most likely be released in further stories, if people are interested in this.
By the time I was around 12–13 years of age, I addressed my problems that I had. I needed emotional help for the destructive childhood, I had. I have been feeling this deep hurt inside of me that no one could help. Most days I hated waking up in the morning, I hated doing the things I once loved. In life no one prepares you for “depression” it just hits you, then it attaches to you. In order for me to get the help I needed, I had to report my father. And from that moment on, my life fell apart.
Depression didn’t go away, it got worse. I lost the connection with my father, and at that point hadn’t spoken or seen my mother in over 7 years. All I wanted was acceptance and love but couldn’t get access to it. Depression hid me from anybody trying to get to know the real me. They only saw what it lets them see. A hurt, small child. I was nothing back then. I was terrified to speak up for myself, not wanting to hurt anybody. So I stayed silent.
As I entered high school, that’s when I hit my breaking point. Enough is enough. I needed to be myself, I was tired of always being afraid. I got the courage to move out and start a life for myself. I was tired of living day to day not knowing if I could make it another day. I wanted to be happy and be a teenager since I never got to experience it. I felt like a prisoner in my own house. Since then, I’m not scared to tell anyone what I’m thinking. I’m not scared to defend myself in an argument.
In conclusion to this part of my life, no matter what you go through depression never goes away. But if you fight it to an extent, it won’t take over and you have full control. Don’t let it swallow you up whole, because it’ll only eat you more and more. This is just an insider on a part of my life that still affects me to this day. I am new to this platform and wanted to see where this could take me. If you are interested in more detailed stories, let me know and follow for more :) Thank-you, sincerely Madison C. | https://medium.com/@madisoncaron/depression-matters-f136de1d18a | ['Madison Caron'] | 2020-12-27 16:43:47.614000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Addiction', 'Depression'] |
Connections | Photo by Matus Karahuta on Unsplash
Essential to our survival as individuals, as a race are — Connections.
Like hangs a spider, from its threads of gossamer
So, do we, in our lives suspend through connections.
In this world constantly changing — swiveling as I write,
Perhaps its temperature saw an infinitesimal rise.
Our shard of existence scales just to a moment
For the Universe and for us, fills entire lifetimes.
Like waves shaping a sandy shore —
rising, giving and withdrawing,
We see also changes in us —
the way we speak, and the way we live.
Our brains still wired to our tribes wanting to sleep side-by-side.
Yet, like uprooted plants, we are missing our quorum senses,
And trying to find soil in an ocean floating uncertainty at its abyss.
To weather this change, one must find connection –
To another human, another soul, and maybe even to a cyborg,
A plant, an animal, and why exclude an android?
Woven in this web where not all threads are seen
As beings, we won’t be wrong
To find connections that help survive.
Taking fragile to reach strong.
As unexpected as may seem, there is comfort;
In an old recording of voice or in Alexa finding your song
And in listening to a tree speaking the language of the wind.
There is connection —with a crab scurrying across the sand.
With the cat curled up in a corner,
And with the stranger across the street —
You’ve but exchanged mere glances, an occasional smile.
Through such connections, we survive. | https://medium.com/illumination/connections-3f24181b23c8 | ['Ananya Ashok'] | 2020-12-10 13:11:26.159000+00:00 | ['Connection', 'Togetherness', 'Humanity', 'Survival', 'Network'] |
The Math behind Machine Learning | How far is math important when speaking about machine learning?
Many of us start looking at the coding part to improve programming skills.
Machine learning has become a debatable field in the last 5 years, especially after the bomb of ‘Deep Learning’. Within this wide rush towards it, it is important for any beginner in this field to understand the basics of machine learning and its core aspect, the one that is leading it to be here today, and the core that will lead machines to lead the world.
In this article, I will try to cover a simple yet effective part of the math behind machine learning which is the probabilistic view of models using probability simple rules only.
The following image has crossed my way today:
Probably .. the master of ML.
The five rules of probability. Mainly, all programmers have taken a probability course in their high school or college. As simple as it seems, these simple rules form the most important laws of machine learning.
To make things clear, I will start stating some examples that use these probability rules ( shown in the figure above) and others.
CTC algorithm
CTC ( Connectionist Temporal Classification) is one of the interesting algorithms used in sequence-to-sequence models, that is based on probability laws. For instance, it works as follows:
let x be a letter ( x : letter) , w be a word ( w:word)
The question is: what is the probability of having the letter x in the word w ?
p(x/w) = ?. The answer here determines the next step that the algorithm will take.
Now, to know its importance, check the impact of CTC in the following subdomains of machine learning:
Handwritten text recognition, Voice recognition
The reason behind using ctc in these models is that they rely mainly on the probability on the next step to decide the current one.
The figure above shows the baseline architecture of the handwritten decoding model. First of all, convolutional layers are used to extract features for the handwritten images. Next, their output is fed to bidirectional lstm layers, simply to save the current feature(letter) to compare it with the next feature(letter). In this case, we say what is the probability of letter x1 knowing that it is followed ( or passed by) letter x2? see? simple probability lows lead to gentle and great models that will take the world into another future!
Finally, after predicting the pattern of letters, they will enter into a decision-making tree, the CTC model is responsible for choosing the correct pattern of the word.
Probability is the science of studying uncertainty. Machine learning is the science of solving uncertainty by making it ‘mostly’ certain.
These two factors make a great combination of togerther. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/the-math-behind-machine-learning-331a4603838d | [] | 2020-10-16 13:07:20.325000+00:00 | ['Math', 'Machine Learning', 'Neural Networks', 'Problem Solving', 'Deep Learning'] |
Netflix is already a global phenomenon; where does it go from here? | IMAGE: Tumisu — Pixabay (CC0)
This is a good year to think about the impressive power of Netflix, the first truly global television channel, with some 167 million subscriptions worldwide and that has a far greater reach based on the number of people per household, and even bigger if you take into account subscribers who share their password with friends and family. In the United States, even before the pandemic, Netflix was broadcasting more than 100 million hours of content per day, giving it 10% of the time Americans dedicate to watching television, and some of its series are already household names.
Over the course of a year we spent most of locked down in our homes, during which we watched a lot of Netflix, the company has recorded some impressive numbers: in the first two quarters it attracted 15.77 and 10.09 million subscribers respectively, and although that dropped to 2.2 million in the third quarter, its share value rose by 60%, giving it a capitalization of almost $235 billion dollars. Some analysts are predicting that its share price of $529 could reach $670, putting its worth at $295 billion.
But beyond the numbers, Netflix is increasingly a cultural phenomenon: in 2018, I was struck by an article that linked the appearance of an actor or actress in a Netflix series to their increased popularity on the social networks, pointing to the company as the factory of a whole new generation of global icons. Now, it seems that there’s an increased interest in chess following the success of Queen’s Gambit, an upsurge in online searches about Michael Jordan following The Last Dance, or the rise in discussions and searches related to the problems related to social networks after the release of The Social Dilemma, to name just a few.
How does one estimate the value of a company with a presence in every country in the world except China, North Korea, Crimea and Syria, which consumes almost 15% of the global bandwidth, and which now produces its own cultural phenomena? Netflix’s success lies not only in creating and distributing content: it is to have done so through a system of machine learning algorithms capable not only of recommending the most appropriate content for each of its user, but of using them as a guide for planning its productions.
In addition, there are the consumption patterns created by the company: encouraging binge watching by making all the chapters of a series available to users at once, has turned many of us into junkies, in many cases, when we watch a series on Netflix, we devote a good part of an evening to it. Its strategy of data analysis and its long-term vision has created economies of scale and increased knowledge, as well as garnering more nominations for industry awards than any other company, and all underpinned by a healthy bottom line.
In short, Netflix’s criteria for producing and delivering content has made it a global phenomenon; one can only wonder what the future holds. | https://medium.com/enrique-dans/netflix-is-already-a-global-phenomenon-where-does-it-go-from-here-79ba277ad327 | ['Enrique Dans'] | 2020-12-29 09:34:33.828000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'Netflix', 'Data', 'TV Series', 'Machine Learning'] |
A Discursive Essay to the Bird on the Windowsill of Chaos | One: You
You are dressed to kill
in downy feathers and
eyes like pits of Hades;
Pits of passion, never
heard of again because
‘we mustn’t upset your
Mother’. Keep your madness
locked away inside until
it begins to break out of you in hypermetrical
Harpings-on of your soul as it strives to push out through your chest,
push past your heart and your lungs and your ribs, your
muscles and skin and those fucking fucking feathers that never stop
Shed
d i n g.
Two: Liminality
Windowsills are pretty places.
lim-uh-nal-i-tee (noun, Anthropology): the transitional period or phase of a rite of passage, during which the participant lacks social status or rank, remains anonymous, shows obedience and humility, and follows prescribed forms of conduct, dress, etc.
You were never one for liminality.
You stand on your windowsill,
looking out on bright blue blossoms of
blooming sky,
Waiting
for the anonymity to sink
in
but it doesn’t.
You are a paradox in a fur coat.
Three: Rise
The phoenix rises
as it changes anew.
Smoke rises
as its lover blows it through.
You rise
like Lucifer falls.
Off, off and up
to the telephone wire,
to a scalpeled line in the flesh of morning,
mourning what could have been,
your madness spat out
in soft specks of dew,
and forevermore, i will think of
you,
you
you | https://medium.com/@annacoopey25/a-discursive-essay-to-the-bird-on-the-windowsill-of-chaos-916e6b00b79d | ['Anna Coopey'] | 2020-12-03 23:25:24.258000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Poet', 'Madness', 'Birds', 'Poem'] |
Generate Bitcoin Wallet Keys With Scannable QR Code | The use of bitcoin paper wallet is fairly easy login to a secure website go to the account section tap on to receive button of your account and a QR code will be displayed and then open your paper wallet to see your private key and your code and Scan the code with your camera tap to send funds
The Public Key and Private Key
So the question now arises how this all functions There are some basic differences between the Private key and Public key, The Private key is faster while the public is slower key, and the Private key decrypts data which is then coded while the public key encrypts the code
Top Bitcoin Paper Wallet Generator Website
So which is the best place for all users to interact with such technology there are some Top bitcoin paper wallet generator website such as
bitcoin-paper-wallet.net
bitAddress.org
btcofficialwallet.org
btc-paper-wallet.com
The Safest Way to Store Bitcoin
There are many forms of storage of bitcoins are upon which depend on customer’s preferences such as cold storage the most secure methods of collection bitcoins as these wallets are Inaccessible by the internet and customer's sensitive information can never be exploited. Offline wallets are disconnected from electronic devices and half of the information is kept on a physical system it is considered the advanced and safest medium for bitcoin.
Hot Wallet another way to store bitcoin they run online and are connected to various devices while they can be very suitable for some customers and can get their work done faster.
Bitcoin Deep Cold Storage system is the most discreet system of storing bitcoins where the owner remains unknown and still gets to use services the user security of not losing bitcoins or theft is the most important aspect of this system was found by a company in London that gave services of bank vaults for secure keys of bitcoins | https://medium.com/@btcusd/generate-bitcoin-wallet-keys-with-scanable-qr-code-d4e9e367e3b | [] | 2021-06-02 10:31:14.267000+00:00 | ['Crypto Wallet', 'Wallet', 'Bitcoin', 'Bitcoin Wallet', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
Basis Risk, Alpha Factories, and Being too Clever for your own Good | The beauty of a robust financial market is that you can make exactly the bet you want to make. Suppose you’re an American investor and you’ve found a really great company in, say, Argentina. You buy the stock, it rises 50% — but it’s priced in Argentine Pesos, which are down a little more than 35% in the last year, so in dollar terms you’ve lost.
The natural response is to hedge, and many investors do. Why make two bets when you’re only betting on one thing?
This is usually sensible, but not always. Consider the case of investing in an exporter located in a country that’s dependent on exports. In this case, the currency is a natural hedge: a lower Yen is bad for unhedged US investors, but it’s good for the companies they invest in. Put another way, investing in Japanese stocks and hedging out currency risk is equivalent to betting on a Yen devaluation and doubling down.
That’s precisely what WisdomTree’s DXJ ETF did: they bought Japanese stocks and hedged their Yen exposure. From November 2012 to May 2013, the Yen was devalued from 80 to 102, Japanese exports promptly rose, and DXJ’s assets under management rose about 18x. DXJ turned into one of the hottest funds, not because it made superior stock picks (it’s a purely passive vehicle), but because it “hedged” in a way that actually constituted doubling down on its bets.
DXJ hasn’t done terribly for subsequent investors, but they’ve missed out. Since that rise, it’s up another 38% or so, but it’s underperformed US equities and other ETFs, and lost around three quarters of its assets.
There’s a useful lesson for investors there: a “hedge” that doesn’t address the underlying risk of an investment can produce misleadingly good results, at least for a while.
Hedging as a Way of Life
DXJ is a retail-facing product. An institutional investor taking a view on Japanese equities and FX would probably trade the underlying index and hedge manually, rather than paying WisdomTree almost 50 basis points per year to execute some straightforward currency trades.
However, some risks are harder to hedge. An investor in airlines, for example, is taking a view on:
Consumer spending
Corporate spending
Oil prices
Short-term rates (if the airline issues floating-rate debt)
Long-term rates (if they use fixed-rate debt)
The dollar (planes and oil are priced in dollars, but some plane tickets might be priced in pounds or Euros)
Local elections (which can delay or accelerate new terminal openings)
National elections (which can affect who gets to compete with them)
Global warming (snow causes frequent delays in New York and Boston airports)
Long-term growth in credit card spending
The airline itself
The two schools of thought here are to either to evaluate these risks one airline at a time or one risk at a time. The classic stock-picking approach is to do this at the airline level; to model each company’s quarter based on its idiosyncratic risks, and to demand higher returns from companies with more hard-to-model risks and lower returns from the ones that are hedged. On oil, for example, a low-cost carrier with an inefficient fleet faces relatively more oil risk, and gets its valuation penalized accordingly. Delta owns an oil refinery, which reduces some of their oil risk; United has a Houston hub, which hedges their oil risk because whenever United is paying extra for oil, Exxon is buying more seats on their planes.
If you don’t want to take these risks, one approach is to divide the entire universe of investable equities into little clusters that are subject to similar risks, then invest in a balanced long/short portfolio within these sectors. In other words, instead of being positive or negative on airlines, you’re picking two or three to be long and three or four to short. You repeat the same process for semiconductor stocks, natural gas companies, auto manufacturers, and banks.
Any one of these portfolios will be extraordinarily boring. There just aren’t a lot of reasons for one company to out- or under-perform its immediate peers. But there are some reasons, and in theory the risk of such a portfolio is minimal, which allows investors to lever up. Often, they can lever up a lot: 6–8x equity is a good range to think of.
Call it the “alpha factory” approach. Set the allowed level of beta in each portfolio to zero — no profit or loss from any predictable source of randomness. And then lever up what’s left to produce streams of uncorrelated profits.
By taming the portfolio’s exposure to volatile, hard-to-predict factors, this strategy lets companies produce healthy risk-adjusted returns. With outcomes less dependent on luck, funds can be more meritocratic, i.e. they can fire faster. If you’re evaluating a long-only portfolio manager who is down this year, you can argue about which vagaries of the market were responsible. If you’re looking at a PM who spends 100% of his time on luxury goods companies, always runs a balanced portfolio, and lost money last month, it’s probably that PM’s fault.
But there’s a hidden factor exposure here: what if all the balanced, market-neutral, factor-neutral funds end up making the same trades? In the short term, this is great; if you’re long X and short Y, and someone else makes the same trade, both legs of your portfolio outperform at the same time. If your competitors are raising more capital, they slowly ease into the same trades you’ve already made, so your portfolio shows smooth appreciation.
Until, suddenly, it doesn’t.
Quant Quakes and Invisible Factors
September 1998 and August 2007 were very different times, but one thing they had in common was that they were months in which every correlation went to 1. In 1998, Italy/German bond spreads, US corporate high yield spreads, and the discount for announced-but-unconsumated mergers all moved together. In 2007, value stocks, momentum stocks, and complicated CDOs all traded the same way.
What had happened was that investors were levering up uncorrelated bets, but since they were all looking at the same historical data, they all made the same uncorrelated bets. A measurably low correlation will always equal 1 in a crisis, because the natural bettors on that relationship are all liquidating at the same time.
In hedging, we’d call it “basis risk,” i.e. the risk that the instrument you’re using to hedge doesn’t match the performance of the thing you’re hedging. 90% of the time, if you own shares of company X and you short shares of their closest competitor, you’re hedged. But sometimes that means owning IAG, shorting Ryanair, and suddenly realizing that the most important thing going on at Ryanair is that their competitor, IAG, is facing strikes.
Levered, hedged approaches based on backwards-looking correlations are a way to manufacture higher correlations in the future. You don’t have to know exactly where those risks will come from to know that they’re coming.
Premium Beta
One of the perennial debates in active management is over what counts as value-added alpha and what represents beta, i.e. the results anyone could get from market exposure. Over time, the definition of alpha has gotten more restrictive. Fund managers used to be able to take credit (and charge!) for things like momentum or value. Now, those are commodities, easily available in ETF form.
The usual definition I see is that if your returns can be matched by writing a simple list of rules based on a widely-available data feed, it’s beta. Buying stocks that are cheap relative to tangible book value: beta; buying stocks that are cheap relative to intangible brand value: still alpha, for now, but as soon as SurveyMonkey spins up an API that lets you instantly ask a thousand random Americans what kind of premium they’d pay for WD-40 or Hershey over the brand-X competitor, that strategy instantly collapses into beta.
But I’d argue for an even stricter definition of beta. Beta is the extent to which one fund’s performance can be predicted entirely on the basis of how a handful of their competitors are doing. You may not correlate with the S&P, or with any of the Fama-French factors, but if you correlate with somebody, neither of you will be able to charge high fees.
This isn’t uniformly terrible news for asset managers. Investors are risk-averse, so they hate to lose money. On the other hand, they’re generally not losing their own money, so they care about reputational risk. Going long this kind of beta means making a hedged bet: yes, you might lose money, but so will all of your peers; you’ll be embarrassed and collect a low bonus, but you won’t get fired.
However, as discussed, that’s just temporary. In the long term, all the easy hedges accumulate future risk, and the probability of a blowup asymptotically approaches 1. | https://medium.com/swlh/basis-risk-alpha-factories-and-being-too-clever-for-your-own-good-6f3eca0603d | ['Byrne Hobart'] | 2019-10-18 13:22:18.753000+00:00 | ['Economics', 'Business', 'Quant', 'Finance', 'Investing'] |
Numb | Numb
Prose
Photo by Konstantine Trundayev on Unsplash
You’d know you hit rock bottom
when the people around you start to vanish.
One by one
they leave,
as your social circle becomes smaller by the second
even your tears leave you too.
What’s left is someone brimming with sorrow
yet with no tears to cry
only to wallow waist-deep in negativity
yet trying so hard to fight on.
I always believe that NO ONE
in this world is weak or strong.
We all fight our share of battles,
but some of us grow tired of fighting wars
we know deep down we’ll never win
So we let them get the best of us.
And like that,
we grow tired.
We grow tired of societal expectations.
We grow tired of the piles of workload.
We grow tired of donning fake smiles.
We grow tired of making an effort to dress and look presentable.
And when all around us makes us tired,
we fall into the worse stage of
being numb
where emotions are left unfelt
And people are left uncared for.
We start to become encompassed by more negativity
maybe start to bring harm to the question
we neglect everything, everyone,
and most importantly,
ourselves.
We look into the mirror
see not us
but someone rotten of emotions
numb of life.
The worse part?
Nobody knows about us.
Nobody knows our anguish
, nor do they check upon us.
And in our attempt to share with them our troubles,
only to be replyed with
dramatic
or exaggeration.
Depression is scarily
widespread today.
It is heart-wrenching to know.
CHILDREN now
already falling into the abyss of depression.
And when they reach out to parents and friends
with a fixed mindset
and heedless thoughts
they question everything
they question whether they are loved or not
they question favoritism
and whether the earth truly has a space for them.
And as they jump from balconies
or harm themselves in clandestine
who are we to refuse
that the upcoming generations
might only mature to be sadder?
Depression is named
the silent killer
for a reason.
and none of us should neglect that
or anyone suffering from it.
The stigma surrounding mental illness should be
eradicated as soon as possible.
Because I love you.
We love you.
If you decide to let depression get the best of you,
who would take care of your kitten back home?
Who would assure the grieving parents that go to bed crying every night?
Who would be here to look at the beauty of the world, to taste the tastiest of waffles, see the brightest of days, to see the person who actually loves you?
because mark my words.
We all love you. You are never alone, and we got your back. Hang in there, please!
You may go to bed sad every night, may not be loved widely, but at least you’re loved DEEPLY.
By me. | https://medium.com/know-thyself-heal-thyself/numb-ad34d9cb9f9d | ['Daniel A. Teo'] | 2020-12-10 17:58:13.161000+00:00 | ['Prose', 'Mental Health', 'Happiness', 'Depression', 'Self Improvement'] |
The Crazy Sources of Red Food Dye | Even before I learned that “red velvet cake” was just chocolate cake with red food coloring, I considered it one of my favorite flavors — ironically, second only to (un-dyed) chocolate.
A surprising amount of the food we consume contains various compounds to add color. Marshmallows look white, but they contain blue coloring (to keep them from growing less bright as they sit on shelves). Starbucks uses food coloring in its strawberry drinks. And frozen meat, like fish and crab meat, contains red food coloring to make it more appealing.
But where do we get this food coloring from? In the case of many red dyes, it comes from an unexpected source:
The crushed bodies of a Central and South American insect, called the Cochineal.
What’s the history of our use of a crushed-up bug for our red food coloring needs? What foods contain this insect product?
And can we avoid eating insect-based dye — or are the alternatives even worse?
Let’s dig into the red meat of this cool intersection of food and biology.
Carmine Red, the Aztec Secret
A little insect biology on the Cochineal: this critter is a scale insect (not a beetle) that thrives on cacti. It drills little holes in the cactus and sucks moisture and nutrients from the plant.
In order to repel other insects, birds, or other creatures that may find it to be a tasty snack, the Cochineal produces a nasty-tasting compound called carminic acid. And these bugs contain a lot of carminic acid — between 17–24% of the bug’s dry weight is made up of just this compound!
If you harvest a bunch of these bugs, crush them up, and dunk them in an acidic solution, the carminic acid can be extracted. When extracted and processed through mixing with salts, the result is carmine dye, which is a brilliant, vibrant red color.
(You may also recognize this color under other names, including Cochineal extract, Natural Red 4, E120, or Crimson Lake.)
Thankfully, these bugs grow and reproduce quickly, since it can take 70,000 individual Cochineal insects to produce a pound of Carmine Red dye!
A cochineal insect on its preferred food, the prickly pear cactus. Source.
Cochineal were harvested by the Aztecs in Central America to produce red dyes, and when the Spanish invaded, they claimed the secret of Carmine Red as their own. They managed to keep the source of this dye as a secret for more than two hundred years; it wasn’t until the late 1700s that a Frenchman managed to infiltrate a Cochineal plantation and steal samples of the bug and its cactus food source.
Carmine Red isn’t the only red dye that’s produced today — in fact, the production of Carmine dye was nearly wiped out in the 1900s as more synthetic dyes were discovered — but it’s still in widespread use in various foods. It’s also used in many beauty products, such as in those vibrantly red lipsticks.
But if we can make synthetic dyes, why would we keep using Carmine Red?
Coal Produces Other Colors Besides Black
When we talk about coal, we usually picture a deep, inky black substance. But coal byproducts — and petroleum byproducts as well — can also be used to produce other colors.
There are several azo dyes, which are named after the presence of two rings connected by a pair of nitrogen atoms. These dyes are all synthetic, produced first from coal byproducts, and later from petroleum products.
These petroleum-based synthetic dyes include two, named amaranth dye and Allura Red — which you may recognize from some food labels as Red 2 and Red 40, respectively.
Mmm, love how that Red 40 dye gives my ketchup that added kick that perfectly offsets my hot dog. Photo by Pedro Durigan on Unsplash
Red dyes made from petroleum products are in many of the red-colored foods that we eat, including ketchup, candy, and soda.
But when we’re dealing with consuming chemicals derived from fossil fuels, there are added concerns, generally related to the possibility of cancer.
For example, let’s look at amaranth, the azo compound that’s commonly labeled today as Red 2.
It was used widely throughout the 1900s, up until 1971 — when scientists in the Soviet Union published an article suggesting that it may be able to cause cancer when consumed at high doses. This caused an outcry among the public, and five years later, the FDA issued a ban after concluding that Red 2 was linked with cases of cancer in rats.
Interestingly, although Red 2 is still illegal in the United States, it was not banned in the European Union and is still widely used in food products sold there.
And conversely, the European Union requires that any food containing Red 40 must be explicitly labeled. In the United Kingdom, certain synthetic food dyes are also under additional examination, as there may be a potential link between hyperactivity in children and the consumption of artificial coloring agents. The evidence is not overwhelming, but scientists and government groups are cautious about the human consumption of petroleum products.
Bugs or Petroleum?
In the end, there are potential risks to either artificial color additive that we put in food; the Carmine Red dye produced from the Cochineal insect can occasionally cause an allergic reaction, and it’s technically not a vegan product, since it’s derived from insects.
The many synthetic red dyes, however, including Red 2 and Red 40, are derived from petroleum products and have occasionally been linked to cancer or hyperactivity. Neither of these links has been fully confirmed and they often are based on consuming very large doses — but they’re not guaranteed better options than Carmine Red.
A few years ago, after an outcry over Starbucks’ use of Carmine Red dye in their strawberry flavored drinks, the company promised to replace the dye with another, based on tomato extract. The choice was made to ensure that their menu would be vegan, rather than from health concerns.
In the end, however, I think that most of us, once we get past the initial shock, would rather have a food coloring based on insects, rather than on petroleum derived products. And now you’ve got a fun story to share at the next family barbecue, when you see someone reaching for the ketchup! | https://medium.com/a-microbiome-scientist-at-large/the-crazy-sources-of-red-food-dye-6a7eddbcd03b | ['Sam Westreich'] | 2020-10-26 11:38:07.996000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Diet', 'Science', 'Food', 'Environment'] |
Gabriel Martinelli strikes twice, Arsenal win | Arsenal continued to dominate in the second half, although could have been reduced to 10 men when the Video Assistant Referee reviewed a tackle from midfielder Granit Xhaka on Leeds midfielder Raphinha for a potential red card early in the second half, but no punishment was given.
Leeds netted a consolation goal on 75 minutes through a belting Raphinha penalty after striker Joe Gelhardt was taken down inside the box.
Smith Rowe capped his side’s performance with a goal on 83 minutes, firing home a superb pass from teammate Martin Odegaard.
After the match, Arteta heaped praise on Martinelli, who has now scored four goals in his last six league games.
“We see the player every day and we know where the player has to be to be able to play at the top level all season,” Arteta told reporters.
“We are here to develop him as a player and he has had to wait for his moment.”
“I am really happy with him and how he is performing. He has come a long, long, way. His energy and his passion do not get much better. When he has the chances he puts them away. He is heading in the right direction.”
Arteta confirmed after the match that Arsenal players sitting on the bench were racially abused by a Leeds supporter.
“I can confirm it and it was reported to stadium manager,” Arteta said.
“The authorities will investigate that. One of the players on the bench heard those comments. I don’t know exactly who it was directed at.” | https://medium.com/@cricketsoccer/gabriel-martinelli-strikes-twice-arsenal-win-35bbde245d1b | ['Cricket Soccer'] | 2021-12-19 09:29:59.032000+00:00 | ['Arsenal', 'Brazil', 'Gabriel Martinelli'] |
Introduction to Object Relationships in Ruby | I’m not proud of what I’ve done, but it had to be done. This thoroughly commented diagram demonstrates a fully functional Many-to-Many relationship between Doctors and Patients. Notice how it looks suspiciously like two One-to-Many relationships (if it looks that way, that’s because it is).
Remember when we decided each attribute for a particular instance of a model should only contain a single value? Since Doctors have many Patients, and Patients can have many Doctors, neither one of them should store data on the other. A Many-to-Many relationship must have a join model, in this case Appointment, where each Appointment belongs to one Doctor and one Patient.
It is always the model belonging to a single instance of a related model (or models) that stores the related instances.
Re-read that until your eye-holes hurt. Alternatively, when you draw your relationship diagrams (and you should ALWAYS draw your relationship diagrams) you can just remember that you store related instances in the side receiving the forky end. I like to use app.diagrams.net (use the ‘Entity Relation’ objects).
I included some basic methods demonstrating typical functionality found in Many-to-Many relationships which also show how you have to ‘go through’ the join model to find all the instances of one side of the relationship that relate to a particular instance from the other side.
This is the end of the blog post. Take care of yourself.
And as promised, copy-paste-able code blocks if you want to play with this yourself:
Doctor
class Doctor attr_accessor :name, :office, :specialty #before we work with databases to store each instance of the #Doctor class, it is convenient to store each Doctor in a #class variable array called @@all @@all = [] def initialize(name, office, specialty) @name = name @office = office @specialty = specialty #this adds each instance of the Doctor class to @@all upon #initialization @@all << self end #inside a class when we start a method definition with 'self' it #means this is a class method (as opposed to an instance method). #That means we call .all on the Doctor class to return the array #of all instances def self.all @@all end #returns an array of all appointments relating to a #particular Doctor def appts Appointment.all.select { |appt| appt.doctor == self } end #returns an array of all appointment times relating #to a particular Doctor def appt_times self.appts.map{ |appt| appt.appt_time } end #returns an array of all patients relating to #a particular Doctor. See comment on the 'doctors' #method in the Patient class to learn why we #need to 'go through' Appointments def patients self.appts.map{ |appt| appt.patient.name } end end
Appointment
class Appointment attr_accessor :appt_time #here we have appt_time in an attr_accessor because we may #need to reschedule, but Doctor and Patient are in an #attr_reader, because they shouldn't change after an #Appointment instance is created. attr_reader :doctor, :patient @@all = [] #IMPORTANT - Appointment is the join model for the #Many-to-Many relationship between Doctors and #Patients. You can think of each side of the Many-to-Many #as having a One-to-Many with the join model. #It is always the model that 'has one' of the other #model where you store that model's information. Each #Appointment has one Doctor and one Patient, so we store #Doctor and Patient here. Doctors and Patients can have #many Appointments, so it is much easier to use #Appointment as the Single Source of Truth def initialize(appt_time, doctor, patient) @appt_time = appt_time @doctor = doctor @patient = patient @@all << self end def self.all @@all end end
Patient | https://medium.com/@bswan0002/introduction-to-object-relationships-in-ruby-902304ec3bee | ['Ben Swanson'] | 2020-12-23 05:56:25.457000+00:00 | ['One To Many', 'Many To Many', 'Object Oriented', 'Ruby', 'Object Relationships'] |
I proposed to my boyfriend | I was in a Taco Bell drive-thru with my boyfriend when we decided we would get married. I had been thinking about proposing to him for a while and floated the idea of me proposing to him, instead of the traditional man-proposes-to-woman.
When we talked about it, neither of us felt right about just one of us spending a lot of money on a ring and planning a big romantic proposal. We both wanted to have the opportunity.
So right there in that drive-thru, before we received our Crunch Wrap Supremes and Quesaritos (RIP), we decided that we were “unofficially” engaged. The plan was that by Spring 2021, we would each propose to the other.
Since I had already been thinking about proposal ideas that centered on a cute Christmassy date we went on in Willow Glen every year since we started dating, I got to work. COVID-19 second-wave shutdowns changed around a lot of what I wanted to do, but what I planned instead ended up being intimate, quiet, and beautiful.
With the help of his parents, I made our own little Willow Glen winter wonderland where I could pop the question without worrying about getting sick. It was romantic, cozy, and guess what? He said yes!
He said yes!
Even though I know he’s planning to propose to me in the next few months, it doesn’t take any of the magic away. I got to show him how much I love him during my proposal and I know he’s going to do the same for me. We’re a team, and I love that.
Marriage should be a decision you make together
I’ve never been a big one for traditions, so the fact that we decided to get engaged in a non-traditional just made sense. Don’t get me wrong, I love love, relationships, and even weddings. I just don’t like how deeply rooted in sexism they can be.
What really got me thinking about sexism in wedding traditions was when I came out as bisexual a few years ago. How would LGBTQ+ people celebrate such clearly gendered traditions? If two women are getting married, who would propose to who? This train of thought made me realize that the traditions themselves are not what is important. It’s the people involved and the love they share that really counts.
Photo by Marcelo Chagas from Pexels
So how can we take the “good” parts of these traditions and make them palatable for modern times? I think we start by treating everyone as equals. Those in the relationship have a discussion and decide that they want to get married. No one should be surprised by a marriage proposal. What I mean by that is no one should present a ring and truly be wondering if their beloved will say yes.
Marriage is a huge life decision. It means intertwining lives, finances, and family. Why should just one person — typically a man in a heterosexual couple — make a huge decision and spend a ton of money? No one is being bought. A family is being formed.
Love is what you want it to be
With all that being said, I’m not trying to harp on anyone who chooses to go the traditional route. My point is that it should be a choice. You’ve discussed your future and are taking a step forward…together.
A marriage proposal is about making a commitment, and I truly believe that the most beautiful way to do that is in the way that feels right to you and your partner(s). So let’s stop putting so much weight on tradition and instead, focus on celebrating love. | https://medium.com/@kayleemoser/i-proposed-to-my-boyfriend-cede8ed850b8 | ['Kaylee Moser'] | 2020-12-24 22:10:44.908000+00:00 | ['Gender Equality', 'Marriage', 'Relationships', 'Weddings', 'Love'] |
Economic Revolution: Why were the principles changed? | After the change of power, the phrase “economic revolution” has been actively circulating. In fact, it has also been included in the Government program. If we try to analyze it, we will conclude that the term assumes the following: radical changes in the economy, removing existing mechanisms and creating new ones. Is this transformative strategy possible or appropriate from the point of view of economic development? Of course, it is not.
Everyone who knows the peculiarities of the economic system can confirm that the use of this term is meaningless. The policy based on it is equally meaningless as it is both theoretically and practically impossible to implement such a policy in Armenia. In this case, it is more appropriate to introduce the idea for reforms, the need for which is evident. The necessity for those reforms was the very reason for the events in April which are being accompanied by promises made so far.
Of course, the former Government left many problems, which continue to be voiced by the current Government. The criticism directed against the former authorities serves as the primary tool for the economic revolution, whereas concrete actions are gradually pushed to the political background.
Let’s not forget the fact that, in the past, Nikol Pashinyan’s statements included bitter criticism the content of which has now been changed. For example, before coming to power, Pashinyan did not hide his negative attitude to joining the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and called for the termination of the agreement. How did it happen that now Armenia is going to cooperate and strengthen relations with the same organization? The same can be said about the prime minister’s former attitude towards Armenian-Russian economic relations which has also changed. One more thing: previously, the former authorities were blamed for high interest rates and for the usurious nature of the banks. Now it became clear that the state has nothing to do with bank-client relations and interest rates reduction. Only the customer bears the responsibility for taking a loan. It turns out that the citizens should organize an economic revolution, and that poverty should be defeated in people’s minds. Unfortunately, these facts lead to the conclusion that the government abstains from defining the vision of the economic revolution that they point to. Putting aside the absence of figures in the new program of the Government, we need to notice the lack of strategy and consistency in it, as good wishes and improvident programs have come to replace them. Low economic growth, unemployment, poverty level and other indices which are gradually becoming an instrument of manipulation (which, besides, are not mentioned in numbers but rather voiced just as priorities) are not even noticeable in the economic development plan. Instead, the fight against corruption is being recognized as the most important tool for the economic revolution. That fight is also organized without clear procedures and accompanied by various threats. It is stated that the investments are encouraged, however, in practice, the authorities put the previously made investments and the ones that were expected to provide benefits at risk. The promises to exempt microbusiness from taxes also belong to the list of hopes yet not realized.
Economic reforms are usually implemented through systematic approaches: changes in the tax and customs laws, correct foreign policy, investment climate improvements, the preconditions of which are security guarantees and clearly defined “rules of the game.”
Singapore’s economic miracle, who many often try to localize in Armenia by saying that everything is possible in case there is a political will, became a reality due to the consistent foreign policy, a clear strategy for reaching international recognition, and, most importantly, due to the intellectual potential and professionalism of the government. Whether such conditions are present in Armenia or not, the floor is yours to judge.
Armenian and Russian versions of the article.
Author — Anna Hakobyan | https://medium.com/@antifakeam/economic-revolution-why-were-the-principles-changed-1b9bfb5ee3a8 | [] | 2019-05-09 14:48:47.497000+00:00 | ['Economics', 'Politics', 'Nikol Pashinyan', 'Economic Development', 'Revolution'] |
Using a video background on Google Meet | Creative Hacks | Using a video background on Google Meet | Creative Hacks
After endless Google meets calls this year as a result of the Covid-19 Pandemic I decided to do some ‘Creative hacking’. I call it hacking but, in actual fact, it’s just a small tweak to the DOM to allow MP4 and other video file uploads.
This article contains the following sections;
Picking the perfect background Change the DOM Previewing the background
If you just want to see the background skip to the last section.
Picking your perfect background
In this example, I will be using a video background from GIPHY — If you haven't heard of Giphy you should do some research, they’re an awesome platforming for hosting GIFs and Stickers. This can be really useful for SEO or GSEO as it is more recently being referred to in the industry(more on this in another article).
First of all, go to https://giphy.com/backdrop and find your perfect backdrop or if you want to use your own video you can use that too!
This is the one we’ll be using (Source: Giphy)
Download the backdrop to your device, the format should be either a GIF Image or an MP4 video! Once you’ve got some form of MP4 or GIF file on your device move onto the next section.
Changing the DOM
Okay now onto the exciting bit of changing the DOM element to allow for Video uploads! This is fairly easy but, if you’re not used to using the Google Developer Tools it might be slightly overwhelming. Just following along and you should be absolutely fine.
Once you’ve got a GIF or MP4 file saved to your device head over to Google Meet and create or join a meeting.
Google meets — Join or create a meeting
Once you’ve created or joined meeting you should be taken to a screen with a video feed of yourself. Please excuse my absolute mugshot in the next screenshot 😂
My beautiful mugshot 😂
Once you reach this screen click on the button in the button right of the video feed (the button that lets you blur the background). This should then show a bunch of different image options in addition to allowing you to upload a custom image. See the example below
Right-click on the rectangle that has the plus icon on it (the fourth one in the list in the above example), click ‘Inspect element’ or ‘Inspect’ this should bring up the Google Developer tools (basically a bunch of HTML code). Inside that window look for the line that looks similar to this (you shouldn’t need to scroll to find the code)
<input type=”file” jsname=”tif8Pe” jsaction=”change:E7zRc” accept=”image/jpeg, image/png” style=”display: none;”>
Where it says accept=”image/jpeg, image/png” replace that with the following code snippet
accept=”image/jpeg, image/png, image/gif, video/mp4”
This will then allow you to upload MP4 videos and GIF images. Close the Developer tools window and left-click on the rectangle that has the plus icon on it. This will open a file explore where you can choose a file. Click on the video or GIF image that you would like to use as your background.
And that's it! You should now see your face with a video background 🎉
The Result — Previewing the background
Here is a preview of the background animation! Once it’s upload it’s just a case of clicking join meeting and then you’ll be good to go with your background video :)
To use a video format other than MP4 you’ll have to check the relevant Mime type — See a full list here | https://medium.com/@gaz-think3/using-a-video-background-on-google-meet-creative-hacks-a5efdcaacb8e | ['Gaz Jones'] | 2020-12-21 15:37:20.641000+00:00 | ['Lifehacks', 'Google Meet', 'Google', 'Creative', 'Hacks'] |
3 Easy Ways to get in shape when you detest exercising | 3 Easy Ways to get in shape when you detest exercising
Forcing yourself to work out and diet, when you hate every second of it, is not a long term solution for your health — here’s what to do. Chris Davidson Follow Dec 23, 2020 · 5 min read
3 easy ways to get in shape when you hate exercising
Just learn to love training and eating kale, and stop complaining, OK?!
There you go, end of article…
Ha! Just kidding obviously. That is often the sum total of advice for anyone wanting to get in shape but who has no desire to go all-in on a fancy workout program, gym membership and restrictive diet plan.
We are told that EVERYONE should want to exercise because of the fantastic health and aesthetic benefits. So most articles just try to convince you to change your mind so that you will want to exercise.
What many of us want to know, but never have the guts to ask out loud is…
Can’t I, like, just do all this fitness stuff half-assed and still make progress? Do I really have to become someone who ‘works out’ and ‘eats healthily’ all the time? Because, to be honest, I’d rather not.
Good news — yes you can indeed do it all half-assed, and still make progress.
If you are happy to make slow yet consistent progress in getting fitter, stronger, slimmer and healthier then you can absolutely get away with doing not-very-much-at-all.
In fact, we can even give it a fancy name so we sound like a cool tribe who have chosen not to work out very much, even though we could, like, totally exercise 24 hours a day/7 days a week if we felt like it.
So instead of calling it Not-Exercising-Very-Much, let’s call it Minimalist Training. | https://medium.com/betterism/3-easy-ways-to-get-in-shape-when-you-detest-exercising-378a065e03a2 | ['Chris Davidson'] | 2020-12-29 13:39:54.183000+00:00 | ['Weight Loss', 'Minimalism', 'Self Love', 'Exercise', 'Fitness'] |
Top Freelance Marketplaces in the UK | As a freelancer finding work can be tricky! With thousands of freelancer job sites out there, it can be overwhelming on where you should look and sign-up to. Some are over competitive, some are expensive, and some are just just there to waste your precious time. But of course, there are also good sites that offer good work. In this quick piece, I’m going to map out my top 4 (at this moment) marketplaces that work for me, in no particular order.
YunoJuno
YunoJuno is one of the leading freelance job sites. It offers really high quality jobs from high quality clients. The sign-up process requires some time, but I think it’s definitely worth it.
Bark.com
Bark is an another freelance job site that you can find pretty good gigs on. Bark doesn’t charge a membership fee, but be careful with paying for leads (sometimes it can come up to you spending £30 to actually getting a lead).
Wishu
Wishu is a fairly new marketplace within the UK scene. I joined wishu in April and got quite a few direct messages from clients inviting me to projects. If you’re a freelancer who is looking for a nice looking app that provides you with not only jobs but also good freelancer resources and you don’t want to spend money — you should check wishu out.
The-Dots
Okay, The-Dots is a professional network, not a marketplace. But hear me out, I have landed a few really amazing freelance gigs as-well-as great connections with some really interesting and big clients.
Please note that I will be going into greater detail on each of these sites separately, as-well-as comparing them. This is only Part 1. So stay tuned! | https://medium.com/@on.demand.elio/top-freelance-marketplaces-in-the-uk-57a5d4b44750 | ["Uk'S Marketplace Hero"] | 2020-11-19 11:29:47.395000+00:00 | ['Job Search', 'Marketplaces', 'Freelance', 'Freelancing', 'Freelancers'] |
20/02/2018: Biggest Stories in the Cryptosphere | 1. Cryptocurrency Transactions Backed By South Korean Government
Concerns over a possible ban implemented by the government of South Korea have finally been put to rest. The Head of Financial Regulator and Watchdog has made two important announcements. Cryptocurrency trading will be backed by the government, while banks will be encouraged to ease transactions with exchanges for their customers. The latter is due to the reluctance of these financial institutions to provide cryptocurrency traders with virtual bank accounts. Furthermore, Choe Heung-sik, the country’s Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) Chief, has stated that the government will actively help the industry flourish in the country, with the inclusion of Know Your Customer checks(KYC).
2. $4 Million In Bitcoin Traded Every Week In Nigeria
We previously reported about the Nigerian Senate launching an investigation into Bitcoin. Despite the government’s concerns, it has now been reported that $3.8 million (1.389 billion Nigeria Naira) are being traded on a weekly basis, through 13 local exchanges. Many have argued that the government should reevaluate its position, and take advantage of this new innovation. Analysts said that before the implementation of any ban, there should be an understanding of the topic. The 13 Nigeria-based exchanges have peaked in December of last year, trading $5.4 (N1.95). Additionally, Emeka Okoye, Software Developer and Chief Architect at Cymantiks Nigeria, thinks that the government’s hostility will only lead to further speculation and volatility. According to Okoye, because of the potential this technology has, the government should embrace it, rather than push it underground. However, he clarified that he does not believe Bitcoin will replace fiat currencies. Still, it will facilitate the transfer of money.
3. Nicolas Maduro’s Cryptocurrency Petro Has Officially Launched
Venezuela hopes to alleviate the issues caused by hyperinflation and US sanctions with the launch of the infamous oil-backed cryptocurrency Petro (PTR). The Superintendent Carlos Vargas has previously announced the first phase of the sale taking place today, February 20th. He went on to say that it was expected for investors from Turkey and Middle Eastern countries such as Qatar, to take part in the sale. The plan is to find the right customers, and then rely on the secondary market trading. However, many believe that a clampdown on citizens’ freedom has created trust and transparency issues for Venezuela. Lastly, the Director and Senior Economist at Longview Economics, Harry Colvin, has expressed doubts over the project being successful.
4. Cryptocurrencies Might Be Safe From Property Taxation
A tax bill calling for the exemption of cryptocurrencies from state property tax has been issued in the state senate of Wyoming. The piece of legislation enlists the items which should be immune. Called Wyoming Senate Bill 111, it was issued by Senators Ogden Driskill, Tara Nethercott, and Chris Rothfuss, with the help of representatives Tyler Lindholm, David Miller, and Jared Olsen. The ‘ayes’, ‘nays, and ‘excused’ were respectively 26, 3, 1. The news comes following reports of a bipartisan movement calling for crypto regulations in the US. | https://medium.com/hackernoon/20-02-2018-biggest-stories-in-the-cryptosphere-100cd402b7d8 | [] | 2018-02-20 16:05:41.756000+00:00 | ['Regulation', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Taxes', 'Venezuela', 'Bitcoin'] |
Political and medical leaders are not following the science of behavioural change. | Political and medical leaders are enabling large numbers of deaths, hospitalizations, and massive economic damage by not following the science of behavioural change.
Political and medical leaders are expecting the public to make major behavioural changes E.g. wearing masks, reduced social gatherings, and social distancing. Most leaders are taking the approach of telling or dictating to people what they must do. This is not science based. The result is that many people are not doing as they as told, which is the natural result.
A science-based approach requires communicating to people why they, as individuals, have an urgent need to change. E.g. avoid them or their friends and family dying. There are more components to a science-based approach, noted in the further reading section below.
I don’t know why political and medical leaders are taking a non-science-based approach and enabling massive harm. Perhaps they have not asked the experts for advice. Perhaps they have rejected the advice. Perhaps they’ve decided to take the easy approach and just dictate to people.
COVID-19 may be the greatest failing of our political and medical leaders in the past 100 years.
What can you do?
Reach out to the political and medical leaders you know to help them understand the science of behavioural changes. It’s not too late to save lives and reduce economic destruction.
Further reading
The following three articles focus on major behavioural change within business organization. The same principles apply to the major COVID-19 behavioural changes: wearing masks, reduced social gatherings, and social distancing.
The science of change management
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolkinseygoman/2016/08/12/10-change-management-strategies-that-are-backed-by-science/?sh=8a845b42bd63
The four building blocks of change — McKinsey
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/the-four-building-blocks--of-change
Managing the people aspects of change
https://res.torontocentre.org/guidedocs/Managing%20the%20People%20Aspects%20of%20Supervisory%20Change%20FINAL.pdf | https://medium.com/@tomkoor/political-and-medical-leaders-are-not-following-the-science-of-behavioural-change-6c6cc7a315ab | ['Tom Koor'] | 2020-12-21 18:18:49.114000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Change Management', 'Behavioral Science'] |
Five Reasons Why Biden’s Move Against Corrupt Billionaire Dan Gertler Matters | By John Prendergast and Sasha Lezhnev
Simon Dawson/Getty Images.
In an important move for combating global corruption, the United States today revoked the last-minute license given by the Trump administration to corrupt tycoon Dan Gertler. Following years of investigations by Bloomberg, Global Witness, PPLAAF, The Sentry, and other groups, Gertler and his network of companies were sanctioned by the United States in 2017 for their involvement in grand corruption in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), with further companies being sanctioned in 2018. Gertler had “amassed his fortune through hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of opaque and corrupt mining and oil deals in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC),” according to the Department of the Treasury. Importantly, Gertler was sanctioned under the Global Magnitsky sanctions program as part of the first-ever use of this landmark bipartisan anti-corruption and human rights tool.
The restoration of the sanctions on Gertler and dozens of his companies is significant on multiple levels. Here we outline five major impacts and three recommendations for next steps to achieve even greater results.
1. The revocation of the license enables critical Congolese and US anti-corruption efforts in the DRC to get back on track.
Gertler has been at the heart of a kleptocratic system that has perpetuated poverty in the DRC, where 72% of the population lives on less than $2 per day despite an estimated $24 trillion in natural resource reserves. Countering that looting machine through accountability and reforms is essential to making progress on security, governance, and human rights in the country. The DRC lost over $1 billion in revenue because of Gertler’s illicit mining and oil deals, and he is the reported inspiration for the movie Blood Diamond. A Congolese civil society leader has called him the “gravedigger of the Congolese economy.”
Gertler was then-DRC President Joseph Kabila’s biggest business partner, allegedly paying millions of dollars in bribes to Kabila and his inner circle over the years. A major part of Gertler’s insider strategy involved asset flipping, as he obtained mining and oil concessions from Kabila’s cronies for extremely low prices and then sold them for massive profits with minimal or no investment. For example, he reportedly purchased one mine for $60 million and then sold it for $680 million; he also reportedly made a 29,900% profit in an oil deal. The network sanctions imposed by the Treasury Department on Gertler and 33 of his companies were instrumental in influencing Kabila to not seek an unconstitutional third term, which likely would have led to mass violence.
Given Gertler’s influence in the DRC, the license effectively gutting the sanctions threatened to set back Congolese efforts to build a cleaner government and business environment, just as new President Félix Tshisekedi was starting to sideline Kabila and negotiate the formation of a new government. Tshisekedi has made several embryonic but important strides in fighting corruption since he came to power in January 2019, but there is still a long way to go to truly shift incentives away from the kleptocracy. Having the money of Kabila’s biggest backer circulating in Kinshasa threatened to tilt the balance of power in Kabila’s favor and make nascent reform efforts much more complicated. According to a former Kabila minister, Gertler’s money helped Kabila win previous elections and stay in power. Furthermore, the US government has been focusing on supporting anti-corruption and governance reform in the DRC, and the license was a major blow to those efforts.
2. The action restores the credibility of a major anti-corruption tool, the Global Magnitsky sanctions program.
If left unchallenged, the midnight move to effectively nullify the sanctions would have significantly damaged the Global Magnitsky program sanctions program and undermined US anti-corruption efforts. “GloMag,” as it’s called for short, is a very important and unique foreign policy tool that allows the United States to sanction anyone globally involved in corruption or human rights abuses. The fact that the cancellation was done through a specific license — rather than by publicly delisting or issuing a general license — threatened the integrity of US sanctions administration as a whole.
3. It helps create a deterrent against tycoons who facilitate corruption.
If left active, the license would have sent a message to business tycoons who facilitate grand corruption in Africa and elsewhere that they could continue doing so with impunity. It would also have sent signals that international facilitators of corruption could effectively undo US sanctions with a bit of lobbying. Corruption, profiteering, and state capture are drivers and incentives for conflict, human rights abuse, and human suffering. Today’s action sends an important message that the facilitators of grand corruption will face consequences for their actions.
4. The revocation highlights the importance of sanctions against entire networks, not just one person.
Significantly, the Treasury Department had employed network sanctions in this case by targeting Gertler’s entire business empire, sanctioning Gertler, one of his main business partners, and 33 of his companies. Despite some of Gertler’s evasive maneuvers, the sanctions had an important impact in the DRC, which never would have been the case without designating his global corporate network. By sanctioning Gertler’s network, the Treasury Department helped curtail his ability to move and launder mining revenues, which the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) describes in a June 2018 Advisory.
5. The action illustrates how NGO advocacy and Congressional attention matter.
“GertlerGate,” as some have called it, generated significant attention from Congolese and international NGOs, Congress, and the media over the past month. Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ), Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Ben Cardin (D-MD) released a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen that urged her to “immediately and publicly rescind the license, making it clear to Gertler and other sanctioned individuals that the Biden administration will uphold the spirit and the letter of the Global Magnitsky Act.” A day later, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Gregory Meeks (D-NY), Africa Subcommittee Chair Karen Bass (D-CA), and National Security Subcommittee Chair Jim Himes (D-CT) wrote a scathing letter, pointing out that Gertler risks becoming “a case study in how to circumvent American sanctions.” Then two weeks ago, Senator Cardin urged Deputy Treasury Secretary nominee Wally Adeyemo to review the license at the latter’s confirmation hearing.
Additionally, 30 Congolese and international NGOs, including The Sentry, sent a letter to the Biden administration that echoed those messages from Congress, highlighting that the sanctions against Gertler “attest to the fact that the US is ready to take concrete and effective action against those who deprive the Congolese people of the means to rebuild the country” and therefore must be put in place again. A group of influential NGOs then wrote to banks, advising them not to unfreeze the accounts of Gertler and his companies. Media attention was also important. The story received front-page coverage by the New York Times, as well as stories by Reuters, Bloomberg, The Economist, Al Jazeera, Congolese media, and others. Today’s action demonstrates how advocacy and attention can create pressure for change.
What is needed now?
Reversing this eleventh-hour maneuver is an important necessary step, but more action is needed to close the loopholes for kleptocrats. First, the Treasury Department should proactively tighten gaps that allow Gertler to circumvent some of the sanctions, and tighten US sanctions by designating his new companies and those of his close business associates. Such action has been supported by bipartisan calls from Congress. A letter last year from former Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jim Risch (R-ID), then-Ranking Member Bob Menendez (D-NJ), and seven other Senators called for the US government to “consider measures to address already-designated individuals who are circumventing sanctions through the establishment of new companies.”
Second, since Gertler made post-sanctions deals payable in euros, Secretary of State Tony Blinken should also encourage the European Union (EU) to sanction Gertler’s entire network. This could be done by adding corruption as a criterion for sanctions either under the new EU Magnitsky Act or under the EU’s DRC sanctions program. A group of members of the European Parliament recently called on the European Union to take action on this.
Finally, the State Department should double down on fighting corruption in the DRC and the region. This should include adopting a regional policy strategy on combating corruption and appointing a high-level, well-resourced special envoy to the Great Lakes region. Priority reforms should include ensuring that state-owned mining companies (which Gertler, Kabila, and others manipulated for corrupt purposes) undergo transparent financial audits, taking anti-money laundering actions against banks that facilitate the laundering of the proceeds of corruption, placing US sanctions on networks that trade in conflict gold, and establishing an accountability mechanism to investigate and prosecute those most responsible for widespread human rights abuses.
John Prendergast is Founding Director of The Sentry, where Sasha Lezhnev is Deputy Director of Policy. | https://medium.com/@thesentry/five-reasons-why-bidens-move-against-corrupt-billionaire-dan-gertler-matters-932acff3a086 | ['The Sentry'] | 2021-03-10 20:42:43.455000+00:00 | ['Drc', 'Dan Gertler', 'Rdc', 'Corruption'] |
Sass Basics — Supercharge Your CSS | Being a web developer usually involves several technologies. At a minimum, you probably have a good understanding of HTML and CSS with a sprinkling of JavaScript for good measure. Add to that some back-end knowledge with a server-side framework and a database and you’ve got yourself a Full Stack (see what I did there?).
But, each layer of the stack over the years has been augmented slightly. Where SQL-based databases were prevalent in years past, NoSQL equivalents such as MongoDB has risen. From Microsoft, TypeScript has slowly started to make the lives of JavaScript developers much more productive. And, in the CSS world, projects like Sass have started to improve the styling, readability and function of the language.
Scss Tips
Rather than write endless paragraphs of explanations I’m going to distil SCSS into 3 basics Tips. SCSS, of course, is a very broad topic, but this will serve as a starting point.
Sass comes in 2 flavours, SCSS and SASS. I’ll focus on SCSS since it more closely resembles CSS. See https://sass-lang.com/ for more information.
Tip 1. Nesting
In a basic HTML layout, there is a <div class="outer"> tag that contains 2 <div class="inner"> tags.
To write a style that targets the inner class, in CSS you would write:
.outer { background-color: blue; } .outer .inner {
background-color: black;
color: green;
}
Pretty simple. But, how could this be improved using SCSS?
.outer {
background-color: blue; .inner {
background-color: black;
color: green;
}
}
At first glance, this looks example like plain old CSS. But, if you were to write this in a CSS editor is would fail because of the nesting. It surprises me that CSS doesn’t include this nesting feature out of the box because the target HTML is nested, but, this is the world we live in.
By applying this nesting technique, not only is your code easier to read, there are some simple enhancements.
If you needed to rename the outer class to avoid a conflict, achieving this in SCSS is much easier as the relationship hierarchy will be followed.
To take the concept of nesting further, you can add the & operator. This will essentially “copy” the previous selector and apply it to the nested element.
Take this CSS sample for creating an active and inactive state for a DIV tag.
.outer {
background-color: green;
color: white;
} .outer.active {
border: blue 1px solid;
} .outer:not(.active) {
opacity: 30%;
}
Again, another simple example. But, in SCSS this would be:
.outer {
background-color: green;
color: white;
&.active {
border: blue 1px solid;
}
&:not(.active) {
opacity: 30%;
}
}
The exact same result is achieved, but by bringing together the nesting feature with the & operator, we’re able to create much more readable code.
Tip 2. Mixins
The next feature to focus on are Mixins. If you’re used to reading code then Mixins are analogous to Functions in JavaScript.
Mixins within SCSS are used to inject reusable style segments. An example can be seen below. Let’s say you want to make similar (but not exact) border styles for elements.
4 similar border styles
The CSS for this would look a little like
.box {
margin: 1em 0;
max-width: 300px;
padding: .3em;
} .box.full {
border: 4px inset rgba(28,110,164,1);
border-radius: 0px 28px 0px 0px;
} .box.almost {
border: 4px inset rgba(28,110,164,0.75);
border-radius: 0px 28px 0px 0px;
} .box.faded {
border: 4px inset rgba(28,110,164,0.25);
border-radius: 0px 28px 0px 0px;
} .box.inactive {
border: 4px inset rgba(28,110,164,0.1);
border-radius: 0px 28px 0px 0px;
}
The only value that changes on the border is the Alpha component of the border colour. And if we wanted to change the base colour then it would need to change this in 4 places. Fortunately, SCSS to the rescue.
&.#{$name} {
border: 4px inset rgba(28,110,164,$alpha);
border-radius: 0px 28px 0px 0px;
}
} // Create a mixin that defines the border style
@mixin box-border($name, $alpha) {&.#{$name} {border: 4px inset rgba(28,110,164,$alpha);border-radius: 0px 28px 0px 0px;
margin: 1em 0;
max-width: 300px;
padding: .3em;
// Call the mixin to reuse the border style
} .box {margin: 1em 0;max-width: 300px;padding: .3em;// Call the mixin to reuse the border style @include box-border(full, 1); @include box-border(almost, 0.75); @include box-border(faded, 0.25); @include box-border(inactive, 0.1);
Wow, this is a huge difference in coding style! Not only is this fewer lines of code, but we’ve also created a reusable function that can be included anywhere.
The Mixin that’s defined takes 2 parameters (name and alpha value) and outputs a sub-style which includes the standard border, adjusted using the variable alpha value.
The &.#{$name} will output to .box.active and .box.almost because we’re combining this with the nesting principles from the previous tip.
So, if we wish to change the border colour, it’s just in 1 place and all 4 styles will update.
Tip 3. Variables
We touched on this in the Mixin section where variables were used to construct border styles. But, variables can be used throughout your files, not just Mixins.
When creating consistent styles across your application, variable reuse can come in hand.y
For example, if you same the opacity value to indicate active vs. inactive state. Instead of copying that value throughout your file you can simply define it once and reference it throughout. Then, if the value changes, your entire project will update.
// Define the Opacity
$my-opacity: 0.3; .hello {
background-color: blue;
&.inactive {
opacity: $my-opacity;
}
} .world {
background-color: green;
&.inactive {
opacity: $my-opacity;
}
}
Clearly this is a simple example, but, if you’re familiar with more complex languages such as JavaScript then you already have the skillset to utilise this feature to enhance your CSS and make it easier to maintain.
Other Features
SCSS doesn’t just stop here. Here are a few other examples: | https://medium.com/swlh/sass-basics-supercharge-your-css-1b72cdf5c01a | ['Wandering Developer'] | 2020-09-01 13:37:45.740000+00:00 | ['Web Development', 'HTML', 'CSS', 'Sass', 'Scss'] |
Get your blog ranked high on google — 12 effective tips | You have worked hard on your blog. You often make blog posts. You are always trying to write exciting content. Your posts are exciting, yet full of information. You never end a blog post without a CTA (call to action). In other words, it is very strong content that you would like to have on your blog.
There’s just one problem, and it’s a pretty big problem. You will not be found on google at all. Unless someone is searching for your blog directly, you will be forced to go back many pages in Google search results before your blog appears on google.
The first thing that could possibly fall on you is perhaps to spam your keywords that you would like to be found on, as if there was not a day tomorrow, but this can hurt you. Not only is your content being read as if it were a robot writing it, but Google’s algorithm is constantly changing. An SEO tactic that works today may not work tomorrow.
Besides filling your articles and blog posts with your keywords, how else can you improve your google ranking and get high on google? Here are 12 proven tactics, some of which are SEO driven and others content driven.
Get more strategies here
Go directly to the section on:
1. Get a handle on grammar
2. Update old blog posts (especially your URL)
3. Make your site secure with HTTPS
4. Do not stop using keywords, but use them correctly (and the right ones)
5. Get mobile optimized
Double check your page speed
7. Make social proof
8. Learn to link
9. Guest posts
10. Share, share and share something more.
11. Redesign your website
12. Keep doing what you are doing
What can you bring from here
1. Get a handle on grammar
The pages that rank highest in Google’s rank are the ones with the most authority. When you read a post on these blogs, then they are perfect in every way. When they rank highest on google, it’s because they draw pictures for their audience, and their headlines are formatted correctly, and the paragraphs abound.
It makes sense that google will not place a page without authority high on google. This is because it damages Google’s credibility. It annoys the customers and they will instead use another search option to find better results.
So how do you change the authority of your site? Get a handle on your grammar and spelling.
If you grew up obsessed with perfect spelling, then this is your lucky day. Go through your blog posts. Check them out for grammar mistakes and see what you find.
It is possible that you have made spelling mistakes or grammar mistakes without noticing it at all. Getting rid of these errors will get you one step closer to getting your blog or website ranked high on google.
2. Update old blog posts (especially your URL)
People love good updated posts. Seeing an old topic again is to the benefit of both you audience and you as a blog writer. Your audience sees an update on a post they may have read several years back. It will guarantee traffic, and of course also make the post more relevant to the present.
These posts give you an advantage because you do not have to write from scratch. You already have an idea and you already have content that you can probably reuse. You just have to be more discriminating with the help you render toward other people.
However, do not focus on the post. Go back and see your old URL. As an example, let’s say you wrote a blog post on how to get in the best shape in 2019. Now we go into 2020 next time and you want to make more advice and guidelines. You add a few new things and then your post is ready.
The actual URL for your old post may be something like dinblog.dk/blog/hvordan-kommer-man-bedst-i/. But what you were actually trying to write was “how to get in shape”. But your URL was shortened because it had too many words.
Your URL does not have to contain your entire headline. If you want to be more effective then it should include keywords (more on this later). It alone will improve your rank and ranking on google.
Let’s say you renew a post called: ‘’ The 5 best ways to get in shape in 2019 that you do not want to miss (Update). ‘’ By doing as in the example, some of your keywords be ‘’ high fat burning ‘’ so your updated URL will be something like yourblog / blog / 5-best-ways-to-get-fit-on-high-fat burning.
It gets your keywords in your URL and informs the reader about what to expect in your post.
3. Make your site secure with HTTPS
Speaking of URLs, how secure is your site then? Even if you want to say ‘’ absolutely sure ‘’, then you know that it’s probably also not completely true. There is often big news where one is reminded that hackers exist and can destroy even the biggest companies.
But what does that have to do with your ranking and rank on google? Pretty much, actually.
Just as google does not allow pages without authority to get a good ranking on google, so your page will not rank high on google if there is questionable security on your page. Google users will feel safe when they click on a page. Especially if it’s the first time. They do not want to open their computer and find out that it is infected with viruses and malware.
Google has a reputation that they need to take care of. Therefore, one can only rank high on google if you have a secure site with good authority.
How can you ensure that your site is one of them? Stop using http.
Wait what?
As of 2014, Google will rank and rank the pages that use https higher than pages that use http. These pages are extra secure and have an extra layer of encryption. Even if Google changes its algorithm and stops preferring HTTPS pages over http pages, then you will still help yourself to have a more secure page.
Watch this video that talks about an effective traffic app
4. Do not stop using keywords, but use them correctly (and the right ones)
I mentioned above how keyword spam does not work. But that does not mean you should never use keywords in your blog posts again. In fact, just the opposite. Your keywords should not be random, but you should be strategic when using them.
Go to the competitor.
See which keywords have the most impressions and have earned the competitor the most money. Then you need to take the same keywords (if they are relevant, of course) and write some better content.
Yes, it’s actually that simple.
So how do you find the keywords that your competitors are using? Do you spend a lot of hours reading their blog, noticing the keywords in every blog post?
No. It is both tedious and time consuming. Instead, there are a lot of tools that you can rely on that can do the job for you. I personally use SEMRush, but there are a whole lot of tools out there that are just as good. The full version is not free, but it’s all worth it once you get started.
Many of these tools, once registered, only require you to copy your competitor’s URL, and the tool does the rest. You can then see which keywords the competitor is using and which ones are doing the best. Now is the time to write some really good content.
5. Get mobile optimized
Our smartphone is like an extra pendant because we use them so much. Some people can not take anywhere without their cell phone.
This means that you are practically guaranteed to get a large proportion of your visitors who check your website on their mobile, tablet or other mobile device. Is your blog or website ready for it?
Yes, every page that you can see on a laptop or computer will come up on a smartphone, but they are not always similar. If the site is not optimized to be viewed on a mobile phone, then the user experience will be a nightmare.
Imagine trying to push an elephant into a minivan. You can only get the elephant’s hind legs in it.
Your page is exactly that together. The Elephant is your website, which is not optimized for mobiles. The small minicar is a user’s smartphone. They only see a small piece of your page (the elephant’s hind legs) because the rest of the page consists of a lot of squeezed text and too large images.
When your site is mobile-optimized, it is far more user-friendly for your visitors. It will also rank higher on google, thereby getting a better ranking.
So, if you have not already optimized your page, get started. Otherwise you will miss a whole lot of potential customers and visitors who will never see your page because it is not mobile optimized, and move on instead.
Double check your page speed
When we talk about changes on the website, how fast is your page then? It does not only depend on the user’s internet speed. Your page has its own speed.
If your site loads as fast as Superman can fly, then you can count on your visitors and potential customers to be impressed. If your page loads as slowly as a snail? Well then, your customers will move on, to find a page that loads faster.
Google only performs speed tests on the front page of the page. Again, this is a reputational problem. If google ranks pages, and ranks them high even though they load slowly, then who will trust google as a search engine? None.
Before you assume that there is a problem with the speed on your side, do a speed test. There are countless websites out there where you can test if there are any issues with your page’s load speed. Several of these sites are even made for marketers.
Now that you know the speed of your website and know it’s too slow, here are a few things you can do right now to improve it.
Reduce your photos. Keep them optimized so they do not lose quality. The more images you have on your blog, the more they can slow down your page’s load speed.
Delete plugins. They are not all usable forever. If you have not used a plugin for several months, or if it is outdated, get rid of it.
Change hosting. If all else fails, then you can always switch to a faster website hosting.
7. Make social proof
Reviews, pictures of smiling people and selections.
What do all these things have in common? They are all Social proof.
Social Proof is a psychological phenomenon that marketers have embraced. They have realized that they can change a person’s psychological behavior by acting in a certain way.
It may sound like nonsense and nonsense, but it is not.
Let’s take one of the easiest types of social proof, namely reviews. You probably also have reviews on your own website or blog. If you have, then you also have social proof without you even being aware of it.
When you buy a product for the first time, do you do it completely blind? Probably not. Instead, you read reviews and look at pictures and compare prices.
If you see a lot of positive reviews, then you will be influenced to buy. If you see a lot of negative reviews, then you will be influenced not to buy. This is how social proof works. It is an easy encouragement from other users and customers to act in a certain way.
8. Learn to link
You have probably heard of the concept of link building. This is when you make some posts on other websites or blogs, and link back to your page. You may already be good at this, or maybe you can learn a little more about it.
It is completely alright. Link building can be a bit difficult, but once you are good at it, your blog or website will probably rank high on google.
The first thing you need to do is go through your blog or website link. Not manually of course. But with a free ‘’ broken link checker ‘’ page or tool. If you have some links that are dead or broken, then they can either make them or remove them.
Now it’s time to go back to your keywords. Hopefully you will now check the keywords that your competitors use and find bigger and better ways to use these or similar keywords, to create your own content.
These keywords don’t just have to be on your blog. You can also use them on social media, and here Twitter is actually a great opportunity to showcase these great keywords that you write about.
If you do not link these keywords, then you will miss customers and a chance to improve your rank on google. However, you should not make links every time the keyword comes in a post, but you should at least do it once on your website or blog.
9. Guest posts
Do you want to practice link building the right way? So make guesses.
Guest posts offer many benefits when it comes to ranking high on google and getting a good ranking. First, you need to tense your link building muscle. You can prove that your page has a good authority, by getting a link from another site that google places high.
Guest posts help you too. There will be a lot of new eyes on your content. They will definitely be curious about your company website or blog and will learn more.
If you get the chance to make a guest post, remember to practice good ethics. Do not write a sales post where you are trying to get people to buy something on your site. You’d rather have shared some good content with some solid tips and advice for readers that they actually get something out of.
Also, make sure other sites write guest posts for you. Right must be right. By doing this, your site will appear to be more authoritative, so it pays off for both parties.
10. Share, share and share something more.
Now I’ve talked a lot about social media already. How often does it finally use it? And no, not how much you personally use it, but for your business?
In the perfect world, you would share every blog post and in general all the news that is interesting, to your social media audience. But you are busy, and are distracted instead. Then you forget all about it.
In addition to link building, social media also shows google that your site is relevant and has a good reputation.
Have you ever clicked on a company page on facebook? If you have, then you may have also noticed that there is an area where it says ‘’ These people are talking about it ‘’. These are the people who make posts about that particular company. The more people who have something to say, the more relevant your business is according to google.
Further up, I told about social proof. It includes reviews and withdrawals from other customers. On sites like facebook, customers can make reviews of your product and even give you between one and five stars. Customers may comment on your posts or on your facebook page itself.
If you do not notice these things today, then you should start now. You want your customers to have good things to say about your business. In the eyes of google, it makes you a better authority on the web. There will be negative reviews no matter what, but they should not be overwhelming if you do a good job of getting happy customers.
11. Redesign your website
What does your website look like?
Does it have a free theme? Have you made the design yourself? Have you paid someone to design it for you?
If you want to be a respected authority, then it all starts with your website. Your site is like a nice house for sale on the corner of the street. If it looks great on the outside, then it will attract attention. If it looks awful inside, then probably no one will get stuck.
If you have a free theme that is not very well made, then it can also be reflected in the code on the page. This means that there is a greater risk for hackers, and this goes directly against Google’s requirements for security on the pages. Since security on google is something that google attaches great importance to, it is also a disadvantage. It’s okay to use a cheap theme when you start, but once your page has grown and grown, your page should grow with you.
If you made your own page, or if you paid for a design, when was it last updated? That code is not good forever. An old code slows down your blog and makes it more insecure.
Whether you do it yourself or hire a professional, by giving your website a total update, you can land on the first page of Google search results.
12. Keep doing what you are doing
The above suggestions are all great opportunities to improve and get higher on google. But there is also a chance that you are already on your way. It may be that you just need to focus your efforts on getting your page to grow, and wait for your page to get higher on Google rankings.
If you always write very useful content, keep going. Content is always important. If website design is what you are a fan of, then go for it. If you’re a social media expert, then this is just super nice.
No matter how much you want to influence your google ranking, in order to rank high on google, do not lose focus on what really matters, namely your customers. If you treat them properly, then the rest will follow.
What can you bring from here
Your ranking on google depends on whether your website appears at the top of the first page of search results, or on the fifth page. Although everyone wants to be number one, getting there is not easy. Even if you do, it can be difficult to keep up with Google’s algorithm.
Google values a few points highly, such as corporate: Authority, security, reputation and relevance. If you can hit all four, then you can probably get on the first page.
With good content, good presence on social media, link building capabilities and a secure and redesigned website, you are well on your way to changing your ranking and rank on google so you can get higher up. Remember that the most important thing at all is to prioritize your customers. As previously mentioned, the rest will probably follow. | https://medium.com/@laviswills/get-your-blog-ranked-high-on-google-12-effective-tips-6754a7649a3e | [] | 2020-12-08 18:33:08.471000+00:00 | ['Website Seo', 'Traffic', 'Blog Rank', 'Optimization', 'Blogging Tips'] |
Let’s shut down the Internet | I have been talking about the Internet for over a decade now and even amongst the IT crowd, people often miss the fact that even before a web request hits the intended web server, a DNS query has to be made to a DNS server to determine the IP of the webserver. To the uninitiated, DNS stands for Domain Name System and it is like the phonebook on your cell phone.
Comparing Contact entry to a DNS entry
Every domain name, like, google.com has 1 or more entries like the IP addresses of the server and IP address or hostname of the servers handling the mails.
There are thousands of DNS servers worldwide. At least every ISP has one and they provide it to you when setting up the Internet connection for you. The address of the DNS server can be specified at the Router level or on each device. In most cases, the Router is responsible for providing the DNS server address to all the devices that connect to it. One of the most popular DNS servers is 8.8.8.8, which is managed by Google.
If you lose access to the DNS server, your devices will not be able to figure out how to access any website.
Brainstorming in progress!
Here is the plan in brief:
Hack and connect to the WiFi router. Bypass the authentication for the router configuration page. Change/remove the DNS entry. Force the devices to reconnect to the Router for the new changes to take effect.
It wasn’t really that hard to execute this. We found an excellent article to execute step 1 — How to Hack WPA/WPA2 WiFi with Reaver.
Step 2 was easier than we thought. Mr. X had a D-link router, specifically, DSL-2888A router which has a known Insufficient Authentication (CVE-2020–24579) issue.
Here is the Proof-of-concept video: https://player.vimeo.com/video/491824274
Once inside, changing the DNS to something invalid, ie, step 3 was easy.
DNS Settings in DSL Router
Unexpectedly, step 4 was the toughest part as we had to get out of the house to execute it. To force the devices to connect, either Mr. X had to go out of his house (or outside the range of the Wi-Fi router) or we had to restart the router. Given the lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the former was unlikely. The most athletic guy in our group is the birthday boy — CSS. He jumped across the common wall and flipped the MCB switch, forcing all electronic devices connected to a power source to restart, which included the WiFi router. | https://medium.com/@punit-g7/lets-shut-down-the-internet-95d12bcd99aa | ['Punit Gupta'] | 2020-12-25 09:53:23.174000+00:00 | ['Internet', 'Hacking', 'Sunrise'] |
People are Adding Deceptive Titles to These Images, Totally Altering What Your Brain Sees, and Here They are The Best. | The Internet is an immense place where any oddly unique item finds its home. There’s no mystery out there. Like this is deceptive thumbnails. Oh, yeah you got it correctly. Misleading thumbnails that you frequently see on social media are something for this Reddit group that goes by exactly the same title: Misleading thumbnails.
489k members of this online community share weird, funny, and cool images that aren’t necessarily what you think they are. The reasoning is simple: some Reddit thumbnails give rise to a peculiar optical illusion due to their small size and make you go: “Hmm… let’s see.”
According to the group’s definition, “when you open the images to the full size, you’re in for a surprise.” So today, we selected some of the most misleading images that would make you scratch your head before you realized that you were bamboozled.
1- Crowd in a concert
2- View of the Jupiter
3- Giraffes Love the Sunset of Serengeti
4- Delicious Sushi
5- Unfortunate Break In Couch of Leather
6- A bunch of Bananas
7- Surfer Trips Never Double Tube Wave
More on the site | https://medium.com/@scribbledmemes/people-are-adding-deceptive-titles-to-these-images-totally-altering-what-your-brain-sees-and-af4e2aec8f0 | ['Scribbled Memes'] | 2020-12-26 15:47:25.095000+00:00 | ['Photography', 'Funny', 'Creativity'] |
Ellis Cooper hated the world. | Ellis Cooper hated the world.
His parents were dead. His best friend left Ellis when he came out as gay to him.
In short: life sucked balls.
Ellis lived alone on a boat, fishing his days away and selling his wares to make a living.
Ellis was alone. So very, very alone. He didn't hate it though, he was mostly just annoyed by it.
The bar was the only place he could go to forget. To drink away all his emotions. Drinking relaxed him. It helped him feel better about his awful life.
Not tonight, though.
Tonight two assholes decided to get into a bitch fight.
Ellis watched as a handsome man with short, dark hair who couldn't have been more than a few years older than him slinked around until he spotted a beastly man holding a beer. A slow grin spread over the handsome mans face as he spotted his target. The man weaved through the crowd until he was right behind the beast.
"Mind if I take this?" The tanned, handsome man asked loud enough that it was clear he wanted people to hear. He snatched the beer from the mans grip and smashed the bottle against the of the mans shoulder. To anyone else, it would have hurt enough for them to pass out but this man was like a before picture of the beast from Beauty and the Beast.
"You bitch!" The beast growled and turned around in a swift rage. His giant face was almost purple with anger. He looked to be on many drugs.
The bar went mostly silent, quiet except for a few stragglers that were too drunk to be aware of the fight that was happening.
As the two brawlers stood next to eachother at full height the handsome man, compared to the beast, was a puny ant awaiting a giant boot to squish it.
Jesus fuck, I'm about to witness a murder, Ellis thought.
Ellis saw the flash of hesitation in the handsome mans face as he saw the size of the beast before he hid it with a impish grin.
The beast swung his fist forward to hit the handsome man but he missed as the handsome man danced around the beast, using his smaller stature to his advantage.
As the beast was distracted by the handsome man pinching and poking him all over, the handsome man head butted him in the stomach.
The beast clutched his stomach and groaned in pain as the handsome man raised his arms and turned in a victorious circle like he beat someone in a boxing match.
A triumphant smirk settled over his sharp features. The handsome man turned to face Ellis and winked over at him.
Self-righteous bastard. Ellis thought as a light blush dusted his cheeks.
Ellis shook his head to clear his alcohol ridden mind and turned his attention back to the beast.
The beast--true to his name--growled and grabbed the bar stool he had been sitting on moments before.
The chair swung through the air in an arch, complete with a whooshing sound.
The handsome man didn't have time to turn before the stool connected with his skull with a painful sounding crack.
The handsome man crumpled.
Sticky blood coated the back of his head and turned his dark brown hair darker.
Everyone in the bar seemed to collectively wince before turning back to their drinks and hookups as the show ended.
The handsome man was laying on the ground in a small puddle of his own blood, struggling to stand.
Ellis sighed and stood. He might as well try to help the bastard.
"Need some help?"
A groan was the only answer Ellis got. He took it as a yes.
Ellis hooked his arms under the handsome mans shoulders and pulled him up.
Another loud groan came from the handsome man--who probably had a concussion from the blow.
"Why the hell are you so heavy?" Ellis wheezed, trying to carry the man to the bar to sit.
"The weight of my beauty weighs me down."
What an asshole.
"Why am I even helping you?" Ellis mutters to himself.
The handsome man must have heard because he said, "common decency, I suppose?"
Ellis rolled his eyes and groaned in annoyance.
The handsome man smirked over at him. "I'd like to hear you make that sound again...in my bed."
Ellis narrowed his eyes but kept walking without a sound.
"Don't be like that, babe." The handsome but asshole-ish man said and leaned his head close enough that Ellis could feel the man's hot breathe against his neck.
"Call me babe again and I'll rip your balls off."
The handsome man's eyes widened in mock hurt.
"As fun as that sounds, why don't we do something else?"
"Look, neither of us know each other and once the alcohol wears off, neither of us will remember each other. So I'm just gonna take you back to your place and then I'm gonna go home."
The man pouted and pinned Ellis against a nearby wall.
This close, Ellis could see how dark the mans eyes actually were.
The mans lips grazed Ellis's neck as he whispered, "and if I dont want to go home alone?"
Ellis shuddered and attempted to make his half hard-on to go away.
Think of old people, sickness...rocks?
"Then you'll just have to suck it up." Ellis said and grit his teeth, trying to push the man away.
"Maybe I want to suck you up."
It made no sense but still managed to make Ellis harder.
"You have a concussion, you're drunk and you are being way too handsy with a stranger. You need to go to sleep, or better yet, go to a doctor." Ellis said and pressed his hands against the mans chest, unknowingly making the man even harder.
Ellis tried to shift but froze when he felt the mans manhood pressed against his leg. Ellis's cheeks turned a deep red and the man smirked.
"I can feel yours too, you know." The man chuckled darkly.
Anger suddenly filled Ellis at the statement, this stranger had no right to...fondle him like this!
"Get off me you pervert!"
Ellis finally found the strength to push the man away. The man blinked at him, he had probably never been so blatantly rejected before.
"I tried to help you but you're a real ass!" Ellis fumed.
The man nodded and backed off. At least he knew what consent was.
Ellis stomped away, tonight had been pretty shit. First he didnt get to finish his drink because of the bar fight, then he had to help a dumbass pervert, then he was practically molested.
Ellis heard the man slump to the ground and tried to keep walking, but he couldn't do it.
Ellis couldn't just leave a hurt, drunk man sitting in the streets. So he turned around.
The man looked up as Ellis came back, his face brightening.
"Listen up, I'm not going to sleep with you but since you probably can't remember your own address in this state, you are coming home with me. But as soon as you wake up I'm taking you home. Understand?"
The man nodded in understanding. He stood shakily to his feet and staggered towards Ellis, who stood a few feet away.
"Thanks." The man whispered before promptly passing out on Ellis's chest.
Ellis fumbled but managed to drag the man along to his boat without capturing any attention from people who would think he killed the unconscious man in his arms. The blood on the back of the handsome mans head wasn't helping.
After getting the mans pants snagged on the wooden dock leading to his boat twice and dropping the man in the water once, they finally made it on board.
After cleaning the his head and bandaging it, Ellis dropped the man in his bed that sat below deck and decided to sleep in the hammock he kept in the closet.
Ellis fell asleep to the sound of the waves. | https://medium.com/@vidergarsophie/ellis-cooper-hated-the-world-2e07dd661d17 | ['Sophia Rose'] | 2020-12-27 03:02:45.705000+00:00 | ['Story', 'LGBTQ', 'Ocean', 'Boat', 'Gay'] |
Tears of Change | Self-Improvement
Tears of Change
Photo from the author
Recently I have been learning what it means to truly feel. It is incredibly uncomfortable, and I am experiencing it in a way I hate, but it has forced me to figure out how to create healthy change. Part of learning what it means to feel includes learning how to cry.
Control
I hate crying. I don’t mean that in a tough-guy way, or at least I don’t think I do. It infuriates me because it causes me to understand that I have to deal with complicated feelings. It tells me that I am at a breaking point and that I do not have the strength to stop myself from experiencing specific emotions that I am generally able to suppress.
I don’t like feeling my physiological responses to crying. I feel my stomach flex in a way that tells me I need comfort. My throat restricts my airflow yet simultaneously demands that my pain be vocalized in a way that I cannot control. I’m unable to control my diaphragm as I lose the ability to breathe. I feel my face contort in a way that makes me forcefully admit that I need help. The raw and powerful heat behind my eyes manifests itself in the furious tears that I cannot figure out how to stop. My eyes involuntarily shut, not allowing me to center myself by looking at my surroundings.
There are times when controlling people’s perceptions of me feels like it needs to be paramount, but I didn’t realize that until recently. I want to be a symbol of stability, support, and unwavering strength for people. I tell myself that I need to have a fierce grip on what I feel; because if I do not, then I am admitting that I cannot be those things for people.
I know these are cognitive distortions, but they are the first things that come to my mind regardless.
I believe some of this is tied to the fact that I have experienced traumatic situations over which I had no control. Some of these experiences included violations of my emotional and physical boundaries. I don’t want to give that control to anyone ever again, and sometimes that is to a fault. The minute I feel that happening with someone, I am quick to pull back; because I feel threatened, even if that is not their intention. I often feel like I am the only one that can keep myself safe, and up to this year, that has been the truth.
Release
While 95% of me hates crying, a small percentage of me feels the necessity of the full release of emotions. There have been times where I have cried, and I feel as if I hit a reset button on my energy. Though the flow of warm tears frequently symbolizes a lack of control, it also holds an absolute comfort that I can’t get from anything or anyone else.
I wish that I would be more open to feeling and more open to crying, and I think that a shift is happening in my life right now. It is hard to accept, but I also know that it is something that I have to accept as I continue to work on myself. I want my children to be able to express their feelings. I want to support them when they are having a hard time, and I want them to feel safe sharing their deepest, most painful feelings with me. I want them to know that I will uphold and protect their emotions when they share them. However, I need first to figure out how to do that for myself.
I have found myself crying more in the past few months than I have probably cried in the past ten years combined. I have noticed a pattern of anger when I start to cry, yet I feel the relief at the end of those emotional moments. I am learning to accept the feelings that I have suppressed for years. I am discovering a new version of myself, and it feels awkward, painful, and necessary.
Acceptance
There was an instance in the past week where I have shouted at myself, “It is ok to feel!” in the midst of crying because I was trying my hardest to get myself to stop.
It was a powerful moment. Because it let me see that I will do everything to maintain the perception that I am strong and that I can handle anything that life throws at me, yet the reality is, I can’t. It is not humanly possible to hold that weight without breaking at times, and I have to accept that. I don’t want to admit that, but my mind, body, and spirit have taught me that they will accept it regardless of my permission.
Growth is necessary to experience the best quality of life. That is a fact that I am comfortable helping other people understand, but it is a whole different beast when it comes to me understanding that for my own life. I am learning to become safe in expressing my feelings to not only myself but to other people as well. There’s a good chance that it will take a while. I have recently been hurt in choosing to be open emotionally, but I haven’t retreated as fast and fiercely as I did in the past.
I am beginning to understand that I can allow my tears to hold purpose and that they can engraft life lessons into my being as they gently cradle and redefine my weary face. I am beginning to understand that my feelings can provide a roadmap for change in my life. I am beginning to realize that I must entrust my emotions to those who want to love me genuinely.
I can embrace the ugliness when I cry, knowing that the result is that my soul shines with a new brightness after being cleansed by the rich and rejuvenating tears that offer me unconditional comfort and new revelation. | https://medium.com/the-bad-influence/tears-of-change-b5fdb7991d1a | [] | 2020-12-14 21:02:26.965000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Self Improvement', 'Change', 'The Bad Influence', 'Mental Health'] |
Therapy : The Best Gift?. I had my last session of the year with… | I had my last session of the year with my therapist yesterday and it was one of those breakthrough moments. I tend to enjoy when she delivers a different energy, a new line of questioning because I’ve learnt to anticipate its outcome and am never disappointed. With each session it becomes more apparent where she strings together all that we discussed. It’s interesting as I’ve never seen her take notes yet somehow she recalls the most important things and then some. This session felt like the most important threading of all so far.
It became very apparent to us both, through a series of gruelling questioning that I have a great amount of self respect, this was something I always felt but never witnessed with the level of consciousness present yesterday. It kind of let me know that even when I do something that I myself question, at the core of me is this healthy self respect, I feel very powerfully guided by that awareness.
In the week prior to this recent session it was suggested that I become comfortable with “not knowing”. At the time, the importance of this wasn’t apparent I jokingly told her I’m an evidence based person, my logic and sense of reason have to be satiated, she smirked back at me knowingly and patiently. So there I was unaware of the importance of “not knowing” whilst low key feeling she’s known for some time now and I’m about to find out!
For those who don’t know what talk therapy is; it really says it in the name, we talk! There are questions and prompts from the therapist that create a safe space for you to discuss you, your life, a good therapist artfully keeps their patient from wondering off into useless tangents. After almost an hour of talking, just before the end of our session, a session that was far more cerebral than it was emotional, she asked the question “what is the most primitive part of yourself that you need to leave behind?” As she spoke and within the context of the 48 minutes that had elapsed, in my mind I could hear “the need for things to make sense” and I could see the many scenarios in my life that I struggled to make sense of. It would maybe be difficult for you to grasp how profound a moment this was for me because it is my story, my journey and something I have experienced in its fullness, so I suppose just take my words for it, it was a huge moment and I most definitely cried!
I try not to cry in front of most people, an ex even said he couldnt believe how shocked I was that I cried in front of him, its normal I know, but if you’ve been paying attetion you’ll already know I’ve struggled with vulnerability. So crying in front of my therapist who is really a stranger to me, shouldn’t feel okay, but I welcome it because it signals that we’re getting somewhere.
I’m liking this idea of just sitting with the truth of something, because the truth doesn’t always make sense, look at nature, our existence, the fact some of us can identify with a series of stars and planets. For most of my life I have put an unfair requirement on the truth to make sense, it making sense would help me to understand my wounds and why they were inflicted, I’ve been tirelessly searching for the “good reason” for the good in each truth. But there is a universal truth that good or bad, some truths exist and we may never know why. I’m certain many of us at some point in life have questioned this figure of divine wisdom many refer to as God. If God is truly so wise, truly so good wtf do serial killers exist, rapists, molesters, liars even. Wouldn’t divine wisdom and all encompassing power create perfection?
I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole with you all today. Today I felt like sharing that now I want to relieve myself of needing to find the good in truth, I want to instead accept the truth and meet it where I find it. I want it to be that my experience of the truth is enough, that this alone be the thing that guides me. If this resonates with you, I hope you allow your truth to guide you, I hope you accept the truth of others and move forward in life not challenging another’s truth but just being fully cognisant of how it impacts you and the power you have to change that.
To end, and to answer the question, is therapy the greatest gift? It certainly has been a wonderful gift to myself, I certainly wish it for others. This Christmas, as with all Christmases there will be many who cannot partake in the seasons festivities be that because of finances, or not having anyone to share it with. Love remains the greatest gift, to ourselves and to others, if that is all you have to share please know that it is more than enough. If you have extra love to give, please don’t hesitate.
If you’re interested in gifting love, time or anything else this christmas check out the below links. | https://medium.com/@thisiskikelomo/therapy-the-best-gift-2a4066183266 | ['Kimberly Fagbenle'] | 2020-12-19 12:56:47.845000+00:00 | ['Gifts', 'Therapy', 'Christmas', 'Community', 'Love'] |
Setting Up Your Windows For Programming / Coding (web development) | setting up your computer for programming / coding (web development)
One of the most important and necessary things to do as a developer is setting up your machine. Though this might seem easy especially on Operating Systems such as MacOs and Linux, it mostly hard and a headache to do on a windows machine. With a little experience over the years, I find windows machines a hell to go with as far as development is concerned. If you ask for my recommendations, I’d suggest you go in for a Unix based box. But I know a lot out there prefer to use windows and that’s not a problem because today am going to be teaching you how to set up your windows machine for development. This tutorial is going to be as basic and self explanatory as possible. So my noobs out there don’t worry, I encourage you not to panic but rather grab a cup of coffee and get ready to follow along smoothly.
Before I move straight into the main tutorials, I’d first like to explain some really important concepts which is going to answer the questions to why we are setting up our machines the way this tutorial is going to be teaching. Also this tutorial is going to cover the following:
Terminal with a suitable package manager
Text editor with suitable extensions
A version control system (VCS), Git
1. Terminal
From experience, I can tell that about 90% of learners who begin their way into the development world often know nothing about the terminal and often get confused when anything about it is mentioned. What is the terminal? one may ask. The terminal is actually an interface where instructions known as commands could be given to the computer to carry out. Unlike the normal GUI (Graphical User Interface) where the mouse is used to click buttons and other graphical elements in order to issue commands, we have another interface called the CLI (short for Command-Line Interface) of which the terminal happens to fall under, and it is through the terminal that commands are written to give out a task. Let us take for instance, a shutdown operation. Using the normal way, a user would click a few buttons in order to achieve that. That same task (shutdown) could be carried out with the terminal but within a short amount of time. Since this tutorials is actually not dedicated to the terminal, we’ll not go deep into it.But below is just a glance of what a linux terminal looks like. | https://incmarathintech.medium.com/setting-up-your-windows-for-programming-coding-web-development-e2535d704fcd | ['Codetopia Community'] | 2020-11-02 08:16:39.635000+00:00 | ['Windows', 'Git', 'Coding', 'Terminal', 'Vscode'] |
Audit AWS Resources using AWS Config | Fit-DevOps | This Blog was originally published at https://fitdevops.in
All the Latest updates and Contents will be published there.
Don’t forget to check as I will post content everyday…
In my previous blog, I have explained on How you can set up monitoring systems for tracking IAM users activity and the API usage in the AWS services, Check here.
In this guide, We will learn how to set up an auditing system for the AWS resources using AWS Config.
What is AWS Config?
The public cloud providers such as AWS offers a variety of features such as High availability, Scaling, Serverless and much more.
But the most important thing is to ensure that the services we use are secure enough, that’s where AWS config has come in.
AWS Config is used for assessing, auditing and monitoring configuration changes in the AWS cloud.
It gives a detailed view of all the configurations of the AWS resources such as EBS , EC2 , VPC , security group and so on.
What AWS Config can do?
It helps us to provide the configurations of one or more services in the aws account.
Helps us to evaluate AWS resource configurations for desired settings.
Provides the backup of the current settings applied to the AWS resources.
Provides historical configurations of one or more resources.
Send out a notification whenever a change happens such as create , delete and modify.
Provide information about the relationship between AWS services.
Different Ways to Use AWS Config
Resource Administration
Managing and troubleshooting configuration changes
Auditing and Compliance
Security Analysis
How does AWS Config Work?
When the AWS config is enabled for the first time , It scans all the supported existing AWS resources and creates a configuration item for each resource.
When there is a change in the existing resources or new resources are created, AWS config will also record the same and maintains a historical record for the configuration items.
We can either allow the AWS config to create configuration items for all the supported AWS resources or we can enable only for the particular AWS services.
Setting Up AWS Config using Console
To set up AWS config, Login to AWS Config console.
and then click Get started
Lists of Supported Resource Types : API Gateway , Cloudwatch , Cloudfront , Dynamo DB , EBS , EC2 , Elasticsearch , Redshift , RDS , Quantum Ledger database , S3 , SQS , SNS , VPC , Auto scaling , ACM , Cloudformation , Cloudtrail , CodeBuild , CodePipeline , Elastic Beanstalk , IAM , KMS , Lambda , Secrets Manager , Shield , Service Catalog , Systems Manager , WAF , X-Ray and Elastic Load Balancing.
Under Settings , You can enable AWS config to record configurations for all the supported AWS resources or you can enable only for the particular AWS resources.
To enable for all resources , Choose All resources and to track global services such as IAM , Enable it.
I would suggest you enable IAM to keep track of changes in the IAM users , groups , Roles and Policies.
To enable for particular resources , Under Specific types , Select the services
You can select multiple AWS services.
Under Amazon S3 bucket , The S3 bucket will be used to store the snapshot of all the configuration items and the configuration history which is recorded by the AWS config.
You can create a bucket from here on the go , Or you can use the existing S3 bucket. Check here for more detail
You can also store the AWS config snapshot in the S3 bucket which is in another AWS account. But Make sure the permission to store the configuration item is provided for the AWS config.
We can also use the folder/prefix within the bucket to store the configs.
Under Amazon SNS Topic, We can use SNS topic to alert us for the following cases such as Configuration history delivery, compliance, configuration snapshot delivery.
You can use an existing topic or you can create an SNS topic with subscribers in your account.
We can also choose an SNS topic from another AWS account, But make sure the SNS topic has granted permission for the AWS config.
Under AWS Config role , we need to grant read-only permission for the AWS config for all the supported AWS services.
Also we should grant permission to put config items to S3 and SNS access to sent notifications.
We can use the existing service-linked role, already created by AWS or you can create a role and assign the same to the AWS config.
and then click Next
For AWS Config rules , We can apply existing one or more rules against the AWS resources.
We can either apply the existing rule while creating the AWS config , or we can apply the existing rules after the AWS config is created.
We can also create our own custom rules and we can apply the same.
It will be highlighted If you select the rules.
and then Click Next
Review the Settings of the AWS config and then click Confirm.
It will take some time to set up the AWS config.
Once the AWS config is created , From the Dashboard , Click Status
You will get the status of the configurations.
Configuration Snapshot : It is the collection of configuration items for the supported AWS resources that exist in your account.
Configuration History : A collection of configuration items over a given period of time for the provided AWS resources.
Configuration Stream : It’s an automatically updated list of all the configuration items for the resources that AWS config is recording.
This is how the AWS config dashboard represents all the details.
It will take some time to discover all the resources.
Conclusion
We have successfully implemented an auditing system for the AWS resources using AWS config.
Hope you find it helpful. Please check out my other publications. | https://faun.pub/audit-aws-resources-using-aws-config-fit-devops-254e46893350 | ['Rahul K'] | 2021-09-13 08:49:45.054000+00:00 | ['AWS', 'Aws Config', 'Compliance', 'Security', 'Cis Benchmarks'] |
I’m not the gentlest person I know. | I’m not the gentlest person I know. Yet, I feel blessed to finally know how I truly benefit from being gentler with myself and the people around me.
Being a Virgo with a naturally harsh inner critic, I saw how my life transformed the most during various times when I accepted the gift of Gentleness through various teachers and healing modalities.
I am so grateful to interview 11 Gentleness Ambassadors from all over the world during our lockdown periods and spend time to distill the essence of their wisdom into articles published on Medium.
I am proud to be a Gentleness Ambassador. :) | https://medium.com/@bingzhuang/im-not-the-gentlest-person-i-know-35438f07c9cf | ['Bingz Huang'] | 2020-12-18 07:50:57.658000+00:00 | ['Gentleness', 'Short Form Content', 'Short Form'] |
Hello, my name is Oat | When I was a sophomore in high school, I had an assignment in my English class where I had to write an autobiography. Well actually, in the words of an influential math teacher I once had, I got to have the opportunity to go to school and write that autobiography. So I made sure to do a damn good job writing it.
I thought I understood almost everything when I was a sophomore. I was starting to find success on the debate team, had evolved from my middle school phase of being shy and introverted, and had even successfully asked the girl I liked to go to the winter dance with me. I had recreated myself in the span of two years of high school, and I was really proud of the end result.
Unsurprisingly, my autobiography was glowing. I had nothing bad to say about myself, just pat on the back after pat on the back. But looking back, I remember almost nothing of what I wrote, only the title,
Oatmeal doesn’t have to be Boring.
I spent a little longer than I’d like to admit coming up with that title, but it’s a statement that perfectly defines me. Here’s the rundown on who I am: Asian, average weight, average height, glasses, plays non-contact sports, occasionally studious, vanilla, and alternates between dressing like Macklemore in “Thrift Shop” and your average finance bro. On the surface, I look like my favorite breakfast food, oatmeal. Average. Bland. Boring. I’m a carbon copy of tons of people on the outside, but as I elaborated in my autobiography, “oatmeal” gets really interesting when you dig beyond the surface.
my autobiography’s cover
Beyond the surface, there’s berries, bananas, craisins, and plenty of flavor. That’s me. Regardless of how I looked and what I did, I always thought I was special growing up. And in some ways, I still feel that way. I feel an itch to do something special and be someone special. But if I’m being honest, there’s little that I’ve done towards satisfying that itch. The oatmeal is still bland for the most part.
I always say this, but this time for real, things are going to change soon. I’m at a sort of turning point in my life. I was dumped by my first girlfriend (who I dated for three years) about two months ago. I had a crisis about the purpose of life, fell behind in school, and just didn’t have the free time to pursue things I wanted to do. She was my entire support system, so it’s beenhard to move on. But I’m tired of being tired. I’m ready to start enjoying life again.
I’m not really sure why I decided to start writing on medium. But having gotten to this point, I’m glad I did. Writing out what I’m feeling, telling stories, and generally just sharing words with anyone is actually helping me feel less lonely and more empowered to go do something. My former girlfriend used to be the recipient of all my words and feelings, so it’s been a hard transition to the single life. But right now, I feel excited to be sharing the flavor of my life once again.
This first article was written completely off the top of my head with no planning, but I might try to write with more organization in the future. With a month of break ahead of me, I can’t wait to start writing more. I have no idea who will find my writing or if I’ll share it with my friends, but if you’re reading this, I hope you’ll enjoy everything I have to share! | https://medium.com/@interestingoatmeal/hello-my-name-is-oat-db6e96aee421 | [] | 2020-12-15 21:09:18.983000+00:00 | ['Biography', 'College', 'Self', 'Writing', 'Autobiography'] |
The Architecture of Amazon’s DynamoDB and Why Its Performance Is So High | DynamoDB is a NoSQL database provided by Amazon Web Service (AWS). It can provide extremely high performance, more than 10 trillion requests per day with peaks greater than 20 million requests per second, and can support virtually any size with horizontal scaling. It is not uncommon for DynamoDB to serve over petabytes of data.
In this article, we will start with a brief introduction to the APIs of the DynamoDB. We will then look into the architecture of DynamoDB and explain in detail why DynamoDB can provide such high performance.
From a 10,000 feet view, DynamoDB is basically a key-value store. It can be thought as a hash-map backed by some persistent storage. Two most important operations supported by DynamoDB are Get and Put.
Unsurprisingly, the semantics of Get and Put operations are consistent with our understanding of hash-map or key-value store. For instance, we can use Put operation to persists a key-value pair to the DynamoDB and a subsequent Get operation will return the value we stored previously.
Put(“key”, “value”); Get(“Key”) → Returns “value”
What differentiates DynamoDB is its extremely high performance. In the next sections, we will closely examine the architecture of DynamoDB and understand why DynamoDB is so scalable.
Partitioning
To achieve horizontal scaling, DynamoDB assigns data to different partitions which are hosted by distinct machines. When there are more data, DynamoDB can create more partitions and use more machines to host those additional partitions. It works as following.
DynamoDB uses a cluster of machines and each machine is responsible for storing a portion of the data in its local disks. When a machine is added to the DynamoDB machine cluster, it is randomly assigned an integer value, which we call token in our article. In our example, we assume the DynamoDB has 3 machines. A is assigned a token of 100, B 2000 and C 10,000.
When we insert a key-value pair to the DynamoDB, the key is first hashed into an integer, I. The key-value pair is then stored on the machine that we will meet first if we start from I and walk clockwise around the ring. Therefore keys that are hashed to (1000, 2⁶⁴-1] and [0, 100] are stored on machine A. Machine B therefore stores keys whose hash values are between 100 and 2000. The rest are stored on machine C.
If we receive a lot of data whose hash values are between (10,000, 30,000], machine A will probably be overloaded. What we can do now is add another machine D and split the data stored on A between A and D. Given that data are mostly between (10,000, 30,000], we could assign the machine D a token of 15,000. The load is then more or less evenly spread between machine A and D.
When a range becomes hot, that is, we received a lot of data whose hash values fall inside the range, we could add more machines and assign those machine a token value within the range. With this change, the load and data are spread across more machine. If data are deleted and two consecutive ranges become cold, we can merge them. For example, if there is little data whose hash values are inside (100, 2000] and (2000, 10,000], we could remove machine B from the cluster and uses C to host those data.
There are at least two benefits with this design.
First, there is basically no scaling limitations. We can always scale up the DynamoDB to store more data by adding more machines.
Second, this enables incremental scalability. When we first bring up a DynamoDB, we don’t need to allocate a lot of machines. We can add more machines as we have more data. This can greatly save resources.
Note that different keys may be hashed to the same value. It is fine because the hash value only decides which machine hosts the data. We retrieve the value from that machine based on the key, not its hash value.
Replication
If the data is only stored on one machine, it is not very reliable nor available. When the machine crashes or the disk is corrupted, the data is lost. When the machine is down, we can’t access the data. To resolve the issue, DynamoDB replicates the data N times. We will assume N=3 in our article, which is commonly used in AWS.
Each machine has complete knowledge of the tokens of all machines inside the cluster. For example, all machines know that A has a token value of 100.
When a machine receives a request to persist data, it will forward the request to other two machines that have the next two greater tokens. For instance, when machine A receives a request to store {“key”: “value”}, it will first find out which two machines have the next two greater tokens, and in our case, it is machine B and C. It then sends the request to persist the key-value pair to machine B and C.
Machine A considers the data persisted after it receives responses from both machine B and C. It then sends the response back to the client. However, this has an issue. Without replication, the request processing is slow only when machine A is slow. Now the processing is slow when any of the 3 machines is slow.
To resolve the issue, DynamoDB doesn’t require receiving responses from all N machines before returning to the client. It only requires W machines to write the data to the disk. W is normally set to 2 in AWS. In our case, machine A returns to the client when 2 of the following events have happened
Write to disk inside A succeeds
Received response from B
Received response from C
Note that machine A could actually receive response from B and C before it completes writing to its local disk if its disk is overloaded.
This approach reduces write latency, it however introduces another issue. You may not be able to read the value you just wrote into the database! Imagine the case that machine A received response from B and C and returns to the client. However the write to its local disk actually fails. Then when client wants to get the value, A would return a wrong result since its local disk doesn’t have the recently updated data.
DynamoDB thus further requires machine A to get R copies of data and return the latest copy to the client. R+W should be greater than N and we can guarantee the user will always see the latest data. R is normally set to 2. In our case, machine A is required to get a copy of the data from at least one of the machine B and C and return the latest value to the client. Therefore the correct value will be returned.
With partitioning and replication, DynamoDB is therefore able to provide both scalable and reliable service! | https://medium.com/swlh/architecture-of-amazons-dynamodb-and-why-its-performance-is-so-high-31d4274c3129 | ["Meg'S Tech Corner"] | 2020-08-24 06:42:52.126000+00:00 | ['Database', 'AWS', 'Software Engineering', 'Cloud Computing', 'NoSQL'] |
E-Commerce Testing丨How to Test an eCommerce Website? | 51Testing | Software Testing Service Provider |Friday, 18th Dec. 2020
Influenced by the pandemic, online businesses get boomed because more people keep a social distance. E-Commerce has become the first option for many start-ups. How to present a user-friendly online shopping website with all necessary functions working normally? Ecommerce testers will tell you the answer.
E-Commerce testing-how to test an e-commerce website?-51testing
Generally, we test an eCommerce website in two different modes:
According to the test types
According to the system architecture of the Ecommerce website
According to the test types, here is the test that we should do for an eCommerce website.
1. Compatibility testing
Generally, we test the browser compatibility to see if our website can display normally in different browsers such as Firebox, Chrome, and Edge, etc. Meanwhile, the operating system compatibility is a key point. We will check if our website can work normally in different operating systems like Windows 10, Windows XP, macOS, etc.
2.UI testing
You should consider the questions below for the user interface of an Ecommerce website.
If the link is correct?
Is there any textual error?
Whether the product price is displayed correctly?
3. User experience(UE) testing
Firstly, check if the classification of the products on the homepage can fit the normal classification rules, and the display of the products is neat and clear enough.
Secondly, check the search result page. If the search result is correct and the display of the information is clear.
Finally, check the products details page. The product detail page will play a key role in the customer’s buying behavior. Product pictures, advertising commentary, product descriptions are all important elements.
4. Shopping process and shopping rules test
The most important process of a B2C website is the shopping process, which includes several important functions: shopping cart, delivery method, payment method, and order submission. The importance of the user experience of this process is to allow customers to easily complete the order process.
5. Shopping cart testing
When a certain product has a shopping limit, can it be placed in the shopping cart if it exceeds this value? Are the shopping limits in the shopping cart correct? Can the points be redeemed for genuine products or restricted products? Whether the points can be redeemed for promotional products?
6. Payment process
Can the selected products in the shopping cart be paid for normally? When the payment is completed, without waiting for the page to jump, whether the data transmission is correct if we close the browser directly? When the payment is completed, wait for the page to jump, whether the page we jump to is correct? Whether the data transmission between a certain module of the website is correct?
7. Order process test
After the order is submitted, verify the processing flow of the order and check whether the corresponding order status is correct.
Performance and response speed test.
Concurrency testing such as the seckill function.
Purchase the same restricted product at the same time.
Concurrent operation of twice points redemption with the same account.
When submitting an order, whether there are multiple orders during concurrent operations.
According to the system architecture of the e-commerce website, we should focus on the testing below.
For a typical system structure, the three-tier C/S architecture is currently adopted, namely 1.Presentation layer, 2. Business layer, and 3. Data layer (the page interacts with the database).
1. Presentation layer
Check if the front end of the application is correct.
content test
Check the correctness, accuracy of the information provided by the web application system.
site structure
Check if there are errors in the site structure and find out the invalid links.
a. Whether there is an empty link
b. Whether link to the specified page
c. Whether there is a connection error.
user environment
Check if the website is compatible with the users’ browsers and operating systems.
2. The business layer
In this layer, the test work is mainly to find out problems in the business logic.
The load test is to measure the performance of the Web system at a certain level to ensure that the Web system can work normally within the required range.
data verification
Collect data of test user in a way of form and submit the data after ensuring the consistency, correctness, and completeness of the data. Then go to the database to verify.
business test
Test the correctness of the business process of the system. Such as adding products to the shopping cart, settlement, order submission, order processing flow, etc.
3. Data layer
The test of the data layer mainly refers to the test of the database management system used to collecting and storing information.
response time,
Quantitative concurrent operations, whether the application system has an impact on the response data, which directly affect user experience.
data integrity
The test work mainly verifies the submission and storage of data. Compare the data to be submitted with the data in the database to confirm whether it is correct.
Ecommerce testing-homepage testing- shopping cart testing- payment gateway testing-51testing
What testing should we focus on the homepage, shopping cart, and payment gateway of an eCommerce website?
Homepage test
The homepage test is divided into two important modules, UI test, and search function test.
The UI test mainly tests items below:
Whether the layout of the page is neat and beautiful?
Whether the information, text, and pictures of each product are displayed correctly?
Whether the pictures are deformed?
Whether it jumps to the correct page by clicking the link?
Whether there are empty links?
Whether the input box, drop-down box, multi-select box, button function, js animation effect are normal?
Whether the carousel diagram is normal when the mouse is hovering？
Whether the page loading speed is normal？
Whether it is compatible with different browsers, and whether it supports mobile terminal？
The search function test is divided into product search and shop search:
Whether the search function has a character type and length limit?
Whether there are prompt messages?
Whether we can match the correct information when entering the complete product information?
Whether there is a search history prompt when clicking the empty search box?
Whether there is any prompt information in the search box, whether the prompt information can be selected, whether the matching information can be displayed when clicking the prompt information?
Whether the required products can be displayed when entering the keyword?
Whether the products can be displayed when the search box is empty?
Whether there is a prompt when can not find the products? Is there a link to return to the homepage?
Shop search is similar to the product search.
Shopping cart testing
Interface test
For the website/APP interface, we need to check whether the layout of the page is reasonable and the display of the page is in full.
Functional test
All page links work normally and can turn into the correct page.
Products added from the product listing page can be displayed in the shopping cart.
When products are added to the shopping cart from other pages while the shopping cart page is opened. The newly added products can be displayed after the shopping cart page is refreshed.
If click on the shopping cart when not logged in, the user will be prompted to enter the user name and password, or another shopping way will be prompted for non-registered users.
When the product is not selected, the settlement button is gray and cannot be clicked.
After selecting the product, the total price of the selected product will be displayed, and the settlement button will be highlighted and can be clicked.
Select the product and click the settlement button, and then the user can enter the order confirmation page.
On the shopping cart page, you can modify the added product information and save it automatically.
Check whether there is a corresponding reminder in the shopping cart if there is a price reduction or an urgent inventory and whether the out-of-stock product can be added to the shopping cart.
Check if there is a limit on the number of goods that can be added to the shopping cart.
Unwanted goods can be deleted.
Performance Testing
How long does it take to open the shopping cart page;
Usability test
Whether the shortcut function is supported
Compatibility test
Whether the functions on different browsers are normal?
Whether the functions are normal on different APPs?
Delivery information
Whether the functions of adding, modifying, deleting, and receiving information functions are normal?
How many receiving information can be added at most?
Whether the input box has restrictions on the character type and length?
Whether the receiving information can be saved when the required field is empty?
Can it be displayed correctly in the list after saving successfully? Whether the saved information can be viewed in the background?
Can an order be submitted without receiving information?
Can the user choose more than one receiving information?
Commodity information
Whether the picture, data, price, and other information about the product are correct?
Invoice Information
Whether the character type and length are restricted when adding invoice information, whether the display is normal, and whether the correct invoice information can be queried in the background?
Coupons and points
Whether the coupons and points are displayed correctly and whether they match the background?
Whether coupons and points can be used normally and can they be used in stacks?
Whether the payment amount of coupons and points is reduced accordingly? Whether the coupons and points in the background are also reduced accordingly?
Order submission
After the order is submitted and the payment is successful, whether the order information can be queried in the background?
Abnormal scenarios
If the payment amount is not enough, can the customer buy it? Is there any hint?
Does the network interruption and power outage during the payment process affect the payment?
Can the payment be made normally in the weak network?
Payment gateway testing
Payment functions are often involved in many software applications. The focus of the payment function test is whether there is a loss of assets and consistency of transactions.
When doing payment gateway testing, we should pay attention to the below situation on the payment amount.
The minimum amount of payment: such as $0.01
Amount without actual payment: such as an order of $0
Wrong payment amount: wrong format, wrong number (the payment amount is negative)
Maximum amount limit: For some payment gateway, there is a payment maximum limit.
The balance is less than the actual amount to be paid.
The payment amount exceeds the daily consumption amount limit or a single consumption amount limit.
There is much third-party payment gateway. For example Alipay, Paypal, online banking, mobile banking, etc. So pay attention to the difference among these payment gateways.
On the operation of payment, these payment methods should attract your attention.
Biometric payment (Fingerprint payment)
Password-free payment
Account + password payment
Get payment verification code dynamically
Bank card number + password binding payment
If there are abnormal scenarios, fault tolerance becomes an important matter to consider.
How to deal with refunds?
What if the network is disconnected during payment?
How to replace the order or refund the order after the payment fails?
If the payment amount is insufficient, can the customer continue to pay after recharging?
Whether there will be multiple deductions if keep clicking?
If multiple deductions occur, how to refund the payment account?
____
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Exp. Share | Performance Testing tutorial, step by step, a complete guide | https://medium.com/@51testing/e-commerce-testing%E4%B8%A8how-to-test-an-ecommerce-website-b181ac9bb0b | [] | 2020-12-18 09:09:26.844000+00:00 | ['Ecommerce Solution', 'Software Testing', 'Software Testing Company', 'Ecommerce Testing', 'Ecommerce'] |
First-Ever Odorless Marijuana Claimed By Canadian Startup | The Ontario-based company, CannabCo Pharmaceutical Corp. (CannabCo) has announced the development and production of new odorless marijuana that is virtually undetectable. The company paired up with an undisclosed technology company to produce this new product that, if approved, could change the way marijuana is handled.
A New Odorless Cannabis Product is Announced
Earlier this month CannabCo announced in a press release the new odorless product “PURECANN” and the many benefits it contains. First of all, the company claims to have produced a cannabis product that has a “virtually undetectable odor of dry product during storage” and greatly minimizes the smell of marijuana during consumption.
“There are no third-party gadgets, or devices on the part of the user, the end result is pure cannabis that doesn’t smell,” says CannabCo President and CEO Mark Pellicane.
Imagine being able to walk around the public without having to worry about the wafting smell of weed coming from your purse or being able to smoke on your break and now worry about your clothes smelling of marijuana. These are problems that stoners have faced since the beginning of high times.
Imagine the Possibilities
This does, however, bring new issues into the picture if this product is approved (they meet all GMP standards). The public has to then start to worry about the drug’s biggest giveaway not being present anymore. Airports, schools, and other public areas will have less of an idea if marijuana is being smoked. Police will have a much harder time trying to suspect marijuana if you use this product as well. This newer ability to be able to hide the stench is both a blessing and a curse, depending on how you look at it. People who live in apartment complexes will now no longer have to worry about getting a complaint about the smell of marijuana. On the other hand, parents may have to pay extra attention to see if there’s any smoke coming from their kids’ window.
Another benefit of PURECANN is the lack of harshness when smoking. The technology used eliminates the harsh after taste that marijuana usually has, without removing any of the essential properties. This opens up the door for users who have been curious about smoking weed but are turned off because of the constant coughing smokers usually face. Effectively, this will create a better morning after smoking with much less residue in your throat, causing the notorious “day after” feeling, according to Cannabco.
The last claim CannabCo has on PURECANN is its ability to market for a new “connoisseur” product that will appeal to new demographics. Cannabco COO Mark Novak believes this new advancement in technology will open up the doors for what is possible in the marijuana world.
“In using this technology CannabCo will be able to produce a wide variety of products currently not in the marketplace, addressing a key market segment that currently does not exist,” said Novak.
But That’s Not All, CannabCo Claims to Have Other Innovative Technology
Another development Cannabco announced in the press release is the development of PHEONIX technology, which they are applying to their indoor growing operations. This technology has reduced the cost of production for a gram of marijuana down to 50 cents. The surplus of money they created from this transition is to be used to further develop PURECANN.
The press release didn’t go into too much detail about PHEONIX technology, but if this alternative method of growing proves to be effective, Canada could see a price drop in cannabis products. While Cannabco continues to push this new development to Canada, the rest of the world is forced to sit back and wait for the results of testing.
The development and production of PURECANN could potentially be the next step needed to move forward the legalization process for certain states. It could also potentially be the next big problem for both the public and law enforcement. Either way, CannabCo continues to prove to be the leading cannabis company that is making marijuana more accessible for people who really need it, and don’t want to worry about smelling like it. | https://medium.com/@consultants/first-ever-odorless-marijuana-claimed-by-canadian-startup-f11e9cd81264 | [] | 2019-09-23 20:14:09.083000+00:00 | ['Science', 'Canada', 'News', 'Marijuana', 'Cannabis'] |
The Zenly Experience — a product case study | The Zenly Experience — a product case study
Design is all about finding balance, and we could all learn from Zenly on how to do that.
“The Zenly Experience” with a phone mockup
So first, what is Zenly? Essentially, it’s a better way to keep track of your friends & family. You can view location, send messages, and a ton of other cool things. The team at Zenly went above & beyond with their added features, so let’s take a look.
three phone mockups of a the zenly onboarding
The first experience with Zenly is the onboarding flow. Now, I am a HUGE believer that onboarding is one of the most important features of an app. Zenly’s was so simple, but enjoyable I honestly didnt want it to end. The playful copy, big font, and dynamic cursor sets the tone for the Zenly experience.
three phone mockups of Zenly onboarding
During this process you also get a taste of the amazing 3D illustrations that are common place within this app. Simple, clear copy that has a personality matched with eye catching illustrations make for the perfect onboarding experience.
Three phone mockups of Zenly empty states
Once you’re in any new app, empty states are everywhere. This is one of the most overlooked areas of an app that has a huge impact on experience. The Zenly team nails their empty states. I almost didn’t want to even add friends or messages so I could see these clean screens.
Once you do start adding friends, you get greeted with a clean bubbly interface with rounded buttons and the standard thick font. Where this experience become great is the success screens.
When you add a friend, you unlock new emojis that fall onto your screen. Zenly knows the success of their app is dependent on you adding your friends, and to do that, they make that process desirable. This was so fun and cool to watch, I wanted to keep inviting people just to see these emojis.
Continuing with sharing, this is the best use of sharing screens I’ve seen in any app. Again, Zenly knows how important it is for you, and their business that you share the app, and they do an amazing job making that experience enjoyable.
These are three of their share screens. Filled with Zenly brand illustrations, motion, colors, and feel. These are so cool and well done that it makes posting them on your IG story feel artsy, very well done.
Two phone mockups with maps
At the core, Zenly is an interactive map. To try and reinvent this, they went above and beyond in some of their novelty features within the map. For ex, flights, COVID tracking, temperature, and other cool lenses make just using the map fun too.
One phone mockup showing the footprints screen
One of the more interesting Zenly features is the Footprints section. This is a way to keep track of where you’ve been, a pretty cool feature if I’m honest. But throughout the entire app, this is the only screen that feels off brand… why the neon-foresty green???
The last thing I’m touching on in the app is the profile & COVID tracking features. The profile, is as clean and simple as it gets, bubbly elements, no clutter it works great for the brand.
two phone mockups with profile and covid features
Where Zenly shines in my opinion, is with the COVID feature. This app main use case is when people are out and about, but yet they are gamifying staying home to stop the spead of COVID. And as every other screen in the app, it is enjoyable to be on. @Zenly you guys nailed this.
Now, I wanted to focus only on the mobile experience, but the Zenly website is too good to ignore. This is the most enjoyable website I have ever been on. Every single page, illustration, use of motion and simplicity literally makes you want to go through it multiple times.
https://vimeo.com/430399695 | https://uxdesign.cc/the-zenly-experience-a-product-case-study-55e148b0d0e4 | ['Josh Nelson'] | 2020-07-20 23:39:40.447000+00:00 | ['Product Design', 'Tech', 'User Experience', 'Case Study', 'Apps'] |
My 6-Year-Old Is Chill AF. She Also Has Anxiety and OCD. | Over the past eight months, I have been routinely amazed by my kid. The coronavirus pandemic changed her life. Preschool shut down. We quit going shopping, quit dining out. Her Frozen II birthday party was canceled. We didn’t get to go to the pool this summer or hang out with friends.
There’s a whole lot we quit doing, all to be safe, just in case. I never expected that to be easy for my daughter. I know it’s tough. It’s hard on me and we miss everything from leisurely Target trips to Saturdays spent at the library.
I keep waiting for her to have a meltdown because she misses the McDonald’s play place, or because we drive past the old “bounce house” every single day. The bounce house was one of our favorite hangouts — a place where I could work on my writing and she could play with other kids — but they had to close their doors months ago.
Many of our favorite places have closed over the past few months, even the American Girl store just outside of Atlanta, where we always planned to have her golden birthday in a few years. It feels like life has been one disappointment after another this year, and yet, my daughter takes it all in stride.
Nothing is quite “normal,” but my kid’s easygoing nature means that every socially-distanced holiday so far has been her definition of the “best day ever.”
Seriously. Her Zoom birthday party and home festivities? “This is the best birthday ever,” she declared. No trick or treating this Halloween, but we still managed to do a socially-distanced play date. “Best Halloween ever!” She talked about that celebration every day for a week.
In a lot of ways, I’ve lucked out because my daughter is so damn easy to please. Sure, she’s still a kid, so she sometimes thinks she wants every single toy she sees on TV, but she totally gets it when I tell her no, not today, maybe never, etc. She trusts me, I think, to look at most situations on a case-by-case basis. I trust her to not lose her shit when I say no.
“Hey, I don’t think I’m up to putting the big tree up for Christmas this year,” I told her last week. “I feel bad about that. What do you think? What if we do a real small tree instead?”
My daughter barely missed a beat.
“Yeah, we could use my doll tree,” she said. “That would be fun.”
“I’ll put an advent calendar tree on the wall too,” I told her.
THIS is the only tree I feel like putting up in 2020 | Image by Pottery Barn Kids
“Ooh, yeah!” As she replied, I almost couldn’t believe it. How did I ever get such an easy-going kid? | https://medium.com/honestly-yours/my-6-year-old-is-chill-af-she-also-has-anxiety-and-ocd-8137beda9d85 | ['Shannon Ashley'] | 2020-11-16 23:52:53.142000+00:00 | ['Parenting', 'Life Lessons', 'Family', 'Life', 'Mental Health'] |
Fun With Funding: Contributing To A Gitcoin Grant | I believe that this community, above all, appreciates the importance of rewarding creators, so I thought it would be fun to document my experience of making a (small) contribution to a Gitcoin Grant.
Gitcoin grants are, “a fast, easy and secure way to provide recurring token contributions to your favorite OSS maintainers.” Most of my work is on Ethereum 2.0 development, and one of the great services to the community is performed by @pggallagher who faithfully writes up the notes from the regular developers’ meetings. A little while ago, Peter suggested setting up a Gitcoin Grant to encourage this work.
Visiting the Gitcoin Grants page, we can see Peter’s request.
Are you ready to DAI?
The first challenge: I had planned to make a donation in plain old Ether, but this didn’t seem to be an option. After some digging around, I eventually realised that grants can only be made in tokens. Wrapped Ether (WETH — an ERC20 token that is convertible 1:1 with Ether) would have been ideal, but that option didn’t appear on the drop-down list of 188 or so supported tokens. In the end I opted for the default option, DAI.
As an aside, the reason for this is that Gitcoin seeks to support the ERC-1337 standard for recurring subscriptions on the blockchain. This relies on ERC-20’s approve() method to pre-approve future payments. I suppose that it wouldn’t be difficult to set up an escrow contract to do this with Ether directly — but, yay for standards!
Anyway, DAI is a stable-coin aiming to track the US dollar, which is great, but I didn’t have any. After a quick Google, Bancor looked to be a convenient and cost-effective way to exchange Ether for DAI. Bancor is a “Decentralized Liquidity Network”, so you are not interacting with other people, or a company: your counterparties are smart contracts. The whole thing was straightforward, with no account required, no KYC or other hurdles to jump.
I settled on $10 per two-weekly meeting write-up, and planned for about six months. So I was after $120 worth in total. I typed “120” into the DAI box, and the Bancor dApp automatically populated the ETH box at what looked to be a reasonable rate (for New Year’s day 2019).
Clicking Convert led to some complexity, but nothing too scary:
Clicking through another couple of screens and signing the transaction with MetaMask was smooth, and the transaction went through pretty swiftly, launching a blizzard of internal activity that you can see on Etherscan. It looks like my initial Ether was converted to wrapped Ether that was passed between a couple of contracts. Then it was traded for some BNT which was again moved around, and finally into DAI that gets sent to my account after yet another hop. We truly have achieved “programmable money”.
Pretty soon, I had some DAI in my account:
Ooops — I wanted 120 of them! I assume the exchange rate moved fractionally against me while the transaction was pending. Oh well. (I have no idea why MetaMask shows the value of this as $135.31. It isn’t.)
Now I’ve got my DAI, I can get on with the Gitcoin Grant contribution.
Getting Going with Gitcoin Grants
Full disclosure, my first attempts to contribute failed due to a bug, but the Gitcoin people were super helpful and we found the problem. The below documents the eventual happy flow 😃.
Filling in the grants form was straightforward, except for having to divide my 119.997193078834529614 DAI by 12 to get the right regular payment (don’t use more than 4 decimal places for now, or you’ll run into the bug I found!). The default gas price was fine, and the transaction confirmation was near instantaneous.
As per the instructions, I had to sign twice in MetaMask: the first time for a transaction, the second just a signing operation (not a transaction) that Gitcoin will use to authorise future payments on my behalf.
The initial transaction went through after a few seconds, and a short time later I received an email confirming my support 🎉. Soon after that, 9.999 DAI was deducted from my account, and I received another email confirmation of the fact.
I’m now a contributor 😀
Conclusion
Modulo some small teething problems, everything works!
One day soon, we’ll be able to do all this and have no idea whatsoever that it is all taking place on a blockchain, trustlessly guaranteed by smart contracts.
Yes, from end to end there are extra steps due to having to use DAI or other tokens, but it already feels easier than setting up a recurring payment with my bank, and I feel more in control.
It’s all astonishing if you do happen to appreciate what’s happening under the hood. I’m simply blown away by Bancor. And the Gitcoin grants, while maybe technically less complex, have the potential to be an amazing service for the OSS community. Funding for valuable open source projects has long been an issue; wouldn’t it be wonderful if we all felt enabled to support the projects from which we benefit so much?
Disclaimer: I am not associated with Gitcoin, although I do work for the same overall organisation, ConsenSys.
Under the hood
This is totally optional and you don’t need to understand any of this in order to contribute to a grant, but it is interesting to take a little look at what’s going on behind the scenes.
The first transaction that you sign when making a grant is an approve() method call on your chosen ERC-20 token, in my case the DAI contract. The ERC-20 approve() functionality authorises a third party to transfer tokens out of your account, up to the limit you specify. In this case, the transaction authorised the Gitcoin Subscription contract for this grant to take up to 120 DAI (minus epsilon) from my account — the total amount for the whole 12 contributions.
Parameters for the approve() call to the DAI contract
The second operation is not a transaction, but signing some data. To understand why this is needed, we need to take a look at the Gitcoin Subscription contract source code.
The model is that, as users, we authorise payments to take place at certain times in the future. However, due to the way Ethereum works, smart contracts can’t be set to execute autonomously at specific times: they need to be prodded by an external actor when it’s time to do something. The Subscription contract has a method executeSubscription(). At the set intervals, Gitcoin will call this method in order to execute the next payment. The method checks that it is not being called too soon, before the payment is due.
As proof that I actually agreed to the parameters passed to the executeSubscription() — who is being paid, the token type, the amount, the payment interval — I need to sign a string containing these parameters when the grant is set up. Gitcoin stores this signature, and, every time the execute subscription method is called, passes it as proof that I agreed to the parameters. The contract checks the signature to ensure nothing untoward is going on. This should be happening every 14 days for the contribution I have set up.
It’s a belt-and-braces approach: my maximum contribution is already set by the amount I approved on the DAI contract, but it is reassuring to know that everything is double-protected. If I wanted to cancel outside the Gitcoin workflow, I could still do so simply by setting the approved amount to zero on the DAI contract, or just by moving my DAI elsewhere.
Finally, note that the total amount authorised to be taken from my account in the approve() transaction above (the “wad”) is my 9.999 DAI * 12 payments, plus another 14.4 nano DAI (plus 0.01 pico DAI that I can’t explain). The 14.4 nano DAI are intended to provide a 1.2 nano DAI fee to the relaying account that prods the Subscription contract every 14 days. It is to cover its gas fees for doing so and to provide some incentivisation. If this incentivisation were a more realistic amount, the whole process could be completely decentralised: any 3rd party other than the Gitcoin server could submit the executeSubscription() transaction in return for the reward. This is very cool. | https://medium.com/gitcoin/fun-with-funding-contributing-to-a-gitcoin-grant-bfd17b31caa8 | ['Ben Edgington'] | 2019-01-09 15:11:13.811000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Open Source', 'Tech', 'Ethereum'] |
The Power of Bayesian Inference estimated using PyMC3 | Ref: Jupyter Notebook and GitHub Repository
The beauty of Bayesian methods is their ability to generate probability estimates of the quality of derived models based on a priori expectations of the behaviour of the model parameters. Rather than a single point-solution, we obtain a distribution of solutions each with an assigned probability. A priori expectations of the data behaviour are formulated into a set of Priors, probability distributions over the model parameters.
The following scenario is based on Thomas Wiecki’s excellent article “GLM: Robust Linear Regression”¹ and is an exploration of the Python library PyMC3² as a means to model data using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods in Python, with some discussion of the predictive power of the derived Bayesian models. Different priors are considered, including Normal, Student-T, Gamma and Gaussian Random Walk, with a view to model the sample data both using generalized linear models (GLM) and by taking a non-parametric approach, estimating observed data directly from the imputed priors.
Sample Data
Our sample data is generated as a simple linear model with given intercept and slope, with an additional random Gaussian noise term added to each observation. To make the task interesting, a small number of outliers are added to the distribution which have no algebraic relationship to the true linear model. Our objective is to model the observed linear model as closely as possible with the greatest possible robustness to disruption by the outliers and the observation error terms.
Normal vs Student-T priors
We compare models based on Normal versus Student-T observation error priors. Wiecki shows that a Student-T prior is better at handling outliers than the Normal as the distribution has longer tails, conveying the notion that an outlier is not to be considered wholly unexpected.
True linear model and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression
We start with a simulated dataset of observations of the form y=ax+b+epsilon, with the noise term epsilon drawn from a normal distribution. Here we 1) create observation values in the range x from 0 to 1.5, based on the ‘true’ linear model, 2) add test outliers and 3) extend the x axis from 1.5 to 3.0 so we can test the predictive power of our models into this region.
In the predictive region we have used numpy.MaskedArray() function in order to indicate to PyMC3 that we have unknown observational data in this region¹⁵.
It is useful to visualize the simulated data, along with the true regression line and ordinary least squares regression.
The Seaborn library allows us to draw this plot directly⁴, and we can also set a ‘robust’ flag which calculates the regression line while de-weighting outliers. | https://towardsdatascience.com/the-power-of-bayesian-inference-estimated-using-pymc3-6357e3af7f1f | ['Marcus Richards Ph.D.'] | 2020-08-18 15:46:28.444000+00:00 | ['Bayesian Statistics', 'Inside Ai', 'Monte Carlo Method', 'Pymc3', 'Python'] |
ML06: Intro to Multi-class Classification | This is a continuation of Mathematics behind Machine Learning Series.
In the last post, we saw how elegantly the maximum margin principle formulates to solve a binary classification task.
B ut for multiclass, the notion of maximum margin is harder to formulate. So the question of how can we reuse the 2-class formulation for k classes.
One-vs-Rest (OvR): for each class k train an SVM that is expert in classifying k (one) versus non-k (the rest) meaning we have to create a binary classifier for each class k, which is an expert in separating that class(k) from all the other classes.
One-vs-One (OvO): for each pair of classes (k, k’), train an SVM that is expert in classifying k versus k’.
In either case, make multiclass predictions by combining individual binary predictions.
One-vs-Rest
Let’s take an example of a 3 class classifier, for OvR we need 3 SVMs each of which is an expert in separating 1 class from the other 2. Let see a visual example below:
OvR SVM with linear kernel
We can 3 SVMs one for blue, one for orange, and one for green class. Each SVM is trained on binary data, meaning that it’s task is to separate its class from all the other classes. The heatmap below shows the heatmap for individual SVM. | https://malhotravaibhav.medium.com/ml06-intro-to-multi-class-classification-e61eb7492ffd | ['Vaibhav Malhotra'] | 2020-10-25 18:23:40.280000+00:00 | ['Classification', 'Multiclass Classification'] |
Mayor Johnson forms Mayor’s Anti-Hate Advisory Council | DALLAS — Mayor Eric Johnson on Wednesday announced that he has formed the Mayor’s Anti-Hate Advisory Council in light of statistics that show a rising number of hate crimes in Dallas and across the country.
The new advisory council will meet regularly to discuss ways to make the City of Dallas and its police department better equipped to both respond to and prevent hate crimes and to promote a culture that is tolerant and understanding. The announcement comes after the FBI released a new report showing that nationwide, hate crimes hit at a 12-year high in 2020. Dallas also saw an increase last year.
The Mayor’s Anti-Hate Advisory Council includes key community leaders who are representative of various segments of the city’s population.
“Dallas is a welcoming city, one that embraces its diversity and works to overcome the racial and economic divisions sowed by generations that have long past,” Mayor Johnson said.
But, the mayor added in his remarks, “we cannot afford to ignore or downplay hate. Nobody should feel uncomfortable or unsafe in Dallas because of who they are — because of their race or ethnicity, their sexual and gender identities, their religion, or their national origin.”
The new mayoral advisory council is Mayor Johnson’s third. He previously formed the Mayor’s International Advisory Council and the Mayor’s Domestic Violence Advisory Council. Both remain active.
The inaugural Mayor’s Anti-Hate Advisory council will include 16 people. Mayor Johnson named four co-chairs: Sammie Berry, Minister of Dallas West Church of Christ and Chair of Dallas Area Preachers and Church Leaders; Sherry Goldberg, Chair of the Community Security Initiative of the Jewish Federation of Greater Dallas; Gary Sanchez, Board Chair, North Texas LGBT Chamber of Commerce; Sanjiv Yajnik, President of Financial Services, Capital One Financial Corporation.
“I love the city of Dallas, but we have work to do to eliminate hate,” said Berry. “We need to look at the value systems, the policies, and the laws that allow hate to fester. We need to work diligently to educate and eliminate hate and hate crimes here in our city. This advisory council gives us an excellent forum to work with Mayor Johnson on these critical issues and on building a better Dallas.”
“I applaud Mayor Johnson for his commitment and vision for our great city,” said Goldberg. “As a group, we must work together to combat and eliminate hate of all forms. Strength comes in numbers. When we all join in and work cohesively, our city will be rewarded now and for generations to come.”
“Hate has no home here in Dallas,” Sanchez said. “Regardless of one’s race, appearance, views or identity, everyone deserves to walk the streets of Dallas with a sense of safety and respect. I thank Mayor Johnson for this opportunity, and I am looking forward to working with my fellow co-chairs and committee members to drive hate out of our city and make Dallas a welcoming place for all those who live here, work here, or are simply passing through.”
“I am heartened to see our region’s deep commitment to inclusivity, and call upon everyone to condemn all acts of hate,” said Yajnik. “Efforts to drive positive change cannot end until every member of our community feels safe, valued, heard and supported. I’m honored to work hand in hand with Mayor Johnson and key community leaders to help foster belonging for all in the greater DFW area.”
Here is the full Mayor’s Anti-Hate Advisory Council: | https://medium.com/dallasmayor/mayor-johnson-forms-mayors-anti-hate-advisory-council-3aa5425d6043 | ['Tristan Hallman'] | 2021-09-15 20:14:56.789000+00:00 | ['Dallas', 'Diversity', 'Press Release'] |
Music Beats Netflix; Streamstock Set For Friday | Music streaming finally has more paying subscribers than Netflix — www.musicbusinessworldwide.com
One of the more deflating facts about the size of the global music streaming business has, for the time being, been banished to history. Across the past half-decade, the total number of people paying to subscribe to audio music services has trailed behind those shelling out for just one TV and movie service — Netflix.
How Spotify Created a Profitable New Way for Consumers to Obtain the Music They Listen to — www.entrepreneur.com
Its popular service, which grew virally, is free to the majority of users but still turns a profit.
Garth Brooks’ Ghost Tunes Folding Into Amazon Music — www.billboard.com
The so-called alternative to iTunes appears to be no more.
GroupM/Spotify reveal $220m mobile music streaming ad opportunity — www.bizreport.com
Group M and Spotify plan to tap into streaming media consumption, in particular music, to generate new ad revenue.
Streamstock 2017 Online Music & Arts Festival Set For Friday — www.jambase.com
On Friday, Streamstock 2017 will provide an alternative to the Inauguration festivities.
Guvera music streaming service escapes insolvency bid — www.smh.com.au
Troubled Australian music streaming service Guvera has escaped an attempt to have its business sent to the liquidators.
Spotify is the top-grossing iOS app, Line takes first spot on Google Play — betanews.com
There are lots of really successful paid apps, but which one generates the most net revenue? According to a Sensor Tower report, Spotify comes out on top overall in 2016.
VIZIO Crave 360, Crave Pro speakers get some Spotify love — www.slashgear.com
VIZIO is a brand better known for its TVs, both traditional and smart, but of late it has been making huge strides to leave a mark in the connect speaker market | https://medium.com/platform-stream/music-beats-netflix-streamstock-set-for-friday-9b55f908bcee | ['Platform'] | 2017-01-18 17:30:09.628000+00:00 | ['Spotify', 'Streamstock', 'Streaming Music', 'Groupm', 'Music'] |
What I talk about, when I talk about riding my bike | My best friend has two wheels. Instead of lying, charging, next to my bed it is hanging majestically and colourful on a hook in the other end of my room. I do also have a smartphone; a Samsung Galaxy something smart. Black with a slightly incised screen which emits an annoying amount of light if you look at in the dark.
Every morning the three of us go to work together — together with the bike, I’m responsible for getting us there, some mornings fast, others slow. My phone is in my backpack.
Together we pass car drivers caught in the morning traffic jams, who scrolls annoyed through the news feed of the day on their smart phones with a half-eaten piece of bread in the other hand — often trying to squeeze in on the other side of the traffic lights if they can. Imagine what would happen if they didn’t make it in time…
In a fast developing world, the need for a free space is of crucial importance for me — and I think for most people. Constantly aware of our social networking and jobs through the internet, we are the generation who is the less bored of all time. Think about it. When is the last time you remembered staring out the window not knowing what to do for a longer time?
Some find boredom a negative thing, something ineffective. But let’s consider: Vacation and free space is ineffective as well. Or?
I find a close connection between boredom and free space. I can’t say I love boredom but it gives me time to reflect and relax. And it gives me a free space.
I find my free space on my bike. Whether it is commuting to work, training towards the coming season or racing national championships, I love the way I can use my intuition and creative senses: Making an attack on the last descent, social networking on long winter rides or simply just looking for potholes in the tarmac to train my bunny-hop skills.
To ride more for me does not necessarily mean that I have increase the amount of hours on the bike, but I find it inspiring the ‘more’ I get from riding. The nourishing feeling of arriving at work after the ride, the happiness of spending time together with friends or the relief of finishing a bike race in a good position.
Even though I feel the most ‘effective’ while being at work, the best ideas always pop up when I’m on the bike — and I find it a little ironic to the ‘effectiveness culture’ of today that these ideas always vanish the very same moment I open my computer or smart phone to find unanswered mails, chats and notifications.
Which brings me back to my morning commutes: I’m not saying that the biking give me philosophical skills on the level of Platon or Sokrates, but it gives me a small time of boredom where I don’t have the opportunity to check my Messenger-chats or mailbox. On the bike I can immerse into the day that has passed or the day that wait tomorrow. Or maybe simply into the fact that the leaves on the trees soon will return with warmer weather. | https://medium.com/@thomas-steinthal/what-i-talk-about-when-i-talk-about-riding-my-bike-d92ab3fdf68c | ['Thomas Steinthal'] | 2021-01-07 15:40:51.569000+00:00 | ['Boredom', 'Effectiveness', 'Cycling'] |
What is a bicycle, and what should you know before buying it? | Bicycle:
Bicycle means two-wheeled vehicle. Bicycles are a beautiful and fantastic way to get to your destination quickly on busy roads these days. Not only will cycling get you to your destination faster, but regular cycling will also keep your body healthy. So if you want to lose body fat, get rid of breathing problems, and get off the bike today. But if you want to get off the bike, you cannot, and you must buy a bike first.
Budget:
Before buying a bike, decide what your budget is. This is because what kind of bike you can buy will depend on your budget. If your budget is high, then buy a good brand model, and if your budget is low, you have to save a lot of verification to buy the bike.
Single-gear or multi-gear:
Then you have to decide whether a multi-gear bike or a single-gear bike will be better for you. If your budget is between 5000–6000, buying a single gear bike would be good. Within this budget, you will find some perfect bicycles of Prince and Meghna brands. And if your budget is more than 6000, then you can buy a multi-gear bicycle. And the price of a good quality foreign brand multi-gear bicycle starts from Rs 10,000. If your budget is more than 10,000, you can buy bicycles from famous foreign brands like Phoenix, Raleigh, Hero, or Foxter.
Gear Movement:
When buying a bicycle, one of the things you need to pay attention to is the gear movement of the bicycle. That is, whether the bike can be easily shifted from one gear to another. If the gear movement of the bicycle is not smooth, then you should never buy that bicycle. On the other hand, gear controlling is good on both types of bicycles.
1) Control the gear by turning it by hand.
2) Gear is controlled by pressing a button.
Although the price of button gear is relatively high, it is comfortable.
Frame:
The next thing you need to keep in mind is the frame of the bicycle. There are usually three types of bicycle frames.
1) Iron frame: Iron frame is made of iron. Bicycles usually made of iron frames are pretty heavy.
2) Alloy frame: Such a frame is made of aluminum. Alloy framed bicycles are usually relatively light in weight.
3) Carbon frame: This frame is made of carbon fiber is the lightest in weight. This type of frame is used in racing bikes. However, bicycles made of this frame are very rare in Bangladesh, and the price is much higher.
The demand is much higher as the alloy framed bicycles are lighter in weight. Carrying alloy bicycles is also an advantage. You can easily climb up to the second or third floor with your shoulders. If your home is on the second floor or above, refrain from buying iron frame bicycles.
Suspension:
Refrain from buying dual suspension bikes.
Brake:
One of the most important things about a bicycle is the brakes. Is it a V brake or a disc brake? Note that the price of V brakes is relatively low. The effectiveness is also much less. And the price of disc brakes is a bit higher. This is because the effectiveness of disc brakes is much higher. If you want to do stunts, you must buy a bicycle with disc brakes.
Chain:
Before buying a bicycle, make sure that the chain of the bicycle is skidding when pedaling. Then, if you disk it, do not forget to buy that bike. If you buy, you will be deceived. | https://medium.com/@rssmunna/what-is-a-bicycle-and-what-should-you-know-before-buying-it-e039b67a719e | ['Rajib Roy'] | 2021-05-26 10:21:14.750000+00:00 | ['Suspension', 'Budget', 'Gear', 'Bicycles', 'Movement'] |
Tulum, a town made for Instagram | The idea of buying property can be really alluring on vacation, and its not always easy to walk away from a sales presentation in the region surrounding Riviera Maya. Especially ones concerning time share properties.
Developments like these make me feel like the golden era of the town is behind us. The best plots with ocean views are taken, property prices are inflated the town has become a money machine, than a laidback beach town. Developments like these help the economy, but absolutely kill the vibe.
Early History
My host, Alex Alvarez, has been a professional diver for over 20 years. He had moved to Tulum in the 90’s when it was truly a quaint, laidback beach town. He lights up when he talks about his early days and casually mentions that he was one of the divers who discovered a 13,000 year-old human skeleton during an underwater cave expedition around the region. These were the earliest known remains of a prehistoric teenage girl who had possibly fallen in the cave and injured herself. The PBS documentary First Face of America chronicles this expedition. He has partnered with National Geographic as well
Hearing this story and Alex’s passion for diving, I was convinced to go diving with him and document a day in his life. However, his house had burned down recently and he had his own construction to supervise. “In January we can try, maybe. I advice you not to dive with a camera the first few times, most accidents recently have something to do with photography,” he warned.
I was amazed at his humility and thought I’d leave him a token for new home, a painting of an underwater cave made during my stay; it’s still in progress. | https://medium.com/boketto-club/tulum-a-town-made-for-instagram-66da997af01b | ['Akash Ghai'] | 2020-12-22 12:22:48.305000+00:00 | ['Beach', 'Instagram', 'Mexico', 'Travel', 'Real Estate'] |
Accessibility Evaluation — Modcloth | Methods
Three methods were used to conduct the evaluation.
Automated code inspection: use of a tool to thoroughly review code against rules to determine whether the code meets accessibility guidelines.
2. Manual code inspection: relies on an individual to review the code and allows for qualitative judgments.
3. Experience walkthrough: evaluator navigates through the site as a person with one or more disabilities to, practically, get a sense of the user experience regardless of the formatting of the code.
These were chosen because each has its own advantages and disadvantages (see table below)and because of this, no one method can accurately provide the most complete picture of a system’s accessibility like the use of all three together.
Advantages and disadvantages of the three evaluation methods.
Automated code inspection
A trial version of SortSite was used to complete the automated code inspection of three web pages. Each error was recorded into an Excel spreadsheet, noting the exact issue provided by SortSite, level, and related guideline/failure.
Inspection spreadsheet
The spreadsheet was used to identify common unsuccessful guidelines across the different pages and used to easily transfer the information into the inspection results of the evaluation report.
Manual code inspection
Apple’s VoiceOver screen reader software, laptop keyboard, and Chrome’s code inspection feature were primarily used in the manual code inspection. The table below outlines some of the questions addressed during the inspection.
Some of the questions addressed during the inspection.
Some of my notes from the inspection and walkthrough
Experience evaluation
Apple’s VoiceOver screen reader software and laptop keyboard were used for the experience evaluation. The evaluator assumed the roles of a person with low vision and a person who can only use a keyboard, respectively. Additionally, the following criteria were employed:
How well the site supports use of assistive devices such as screen readers,
2. The degree to which the site is navigable without a mouse or trackpad, and
3. Whether the pages allow a visitor with disabilities to understand where they are and what they can do. | https://medium.com/monica-mielke-portfolio/modcloth-accessibility-ad8d148493a0 | ['Monica Mielke'] | 2021-03-05 21:53:32.338000+00:00 | ['Case Study', 'UX Design', 'User Experience', 'Accessibility', 'Accessibility Testing'] |
Data Virtualization Software Market Research 2020: Key Players- SAP, AtScale, AWS, Informatica, OpenLink Virtuoso, Oracle, IBM | Data Virtualization Software Market
Data Virtualization Software Market: Classification, Opportunities, Types and Applications, Status and Forecast to 2027
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The report discusses the various types of solutions for Data Virtualization Software Market. While the regions considered in the scope of the report include North America, Europe, and various others. The study also emphasizes on how rising Data Virtualization Software threats is changing the market scenario.
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Top Key players@ SAP, AtScale, AWS, Informatica, OpenLink Virtuoso, Oracle, IBM, Vmware, Denodo, Data Virtuality, Red Hat, Stone Bond, TIBCO, and Actifio
This report provides pinpoint analysis for changing competitive dynamics. It offers a forward-looking perspective on different factors driving or limiting market growth. It provides a five-year forecast assessed on the basis of how they Data Virtualization Software Market is predicted to grow. It helps in understanding the key product segments and their future and helps in making informed business decisions by having complete insights of market and by making in-depth analysis of market segments.
Key questions answered in the report include:
What will the market size and the growth rate be in 2027?
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What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the vendors in the Global Data Virtualization Software Market?
Trending factors influencing the market shares of the Americas, APAC, Europe, and MEA.
This unique market intelligence report from the author provides information not available from any other published source. The report includes diagnostics sales and market share estimates by product as well as a profile of the company’s diagnostics business.
The report, focuses on the global Data Virtualization Software market, and answers some of the most critical questions stakeholders are currently facing across the globe. Information about the size of the market (by the end of the forecast year), companies that are most likely to scale up their competitive abilities, leading segments, and challenges impeding the growth of the market are given.
Analysis tools such as SWOT analysis and Porter’s five force model have been inculcated in order to present a perfect in-depth knowledge about Data Virtualization Software market. Ample graphs, tables, charts are added to help have an accurate understanding of this market. The Data Virtualization Software market is also been analyzed in terms of value chain analysis and regulatory analysis.
The report includes six parts, dealing with:
1.) Basic information;
2.) The Asia Data Virtualization Software Market;
3.) The North American Data Virtualization Software Market;
4.) The European Data Virtualization Software Market;
5.) Market entry and investment feasibility;
6.) The report conclusion.
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This report provides pin-point analysis for changing competitive dynamics
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It provides pin point analysis of changing competition dynamics and keeps you ahead of competitors
It helps in making informed business decisions by having complete insights of market and by making in-depth analysis of market segments
TABLE OF CONTENT:
1 Report Overview
2 Global Growth Trends
3 Market Share by Key Players
4 Breakdown Data by Type and Application
5 United States
6 Europe
7 China
8 Japan
9 Southeast Asia
10 India
11 Central & South America
12 International Players Profiles
13 Market Forecast 2020–2027
14 Analyst’s Viewpoints/Conclusions
15 Appendix
Request a Discount Report of Data Virtualization Software Market @ http://bit.ly/39cHc8K | https://medium.com/@pickachuupika/data-virtualization-software-market-research-2020-key-players-sap-atscale-aws-informatica-a0ee432f2e8d | ['Pickachuu Pika'] | 2020-02-07 04:10:07.893000+00:00 | ['Software', 'Virtualization', 'Data', 'Market'] |
Forgiveness Is Not All It’s Cracked Up To Be | Forgiveness Is Not All It’s Cracked Up To Be
When you know in your heart that you can’t forgive, stop trying.
Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich from Pexels
They say that forgiveness is at the root of moving forward. To get passed the anger and heartache, we must forgive the ones who caused it. Okay. Normally I’d go along with that. It’s healthy, it’s positive, it’s progress. And I’m all for progress.
But when you’ve been double-crossed by someone close, and the idea of forgiving them feels like being sentenced to scrubbing shitty toilets with a toothbrush for the rest of your life, it’s best to face facts. You will never make peace with that.
My mother raised me on kindness and fairness, wrapping it all up with her favorite Golden Rule, treat others the way you wish to be treated. Now, I’m first to admit that I can be a pretty harsh critic. And I’m judgmental as hell. But in spite of my flaws, compassion plays a major role in my life. I’m a true Libra in that respect. I weigh things out and always strive to play fair.
But finding forgiveness for my double-crosser proved impossible. I cried almost every evening, struggling to get to the other side. He’d once been my hero and I was heartbroken by what he’d done. But I couldn’t forgive him. And had no way to resolve that. Until another option began to emerge. One I hadn’t even considered before. What if — gasp — I didn’t forgive him?
The relief of having an option was immediate. I wasn’t looking for revenge. I felt no urge to strike out or cause him any harm. I just wanted to keep him as far away from me as possible and once I forgave myself for not forgiving him, I was able to breathe again.
I made him and the rest of our immediate family aware of my feelings. It wasn’t a happy time for us but I didn’t give a damn. I cut him out of my life completely. The fam would simply have to get over it.
How hard must it be to pretend that things are cool between you when all you want to do is drop a house on them every time they come into view?
Some warned me that I’d regret my decision someday but it felt way too good not to be right. I couldn’t believe how liberating it was. At family gatherings, there was no pressure to “fix my face” and pretend. The need to put on a front so everyone would feel comfortable was nonexistent. No apologies were necessary. Everyone who needed to know knew exactly where I stood.
Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t flip tables or cause any scenes. Not once. But I also didn’t express any joy when he and I happened to be in the same room. We gave each other plenty of space.
And I realized something in all of this. People often forgive not for themselves but for the sake of others. You might still despise your bitch of a cousin for sleeping with your husband or your bastard brother for stabbing you in the back, but for the sake of the family, you forgive them. Or at least put forth the illusion that you have.
How hard must it be to pretend that things are cool between you when all you want to do is drop a house on them every time they come into view? I’ve seen many people plaster fake smiles on their faces and jump through demoralizing hoops just to keep peace in their families. Every holiday. At every family reunion. And every funeral. It eats them up inside, keeping up the pretense. Party after party. Year after year.
My double-crosser passed away ten years ago. He never came clean with me and I never forgave him. Have I any regrets? Not a one. Like I told my husband, if I was wrong, I guess I’ll have some ‘splainin’ to do when I reach those Pearly Gates.
If you’ve tried to forgive someone who has committed a tremendous wrong against you, and you know in your heart that you can’t do it, I say give yourself a break and stop trying. And for Pete’s sake, don’t beat yourself up about it. That’s just misplaced guilt talking.
I mean, honestly. When someone fucks over you, why should YOU feel guilty? | https://medium.com/fearless-she-wrote/forgiveness-is-not-all-its-cracked-up-to-be-a8033f96cc10 | ['Edwina Owens Elliott'] | 2020-11-10 15:09:04.713000+00:00 | ['Forgiveness', 'Relationships', 'Self', 'Family'] |
The State of Our Organizations in Two Pictures | Orchestrator of Citizen Driven high performance networks flowing through Strategic Ecosystems for Traffic Management. | https://medium.com/@smartswarms/the-state-of-our-organizations-in-two-pictures-a1471bf30149 | ['Gregory D Esau'] | 2020-12-04 17:12:28.577000+00:00 | ['Orchestration', 'Ecosystem Building', 'Platform Thinking', 'Organization', 'Digital Transformation'] |
What’s Up With The VIX? | What Does The VIX Actually Tell Us?
Anytime you put the word “implied” in the name of a metric like implied volatility, people like to assume the existence of a mystical ability to predict the future.
Yes, the VIX is a crowd-sourced measure of expected market volatility; but in this case, the crowd despite all its “collective wisdom” is not very good at predicting market volatility. Look at the plot below, which compares VIX implied volatility and realized volatility. They pretty much move in lockstep. The key is that the orange line plots the volatility of S&P 500 returns over the PREVIOUS 30 days, not the next 30 days — meaning that VIX implied volatility is highly correlated with backwards looking volatility, not future volatility.
VIX implied volatility (blue) vs. realized volatility (orange)
To hammer in this point, here is a similar plot, except instead of backwards looking vol (previous 30 days), I graphed forward vol (next 30 days) in its place. If the lines line up perfectly, that would mean that VIX does predict future volatility. Instead, what we see is the orange line clearly leading the blue line (for example, the orange line spikes up first before the blue line follows). This is expected, if we could use the VIX to predict future changes in the stock market, we would all be rich (or this benefit would quickly be arbitraged away).
VIX doesn’t predict future volatility
VIX Tends To Move Opposite The Stock Market
VIX is commonly called the Fear Gauge by market pundits. That’s because it tends to spike when stock prices crash (inducing investors to panic). The following scatterplot shows the relationship between daily percentage changes in the S&P 500 and daily raw changes in the VIX — as you can see, there is a strong negative correlation (market goes down, VIX goes up).
VIX moves opposite the S&P 500
Astute students of statistics are probably thinking, “If VIX is a measure of volatility, why doesn’t it also go up when markets spike up?” Great question. Pure statistical volatility doesn’t care about direction, a big move is a big move regardless of if it’s up or down. And yes, a huge and unexpected up move in the stock market would put some upward pressure on the VIX (giving ETFs indexed to percentage changes in the VIX a convex relationship with the stock market).
But overall, VIX’s strong inverse relationship with the market holds due to the following factors:
Big Up Days Tend To Happen In Bear Markets
Big up days in stock markets usually happen in the midst of large drawdowns (like after a few weeks of crashing, stocks take a breather and shoot up 8% in one day). So these big up moves don’t impact the VIX that much because the preceding crash already caused the VIX to spike up. Said differently, usually by the time big up days occur, VIX is already really high and investors are already expecting large moves in either direction.
If big positive days in the stock market started occurring out of the blue during bull markets instead of primarily occurring in bear markets, the observed statistical relationship would probably change. But until then, it remains a hypothetical.
Complacency Vs. Fear
It’s important to keep in mind that the VIX is not a purely statistical construct. It’s a measure of investor uncertainty that embeds the aggregate emotions of market participants as well. To that end, market participants tend to associate rising stock markets with stability, optimism, and certainty causing the VIX to decline. And when markets crash, we are filled with feelings of dread, fear, and uncertainty causing VIX to spike.
The Fear Premium
There is a fear premium baked into VIX, especially when it’s low. Look carefully at the first plot (implied vol vs. previous 30 days realized vol) — when volatility is low (and markets are calm), the orange line tends to be below the blue line. This means that options markets tend to systematically price in a higher level of volatility than that which actually gets realized.
It’s basically an insurance effect. When calculating your insurance premium, insurer’s look at the actual probability of your house catching on fire (based on history and data) and then add a premium to that so that on average they can turn a profit (this compensates them for the risk they take on). The options markets work the same way — investors use options and VIX related derivatives to hedge. In order to motivate people to take the other side of this trade and bear the risk, they need to offer compensation, which comes in the form of a vol premium (the excess of implied over realized). Over time, because the implied probability of a big market move tends to be greater than the actual realized probability, investors willing to provide stock market insurance get paid a premium (in return for bearing substantial risk).
So why does this matter? Well, the size of the premium is a function of two things — expectations about future market volatility (extrapolating the recent past) and the supply and demand for insurance against market crashes. During good times, the supply of insurance goes up because more and more investors view the premiums as easy money (and write put options). At the same time, the demand for insurance goes down because investors get tired of paying for insurance that never turns out to be needed (fewer buyers of put options). This compresses the fear premium (a.k.a. the cost of insurance), putting downward pressure on the VIX when markets are calm or in an upwards trend. | https://medium.com/alpha-beta-blog/whats-up-with-the-vix-88b0a724d9fb | ['Tony Yiu'] | 2020-09-03 16:59:30.102000+00:00 | ['Economics', 'Investing', 'Business', 'Data Science', 'Finance'] |
CFPB Pauses Anti-Consumer Reorganization Plan | In the wake of the election and pushback from Senate Banking Committee Ranking Member Sherrod Brown, consumer groups, and even agency staff members, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced last month that it would pause a plan to reorganize the Division of Supervision, Enforcement, and Fair Lending (SEFL) that, if adopted, would leave consumers vulnerable and defenseless.
More than 80 advocacy groups, including CFA, had submitted comments to the Bureau last month in which they argued that the SEFL Division should be strengthened rather than reorganized. Criticism did not come from advocates alone. Arent Fox LLP, an industry law firm, said that “the change amounts to the single most effective effort by the CFPB to weaken its own Enforcement arm since the Trump administration took over. It cuts across all industries and products overseen by the Bureau.”
In their comments, the consumer groups wrote that “the proposed SEFL reorganization undermines the vast enforcement authority granted by the landmark Dodd-Frank Act to enforce federal consumer financial law and bring legal action against companies that violate that law.” The proposal would do this in a number of ways.
First, the proposal would disband Enforcement’s Policy and Strategy Team, which provides support to Enforcement attorneys and determines Enforcement’s overall policy and strategy, and would reassign team members to various Institution Product Line teams. The reorganization would also require Enforcement attorneys to get approval from another office before opening new investigations. Further, it would leave the question of whether federal consumer financial law should be resolved through supervisory exams or through an enforcement action to another office. “These drastic changes will eliminate the Enforcement office’s independence, strip its authority to open new research matters, and remove Enforcement’s critical, expert voice from the SEFL decision making process,” the groups stated.
In addition, the proposal would “dramatically weaken the CFPB’s ability to hold small financial firms accountable for violating the law, especially payday lenders and debt collectors. Because CFPB supervisors do not conduct examinations of these non-bank firms, violations by these institutions could go undetected,” the groups wrote.
With COVID-19 numbers rising nationally and consumers reeling from the current financial crisis, this reorganization could not come at a worse time, the groups argued. Enforcement actions under the current administration have plummeted even as complaints are on the rise. Since the pandemic broke out, the CFPB has seen record-setting numbers of consumer complaints each month.
“In March-June 2020, complaint levels were up by 50% over complaint levels during the same period of the previous year, with complaint volume increasing each consecutive month. The sheer number of complaints received by the CFPB illustrates how much consumers are struggling in the current financial crisis, and the proposed reorganization would leave consumers with less effective recourse in the face of lawbreaking financial institutions,” the groups stated. | https://medium.com/@cfastaffofficial/cfpb-pauses-anti-consumer-reorganization-plan-c70c0c29e2aa | ['Consumer Federation Of America'] | 2020-12-02 15:16:08.254000+00:00 | ['Government', 'Regulation', 'Money', 'Politics', 'Finance'] |
Drop the Charges! An Open Letter to Columbus Mayor Andrew J. Ginther on the MLK Day Arrests of Activists | Photo credit: Courtney Hergesheimer/Columbus Alive
January 21, 2020
Dear Mayor Ginther:
I’m writing this as an “open letter” so anyone can read and share it. I have no illusions that someone of your position will read this appeal, but if anyone can make use of it to support today’s struggles against injustice and to reclaim the real meaning of MLK Day, it will have served its purpose.
As you know, Monday, January 20, marked the 35th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Birthday Breakfast in the city of Columbus — a grand affair involving hundreds of people and, it is said, one the biggest such celebrations of MLK Day in the US.
I was there too, as a member of the choir performing at the event. Musical and dance numbers, including a song by the wonderful children’s choir and other artistic tributes to Dr. King, opened up the program nicely.
But then an ugly event occurred that marred the festivities: the shutting down and arrest of two peaceful, non-violent protestors who were attempting to bring awareness to the killing of Julius Tate, Jr. by undercover Columbus police on December 7, 2018.
These protestors, Dkéama Alexis and Mia Santiago of the Columbus Freedom Coalition, I am shocked to learn, are being charged with criminal trespassing — even though they had bought tickets to the event.
I am writing to assert that this arrest and persecution of the activists directly contradicts the message and spirit of MLK Day. In honor of Dr. King and what he stood for, and in acknowledgement of the continuing racism and violence experienced by Black youth in Columbus and in the US, I join the Columbus Freedom Coalition and many others in asking you to put the considerable weight of your office behind this case, and encourage the prosecutor to drop the charges.
I write as an eyewitness to the protest and the draconian response of the police and organizers. I write as a concerned resident of Columbus, livid at both repeated instances of racist police brutality and the tough treatment meted out to peaceful protestors. I write as a faculty member in the English department at Ohio State, a community that Santiago belongs to as a student and colleague.
Needless to say, the thoughts and opinions here are mine alone and do not officially represent OSU, the English department, or the choir, Capriccio Columbus.
Positioned in the corner of the venue and far from the center stage, I could not see you or your exchange with the protestors. But the chants of “Justice for Julius” rang loud and clear — and, frankly, were a refreshing reminder of what the day was about and who we were celebrating.
But the response they received was also dreadfully familiar to anyone who has stood up to the powerful in the interests of justice: no dialogue or alternative means of taking on a challenge, just the steady march of the cops across the room, the removal of the “disturbance,” and the silencing of protest.
Please consider: if MLK himself, whom we all claim to cherish, were witnessing that event would he be on the side of the protestors, or the police?
Would Dr. King stand with the family of Julius Tate, Jr. and call for us to take to the streets? Or with the muzzling and disciplining of two individuals who merely used their voices and expressed their opinions to address the serious matter of police brutality?
You and I may disagree on whether Columbus police were to blame on December 7, 2018 when Julius Tate, Jr. was killed — which I, frankly, regard as deliberate entrapment. And we may have a different take on what happened on June 6, 2016, when 23-year-old Henry Green was killed by police — leading to protests and fundamental changes to the “summer safety initiative” under your administration.
In September 14, 2016 when 13-year-old Tyre King was killed for the crime of wielding a BB gun, you noted the tragedy of losing a child so young but failed to condemn the grand jury that exonerated Officer Bryan Mason.
You see “strained relations” between the community and police; many of us see ages and ages of unremitting, systematic discrimination and racism.
But my appeal to you here is not about whether you agree with me and community activists on the questions of ongoing racism, persistent police brutality, and the racialized, structural violence and inequality of housing, education, and healthcare in our city, even as the wealthy make profits hand over fist. A divided and untenable crisis in US society that Dr. King famously named “the two Americas” in a 1967 speech.
I am saying something much more basic than this.
Anyone who values the words and life of MLK, especially if they have prominence and political power, needs to recognize what a fundamental contradiction it is to openly or tacitly support Monday’s arrest — and the antagonizing of non-violent protestors that happens in this city, in this country, and all over the world.
When it happens elsewhere (especially in a country we don’t like), we in the US call it “repression” and make speeches about democracy. When it happens here, and especially to Black people, we call it “law and order.”
Innumerable ironies and hypocrisies abounded on Monday for all of those of us who read and follow the path of Dr. King, and his incessant and righteous calls for a mass civil disobedience.
For example, when I went to get breakfast I could see an image of Dr. King’s “mug shot” from one of his many arrests on the massive screen behind the stage. I marveled how easily organizations today can praise MLK’s jail-going of the past but do not hesitate, for a second, to arrest protestors in the present. In his time, as we know, Dr. King was seen by the powers that be as nothing but a “disturber of the peace.”
Apparently, as I heard later, after the arrests someone from the platform said it was ok to protest but not to be “rude.” Has this individual ever read King — whose tactics had nothing to do with passivity and politeness, but had everything to do with standing up for the downtrodden and oppressed, for direct action, and for speaking truth to power?
In “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (1963), responding to the charge that he ought to negotiate and not protest, King insists: “We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up…”
In fact, Dr. King goes on to say, in the same essay, that “the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’…”
What a wonderful idea — not a “negative peace” and “order” with injustice, but a “positive peace” that involves struggle and transformation.
We heard many speakers on Monday saying Dr. King taught us to “turn the other cheek.” But imagine if the city authorities and leaders would put that into practice, even a little bit, when confronted by unarmed protestors chanting slogans?
Why is the violence of armed police always the response? Would it have harmed the event to let them get to the microphone and have their say, seeing their passion and commitment? Would it have hurt to have them, say, put up a table in the hall so that others could receive and consider their information?
As a society, we haven’t come close to understanding the depths of Dr. Kings’ thinking on non-violent direct action, his critique of the “three evils” of “racism, excessive materialism, and militarism,” his opposition to the Vietnam War as a form of extreme, state violence, and his refusal to give an inch to white supremacy.
Dr. King has been whitewashed and his message has been tamed, as if all he wanted was some pleasant speeches and hand-holding across racial lines. But the real Dr. King was complex, nuanced, self-critical — and always evolving towards an understanding that the ills he battled were systemic, inter-connected, and deeply rooted in US society.
In truth, Dkéama Alexis and Mia Santiago were not disrupters of the event. They, in fact, embodied the rebellious spirit that Dr. King spoke about and practiced. They showed us what it looks like to treat MLK, and indeed the Black freedom struggle as a whole, not as historical artifacts to be worshipped from a distance but as a set of ideas and practices that are guides to fighting injustice today.
We — all of us — have to take up King’s challenge in his Nobel speech, “The Quest for Peace and Justice” (1964), to be witnesses to truth. To be witnesses to a righteous struggle. To put ourselves against the ongoing injustice and repression faced by Black and Brown masses today — and the Black and Brown activists who speak up to protest this state of affairs.
In the absence of this, talking about diversity and peace are empty words. And there’s no time for that anymore. If there ever was.
The charges against the MLK Day protestors must be dropped, immediately.
Sincerely,
Dr. Pranav Jani | [email protected]
Action Items | https://pranavjani.medium.com/drop-the-charges-open-letter-to-columbus-mayor-andrew-j-ginther-on-mlk-day-arrests-d8ee834cb667 | ['Pranav Jani'] | 2020-01-30 03:57:02.961000+00:00 | ['Columbus Ohio', 'Police Brutality', 'Mlk Day'] |
Sekolah 6 tahun, Pindahnya 5 Kali | Have an interest in art, writing, traveling and people's story | https://medium.com/@azzahra-adella/sekolah-6-tahun-pindahnya-5-kali-df8f358823fd | ['Azzahra Felicia Adella'] | 2020-12-29 01:15:43.683000+00:00 | ['Schools', 'Stories', 'Bahasa Indonesia', 'Life', 'Experience'] |
Tips for Good Form When Shooting a Basketball | Dedicated student and athlete Luke Stankavage splits his time between schoolwork and basketball. A member of the National Honor Society, Luke Stankavage plays varsity basketball at Ardrey Kell High School in North Carolina and is one of the top players on his team because he spends time honing his basketball skills.
To improve your basketball shooting skills, begin by analyzing both your stance and grip before each shot. In terms of stance, keep your feet shoulder-width apart and slightly bend your knees. Keep both of your feet facing the basket and place them together or staggered, depending on what is most comfortable for you.
Regarding grip, spread your fingers just wide enough that you can balance the ball in a single hand. Hold the ball on your finger pads, not your palm, and place your non-shooting hand, also known as your balance or guiding hand, on the side of the ball so you have some control over the direction of your shot. This hand does not move as you deliver the shot.
During the shooting process, check how your body moves. Keep your elbow comfortably under the ball as you make your shot. Meanwhile, uncoil your legs, core, and arms as the shot progresses. You want to shoot tall so your entire body is uncoiled and your wrist and elbow make a straight line from your body to the basket. | https://medium.com/@lukestankavage/tips-for-good-form-when-shooting-a-basketball-24e1b891ca7a | ['Luke Stankavage'] | 2021-07-02 05:57:35.507000+00:00 | ['Basketball'] |
The Antisemitism at UVM Seeps Off Campus | Walking around campus, looking out at the blueish green mountains in between red brick buildings, it’s easy for students to think they’ve entered a refuge, far from the chaos and social issues of a typical city. Unfortunately, there’s more to a university experience than its aesthetic.
The Hillel Building at the University of Vermont
During my first week on campus, I was warned by my Jewish peers that there will come a time when I stop wearing Jewish symbols for safety, as they have since coming to UVM.
Last year, as UVM students felt ignored by the administration regarding issues surrounding sexual assault, a student group emerged called Share Your Story UVM. The group offered a safe space for survivors to share their stories and demand action anonymously. However, that same group then made several posts that excluded Jewish survivors, attacked Jewish groups on campus including Hillel, and spread antisemitic rhetoric. While UVM Hillel quickly announced their continued support for all survivors regardless of their identities including Jewish survivors, the university failed to respond to the group’s antisemitism.
Earlier, a teacher’s assistant at UVM publicly expressed the desire to use a discriminatory grading policy against Jewish students, posting a sample grading policy that among other things, deducted two points “just cuz I hate [their] vibe in general”, would give Zionists a zero for participation, and deducted five points from the grades of students who participated in a Jewish activity called Birthright. The university has yet to respond to this incident of disparate treatment from April 5, 2021.
These events merely highlight two out of the dozens of verified antisemitic incidents at the University of Vermont reported to Jewish on Campus over the last year.
When a university fails to protect marginalized students from brazen discrimination, one can only expect antisemitism to flourish.
And flourish it has. Antisemitism has poured directly out of UVM’s campus into the city of Burlington. UVM Book Club, a university recognized student club, consists of a group, “University of Vermont Revolutionary Socialist Union” which publicly announced on May 1, 2021 that they exclude Zionists. After months passed with no reaction from the university, the group, which continues to operate with university recognition, announced their participation in local politics– specifically their work to try to pass legislation during the High Holy Days in support of the controversial organization BDS.
During the holiest time of the Jewish year, UVM students will be among those participating in a march through downtown Burlington, before arriving at City Council in hopes of pressuring our local government to give in to their demands.
The proposed legislation itself begins with roughly a page of justification– not too dissimilar from the same xenophobic narratives my family heard said about themselves as immigrants. That we are a people of criminals, and therefore deserve whatever edict is to be carried out against us. The resolution even explicitly names Jews as accountable for denying Palestinians self determination.
The ultimate action item is an endorsement of the controversial organization BDS, which both indirectly and directly harms Jews. The passage of similar pro-BDS resolutions have been proven to correlate with higher rates of antisemitic incidents. At the University of Toronto, BDS resulted in the ban of kosher food, inhibiting the ability of students to practice Judaism. At Pomona College, the passage of BDS was used as an excuse to cut funds to Jewish groups Hillel and Chabad.
Should this resolution pass, it would become the first BDS resolution passed by a municipality in the United States, making its potential effects unpredictable. However, we do know Jewish on Campus has already recorded a spike in antisemitic incidents at UVM over the last week. Since Thursday, there has been an average of over 3 antisemitic incidents per day at UVM.
Beyond its issues of antisemitism, BDS advocates for institutional boycotts against Israel rather than support for the Palestinian people or even individual-based boycotts that would be representative of Vermonters.
The Jewish community, unprepared for such affronts to occur during the Days of Awe, wasn’t able to launch a petition until the day Rosh Hashanah began. While it is unclear how events will play out in Burlington, I hope others will look to us as an example of what happens when the needs of Jews on campus go ignored. The bigotry does not stop when students step off campus. | https://medium.com/jewish-on-campus/uvm-antisemitism-cf36b41b416d | ['Avi Zatz'] | 2021-09-12 16:27:51.171000+00:00 | ['Hillel', 'Jewish', 'Bds', 'Discrimination', 'Antisemitism'] |
Slavery and the Origins of the American Police State | Slavery and the Origins of the American Police State
From the beginning, some Americans have been able to move more freely than others
Photo: CORBIS/Getty Images
They were called patrollers or, variously, “paterollers,” “paddyrollers,” or “patterolls,” and they were meant to be part of the solution to Colonial America’s biggest problem, labor. Unlike Great Britain, which had a large, basically immobile peasant class that could be forced to work for subsistence wages, there weren’t enough cheap bodies in America to do the grunt work. If you were a planter looking to make your fortune in rice or tobacco—the New World’s cash crops—you had to size up to industrial scale, and for that you needed bodies, armies of bodies, a labor force that could be made to work for terms no less brutal than those inflicted on the miserables of Europe.
Native Americans weren’t the solution, not after disease, war, and murderous forms of forced labor reduced their number by half. Indentured servants were imported, but in numbers too few to fill the void, and they had a habit of running off: the wide frontier beckoned, all that empty space for sass-mouths and malcontents to vanish into. So it became Africans. Jamestown received its first cargo of enslaved humans in 1619, a dozen years after the colony’s founding: “20 and odd Negroes,” according to records, the first installment on the estimated 455,000 who would eventually land in North America.
Control of this new labor force would be key; mutiny was the great fear. By the early 1700s, a comprehensive system of racially directed law enforcement was well on its way to being fully developed.
Certain people, granted power, can be counted on to abuse those under their authority just because they can
This was, in fact, the first systematic form of policing in the land that would become the United States. The northeast colonies relied on the informal “night-watch” system of volunteer policing and on private security to protect commercial property. In the southern colonies, policing’s origins were rooted in the slave economy and the radically racialized social order that invented “whiteness” as the ultimate boundary. “Whites,” no matter how poor or low, could not be held in slavery. “Blacks” could be enslaved by anyone—whites, free blacks, and people of mixed race. The distinction—and the economic order that created it—was maintained by a legally sanctioned system of surveillance, intimidation, and brute force whose purpose was the control of blacks. Slave patrols, or paddyrollers, were the chief enforcers of this system; groups of armed, mounted whites who rode at night among the plantations and settlements of their assigned “beats”—the word originated with the patrols—seeking out runaway slaves, unsanctioned gatherings, weapons, contraband, and generally any sign of potential revolt. They were the stuff of lore and songs:
Run Nigger run, Patty Roller will catch you, Run Nigger run
I’ll shoot you with my flintlock gun.
Run nigger run, Patty Roller will catch you, Run, nigger run, you’d better get away.
Slave patrols usually consisted of three to six white men on horseback equipped with guns, rope, and whips. “A mounted man presents an awesome figure, and the power and majesty of a group of men on horseback, at night, could terrify slaves into submission,” writes Sally Hadden in her fine and useful book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Among other duties, paddyrollers enforced the pass system, which required all slaves absent from their master’s property to have a pass, or “ticket,” signed by the master indicating permission for travel. Any slave encountered without a pass was subject to detention and beating on the spot, although possession of a valid pass was by no means a guarantee against beating.
Certain people, granted power, can be counted on to abuse those under their authority just because they can; one imagines moreover that gratuitous beatings relieved the tedium and fatigue of nightlong patrols and served to reinforce the notion of who was boss. The paddyrollers’ authority extended to patrolling plantation grounds and entering slave quarters, where the presence of books, writing paper, weapons, liquor, luxury items, or more than the usual store of provisions was cause for beating. “Gatherings”—weddings, funerals, church services—were grounds for beating, writes Hadden. Mingling with whites, especially poor whites, or any “loose, disorderly or suspected person”: beating. Back talk: beating. Dressing tidily: beating. Singing certain hymns: beating. Even best behavior could earn a lick: “Elige Davison, another former Virginia slave, remembered that as bondsmen lay asleep in their own quarters, patrollers would enter and lightly hit them with a whip to see if they were truly tired and asleep at the end of the workday,” Hadden writes. For an enslaved woman, a beating might well be the least of her worries.
The system continued largely intact after Emancipation and the defeat of the Confederacy. Legally sanctioned slave patrols were replaced by night-riding vigilantes like the Ku Klux Klan, whose white robes, flaming torches, and queer pseudo-ghost talk were intended for maximum terrorizing effect. Lynching and shooting took place alongside the more traditional punishments of beating and whipping; blacks’ economic value as slaves had evaporated, and with it the constraints on lethal force that had offered some measure of protection under the old system. White supremacy continued as the dominant reality for the next hundred years, a social and psychological reality maintained by terror, surveillance, and the letter of the law. Its power was such that even the New Deal—the most profound reordering of American society since the Civil War—left white supremacy intact. Twenty-six lynchings were recorded in Southern states in 1933. An antilynching bill was defeated in Congress in 1935. Southern blacks’ awareness of antebellum history was acute, naturally enough given that they were living it. “Even seventy years after freedom came,” Hadden writes, “one former bondsman declared he still had his badge and pass to show the patrol, so that no one could molest him.”
We don’t have to know the particulars of history in order to live it in our bones. Sometimes history arrives as a sense of the uncanny, the peculiar weight of certain words and acts, a suffusion of dreadful power. We might suppose the pass system is long gone, but there it is in stop-and-frisk, in racial profiling, in the reflexive fear and violence of our own time. Trayvon Martin, 17 years old, walking down the street just minding his own, killed by a self-anointed, night-riding, so-called neighborhood watchman. Sandra Bland, died in a Texas jail after being pulled over for failure to signal a lane change. Walter Scott, stopped by police in North Charleston for an allegedly broken taillight, shot to death with eight bullets in his back. Philando Castile, popular school cafeteria supervisor, shot dead in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, during a traffic stop for, allegedly, a broken taillight (accounts differ); records reveal that he’d been pulled over no fewer than 52 times by local police in the preceding 14 years and owed over $6,000 in outstanding fines. That $6,000 in fines opens the window onto another ugly echo of times past, the use of law enforcement to extract profit from black and brown people.
Michael Brown’s death at the hands of Ferguson police led to the exposure of a municipal regime that deployed police less for the sake of public safety than as a means of plundering the African-American community. In 2010, Ferguson’s finance director informed the police chief that “unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year, it will be hard to significantly raise collections next year.” A new “I-270 traffic enforcement initiative… to fill the revenue pipeline” is plainly documented, and by Oct. 31, 2014, the municipal courts of Ferguson, a town of 21,000 residents (two-thirds of whom are black), had handled no fewer than 53,000 traffic cases that year. By 2015, more than one-fifth of the town’s revenue would come from fines and fees. The community’s frustration after years of harassment, abuse, and humiliation at the hands of the police would finally explode in the protests that followed Michael Brown’s death.
Some facts sit heavier in the gut than others. It may be that the American brain is wired for certain cues, or maybe it’s just the nature of systems of control, systems that grant or withhold sanction to move about, to work, to vote, to be secure in your home and body, to be free of suspicion absent evidence to the contrary. Sanction, in other words, to exercise your full humanity. Slave patrols and passes, the Klan, Jim Crow—these are historical incarnations of a social order that held people of color to less-than status, the necessary corollary to white supremacy.
One doubts that Donald Trump knew the first thing about the pass system and paddyrollers when he took up the birther movement in 2011, employing lies and the cheapest sorts of innuendo to mainstream the allegation—the outright fantasy—that Barack Obama was not a genuine U.S. citizen. Trump, that master plumber of the American psyche, intuited the heat in the allegation, its potential for exciting the country’s ingrained racism. You couldn’t very well send night riders in full conehead regalia to burn a cross on the White House lawn in hopes of running the Obamas out of town, but you could harass and attack by other means, wage a 21st-century version of vigilante warfare on behalf of white supremacy.
By attacking Obama’s claim to citizenship, Trump tapped into the toxic confluence of racism and economics that’s organized life in America from the very beginning.
And so it went: the black man didn’t belong in the White House because he wasn’t a real American. He was an interloper, a pretender. Less than American. Which, of course, has been exactly the issue for people of color in America for 400 years, the issue brought into high relief—the schizophrenia inscribed by the country’s own hand, in effect—by the fine ideals expressed in the founding documents. All men created equal. Certain inalienable rights. So who is a “man”? Who is to be counted among “we the people”? Who is entitled to full enjoyment of the God-given rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and the protection and exercise of those rights as provided by the laws of the country? Trayvon Martin clearly wasn’t. Zimmerman walked, and it became necessary to say what in a just society would go without saying: Black lives matter.
The great divide in America has always been the color of skin, the presumptive and usually final criterion. Whiteness is law, legitimacy, citizenship, the benefit of the doubt. Not-white is doubt. Not-white has to prove, not just once but over and over: 52 traffic stops. Can a white person even imagine? For 52 times Philando Castile had to stop and show his papers, keep his cool, say yes sir, no sir. Had to check the fury that surely rose in him with every stop, every new harassment and humiliation. This remarkable record of self-control should properly be called superhuman. A certain kind of gasbag politician loves to yatter at minorities for their alleged dearths of “personal responsibility,” yet these pols remain blind to a form of strenuous personal responsibility that’s enacted in some fashion several million times a day by people of color in America.
By attacking Obama’s claim to citizenship—by insisting that he produce a particular piece of paper in form and substance satisfactory to the race police, in their sole discretion—Trump tapped into the core of the American anthropology, the peculiarly toxic confluence of racism and economics that’s organized life in America from the very beginning. That the birther claim lacked even the slightest basis in fact was surely part of its power, that it existed so blatantly in the realm of racial animus. No night riders, no burning crosses, but there are other marginally less florid means of making the point. Dog whistles and codes. Racism hiding in plain sight. Birtherism was a dog whistle blown through a megaphone, and Trump rode it to the top of the polls in 2011, only to decline going head-to-head with Obama when he had the chance. He was still riding the birther wave as 2016 approached, but with the official launch of his candidacy in June 2015, Trump did something no mainstream candidate for president had done in a generation. He threw away the dog whistle.
They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.
An agenda he elaborated over the next 18 months with the wall, the illegal-immigrant-atrocity stories, the proposal to ban all Muslim immigrants, his smirking approval when his supporters beat Black Lives Matter protesters, the assertion that President Obama was “the founder” of ISIS, and in the wake of the Orlando massacre, that Obama either “doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands.”
For those of us of a certain age, it was a time warp, a fever-dream blast from the past. Who would have thought that George Wallace would be reincarnated in American politics as a New York City real estate tycoon? Wallace, that Brylcreemed banty rooster of a man, fighting cock of the racist Southern walk, and four-term governor of Alabama who thundered in his first inaugural address, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” He flamed across the national stage for 20 years, a dart-eyed, snarling prophet of the honky apocalypse.
He ran for president four times. As the American Independent Party’s nominee in 1968, he won five Deep South states and 46 Electoral College votes. That same year, Norman Mailer mused on the volcanic potential that Wallace touched but couldn’t fully tap, the power imminent in white America’s obsession with “the Negro problem” and its simmering, psychopathically suppressed guilt over the demonstrably valid claim that, as Mailer put it, “America’s wealth, whiteness, and hygiene had been refined out of the most powerful molecules stolen from the sweat of the black man.”
Wallace ran too hot for the ’60s and ’70s. Times had changed, and the racial concerns of variously aggrieved, enraged, neurotic whites had to be addressed by cooler means. But in 2016, Trump brought back the heat—and won. It seems that history has led us in a circle back to Alabama days, a circle so wide, so encompassing of far horizons, that we hadn’t known this journey that looked so much like progress was in fact a fantasy, a happy story we told ourselves along the way. | https://gen.medium.com/slavery-and-the-origins-of-the-american-police-state-ec318f5ff05b | ['Ben Fountain'] | 2020-05-29 20:20:30.957000+00:00 | ['Slavery', 'Police State', 'History', 'Book Excerpts', 'Race'] |
My Last Day Being 20 | It’s a weird feeling knowing you’re at the end of something.
I’ve been moving through the motions of day to day life so much so that my birthday kind of snuck up on me. The fact that it’s actually tomorrow is insane as I hadn’t even given it much thought the past few weeks leading up to it.
I’ll be 21. That’s weird to even type.
I know a lot of people that do birthday countdowns and huge celebrations but that’s just never really been my thing. To each’s own ya know?
The funny thing about having another birthday is that you can’t go back. You can never be the age of the past again. It’s but a passing vapor and a memory just like the age you are now will be.
I haven’t really thought too much about tomorrow. I’m sure there will be some birthday posts from family etc. and those are always nice to read. I’ll probably go out to eat and post something about the experience on IG as well. That’s honestly all I really have lined up at the moment. It’ll be VERY tame by the looks of it haha.
All in all, my last day of being 20 years old wasn’t anything epic or wild like in an adventure story but it was more or less pretty calm and reflective to some degree.
In reflecting on how far I’ve come in this journey I’m happy to have made it and thankful for the people who’ve made this journey what it has been. I’m thankful to God for keeping me amidst my many, many, many (insert about 20 more “many’s), many mistakes. I’ve come to learn that mistakes are apart of the process though and even if you count yourself out, God does.
At 20 I’ve also learned to question my own thinking patterns and the negative cycles I often go through. I’ve spent a lot of my life inside of my head rather than out of it and as much as it has helped me in thinking through certain situations and responses, it’s also been to my detriment in productivity and creating meaningful things.
I’ve learned to see people as people and recognize my own demons. We as a society often complain about “the other” and that could be in a race or even with the other gender. I see women and men complain about “How all women are like this...” and “All men are like this…” when in reality we’re all guilty of doing one thing or another that isn’t healthy or productive in relationships.
In regards to race, I’ve recognized that we are all just souls placed into different colored units and we’re as much capable of evil in whatever color or tone our unit is. Our bodies and skin tones are just different makes and styles like cars and they have different paint jobs as well but when you strip all of that away it’s a car. When you strip the body away you’re just a soul and I don’t think a lot of people are ready to see that. What I’m saying isn’t anything new but God showed that to me in a profound way and I feel it’d be nice if we all looked at each other that way. There is no evil race. Only souls that were placed in a body that you very well could’ve been in had God willed it.
The media profits off of division though and blindly leads people into hatred of one another over the hatred of the lies and division caused by outlets who thrive off of our division with one another.
___________
In the past year, I’ve also come to look at the world differently. Nothing is as clean-cut as it used to be when I was a kid. I used to just see things as very black and white so I lacked the insight into how the world really works and how things have always been.
To be more specific I’m now realizing just how much everyone else is struggling with their own battles and that no one’s life is exactly how it may seem on the outside. It’s easy to look at a person’s life and think they must be living large and in charge but reality is often very different than the world portrayed on social media and how you’ve imagined them to be in your head.
___________
I’ve met a lot of incredible people during my time as a 20 year old and had lots of amazing conversations that have deepened my insight as a young man.
I helped build a roof with my grandpa, I took my first steps into Real Estate and continued in Branding with my aunt, expanded in my filmmaking style, and became a full time Aquarist who avidly listens to Hotel Pools (CHECK HIM OUT).
Within this time period I’ve also reunited with many old friends from my past which has been enlightening to see people grow and blossom into who they’ve been called to be.
There’s been some fun adventures with friends, a few crushes, some tough days, some amazing days and everything in between as well.
The biggest milestone of course was releasing my 1st book, A Letter to My Fatherz: Finding Peace In the Midst of Absence.
Seeing the feedback for that has been amazing and I’m thankful to God for the people he’s used it to impact and show his face too.
My goal heading into 21 is to leave that number having accomplished new heights, new milestones and be even better than now.
I’m not exactly sure what all lies in the future but I’m optimistic and looking forward to following God and his call on my life in this next phase of my life.
It really is impossible to know what will lie ahead but I choose to head into it without fear and with optimism that God orders my steps. With that in mind, I cannot fail. To fail would be to disregard the progress, even if small, that’s already been made amidst my many mistakes and the greater things that lie ahead in rising above them.
Cheers to the future! | https://medium.com/@caleblabord/my-last-day-being-20-6cd11139aaab | ['Caleb Labord'] | 2020-12-01 00:58:28.785000+00:00 | ['Inspirational', 'Self Improvement', 'Growing Up', 'Inspiration', 'Life'] |
Helping Those Who Help Others — How We Updated This Nonprofit’s Site for Easier Use and Clearer Messaging | Helping Those Who Help Others — How We Updated This Nonprofit’s Site for Easier Use and Clearer Messaging Ideometry Follow Oct 20, 2017 · 3 min read
Simply put, CDA wants to make the world a better place, and they want to help others make the world a better place by ensuring their relief efforts do not have unintended negative consequences.
Through their website, CDA offers publications, case studies, toolkits and guides relating to areas such as Responsible Business and Conflict Sensitivity, but they also provide in-person advisory services and trainings to nonprofits, NGOs and corporations in these same areas of expertise.
The Problem
Though clients give glowing reviews of CDA’s services, people were less than enthusiastic about their website. Along with its outdated appearance and wordy subpages, the site was not user-friendly. For example, the search function for CDA’s publications, the main driver of traffic to the site, was very difficult to find and navigate.
Furthermore, CDA’s website did not reflect the recent restructuring of CDA’s organization, namely their Collaborative Learning branch and their Advisory Services.
The Solution
Ideometry conducted extensive interviews with current CDA employees as well as internal and external stakeholders to get an accurate understanding of what the exact needs were for the new website. We compiled this information to create a series of user journeys, and these user journeys guided the restructuring of CDA’s website.
The new website highlights those aspects of CDA users most want to see — the upcoming events, the recent publications, the blog posts — while educating them about new CDA project and service areas. It’s also extremely user-friendly, with mobile-compatibility, modern design and clear calls to action.
Most importantly, the back end of the website is user-friendly for CDA staff, so they can quickly update the content as needed. Ideometry even designed a new logo that CDA can use not only on its website, but on mailers, email headings and business cards.
***
If you liked what you saw here, check out some of the other branding and creative campaigns we’ve done for a major credit union and a BBQ catering startup.
Need help creating an amazing brand? Get in touch with us today. | https://medium.com/ideometry/helping-those-who-help-others-how-we-updated-this-nonprofits-site-for-easier-use-and-clearer-3b3cceeb09ea | [] | 2017-10-24 14:43:01.694000+00:00 | ['Web Design', 'Web Development', 'Marketing', 'Nonprofit', 'Digital Marketing'] |
Miracle Monkey Brains Amazingly Made Bigger from Human Genes | Miracle Monkey Brains Amazingly Made Bigger from Human Genes
Marmoset Monkey — Image by Public Domain
Yes, we’ve all read the story.
How a bored doctor decided to use a few body parts lying around his lab. His boredom morphed into a famous monster, a novel, and countless movies at drive-in theaters during the 1950s and ‘60s.
Frankenstein was well ahead of his time in terms of marketing. He was probably the first monster that understood the importance of branding — as his legend will outlive every one of us.
Real-life Frankenstein story?
In an attempt to enlarge a primate's brain, scientists spliced human genes directly into a monkey’s fetus¹. Amazingly, this experiment worked.
The research team combined brilliant minds from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Germany and from the Central Institute for Experimental Animals in Japan. Together, they introduced a precise human gene, known as ARHGAP11B², into a marmoset monkey fetus. This enlarged the neocortex of its brain.
The neocortex happens to be the most recent region of the brain to evolve. It is the outer shell of our brain and makes up over 75% of its entirety. The neocortex is perhaps the most human thing about us — as it is responsible for all the quirks and idiosyncrasies that make us unique — this includes our use of complex languages and reasoning.
Evolving from primates
Whenever our hominid ancestors jumped from the evolutionary tree of our chimpanzee kinfolks, their brains rapidly expanded. It actually tripled in size over a period of around three million years. In fact, their brains grew so rapidly that they were cramped, and this was what caused the distinct folding of the human neocortex into the wrinkles we have now.
Scientists have always maintained that several evolutionary factors were involved, but they believe that the ARGHAP11B gene was unique to hominids. It could’ve very well provided the mental boost to our distant ancestors, such as the Denisovans and Neanderthals.
DNA structure — Image by Pixabay
The role of ARGHAP11B in human evolution
Many studies in the past have been conducted using ARHGAP11B. When it has been unnaturally expressed in ferrets and mice, neocortex enlargements were also observed. But this study was the first time it was used on a non-human primate with normal human expression levels. And it suggests that ARGHAP11B played a major role in the evolution of humans.
ARGHAP11B was created in our ancestors about five million years ago. There was a genetic mistake made during the copying of the gene ARGHAP11A. In short, there was a substitution of one nucleotide base that led to the formation of ARHGAP11B. This caused the brain’s neuron-producing cells to make more of themselves for a longer time period, producing a bigger neocortex.
Response from the study’s lead author
“We found indeed that the neocortex of the common marmoset brain was enlarged and the brain surface folded,” said Michael Heide, who was the study’s lead author. “Its cortical plate was also thicker than normal.”
Heide also added:
“Furthermore, we could see increased numbers of basal radial glia progenitors in the outer subventricular zone and increased numbers of upper-layer neurons, the neuron type that increases in primate evolution.”
Ethical concerns are being raised
The scientists refer to these human-monkey hybrids as ‘transgenic non-human primates.’ As you would imagine, not all people are pleased with these kinds of experiments on primates. It raises all sorts of ethical issues. And it doesn’t help that human genes are inserted into these animals.
This is why scientists can only use monkey fetuses for their studies, and they are taken via C-section after 100 days of growth. Letting these experiments extend past the fetal phase and allow such human gene-carrying monkeys to be born into the world would be unethical and irresponsible.
The study’s coauthor Wieland Huttner issued the following statement in a press release.
“We confined our analyses to marmoset fetuses because we anticipated that the expression of this human-specific gene would affect the neocortex development in the marmoset,” Huttner said. “In light of potential unforeseeable consequences with regard to postnatal brain function, we considered it a prerequisite — and mandatory from an ethical point of view — to first determine the effects of ARHGAP11B on the development of fetal marmoset neocortex.” | https://medium.com/@charliestephen6/miracle-monkey-brains-amazingly-made-bigger-from-human-genes-1cfa20e96b84 | ['Charles Stephen'] | 2021-02-02 15:02:36.930000+00:00 | ['Animals', 'Biology', 'Science', 'Society', 'Genetics'] |
Will Apple Be the New Netflix? | Potentially. The company, however, will definitely be playing with the big boys.
Many had to see this one coming given the technological trend we’re seeing: we’re no longer living on a device-focused basis even though many of us still to this day hold onto our smartphones like they’re antidotes. We are, instead, opting for cloud technology and subscription-based services designed to give us a wealth of offerings, literally as much as we’d like. It was clear as such blockbuster brands like, well, Blockbuster — DVDs, CDs and more — suddenly go the way of the Dodo in exchange for something more digital.
Yes, the Cloud-Based Subscription Service Leads the Way in Entertainment Tech, But Does That Mean Apple Should Go That Way, Too?
We may not have a choice as iPhone sales continue to dip, and the company looks for new ways to penetrate trending markets and grab a piece of that subscription pie. As you can see just from reading, the pie is the media market associated with entertainment — platforms like Hulu and Netflix have a stronghold.
CNBC reported recently that Apple plans on offering subscriptions of popular networks like Starz, CBS and Showtime, built in with its very own TV app that you can use on your iPhone, or iPad — and especially that Apple TV you just bought for a pretty penny. Of course, the company takes a cut, but believe it or not Apple will even dive right into the original programming route.
That’s right, you heard correctly: Apple may become the new Netflix.
Should We Be Scared, Thinking That This Will Be an All-Out Media Streaming War?
We’ve got the Disney mega-powerhouse coming out with their own streaming service, after all. But don’t fret. The ultimate beneficiary is you: the consumer. And Apple has plenty of clout to back up their backing in this goal with talent like Reese Witherspoon, Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey already signing on for some original programming you can, yes indeed, watch exclusively on your owned iPhone — for free, no less.
Beat that, Netflix.
Do you think the “Orange Is the New Black” brand should worry much? CHIME IN WITH YOUR OWN FREE VIGYAA ACCOUNT AND WRITE UP YOUR THOUGHTS! | https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/will-apple-be-the-new-netflix-f85c993f2242 | ['Pierre Roustan'] | 2019-02-25 14:13:21.445000+00:00 | ['Technology News', 'Netflix', 'Technology Trends', 'Apple', 'Technology'] |
Cassandra, the Lady of NoSQL Databases | Among the new storage systems that are appearing within the Big Data universe, Cassandra is one of the most interesting and significant.
Cassandra is defined as a distributed and massively scalable NoSQL database, and this, from our point of view, is its greatest virtue: the capacity to scale up linearly.
Additionally, Cassandra introduces very interesting concepts, such as multi data center support and peer-to-peer communication between its nodes. In this article, we will take a closer look at these and other characteristics that make Cassandra so special.
History and origins
Cassandra’s original development started in Facebook, where it was designed to power the inbox search feature. In 2008, it was released as an open-source project; in February 2010, it became a top-level Apache Software Foundation project.
It is inspired on and influenced by the 2007 Amazon Dynamo and 2006 Google Bigtable papers. Nowadays, it is maintained and developed by Datastax.
Its name is inspired on priestess Cassandra of Greek mythology, who had the gift of prophecy and predicted the Trojan Horse deception.
Architecture and characteristics
Cassandra offers tolerance to partitions and availability, but at the expense of consistency, as defined in the CAP theorem. The level of consistency is tunable, based on our preferences, including at the query level.
It is distributed, which means that the information is scattered across the various nodes of the cluster. Furthermore, it offers high availability, so that if any of the nodes fails, the service doesn’t drop or degrade.
It is linearly scalable, which means that the throughput increases linearly as we add nodes. For example: if we can support 100,000 operations per second with 2 nodes, we will support 200,000 with 4. This gives our systems great predictability.
It is horizontally scalable, which means we can scale up our system by adding new nodes based on low-cost commodity hardware.
It implements a peer-to-peer architecture, which eliminates single points of failure and dispenses with the master-slave patterns of other storage systems. This way, any of the nodes can take on the role of query coordinator. It will be the driver to decide which node should take on the role of coordinator.
The data is distributed across the cluster based on a single token, calculated for each row by a hash function. The nodes evenly split the range of tokens, which goes from -263 to 263; this defines the primary node.
Internally, Cassandra will replicate the data across the nodes with the policy we define; for example, we can define the factor of replication. Additionally, it supports the concept of data center to logically group the nodes and keep the data closer to the user.
CQL
Cassandra Query Language (CQL) is the language used for accessing data in Cassandra, derived from SQL. In Cassandra, the data is denormalized, and therefore the concept of joins or subqueries doesn’t exist.
We can interface with Cassandra with CQL through the CQL shell, cqlshell. We can also use graphic tools like DevCenter or through supported drivers for multiple programming languages.
Data model
It also combines properties of a key-value database with those of a column-oriented one. As we can see in the following diagram, the information is organized in such a way that the entire row has a single key and a series of key pairs, a column value.
It is important to keep these characteristics in mind when we design our data model.
When we design our model, we must be guided by the data-access patterns, we must analyze the queries we want to implement in our system; this way, we will be able to design an efficient model that can make the most of Cassandra’s advantages.
It is also important to adequately define the partition key of our data, because Cassandra will use this key to distribute the data across the cluster. I
f we want to make the most of our cluster, we must conceive the distribution of the data to avoid bottlenecks. It is also advisable, given our query pattern, to attempt to minimize the number of partitions we must access for any one reading.
Conclusion
Cassandra is a brilliant solution for many of the uses we can find in the world of Big Data. Nevertheless, it is not suited to store a conventional data warehouse.
Ideally, we want to have from the start a clear understanding of the use and type of queries needed, so that we can design the database coherently. This way, we will be able to handle large data volumes and make the most of this powerful distributed database. | https://medium.com/swlh/cassandra-the-lady-of-nosql-databases-785a80921bc5 | ['Paradigma Digital'] | 2020-11-21 17:53:32.372000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Cassandra', 'Big Data', 'NoSQL', 'Data'] |
Android Jetpack Compose: Remember Made Easy | Learning Android Development
Android Jetpack Compose: Remember Made Easy
Make Learning Jetpack Compose Easier
Photo by Josh Riemer on Unsplash
We learn about Recomposition previously, where the State Variable is like a remote control. When the State Variable changes, it triggers only the particular UI that interacts with the State Variable to be redrawn (recompose).
There’s another concept important for Jetpack Compose, that’s Remember.
Recomposition recap
Before we understand Remember, let’s relook into Recomposition.
The State Variable is usually outside the composable function like below
class MainActivity : AppCompatActivity() {
var isOn by mutableStateOf(false)
override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)
setContent {
Box(modifier = Modifier.fillMaxSize().background(
if (isOn) Color.Green else Color.Red)
)
Button(
modifier = Modifier.padding(64.dp).fillMaxSize(),
onClick = { isOn = !isOn }) {
Text(
text = if (isOn) "On" else "Off",
color = if (isOn) Color.Green else Color.Red,
fontSize = 48.sp
)
}
}
}
}
Given the button and the box are all within a composable function, having the State Variable outside of it, looks kind of odd. How nice if we can encapsulate the State Variable within the composable function as below.
class MainActivity : AppCompatActivity() {
override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)
setContent {
var isOn by mutableStateOf(false) Box(modifier = Modifier.fillMaxSize().background(
if (isOn) Color.Green else Color.Red)
)
Button(
modifier = Modifier.padding(64.dp).fillMaxSize(),
onClick = { isOn = !isOn }) {
Text(
text = if (isOn) "On" else "Off",
color = if (isOn) Color.Green else Color.Red,
fontSize = 48.sp
)
}
}
}
}
But unfortunately, composable function is still a function. Every time the composable function get recompose, the isOn variable gets reset to false . This makes the UI always in the false state and the button seems not able to trigger the UI change at all.
Remember came to rescue
The Jetpack Compose team created the remember function as below, which we can use to store the State Variable within.
class MainActivity : AppCompatActivity() {
override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)
setContent {
var isOn by remember { mutableStateOf(false) } Box(modifier = Modifier.fillMaxSize().background(
if (isOn) Color.Green else Color.Red)
)
Button(
modifier = Modifier.padding(64.dp).fillMaxSize(),
onClick = { isOn = !isOn }) {
Text(
text = if (isOn) "On" else "Off",
color = if (isOn) Color.Green else Color.Red,
fontSize = 48.sp
)
}
}
}
}
Instead of creating a new one every time, whenever recompose, the remember will retrieve the previous State Variable, hence making it persist within the composable function, and not reconstructed every time the function recompose.
Remember with keys
The Remember function actually comes with a key that one can supply.
@Composablefun <T>
remember(vararg inputs: Any?, calculation: () -> T): T
Thanks Leland Richardson for his blog in sharing it.
Do note it is vararg , which means it can take any number of keys.
How it works in a simplified diagram as below.
From here we know that it only stores one entry. When a new key is provided, it will generate a new object. If one gets back to the previous key, it will generate another new object (i.e. it is NOT like map where we have a map of key-value.)
To illustrate this better, I create another simple app as below.
In this App, we have a switch that changes the color from Red-Green to Black-White (I name the boolean checking as isGrayScale ).
With the switch, I will change the color choice, using isGrayScale as the key. So depends on the value of isGrayScale , the ColorChoice will change.
val colorChoice by remember(isGrayScale) {
mutableStateOf(
if (isGrayScale)
ColorChoice(
onColor = Color.White,
offColor = Color.Black)
else
ColorChoice(
onColor = Color.Green,
offColor = Color.Red)
)
}
The ColorChoice is a simple class as below.
class ColorChoice(
private val onColor: Color,
private val offColor: Color
) {
var isOn = false
var color by mutableStateOf(offColor)
fun toggle() {
isOn = !isOn
color = if(isOn) { onColor } else { offColor }
}
}
Notice I made color as a State Variable, as I want the UI to change when the value is updated.
And lastly, all the drawing composable functions as below that change as colorChoice.color change. (i.e. when isGrayScale changes, the colorChoice.color also changes)
Box(modifier = Modifier
.fillMaxSize()
.background(colorChoice.color))
Button(
modifier = Modifier.padding(64.dp).fillMaxSize(),
onClick = colorChoice::toggle) {
Text(
text = if (colorChoice.isOn) "On" else "Off",
color = colorChoice.color,
fontSize = 48.sp
)
}
Switch(
modifier = Modifier.padding(64.dp).fillMaxWidth(),
checked = isGrayScale,
onCheckedChange = {isGrayScale = !isGrayScale}
)
Note: In the Button onClick I didn’t use { colorChoice.toggle() } , instead, I use colorChoice::toggle directly. The reason is, if we put it in the lambda, the first colorChoice is kept within the lambda and not change when the colorChoice has changed. Check this StackOverflow.
You can access the full code here.
When should we use “remember”?
One thing that wasn’t mentioned above is, the store object in remember doesn’t survive state restoration. If the App is killed by the system, the value is gone.
My personal recommendation is to consider supply the State Variable externally, e.g. from the ViewModel, etc.
First, you have a better separation of business logic and UI logic.
Second, you can handle state restoration there better
But if the State is internal to your UI, e.g. animation value, and state restoration is not crucial, then use remember. | https://medium.com/mobile-app-development-publication/android-jetpack-compose-remember-made-easy-8bd86a48536c | [] | 2020-12-13 05:48:17.900000+00:00 | ['Android Development', 'Jetpack Compose', 'Android App Development', 'Android', 'AndroidDev'] |
ML Bootcamp at Criteo | ML Bootcamp at Criteo
Machine Learning (ML) has been at the heart of the Criteo business since the company first began. It is the technology which allows us to present the right ad, to the right person, at the right moment. Today, ML is an important subject in any computer science course but this was not always the case. Criteo has a need for engineers knowledgeable in Machine Learning to complement our team of specialized researchers (the Research Team ) so, we came up with the idea of creating the Criteo ML Bootcamp.
What is ML-Bootcamp?
ML Bootcamp is a three-month program with the objective of immersing participants in Criteo’s Machine Learning research projects by combining both theoretical and practical training with the opportunity to contribute to a live project.
The introduction process
To ensure that participants get the most out of Bootcamp they are required to have worked at least one year at Criteo R&D and exhibit a high level of autonomy in their work. Each applicant must submit a CV and a letter of motivation. Each intake group is kept small to ensure the program remains highly interactive.
An intensive theoretical and practical training
The Bootcamp is composed of two complementary phases: a training phase and a mission phase. The first month is dedicated to training. The theoretical part of the training consists of sessions covering the ten most relevant areas of machine learning delivered by members of the Research Team. The topics covered are:
Participants are encouraged to study the content in advance and come to sessions prepared to dive deeper into each topic. The theory lessons are followed by four days of intensive, practical training sessions where the participants are given sets of exercises to perform in the different machine learning categories they’ve studied.
There are theoretical exercises, where a participant might be asked to prove the characteristics of an algorithm, as well as practical exercises, which require a participant to apply an algorithm on public data sets and study its behavior when playing with the parameters. The idea is for participants to become comfortable using their new skills before dedicating the next two months to a project.
The mission
Equipped with a new set of tools, each participant is paired with a researcher who has a specific topic to investigate. The project includes both a scientific and an engineering component and might cover themes like:
the investigation of different models for predicting sales based on what was observed during the first 10 hours after showing an ad to determine how we can estimate the attributed sales after 30 days;
the study of new bounds for taking decisions on A/B tests to determine if the difference we observe on the first few days of an A/B test are already statistically significant and whether we can stop the test now;
the implementation or porting of a policy learning algorithm in a new data pipeline.
Bootcamp missions are always based on topics the Research Team is currently investigating. Working with a real scenario teaches engineers that putting theory into practice is not always as simple as it seems. Obtaining and cleaning data can be the most challenging part of a machine learning project. ML Bootcamp creates a collaborative situation where the Researcher makes significant progress on a project and the engineer further develops their machine learning skills.
The Debrief
After two months working on a Mission, participants present their results in a debrief session and review what lessons were learned from both an organizational and personal perspective. Some missions have opened the door to exciting new opportunities, others have resulted in promising leads being shut down. Regardless of the outcome, participants package up their results along with all the developed code so that it is available for future use or further development.
The adventure
ML Bootcamp is an intensive yet worthwhile program for the participants, trainers and mission leaders alike.
As with any program of its kind, the reward is directly linked to the investment that participants are prepared to make. In order to ensure the experience remains motivating and challenging, ML Bootcamp is constantly reviewed and adapted. It’s our goal to ensure that each participant walks away from the program feeling a sense of accomplishment and pride at having “survived” ML Bootcamp. | https://medium.com/criteo-labs/ml-bootcamp-at-criteo-2eb0fe33ce77 | ['Criteo Labs'] | 2020-12-29 15:37:03.653000+00:00 | ['Criteo', 'Machine Learning'] |
Even if the pandemic does lessen or go away this summer in the United States | And this may be just the first wave of a pandemic that could return in multiple seasons, all depending on whether it can be contained by physical distancing, a potential vaccine, or other preventive measures.
“This is an extraordinarily transmissible virus, and I think it’s more transmissible than we recognize,” says Michael Mina, assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
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Mina has “little faith” in the accuracy or extent of Covid-19 testing so far. Between people who are sick but have not been tested and the unknown number of people carrying the disease without any symptoms and transmitting it, Mina and other epidemiologists says it’s completely unknown how many people are actually infected.
“We really don’t know if we’ve been 10 times off or 100 times off in terms of the cases,” Mina says. “Personally, I lean more to 50 or 100 times off.”
That means instead of more than a million cases in the world right now, there could be anywhere from 10 million to perhaps 100 million. That also means the extreme preventive measures like stay-at-home orders could last months, not weeks, Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, tells the health news site Stat.
Few doubt that the effects will be grave, no matter what the actual number of cases is right now.
Total U.S. deaths from Covid-19 are projected to climb steeply in coming weeks and reach 93,531 by August 4, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), an independent global health research center at the University of Washington. The estimate, which includes a wide range of uncertainty, was cited by Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator.
‘It’s all coming soon’
“The spread and scope of Covid-19 is just immense, and that’s because it’s been spreading unchecked, and still is,” says Mark Cameron, PhD, an immunologist and medical researcher in the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.
During the 2003 SARS epidemic, which was also caused by a coronavirus, Cameron worked at Toronto General Hospital, the only major city that experienced an outbreak outside of China. That disease and this one yielded similar data on many measures except one: the ratio of severe to mild cases. “People who got SARS in 2003 got very sick very fast, so it was easy to identify them and isolate and treat them,” Cameron says. Conversely, a far lower percentage of people had mild or no symptoms with SARS, so it did not spread as rapidly as Covid-19.
Many of the same extreme preventive measures were taken in Toronto as are being done now in states across America, Cameron says, and the 2003 epidemic was contained, and the virus was apparently eliminated from the human population.
“This virus is very smart, and it spreads very easily,” Cameron says of Covid-19. “This is unprecedented. This is a 100-year pandemic.”
Image for post
The first U.S. case of Covid-19 was reported on January 21, 2020. This chart shows the number of new cases each day since then, through April 7. Credit: Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
New York’s coronavirus outbreak illustrates how population density fosters more rapid spread of a disease, Cameron and other experts say. But every city and state that has yet to see severe outbreaks of Covid-19 will get its turn, Cameron tells me. The curves will be similar, even if the total numbers of cases and deaths are lower.
“Every state will experience their own curve and their own peak,” he says.
Mina agrees, adding another twist that has yet to play out: It’s known that people with underlying health conditions are at greater risk for severe symptoms and death from the coronavirus. Areas with a high proportion of people who have heart disease and diabetes may therefore experience more severe death ratios than what’s been seen so far. Mina cited Memphis, New Orleans, and Atlanta as three examples.
“These are places that I think have the potential to be hit very hard,” Mina says. “It’s all coming soon.”
Making matters potentially worse, unlike New York and other major cities that have large, highly capable hospitals, many rural communities have none. St. John the Baptist Parish in Louisiana, near Baton Rouge, has the highest per capita coronavirus mortality rate in the nation right now and exactly zero hospitals, according to Politico.
How the curves ultimately play out depends largely on the extent to which preventive measures are put in place, kept in place, and followed by the public.
“Our estimated trajectory of Covid-19 deaths assumes continued and uninterrupted vigilance by the general public, hospital and health workers, and government agencies,” says Dr. Christopher Murray, director of IHME, the organization publishing the death projections cited by the White House. “The trajectory of the pandemic will change — and dramatically for the worse — if people ease up on social distancing or relax with other precautions. We encourage everyone to adhere to those precautions to help save lives.”
“Unlike seasonal influenza, where the transmission chains get easier to break in the warm summer months, we cannot count on Covid-19 relenting simply because of a change of season.”
Time to prepare
Meanwhile, cities, counties, and states fortunate enough to have watched the havoc unfold elsewhere have had an opportunity to take strong spread-prevention actions while simultaneously making preparations akin to a war footing while case counts are relatively low.
One example of a state in waiting is Ohio, where Governor Mike DeWine issued a strong stay-at-home order on March 23. “We haven’t faced an enemy like we are facing today in 102 years — we are at war,” DeWine said.
That strict order and other physical distancing measures help explain why Ohio has about one-fourth as many cases as neighboring Michigan, says Dr. Robert Salata, a professor of medicine in epidemiology and international health at Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University.
Salata leads the medical response in an 18-institution united command center, similar to what the military uses in a time of war. “And this is a time of war,” he says in a phone interview. Cases are starting to spike, and Ohio is in week one of a four-week ramp-up to an expected peak, he says.
“It’s not totally chaotic or a real crisis at this point,” Salata says. “But it can become so, and we’re preparing for that inevitability.”
He and colleagues are taking a variety of measures:
Eliminating elective surgeries and cutting back on even semi-urgent care to reduce occupancy in the system to just 60% — much lower than normal.
Working with a local biodefense company to figure out how to resterilize and reuse protective gear.
Figuring out when infected hospital workers can return to work by testing 10 days after symptom onset and again 24 hours later and letting them return if they test negative but still have a cough. (But, of course, they wear a mask.)
Using this low-volume window of opportunity to study the Covid-19 cases they do have, including through clinical drug trials.
“Ohio has had more time to watch what’s been happening in Seattle and the Bay Area and New York to be proactive instead of reactive,” Cameron says. “But at the same time, what I’m seeing in the case data, in general every city or county is experiencing the same type of curve. Ohio might have been a little lucky so far, and population density and measures that were taken proactively will help us, but we can’t be complacent in terms of this spread and the case rates of infection that have been seen everywhere else.”
72% of all counties probably already have an outbreak
Given the underreporting of total cases, disease modelers at the University of Texas at Austin used the available data to project the likelihood that any given county in the United States already has an outbreak, meaning sustained human transmission, whether they realize it or not.
“If a county has detected only one case of Covid-19, there is a 51% chance that there is already a growing outbreak underway,” the researchers state. “Covid-19 is likely spreading in 72% of all counties in the U.S., containing 94% of the national population.”
Image for post
Probability of ongoing Covid-19 outbreaks for the 3,142 counties in the United States. The chance of an unseen outbreak in a county without any reported cases is 9%. A single reported case suggests that community transmission is likely. Source: Emily Javan, Dr. Spencer J. Fox, Dr. Lauren Ancel Meyers
“Proactive social distancing, even before two cases are confirmed, is prudent,” conclude researchers Emily Javan, Dr. Spencer Fox, and Dr. Lauren Ancel Meyers. “Although not entirely surprising, these risk estimates provide evidence for policymakers who are still weighing if, when, and how aggressively to enact social distancing measures.”
Second wave… and then more
Meanwhile, worst-case scenarios are not inevitable, says Dr. Harvey Fineberg, president of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, a philanthropic organization, and former president of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine.
“That choice begins with a forceful, focused campaign to eradicate Covid-19 in the United States. The aim is not to flatten the curve; the goal is to crush the curve,” Fineberg writes in an April 1 editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine. “China did this in Wuhan. We can do it across this country in 10 weeks.” But that would require quickly taking a far more aggressive approach than the current U.S. response, six big steps, including:
Establishing a unified command at the federal level and for each state.
Solving the shortage of protective gear for health care workers.
Making available millions of diagnostic tests.
While what is done now is vital, decisions in the coming weeks and months could prove similarly weighty.
“We know from the SARS 2003 outbreak in Toronto that there is a well-documented wave of second infections caused by letting some of the close-contact and personal protective equipment (PPE) precautions be relaxed because they felt they were on the other side of the curve,” Cameron says. “Turns out they weren’t, and a new curve, a new outbreak, a second wave, occurred in Toronto. We need to avoid that.”
Already some Asian countries that had flattened their curves are seeing resurgences in new cases, including Singapore and Taiwan, according to the New York Times.
Next season and beyond
Further ahead looms another great unknown: whether Covid-19 will subside with warmer temperatures, as is typical of some coronaviruses and influenza.
Don’t bank on it.
“Unlike seasonal influenza or common colds, where the transmission chains get easier to break in the warm, humid, summer months, especially amongst communities with herd immunity, we cannot count on Covid-19 relenting simply because of a change of season,” Cameron says. “Covid-19 has already bulldozed through multiple different climates in the Northern and Southern hemispheres quite easily.”
Among South American countries as of April 4, Brazil had 7,910 diagnosed cases and 299 deaths, Chile had 3,737 cases and 22 deaths, and Ecuador had 3,163 cases and 120 deaths.
Even if the pandemic does lessen or go away this summer in the United States, that won’t mean it’s gone.
“It is more likely that Covid-19 will spread relatively unchecked by seasons until the surges and curves have run their course… in populations worldwide, then return seasonally, hopefully put in some check by those amongst us with preexisting immunity by having had it already,” Cameron says. A vaccine would also help, of course, but that’s thought to be months away.
Breaking the chain of transmission
Cameron cites the 2009 H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic as an example of how viruses can flout the seasonality rule. “It took firm hold in the spring and summer months of 2009 in Mexico and the U.S., spreading virtually worldwide from there until August 2010.”
The influenza pandemic of 1918–19 cycled through multiple seasons across two years, ultimately killing some 675,000 people in the United States and more than 50 million around the globe. (In Boston, a second wave hit during the first season when World War I ended and large crowds gathered to celebrate.)
If there is a notable dip in Covid-19 cases this summer, all it takes to reemerge in the fall is for infected people, whether from south of the equator or from a fresh pocket in the Northern Hemisphere, to travel.
“There has to be a chain of human transmission to support the seasonality of a particular illness,” Cameron explains. “So, breaking that transmission is absolutely critical. If it finds enough of a foothold in enough places that we don’t detect, it will reemerge in the fall.” | https://medium.com/@iilham-kiki-e/even-if-the-pandemic-does-lessen-or-go-away-this-summer-in-the-united-states-9d8e994718bb | ['Iilham Kiki E'] | 2020-12-27 14:24:10.287000+00:00 | ['Sports', 'Technology', 'Social Media', 'News', 'Covid 19'] |
Brexit, Trump, COVID . Today, on what is Christmas day, I… | Today, on what is Christmas day, I would like to quickly jot down my thoughts on some of the latest news:
1.After years of negotiations, the UK government and EU have come to a final agreement regarding Brexit and future commercial relations. For those of you that are interested in the details of the agreement, feel free to check the relevant news sites (France Info , BBC News , The Guardian and other news outlets).
My personal take on the Brexit is that it hurts the UK more than it hurts the EU, although both UK and EU citizens will be affected by new travel rules. For those interested, the current rules for EU citizens visiting the UK can be found at the UK Home Office website. I also do think that in about 1–2 years, the UK will realize that Brexit was bad to begin with, and they will start the process of rejoining the EU. And I do think the EU should stay open minded about this and when it happens welcome the UK back in the European Union.
2. Joe Biden has become the United States President-elect on November 3rd and about 45 days later, the current holder of the office cant get over the defeat, promotes wild conspiracy theories and questions the United States democratic system. And doing all of this for his own benefit, instead of focusing his efforts on helping improving the COVID situation. I personally do think the US did well to get rid off Trump because he was steadily and slowly taking the country toward a dictature….my family and some friends do think the last 4 years were already dictature because of all the laws Trump has broken.
As someone living in Europe now, there are 2 things that I think will happen with Trump after January 20 and President Biden takes office:
a) legal problems for Trump, the Trump family and organisation will grow and become very real. Already, the 2 Deutsche Bank bankers responsible for Trump accounts resigned. Check out the article on CNN . And such things will continue to occur as people are looking to get out of Trump orbit and protect themselves and their family from legal issues.
b) In about 5–10 years, I do think we will see a TV series relating the Trump years. Whether it is a comedy series or a serious one, no idea. Given all the various weird things Trump has done or said the past 4 years, a comedy show could be appropriate….
3. the COVID is becoming more and more worrying. And it is crazy to see people on both sides of the ocean disregard the health guidelines by traveling and shopping in various stores. And it is hard to comprehend that governments think contamination are easier by going to concerts, gyms, movies or sports events than by shopping in malls……People need to get used and need to learn to shop online, including for food. And governments need to let the arts industries, the sports industries restart fully.
Out here in France, we just finished the 2nd lock down and we are now in curfew until January 20, however there are doctors and scientists arguing right now about imposing a 3rd lock down. And some are arguing for this 3rd lock down to be as strict as the one we had last March…..As much as people have been following the guidelines for the past 2 lock downs, I dont think a 3rd one will go down very well and if a 3rd one is imposed, I think we will see more and more people resisting the rules imposed by the government.
And I will finish this blog story with a question which I have been wondering since last February. We have scientists doing research all over the world and for many years….I have a hard time believing that no scientist has ever found this COVID and no research was ever made to potentially face such a problem…..Do I think that scientists have been misleading the world? I dont know and scientists do deserve the benefit of the doubt, however the world also needs answers regarding what they knew and when. | https://medium.com/@avguste/brexit-trump-covid-randoms-d0652af8070f | ['Avguste Antonov'] | 2020-12-25 17:07:26.049000+00:00 | ['Trump', 'Brexit', 'Covid 19 Crisis'] |
Modern Chemistry’s Downside | Modern Chemistry’s Downside
Beware those toxic rubbers and lubes
Dainis Gravereis — Unsplash
News flash: Not only are all vaginas and penises not the same…but all lubes and rubbers differ as well. This I have come to appreciate (or fallen prey to) in the modern era.
Back in my “free love” youth, neither condoms nor lube were the order of the day. Birth control pills had just been developed and virtually every college girl was on them. As far as diseases went…yeah, you could catch something. But if you did, it wouldn’t kill you. And thus almost nobody used a rubber. As for lube? Never even heard of it!
Obviously, that has all changed. Unless a couple is married or in a committed relationship, out comes the wrapper at the crucial moment. And that wrapper is not only no longer the “one size fits all” raincoat of yesteryear…but it’s often bathed in some chemical or other which may or may not agree with your constitution.
When it comes to the chemical component, public enemy #1 is the nonoxynol-9 rubber! If I stick my stuff in one of those deals, I will immediately feel a stinging pinch at the end of Mr. Bill. And if I do not heed the warning and continue until completion, I will inevitably experience what I can only describe as a pin prick feeling which sends me through the roof every time I urinate for the next week. Brutal!
Then ya got your condoms with lubrication either on the inside or out which could set a guy off (and not in a good way). Add on condoms that contain a chemical which helps guys delay ejaculation. And finally…your warming or icing rubbers may also disagree with some users. I can tell you from personal experience, my delicate apparatus is adversely affected by a lot of these substances.
A few months ago, I neglected to ask my partner what kind of rubber she was using. And though it wasn’t the “killer,” there was something in the unit that hurt me. Once again, I asked myself “why didn’t you check first?”…a rule I’ve adopted over the years for my own comfort. The problem is sometimes while in the throes…I forget!
Then ya got all your different types of lube…yet another gauntlet to run!
I used to be big on receiving hand jobs — or “squishies” as we called them at Action Magazine. And it didn’t take long for me to realize that Astroglide (among others) was a no-no! Wet was (and is) cool as well as simple body lotion (some kinds) and KY liquid. But Lifestyles lube? Bad news. It became a trial and error thing with me taking careful notes so as not to be afflicted twice by the same “battery acid.”
The reason for all this lube-based drama is that all these different products are not the same. They use different chemicals to accomplish their mission. Just for example…paraffin-based lube caused problems in so many men that the good people at Astroglide eliminated the chemical from their product. So it’s come down to this: As a result of my being such a “tender” guy, I’ve opted for carrying my own rubbers and lube to the party! That way with a little pre-planning, I won’t have to worry
Here’s a funny story about different rubbers from a while back: When the moment came, my partner pulled the raincoat from her purse whereupon I had the good sense to ask what kind of condom she’d be using on me.
Obviously, from what you’ve just been reading, I was hoping for a dry sheath…or at least one doused in a familiar chemical. And ya know how she responded?
“It’s regular size.” Too funny.
Gosh! You’d think a pro would have the savvy to say “it’s a magnum. No problem!”
I’m reminded of the time I heard a phone girl ask a caller “where did you see our ad?”…whereupon the guy answered “at 42nd Street and 7th Avenue.”
“No douchebag! Which paper or website, you moron?” she shook her head and spanked the customer.
Anyway…enough of my treatise on the modern day perils of having a varied sex life.
“It’s regular size!” As if! | https://medium.com/sex-and-satire/modern-chemistrys-downside-5bf692032442 | ['William', 'Dollar Bill'] | 2020-10-26 16:42:51.481000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'Humor', 'Sex', 'Psychology', 'Education'] |
A Guide for Parents to be Sensitive to Their Child’s Sexuality | A Guide for Parents to be Sensitive to Their Child’s Sexuality
Based on the personal experience of coming out to my parents.
Photo by Meireles Neto on Unsplash
I was ten and a half years old. I had never heard the term ‘queer’, let alone known someone who was like that. After watching ‘3 Idiots’ for the fourth time, an unfamiliar word — ‘gay’ — landed on my ears, so I pulled out a thesaurus and flipped through the pages until I spotted it; at that tender age, I didn’t understand who a homosexual was.
Girls Like Girls Like Boys Do
During that same dreadful year, I had my first brush with ‘love’; she was eleven years older and about to get engaged within a few months. I was utterly convinced that she was meant for me. I used love calculators to estimate our compatibility and was thoroughly devastated when the result read only 9%. My classmates, in hushed whispers, called me a lesbian, yet another alien word. All I could gather was that it might be an insult. Troubled, I decided that I was not going to be a lesbian; as the eldest child of affluent parents, I learnt to feel outcasted long before I came to terms with what homosexuality was. I did my best to disassociate myself from my classmates’ notions, but that was just the beginning. A long list of women caught my fancy: the attractive cashier at the grocery store, a friend’s half-Italian classmate, Kate Beckinsale in Pearl Harbour, the Punjabi girl residing on the 5th floor, a random Instagram model who popped up on my feed, a cousin’s best friend, and an array of strangers.
It became increasingly difficult for me to explain my interest in women, even to myself. I couldn’t digest the fact that perhaps I was that dirty word which floated through the hallways of my school. It was hard to admit, and even harder to live with. Within the comfort of my house, I had to confront a nullifying silence, which left me convinced that nobody else in the world had the same sick longings as I did. But my closest coterie barely cared; they cheered on my often short-lived affections aimed at women and were my shoulder to cry upon, when the chronicles of an early-teen closeted-lesbian’s impossible conquests predictably met their doom.
Fast-forward to seven years later — gathering every last ounce of courage that I possessed, I came out to my parents. Upon uttering the three dreaded words, the usual, heartwarming “maybe it is just a phase” greeted me. A volley of acerbic arguments — the “You-are-most-definitely-straight” argument, the “You-will-invite-trouble” argument, and the “How-will-you-find-a-suitable-boy-if-you-keep-advertising-your-sexuality” argument embraced me with open arms.
In medias res, when I was sixteen, I stumbled upon a wonderful human being. Of all the classrooms in all the towns in all the world, she walked into mine. Everything about her screamed you-are-so-falling-for-her. I recall this day vividly — we were perched upon a sofa in the newly-renovated library, discussing all things irrelevant and inappropriate, when she rested her head upon my shoulder and said, “You might be pansexual”. Under my breath, I repeated after her, tasting the new word on my tongue, a strange kind of warmth spreading through my body. There was something oddly liberating about her acceptance.
When I told my parents that I was off the market, happily in love with the very same girl, it is an understatement if I say that all hell broke loose. The previous arguments were now cemented by threats to keep us apart and a round of slammed doors, bitter tears trickling from swollen eyes, raised voice, fists banging against walls, shrouded by rage and disappointment.
My parents are fundamentally good people. They are the poster children of the Indian Generation X small-towners, who grew up against a backdrop of sandy beaches and swaying coconut trees, packed their responsibilities into a suitcase and migrated to a cosmopolitan metropolis in the pursuit of happiness. Growing up, they were staunch believers of the idea that one day they will become far better, inclusive, and sensitive parents than their own.
In my opinion, I belong to a mostly liberal upper-middle-class family: in a house of two daughters, there has been not a single sexist remark or action; we’ve always been encouraged to chase our passions and to dream, the bigger the better; but even my parents are shackled to one of the most enduring and cruellest legacies of colonialism — heteronormativity, which remains the long undisputed cause of homophobia. To the land of Kama-Sutra, the colonisers brought authoritative rigidity, narrow-mindedness, and an archaic Victorian law.
Battling Parental Homophobia
So, what do you do when your father is a distastefully homophobic Hiram Lodge? And your mother is a somewhat outspoken but a largely meek Hermione Lodge, who tries to placate you with ill-placed ‘mija’s?
I distanced myself from the Lodges.
For roughly five months, I continued to marinate in my resentment. There were so many things that I wanted to tell my parents, but the words could barely escape my throat. I wanted to shake them by the shoulders, and chant, over and over, that they were wrong.
The one thing that I realised since the time that I came out was that parents are not perfect; at the end of the day, they are just human beings. Along every turn, I noticed that I was defending their actions: that is the mentality that they grew up with; he said it in a fit of anger; they will eventually accept me; there is no chance that my parents are homophobic. The sense of betrayal that spread through my body, when it dawned upon me that my father was unequivocal in what he said, is the one feeling that I cannot translate into words.
Non-acceptance, which either breeds homophobia or stems from it, is the bully on the block that can reduce a relationship to ashes. This was captured in S3E04 (“Finger in the Dyke”) of Orange is the New Black. One of the characters, Carrie “Big Boo” Black, is a forty-two-year-old lesbian. A flashback reveals that Big Boo and her mother are at loggerheads because the former is hard-butch, which does not go down well with her mother. Eventually, when her mother is on her deathbed — after much coaxing from her girlfriend — Boo goes to the hospital to see her. Upon being instructed by her father to changes into something more girly — for her mother’s sake — Boo utters the iconic words:
“I have fought for this too long… I refuse to be invisible, Daddy. Not for you, not for mom, not for anyone.”
After several unsuccessful attempts of immersing in mundane tasks to take my mind off the new-found bitterness which had made a home out of me, I came to terms with the fact that I had to look for a healthy outlet. The first step, I realised, is to stand your ground — you can like a person of any gender and it is nobody’s business to tell you otherwise. Secondly, build a support system — talk to your friends or any other trusted person — with whom you can have a frank conversation about your feelings. Personally, it has benefitted me tremendously once I started interacting with fellow queer teens; not only does that establish a sense of solidarity and safety, but it also emphasises upon the fact that you are not alone. The third and perhaps the toughest step depends upon the pre-coming-out-relationship that you share with your parents — do you want them to approve? If yes, then you have to address the elephant in the room, and reconvene conversations regarding your sexuality with your parents.
How Can Parents Help?
On a broad spectrum of familial reactions, one end represents Elio Perlman’s parents from Call Me By Your Name, who made Oliver feel like a part of their family — “almost like a son-in-law” — whereas the parents on the other end are like Oliver’s, who would have carted him off “to a correctional facility”. While the dream is to have as many parents migrating from one side of the reactionary scale to the other, the harsh reality is that a majority of them are scattered along either the middle or the unfavourable end.
If your first reaction to your child’s sexuality is to be shell-shocked, and if you can feel the words “what if it’s just a phase” slip off your tongue, stop right there. If you are at a loss when it comes to navigating dinner-table-discussions with them, you need to consult the wonderful world of Google. Use all available resources to explore your child’s identity, so you can fiercely stand by them as they conquer the world one demon at a time.
When the child you have cared for in your womb for 9 months and a further 10+ years comes out to you, the basic and crucial response is acceptance. Period. Throughout the turbulent journey out of the closet, they must have battled intense periods of self-doubt and anxiety with a massive amount of courage (take it from a lesbian); all they need is love. If you are the first person they come out to, they will imagine you as their safe-space. While showering, they must have envisioned the conversation that they will have with you when they tell you that they identify as queer and how you will hug your child and reassure them that you accept them for the reason that they are. Do not let your child down!
According to multiple studies, LGBTQIA+ teens are more likely to experience depression, suicidal thoughts, substance abuse and promiscuous behaviour, as compared to their straight counterparts. Every year, across the globe, thousands of queer kids become homeless just because their parents are unable to digest the existence of alternate sexualities; heteronormativity is so heavily ingrained in our heads that we are afraid of anything else blossoming in its place.
When your child decides to take that step and involve you in the conversation, you need to remember that the way you react to the news has a deep and lasting impact on their life — they will recall each time that they felt loved, accepted, and respected. On the other hand, if you invalidate, ridicule, or ignore them, you will become a misinformed homophobic parent, and one day you will walk into your child’s bedroom, wondering when you grew apart, while they will be watching Love, Simon hoping to have parents as understanding as Simon’s. | https://medium.com/thecontextmag/a-guide-for-parents-to-be-sensitive-to-their-childs-sexuality-b4b66c0d0f06 | ['Context Staff'] | 2019-01-23 13:42:48.495000+00:00 | ['India', 'LGBT', 'LGBTQ', 'Pride', 'Personal Essay'] |
Fauci Says COVID-19 Vaccine Was Developed by a Black Woman and I’m Still Not Taking It | #1 A history of justified mistrust
For centuries — yes, hundreds of years — in Western societies, Black bodies have been used against their will and/or without consent as guinea pigs for the medical establishment to test, mutilate/ disfigure, poke, prod, and maim in the name of medicine and science. U.S. history is littered with examples. See the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment in which 399 infected and 201 uninfected Black men were deceived into thinking they were being treated for syphilis whilst the study’s intention was to follow and document the effects of untreated syphilis over time. Many Black doctors and nurses were recruited to aide in this deception over the 40 year course of the study.
See Henrietta Lacks a cancer patient whose cell culture was taken during treatment for cervical cancer and used as the genesis for what we now know to be HeLa cells. These cells are routinely used to test the effects of drugs and other substances on the human body. Lacks died unaware of the use of her genetic material in 1951 and her family was not made aware until 24 years later. Still there has been no resolve to the matter of patients rights and privacy with respect to the unwitting collection of genetic material.
Let us not delve into the savage dissection of enslaved Black women’s genitalia for advancement of gynecology by J. Marion Sims in the 19th century. He routinely operated on these captive women without anesthesia. Undoubtedly, he would have been assisted in these practices by other enslaved Black people who had no choice.
Black women are three to four times more likely to die in childbirth or postpartum than their white counterparts. Studies have shown that this is largely due to disparities in how white doctors respond to Black women’s assertions of pain or discomfort. The medical system in the United States has an implicit bias against Black women that is routinely reinforced and unmitigated by socioeconomic standing, see Serena Williams birthing story and the tragic death of Kira Dixson Johnson. Both Williams and Johnson alerted medical professionals about postpartum irregularities whilst still in care and were ignored. Williams managed to convince doctors to take her seriously by demanding appropriate care, but Dixson and her husband were unsuccessful in their attempts leading to her untimely death.
What does all of this mean?
Black people have long understood that the Western medical system much like it’s judicial, economic, and sociopolitical siblings were not built for our benefit. Furthermore, this system and it’s agents have rarely, if ever, done more than tolerate our existence. | https://medium.com/womans-rant/fauci-says-covid-19-vaccine-was-developed-by-a-black-woman-and-im-still-not-taking-it-ca000f92a8d8 | ['Melissa A. Matthews'] | 2020-12-11 09:52:15.543000+00:00 | ['BlackLivesMatter', 'Covid 19', 'Medicine', 'Race', 'Vaccines'] |
Five Best Practices for Successful Salesforce Testing | Salesforce Testing Best Practices
We have identified when to test and where to test, now we will explain some best practices for how to go about Salesforce testing effectively. Some of these tips are specific to Salesforce while others are tips that are helpful for software testing in general.
1. Effective Test Strategy and Test Planning
Proper test strategy and test planning play a very important role in successful Salesforce testing, as many components and businesses critical processes are involved in the process. During this process, you must define what your high-level objectives are, who all of your stakeholders are, and their responsibilities. You should also document the different phases of testing, the different tooling which you are going to use, as well as the exit criteria of the test.
Implementing a successful test strategy for Salesforce can help businesses to identify the bottlenecks or defects, and streamline their operations. Proper planning is always an important first step.
2. Integrating Test Environment
Having an integrated test environment is a key in any testing project, especially in complex systems like eCommerce applications. In Salesforce, there are many other systems integrated into the platform like microservices from various payment providers, fulfilment partners, delivery partners, and more.
To satisfactorily test business-critical functions, these systems should be integrated so that proper integration testing that can be performed in real-time scenarios like on production.
Doing integration testing properly is typically expensive when done at the right phase of development. However, it will be much more expensive to fix any defects if they are discovered at a later stage, such as in production.
3. Automated Test Scripts
Automating business processes, like a check out and order fulfillment flow, in Salesforce saves lots of time when testing. However, be sure to stay on top of test flakiness.
Using test automation tools like Selenium, Provar, Leap Work, UFT & Cypress, automated functional testing can be performed.
Salesforce supports several types of API endpoints which also can be exposed for automation testing. API endpoints can be automated by using tools like Postman, REST-Assured & Soap UI.
We are talking about Salesforces specifically here, but imagine how useful it would be to automatically upload all the results from your automated tests to one central dashboard. Well, we’ve made it possible with our test results dashboard, Calliope Pro.
Real-time test results data in a central dashboard for all development team stakeholders to view. Developers know where to work on fixes and project managers know, with a few minutes work, with the code is release-ready.
Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Give it a try for free (no credit card or payment required).
4. Fix Problems Early
We’ve all heard of the idea of “shifting testing to the left”, or in other words, testing earlier in the development lifecycle. This concept still holds true for Salesforce testing.
The early detection of problems and the implementation of fixes for those problems at early stages in development save lots of effort, cost, and minimises complexity. Early detection and resolution also have the added benefits of reducing business risk, improving application security, and boosting the overall quality of the application.
Regular smaller deployments and the testing of these deployments prevents many of these from occurring and allows testers to confirm that recently developed code works correctly.
5. Involve Your Stakeholders in UAT Testing
Stakeholders should always be involved in User Acceptance Testing (UAT) so they can be shown that has been designed and how it works, all while providing their feedback and suggestions for future releases. It is actually one of the reasons why Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is so popular.
Involving them in the testing process helps test engineers find any issues in the business process, helping to ensure the application meets the requirements and to verify that the developed code meets their expectations.
Many delays and issues arrive in the development process when the business-side and the development-side are not in alignment. Avoid this miscommunication and foster dialogue between stakeholders.
If you have gotten this far and already discovered some tips to help you improve your Salesforce testing practices, that’s great, we are glad to have helped.
For some readers of this article, however, the prospect of testing on Salesforce may still feel too daunting. Nothing to feel bad about. Software development and software testing are hard, especially if you are learning how to do it outside of your core domain of expertise.
Fortunately, software testing is our domain of expertise. Need some help with automated or manual testing? spriteCloud has got you covered. Review our services and get in touch with us via a contact form for more information on pricing and scheduling. | https://medium.com/@spritecloud/five-best-practices-for-successful-salesforce-testing-7c1eb8c9d18b | [] | 2020-11-30 14:09:57.303000+00:00 | ['Software Testing', 'Testing', 'Salesforce', 'Quality Assurance'] |
Understand Responsive Images Through gatsby-image | The Anatomy of a Responsive Image
Here is the markup of both the fixed and fluid images generated by gatsby-image .
Markup of fixed and fluid images generated by gatsby-image.
Whether an image is fixed or fluid, it’s always wrapped inside a <div> element named gatsby-image-wrapper .
The first element inside the wrapper is a placeholder image.
We can tell that it’s a placeholder because its attribute is aria-hidden=”true” , and the image’s dimension is 20x13.
This placeholder serves two purposes when the browser hasn’t finished loading the actual image:
Gives a smooth transition with the “blur-up” technique popularized by none other than Medium.
Prevents image jump.
If you refresh the browser, you will see that familiar blur-up effect.
Blur-up effect.
To tell you the truth, the blur-up effect is best experienced when the internet is slow, and this may well be the only good thing about slow internet. It lets us developers enjoy the fruits of our labor and the marvel of technology.
Right underneath the placeholder image is an empty <div> that only appears when the image is set to fluid.
This element adds a bottom padding to the image. Its value is the same as the image’s aspect ratio: 2592/3888 = 0.6666.
This empty <div> is needed because both the gatsby-image-wrapper and the actual image have no predefined width and height. At the same time, the actual image has to take up the whole width and height of its parent.
Without the empty container with the bottom padding, the actual image will disappear.
Finally, the <picture> element.
There is nothing special about this tag, but it houses two important elements: <source> and <img> . Because they are so pivotal in the layout of the image, I’ll put them in dedicated headings.
<source> element
The most important attribute of the <source> element is srcset . It provides a bunch of images with hints to help the browser pick the right one for different viewport widths.
Notice that srcset differs between fixed and fluid images.
For the fixed image:
Fox the fluid image:
As you can see, each image in srcset is separated from the previous one by a comma. Each one contains:
The path to the image ( /static/362300c046749582c4ff6569a40211d8/25b50/james-mccullough-Znxkw16UKG0-unsplash.jpg ).
). A space.
The x descriptor in case of a fixed image and w descriptor for a fluid one.
x refers to pixel density. The x descriptor specifies the pixel density the image is intended for.
In this example, the default image is 35KB, but it expands to 68KB when the pixel density is 1.5 times the standard (107KB when double).
It’s a huge leap from 35 to 68, and then to 107. Thus you can see the importance of serving the right image for the right screen device.
Meanwhile, the w in the w descriptor refers to the image’s instrinsic width in pixels. Note that it is set in w unit — not px , as we often see. This is the image’s real size and you can verify that by inspecting the file on your computer.
The w descriptor is only applied to fluid images because, with fixed images, we have only one single image size that we want to display regardless of the situation.
In this demo, the w descriptor values are 1750w, 350w, 700w, 1050w, and 1444w and 3888w. Did you notice the pattern?
3888w happens to be the width of the original image.
At the same time, we have set the maxWidth of our fluid image to 300. That means gatsby-plugin-sharp generates automatic sizes that are 50%, 100%, 150%, and 200% of the value we set in the GraphQL query. That’s very thoughtful.
Also, in the case of a fluid image, we have another attribute in the <source> element: sizes .
This attribute defines a set of media conditions and the corresponding images to serve when the condition is true.
<picture> <source sizes="(max-width:700px) 100vw, 700px></source> </picture>
The hint above tells the browser to make the image span 100% of the viewport when the browser window is 700px wide and below. Otherwise, just serve an image that is 700px wide.
At the same time, this hint also satisfies our GraphQL query that specifies that the image never exceeds 700px in width.
The actual image
Finally, we get to the all-important <img> tag. Without it, the actual image won’t appear.
Its sizes and srcset attributes are the same as the ones in the <source> element.
The attribute of note here is src . Do you remember that the media condition tells the browser to load a 700px wide image when the viewport is above 700px?
This src attribute embeds that very image.
Actually, that’s all there is to the actual image. So much groundwork for one image. | https://medium.com/better-programming/understand-responsive-images-through-gatsby-image-81f861b91158 | ['Trang Le'] | 2020-04-20 18:23:16.730000+00:00 | ['Responsive Design', 'Programming', 'React', 'JavaScript', 'Gatsbyjs'] |
Gene Marker PACS a Punch for Cervical Cancer Treatments | In cervical cancer, mutations in healthy cells cause cells to grow and multiply uncontrollably, invading surrounding tissues and spreading around the body. Infection by the human papillomavirus (HPV) and lifestyle factors are among the root causes of the disease. In 2020, nearly 14,000 women in the U.S. will be diagnosed with invasive cervical cancer and over 4,000 will die from it.
Chemotherapy and radiation are standard clinical interventions for cervical cancer. However, the problem is that not every patient will respond favorably to these treatments. Until now, there is no way for physicians to distinguish which subset of patients will benefit from standard treatment strategies and which should opt for alternatives.
Now, cancer experts from UCLA have identified a gene called PACS-1, which when expressed at high levels in cervical cancer tissues, points towards possible resistance to chemo treatment. The scientists were able to track the dynamics of the PACS-1 protein in cells derived from primary tumors and made an interesting discovery.
When the PACS-1 protein translocated from the cell’s cytoplasm to the nucleus, this made the cell resistant to killing by cancer therapeutics. This occurred through the PACS-1-mediated suppression of the DNA damage response — an in-built safety mechanism in cells that repairs DNA to prevent the generation of deleterious mutations.
The study, published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, suggests that PACS-1 represents a viable diagnostic marker that could contribute to improved therapeutic strategies for patients with chemo-resistant cervical cancer. The authors suggest that treatments that suppress PACS-1 expression in combination with chemotherapeutics or immuno-oncology approaches might be the key to addressing these tumors which until now, have been deemed untreatable.
Source: Journal of Biological Chemistry. | https://medium.com/the-reading-frame/gene-marker-pacs-a-punch-for-cervical-cancer-treatments-57dbdee3697 | ['Tara Fernandez'] | 2020-12-16 19:42:20.199000+00:00 | ['Cancer', 'Cell Biology', 'Biomarkers Market', 'Womens Health', 'Medicine'] |
Offline Networking for Business Growth | Work the room
So you’ve identified a suitable event, packed your business cards and arrived at the venue — now what?
It is important to make a great first impression, as people decide whether or not they like you within a matter of seconds. Although you may prefer to work in your pyjamas all day, make sure you have some proper business attire ready for professional networking events. As a general rule, dress at least ten percent better than the people you want to attract. The last thing you want to do is come across as some haphazard freelancer — you are a business owner and want to be treated as such, so dress and act accordingly!
Being nervous is completely normal, but don’t use it as an excuse to keep getting refills from the buffet or (pretend to) send text messages on your phone all night. That would defeat the entire point of being there, so relax, get in there and work the room. After all, everyone shares the same goal and is there to network.
Try to talk to as many people as possible rather than clinging to those you already know. To do this effectively, smile and make eye contact for a great first impression. Make sure you’ve prepared an effective elevator speech to raise the other person’s interest. When you’re asked ‘what do you do?’, you need to be able to respond with short phrases that will get you noticed and remembered in less than ten seconds. What you say should make the listener want to find out more about you and your business and lead to further questions.
If you’ve identified someone important you really want to speak to, don’t be afraid to ask the host to introduce you to them. Connecting with the right people is your main objective after all.
When engaging with someone, try to listen carefully in order to demonstrate genuine interest and at the same time finding out more about their business. Everyone likes to talk about themselves, so people will remember you for being a good listener and feel flattered that someone is interested in them and their business. And flattery goes a long way as they say. | https://medium.com/marketing-for-small-businesses/offline-networking-for-business-growth-f80866d6a564 | ['Kahli Bree Adams'] | 2020-06-18 06:39:38.331000+00:00 | ['Freelancers', 'Communication', 'Networking', 'Business', 'Small Business'] |
Two Sides of the Same Coin | Light… Darkness
Night… Day
Two sides of the same coin
…… A million little particles of stardust . . . . . … . ………….
Settle. ….. . .. . … . .. .. . .. .. . . .. . . .. . . .. .. .
….. .On……. .. .. . .. … ………… …. .. .. .. .. . … … .. .
….. . ..Land .. …. .. …………………….. … … .
……. ……… Quietly
…………… …………………….. ………………………………
……………………………………………………………………
And the gears turn at the hands of
And the levers are pulled by the hands of
And the circle was completed by the hands of
And we embrace the mystery made by the hands of
And we stare up into the millions eyes killed by the hands of
And we spiral out of infinity again and are received by the hands of
And we ride the wave of a never ending math equation drew up by the hands of
A word.
Spoken into the void.
Destroys the wonder of looking into the night sky.
In awe, for guidance.
We are lost with no direction. We stumble around in the dark. Until the light frees us from time.
Then:
You will see your past and future all at once
You will see your present goes as fast as you can name it
You will see yourself in everything that lives
You will see through the illusion of time
You will see everything is happening at once
You will know everything
You will be everything
You are everything
Everything is in you
And you are beautiful | https://medium.com/the-scene-heard/two-sides-of-the-same-coin-37727942f916 | [] | 2018-05-05 19:06:01.030000+00:00 | ['David Foster Wallace', 'Thesceneandheard', 'Poetry', 'Universe', 'Beauty'] |
SiberianSwap #1 Hybrid DEX & Yield Farm Platform on BSC! | SiberianSwap — The Next Generation Automatic Liquidity Acquision Yield Farming & AMM on Binance Smart Chain With Efficient Rewards Lockup & Anti Whale Mechanism
Welcome to SIBERIANSWAP — The Next Generation Automatic Liquidity Acquisition Yield Farm & AMM on Binance Smart Chain. SIBERIANSWAP is run by a team of innovative and trusted developers.
Simple & Fair rules
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No rug pulls. Standard contracts, forked from Pantherswap v1, a Techrate and Certik audited project. Decentralized Exchange is also standard contracts, forked from Pancakeswap (pancakerouter contract). No pre-sale, no pre-mine for dev. Liquidity are locked, cannot be withdrawn. 8h time lock, will be 24h after 3 days from project launch.
We are here to provide a secure and fair experience. Customer’s fund safety is our 1st priority.
About SIBERIANSWAP
SiberianSwap is the Next Generation Automatic Liquidity Acquisition yield farm and AMM decentralized exchange running on Binance Smart Chain with lots of unique and creative features that let you earn and win.
Decentralized Exchange (DEX)
Instantly swap crypto tokens: No registration or account needed.
Low Fees — why pay more? SiberianSwap runs on Binance Smart Chain, a blockchain with much lower transaction costs than Etherum or Bitcoin. Trading fees are lower than other top decentralized exchanges too, so that’s a double win for you!
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Automated Market Maker (AMM) — SiberianSwap is an AMM, built with the intention of bringing even more liquidity into the protocol. SIBERIAN’s main farming token also serves as the reward token. SiberianSwap provides numerous Farming pools and low trading fees (0.25%) on its swap section.
0.17% of trading fee goes back to LP’s.
0.08% goes back to Buyback & Burn to increase the stability of Siberian Tokens.
SiberianRouter Smart Contracts — Our Token Swap (trade) functions and smart contracts are built and forked from pancakeswap contracts, which the #1 DEX on Binance Smart Chain.
Roadmap & Expansions
Launch
Token Fair Launch
Audits
Apply for Listings on Coinmarketcap, Coingecko, DappRadar, BscScan, etc.
Special Rewards Farming (Stake SIBERIAN to earn BUSD and BNB) — 14 to 21 days after launch
Twitter Contests — Will start right after launch
Partnerships — WIll start right after launch
DEX
AMM Decentralized Exchange — WIll start at launch
Token Swap (Trading) — Will start at launch
Liquidity Pools — Will start at launch
Cross-Chain Expansions
Polygon Matic Network — 30 to 60 days after launch
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Unlike other farms before, in SiberianSwap each transfer of SIBERIAN must pay a 6% transfer tax. The 5% transfer tax gets added back to the liquidity pool through the contract automatically to raise the SIBERIAN price floor continuously. And the liquidity will be locked and inaccessible.
This is an innovative feature of SIBERIANSWAP, combined with smart fee distributions model and Special Pools, this will encourage users to hold the token for long term benefits.
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As we have mentioned above, each transfer of SIBERIAN must pay a 6% transfer tax. The 3% transfer tax will be allocated to automatic liquidity acquisition. And the rest 3% transfer tax will be burned immediately. The whole process is automatic.
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Harvest lockup is a unique rewards lockup mechanism used to limit the frequency of harvest. It is designed to prevent farming arbitrage bots from constantly harvesting and dumping like other farms before SiberianSwap.
For example, the harvest lockup of the SIBERIAN-BUSD farm is 3 hours. It means that farmers who stake in the SIBERIAN-BUSD farm can only harvest (claim their rewards from farming) every 3 hours.
You can check the harvest lockup on each farm card.
To clarify, the harvest lockup only locks users’ farming rewards. The tokens and LP tokens staked in farms can be withdrawn anytime.
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Transfer more than 0.5% of the total supply will be rejected. So a big whale cannot dump the price immediately like other farms before SiberianSwap. As the total supply grows, this ratio will be reduced.
Deposit Fee Redistribution
A 4% deposit fee will be charged when users enter staking on SiberianSwap, but unlike other yield farms, we don’t plan to use the deposit fee to buy back and burn. It’s a waste of money. Instead, we will redistribute the 3% deposit fee to SIBERIAN holders in Special Pools to encourage holding. And 1% deposit fee will be sent to the dev team as the development fund.
What is Special Rewards Farming?
Special Rewards are farming pools that allow SIBERIAN holders to stake their SIBERIAN to earn other tokens. Two pools (BUSD & BNB) will be created by the dev team after launch, the 3% deposit fee will be used to these two pools as the rewards for SIBERIAN staking.
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An on-chain referral program has been implemented to incentivize users to invite friends to join the farming. Inviters can earn 3% of his/her friends’ earnings forever.
Visit SiberianSwap referral program page
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Do I lose 3% of my income to the referrer because of using his referral link?
No! The contract will automatically take 3% from total liquidity pool and send it to referrer wallet. So you and him earn together, you don’t lose anything from your harvested rewards.
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Website: https://siberianswap.finance/ | https://medium.com/@siberianswap/siberianswap-1-hybrid-dex-yield-farm-platform-on-bsc-2376181a6360 | [] | 2021-06-08 19:09:09.989000+00:00 | ['Binance Smart Chain', 'Binance', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Yield Farming', 'Defi'] |
3 Reasons Other People’s Opinions Do Matter | Aspiring creatives are often told to produce work purely for themselves — at least at the beginning of their journey.
The idea is that enjoying the process of creation is more important than worrying about the recognition our work receives.
I myself have repeated that advice on this blog, so my intention with this piece isn’t to refute it.
I do think enjoying the process of whatever it is we decide to do is more important than any recognition we might receive.
We can’t control recognition, but we can control the attitude we adopt toward the work we take up.
There are no guarantees that we will become financially independent as creatives, and so the real question we need to ask ourselves is, “Can I do what I do even if the money never comes?”
Learning to have fun while creating, setting one’s own goals and working diligently toward them, and not being too concerned with how others view our journey are all critical elements of getting back in touch with our creative nature.
That being said, I think there is an equally valid perspective regarding why we should make an effort to care about someone’s opinion when it stems from the genuine desire of wanting to give good feedback.
What I’m not suggesting is that we ought to let anyone who has a negative opinion of something we create completely obliterate our self-esteem, or even that we have to admit that they are one-hundred percent right in their assessment.
I’m merely suggesting that other people’s reactions to our work can teach us a lot about our strengths and weaknesses, provided we cultivate an attitude of being able to learn from feedback.
So I thought I’d take the time to run through three reasons why we should make that effort.
Reason # 1 — We Need Feedback to Improve & Grow
While it’s possible for each of us to act as our own critic, there’s simply no substitute for having outsiders engage with and respond to our work.
We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve. — Bill Gates
For example, sometimes we think we are being clear in our message only to realize that it’s clunky in ways we didn’t catch.
If you’ve ever written something in a flash, took a day or more break from it, and then come back to realize that it was a hurried mess, then you’ll know what I’m talking about.
The act of taking a break distanced you from your work, and you were able to see it a bit more objectively.
Well, other people are like that, times a hundred.
Their reaction is a clue as to whether our train of thought was expressed clearly, or if it jumped all over the place and missed out on providing its intended value.
Anyone interested in improvement should be open to hearing well-reasoned critiques of their work (unfortunately, so many critiques are not well-reasoned, but more on that later).
Put another way, we grow in proportion to the degree that we are capable of admitting that we still have faults that need to be worked on.
Other people can help with pointing out those faults — as painful as it may be.
We just need to take care to discern when someone’s critique is valid, versus when someone is trolling or attacking us with unnecessary negativity.
Reason #2 — No Feedback Is the Worst Kind of Feedback
If our goal is to provide value to our audience and maybe even get paid for what we do someday, then we need to care about what sort of reactions our work is triggering in others.
Comments and feedback — aka opinions — are the only way to know how our work is affecting the people it comes into contact with.
But here’s the thing: people mostly comment on what provokes either a really positive or really negative reaction out of them.
A popular example is the recent Star Wars sequel trilogy.
Most people loved The Force Awakens, but The Last Jedi is really where people drew battle lines.
It’s no surprise then that The Last Jedi is probably still the most talked-about installment of the trilogy.
It provoked strong reactions out of people, which I think many creatives would readily admit as something they want their own work to do.
It’s when people have no reaction to our work that we find ourselves in a bit of a pickle.
No reaction means our work is still dwelling somewhere in the land of mediocrity, either by playing it safe, failing to entertain/provide value, etc.
But no one should be devastated if this is the case.
After all, out of the 311 (and counting) blog posts I’ve published thus far, none have gone viral, and very few of them have even one response.
What this tells me is that I still have a lot of room left to improve my writing game, even if I can “blame” some of it on the luck of the internet draw.
At this point, however, I prefer to believe that the impetus is on me to provide more value for my readers and to not make excuses for why I haven’t seemed to be capable of doing that yet.
The point I’m trying to make, however, is this: the only alternative to hearing others’ opinions of our work (whether they be positive or negative) is a silent audience, and who really wants that?
Reason #3 — If We Eventually Want to Make a Larger Impact, Some Degree of Social Validation Is Necessary
While in the beginning stages of any creative journey it’s always best to learn how to enjoy the process for its own sake, many of us also want to make a larger impact on the world — if we’re permitted.
To do that, however, some degree of social validation is necessary.
… creativity cannot be understood by looking only at the people who appear to make it happen. Just as the sound of a tree crashing in the forest is unheard if nobody is there to hear it, so creative ideas vanish unless there is a receptive audience to record and implement them. And without the assessment of competent outsiders, there is no reliable way to decide whether the claims of a self-styled creative person are valid. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
I learned this the hard way when I was forced to question my earlier I-only-want-to-rebel self.
I guess you could say that I sort of saw through the absurdity of non-conforming just to be a non-conformist. As other people have pointed out, that’s basically just a different way of conforming.
The truth is, of course, that every human being wants to feel accepted by at least one other human being, and most of us want to feel like we have a place in society at large as well.
So while it’s fine to create work for ourselves in the beginning, I think that any aspiring creative should feel unashamed in admitting that they want their work to find a broader audience eventually.
We can debate all day what a “competent outsider” is from Mihaly’s quote above, but for the sake of keeping things simple, I’ll stick to just the blogging world.
When I think about what a blog is, I don’t try to inflate it into something grand.
I see a blog as a place to share the knowledge I’m exploring with others and to help them learn and grow along with me.
It’s a place for self-reflection, sharing knowledge and wisdom, and being unafraid of updating my worldview when and if I find it is in need of updating.
From this perspective, anyone who comments is a “competent outsider,” as I’m not trying to revolutionize, say, theoretical physics.
I’m just trying to make an impact on whoever stumbles in here.
That’s why feedback is so critical, and why anyone in the same boat as me shouldn’t run away from hearing others’ opinions of their work.
Feedback is eventually what we want — we just have to embrace hearing critiques along with praise, and not let either type of comment go to our heads.
This doesn’t mean we have to be enslaved to the desire to have our work socially validated.
Honesty and authenticity are still more important than performative displays for the crowd.
But, interestingly enough, being honest enough to risk upsetting people is also the same way that we attract an audience that’s genuinely interested in what we have to say.
To Sum It All Up
Should other people’s opinions matter to the lone creative trying to produce work that impacts the world?
The answer is, of course, yes — to a certain degree.
Other people’s opinions shouldn’t determine how we view our work in the long run, but we should learn enough from them so that we can keep improving.
Silence, in many ways, is the worst form of feedback, as it reveals to us that our work isn’t yet making an impact or provoking strong reactions out of people.
We should also feel comfortable admitting that making an impact and receiving social validation is, in many ways, the same thing.
Rather than run away from people praising or critiquing our work (and sometimes they can do both), we should embrace it as a necessary element of the process.
Other people are indeed the mirror that is held up to us and our work.
Sometimes the image we see makes us uncomfortable.
But that’s okay, so long as we are willing to learn something and keep on chugging along. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/3-reasons-other-peoples-opinions-do-matter-47e84108ecef | ['Colton Tanner Casados-Medve'] | 2020-12-14 21:38:28.528000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Blogging', 'Creativity', 'Opinion', 'Growth'] |
Franciscans, Jesuits and so forth — he suggested one way to reclaim evangelicalism is for those called to evangelism to rise up as a holy order across the church universal. | Franciscans, Jesuits and so forth — he suggested one way to reclaim evangelicalism is for those called to evangelism to rise up as a holy order across the church universal. Firoso Nov 19, 2020·6 min read
Evangelicalism in America is nearing extinction due to the movement’s devotion to politics at the expense of its original calling to share the gospel, according to Mark Galli, former editor-in-chief of Christianity Today.
“The evangelicalism that transformed the world is, for all practical purposes, dying if not already dead,” Galli said during the “Conversations that Matter” webinar hosted by Baptist News Global Oct. 8. He spoke with BNG Executive Director and Publisher Mark Wingfield in an hour-long webinar that is available for viewing on BNG’s YouTube channel.
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Now semi-retired, Galli served 20 years at Christianity Today and is the author of a new book, When Did We Start Forgetting God: The Root of the Evangelical Crisis and Hope for the Future.
While he has identified at times as Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Anglican and recently becoming Roman Catholic, Galli said he has remained true to his evangelical upbringing that emphasized evangelism and spiritual renewal.
“I am an evangelical Catholic,” he said.
Galli spoke on an array of other topics including the culture war divisions between Americans, the polities that divide churches, and how dialogue may help pastors and others hurdle those barriers.
That editorial
But he hit on a very high-profile topic, too: his December 2019 Christianity Today editorial describing President Donald Trump as morally unfit to hold office and arguing for his removal. It was published during the Congressional impeachment hearings.
“He himself has admitted to immoral actions in business and his relationship with women, about which he remains proud,” Galli wrote. “His Twitter feed alone — with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies and slanders — is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.”
The piece generated severe backlash from the right, including from the president himself. The viciousness of responses often was hard to bear, Galli said.
The one possible thing he would redo, he said, is the headline — “Trump Should Be Removed from Office” — that placed the emphasis on politics, when it was faith that motivated his position, Galli explained. “I was making moral arguments to fellow evangelicals. But it sounded like a political comment.”
The editorial was not, as some claimed, an effort to back Trump’s opponent in the 2020 election. It’s just that Trump has “such deeply flawed moral character” that he needs to leave office, Galli said.
Trump has “such deeply flawed moral character” that he needs to leave office.
He has no quarrel with conservative evangelicals who acknowledge Trump’s flaws but still vote for him because he lines up on issues important to them, Galli said.
There were certainly plenty of those in 2016, according to a pre-election Pew survey that Christianity Today published titled, “Most Evangelicals Will Vote Trump, But Not for Trump.”
Rather than citing issues like abortion, religious freedom and support for Israel as rationale for voting Trump, white evangelicals were much more concerned about the economy four years ago, Galli recalled. “I get it. I disagree with their choice, but I respect their wrestling.”
On the other hand, he said he does not understand those evangelicals who refuse to criticize Trump on moral grounds, who believe liberals need some shaking up and describe the president in messianic terms.
He recalled an anecdote about a pro-Trump Christian describing the president as sitting “at the right hand of the Father” and said of this ideology: “That’s idolatry, clearly and simply.”
Demise of evangelicalism
To explain the demise of evangelicalism, Galli cited the legacy of Billy Graham, who even in advanced age preached to invite men and women of all races and cultures to Christ. “He was the glue that held evangelicalism together for many years,” Galli said.
“An unfortunate symbol of what evangelicalism has become is epitomized by his son, Franklin,” he continued. “Franklin stands for evangelicals on both the right and the left who believe that politics is an essential work of evangelical faith.”
“Franklin (Graham) stands for evangelicals on both the right and the left who believe that politics is an essential work of evangelical faith.”
One symbol of that politicization is an organization called Evangelicals for Trump.
“In describing themselves in that way, they have become just another political interest group, taking the great name ‘evangelical,’ with all its theological and doctrinal and gospel history and meaning and putting it in the service of a political candidate,” Galli asserted.
And from his vantage point, the news is no better from the evangelical left.
“What’s really troubling to me is that instead of decrying this coopting of the term ‘evangelical’ for political gain, the evangelical left has only mirrored this tragic move when they recently formed a group called Evangelicals for Joe Biden.”
Evangelical groups that focus almost solely on social justice and cultural change, instead of sharing the gospel, are contributing to the decline, too, he said.
“As a result, we’ve started to let the agenda of the world determine the agenda of the church, and we’ve sidelined evangelism and church renewal as the result.”
Galli said he noticed this trend during the hiring process at Christianity Today beginning in the 1990s. Candidates overwhelmingly were interested in cultural analysis, and perhaps one in 10 story ideas pitched was about evangelistic outreach.
For the most part, he added, the lack of interest in that founding mission of faith sharing exists across the board.
“I am going to go so far as to say that our fascination with social amelioration, and political activism, has watered down the evangelical faith to the point that it looks little different than mainline Christianity,” he said.
“We’ve forgotten that the genius of evangelical faith was its singular focus: spiritual renewal. ‘You must be born again’ was preached to individuals and to whole churches and denominations, from George Whitefield, John Wesley, to Charles Finney, to Dwight Moody to Billy Graham. It was preached in the First and Second Great Awakenings, it was preached by the circuit riders, and at local Baptist revivals every year or many times a year.”
Yet, that message is not being preached much nowadays, and there will be consequences, he said. “Evangelicals today no longer have a laser focus on evangelism and spiritual renewal. As a result, I believe they will fade away as will the very term.”
Who will the Lord raise up?
But Galli predicted the mission of evangelism will continue, possibly under a different name.
“In every generation, the Lord raises up some Christians to whom he gives the charism of evangelism and spiritual renewal. What they will be called in the future, I don’t know.”
“In every generation, the Lord raises up some Christians to whom he gives the charism of evangelism and spiritual renewal. What they will be called in the future, I don’t know.”
Citing the tradition of various orders within Roman Catholicism — Benedictines, Franciscans, Jesuits and so forth — he suggested one way to reclaim evangelicalism is for those called to evangelism to rise up as a holy order across the church universal.
With some portion of the church focused on evangelism, then Christians can be involved in the public square, love their neighbors and work for social and political justice, he added. “Christians should not run away from culture but dash right into the middle of it and do whatever it takes to show forth the righteousness of God.”
Friendship amid differences
Galli explained that he’s developed these insights partly in becoming Catholic, which has provided a different vantage point from which to view evangelicalism and the wider church.
Regarding Christian unity, he said: “I don’t know if there is a reason for us to be apart, but it’s hard to get together because no one is willing to give up anything. For example, talking to a Methodist and a Presbyterian reveals little difference, “but Methodists don’t want to give up their bishops and Presbyterians don’t want to submit to bishops.”
Divisions within congregations, especially politically driven ones, must be addressed delicately, Galli said, suggesting pastors preach on the Bible from the pulpit and speak with parishioners aside from their sermons about politics.
But he acknowledged that even the Bible has been politicized in the current climate.
“Unfortunately, everything is perceived as political,” he said. “We just have to remind ourselves there are more important things than politics.”
Former Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia lived that approach, he said. They did not let ideological differences prevent a friendship.
“That is something American leaders ought to be promoting,” he concluded. | https://medium.com/@5firoso/evangelicalism-in-america-is-nearing-extinction-due-to-the-movements-devotion-to-politics-at-the-557332c6e216 | [] | 2020-11-19 17:25:02.038000+00:00 | ['Sports', 'Social Media', 'News', 'Live Streaming'] |
Walking with Ghosts — a 9–11 Remembrance | Thomas D. Kirsch
The Pile, September 2001
Twenty years ago, the church sat surrounded by its ancient graveyard, dust-shrouded, locked, and empty. Inside the black wrought iron fence, the grayed-out grass and trees looked as lifeless as the worn tombstones. On the other side, to the west, recovery workers like myself choked in the same gray-brown dust, churned up by the work at Ground Zero and with each step we took. The air was thick with the continuous roar of heavy equipment, the pungent smoke of hidden fires, and an unseen, pressing sorrow. When the bell clanged, it meant they were bringing out the dead.
***
For over six months after the 9–11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center towers, more than one hundred thousand professionals and volunteers worked at the site, putting out fires, clearing the rubble, recovering bodies — police, fire, EMS, construction workers, engineers, truckers, American Red Cross volunteers, and many others. We acted like everything was normal.
“It’s just a job.”
“I don’t need to wear that stupid mask.”
“Another day, another dollar.”
We were fools.
Since then, eighty-one thousand have enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program, set up to track the physical and mental health impact of working in that jumble of concrete and steel. The daily exposures to the destruction of a world, mass death, and the toxic dust and smoke have taken their toll. Responders suffered long-term health effects that include increased heart disease, respiratory illnesses, cancer, accelerated aging, and even permanent changes to the brain. The mental impacts are even more pervasive — PTSD, depression, and early cognitive decline. As a result, the September 11th Victims Compensation Fund has awarded $7.76 billion to over 34,400 responders who have become sick or died.
***
I have responded to dozens of disasters throughout the world since 9–11 and carry the burden of all. But my ghosts first gathered there, in the stench of that smoking rubble, with the clang of that bell. The weight of it all accumulated until my marriage collapsed and I struggled to function at work. I took a sabbatical, worked overseas, and then spent two months in the wilderness, seeking some answers. After walking nine hundred miles on the Pacific Crest Trail, I thought I had learned much, solved a little, maybe found a new path. I decided to finish my journey where it actually began — Lower Manhattan, on West Street just south of Vesey. It seemed right — walking New York City into a resolved past would complete the circle. Bury the ghosts. I had not been back since 2001.
***
On September 11th, 2001, I woke in my suburban home after a late shift in the emergency department to the strained voices of stunned announcers on my radio-alarm. I sat for hours, unshowered, unshaven, as endless replays of planes full of people disintegrated into giant fireballs and shards of buildings and bodies fluttered to the ground. Trapped by fire, people jumped, tumbling endless seconds, like leaves falling from a tree of smoke. Then the slow-motion horror of the towers, one following the other, crumbling into themselves, leaving nothing but a giant cloud of brown-gray dust that swallowed the tip of Manhattan. The security of life in America, the safe world I thought I had created for my family, had crumbled with those falling towers. We were, all of us, living in a new world.
When the travel ban was lifted, I flew to the American Red Cross headquarters in Washington, D.C., to respond as their Volunteer Medical Director. I took the train to New York City, the same train through the same rolling suburbia I had taken dozens of times. But when the city came into view, an unrecognized anxiety shivered me — the skyline seemed vaguely wrong, as if the island was tilted, the southern tip floating. It took seconds before I recognized the absence — the mass of Twin Towers no longer weighted the downtown — all that was left was a ghostly plume of pale-gray smoke.
Times Square was a funeral, everything subdued, solemn. The west side of lower Manhattan was closed off south of Chambers Street. Somber people gathered at the guarded north entrance on Greenwich, watching, whispering, praying, hoping. Stepping through that barricade felt like entering a cemetery.
The ‘Respite Center’ was inside the gate on the closed campus of St. John’s University. It was a retreat for the responders, with a cafeteria, places to rest and take a break, a first aid station, and tables of donated gifts and food. Exhausted workers still wearing hardhats chatted at tables or napped on recliners. The Red Cross nurses spent most of their time flushing the dust that caked the workers’ eyes.
A hundred yards south, the site was another world — ‘The Pile’ to the responders — a chaotic jumble of wreckage that had once been glistening white, sky-high towers. It was at once mundane and horrible — a demolition site with the usual trucks, cranes, and hardhat workers. But it was also the rubble of our beliefs in a safe world; a pile of death with the bodies of 2,753 slaughtered people intermingled in the debris. The wisps of smoke from the fires raging below like their fleeting souls. It was a massive, smoking heap of jumbled girders and shattered concrete that dwarfed the tiny workers. American flags fluttered throughout and hung from the nearby buildings. To the south and east, the buildings stood like silent mourners, wreathed with protective black netting like a widow’s gossamer veil. The base of the North Tower was outlined by angry knives of giant metal shards that had been its cladding, stabbing dozens of feet into the sky. The South Tower was nothing but a confusion of rubble beside the vast hole that led to the destroyed train station.
Like ants, workers struggled through the wreckage. Giant cranes lifted debris. Firefighters poured water into rubble gaps to quench the uncontained inferno below. Twelve or more hours a day, set to the scorching, filthy, and soul-crushing task of bringing order to this chaos. Digging through millions of tons of debris to discover crushed bodies or pieces of flesh and bone — throats burning from the foul smoke, eyes stung by dust, hearts heavy with the weight of the ghosts.
It is the smell that stayed with me, an acrid, stinging mixture of burned jet fuel, dirt, and cement. Perhaps flesh. Dark-haunting odor-memories buried deep in my brain rise now and again in odd settings, triggered by obscure smells, sights, or sounds to unearth emotions that smother me.
West Street was The Pile’s thoroughfare. It had been reduced to a truck-choked dirt road that split The Pile from the battered buildings to the west. I traversed its grimy maze many times a day to get to the aid stations and attend meetings at the fire station to the south, distributing dust masks to the responders along the way. The walk was a descent into the ruins of our lost world. The weight of the ghosts grew with each somber until my feet became lead and my back hunched under their invisible burden.
Occasionally, the bell rang. Work stopped. Except for the water pouring from the firehoses, the area became eerily still. From somewhere in the complicated jumble, firefighters would emerge carrying a flag-draped stretcher. A priest followed, offering last rights. Another hero’s body. Or another crushed piece. The police, firefighters, and veterans saluted; the rest of us bowed our heads, shuffling nervously at the nearness of mass death. The tears help flush our eyes.
Sometimes I walked to get away, wandering the abandoned streets of lower Manhattan to be alone. It was like a post-apocalyptic movie — towering buildings hemmed empty, silent streets; a ghost town thickly covered in the dust of the destroyed towers that stirred in gentle swirls with each step. There were scattered shrines for the lost, entire walls covered with photographs of young, smiling faces, with scrawled, plaintive messages from family and friends begging for information. Pleas of false hope, disbelief, and sorrow. As hope faded, the walls became monuments for the dead, heaped with flowers, mats of melted candles, and piles of teddy bears. The ghostly photo-eyes followed as you passed, pleading, wordless. Their presence an ache. That’s where I stumbled on that stone colonial church surrounded by an ancient, tree-shaded graveyard east of the site. It stood elegant and forlorn, an anomaly in a neighborhood of giant glass towers, as if awaiting the return of its parishioners or the thousands of souls lingering nearby.
***
The final leg of my thousand-mile walk began at my mother-in-law’s 79th Street apartment on a blustery-cold, early Fall morning. I headed south on 2nd Avenue, an unhip boulevard where modern glass and marble buildings alternate with scattered pockets of 19th-century red brick tenements with corroding black-metal fire escapes cascading down their facades. Miles fell away as I passed through the microneighborhoods on the Eastside — the Bowery, Chinatown, and ‘Two Bridges’ where the Brooklyn traffic rumbles overhead like distant thunder in the mountains.
As I neared Battery Park at the tip of Manhattan, hundreds of people speaking a dozen languages crowded the sidewalk. Walking slowed to a jerky crawl. A heaviness descended. I caught sight of the Freedom Tower and stood suspended at the edge of a long-buried past as crowds slid around me. Visions of The Pile flashed. Hidden memories coalesced — thick dust covering everything, blowing trash on empty streets, the acrid smell of burnt concrete and death.
I froze. Instead of moving forward, I turned away. Instead of walking into a resolved past, I ran parallel. At each cross street, the ghosts of 9–11 tugged. Their souls gathered as I receded. Each step pulled me deeper into the past — a long-forgotten building brought a crystal memory of a wall covered with pictures of the lost. The sour stench of wilted flowers. Dusty, limp teddy bears. Fading photo faces now erased. Every smiling tourist seemed unholy.
***
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) results from a traumatic or terrifying event outside of our normal experiences. It causes intrusive and distressing memories of the trauma, sleep disruptions, and overreactions to perceived signs of danger and leads to withdrawal from human interactions, dissatisfaction with life, and difficulty in relationships. Mental illnesses were the most common health effect of the 9/11 attacks — up to 20% of victims and responders had PTSD symptoms more than five years later and 15% after ten years. More suffered from depression or had twice the rate of binge drinking. PTSD was more than twice as likely in non-traditional responders (construction workers and volunteers as opposed to police and fire). PTSD risks increased for the responders who arrived early, worked longer, and were exposed to death and human remains. Unrecognized, unacknowledged for years, I became increasingly angry and withdrawn until it all broke.
***
I’d come to Manhattan to finish a long walk and inward journey. I thought I had grown, learned to adapt, that all the trauma was behind me. And then I slammed into the past.
As I hurried north to leave, I ran straight into the church, ‘St. Paul’s Chapel of Trinity Church,’ the same locked and dust-shrouded place from so long-ago. Everything around was normal — traffic, busy shops, and shouting street vendors. It all shrank away as the past beckoned. I hesitated, then entered heavy, hunched. The cemetery’s thin, black wrought-iron fence seemed to swallow the city’s noise, and I was engulfed.
Looking across the cemetery to the west, I could almost see The Pile, hear the dust-stifled work. Feel the weight of the ghosts. All of it was just over there, past the tombstones and trees, down that street, no more than a couple hundred yards away. I stood alone, shrouded in my selfish sorrow, but there were so many more who lost loved ones or dealt with death and destruction for months — tens of thousands of victims, responders, family, and friends who couldn’t leave the weight behind. So many living, carrying the burden of so many ghosts — still trying to walk back to their lives before 9–11.
The scene blurred from long-buried tears. Beside me, a bundled-warm little boy looked up quietly, studying my face as I stood lost in another time. His soft, sad eyes lingered over his shoulder as his mother pulled him away from the strange man. Unable to move nearer to my past, I turned back into the dark church, pausing in its gray light long enough to compose myself. And then plunged back into the living city.
I walked almost frantic to escape. But the streets were crowded — too many people, too many voices, too little room. I put on my headphones to drown their noise, then charged through the throng, still trying to shed the ghosts. I didn’t stop walking until the pain in my feet was the only thing I could attend to, twenty miles at least. But it still wasn’t enough. | https://medium.com/@tdkirsch/walking-with-ghosts-a-9-11-remembrance-74724293c2ea | ['Thomas D. Kirsch'] | 2021-09-11 03:29:58.822000+00:00 | ['9 11 Attacks', '9 11 Memorial', 'PTSD', 'Mental Health'] |
What’s New in React 16 and Fiber Explanation | Previously, React would block the entire thread as it calculated the tree. This process for reconciliation is now named “stack reconciliation”. While React is known to be very fast, blocking the main thread could still cause some applications to not feel fluid. Version 16 aims to fix this problem by not requiring the render process to complete once it’s initiated. React computes part of the tree and then will pause rendering to check if the main thread has any paints or updates that need to be performed. Once the paints and updates have been completed, React begins rendering again. This process is accomplished by introducing a new data structure called a “fiber” that maps to a React instance and manages the work for the instance as well as know its relationship to other fibers. A fiber is just a JavaScript object. These images depict the old versus new rendering methods.
Stack reconciliation — updates must be completed entirely before returning to main thread (credit Lin Clark)
Fiber reconciliation — updates will be batched in chunks and React will manage the main thread (credit Lin Clark)
React 16 will also prioritize updates by importance. This allows high priority updates to jump to the front of the line and be processed first. An example of this would be something like a key input. This is high priority because the user needs that immediate feedback to feel fluid as opposed to a low priority update like an API response which can wait an extra 100–200 milliseconds.
React priorities (credit Lin Clark)
By breaking the UI updates into smaller units of work, a better overall user experience is achieved. Pausing reconciliation work to allow the main thread to execute other necessary tasks provides a smoother interface and better perceived performance.
Error Handling
Errors in React have been a little bit of mess to work with, but this is changing in version 16. Previously, errors inside components would corrupt React’s state and provide cryptic errors on subsequent renders.
lol wut?
React 16 includes error boundaries will not only provide much clearer error messaging, but also prevent the entire application from breaking. After being added to your app, error boundaries catch errors and gracefully display a fallback UI without the entire component tree crashing. The boundaries can catch errors during rendering, in lifecycle methods, and in constructors of the whole tree below them. Error boundaries are simply implemented through the new lifecycle method componentDidCatch(error, info) .
Here, any error that happens in <MyWidget/> or its children will be captured by the <ErrorBoundary> component. This functionality behaves like a catch {} block in JavaScript. If the error boundary receives an error state, you as a developer are able to define what is displayed in the UI. Note that the error boundary will only catch errors in the tree below it, but it will not recognize errors in itself.
Moving forward, you’ll see robust and actionable errors like this:
omg that’s nice (credit Facebook)
Return multiple elements from render
You can now return an array, but don’t forget your keys !
render() {
return [
<li key="A">First item</li>,
<li key="B">Second item</li>,
<li key="C">Third item</li>,
];
}
Portals
Render items into a new DOM node. For example, it could be great to have a general modal component you portal content in to.
render() {
// React does *not* create a new div. It renders the children into `domNode`.
// `domNode` is any valid DOM node, regardless of its location in the DOM.
return ReactDOM.createPortal(
this.props.children,
domNode,
);
}
Compatibility
Async Rendering
The focus of the initial 16.0 release is on compatibility for existing applications. Async rendering will not be an option initially, but in later 16.x releases, it will be included as an opt-in feature.
Browser Compatibility
React 16 is dependent on Map and Set . To ensure compatibility with all browsers, you must include a polyfill. Popular options are core-js or babel-polyfill.
In addition, it will also depend on requestAnimationFrame , including for tests. A simple shim for test purposes would be:
global.requestAnimationFrame = function(callback) {
setTimeout(callback);
};
Component Lifecycle
Since React prioritizes the rendering, you are no longer guaranteed componentWillUpdate and shouldComponentUpdate of different components will fire in a predictable order. The React team is working to provide an upgrade path for apps that would break from this behavior.
Usage
Currently React 16 is in beta, but it will be released soon. You can start using version 16 now by doing the following: | https://medium.com/edge-coders/react-16-features-and-fiber-explanation-e779544bb1b7 | ['Trey Huffine'] | 2018-10-30 13:57:05.603000+00:00 | ['Code', 'Tech', 'React', 'JavaScript', 'Startup'] |
Reimagining impact-related giving, Our Journey So Far. | Too many honest hardworking American families struggle to make ends meets and, through no fault of their own, find themselves in serious financial trouble. According to The Population of Poverty USA, In 2018, 38.1 million people lived in Poverty USA. That means the poverty rate for 2018 was 11.8%
This means that in most cases, their incomes don’t allow them to meet basic needs, their hours are long and unpredictable, and they have no real ability to save for an emergency, let alone their futures.
It is now very clear in 2020, that existing solutions to meet peoples’ day-to-day financial needs are insufficient, often predatory, stressful to whole communities, and can result in devastating financial and emotional costs. Families and communities are in urgent need of a safety net for times of financial stress.
This led the Team at True Given to ask the question:
“How do we reimagine impact-related giving?”
The Opportunity
We are at the right moment: The intersection of COVID -19 and more attention to the historic response of long-standing racial injustice has provided us with a unique opportunity to not only try out of box solutions, the willingness for people to change and adapt faster. As a result, the trend of strategic philanthropy around the country has been accelerated immensely. And so we can leverage this moment of acceleration to ensure the needs of LMI people — especially Black, Latinos, and Women — are integrated into powerful emerging technologies as they develop.
Our Idea
Creating a platform to support the communities by providing tools to raise, manage, and facilitate direct payments to individuals, families, and communities.
Where we are now
After thousands of hours of conducting qualitative and quantitative research (with LMI folks, foundations, social services organizations, nonprofits, and philanthropists), the team was able to synthesize the information and analyze insights to identify a suite of tools needed to effectively support communities.
A sneak peek
Fundraising Tools
Get an at-a-glance view of the donor’s history giving to your organization. Collect one-time & recurring donations for your charity. We offer auto donation receipts, backend reporting, and PCI compliant solutions.
Assessment and Screening Tools
Want more customization for your intake form? Our admin tools let you create as robust of an application form as you like. Easily collect the required information.
Interactive Dashboard
Online Giving, Beneficiary applications, resource sharing & More. Review all your organization activity all in one place. Review incoming donations, the engagement rate of supporters, and applications from applicants. Check-in on your current campaign’s success, build and knock out that “to-do” list, and access recent reports and accounts with one click.
Direct Payment Solutions
Easily and quickly review applications and approve requests for direct cash payments to your applicants with the click of a button.
Branded Community Pages
Organization pages are designed to facilitate engagement, enable social sharing, a trend noticed among donors. On organization pages, donors can meet our True Given beneficiaries, read their stories, and engage with organizations they support.
Outcomes
Our long-term goal is to ensure fintech entrepreneurs, corporate giving officers, foundations, non-profits, social impact innovators, and other actors who shape the charitable giving landscape harness these new technologies to benefit financially vulnerable people.
If you are a non-profit organization, philanthropist, or foundation interested in partnering with us, please email us at [email protected].
True Given is a platform where people who can and are willing to donate, contribute funds towards providing cash relief funds for those who are in need.
If you want to learn more about partnering with True Given, we invite you to explore our website and get in touch. | https://medium.com/@truegiven/reimagining-impact-related-giving-our-journey-so-far-1f12fa1c0f42 | ['Babatunde Ajao'] | 2020-12-06 17:40:16.588000+00:00 | ['Charitable Giving', 'Community', 'Impact Investing', 'Social Change', 'Covid 19'] |
What Happened | I know what I told my friends
I know what I told you.
And then there’s what we both know.
The things you didn’t do.
You lacked passion, and heart, and emotion.
I called you a robot with way too much logic.
And sometimes in love baby you gotta create a commotion.
But you stayed quiet, and distant, and stale.
It’s not my fault I needed more
Someone to scream and fight and cry.
And it’s not like I was keeping score,
Buy would it kill you to at least try?
I get it you don’t know how to flirt.
I get it you can’t call me first.
I get it it’s you’re first time being a boyfriend.
Do you get you’re the reason this has to end?
There’s this guy that I’m talking to,
And so far he seems much better than you.
He’s attentive and funny,
And can actually hold a conversation.
My friends told me to slow down.
And guys I get it, I’m sprinting.
But how do I tell them every time I stop I cry?
You moved on in a second and now it’s like I’m drifting.
But it’s fine I’m fine I’ve been through worse.
And you knew that and still have no remorse.
You left me high and dry,
We didn’t even get to say goodbye. | https://medium.com/@shejshahriar/what-happened-64b45c45c232 | [] | 2020-12-18 00:30:50.320000+00:00 | ['Breakups', 'Love', 'Relationships', 'Dating'] |
Dynamic Pluggable Microservice Framework | Easily deploy RESTful Microservices using this pluggable microservice framework.
No more coding RESTful Interfaces. No more having to debug your RESTful Interfaces.
This is functional programming meets pluggability meets minimal code meets ease of use.
What could be easier than coding your microservices as Python functions in a single module and then drop your microservice module into a directory and then simply make RESTful AJAX Calls to run your microservices?
Oh, you have a complete Python Package for your microservices? Ok. No problem. You will want to expose some of them as endpoints and call them from some kind of a RESTful Interface, yes? So now you code your exposable functions that call your real functions from your real Packages and drop your exposed modules into a directory and now all those microservice functions are exposed as RESTful endpoints without having to restart the server.
Sounds too good to be true? Check it our for yourself. https://github.com/raychorn/microservices-framework
Need a Docker Container ready to run this framework? docker pull raychorn/microservices-framework:0.7.0 then do a “git clone https://github.com/raychorn/microservices-framework” followed by “git pull origin main” to get the latest code from the repo. Or check-out the Releases to pick the release you want to install. Requires Python 3.8.x and PIP and virtualenv all of which have been installed in the Docker Container along with MongoDB as a bonus. There is, of course, a requirements.txt file you can use to install all the required Python Packages for this framework. Need to see how the framework works? See the unit tests and the sample Modules.
Let’s talk about Dynamic RESTful URLs. Most of the time, when working with Django one end-up coding a bunch of urls in the urls.py file, one url spec for each endpoint and the list of urls can become quite complex and unwieldy. What if there was a better way to handle this complexity? What if you could code a single URL spec for Django that could handle every conceivable RESTful url you might wish to use? What if there were a way to configure this behavior using a config file? Some urls need 1 or 2 parameters and others require 3 or 4 parameters while some require 5 or 6 parameters. What if you wanted to add another url spec that for some reason required 10’s or 100’s of url parameters and this too was configurable. Does this sound too good to be true? Maybe so. Or maybe there’s working code that can do this. Point being now you can break free of having to code individual urls for Django.
Ok. So dynamic urls for Django. Cool. So how do you access all those url parameters at runtime? Ever hear about **kwargs? Yup, this allows you to ingest a Python dictionary into your function via kwargs (see the modules in the plugins directory for some examples of how this works). By default the first url parameter is accessed from kwargs as: kwargs.get(‘param1’) which says if the variable exists in the dictionary then give it to me or give me a default of None. What if you wanted to rename these parameters because you don’t like the defaults? See the file named “.env” where this can be done. What if you wanted to rename or remap the url parameters on the fly? This too is supported by the 1.0.0 Release. Now you can remap url parameter names on the fly for each RESTful Call and they all appear in your functions via **kwargs.
Ok. So what if you wanted to use Query Parameters for your GET calls? This is supported and they appear in the **kwargs. Nice, huh?
Which HTTP Methods are supported? GET, PUT, POST and DELETE.
Can I get a directory of my plugged-in modules? Yes, this is supported.
What about Module Aliasing? Yes, this too is supported along with API Versioning. Put your API versions into separate Python Modules and alias them as “v1”, “v2” and “v3” and now you can publish your API Versions that look like API Versions without having to expose the name of the actual modules or module names.
What about exposing a single microservice function using more than one HTTP Method? This too is supported. You can specify the list of HTTP Methods as a Python list or a pipe delimited list in a string or a single HTTP Method name. Again, see the example modules provided by the Release you want to use. The built-in directory function provides all these details as JSON so you can easily publish your endpoints.
Be sure to use unique function aliases, this too is supported, or bad things might happen.
Be sure to use unique module aliases or bad things might happen.
Do I need to restart the server every time I want to deploy a new module? Nope. Just drop the module into the plugins directory and issue the directory URL to see the newly plugged module’s information. This is all dynamic.
What if you wanted to deploy your Java microservices using this framework? This too is supported. Code a command line interface for your Java classes and use the appropriate Python code to issue each command line via separate Python functions and your Java or node.js or Go or whatever other Language or technology you may wish to use can be easily deployed all without having to restart the RESTful Server.
What if you wanted to deploy your Rust code using this framework? Well this too is supported. You can code Python extensions using Rust and then call your Rust functions from your Rust Python extensions and then deploy Python-based “.pyd” files from your Rust development environments. Slick, huh?
Stop coding Microservice RESTful Interfaces by hand and start doing this automatically using this framework. Automation frees us from the tediousness of common every day activities. This framework frees everyone from the most tedious part of publishing function as RESTful AJAX calls. Now you can focus all your efforts on producing Python Modules with easy to understand function decorators to “expose” endpoints. Be sure to notice how to code “private” functions in your modules; bad things might happen if you tried to “expose” a “private” function but you can learn all about this by doing it.
Welcome to the 21st Century. | https://raychorn.medium.com/dynamic-pluggable-microservice-framework-83ddc4b3d26e | [] | 2020-12-15 01:59:15.114000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Functional Programming', 'Dynamic Programming', 'Rest Api', 'Microservices'] |
A New Kind of Blog: Background and Intro to Learning Organizations | A Little Context: At the beginning of the year I decided to embark on a new journey by starting an EdD program in Performance Improvement Leadership. There were a couple of main reasons for the decision. One is I just genuinely love to learn. As much as I like to think I’m self-driven as a learner, I think it’s important to acknowledge most of us could always use some help. For me, it’s about the direction being part of a degree program offers. Having assignments that demand the application of knowledge is valuable. A second reason I started the program is I think it’ll help me to help others. At our school and in my work as a mental performance coach overall I’ve been a part of some innovative projects. There has been a pattern, however, of time invested to get the projects started, things going really well, and then eventually getting stuck because I can’t continue the time investment with other responsibilities. Then, the projects just kind of fizzle out instead of making a continued impact. The methods I’m learning in Performance Improvement Leadership will help us to not get stuck. An extra reason I decided to pursue the degree, if I’m honest, is a little bit of an ego. Completing the degree and being a “Dr,”- not the real kind, no, but the one who spends a lot of money to learn- would mean a lot. Anyway, the reason I think it’s important to let you know about my journey is I’m going to try to get back to writing. This time the blog will look a bit different though. Rather than just focusing on mental performance, you’ll get me- a blend of mental performance, performance improvement leadership, teacher, coach, and aspiring human being. I think I’m at my best with the blend, and I hope you find it useful. Without further ado, let’s get to it.
Intro to Learning Organizations
Most of us want the groups we’re part of to do as well as possible. If you’re a coach, you want your team to win. If you’re a teacher, you want to have a great school. If you work in the business world, you want the business to make lots of money. You get the picture. For great organizations, it isn’t just about doing well for a short period of time. It’s building to do well over the long-haul. The world is in such a fast-moving time that new becomes old at an increasingly rapid pace. This makes sustained success all the more challenging. That’s where creating a learning organization comes in. In learning organizations, there isn’t an end goal. Don’t worry. They don’t ignore results. What they do is continually look to adapt, expand capacity, and find new ways of thinking as a way to create those results. It’s basically “Be You” as a group. Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline is all about the five elements of a learning organization. Below are short descriptions of the elements and examples of how they may relate to you:
1. Systems Thinking- Systems thinking is basically the understanding that everything and everyone is connected. Within teams, it’s realizing how every part impacts the whole. There is a concept of shared responsibility where instead of blaming other people when things go wrong people think about their role and what they can do to help.
Example: A baseball player is struggling with their hitting. It’d be easy to just blame the player. “He can’t do it.” Systems thinking ignores blame and, again, shares responsibility. Maybe it’s a mechanical flaw to be worked on with the hitting coach? Maybe something is going on mentally that can be talked about with a mental skills coach? Perhaps a movement issue that can be addressed within the weight room? You get the picture. A learning organization would look at all of the ways possible to support the player in hopes of helping the player improve. Note: I’m not saying they would help the player make all of those adjustments at once. They’d just be part of the conversation before a next step is made.
2. Personal Mastery- “Organizations learn only through individuals who learn,” is one of my favorite quotes from Senge. Personal mastery is all about growth and learning. Similar to the learning organization, there is no destination.
Example: There are several characteristics of people who approach personal mastery. One is they learn to work with change instead of against it. COVID has brought with it, along with the obvious other much more important issues, great change in the way school works. There’s a noticeable difference in mindset amongst teachers and how they’re approaching it. Some, while of course not happy with it, have been able to adjust and find cool new ways to teach with technology. Others have clung to the idea that “This isn’t teaching.” Which would you rather learn from?
3. Mental Models- Mental models are how our image of how the world works. It’s our familiar thinking and acting. Our mental models are largely what determine our actions. Our mental models are based on our experience so they’re forever incomplete. We all have what are called implicit mental models that are below our awareness. Learning organizations work to help people unearth those models by digging a bit with open dialogue and questions.
Example: An assistant basketball coach goes to the head coach with an idea to change up practice a bit by working more on end-of-game situations. Rather than just shutting the idea down, the head coach asks to hear more. “What is it that led you to that idea?” Then, the assistant has an opportunity to share. If it’s something flimsy, no dice. If there’s more substance, maybe there is a change. Maybe there isn’t. What that simple question does is demands substance for the idea. That’s something we want.
4. Building a Shared Vision- Shared vision is pretty straightforward but difficult. It’s building something that is “ours” for the future. There’s a sense of shared responsibility for something bigger than any individual. Learning organizations value personal visions and even use them to create a shared vision of the group. Want buy-in? Make people feel valued.
Example: A soccer team has a group meeting to determine what vision they’ll have for a season. Rather than it coming top-down from the manager (head coach), each individual player is asked to reflect about and then share what she’s hoping for the year. After hearing everyone, common themes emerge. Together, the group decides on a vision. Likely everyone feels part of the vision. It could be with specific words or just the idea of being heard. Either way, it’s a powerful force to drive the action forward.
5. Team Learning- Team learning is about making the most of a team. There is a popular saying in coaching (I’ll go with baseball/softball here, but use your sport’s version), “I’m not going to play the best nine players. I’m going to play the nine players that are the best together.” Team learning is taking whatever “players” you have and getting them to be the best they can be together. One element of team learning is helping people to recognize their defensive routines. This is when we protect our views and the reasoning behind them.
Example: “I don’t know. That’s just the way I’ve always done it.” If we’re being honest, we’ve probably all said it at one point or another. Maybe it was how we were coached. Or how the first head coach we’d coached with done things. Whatever the reason, it’s difficult to question what we do. To do so can be viewed as a threat to our experience. We have to look past that if we really want to learn with the group. Getting it right takes precedence over being right.
Those are really far too simplistic explanations of the five elements of learning organizations. If you’re ambitious, I’d encourage you to check out the book. If you’re not, I’m sure there are plenty of videos and articles that talk about them further as well. Let’s be honest. If you’ve made it this far, you’ve got at least some ambition in you. Challenge yourself to reflect on your team. Which elements do you think you do well? Which could you do better? What is it that leads you to that conclusion? See what I did, there? You’ll be better for the reflection. More importantly, your team may take the first step to be a true learning organization. | https://medium.com/@ehrlichb1/a-new-kind-of-blog-background-and-intro-to-learning-organizations-7ce57ce4460a | ['Ben Ehrlich'] | 2020-12-24 10:51:21.619000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'Sports', 'Learning', 'Learning And Development', 'Coaching'] |
1Inch Hot Rewards | 1inch Airdrop
1inch exchange is a decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator to help users discover the best trade prices for tokens. Instead of swapping tokens from a single liquidity pool of a DEX, 1inch will aggregate across different pools and suggest the most efficient way to trade tokens.
Hot Rewards - 1500$ 1INCH AIRDROP | https://medium.com/@anuarali-87609/hot-rewards-4d69f9a1cfb9 | ['Anuar Ali'] | 2020-12-27 07:48:00.476000+00:00 | ['Airdrop', 'Exchange', 'Defi', 'Rewards', '1inch'] |
Stablecoins Are Killing It #17 Features Transfero Swisss & BiLira Discussing Stablecoins In Developing Countries | Stablecoins Are Killing It #17 Features Transfero Swisss & BiLira Discussing Stablecoins In Developing Countries Lou Kerner Follow Sep 26 · 2 min read
It was another banner week for stablecoins, as stablecoin market cap passed $20 billion, up more than 350%+ year-to-date. And USDC passed ETH as the leading collateral on MakerDAO used to mint DAI:
Episode #17, on Thursday, October 1st, from 1pm-2pm est, features two experts discussing stablecoins in developing countries.
Our 1st featured guest is Thiago Cesar, the CEO of Transfero Swiss, the creators of the BRZ, a Brazilian stablecoin. Transfero is also the largest crypto-payments processor in Brazil and a major OTC broker in Latin America. Thiago Holds an MSc from the University of London, and produced one of the first academic thesis about Bitcoin in 2014, while also being a researcher at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) within the field of digital currencies.
Our 2nd featured guest is Sinan Koc, the Co-Founder & CEO of BiLira, a Turkish Lira backed stablecoin. Previous to BiLira Sinan worked at ConsenSys Token Foundry as in NY. He then moved back to Istanbul in 2019 to start BiLira and build a blockchain ecosystem in Turkey. Sinan graduated from Wharton at U Penn studying Entrepreneurship and Finance.
We’re going to go deep with Thiago and Sinan on the financial inclusion challenges faced by most consumers in developing countries and stablecoins can help. We’ll discuss regulatory and technology challenges as well as other lessons learned deploying stablecoins in developing countries.
As always, we’ll leave plenty of times for questions from the audience
Click here to register for the call on Zoom.
Click here to read “Six Highlights From “Stablecoins Are Killing It” #16 — Featuring Consensys’ Stablecoin and CBDC Lead, Matthieu Saint Olive, and his colleague, Ludovic Courcelas, Government Strategy Lead at Consensys.
If you thought this was worth at least .000001 Bitcoin, please HELP US by clapping below (up to 50 times). Thx! | https://medium.com/crypto-oracle/stablecoins-are-killing-it-17-features-transfero-swisss-bilira-discussing-stablecoins-in-5675fd46aad1 | ['Lou Kerner'] | 2020-09-26 13:24:50.432000+00:00 | ['Crypto', 'Stablecoin Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin'] |
Vehicle Service Contracts: Are They Worth it? | Photo by Dan Gold on Unsplash
As a car owner or prospective car owner, you may have heard about vehicle service contracts without knowing exactly what they are. These contracts are also referred to as extended service contracts, vehicle protection plans, or (commonly though technically incorrectly) extended auto warranties. A vehicle service contract offers many perks and services that are rarely included in an insurance plan or a manufacturer’s warranty.
Where can you purchase vehicle service contracts? How are they priced? What are the benefits? These are questions you need to know the answers to before deciding what’s right for you. Vehicle service contracts vary widely, as do vehicles themselves!
First, it’s important to understand what a vehicle service contract is and what differentiates it from warranties and insurance. We’ll outline the basics and then dive into the benefits.
What Exactly Is a Vehicle Service Contract (VSC)?
In essence, a vehicle service contract (VSC) covers mechanical car failures over a certain period of time or mileage. It ensures repairs and assistance in the event of these failures.
The contract is signed between a car owner and a third-party VSC provider. The provider agrees to cover services or repairs for your vehicle.
A VSC is similar to a warranty, but it is not the same. If a dealer tries to tell you that you can purchase an extended warranty from a third party, they really mean a vehicle service contract! Unlike a warranty, which is generally included in the purchase of your car, a VSC always requires an extra fee. If you pay for extended coverage of a warranty, that’s technically a VSC.
Vehicle service contracts generally offer specific services rather than inherent or implied faults such as a manufacturer’s defect. A VSC will not extend the exact terms of your existing warranty from the manufacturer. This difference is crucial to understand so that you can maximize your benefits and protection for the full life of your vehicle.
How are Vehicle Service Contracts Priced?
There is no set price for a VSC, as they depend on a few major factors that differ from car owner to car owner:
How comprehensive the coverage of the VSC you plan to purchase is
How old your vehicle is
Whether your car is new or used
Whether you use your car as a ridesharing contractor
If your car is brand new and still covered by a warranty, a VSC may be relatively cheap since your provider is taking on a low risk. If you’re purchasing a luxury vehicle with high horsepower, VSCs can make excellent investments. You’ll need every level of protection you can get for premium vehicles whose components are both expensive and likely candidates for damage.
Purchasing a VSC for a used vehicle is often highly recommended, especially if your car was treated poorly in the past. A car that’s not covered under the manufacturer’s warranty anymore will benefit from this coverage, as will older vehicles with a higher likelihood of mechanical complications.
Because of the higher risk of complications, VSCs for used cars may be more expensive, but they’re often well worth the investment. The price of the repairs needed to maintain an older car quickly adds up, so purchasing a VSC is often much cheaper than paying for multiple repairs yourself. Many different coverage plans exist to cover vehicles of all ages and conditions.
What’s Included in Your Vehicle Service Contract?
What’s covered by your vehicle service contract varies by both the provider and the plan. That’s why it’s extremely important to read your contract thoroughly and understand what exclusions apply.
Some people purchase VSCs because they offer perks that fall outside of the scope of the manufacturer’s warranty, such as 24/7 roadside assistance or GPS repair. The perks alone can be enough for some car owners to sign a contract. Other people purchase VSCs because the manufacturer’s warranty has expired, and without additional coverage, they’re liable for any repairs.
Depending on your plan, VSCs might include:
24-hour roadside assistance
Tire repair or replacement
Rental coverage reimbursement
Towing coverage
Personal concierge service
Key fob replacement
Don’t assume something is covered before signing the contract. For example, if you’re worried about your car’s brakes or you want your alignment checks covered, be sure to read the contract to see if those are included. If what you’re looking for is not listed under your contract’s benefits, assume that it’s not covered. Terms like “normal wear and tear” are subjective, so make sure that the benefits you want are listed explicitly before signing.
Another essential aspect to double-check is who is authorized to perform repairs under your contract. If you prefer a certain service dealer, but that’s not covered under your plan, you may wish to alter your VSC or opt for a different provider. As always, be sure to read the contract thoroughly!
In addition, check if your VSC provider is partnered with insurance companies. This is required in some states, and it also ensures your provider is credible.
All in all, VSCs offer many worthwhile benefits, but it’s essential that you take the time to determine exactly what you want covered. A comprehensive plan often saves time, money, and hassle in the long run, especially in the case of a major mechanical fault. Like insurance, the cost of a VSC pays for itself several times over should you ever encounter unexpected vehicle trouble.
No matter the age or state of your vehicle, there are vehicle service contracts out there for everyone. When you choose a reputable provider and negotiate a fair price, VSCs are great investments for keeping your vehicle in optimal condition without leaving you responsible for repairs. | https://themakingofamillionaire.com/vehicle-service-contracts-are-they-worth-it-11c90aca283e | ['Katie Mcdaniel'] | 2020-12-18 21:45:49.514000+00:00 | ['Vehicles', 'Contracts', 'Cars', 'Service Contracts', 'Vehicle Maintenance'] |
A Hiding Place | Trials come. And the reality is, trials often overcome us.
As much as we desire to be overcomers and conquerors, sometimes, we’re just not. We fail. We get overtaken. We experience loss.
Pain and suffering come to those who least deserve it. Death comes at the wrong times. And losses that can never be replaced enter our lives.
While reading in the Psalms, I came across this passage:
“Surely when the great waters of trial and distressing times overflow, they will not reach the spirit in him.” (Psalm 32:6, Amplified Bible).
There is no denial from the Psalmist of the ability of trials to overflow over one’s life.
And yet, in this drowning of one submerged, the water can still not touch one’s spirit.
We can’t explain away tragedy.
But we can hope that when trials come and when waters overwhelm, there is still a spirit inside of us that remains whole, at peace, and content amongst the chaos and loss.
In the next verse, the Psalmist states:
“You are my hiding place.” (Psalm 32:7, Amplified Bible).
A beautiful thing to know, when you’re overwhelmed — when you’re drowning in the trials of life. When there’s nowhere to go… there’s still a place to hide. | https://medium.com/koinonia/a-hiding-place-d2863a2ce9 | ['John Ross'] | 2020-10-02 20:31:29.448000+00:00 | ['Inspiration', 'Self', 'Christianity', 'Religion', 'This Happened To Me'] |
Stupid easy deploy golang app in ubuntu server with nginx | I’m curious about deploying golang in ubuntu server, since with go you can compile your application with go build main.go and it will create an executable file. so all you need to do to run your app is by calling the compiled app by executing ./main
you can deploy your app using a systemctl services, containerize your app with docker. but is there any easy way to just up and run your golang app in production ? yes.. the step is very easy.. all you need is:
run your app in background. use nginx to bind your domain to your server. that’s it.
of course, this is not a best practice.. this method used only for fun.. you want your application up and run in matter of seconds. let’s breakdown the steps.
STEPS
./main& it means by adding & at the end, your application will run in the background. but still attached to the current terminal session, so when you quit your ssh connection. the process will be terminated. if you run multiple background command you can type jobs in your terminal then it will display all your background process. disown I use disown to detach the process from the terminal session, from the documentation disown command still attached to the terminal session, but somehow. mine is working. best practice, use nohup instead of disown , eg: nohup ./main & setup nginx using proxy forwarding, since my app running on port 2001 , here is my configuration
server {
listen 80;
server_name mydomain.com;
proxy_pass 001;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
}
} location / {proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:2 proxy_set_header Host $host;proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme; | https://medium.com/@kubid/stupid-easy-deploy-golang-app-in-ubuntu-server-with-nginx-c0ef10f06894 | ['Rifki', 'Kubid'] | 2020-08-08 12:45:32.275000+00:00 | ['Ubuntu', 'Nginx', 'Golang', 'Deploy'] |
How to Tell if You’re Getting Professional Virtual Staging Images | Staging photos of a home for sale can work wonders in persuading a client to buy your house. However, a poorly done staging picture can also repel buyers. How can you tell if your virtual furniture staging isn’t working? Here are ways to discern amateur digital alteration work from the professionals.
Cut and Paste
Many art programs allow you to click on a particular image and then drag it into the image the artist is manipulating. With this method, you can add everything from material items, vehicles, animals and people into a still image. However, the pasted element has to look like it belongs in the shot and is not pasted in awkwardly. For example, a table or a couch could seem to float in the air, without being placed on a floor. If a table or chair seems to be defying gravity, it will come off as weird.
Furniture Proportions
In addition to poorly positioned furniture, bad virtual alterations can also leave furniture in a shot that is clearly too big. Art programs allow you to resize elements to make them properly fit a space in a shot. However, amateurs may not take these into consideration. Consequently, you can end up with a small end table that looks like it’s as big as a nearby doorway, or a multi-drawer wooden cabinet that seems so small a five year old can put their hands on top of it. Good virtual furniture staging will position all the elements in an image realistically.
Appearances
Experts at virtual staging are going to stock their digital libraries with the proper furniture that can go into a home. The furnishings should be both appropriate and realistic. On the other hand, amateur digital manipulators may use exotic or strange furnishings that don’t belong in your home, or at the least aren’t part of a scheme you requested for the job. And if the digital quality of the furnishings is poor, your virtually staged picture is going to look unrealistic and possibly even ridiculous. Such problems can include furniture with no details or textures, or very bright colors that look like someone just applied digital paint with no eye for detail or shading.
The goal of quality virtual furniture staging is to paint an imaginary picture for possible home buyers that allows them to dream how they can live inside your home. If your virtually staged photos look off or strange, it’s a good bet they will look elsewhere. So pay attention to poor picture qualities and seek the best professionals to virtually stage your home. | https://medium.com/@virtualstagingrenderinggroup/how-to-tell-if-youre-getting-professional-virtual-staging-images-3870ae0ce7ac | ['Virtual Staging', 'Rendering Group'] | 2017-12-27 11:43:21.916000+00:00 | ['Furniture'] |
My Natural High | My Natural High
A poem about my dreams
Photo by Lacie Slezak on Unsplash
Henery X (long) Challenged me to write a poem explaining my natural high. I hope you enjoy my rendition of ecstasy.
I implore everyone I tagged to let go of your daily stresses and let out your inner feelings – you’re natural high, so we can all feel your personal magic.
My dreams
My essence vibrates, eyes sealed shut, my breathing deepens, as my existence deteriorates from reality.
My conscience seeks deeper, into what I call home.
My escape.
Where my misery becomes nothing but a foreign remembrance.
The once hostile mind that devours my entirety,
Recedes into pastel hues.
The pale moonlight proms beneath my feet, as the grass bows for my entrance.
Birds hum a tune, akin to the beating of my heart.
The water tastes like honeysuckle and leaves a gentle kiss upon my lips.
How sweet it is.
The bliss.
The delicacies of my secret realm resonate within the very fibers of my being.
I dread my awakening.
But it always comes.
I grab hold of this trance and breathe in.
Deep.
One last hit before I go.
Oh, woe is the morning hour,
Dear night, please come soon.
Save me from myself.
Make sure you tag me in the poem you write! Let’s get to know the raw side of each other, writers we are, for now, and forever!
Nicole Akers Randi Lee Harper Sara K. Runnels Kirstie Taylor Zita Fontaine Christine Stevens Roz Warren Christina M. Ward Adam, Diabetic Cyborg Vanessa Torre umair haque Rachel Thompson | https://medium.com/narrative/my-natural-high-1d456bc4c30a | ['Meghan Gause'] | 2020-06-14 06:47:00.280000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Poetry', 'Life', 'Fiction', 'Dreams'] |
Ολοταχώς για… κλιματική καταστροφή, της Μελίνας Μπελενιώτη. | 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/protovoulia-newn/%CE%BF%CE%BB%CE%BF%CF%84%CE%B1%CF%87%CF%8E%CF%82-%CE%B3%CE%B9%CE%B1-%CE%BA%CE%BB%CE%B9%CE%BC%CE%B1%CF%84%CE%B9%CE%BA%CE%AE-%CE%BA%CE%B1%CF%84%CE%B1%CF%83%CF%84%CF%81%CE%BF%CF%86%CE%AE-%CF%84%CE%B7%CF%82-%CE%BC%CE%B5%CE%BB%CE%AF%CE%BD%CE%B1%CF%82-%CE%BC%CF%80%CE%B5%CE%BB%CE%B5%CE%BD%CE%B9%CF%8E%CF%84%CE%B7-a298182a1701 | ['Peter Apostolakis'] | 2020-12-21 10:04:49.156000+00:00 | ['Climate Change', 'Bolsonaro', 'Climate', 'Borris', 'Ελλαδα'] |
What are some choices you made about how to raise me? | There are millions of choices that I make every day regarding how to help you grow up, survive childhood, and be a good person. Some choices are more serious than others, but they all contribute to creating the best you… even if you don’t think that’s true in the moment.
In thinking about this, there are 4 themes that I tend to focus the most on, in my role as your dad.
1) Self-reliance
It’s important to me that you are able to take care of yourself, and that lesson started a long time ago. When you were first learning to walk, you would fall down and cry. My reaction wasn’t to immediately pick you up (unless you really did hurt yourself)… my reaction was to encourage to you to get back up on your own.
Awwwww... you’re not hurt, stop crying and get up, you can do it. And you did.
Not only did you learn that you’re capable of getting up when you fell, but you didn’t always need help — or you knew when to call for help. This was demonstrated during Kiiera’s bicycle accident that required head stitches when she was 7 years old. After the crash, you were able to make it back on your own from the crash site to find other people for help (and an ambulance ride). You helped and saved yourself.
2) Strength
When it comes to strength, I mean physical strength in this case. This doesn’t mean that you become a body builder; it means that you are strong enough to protect yourself, get yourself where you want to be, or get yourself out of trouble.
As you grow up, the version of strength encouragement changes, as your interests do. For example, gymnastics was something that taught you balance and some coordination early on, and lately, American Ninja Warrior and the obstacle course that’s now in our yard encourages grip strength, endurance, and controlling your body, in addition to your weekly Tang So Do lessons at the YMCA.
3) Confidence
Everything that I help you do is about building confidence in yourself, which will allow you to better deal with the bullies in your life or people that want to push you down. Knowing what you can do and what you’re capable of is all that matters, regardless of what someone else tries to tell you.
I have seen you handle yourself very well, as you help others, like at school with your friends. As you help others, you gain confidence in your own abilities and not let others push you to think like you can’t do something, or do something you know you should not. While you have “double stubborn” genes from both me and your mom, I call it confidence when directed properly :-)
4) Experience it
Experiencing life first-hand can be the best way to learn, especially if done combined with the other qualities. There are lots of examples of this as well, from our camping trips in different locations, to letting you climb up the ladder in the garage to the attic (because you REALLY wanted to know what was up there when you were little).
Helping you get experience helps you learn, but it also helps you manage relationships with other people. For example, I thought it was important early on that you learned technology and touch screens and that you played video games. And, not just any video games, the ones that I play… or we played together.
When you think back, you were well-positioned to have conversations about Star Wars, planning a raid on a base with drones, or solving puzzles in thinking about spatial problems. You could “talk with the boys” because you experienced the types of activities they do and with the topics they played, which created shared experiences with other people that helped you build relationships easier.
It All Adds Up
There are many other categories and examples I could share with you, but you can hopefully see that all of these are interconnected and work together.
Strength builds confidence; confidence builds strength.
Experiences create self-reliance; self-reliance creates experiences…
and so on, as you mix them up.
The choices about how to raise you will never end, and I know that I won’t always get them right… I have and will mess up. As your dad, my approach may be a little more “tough,” but it will shape you to be successful in life. | https://medium.com/lessons-from-ordinary/what-are-some-choices-you-made-about-how-to-raise-me-b51853f220db | ['Shaun Holloway'] | 2020-12-08 01:41:52.733000+00:00 | ['Growing Up', 'Life Lessons', 'Questions', 'Children', 'Dads'] |
Anarcho Te Ching | Anarcho Te Ching
a TL;DR to everything I write
Photo by JR Korpa on Unsplash
i. Reading this probably won’t change your life. As Lao Tzu says, “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.” As Tenacious D says, “This is not the greatest song in the world. This is just a tribute.” This is a description of an experience; this article is not the experience itself. Still, I am writing it. Everything I write comes from, and comes back to, understanding this and this understanding. I am practicing.
ii. The nature of existence is towards expansion and complexity. The nature of each living thing in existence is towards healthy equilibrium. Existence expands through the act of things growing towards equilibrium.
iii. What we experience tells us which direction we need to go in to reach our state of equilibrium. What we experience tells us what options we have to reach our state of equilibrium. What we experience tells us which states we are in.
iv. When we experience being out of equilibrium, having too much or too little of something, we need to move towards equilibrium.
v. What we need in order to reach equilibrium is to move towards the opposite state of the state we are currently in. A need is only ever a state of being. States of being can by physical, emotional, mental, and none of these realms is separable from the others.
vi. Rather than denying what exists in our experience, we can work with it to find more options to meet our needs. Rather than fixating on a particular option or desired strategy to meet our needs, we can focus on the needs and broaden our number of possible options to meet them.
vii. All we have is the ability to respond to our experience, and through responding, alter it. Ability is expanded through awareness of more options, and power to take more options.
viii. Awareness is a product of internal conditioning and genetics. Power is a product of external conditioning and genetics. Everything is a product of conditioning and genetics.
ix. Everything comes from everything. The nature of existence is interdependence. Everything has a relationship to everything. Everything uses its relationships to get its needs met.
x. Sometimes, us getting our needs met leads to others not getting their needs met. The more possible options we have to meet our needs, the less we need to deny others their needs or harm others in order to have our needs met.
xi. Ability to meet needs is expanded through greater power and greater awareness. When we have too much awareness but not enough power, we need more power. When we have too much power but not enough awareness, we need more awareness.
xii. This moves relationships towards a state of healthy equilibrium. This allows greater expansion of options to meet needs through allowing greater complexity in available options.
xiii. Politics is social relationships. Social relationships create systems, such as power structures.
xiv. A system is a pattern of behavior, of conditioning awareness and power, that can itself go on to condition behavior (awareness and power). Power hierarchies are systems that limit options for abilities to get needs met.
xv. Those at the top of a hierarchical power structure have more power to get their needs met, and often less awareness of a multiplicity of options or the needs of others. Those at the bottom of a hierarchical power structure have less power to get their needs met, and often more awareness of a multiplicity of options and the needs of others.
xvi. To reach a healthy equilibrium in which everything has the utmost possible options to get its needs met, hierarchical power structures must be allowed to dissolve through the power-lacking increasing power, and the awareness-lacking increasing awareness.
xvii. Having more available options for all beings to gets their needs met moves existence in the direction of a healthy equilibrium. Having more options for all beings to get their needs met without harming one another moves existence in the direction of expansion and complexity.
xviii. Nothing is separable. Everything is distinct from everything else, but still not separate.
xix. There is no map. There is only a compass, and that compass is your experience itself.
xx. Navigating by your compass takes practice. There is only ever practice, and movement towards. | https://medium.com/dogs-with-buddha-nature/anarcho-te-ching-45d0f57bd155 | ['Anna Ronan'] | 2019-07-15 22:50:15.273000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Politics', 'Taoism', 'Spirituality', 'Anarchism'] |
Working for my dream | TELL AN AFRICAN STORY
By Anesuishe Blessings Gatsi
Many a time we fail to accept responsibility for our own lives. We forget that we drive ourselves to our own promised land. The most notable winners at some point encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They succeeded simply because they refused to be victims of circumstances. Certainly, nobody glows more than he who let the hurt go.
Growing up just like any other normal kid I used to run around whenever I saw aeroplanes in the sky. At school I would say when I grow up I want to be a pilot. Can you imagine the excitement of the Wright brothers on the morning of that first flight? For the only boy in a family of four that would surely make a mother proud. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning and only execution brings a glimmer of success. Things took a sudden twist in 2009 on the 21 st of August when mother was involved in a fatal car accident along Seke road. Her spinal cord was left damaged and there was no hope that she could ever walk again. She was admitted at the Avenues hospital, where her recovery path seemed smooth. Within a few weeks, she was transferred to St Giles where she was to learn how to use a wheelchair. On one particular day, a doctor on night shift mistakenly handled her whilst she was in her sleep and she fell off the bed. Efforts to keep her alive were made but she died on her way to Parirenyatwa. When I received the news I realised that making mom happy was out of reach. The pain I felt made me want to save lives. I wanted to be a different doctor. Peace of mind became a fallen concept for me.
I knew that for me to achieve this new found dream I had to work extra hard even if it meant that I had to starve whilst on books. It is during our hardest times that we discover our true taste and desire for success. I refused to conform to the dogmas of the society I lived in. Many a time young children who lose their mothers end up vagabonds. I constantly asked myself certain questions: Who am I around?
What are they doing to me? What have they got me reading? What have they got me saying? Where do they have me going? What do they have me thinking? For some time I hated the so called street lingo ‘swagg’. Simply because I had an educational standard I was termed a nerd. I chose not to limit myself because of other limited imagination. I chose to leave a trail where there was no path than to further bare the usual pathway. I conquered my worst fears, failure.
I joined medical school in august 2018. Driven by my personal statement: ‘TO BE THE LEAD PROVIDER OF INCLUSIVE QUALITY HEALTH. TO PROVIDE EQUITABLE, QUALITY, INCLUSIVE, RELEVANT AND COMPETENCE DRIVEN HEALTH SERVICES IN OUR BELOVED ZIMBABWE. I do not wish to be the wealthiest but certainly the most educated doctor of my generation with the aim of specializing later on as a neurosurgeon. Too many people wish to cross the fence and be where the grass is clean. I believe I am where I should be, all I need is to just water the grass I am standing on to make it green. The gods are different, the times are different but the underlying precepts of caring for the sick wherever or whoever they may remain the same. Having gone through some of the oath’s for doctors I solemnly promised that I would to my best ability to serve humanity caring for the sick, promoting good health and alleviating pain and suffering. I now turn to my calling, promising to preserve its finest traditions, with the reward of long experience in the joy of healing. This promise is made freely and without coercion.
Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be. The best way to predict your own future is to create it and live to it. It is under the greatest adversity that there exists the greatest potential for doing well. | https://medium.com/@thinkafrika/working-for-my-dream-43bbab1d245e | ['Think Afrika'] | 2020-06-21 11:27:13.584000+00:00 | ['BlackLivesMatter', 'Doctors', 'Education', 'Africa', 'Medicine'] |
The Boy Arrived at the Seaside | Snow
After arriving at Suning, as the topic of going home during vacation first appeared, Huan-Feng told his Vietnamese teammate SofM, “There’s only a small river separating my home and Vietnam.” SofM even said he didn’t dare to believe it.
That river is called the Beilun River. With a distance of 60 kilometer in the lower reaches, it forms the boundary line between China and Vietnam, and then flows into the Gulf of Tonkin. At 107° east longitude, the Beilun River encompasses a very small city. On the other side of the river, there is the city Móng Cái of Vietnam, and on this side of the river, there is the Sino-Vietnam Friendship Park (中越人民友谊公园).
That county-level city is called Dongxing; it’s where Tang Huan-feng grew up. During high school, as soon as you leave the gates, you can see Vietnamese people in their stalls selling all kinds of odds and ends. There’s even more Vietnamese people when you go south of the Dongxing port. Huan-Feng’s school even offered Vietnamese language courses back then.
“It felt like you took one step, and you were in Vietnam.”
But on the map, if you move the meridian slightly to the west by 1° and then move 1900 kilometers upwards, you’ll reach the capital of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Yinchuan.
In 2016, Tang Huan-Feng climbed from top to bottom alongside the 106° east longitude, and started the first stage of his esports journey.
As soon as he left school, Huan-Feng sent out his resume to every esports organization he knew of. This included his age, his server, his rank, as well as his reason for going pro. Some of those messages were gone with the wind. Some others replied back with, your rank is too low, it’s not that good, try your best again.
Anxiety spread within. “Stressed, I was too stressed back then.”
But after a period of fruitless searching, someone found him. It was an organization located in Yinchuan, Ningxia. The owner ran his own Internet café and wanted to form an esports team — the salary was 3000 yuan (~$432) a month. Huan-Feng didn’t think much; he immediately made a decision.
Before he left, his father told him: If you’re going to go, then do this properly. If it doesn’t work out, come back and join the military.
Upon his arrival at Yinchuan, Tang Huan-Feng lived in a house even worse than his home in Dongxing.
“The rent was 1000 yuan (~$145), but the shower head was broken, and there was no place to wash our clothes. We had to take our own clothes and wash them at the owner’s house.”
In that organization, Tang Huan-Feng entered a cycle of “wake up from the couch every day at 10 o’clock in the morning, play games all night until 5 or 6 o’clock, go to bed.”
His teammates had to activate bank cards at the Internet café to practice. If they got hungry, they’d order takeout. But sometimes, the owner felt kind enough to take them to his house for dinner — his parents would cook.
Tang Huan-Feng stayed in this organization for more than a year. “I only got the experience. I didn’t improve whatsoever.” He felt like he’d wasted a year.
“Living there for a whole year, it made me aware of how tiring it is to play professionally. How painful would it be if you didn’t play well? That’s all.”
One year later, Huan-Feng saved up 10,000 yuan (~$1440). He left Yinchuan and that organization. But on his way home, he’d already spent about 2000 yuan (~$289).
“Tell me, how painful isn’t that?”
His first esports journey ended in a hurry, but Tang Huan-Feng didn’t join the military. After he had stayed at home for a period of time, he decided to head out once more. But this time he went to WuDu (sister team of Snake Esports), in the municipality of Chongqing.
“It was really hot back then.”
As he recalled his past as a proplayer, Huan-Feng couldn’t quite remember the specific month. What he could remember was the temperature and the more, or less, clothes that he wore every time he left home on his path to pro, or came back again.
2018 was the first year of the secondary league, LDL. The whole nation was divided into four regions, namely Nanjing, Shenzhen, Chongqing and Beijing. There were qualification matches before the spring- and summer split in which teams competed for spots.
In May, together with his WuDu teammates, Tang Huan-Feng won a spot in the LDL Summer Split. During this split, they placed third in their group in the Chongqing region. However, since they didn’t have any wins from the spring split, they weren’t qualified for the finals.
Not too long after the regular season had finished, WuDu’s team captain called for Tang Huan-Feng, and said that he and the support were off the team. Just a few days ago, Huan-Feng felt like his rank wasn’t good enough and wanted to work harder climbing the ladder.
On the day he was dismissed, he’d just reached Challenger on the Korean server.
When he heard the news of his dismissal, Huan-Feng’s heart beat very fast. Complicated feelings surged through him. He asked the management why. They told him they wanted him to find a better platform and a better team. They didn’t say much else, and Huan-Feng didn’t have the nerve to ask for more. But he didn’t want his teammates to know that he’d left, so him and the support snuck home quietly.
It was only a few days after, as the rest of the team came back to base after vacation, they realized that two people were missing.
Huan-Feng had said some very embarrassing, very “Eighth-Grader Syndrome-esque” words to himself when he left, like, “in the future, don’t make me face you guys in the LPL.”
From 2016 to 2018, from Dongxing to Yinchuan and then to Chongqing, Tang Huan-Feng wasted two years on a meridian line only 1° away from his hometown, Dongxing.
From an “Internet café team” to the LDL, Tang Huan-Feng didn’t feel that much of a sense of achievement. He could only feel if he, himself, “did well or not.”
In the summer of 2018, in the LDL Chongqing region, there were many players of different origins. Players who had been to the LPL, even the World Championship, and new stars soon to shine brilliantly on the LPL stage a year later. But Huan-Feng hadn’t ever paid much attention to those famous or powerful opponents.
Later on, when he joined IGY, someone told him straight to his face: How do you not know anything? Are you that arrogant?
He replied: “No, I just focus on myself, that’s all.”
Now, turn back time to August, 2017. Huan-Feng — who was still in the Yinchuan Internet café team — passed through several cities with his teammates until they finally won a spot in the 2018 LDL Spring Split.
After they got a spot, the owner moved the team to a villa. They moved out of that house with the “1000 yuan (~$145) rent”. Huan-Feng had no idea what a spot in the LDL meant back then. He just thought “it’s fine as long as you can compete.”
A former LPL player joined their team later on. He shared his own version of the LDL and the LPL — the significance between the two — with Huan-Feng. He even said to him:
“You can’t make it to the LPL. Only a dozen or so people in this world can make it there, so just why would it be you?”
But the comfortable and joyous lifestyle in the villa didn’t last long. The team’s support told them the truth later — the owner chose to exchange their LDL spot for a place with a better training environment. Hearing the news, Huan-Feng felt like he couldn’t stay there any longer. He had his father help him make up an excuse, that there was something wrong at home and that his child had to return at once.
Huan-Feng left Yinchuan soon after, before the year 2018. But before his departure, the owner took him to the train station, and while they were there, withdrew around 2000 yuan in cash. He told him that it was for him to use during the New Year’s celebration.
“If that thing with the LDL spot hadn’t happened, if he’d just told us everything, then he really was a good boss.”
The difference between dreams and reality is something every proplayer has to face. But, in the process of wandering between the two, Huan-Feng still wanted to aim for even higher places.
Yinchuan is a city where it snows in October.
In the first ten days of October 2017, the region had its earliest snowfall since 1961. But it wasn’t until December when the heavy snow truly fell.
One day near noon, Huan-Feng had just woken up, and suddenly, someone told him, come quickly, it’s snowing outside. That was not long before they moved to their villa. Huan-Feng gazed down from the sixth floor where, below, the whole park had become a white sheet of paper.
Even as the whole team moved into another villa, that snow cover still hadn’t melted.
On that day, Tang Huan-Feng and his teammates ran downstairs. They played in the snow, they took a lot of pictures, and afterwards, they went for lunch together.
Snow was a novelty for Tang Huan-Feng back then. As he looked with curious eyes at the snow-covered world, he felt the intense coldness of the snow itself. He thought: Turns out snow in real life was just like the one in movies.
Nearly 1900 kilometers away from the hometown where he grew up, where snow didn’t fall, Tang Huan-Feng saw snow for the first time in his life. | https://medium.com/@crylast/the-boy-arrived-at-the-seaside-66ddcd497f7c | ['Cry Last'] | 2020-08-18 20:10:45.309000+00:00 | ['League of Legends', 'Esports', 'Lpl'] |
Dashboard of My Training Results | The Big Two
For those who are not as familiar with Olympic Weightlifting it circles around two main lifts, the “Snatch” (from the ground to overhead in one move) and the “Clean and Jerk” (from ground to “front rack” and then from that position to overhead). How much you can lift in these two exercises is what matters. It is these two numbers (i.e. your PR’s) that you can stare yourself blind at. Hence it was important to me that it was these two lifts that were in focus and the first thing you saw when entering the dashboard. Furthermore to get a better understanding on how good you are I used the standards at www.strengthlevel.com/strength-standards as indicators ranging from Beginner to Elite.
I visualized everything by plotting it as a gauge with the standards as the background from red (beginner) to green (elite), my goal as a red line and my current PR as the bar with the actual value (in kg) within the gauge and the delta from my last PR below.
Snatch and Clean & Jerk Gauges
Furthermore, In order to get the two gauges next to each other I structured the html elements according to a “twelve-column system”. Which in essence means that each row consists of twelve columns. If you do not specify the number of columns an element is to take up, the element will distribute itself over all twelve columns. However, if you specify how many columns it can use then it will only use the number of stated columns. If i then want two elements (my “Snatch” and my “Clean & Jerk” gauges) on the same row and be of the same size I have to assign each element six columns (12/2=6). If I wanted three equally sized elements then I would have assigned each element four columns (12/3=4) etc.
Illustration of how to assign elements on each row
The code for assigning elements to columns
The Soviets knew what they were doing, right?
Even Though Olympic Weightlifting only consists of two lifts there are a lot of accessory lifts you need to practice in order to fine-tune your technique and strength in each part of the lift. If you are weak in any of the accessory exercises it can often be an indicator on where it is in your lift that you fail and where you need to improve in order to improve your PR in either snatch or clean & jerk. However, as with everything else in life, it is hard to know where you are without references. Hence, I found a table originating from the Soviet Union, and if it is one thing that is true it is that Russians/Soviets know how to lift heavy weights. Anyhow, I combined this data with my own data, and plotted the results in a bullet graph with the Soviet Standards as a background indicators were dark grey = below were you ought to be, light grey = where you’re supposed to be, and even lighter grey/blue means that you can lift more than what you need to (in relation to your PR). Then of course my own result made out the bar.
“Bullet gauges” for the accessory lifts
Future Development
Even though I have a fully functional dashboard I have a few ideas on how to improve the dashboard.
Ability to update a new PR in the dashboard
Filtering what exercises to show
I would like to expand it to show other types of training results such as Crossfit benchmark workouts. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/dashboard-of-my-training-results-aa8c0e3de9b6 | ['Ted Löndahl'] | 2020-12-02 12:57:06.105000+00:00 | ['Data Visualization', 'Python', 'Dashboard', 'Plotly', 'Training'] |
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