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The Art of Getting By, Without Getting Anything Done | At the time of writing this, it would have been five months since I decided I wanted to ‘start writing stuff.’
I had no clear idea in my head of what it was I wanted to do, just the beginnings of grand concepts I would sit and ruminate about for days and days. This turned into weeks, and then months of daydreaming, all of which was time I could have used to actually develop something. Or maybe send off just one goddamn job application.
Did I want to be a political commentator? Possibly, but did I want to be my dad? Did I want to write book and film reviews? This would be fun, but it would also mean I would actually have to start on my reading list on my Goodreads, and watch the list of films that have been accumulating on my Letterboxd. Did I want to research and write about specific segments of history of the Kurds? Of course, I long to know more about my heritage, but respectfully, there is a fuck ton of it, so where do I start?
Then came the issue of platform. Initially, Wordpress seemed a possibility, but after my first couple attempts of learning how to use it I lost interest, very quickly. The only thing I had to show for it were the fifteen tabs I kept open for weeks on end because I told myself I will get back to it, I swear. Why did I spend maybe a whole month kidding myself that I could start a website anyway? By the way, it is absolutely not that hard, I just got bored.
Whenever I had sat down and tried to begin, everything in my head seemed so much better than it was in real life. I eventually concluded, some things are better left a fantasy. Less work, more instant gratification, no disappointment. Hence, it has taken me this long to submit a blog post, but hey at least it’s given me something to write about.
However the enigma is this: whenever I sat and faced my thoughts, I really did want to research those topics, read those books, watch those films and comment on the shambolic leadership of this country. I wanted to go, go, go! But my brain felt so heavy and I could not make sense of a single thought clearly. My therapist would later accurately describe it to me as ‘brain fog.’ It was so thick and it would turn me into a mess at my desk. I would have an empty Google doc open, excel spreadsheets of incomplete job applications, a Google search on masters in Europe because I suddenly decided I wanted to go into public policy and live in Switzerland, and list after list of what I needed to do because organising my tasks meant I could delay starting them. All the while, my room is piling up in a mess, and until it was tidy I could not start anything anyway.
But I wanted to do it all so incredibly badly. I just couldn’t start or finish. No matter how hard I tried. It was this desire to go coupled with the severe inability to start that would eventually depress me. My dopamine levels wake up and choose violence every day.
Along with various other fun life events (Hey Google, play ‘Shout Out to My Ex’), this build up of frustration led to a period of low moods and poor lifestyle habits. Suddenly, I was beginning to think I was just lazy and incompetent. I could not get out of bed, stick to a plan, complete any task on my to-do list or even read. I sometimes still move my finger along the page to make sure I am not skipping words, or to help me maintain concentration.
So naturally, self-hatred and (intensified) low self-esteem waltzed gleefully into my life. And boy did they do a number on me. This was not something completely new to my life, or something I had even been unaware I struggled with, it just got harder to manage and stay on top of.
I did not know it at the time, but it was not because I am not capable, I just procrastinate, and I would later learn some of it is out of my control. For instance, I left my dissertation to a week or so before the (extended) deadline, but it got done, so I saw no issue. It was a really fun week, by the way.
So, fast forward four months, and I finally decided to seek therapy. Yes, I was depressed (surprise surprise), but my therapist also told me I need to get an ADHD test done pronto.*
Although this was not a complete surprise, I was initially just a little skeptical. I wasn’t sure if I could accept it was ADHD causing my problems, because I was just being lazy, right? Surely, there was no way it was anything more than my avoidant personality and idleness making me fall behind? I was just being who I always was, slow and incapable.
All, wrong!
Thus, one conversation with my therapist made me painstakingly aware, and upset, at how poorly I treat myself, and at how negatively I think of myself. Again, this wasn’t new. I can safely say with absolutely no shame, my entire adult life thus far has consisted of plenty of decisions which were not in my best interest. My self-care habits have not been great.
But we all make bad decisions, not only because they’re so much easier than the good ones, but because they are more likely to bring us instant gratification. It could be an impulsive buy, believing with your entire soul and being you can, of course, handle another drink, or texting back your ex. We aren’t rational thinkers, and I think I’m okay with it for now.
So, whether it was the nature of a therapy session that causes you to think in ways you do not normally do, or if I had finally, after several hard months, reached a point where I was looking at myself in the mirror and wanting to no longer feel this way, something seemed to change. I was so aware of how badly I was treating myself, and I wanted to improve my self-care.
Fast forward to a month after that breakdown in my therapist’s office, and I was slowly doing things differently. I semi-consistently exercise and actually enjoy it, I sleep better (hm, generally), I journal now (this has been the most consistent and wow, has it changed my life) and I tried my hardest to treat myself as I would a friend that was struggling. It has not been easy; I slipped up multiple times, and continue to do so, but I’m taking small steps and I can feel it slowly paying off. Nor do I think it is the end of the world when I fall behind now too. Yet after all of this, I was still struggling severely with my focus, and those Google docs were still empty, and haunting me.
So, during this entire month of, essentially, the beginning of a rebirth in how I look at myself, I could not help but think of what my therapist had said about my habits and ADHD, which she suspected was causing my low moods. In a way, this realisation has helped to create a shift in my mind in how I perceive myself.
I am not lazy or incompetent.
It took me three months, but I did eventually send off just three graduate scheme applications (I got rejected from two but hey, we move).
It took me five months, but I did finally start writing and I enjoyed it.
It took me even longer than that (six months, maybe?) to get a part time job I actually committed to, after rejecting or flaking at the last second on at least four previously, but I am now finally employed.
I no longer sit in frustration and in tears because I had to reread a sentence eight times over to understand it, because I know it does not mean I am worth less. It’s actually okay.
And I know I will not die because I did not start and finish an episode of a podcast I suddenly wanted to create at 1AM.
In reality, I am not getting things done faster after all of this, and I still have some way to go, but it does not cause me so much pain anymore. Nor does it mean I am broken or behind, because rather than focus on how far I have to go, I can see how far I have come.
I am not the CEO of self-love or dealing with things, because I know I am not perfect. But the difference is now, I do not hate myself for it. I see myself for who I am more clearly, and the view from this window is so much brighter.
*If anybody would like to fund my ADHD test, please message. | https://medium.com/@zara04/the-art-of-getting-by-without-getting-anything-done-675dd02ac6fd | [] | 2020-12-21 13:54:42.159000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Life', 'Therapy', 'Procrastination', 'Life Lessons'] |
How to Plan a Video Marketing Campaign | According to Gary Stevens, head of research at HostingCanada.org, “retargeting our website visitors on social media has resulted in a 47 percent increase in visitor value site-wide.” 93 percent of firms reported getting a new client as a consequence of video in 2018, thanks to the granularity of video analytics on platforms like Facebook.
So, how can you get started with a video marketing strategy that will help you increase engagement and results?
Begin with the following steps:
Determine your target audience and campaign objectives.
Every great marketing effort must begin with research — who are you trying to reach? What types of content do they like to consume, and which channels are they most likely to use? It’s pointless to spend money to have amazing video material play on websites that your target audience doesn’t visit. Stay on brand and consistent with your messaging throughout your videos.
While video may appear to be a departure from other forms of marketing or a means to test out a branding refresh, it’s critical that consumers understand who and what is communicating to them while watching your films.
More info about video marketing software
Double-check your video budget.
Many marketers make the mistake of believing that investing a significant amount of money in a video production will ensure its success. On the other hand, if you don’t spend enough money on a large-scale campaign, you risk damaging your brand’s reputation by sending out low-quality messages. Target each channel with your videos and optimize them.
Depending on the channels you use to launch your ads, you’ll want to make sure your videos are optimized for maximum interaction. This means keeping it brief, submitting videos straight to the channel, and including subtitles on Facebook. This means that you should wait two weeks after your video is up on YouTube before making any changes or refining your target audience.
Here are the top 4 most important video marketing software:
https://sites.google.com/view/the-best-video-marketing/accueil | https://medium.com/@chakitoyou/how-to-plan-a-video-marketing-campaign-df85e47d55a7 | ['Chaki Conect'] | 2021-12-26 16:22:20.653000+00:00 | ['Video Marketing Tips', 'Marketing', 'Video Marketing Software', 'Video Marketing Strategy', 'Video Marketing'] |
Pieces of God | We are no more separated from God than the cells in our body are separated from us. In the same way that our cells are merely smaller components of our bodies, we humans are components of the Living Universe.
The difference between us and God is that we are small, and can therefore have smaller and more specific experiences. Divinity is all-encompassing, and the larger you are, the less nuanced your experiences become.
In the largest of our form we experience all things at once. In the next largest, we experience Duality: the ability to experience both Light and Dark.
As we break apart smaller and smaller, we embody even smaller fractals of energies, until we are something as unique and wonderful as ourselves — the little beings splintered off of the organism we call Mother Earth.
When we talk to “higher” energies, we are just reaching up the hierarchy to more and more connected beings. Our higher self is not a part of us — it is all that we are.
A ray of blue light might be only one part of Pure White Light, but the blue light knows nothing except for its purity. The blue light comes from the White Light. It is the White Light, in a more refined and differentiated form.
We are this blue light, and when we remember our innate purity we remember our connection to God. There is no more seeking that needs to be done. We are home when we can realize that we have been home all along. | https://medium.com/@enmwriting/pieces-of-god-1033ee3a2db | [] | 2020-12-20 00:33:30.147000+00:00 | ['Connection', 'God', 'Channeling', 'Divinity'] |
Wistful | Photo Credit Paula Woods, Cleveland, Ohio
Wistful
It’s that time of year.
Actually, for me, that time of year starts around early September. That time of year that I can only identify as….Wistful.
The dictionary defines it as: “having or showing a feeling of vague or regretful longing.”
The thesaurus gives us words to describe it like: Contemplative. Mournful. Reflective. Nostalgic. Melancholy. Dreamy. Yearning.
September is the month my Dad died. It was sudden. I was young. It changed my life.
September was the beginning of the new school year. Hopeful. Filled with possibility. And a touch of dread.
October is harvest time, Halloween, candy corn, and temperatures getting cooler.
November is the time change, my best friend’s birthday (he’s no longer on the planet), the complicated experience of Thanksgiving.
And the on-coming storm known as “The Holiday Season” which leads right into the ever-imposing New Year moment.
So much of my childhood, young adulthood, well, my life, really, is wrapped up in this time of year and, without realizing or anticipating it, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of wistfulness today.
I don’t think I would call it “regretful longing,” though. I don’t much go in for regrets. Longing, sure. I can get on board with some longing. Not regretful though. Just….well, I think the thesaurus has it right.
Melancholy. Nostalgic.
If my life was a movie, this time of year would be filled with flashbacks. Moments of watching junior high soccer games and Halloween parties. Friday night skating. Choosing who I would fall in love with that year (confidently picking the one person who would never return my feelings).
New shoes and clean notebooks. Starting over and then, all too quickly, falling back into the patterns of “me-ness” that I couldn’t seem to escape.
And “that song.” It doesn’t have to be a particular song. Just “that song,” the one that — when I hear it — my soul kind of aches a little bit. And my heart groans just a little bit. That song brings a smile and tear and….memories.
As an adult, this time of year is all about sweaters and fireplaces, hot cider, wearing socks again. Putting away the summer stuff (light shoes, fans and A/C units) and breaking out the blankets, flannel sheets, and long-sleeved shirts.
Getting the new planner for the year ahead and writing in all of the birthdays and special dates I need to remember.
It’s deeper than all of that, though. It’s deeper than the time change and the loss of light.
Longing. The awareness of time passing. The awareness of the change in me. In my body. In my thoughts. In my perspective.
It’s not as sad as it sounds. As I am writing this, it seems to sound somewhat sad and that was not my intention.
I just wanted to try and capture the feeling of wistfulness. It’s not an easy essence to capture. Like most concepts, it’s more like trying to capture the dust we see when the afternoon sun shines through the window. Or like the leaves that rained down from the trees today as I walked Maddie around the neighborhood. Can’t really catch those things. Not with any kind of gracefulness, that is.
And now, with the world in quarantine, needing to stay away and inside, the sense of wistfulness is feeling even more intense.
The “holiday season” is looking very different for some people. For me, not much is changing. It’s been years since I have shared the holidays with friends or other people. There were those times….ah, again, the wistfulness…..
This feeling, this essence of “wistful,” it seems to have a mind and agenda of its own. It shows up when it wants to and lingers as long as it feels like it.
In some ways, I dread it. And, in many other ways, I grieve when it decides that its good and ready to move on. | https://medium.com/@revrachelhollander/wistful-23e8a513cb3c | ['Rev Rachel Hollander'] | 2020-12-03 15:18:56.617000+00:00 | ['Seasons', 'Nostalgia', 'Memories', 'Autum', 'Sadness'] |
Hibernate Reactive with Spring Boot 2 | Reactive programming is not a new thing. Thanks to reactivex and rx-java it’s a reality for almost 10 years. There are other implementations like Project Reactor and even Vert.x. However, for Databases, we are still not there. Some databases have better support than others like Cassandra and Redis have decent support in drivers but JDBC and JPA are not quite there yet. Hibernate just went reactive. There is a hibernate-reactive project now(still beta 1.0) but looking promising. So today I want to share some simple POC I made to make Hibernate Reactive work with Spring Boot 2.x using webflux: using Netty of course. So I made a video going throught the code and explaining how it works. I personally worked with all sorts of persistence on the last +17 years on technology but not an ORM fan nowadays. However I always appreciate performance and better APIs, so I think this is promising even if is for legacy application modernization.
The Video
The code
Cheers,
Diego Pacheco | https://medium.com/@diego-pacheco/hibernate-reactive-with-spring-boot-2-426b02b7457f | ['Diego Pacheco'] | 2020-12-10 01:57:53.046000+00:00 | ['Java', 'Hibernate', 'Spring Boot', 'Reactive', 'Hibernate Reactive'] |
New Years 2008 | Was just fired from both jobs and was dealing with a shitty break up that left me in shambles. A friend of mine invited me up to celebrate new years with him and his girl friend in NYC, I kindly accepted the offer. “Anything to get out of Northern Virginia” I said. I was working 2 jobs, two full time jobs at that. Being pumped full of adderall and alcohol to keep me going, and I’m an sure that I am going to be feeling the affects of that later in life.
I was fired from my main job at a music store for playing porn at the very end of our shift. See earlier in the week a good customer of ours came in with stacks of porn dvd’s and gave them to us sales men and woman as gifts. It was the Christmas rush and we were working every day to make our sales commissions, at the end of our shift, the manager went on the intercom and announced we were now closed for the evening, all of the staff members dragged their feet to the center of the store, exhausted from the open to close shifts and no customers were left, at least, I assumed there were no more customers left in the building.
I took note of the weary faces of my fellow colleagues and felt it was my duty to bring about laughter upon my fellow staff members. I slid in one of my dirty DVDs, turned on the TVs in a few of the departments, everyone laughed, mission accomplished. I walked through the crowed of staff members laughing and cheering me on as I to proceed to clock out. After I had clocked out, a father and his young son come walking out of the store like a bat out of hell. Everyone’s jaw dropped, I turned pale and knew that was the end for me.
My manager at that point had no choice but to write me up, to cover his ass, and I totally get it, just bad timing that is all. The next morning getting looks from my staff members as I’m going to the back to clock in and pretend nothing had really happened. My manager calls me back and fires me, he was actually really disappointed because he really liked me and I liked him. Although he was rather grim most of the time saying one thing I recall in a morbid type of humor, “This Christmas, Dan, my family is going to sit around the tree opening gifts and I’m going to blow my brains out, watch.” ending in an uneasy kind of chuckle. “Ahh come on man, don’t talk like that” was my reply, his response was “It’d be great through wouldn’t it?”. There was a sadness in him I could see, I hope he is doing well.
I had two other jobs during that time, one waiting tables and then later one working in a green house which I actually enjoyed. I had enough of waiting tables and jumped on the green house job when I got the chance, it was after all what I went to trade school for during my last two years in high school. It was great, I closed down the green house, some times we would have orders come in last minute but for the most part it was a relaxing job to have after 8 hours of hearing the opening to crazy train none stop at the music shop.
I have a condition when I’m stressed out or start a new job, I get eczema on my hands really bad, to the point my hands are cracking and bleeding, the timing of this was bad for my new green house job because they used a finger scanner to clock in and I often had a very hard time to clock in and had to write my hours manually. There was one night as I was taking over for the last person’s shift, she always had a huge mess she would ask me to clean up for her when her shift ended and I did so a few times till I said to her “This does happen to be a pet peeve of mine, cleaning up after people when they should take the time to clean up after themselves before their shift ends.” I continued “I’ll help you clean up but please don’t expect me to do this for you every time I come in to take over”. “Yeah, yeah” she said, “No problem, I’ll be right over!” I start getting ready to clean up kind of waiting for her to come over and start helping and I watch her storm over to the time clock and then walk out.
I went back to work the next day after working at the music shop and the manager pulls me aside and is very upset at me for supposedly lying about when I clock in and showing up late every day and supposedly stealing as well. I was fired that day.
At this point being totally jobless and kind of enjoying the slow pace and being able to catch up with myself, but also hating being caught up in my head. I had another job lined up, a government job, security clearance, benefits, the whole 9. It seemed really good but I had some apprehensions, I was for once able to do what I wanted, to be free, I had no girl friend, no kids, living at my moms house, I was 21 years old then and utterly depressed.
I celebrated new years in time square, had a hell of a time, taking shots of absinthe, going to someones house who was a singer song writer, there were artist of all kinds at this party, it really felt like the kind of people I needed to surround myself with. Anyway new years came and went and we were on the train at 6am heading back to my friends place and I said, “I’m not going back to Virginia, I’m starting all over, from scratch, even if that means being homeless, I’m free and I can do what I want for once.”
I ended up being homeless, during winter. I managed to get some random work like valet parking Ferrari’s and Maserati’s and doing some work for a guy who owned a music repair shop who had a pet crow, all while living in a train yard somewhere in Jersey and it wasn't up until May I got a job at a summer camp in Vail Valley, Colorado.
I probably should have just grew some balls and went into NYC but I didn’t. I was scared of the NYC.
— Side note- sorry for the shitty writing, I do not write often and I want to use this platform to document some of my experiences, please be patient with my writing, it’ll improve the more I write. Thank you! | https://medium.com/@rawadventures/new-years-2008-ecf227901637 | ['Raw Adventurer'] | 2019-10-05 18:35:15.927000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Short Story', 'Letting Go', 'Homelessness', 'True Story'] |
How data analytics helps reduce business expenses? | Operational costs are undoubtedly a major concern for businesses amid an intense competitive environment and uncertainty in the capital markets. Not just large scale organizations, but even small businesses are being succumbed by constantly increasing expenses. They then increase the raw material cost, fuel surcharges, and other indirect costs per year, on an average. In order to achieve standard market revenue and build their balance sheets, they not only need to earn but cut their expenses.
Data Analytics and Cost Optimization
Identifying the right opportunities for strategic cost reduction across an entire organization can be challenging. Fortunately, data analytics can assist with keeping costs down in several ways. Data is the key analyzer of consumer behavior. It is the “fuel” that drives the digital economies.
McKinsey Global Institute estimated that retailers exploiting data analytics at scale across their organizations could increase their operating margins by more than 60 percent and that the US healthcare sector could reduce costs by 8 percent through data analytics efficiency and quality improvements.
How Data Analytics work in reducing business expenses?
Data analytics uses Business Intelligence and analytical processing methods like predictive analysis and data mining to run multiple queries that scrutinize data and filter based on the requirement.
These are some points businesses should keep in mind when thinking of optimizing costs:
Digitize the processes, use appropriate algorithms to manage and maintain data which can add value to the business.
Understand current analysis systems and budgets to improve efficiency and minimize costs.
Formulate strategies that can handle real-time customer interaction.
Automate business processes using Business Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence.
Here’s how businesses can reduce expenses by leveraging data analytics:
Understand customer specific approach: Data analytics helps understand the customer preferences by collecting the data via social media or similar platforms. This aids in fast-tracking product design process and hence reduces cost and time to market.
Reduce inventory management and logistics cost: Having easy access to real-time figures, data and analytics can benefit businesses to optimize transportation and shipping costs. It also gives an opportunity to analyze the inventory stocks and hence achieve cost-effective supply chain.
Minimize indirect costs: Indirect costs are associated with a company’s operations system like utilities, rent, office supplies, and is not related to products. It is crucial and can’t be reduced all at once, but data analytics provides a white line that informs enterprises of their most substantial indirect expenses which allows them to adopt better practices.
Monitor cyberattacks and fraud: A report from Radware in 2019, found the average cost of a cyberattack was $1.1 million. A cyberattack can result in a service breach that can have devastating business impacts like wrinkled trust between the user and brand and decreased company assurance, among other adverse effects. Combined with analytics, data can help organizations glean actionable insights to make fraud cases less prominent and narrow down their effects.
It’s not easy to assess where to cut expenses but data analytics can help get a picture of how it can be worked out.
Read more: What is Data Analytics and why It is important for your company?
Get in touch with our experts at [email protected], if you are willing to employ data as your business transformation key. | https://medium.com/daas-labs/how-data-analytics-helps-reduce-business-expenses-a7383538347c | ['Sheetal Dayal'] | 2020-05-21 12:51:58.787000+00:00 | ['Cost Reduction', 'Data Analytics Tools', 'Business Expenses', 'Data Visualization', 'Data Analytics'] |
Lawmakers are fighting over the ethics of taking a COVID-19 vaccine before healthcare workers and the elderly | By Eliza Relman
A handful of both Republican and Democratic members of Congress are loudly objecting to the federal government’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout process, which makes certain politicians a priority to receive a vaccine for the purpose of government continuity and national security.
The National Security Council has determined that an array of both elected and unelected officials should be vaccinated as soon as possible. But some lawmakers argue that they shouldn’t get access to the vaccine before more vulnerable groups do, even as many of their colleagues and public health experts stress the importance of Congress setting an example for the public by taking the vaccine.
The attending physician of Congress and the Supreme Court, Brian Monahan, announced last Thursday that members of Congress would receive a tranche of doses of the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine and urged officials to get it immediately.
“My recommendation to you is absolutely unequivocal: There is no reason why you should defer receiving this vaccine,” he wrote in a letter to Congress. “The benefit far exceeds any small risk.”
After the lawmakers are all given the chance to be vaccinated, other “continuity-essential staff members” on Capitol Hill will be offered the vaccine, but this doesn’t include spouses and family members of lawmakers. So far, about 50 members of the House and Senate — who are required to travel to Washington, DC, regularly — have been infected with the virus.
A slew of Republican lawmakers and activists, led by President Donald Trump, have spent months spreading misinformation about the severity of COVID-19 and actively undermined efforts to contain the virus. There is widespread and longstanding skepticism and opposition to vaccines across a broad swath of the US population.
As many as half of Americans are unsure about taking a COVID-19 vaccine or say they won’t get it, according to recent polling by the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. But a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in late November found increasing confidence in the COVID-19 vaccines as the rollout continues.
Some top government officials and lawmakers, including President-elect Joe Biden, Vice President Mike Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have also received the vaccine over the last few days.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, got the vaccine on Tuesday and has urged Trump to be vaccinated as well. White House officials have said Trump is holding off on getting the vaccine because he was given an experimental antibody treatment earlier this fall after he contracted COVID-19.
‘People have come to expect that things may be unfair’
Some lawmakers have made a concerted effort to educate the public about the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines and argued that officials should set an example for skeptical Americans.
Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted a video of herself receiving the vaccine over the weekend and explained that she wanted to boost public confidence in the vaccine given the pervasive nature of misinformation that’s been spread about COVID-19. She answered questions about the vaccines and explained the basic science behind it to her millions of social media followers.
“I would would never, ever ask you to do something I wasn’t willing to do myself,” the 31-year old wrote.
But some lawmakers have received pushback for taking the vaccine early. Few Americans — about 16%, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll — think that elected officials should get access to the vaccine before higher-risk groups.
Critics have pointed to the hypocrisy of many Republicans who downplayed the threat posed by COVID-19 and undermined efforts to stem the spread being among the first Americans to receive the vaccine.
Sen. Joni Erst, an Iowa Republican, has faced widespread backlash for receiving the vaccine on Sunday after spending months casting doubt on COVID-19 deaths and undermining public health guidance. Ernst has pushed the baseless claim, promoted by QAnon conspiracy theorists, that healthcare providers were inflating the coronavirus death toll in order to boost their revenue. And she falsely suggested in September that under 10,000 Americans had died of the virus, when more than 180,000 Americans had been killed by COVID-19 at the time.
Petula Dvorak, a columnist for The Washington Post, compared certain lawmakers getting special access to the vaccine to VIP passengers aboard the Titanic escaping early on lifeboats before the ship sunk.
“The very folks who downplayed the virus, partied maskless at the White House and called the coronavirus a hoax created to hurt President Trump are now getting the vaccine ahead of front-line and essential workers, and even the vulnerable residents in long-term-care facilities,” she wrote.
Karen Emmons, a professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health, said members of Congress should take a variety of factors — the power of their example, national security, and their own level of risk — into account when deciding when to be vaccinated in order to maximally benefit public health. She noted that Americans will likely be particularly sensitive to how they respond as long as access to the vaccine remains limited.
“In situations of scarcity, people have come to expect that things may be unfair,” Emmons told Insider. “If [lawmakers] deem that the right choice is to be vaccinated now, they could double-down on other ways to show their support for our frontline and health care workers who remain at risk until they can be vaccinated.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) speaks to the media on July 21, 2020. Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Bipartisan division over access to the COVID-19 vaccine
Still, a handful of lawmakers from both sides of the aisle, who are likely wary of public criticism, have announced that they won’t take the vaccine immediately.
Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who has rejected mask-wearing and social distancing, attacked his colleagues, particularly “young healthy” people like Ocasio-Cortez, for taking the vaccine.
“It is inappropriate for me — who has already gotten the virus/has immunity — to get in front of elderly/healthcare workers,” Paul tweeted on Monday about his decision not to immediately get the vaccine. “Same goes for AOC or any young healthy person. They should be among last, not first.”
Ocasio-Cortez hit back at the senator, arguing that lawmakers must “make sure the vaccine isn’t politicized the way masks were politicized” and she blamed Republicans like Paul for spreading disinformation about the virus.
A handful of Democrats have sided with Paul. On Sunday, Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota progressive closely aligned with Ocasio-Cortez, argued that it’s “shameful” for members of Congress to take the vaccine ahead of frontline workers. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Hawaii Democrat, similarly urged her colleagues to “stand in solidarity with our seniors by not [getting the vaccine] until THEY can.”
In a photo posted to Twitter, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez showed her receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. Photo: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez/Twitter
But there is broad mainstream consensus, even among Republicans, that lawmakers should follow the national security directive.
The two other members of the self-named “Squad” of freshman congresswomen, which includes Omar and Ocasio-Cortez, have received the vaccine. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, the Massachusetts Democrat, told CNN that she “wanted to set an example” for Black Americans who might be concerned about the safety of the vaccine.
“Continuity of government and the travel required for members of Congress justify early vaccinations,” Matt Mackowiak, a Republican political strategist, told Insider. “I hope members of Congress take their responsibility as elected officials seriously and take advantage of the vaccine, to build public confidence in its safety and efficacy.”
Dr. Demetrios Kyriacou, an epidemiology professor at Northwestern University, said members of Congress should set an example for communities where anti-vaccine sentiment runs high. He pointed out that the conservative communities that Republican lawmakers represent might be most unconvinced by the safety of the vaccine and most in need of role modeling.
“Congressmen and congresswomen should not wait,” Kyriacou told Insider. “I think it is very important, especially among the more conservative sections of our population as this group tends to be more reluctant to get vaccinated. In addition, Black and Hispanic lawmakers should get vaccinated publicly to encourage these sections of our population to also get vaccinated.”
Oma Seddiq contributed to this report.
If you have a story about the coronavirus pandemic you’d like to share, email us at [email protected].
For more great stories, visit Business Insider’s homepage. | https://medium.com/business-insider/lawmakers-fight-over-the-ethics-of-taking-a-covid-19-vaccine-early-b1453840f173 | ['Business Insider'] | 2020-12-23 16:41:16.512000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Vaccines', 'Alexandria Ocasio Cortez', 'Congress', 'Pandemic'] |
Five Ways to Improve Your Meeting Attendance | Meetings are a fact of life. Many organizations, especially nonprofits without staff, need to accomplish tasks at meetings. Poorly attended meetings are a sign that the organization itself is not healthy.
Every organization needs their board members to attend every board meeting. This is how things get done. If you are going to have effective meetings, then you need all of the players in place to make that happen. If board meetings are poorly attended, then the organization does not have all of the firepower it needs at every meeting. The board has been carefully chosen to reflect a range of skills and experience. If any of those people are missing, then the full range of expertise is not being brought to bear on the issues being discussed at the meeting.
How can you get board members to come to every meeting?
1. First of all set the expectation that full attendance is required at every meeting. Let it be known that board members are expected to attend each meeting held each year. Explain that missing a meeting should be a very rare event. Establish consequences for missing meetings.
2. Make it easy for board members to remember to attend meetings. Do you offer a virtual option for people who are not close enough to attend in person? Do you send out meeting reminders a few days before the meeting so that people can check in with their schedule? Do you plan your meetings well in advance so that board members can check their availability ahead of time? The second Wednesday of every month is an easy way to make sure that your board members can keep the time available for the meeting.
3. Make the meeting productive. Avoiding drama is an excellent goal for most organizations. A meeting where participants leave with a sense of accomplishment, is a meeting that will be well attended next time. Everyone needs to feel that their time is being well spent. I have written other articles on how a strategic plan helps to make sure that meetings are well attended, because each meeting moves the organization forward to achieving their goals.
4. Avoid unpleasant meetings. All board members should be trained in respectful conversations. You want to be discussing the issues not anyone’s personalities. A meeting should be a safe space for people to share their views and have a discussion that does not involve name calling or other disrespectful behaviour. Board members should feel comfortable to express themselves at a meeting without anyone attacking them.
5. Respect time limits. Board meetings should be scheduled for a specific time and the meeting should not extend beyond that. The best way to do this is to stick to the agenda that was created for this meeting. The agenda should be sent out ahead of time so that board members can determine if there is anything on the agenda, where they could have a conflict of interest. Once that has been established then the full board package would be sent out to each board member so that they can prepare properly for the upcoming meeting. Well prepared board members lead to quicker meetings because you do not have to wait for people to read the material and understand the issues.
If you implement these five strategies, then your organization will have better board meetings. | https://medium.com/governance-guru/five-ways-to-improve-your-meeting-attendance-2b73366cda07 | ['Debi Peverill'] | 2020-12-10 02:52:05.839000+00:00 | ['Governance', 'Board', 'Productivity', 'Meetings', 'Agenda'] |
Notes in the Field: 2020 Edition | The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Gender-based Violence concerning Syrian Refugees in Jordan.
The story that follows is my experience researching the above inquiry through a remote internship opportunity, and a reflection on the challenges I faced when I was diagnosed with the COVID-19 Virus during this time.
I was studying abroad in Amman Jordan during the Spring of 2020 when COVID-19 ramped up its quest for world domination. After being required to return to America, I was accepted this past summer to be a remote intern for the Higher Population Council (HPC) in Amman. The HPC is an organization within the Jordanian government that acts as a reference for all population and development related issues in Jordan. They are responsible for facilitating policy implementation, raising awareness of enhancing national capabilities, and researching topics of interest (HPC, 1970).
For me, this position was a way to stay connected with the world I was engaged in before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. I had been ripped away from my studies, the vivid culture of Amman, the hills and valleys on the outskirts of the city, and most importantly- multiple lifelong connections- so quickly. I was excited about the opportunity to continue studying with the region, even if I could not physically be present.
My task from the HPC was to write a literature review of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender-based violence, specifically concerning Syrian refugees in Jordan. My daily tasks were to investigate the importance of the topic, summarize the available literature, and note the most promising solutions (Paalman, 2020). My goal was to provide background information on the topic for the HPC as they prepared to conduct their own study addressing the effects of the pandemic on gender-based violence (GBV).
Investigating the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender-based violence is important because most guidelines concerning GBV and pandemics have been written after the fact, as a result of an observable rise in GBV (GBV AoR, 2020). This is understandable, given we have not endured a pandemic in one hundred years, but it means that the world is behind on preventative measures. As stated in the literature review, “though efforts are being made, the sudden onset of the crisis and a lack of preparedness has resulted in service providers playing catchup on an issue that has just now been deemed critical” (Paalman, 2020).
Pandemics can increase societal inequalities (UN, 2020) and exacerbate or spark diverse forms of GBV (Peterman Et al, 2020). These effects are especially detrimental for those in more vulnerable situations like women and refugees where access to essential items, internet, and education are limited, leading to a high-stress environment.
I settled into the quarantine work routine like much of the rest of the world during the summer of 2020. I woke up at 9:30 in my quaint- but homey, San Francisco apartment, made a small breakfast and a coffee, sat in front of my computer screen, and began to work. As I researched, it struck me that there were virtually no scientific studies with data existing on this topic, meaning the HPC study would be one of the first groups to explore the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on gender-based violence concerning Syrian refugees.
This made the literature review even more important. I was proud to contribute something worthwhile in the realm of research and hopefully, to help make a tangible difference in the civic and governmental awareness of the effect of the pandemic on GBV. Unfortunately, my initiative and ambition came to a standstill when I realized that my sense of smell was disappearing.
Days of research on the effects of the pandemic in Jordan morphed into frantic hours in search of COVID-19 testing sites in San Francisco. My mind was reeling at the difficulties of getting a test and I was consumed with my health, my attention breaking from the women and girls struggling in Jordan.
Receiving a positive diagnosis did not profoundly alter my daily routine. I still woke up every morning at 9:30, got a cup of coffee, and opened my laptop. The difference was that my mentality was rooted in uncertainty. At this point, the world was only gradually discovering the patterns of this micro killer, and I was not receiving the news any faster.
The virus seemed random and irrational; I had heard stories of people who showed mild symptoms the first week, but abruptly, found themselves battling life-threatening symptoms the second week. Others tested positive but had no symptoms at all. For all I knew, the next two weeks were, for me, a coin flip between asymptomatic downtime and a life-threatening health emergency.
I was concerned that my sense of smell would not return, as some media networks had reported. A week into the onset of symptoms, I began to feel mild chest pain. With no guarantee of anything, anxiety and an overactive imagination left me with regular migraines and a racing heart, especially as I lay in bed trying to fall asleep. I was alone, quarantined with only my irrational thoughts. Though this may seem unreasonable to an outsider, I was often troubled with thoughts of dying in my sleep. I was confused and frightened.
Fortunately, I was one of the lucky individuals graced with a smooth recovery. My smell returned gradually, and my chest pain never rose to an unbearable level. None of my symptoms became severe, I did not struggle to breathe, and I could eventually add light activity into my routine. As the virus ran its course I was able to accept the comforting truth that I was going to be okay. My mind settled, and once again I could focus on researching.
In the days that followed, I read testimonies, analyses, and reports:
“The curtailing of services and difficulty accessing them may lead to more unplanned pregnancies or problematic births”.
“Women and girl survey participants point to physical … and emotional violence … as the most prevalent types of GBV that are occurring during the lockdown”.
“With the courts closed, cases related to domestic violence, denial of resources, and other forms of GBV are delayed, depriving women and girls of the essential legal protection rights under Jordanian law.” (Anderson 2020).
I felt guilty that my health worries had consumed me in the weeks prior. Surely one should not feel guilty for worrying about one’s health in a pandemic, however, this guilt was rooted in the contrast between my experience with the COVID-19 virus, and the struggle of the female Syrian refugees I was studying. For those in more vulnerable situations, the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic is considerably more life-threatening.
During my battle with the pandemic, I had all the resources I could need, a stable and secure environment, and easy access to health care. Outside the walls of my self-isolation, women and girls were being denied due process of law, facing emotional and physical abuse and potentially dangerous health conditions.
In an alternate reality, this paper would be categorized as a ‘notes in the field’ contribution, yet 2020 happened, and here we are. When ‘the field’ is represented through a small screen in a dimly lit apartment, being present is difficult. I remember initially lamenting that if the internship was physically abroad, I could have made a greater impact on the project- or the lives of these women. Wistful regret was a natural response, but I did what I could with the world’s situation, as the health and psychological effects of the Corona Virus have been experienced by each and every one of us.
Researching Syrian women affected by the fallout from the pandemic (GBV) whilst being COVID-19 positive myself allowed me to reflect on my life and resolve to live graciously through the opportunities I have been given. It inspired me to continue doing my part given the situation and showed me the power and potential I have to make an impact. The world is bleeding right now, and some of us need more help than others. We can all continue to work towards the common good, despite the challenges we face, and even if it must be done through video calls and E-mails.
Special thanks to Rania Al-Abbadi from the Higher Population Council (HPC) for her guidance and understanding;
Bayan Abdulhaq, and the Students for International Training (SIT) community for providing me this opportunity.
Works Cited
“HPC Homepage.” HPC, 20 Oct. 1970, www.hpc.org.jo/en.
Paalman, Corinne. Internship Review: The Effects of Coronavirus Pandemic on Gender-Based Violence in the Context of Syrian Refugees in Jordan. Students for International Training, 20 Aug. 2020.
Paalman, Corinne. “Literature Review: Effect of the Corona Virus Pandemic on Gender-Based Violence Concerning Syrian Refugees in Jordan.” 13 Aug. 2020. (In affiliation with the Higher Population Council)
Peterman, Amber. “Pandemics and Violence Against Women and Children.” Center For Global Development, 1 Apr. 2020, www.cgdev.org/publication/pandemics-and-violence-against-women-and-children.
Anderson, Kristine. 2020. “Daring To Ask, Listen, And Act: A Snapshot Of The Impacts Of COVID-19 On Women And Girls’ Rights And Sexual And Reproductive Health”. Reliefweb. https://reliefweb.int/report/jordan/daring-ask-listen-and-act-snapshot-impacts-covid-19-women-and-girls-rights-and-sexual. | https://medium.com/@paalmanc/notes-in-the-field-2020-edition-8bc1e0c0fac7 | ['Corinne R. Paalman'] | 2020-12-18 18:35:18.850000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Syrian Refugees', 'Covid Diaries', 'Middle East', 'Remote Working'] |
Dockerizing React App With NodeJS Backend — Typescript Version | Dockerizing React App With NodeJS Backend — Typescript Version
Learn How to Dockerize and make it a deployable image
Photo by Dylan McLeod on Unsplash
Docker is an enterprise-ready container platform that enables organizations to seamlessly build, share, and run any application, anywhere. Almost every company is containerizing its applications for faster production workloads so that they can deploy anytime and sometimes several times a day. There are so many ways we can build a React App. One way is to dockerize the React app with nodejs backend and create a docker image so that we can deploy that image any time or sometimes several times a day.
In this post, we look at the example project and see the step by step guide on how we can dockerize the React app with nodejs as a server.
Introduction
Example Project
Dockerizing the App
Running The App on Docker
Summary
Conclusion
Introduction
Nowadays, it’s very common to dockerize and deploy the Docker image in the production with the help of container orchestration engines such as Docker Swarn or Kubernetes. We are going to Dockerize the app and create an image and run it on Docker on our local machine. We could also push that Image into Docker hub and pull it whenever and wherever we need it.
Here is the complete guide on how to develop a React app with nodejs as a backend server. If you are not familiar with the process or you want to know before studying this guide, I would recommend you going through it.
Javascript Version
Prerequisite
As a prerequisite, you have to install Docker for Desktop (whatever your OS is). Please follow this link to install Docker on your laptop. Once installed you can check the Docker info or version with the following commands. | https://medium.com/bb-tutorials-and-thoughts/dockerizing-react-app-with-nodejs-backend-typescript-version-55a40389b0ac | ['Bhargav Bachina'] | 2020-08-14 05:01:01.005000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Docker', 'Web Development', 'Typescript', 'React'] |
Our 5 tips for saving | We know you have heard so many tips on how to save: put together a budget, stop spending here or there, save every month, and the list goes on and on.
We thought we should also share something with you. Something more practical and which we believe will actually HELP.
Here goes…
1. Have a target in mind
Saving towards a specific amount, event or goal puts things in focus. Its like a compass guiding you to your destination. Think of the reward that your goal will bring and use this to always motivate yourself
2. Automate your savings
You can easily forget or get tempted not to save, if you have to manually move money into your savings account every time. Using a platform like Savebox will help you automate and control your savings.
3. Do it your own way
Set out how to reach your target your own way. Many institutions tend to dictate how much you must save each month to reach your target. In many cases, this may not work for you. With Savebox, you have the flexibility to design your own savings plan and reach your target given your unique circumstances.
4. Celebrate your saving successes
Celebrate each time you reach a savings target or goal. This will motivate you to save for the next goal. Sharing your savings journey with close family and friends will help set a positive example and also motivate them to do the same.
5. Just start
The most important tip of all. Just start with your first savings. Even if it’s a small commitment, this will eventually become a habit. Yesterday was the best day to start and today is the next best day. | https://medium.com/@savebox/our-5-tips-for-saving-d6f16bdddd0c | [] | 2019-07-10 19:33:13.079000+00:00 | ['Saving Money', 'Savings Plan', 'Money', 'Saving'] |
Calculate Delta,% Increase with Up/Down Arrows on YoY,QoQ,MoM,DoD using Lookup function in Tableau | Why Lookup? What is use of this function?
LOOKUP function is used to look up and down a partition of rows and return a values in that field by specifying an offset. This can be used Lookup previous or next value within resp. partition to compute required calculation.
LOOKUP is table calculation which gets executed in the end as per the order of execution of filters and calculations in Tableau. When delta on YoY/QoQ/MoM is to be computed first and later display only the main number wrt current Year, Lookup as Table calculation filter is also required because it gets executed in end after table calculation i.e Delta on YoY gets computed first and then Lookup filter is applied to show only current Year Sales along with Delta on YoY. This scenario is covered in next article of LOOKUP.
Let’s see how to use LOOKUP to calculate Delta, %Increase and Up/Arrow on QoQ.
Drag “Order Date” dimension to Rows. Right Click and then Select “Quarter Q2 2015”. Drag “COUNT(Orders)” to TEXT to see Order count for each of quarter as seen below.
2. Now, Let’s calculate Delta, % Increase and % Increase Arrow from “current quarter” wrt “previous 1 quarter”.
3. Create a new calculated field — Delta and write below Lookup logic:
0 is offset that looks up Count of Orders value for Current Row and -1 is offset that looks up 1 Previous row having count of orders value on QoQ.
4. Drag Delta field on rows to do validation of computed Delta using above logic.
For 2016 Q4 and Q3, Delta is = 5926–4780 = 1146 Orders which means that 1146 orders were increased in 2016 Q4 as compared to 2016 Q3.
For 2016 Q1 and 2015 Q4, Delta is = 2742–4298 = -1556 which means that 1556 orders were reduced in 2016 Q1 as compared to 2015 Q4.
5. Create calculations for % Increase and % Increase Arrow Up/Down as below.
6. Drag both these fields to rows to see below output.
7. Now drag and drop %Increase Arrow Up/Down field to Color and assign red color for down arrow and green for Up arrow. Drag % Increase Arrow Up/Down field from Rows to Text and see final results as below.
8. To Calculate YoY,MoM,DoD — We just have to replace Quarter(Order Date) dimension with YEAR(Order Date) or Month(Order Date) to compute YoY and MoM respectively. | https://medium.com/@ajinkyaabhyankar/calculate-delta-increase-with-up-down-arrows-on-yoy-qoq-mom-dod-using-lookup-function-in-tableau-39a39424ab61 | ['Ajinkya Abhyankar'] | 2020-12-05 16:50:12.992000+00:00 | ['Data Visualization', 'Look Up', 'Tableau', 'Tableau Training', 'Delta'] |
Fear of Forgetting and Compulsive Note Taking | With time, my broader anxiety did not change. If anything, it increased. I had all my original reasons to be anxious plus the new anxiety-inducing time-suck of sifting through my notes. Structure is good, but my notes that I was taking to reduce my anxiety weren’t written in a way that made sense organizationally. My internal monologue, my grocery list, my todo list list, my hopes, my dreams, my fears and my anxieties were all lumped together in notebooks full of notes. I couldn’t throw away the notes because there was a non-zero chance that there was something important therein. Also, I couldn’t process the notes because if I wanted to address stuff for work, I had to search for it and in the process of finding it (which was inefficient) I was inundated by triggers.
From there it only got worse. More triggers. More thoughts. More anxiety. More notes. Less control. I was at a low point in my life. It sounds unbelievable looking back, but at the time I wasn’t 100% sure that what I was struggling with was OCD. I wanted to believe that everything about me was normal. I didn’t want to admit that I had this weakness. I did my best to hide it from those around me. Whenever someone found one of my notebooks or saw me taking notes I was embarrassed.
OCD is not when you like to run a tight ship. It’s not when you like to have a tidy closet. OCD is when you have thoughts so intrusive that you are overwhelmed with anxiety that you seek immediate relief from through these compulsions, whether it be hand washing, checking, counting, writing, or anything.
The turning point in my life came when I started to read about my behaviors online. At the time there wasn’t really anything online about obsessive-compulsive note taking. I found the occasional article about hypergraphia and articles about certain Silicon Valley elites proclaiming it as a super power. At the end of 2017, I eventually came to believe that it was OCD. I read some online and tracked down a book by Dr. Jonathan Grayson. I immediately downloaded it to my phone and started to read it. It was a slog, and not because the book was poorly written or dense, but because every other paragraph triggered me. I persevered. I learned that OCD is not what society tells us it is.
OCD is not when you like to run a tight ship. It’s not when you like to have a tidy closet. OCD is when you have thoughts so intrusive that you are overwhelmed with anxiety that you seek immediate relief from through these compulsions, whether it be hand washing, checking, counting, writing, or anything. With time this neural loop becomes reinforced. And, as I learned, it has the capacity to spread. There comes a point where it gets so bad that the thoughts and behaviors will jump from fear of forgetting and note taking (in my case) to any and all of the other forms of OCD.
I powered through the book, one page at a time. With every page I became more educated about what I was dealing with. With every page, I pushed off finding outside help. The book ends with worksheets. I tried my best on my own to tackle this challenge. It was a valiant effort, but the place I struggled was in the accountability department. I also struggled in trying to tackle the most challenging aspects of my OCD. Eventually, after some tears I reached out to a local care provider. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, but I wanted a specific person (not a facility that rotates you through counselors) and I wanted someone who wasn’t just knowledgeable about OCD, but an expert. I found someone. | https://medium.com/ocd-note-taking/fear-of-forgetting-and-compulsive-note-taking-116225a3bfcd | [] | 2021-02-03 05:33:53.082000+00:00 | ['New Years Resolution', 'Obsessions', 'Notetaking', 'Mental Health', 'Ocd'] |
An Overview of Stablecoins | What are stablecoins?
You are probably asking yourself, “what in the world is a stablecoin anyway?” In essence, a stablecoin is a cryptocurrency that is pegged to another asset (e.g. gold, the U.S. dollar, another cryptocurrency, etc.). This currency is global and is not tied to a central bank. A stablecoin should have as low volatility as possible, as opposed to other cryptocurrencies that are often highly volatile in nature.
Stablecoins are a massive opportunity in the cryptocurrency market because it addresses such a large market. The ultimate goal of a stablecoin is to become a digital form of fiat-free cash that is incredibly stable in value.
What is sound money?
In order for a stablecoin to work, it must meet the requirements of sound money. Those requirements are the following:
It must be a Medium of Exchange (a.k.a. MoE)
It must be a Store of Value (a.k.a. SoV)
It must be a Unit of Account (a.k.a. UoA)
It must be fungible, easily divisible, and easily moved
What do each of these requirements mean?
For a stablecoin to be a medium of exchange, that means that the stablecoin can be used to facilitate the sale of goods without the need to barter. However, this is not the only requirement. Essentially all cryptocurrencies today can be used as a medium of exchange. However, that doesn’t mean they will be used to buy goods and services. That’s because…
Most cryptocurrencies aren’t a good store of value. A store of value is a form of wealth that maintains the current value that it has without depreciating in the future. As we saw in the beginning of 2018 in the cryptocurrency market, many cryptocurrencies declined significantly in value from its all time highs. That means that many cryptocurrencies, while useful for investing and speculation purposes, are not particularly useful as an actual form of money. As such, many people who accept cryptocurrency as payment must exchange it into a stable currency within a relatively short period of time.
Precious metals, such as gold and silver, have often been viewed as being solid stores of value. That is why when investors fear recessions and depressions in the economy, they buy gold (and occasionally silver) because they believe that these precious metals will at the very least maintain its current value.
So why aren’t gold and silver used today as forms of payment? e.g. Why can’t I ask a business to pay me in gold for a service that I do for them? While gold acts as a MoE and a SoV, it does not meet the requirement of being easily divisible or easily moved. According to APMEX, the price of an ounce of gold is $1,293. Let’s say I do a service for somebody and I only need $200. That’s the equivalent of 0.15468 ounces of gold. It’s very difficult to measure how much gold is actually needed unless you have precise measurements. Even then, it can become difficult to get the exact amount of gold the more precise the dollar amount becomes.
Cryptocurrencies, on the other hand, are very easily divisible and are often divisible to up to 18 decimal places. The idea of getting an exact amount of gold in ounces to 18 decimal places is ridiculous. On the other hand, the idea of getting an exact amount of a stablecoin to 18 decimal places is not only feasible but has been done before.
Precious silvers are also difficult to transport, as they can get heavy when transferring large amounts. With cryptocurrencies it is possible to transfer large amounts of wealth with only a computer and an internet connection.
All cryptocurrencies can serve as a unit of account. A unit of account simply means that it is able to provide a unit of measurement that can be used to define and compare value. For example, I can use Ethereum as a unit of account because I can define value in how much Ethereum it costs (e.g. “this car costs 10.5 Ethereum”). I could also use something like shares in a company as a unit of account (e.g. “this apartment will cost the same as 5 AAPL shares a month”), although shares aren’t used as money because they don’t meet many of the other requirements of sound money.
Why do stablecoins matter?
Stablecoins are important for several reasons:
It is important to have a digital currency that remains stable in value (as opposed to Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. that can be volatile), similar to well-known currencies that remain relatively stable in value (such as the U.S. Dollar).
Stablecoins fulfill the “store of value” requirement of money — something that even real-world currencies don’t fulfill.
Let’s look at the second point. There have been numerous examples in history where the value of a currency collapsed due to hyperinflation, causing the wealth of people who hold that currency to plummet. Some examples include:
Weimar Germany (1913–1923): The German “mark” currency plummeted in value after a severe hyperinflation that caused the collapse of Germany’s economy. Apocryphal accounts of Germany at the time show how much the “mark” currency declined in value: families were using money instead of wood to heat a stove because it was a cheaper alternative, and people had to shop with backpacks and wheelbarrows just to carry their money.
The German “mark” currency plummeted in value after a severe hyperinflation that caused the collapse of Germany’s economy. Apocryphal accounts of Germany at the time show how much the “mark” currency declined in value: families were using money instead of wood to heat a stove because it was a cheaper alternative, and people had to shop with backpacks and wheelbarrows just to carry their money. Zimbabwe (1990s — 2010): Zimbabwe experienced extremely volatile currency prices in the late 1990s as a result of confiscating private farms of landowners. It’s estimated that in 2008, Zimbabwe experienced a monthly inflation rate of 79.6 billion perent.
Zimbabwe experienced extremely volatile currency prices in the late 1990s as a result of confiscating private farms of landowners. It’s estimated that in 2008, Zimbabwe experienced a monthly inflation rate of 79.6 billion perent. Venezuela (2009 — Present): The value of Venezuela’s “bolivar” currency has declined steadily and significantly against the U.S. dollar for over a decade now, and experienced hyperinflation.
As you can see, it’s not easy to create a stable currency (especially a digital one). If a global, digital stablecoin were to be successful it would be able to solve many problems in economically unstable environments. For that reason, stablecoins have been referred to as the “holy grail” of the cryptocurrency market.
What are the different types of stablecoins?
There are three main types of stablecoins:
Fiat-collateralized
Crypto-collateralized
Non-collateralized (i.e. seigniorage shares)
What are each of these stablecoin types and what do they mean exactly?
Fiat-collateralized
Fiat-collateralization is the simplest method of creating a stablecoin, and is used by one of the top stablecoins today (Tether). Essentially, fiat-collateralized stablecoins are backed by a real-world asset. This real-world asset is controlled and owned by a central entity.
Fiat-collateralized stablecoins are the easiest to understand — they are essentially IOUs on some asset. Although this method is simple, there is the issue that it requires some degree of centralization. It requires a central entity which can guarantee the issuance and redeemability of the stablecoin into the asset the stablecoin is backed by. Audits from trustworthy parties are required to make sure that the stablecoin is actually fully-collateralized.
Crypto-collateralized
Crypto-collateralized stablecoins are similar in concept to fiat-collateralized stablecoins, except that crypto-collateralized stablecoins are backed by another cryptocurrency as opposed to being backed by a real-world asset.
In order to account for the price-volatility of the collateral backing the stablecoin, stablecoins using this method are over-collateralized. For example, a person needs $200 of ETH to receive $100 of a stablecoin in return. That way, even if ETH falls by 25% the stablecoin can still be stable in value as there is $150 of ETH backing the stablecoin.
There are some criticisms of using the crypto-collateralized method to create a stablecoin. Preston Byrne, for example, believes that these types of stablecoins are doomed to fail in the instance of a “black swan” event where the asset collateralizing the stablecoin declines in value significantly. This would cause the stablecoin to collapse also.
Non-collateralized (i.e. seigniorage shares)
Non-collateralized stablecoins are not backed by any real-world or cryptocurrency asset, and instead it maintains value by people expecting it will maintain a certain value. The main non-collateralized approach is the seigniorage shares method. The seigniorage shares method uses smart contracts that automatically expand and contract the supply of the non-collateralized stablecoin using algorithms to maintain its value.
This method is similar to what central banks do with fiat currencies, but non-collateralized stablecoins do this in a decentralized fashion.
Roadblocks stablecoins must overcome
There are several roadblocks and challenges that stablecoins must overcome before they can become viable currencies that people use.
The first roadblock is that of scalability. In order for digital cash to be viable, it must be able to make transactions quickly and make them cheaply. This is not an easy problem to solve; Bitcoin has faced some criticisms for high transaction fees that make it difficult to use Bitcoin as an actual currency. Stablecoins must be able to solve this issue before they can become widely adopted.
The other roadblock is that of privacy — having privacy when doing transactions is a driving component of why cryptocurrencies are so popular. However, there are still some issues with privacy with current cryptocurrencies. Athough Bitcoin addresses are anonymous (they’re simply a string of letters/numbers), transactions can be linked to a single bitcoin address easily. Or with Ethereum, if I know what your ETH wallet address is then I can easily lookup how much money you own, other ETH addresses that you’ve transacted with, and when you’ve transacted with those addresses. This is an issue for people who expect 100% privacy when dealing with cryptocurrencies, which is possible when dealing with physical cash. Stablecoins will have to solve the issue of creating complete privacy for its users when they want it.
List of stablecoin projects
Here’s a list of some stablecoin projects that exist today. Note that this is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but an overview of some big stablecoin projects that exist today.
Fiat-collateralized
Tether
Tether is an incredibly popular stablecoin that is allegedly backed by the U.S. Dollar. I state allegedly because there have been some doubts about whether or not Tether is 100% collateralized by the U.S. dollar, along with some other criticisms.
TrueUSD
TrueUSD is also a U.S. dollar backed stablecoin. One of the main differences between TrueUSD and Tether is that TrueUSD attempts to be more transparent when it comes to the auditing of its funds that back the TrueUSD token. TrueUSD regularly undergoes third-party auditing to ensure best security practices.
Stably
Stably has the StableUSD, which is backed by the U.S. Dollar and designed to work across different blockchain protocols including Ethereum and Stellar. Similar to TrueUSD, Stably attempts to be as transparent as possible when it comes to the auditing of its funds.
Crypto-collateralized
Maker
Maker has the DAI token, which is always worth $1 each. The DAI token is collateralized with ETH — anybody can create DAI with a bit of technical knowledge. The process of creating DAI can be somewhat complex, and this article will skip over the exact steps of how to create it.
BitShares
BitShares has the BitUSD. BitUSD is also valued at $1 each, and it has 100% or more of its value backed by the BitShares core currency BTS.
Havven
Havven has Nomin, which is a stablecoin backed by a distributed collateral pool. Nomins are collateralised by the value of havvens, and the value of havvens comes from transaction fees that are generated with all nomin transactions and paid to havven holders. The value of nomins is kept stable by havven holders, who are incentivised to manage its supply.
Non-collateralized (i.e. seigniorage shares)
Basis
Basis is designed to keep prices stable by algorithmically adjusting supply. When demand is rising, the blockchain will create more Basis. The expanded supply is designed to bring the Basis price back down. When demand is falling, the blockchain will buy back Basis. The contracted supply is designed to restore Basis price. It could also be thought of as an “algorithmic central bank” of sorts.
Carbon
Carbon is conceptually similar in design to Basis. However, Carbon uses Hedera Hashgraph which could potentially provide it with significantly higher throughput and speed. | https://medium.com/blockchain-report/overview-of-stablecoins-a8c26ec8728e | ['Shaun Newsum'] | 2018-06-12 23:11:21.565000+00:00 | ['Insights Email', 'Stablecoins', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Insights', 'Bitcoin'] |
Who are you, 6ix9ine? | I think the conversation of 6ix9ine finding a true identity for himself and finding value comes from various directions. One of them is a achieving a role model. Role models help guide us into the person we truly want to be whether one approaches him or he goes and finds it. As Akon stated in an interview before, 6ix9ine needs direction to find what he truly wants in life. I definitely agree with this statement. If one was to show him a route of what true success means, such as valuing family and sharing wealth, he can truly begin to express the various things he has troubles with. Another part of this comes down to more emotional intelligence from the people. We really need to stop fueling celebrity politics! I don’t care what you think, but it’s true. If we really gave less attention to the politics of celebrities, the power of celebrities lessen, and what happens? They just become normal people. Maybe this will help 6ix9ine realize who he really is because without fame and money, you just a regular person! | https://medium.com/@anthonyobas/who-are-you-6ix9ine-ec7fe79421a6 | ['Anthony Obas'] | 2020-11-22 22:29:34.853000+00:00 | ['Hip Hop', 'Documentary', 'Social Media', 'Film', 'SoundCloud'] |
This is a very under-discussed problem, especially in the context of Data Science. | This is a very under-discussed problem, especially in the context of Data Science. Kudos for a great article. It would have been even better if there were some specific examples in each of the sections describing what can go wrong and how to prevent it. E.g. I worked on a project about bank document processing. The client and the developers had very different ideas about accuracy. The clients wanted the program to run perfectly on 80% of the documents and the developers were thinking that the program should give 80% performance on each document. | https://medium.com/@charudattamanwatkar/this-is-a-very-under-discussed-problem-especially-in-the-context-of-data-science-78811f7ecd9d | ['Charudatta Manwatkar'] | 2020-12-21 03:43:56.885000+00:00 | ['Project Management', 'Data Science'] |
Countering extremism | The Home Office minister for countering extremism attend a meeting this week to see what steps the Woking Borough Council has taken to counter extremism. Our President was invited to this meeting and in the video above we take a brief look at what happened. | https://medium.com/virtual-mosque/countering-extremism-d70c0cca82c6 | ['Virtual Mosque'] | 2016-04-09 18:26:27.419000+00:00 | ['Home Office', 'Extremism', 'Countering'] |
“Knowledge is power.” How can we innovate to make this true in humanitarian action? | What is the role of data collection and inclusion (or exclusion) in the humanitarian sector?
People with disabilities and older people are disproportionately affected by crises around the world (ADCAP, 2018; HelpAge, 2018).
In humanitarian settings, they can be excluded from receiving assistance and from decision making because of a number of barriers found in society, in organisations and institutions, and in legal frameworks.
At the Humanitarian Innovation Fund, we believe that innovation can play an important role in making humanitarian action more inclusive. But where do we start?
Is knowledge power?
There is a commonly-used phrase, ‘knowledge is power’. A quick Google search will tell you that the origins of the phrase are uncertain; possibly said by the English philosopher and statesman, Sir Francis Bacon, or possibly not.
It will also tell you that that many people fundamentally disagree with this phrase; because knowledge is only power if you have the agency to take action, or to influence the actions of others.
In humanitarian crises, knowledge comes from a wide range of places. It is carried by and between individuals and organisations, communities and governments, and within countless reports and case studies.
Yet there are large gaps in the fabric of our knowledge, which can mean that humanitarian assistance is inappropriate for or does not reach those who need it.
Cover of the second part of the ‘Gap Analysis: the Inclusion of People with Disability and Older People in Humanitarian Response’
One of these gaps is around the inclusion of people with disabilities and older people.
To understand this better, we published a Gap Analysis in 2020, led by the Nossal Institute at the University of Melbourne.
By reviewing thousands of sources of academic and ‘grey’ literature, we saw some stark trends emerge in what we know; namely, that while there has been undoubtable progress made in raising awareness of the inclusion of older people and people with disabilities in humanitarian action (Robinson et al., 2020), exclusion and discrimination are still commonplace. There is little evidence of commitments and guidance translating into practice.
Figure 1 shows the spread of evidence on disability across the nine Humanitarian Inclusion Standards and by humanitarian sector. The boxes that contain no colours and numbers are where no evidence was found.
It’s clear that across the board the evidence base is thin.
Figure 1: Mapping of evidence found on disability inclusion in humanitarian response by Humanitarian Inclusion Standards and sectors. Numbers and colours refer to the individual articles found in a grey and academic literature review. See more detail in section 4 of the 2020 Elrha Gap Analysis.
The data status quo
Let’s think of data as one of the building blocks of knowledge, and explore some of the key issues relating to data in humanitarian settings.
A large volume of data is collected, for example through rapid assessments, during registration processes, via feedback mechanisms and from monitoring and evaluation activities.
In recent years, there has been an increased awareness of the need for data that is disaggregated by characteristics such as gender, age and disability. However, there is limited evidence of disaggregated data being collected on a large scale and used to increase the inclusion of people with disabilities and older people (Robinson et al., 2020; Collinson, 2020; HelpAge International, 2020).
Additionally, data is rarely disaggregated by age categories (eg, 60–70 years, 70–80 years), meaning that the diversity of older people goes unrecognised. There is also little evidence of any consideration for how older age and disability intersect with each other and with other identity characteristics, such as gender, ethnicity and religion (Robinson et al., 2020).
An even starker gap is the lack of qualitative data, such as data on people’s experiences and the individual factors that affect inclusion. The Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) guidelines recommend collecting qualitative data on the risks and barriers to access faced by older people and people with disabilities, and the specific needs, roles and capacities of individuals.
Where data is collected, too often there is no clear objective in mind. Effective and responsible data collection should be done purposefully and analysed to inform decision-making and the planning, implementation and improvement of humanitarian programmes. As found by our gap analysis:
“The collection of data does not in itself lead to change”
In this case, knowledge is only power if it goes on to enact positive change.
Data collection and inclusion (or exclusion)
Some of the most common methods used to collect data, such as key informant interviews and surveys, can pose barriers to participation, create unhelpful power dynamics, and be time- and resource-intensive (Leresche et al., 2020).
There has been some use of alternative and innovative data collection approaches in the humanitarian sector (ALNAP, 2019; Pivotal, 2017; GSMA, 2020). However, these approaches are not widely used or implemented specifically with older people or people with disabilities.
There has also been little collaboration between humanitarian and representative organisations, namely organisations for people with disabilities (OPDs) and older people’s organisations (OPAs).
OPDs and OPAs have unique knowledge about the experiences of people with disabilities and older people, and about the diverse characteristics of individuals. However, there are few opportunities for relationship-building, exchange and coordination between OPAs, OPDs and other humanitarian actors (Robinson et al., 2020).
A recent survey by the International Disability Alliance (IDA) found that:
“OPDs are increasingly invited to sit at the table, but not yet to participate meaningfully in decision-making processes”, and that “involvement is more often in project activities than in the planning, governance or budget decisions.”
What change is needed?
Based on conversations with a range of people in the humanitarian community, we feel there are two key areas where innovation has potential to increase inclusion, as well as some important cross-cutting principles to put into practice.
Firstly, we should borrow tools from the ‘design thinking’ approaches often used in innovation processes. Methods such as ‘community-centred design’, ‘human-centred design’ or ‘user-centred design’ all aim to create solutions that work well according to the people who will be using them.
They are used to rapidly collect targeted data in order to avoid designing something that requires people to adapt or change in some way, or else be excluded.
When these methods are applied well, the result can be an inclusive design process and solutions that are driven by what the data says, and ultimately humanitarian aid that is more appropriate for and popular with communities affected by crises (Sandison, 2019).
Secondly, we need innovative ways to ensure that data collected is used to increase inclusion in a specific humanitarian programme or activity, and not as an end in itself.
A core principle of innovation is to know your problem(s) well, and to adapt your approach to respond to the problem(s) rather than trying a generic new solution.
Effective data collection requires the data needs of a team or project to be clearly defined before finalising and implementing the approach. This includes understanding the audience and structures you are trying to influence, and being creative in how you analyse, present and communicate what you find.
But these two areas on their own won’t be enough to guarantee positive change for people with disabilities and older people affected by crises. Overarching principles of ‘meaningful participation’ and ‘data responsibility’ need to be upheld.
The Humanitarian Inclusion Standards (HIS) emphasise meaningful participation as a core element of inclusion. We have previously defined meaningful participation as:
“People with disabilities and older people are able to participate fully and effectively in decision-making and in the processes for designing, developing, implementing, monitoring and evaluating humanitarian programmes, policies and interventions, as relevant. It should result in participation being an individual choice not limited by barriers including cultural, identity, attitudinal, physical, communication or legal/policy barriers.”
Working in collaboration with OPDs and OPAs is a vital starting point in putting meaningful participation into practice (CBM Global, 2021). Ensuring that OPDs and OPAs are included in, and actively shape, approaches to data collection and analysis is essential to increasing inclusion across humanitarian action.
On data responsibility, the Centre for Humanitarian Data explains that “Irresponsible or inappropriate processing of data in humanitarian contexts can place already vulnerable people and communities at greater risk of harm or exploitation, e.g. by exposing their location or identifying a key vulnerability”. Therefore, the autonomy and safety of all participants and data contributors must be central to any data collection approach, including how data is managed during the project and in the future, and whether it could be shared with other humanitarian actors and coordinators. The recently-published IASC Operational Guidance on Data Responsibility in Humanitarian Action provides further helpful information.
A commitment to better approaches to data
Knowledge can be power. If we commit to collect data in innovative ways that are designed with people with disabilities and older people, we will build knowledge that is representative and inclusive.
We must also commit to collect such data in a responsible way, and with a clear purpose in mind. This way we can be surer that our knowledge is used to take positive action or influence the actions of others.
So perhaps we should bring in another cliché phrase here: “with great power comes great responsibility”. We’ll have to go back to Google to see who coined that one… | https://medium.com/elrha/knowledge-is-power-how-can-we-innovate-to-make-this-true-in-humanitarian-action-7fc647c0bd2e | ['Sophie Van Eetvelt'] | 2021-03-22 20:57:57.677000+00:00 | ['Older People', 'Disability', 'Innovation', 'Data', 'Humanitarian'] |
UpTodd : Interested in some expert input on how to support your young baby’s sight? | UpTodd : Interested in some expert input on how to support your young baby’s sight? UpTodd Sep 18, 2020·4 min read
Did you know?
In the first 3 months, babies can focus on objects that are 8–11 inches away . This is more or less the distance from their parents’ faces while nursing or feeding.
. This is more or less the distance from their parents’ faces while nursing or feeding. Bold black-and-white images stimulate the development of the optic nerves and encourage young babies’ cognitive development without over-stimulating them.
and encourage young babies’ cognitive development without over-stimulating them. Appropriate visual stimulation for newborns is the best way to help extend tummy time . It also teaches the muscles of the eyes and the brain to coordinate and function properly.
. It also teaches the and function properly. Engagement with contrasting images, diverse textures, and patterns boosts infants learning and focus.
What Can Babies See in the First Few Months?
Baby Experts’ Advice on the Importance of Black & White Stimuli | https://medium.com/@uptodd/uptodd-interested-in-some-expert-input-on-how-to-support-your-young-babys-sight-8e94de4049b9 | [] | 2020-09-18 04:23:19.621000+00:00 | ['Baby Care', 'Childcare', 'Baby'] |
XPChain: Age Burnable PoS | About ABPoS
XPChain is building a completely new PoS mechanism from scratch, which has never existed while using existing PoS currency as a reference.
This will be the first currency that implements this new PoS mechanism in the cryptocurrency market.
XPChain has decided to name this new innovative PoS, “Age Burnable PoS (abbreviation: ABPoS)”.
The XPChain development team is currently working day and night to complete the ABPoS development. It has been a tough process to complete this implementation from scratch.
The XPChain team is doing its best to make ABPoS easy for everyone to use. We appreciate all your support on this innovative project!
The following information is under development:
New receiving method of PoS rewards
Current PoS currency has been creating a new chunk which basically includes the principal chunk and the PoS reward when succeeding in the stake. Also, if the stake succeeded before completing the aging process, this chunk could split into two. In ABPoS, when holders succeed in stake, stake rewards will always receive with a separate chunk than the principal.
Example 1
When the stake of 1,000,000 XP succeeded in XP and the reward of 20,000 XP is to be obtained
1,020,000 XP will be received as one chunk, if aging process was completed prior. Chunks of 510,000 XP and 510,000 XP will be received separately, if aging process was not completed
Example 2
When the stake of 1,000,000 XPC succeeds in XPC and rewards 20,000 XPC
A chunk of 1,000,000 XPC subtracted commission, and another chunk of 20,000 XPC will be received separately.
Compound interest to a simple interest
Continuing PoS staking will change the rewards calculation from compound interest to simple interest.
By changing the receiving method of PoS rewards, when stake continues as rewards arrive, rewards will be calculated as a simple interest.
In order to earn rewards with compound interest as the previous PoS system, it is necessary to manually combine the chunks, and it will take more time to start staking due to refreshing aging process.
ABPoS suppresses excessive inflation by making rewards calculation as a simple rate.
New method of using PoS rewards
By changing the receiving method of PoS rewards, the principal and the reward can be divided clearly, and holders can chose to only use the portion of the reward easily.
ABPoS will allow holders to send rewards to a separate address when stake was successful.
PoS currency tends to remain in the PC wallet because it will continue the staking process, and that tends to suppress distribution in general.
ABPoS is designed to promote the distribution of rewards as the rewards are distinguished and the receiving address can be changed.
For example: it is possible to the select mobile wallet to receive PoS rewards while staking with home PC regularly.
New calculation method of the transaction fee
The fee calculation of current PoS currencies is very complicated.
It is very difficult to understand that when the fee becomes unnecessary depending on the time of trading, or when a small amount is sent, a lot of commissions are required. It was difficult for both users and developers.
Therefore, ABPoS simplifies the calculation of the fee and changes the form to collect the fee according to the data size recorded in the blockchain regardless of the time of the transaction
Fee will be completely burned
All transaction fees will be discarded (Burned) and the amount discarded will be reduced from the total supply.
ABPoS collects fees from all transactions according to the data size recorded in the block chain, including staking.
When the stake succeeds, a fee will be charged on the chunk of the principal.
XPC provides various countermeasures so that currencies can easily be distributed, and the more the currency is distributed, the more fees will be collected.
All fees collected will be deleted (burned) from the block chain and the total issue amount will be reduced.
In other words, currencies are always burned, even though they are small amounts, as it helps to control inflation.
Just like a bill printed and circulated, which will face “death” due to wear and damage, XPC is also born by ABPoS and it is designed to face “death” by burning coins.
The reason that the supply limit is not set is because there is a risk that the currency will run short if the amount of death of coins by the burn increases.
Safer Blockchain
With current PoS currencies, attackers with multiple aged chunks were able to attack blockchains consecutively without risk.
With ABPoS, when attacking with aged chunks, measures were taken so that they could not be carried out continuously, and the blockchain is improved in a way that the attackers will carry the risk.
Reference:
https://gist.github.com/mquandalle/7fe702a595f07f4b0f81
Benefits for Developers
Developers have the benefit of making their own wallets and services.
There have been many cases where developers and service providers/operators faced difficulty in making profits with the cryptocurrency so far.
In order to continue development and operation, it was necessary to earn profits in something other than the cryptocurrency system, such as donation and affiliate, and it was quite difficult.
XPC will make various efforts to increase profit.
Examples
Here are examples of things that can be done by ABPoS adopting XPC.
With ABPoS, the PoS reward part can be delivered to another address and it can be sent freely to distribute to plural addresses.
Let’s say someone developed a more convenient wallet than the official, a wallet that will send the rewards portion of PoS to a specified smartphone.
With the consent from the user attached, this wallet can be set to return (receive) 5% of the PoS rewards when the stake is succeeded to benefit the developer.
The user receives rewards to their smartphone every time the stake succeeds, and at the same time, it automatically returns 5% to the developer.
Developers will be able to maintain motivation while earning rewards and will be able to work on developing new functions.
And users can expect new functions, and if they are released safely, they can continue this win-win relationship with each other.
By successfully distributing PoS fees like this, it becomes easy for developers and service providers/operators to earn revenue.
All distribution of the PoS fees is recorded in the blockchain and everyone can verify and confirm the contents at any time.
By recording everything in the blockchain, everyone can promote a clean and fair business.
As soon as the first official XPC Wallet is completed, XPChain will be completely open. All available source code and the blockchain and currency specifications will be released publically.
To make it easier for third parties and other developers to join to create focusing on various features, Official Wallet will not be packed with many functions on purpose.
XPChain aims for the true meaning of Developer Friendly, and will release the SDK and knowledge base that will make it easy to handle blockchains.
Please look forward for XPChain’s innovative development. We truly appreciate and thank you all for your interest and support. | https://medium.com/xpchain/xpchain-age-burnable-pos-5c5569cb0906 | [] | 2018-06-03 08:15:52.490000+00:00 | ['Fintech', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Experience'] |
How to Fix QuickBooks Won’t Open Issue? | It is not uncommon for a QuickBooks user to face QuickBooks won’t open issue. A user may find that QuickBooks Desktop is not starting or is only partially appearing.
There are a number of reasons that can cause QuickBooks not opening issue. Some of them are given below -
Hard disk is corrupted.
Operating system is obsolete.
QuickBooks Desktop is not properly installed.
A QuickBooks file is missing.
How to resolve QuickBooks won’t open issue?
If you click your QuickBooks Desktop icon multiple times, QuickBooks will not open. So, be sure to allow sufficient time for QuickBooks to load before continuing. Below are given several solutions that you can follow to fix QuickBooks not opening problem and get back to focusing on your business.
Download and use QBRefresher Tool
QuickBooks processes running in the background can get stuck. QBRefresher Tool helps you end these QuickBooks processes, and performs a mini-repair to ensure that things are in proper order. Run the tool and then check whether QuickBooks will not open.
Suppress the QuickBooks Desktop application
In case there is damage with your company file, first you need to make sure the QuickBooks program itself is working. QuickBooks may be trying to open your previous company, so it’s important to isolate if the program or your company file is working. Follow these steps -
Press and hold the Ctrl key, then double-click the QuickBooks Desktop icon. Do not release the Ctrl key until you see the No Company Open window, unless QuickBooks freezes or gives you an error.
Select a company file, then choose Open.
Restart your computer
Restart your computer to clear processes and temporary data that may be hogging your system resources. Try to open QuickBooks after restarting.
Run the QBInstall Tool
Download and run the QuickBooks Diagnostic Tool (QBInstall Tool) to fix errors that you may receive when opening QuickBooks Desktop. Follow these steps -
Download the QuickBooks Install Diagnostic Tool .
. When prompted, save the file to the local Desktop.
Close any open programs, then run the QBInstall Tool. It may take up to twenty minutes to complete, depending on your internet speed and computers’ performance.
Restart the computer after running the tool to ensure the components are properly updated.
Now, check for QuickBooks won’t open issue.
Repair your QuickBooks Desktop Installation
Run a repair to replace all damaged installation files.
Perform a Clean Installation of QuickBooks Desktop
If all else fails, performing a clean install can help. Reinstalling your QuickBooks this way moves the installation and program files into new folders, but still in the same default location.
QuickBooks won’t open issue should get fixed by applying the above solutions. But, if you are unable to troubleshoot this issue or any other issue with QuickBooks accounting software, feel free to call at Accountant Squad’s QuickBooks Error Tech Support Number 1–888–502–0363 for getting instant technical support.
Reference URL- http://accountantsquadservices.strikingly.com/blog/quickbooks-wont-open | https://medium.com/@johnluther114/how-to-fix-quickbooks-wont-open-issue-89d00bf1b266 | ['John Luther'] | 2019-06-21 12:33:10.403000+00:00 | ['Quickbooks Tech Support', 'Quickbooks Support', 'Windows 10', 'Quickbooks', 'Quickbooks Online'] |
Physics and Personal Progress | Who knew that studying for my physics finals would lead me to a productivity x physics crossover?
Velocity
Let’s start off with something simple, and probably the first thing you’d ever learn in an introductory physics course: what is velocity? (Kinematics, woo!🍻)
The answer: velocity is your motion with direction. Unlike speed, when it’s just the number (or magnitude of the vector, if you will). If you’re riding a bike in the opposite direction of your friend, but you’re both going at the same speed, you have the same speed but a different velocity.
If you’re doing things at a certain velocity, you will progress faster than someone going at a slower velocity; more often than not, you’ll also be in different directions. Someone who is grinding out fifteen essays every week is facing a lot more velocity in their writing skills than someone who is only doing one every week (under the assumption that they are doing this consistently every week). This is disregarding the quality of the essay, which we will get to later.
With physics, the velocity vector doesn’t completely dedicate itself to the x-axis or y-axis either; you can go at an angle.
In our context, this should be split up into two different directions. Remember the Pythagorean theorem? Yeah, this should be something like that.
These “component vectors” have a smaller magnitude than the culminating vector. There is less of a focus in one particular direction, and more of a focus in two (maybe three, if you really want to get complex). So in those two directions, even while you’re having a lot of velocity in general, your focus is split — and thus, you’re moving slower in the two directions than you would when you go in one particular direction.
However, if you have to feel split up in multiple directions, don’t worry! There is more to it.
Acceleration + Force
We have acceleration, or in layman’s terms, “speeding up or slowing down.” More specifically, it is the change in velocity over a certain period of time. Essentially, if you change your velocity, you can either progress faster or slower, depending on the direction you take — and this is your acceleration.
Acceleration is typically caused by an external force applied to the object, based on Newton’s second law.
A force is defined as a push or pull, and brings a person out of their constant state. With an external force acting on the object in motion, they will be forced to accelerate in the direction of the force — and thus, change their velocity.
Going back to the bicycle example: let’s say someone was biking to their workplace. Suddenly, they realized the amount of time they had was too little, or maybe they were just bored with going at the same pace. So, what does the person riding the bike do? They pedal faster, applying more force on the bike in the particular direction of the intention. The bike accelerates, and thus moves faster. Thus, they were able to go to their work faster.
Basically: if you push yourself, you will get yourself on the grind and working faster. Personally, I noticed it myself. I did virtually no physical activity during the first two months of the pandemic — I was always studying for my AP exams. After they were done, I was bored. My mom started telling me to go work out, so I forced myself to watch and follow along with a Chloe Ting workout. I did this for a few days, just forcing myself — and then I noticed that it became a habit. One hour and thirty minutes of HIIT workouts became characteristic of my summer.
A key thing to remember: keep out the force that is not going to be valuable to you, and maximize the force that goes in the direction that you want to go.
Momentum
This brings me to another point: the point of building momentum.
Your momentum is the product of the mass and the velocity of the object in motion. Essentially, it is proportional to your velocity, but it is factoring in your mass.
Thus, there are two ways of increasing your momentum: either an increase in mass or an increase in the magnitude of the velocity (and thus, acceleration). A change in velocity is easier, ideally, than a change in mass simply because you have to apply a force in order to increase it. Thus, you can change momentum by applying a force over a certain time period. That is essentially how you activate something into momentum, and the term for this is impulse.
When you’re making progress with something, the “mass” is the quality of the things you do to build that progress. This means that there are two ways to keep a consistent momentum:
Move fast and produce results quickly, although they may not be of the best quality.
Increase the “mass” and produce results, but the speed at which they are produced may not be the same.
However, if you make yourself go faster and produce results of higher quality at the same time, you would be increasing your momentum (i.e. building it up).
In the case that there is no net force on the system, momentum is conserved. When there is a net force (which results in impulse), momentum changes. By adding the force (or the push to get out better results at a faster rate), you are activating an impulse that, when properly sustained, can result in a higher momentum.
Energy (and specifically, Kinetic Energy)
In physics, work is done whenever we apply a greater amount of force over a certain displacement. They must be in the same direction — if the force applied is in the opposite direction of the displacement that you are hoping to achieve, this is counterproductive as you are essentially doing negative work, and this removes the energy. With positive work done, you gain more energy.
Thus, when you’re working on something — you must be directionally inclined to do so.
Thanks, Khan Academy!
Note that the consideration of components should also apply — it’s better to fully have the net force in the direction of motion (i.e. your progress in a particular focus of yours) than splitting it up between multiple areas. That way, you maximize the parallel component of force. This is better than it is in the opposite direction, however.
But then, what is energy? Energy is essentially the physical quantity is an object’s capacity for doing work. It comes in many forms: potential, kinetic, chemical, nuclear, thermal, etc.
Here, because it’s so focused on Newtonian mechanics, we’ll only focus on the first two.
Potential energy is basically the energy that you have when you’re stagnant. You’re not really doing anything, but you have that potential. The important part is leveraging this potential. For an object, it’s typically based on their gravitational potential energy (and thus, they must be at a maximum height). For spring, it must be stretched to its maximum amplitude. For us, it is our stagnation — endless curiosity and learning, but not doing anything with that learning.
By gaining velocity, and producing quality results, you can decrease your potential energy and convert that to kinetic energy. Kinetic energy is calculated as:
Basically, the greater your velocity, the greater your kinetic energy is — and the more you are progressing. The quality of your work (mass) is also a key factor, but it is not as important as having that velocity. You might also notice the relationship with momentum:
This does highlight that the quality of your work, while important, is not as important as maintaining the speed. When it becomes a habit that is continuous over time, you will find the quality gets better. Don’t obsess over quality too much: as Nike says, just do it.
To Sum It Up:
All of these physics principles: velocity, acceleration, force, momentum and energy relate together in some way.
When you’re figuring out your priorities and specifically, how to 10x yourself, go in a particular direction and stick to it. Otherwise, the work done is not effective.
Maximizing your velocity will be the biggest factor in increasing your kinetic energy.
Always seek for impulses in your momentum that propel you in the direction, rather than against.
For more insights, connect with me on Linkedin and Twitter, and sub to my personal newsletter! | https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/physics-and-personal-progress-59838dd22b80 | ['Orna Mukhopadhyay'] | 2020-12-27 20:36:03.306000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Physics', 'Productivity'] |
I Couldn’t be an Elephant, so I Became a Writer | Meet Jacquelyn Lynn | Introduction
I Couldn’t be an Elephant, so I Became a Writer
When you love what you do, it’s still work — but it’s awesome work!
Photo by Jerry D. Clement; text added by Jacquelyn Lynn
When I was little, I wanted to grow up to be an elephant.
I loved those majestic creatures and didn’t understand why I couldn’t be one. I don’t recall the moment when I accepted that I couldn’t grow into another species (it must not have been terribly traumatic). Nor do I recall exactly when I realized that I wanted to be what I would eventually become: a writer.
It wasn’t a direct path.
Photo by Jerry D. Clement
After high school, I went to finishing school. Then joined the Army (yeah, I believed the recruiter who told me I’d have a private room in basic training). That was followed by a few years in miscellaneous jobs before I landed in the transportation industry, where I spent 10 years working for air and motor freight companies.
It was fun. It was interesting. It paid well.
It was not what I wanted to do.
I heard about a writer's conference and decided to go. In a session about freelancing for magazines, I listened carefully, took copious notes, went home, and did exactly what the workshop leader said to do.
Three weeks later, I had an assignment from a national magazine.
Lesson: Listen to the people who are successfully doing what you want to do.
I quit my corporate job and launched my career as a freelance business writer.
After decades of writing and ghostwriting, marveling that I was getting paid to learn interesting things and write about them, the publishing landscape began to change. Print publications were disappearing, and the ones that survived were shrinking. At the same time, technology had made it possible for anyone who wanted to write a book to get it published.
Indie publishing! What an opportunity!
I decided to figure it out by writing and publishing a book of my own before doing it for clients.
Image created by Jacquelyn Lynn using MockupShots
Another business book? Not exactly. God was tugging on my heart; in response, I wrote and produced Words to Work By: 31 devotions for the workplace based on the book of Proverbs. My husband/business partner/best friend did the cover design and interior photography.
Since then, we’ve helped our clients write and publish their books. In that capacity, we call ourselves self-publishing consultants.
I’ve written a few more inspirational books, including a novel. Choices is the first in the Joyful Cup Story series and is highly recommended by the author.
Maybe it’s because of my ADD, but I can’t manage to stay in a single niche. My titles under my Conversations series include How to Survive an Active Shooter: What You do Before, During and After an Attack Could Save Your Life and Work as Worship: How Your Labor Becomes Your Legacy.
And here I am on Medium.
Writing. Sharing. Praying my words will make a positive difference.
Thanks for reading and for giving me that opportunity.
More about me …
My novel, Choices, is a story of forgiveness and reconciliation.
I’d love to connect with you! May I send a brief inspirational message every Saturday morning? Visit CreateTeachInspire.com/saturday to receive messages like these: | https://medium.com/illumination/i-couldnt-be-an-elephant-so-i-became-a-writer-d54048740b51 | ['Jacquelyn Lynn'] | 2020-09-13 13:53:44.238000+00:00 | ['Inspiration', 'Christian', 'Creativity', 'Life Lessons', 'Writer'] |
Create a Private PostgreSQL Database for Your Development Environment in Seconds | Build the Dev Stack
The following docker-compose.yml file defines a PostgreSQL container running a specific version of PostgreSQL and pgAdmin 4 (the most common administrative tool for Postgres). The contents of this file warrant a deeper explanation.
The Docker Compose file structure
This file defines two “services” to be created: Postgres and pgAdmin. Each service consists of a single container pulled for you from Docker Hub. Postgres and pgAdmin will be available at port 5432 and port 8080 respectively. Point any programs you write at hostname localhost and browse to http://localhost:8080 to access pgAdmin.
Keep reading for instructions on how to point pgAdmin to Postgres.
PostgreSQL version
In the line that defines the Postgres container, you’ll want to specify the exact version of Postgres that you need. The version is represented as a tag where 9.6.12-alpine is the version in our example. Check here to see which other versions are available.
Storage for Postgres
The docker-compose.yml file above specifies two volume mappings for Postgres. These two mappings will make directories on your computer accessible to Postgres.
The folder mapped to /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d contains the SQL files that Postgres will use to initialize the database. Put SQL files and shell scripts you need in that directory and they will be automatically executed in alphabetical order. The folder mapped to /var/lib/postgresql/data contains the persistent storage for the actual database.
When Postgres starts, it follows the simple flowchart below. If there is no data in the DB, then it executes every SQL file and shell script (in alphabetical order) in the folder on your computer that is mapped to in the /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d directory. If there is data in the folder on your computer mapped to /var/lib/postgresql/data , then it ignores the files.
Should you mount both directories? It depends. The table below describes the behavior you should expect by mapping each of the two volumes for Postgres.
My advice is to map both directories. You can remove files from the init directory if you no longer want to initialize your DB. You can also delete the data directory from your computer to delete any data that would have persisted (Docker will recreate an empty folder in its place the next time you run docker-compose up ).
Pro Tip: you can include CSV files in the init folder on your computer and then populate tables with data from those CSV files by adding the appropriate command to an SQL file in the init directory.
CREATE TABLE Employee(id, first_name, last_name, salary);
COPY Employee FROM '/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/emp.csv'
WITH (FORMAT CSV, HEADER);
Storage for pgAdmin
Although pgAdmin is just a tool for viewing and configuring the database, its connection(s) to the database must be configured. This can be done through the GUI with the “add server” command. Note that the hostname is the container_name parameter from our YML file: some-postgres . The password is also specified in the YML file: mysecret .
An alternative is to save a lot of clicking and typing by specifying these settings (everything except the password) in a JSON file. Map that JSON file to /pgadmin4/servers.json on the container (line 22 in our example YML file) to avoid having to manually configure pgAdmin’s connection to Postgres.
The settings file can specify multiple connections between pgAdmin and Postgres (to connect as different users or to connect to different databases). The following example has only one connection.
Networking
The container_name parameter is just a name, but it is the name that will be used by pgAdmin to access the database on port 5432. The reason is illustrated in this diagram. The two containers are connected to each other via a private network and can therefore access each other via their hostnames (the container names) some-postgres and some-pgadmin . The host (your computer and web browser), however, only sees ports 5432 and 8080 exposed and therefore accesses them at localhost:5432 and localhost:8080 .
The name of that internal network can be specified in the compose file, but there is no value in naming a network whose name is never referenced by your code. Let Docker handle that! If you are curious, you can always view your private and temporary network’s name. In the snippet below, I ran Docker Compose from desktop, so it named the network desktop_default . | https://medium.com/better-programming/create-a-private-postgresql-database-for-your-development-environment-in-seconds-b781640ed01b | ['Doron Chosnek'] | 2020-11-12 16:00:53.210000+00:00 | ['Postgres', 'Programming', 'Database', 'Docker', 'Containers'] |
5 Steps to improve your Programming Skills | Programming Languages
To improve your programming skills the first thing we need to understand a Basic Syntax of every Language. Every programming language like C, C++, Java, Python, PHP, Perl, Ruby, etc. Have there own Syntax please make sure foundation should be always strong.
Once you know the Syntax please use following steps mentioned. | https://medium.com/@dridhon/5-steps-to-improve-your-programming-skills-5999047563d6 | [] | 2020-12-27 05:14:59.861000+00:00 | ['Data Structures', 'Technology', 'Programming', 'Algorithms', 'Coding'] |
Best cycling clothes for women | The best cycling clothes for women are made with the same quality as men’s. There are two kinds of cycling clothing for women — long sleeves and short. Both are made to protect the skin, but they are designed differently. Women’s long-sleeved jerseys are often made from waterproof material or with mesh for ventilation. Men’s long-sleeved jerseys are often windcheater-style with ventilated sleeves and an adjustable collar.More info : abbigliamento donna ciclismo.
Women’s long-sleeved jersey has always been in fashion. It is a stylish option that can be paired with accessories such as a scarf and shoes. If you go for cycling clothes that have long sleeves, make sure they are made of a breathable fabric like cotton or nylon. The moisture will evaporate soon after you are wearing them.
It was not so long ago that long cycling coats were only worn by women. They are now becoming more popular among cycling enthusiasts. Women’s long cycling jackets are very fashionable and come in a wide range of colors. Most of them come with removable liners that make cleaning after cycling less complicated. The jacket should have enough room for additional storage.
Another great option that can help protect the skin when you are riding is cycling shorts. Women’s cycling shorts are available in various styles such as racerback shorts, dress shorts, bib shorts, and track shorts. Most of them have a very thin stretch material at the bottom to allow comfort as well as ventilation. The cloth should be stretchy and made from a breathable material that allows your skin to breathe. You can also find cycling clothes for women with tummy control features, which helps to balance your body weight evenly.
Another benefit of cycling clothes for women is that they usually have extra pockets at the sides or back of the clothes. This allows the user to keep their things from getting caught up in the spokes of the pedals. Also, pockets at the side of the shorts or jersey can help keep hands and arms warm, even if you are wearing short gloves. Some manufacturers create pockets that are internally adjustable, for a better fit. They can also be zipped open if there is a need to have something underneath to protect the cyclist’s jersey.
The best cycling clothes for women should also be very functional and be able to withstand all weather conditions. The shorts should stretch well and offer a good amount of support to prevent chafing. The top should be securely zipped up to keep water from dripping in while you are pedaling. For optimum protection, look for cycling clothes that are specifically designed with women’s safety in mind.
If you are buying cycling clothes for women, then it is important to check to see if the Lycra is made from the same material as bike frames. The Lycra absorbs the sweat, keeping you cool throughout the ride. Look for products that have an internal windproof pocket as well, so that you will be able to carry your necessities along with you. This can include water, gel, energy bars, cell phones, and other small items that might be necessary to make the trip comfortable. It is important to choose the best cycling clothes for women that are not only stylish but comfortable as well. Make sure that they are also fashionable enough to wear with a short skirt, especially if you are going to be going fast on a bumpy road.
Finding the best cycling clothes for women doesn’t have to be a complicated task. Just remember to buy a good quality brand that is both functional and stylish. And while you’re shopping, check for the latest styles and designs. You don’t want to end up riding in the old school, do you? | https://medium.com/@milenatorrisi/best-cycling-clothes-for-women-bdee6037b2a3 | ['Milena Torrisi'] | 2021-04-25 19:07:37.565000+00:00 | ['Clothing'] |
Set Up Your Express App(Modernized Version) | Express is constantly the highlight of almost every Node developer. While being the most popular Node framework, Express helps set up and configure routes to send and receive requests between the front-end and the database of an app.
Express is a great framework for single-page apps, websites, hybrids, and so on. It provides lightweight yet powerful tools for HTTP servers. In my opinion, and a lot of others, this is a good starting point if you want to learn a Node framework for server-side development.
Objectives:
After going through this post, you should be able to:
Set up a basic express app using express-generator and npx
Set up nodemon for automatic refresh
Set up routes in your express app
Display express responses in the browser using pug view
Prerequisites:
You should have Node installed on your local machine to successfully follow along with this guide. Click here to go to the download page.
Ensure you have a suitable text editor such as visual studio code for when we would make changes to the code. Download it here.
Steps:
First thing’s first, let’s keep things organized.
Create a folder to contain our application. Open up your terminal(command prompt on windows) and navigate to the newly created folder. In the terminal, to setup our express app, type the following and hit enter:
npx express-generator mynewapp -- view=pug
We’re explicitly setting the template engine because by default npx will install ‘jade’ template which is deprecated.
4. Once the process has completed, successively run the following commands in the terminal, hitting enter after each:
cd mynewapp/ npm install npm install nodemon -g
We navigated into our new directory, installed the dependencies and finally installed a tool that will allow our server to automatically detect changes we make while running.
5. If you completed the above step without any errors, then your app is all setup. It’s time to make some edits to it, you can go ahead to start your app by running either of these commands in the terminal: | https://medium.com/@haelmj/set-up-your-express-app-modernized-version-11152418b2f8 | ['Michael Ndon'] | 2020-12-26 19:43:52.704000+00:00 | ['Nodejs', 'Expressjs', 'Web Development', 'Backend', 'JavaScript'] |
What’s behind a simple SQL query? | What’s behind a simple SQL query?
A brief behind the scenes examination of what happens when an app/developer runs a SQL query to fetch data from a PostgresDB database. Nikolay Dimolarov Aug 6, 2020·7 min read
Where does meat come from? Photo by Vlad Chețan from Pexels
Just like most kids these days do not seem to know where their meat comes from (hint: not growing on trees but could be from a lab) or why the sky is blue (hint: blue light has shorter, smaller waves), an alarming amount of developers do not (really) know where their data comes from and how it is processed & stored. This article should be a starting point into an engineer’s journey in understanding how that works. That is a very good thing regardless of what framework and no-code platform marketers are trying to teach you. Especially if data really is the new oil (apparently it has been for some years now), it might pay off to see how databases work.
Disclaimer: this is not a SQL tutorial
Without further ado a simple SQL statement to fetch all users from a DB called users:
Disclaimer 2: the point is not to write fancy SQL statements but to showcase what is happening once you do
SELECT * FROM users;
So, how many of you actually know what is happening between pressing enter in your psql terminal and getting back that result?
Fundamentals
In order to understand this one has to start at the beginning — PostgresDB’s architecture.
At the end of the day it is a client/server application written in C++. A client is anyone who accesses the DB e.g. your psql terminal, your Lambda function, JDBC driver etc. and the server is the PGDB backend, which accepts your requests, stores the data etc.
Here is a basic architecture overview of PostgresDB that will be zoomed into throughout the article:
This is kind of oldschool but it still works :) Source: SlideShare
The Path of a Query
There is a pretty good overview of the “path of a query” in the depths of the official PostgresDB documentation. Here is what you should know:
1. Establish connection, transmit query & wait for results
PGDB can handle multiple connections concurrently (through the “postmaster”, see architecture) and for each connection it forks a new process (“postgres”, see architecture) to handle the requests (e.g. SQL statements) of that connection. In other words it is a simple “process per user” client/server model. The postmaster handles the initial connection and authentication and then hands that connection over to a new postgres process. Those processes communicate between each other with a shared memory and semaphores to ensure the overall data integrity even with concurrent connections (remember ACID?)
2. Parsing the query
This consists of 2 stages:
Parse: the PGDB parser utilises the UNIX tools bison and flex as parser and lexer in order to validate if an incoming query string (ASCII text) is a valid SQL query. This is done only with fixed rules about the syntax of SQL without any understanding of the underlying semantics of the query string. The output is a parse tree:
An example for a parse tree for a SELECT statement. Source: interdb.jp
Transform: uses the parser tree to construct a query tree, which contains the semantic interpretation of the query e.g. which tables, data types, operators and functions are referenced. The root of the query trees is the Query data structure defined here. The output:
Same example with the query tree as output. Source: interdb.jp
Mini deep-dive into the Query:
targetList: holds the output of the query and its datatype in this case the columns id and data, which are both integers
rtable: holds the reference to the table
jointree: holds the FROM and WHERE operators
sortClause: holds how data should be sorted
An important note straight from the official docs:
The reason for separating raw parsing from semantic analysis is that system catalog lookups can only be done within a transaction, and we do not wish to start a transaction immediately upon receiving a query string. The raw parsing stage is sufficient to identify the transaction control commands (BEGIN, ROLLBACK, etc), and these can then be correctly executed without any further analysis. Once we know that we are dealing with an actual query (such as SELECT or UPDATE), it is okay to start a transaction if we’re not already in one. Only then can the transformation process be invoked.
3. The Rewrite
PGDB’s rewrite system uses the query tree as input and performs transformations based on rules stored in its system catalogs that can be applied to the query tree. The output is again a query tree. A good example is the realization of views (virtual tables) where the rewrite system rewrites the user query to access the original tables in the view’s definition instead of the view’s alias.
A comprehensive example on how the rule system works for views can be found here.
4. The Query Plan
The planner/optimizer uses the rewritten query tree from the last step to create the optimal/cheapest (=fastest/most efficient) execution plan for the query — the query plan. The optimizer looks at all possible paths to execute the query. Unless the statement has a large number of joins exceeding the geqo_treshold where looking at all possibilities is not computationally feasible. In that case a Generic Query Optimizer is used instead.
Same example with a query plan/plan tree. Source: interdb.jp
The example in the diagram above shows a simple example where the executor has to do a sequential scan of the table tbl_a followed by a sort.
You can check your query plan by typing EXPLAIN in front of your query:
EXPLAIN SELECT (...)
5. The Executor
The official documentation explains it as clearly as one could:
The executor recursively steps through the plan tree and retrieves rows in the way represented by the plan. The executor makes use of the storage system while scanning relations, performs sorts and joins, evaluates qualifications and finally hands back the rows derived.
The executor is used to evaluate all 4 basic SQL query types SELECT, INSERT, DELETE and UPDATE. You can find more details on the executor’s steps for each query type here.
Bonus: GPU Acceleration
There are actually tools out there like PG Strom for GPU acceleration especially for the query optimizer and executor as shown in this diagram:
Again kind of old school but what’s not to like? :) Source: SlideShare
This is not something that was tested for the article but it might inspire you to check out what is out there as this seems to be a pretty cool technology.
Memory
OK. Now you know (1) what happens when you connect to a PGDB instance and (2) how SQL queries are parsed, optimized and executed. The only thing that is missing is how the data is stored to cover the (very) basics of how modern* databases work.
*You can take “modern” with a grain of salt given how old PostgresDB is but it is still very widely used and it is one of the main relational databases in use today.
There is a great explanation of this topic here, so below is just a brief summary.
(Very) High level overview of the memory architecture of PostgresDB. Source: severalnines.com
There are 2 types of memory:
1. Local memory
It is used by each postgres backend process. This memory is allocated by each process for query processing and consists of:
temp_buffers: storing temp tables by executor
work_mem: used by executor for joins etc.
maintenance_work_mem: maintenance ops like REINDEX
2. Shared memory
It is allocated when the PGDB server starts and is used by all backend processes to ensure data integrity (remember the beginning of the article?) This is also the memory that the backend process interfaces with — it does not normally interface directly with the persistent storage. This shared memory consists of:
Shared buffer pool: where pages within tables and indexes are loaded into
WAL buffer: Postgres has a write ahead log i.e. a transactional log making sure no data is lost due to server failure. WAL data is stored in the WAL buffer before being transferred to persistent storage.
Commit log: holds all transactional states as a part of the concurrency control mechanism
You can tune these values and how much memory is allocated to them to increase the performance of your database. Even more information on the utilities for each part of the memory can be found here.
Bringing it together/What about persistent storage?
What happens in the end? How is data being persisted? The executor can read/write from/to tables and indexes in the database through the buffer manager, which can access data from the persistent storage by adding it to the shared buffer pool.
Summary
By now you should have a basic understanding of the inner-workings of one of the most popular databases! At the end of the day you are just interfacing with a very smart C++ application — how cool is that? Hopefully this removes some of the stigma away from the “databases are complicated”. Maybe it will even inspire you to dig deeper and understand how you can optimize your applications by understanding better how your data is stored — by far and large one of the biggest bottlenecks in modern software engineering.
Sources: | https://towardsdatascience.com/whats-behind-a-simple-sql-query-c78e3ded8321 | ['Nikolay Dimolarov'] | 2020-08-07 16:37:56.901000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Postgres', 'Relational Databases', 'Data', 'Sql'] |
On Happiness | Sometimes I feel like I cannot omit myself at all
Like there are clots in my bloodstream
Like my pores are blocked with thick sludge.
Sometimes my brain feels like it’s been dropped in sand
like an iPhone
And my neurotransmitters just won’t conduct electricity.
Sometimes my thoughts are so unclean I need a scalding shower
Like my lungs are seeping tar
Like the seams of my veins will only reseal if melted
Sometimes my nails don’t feel strong enough to shovel the decay of indecision
from my skin.
Sometimes I feel the things I never got to say
Like my vocal chords had rusted through
Like my amylase had turned toxic and burnt holes through my face
Sometimes unspoken words bounce around my skull
like windows screensavers
And my saliva leaks in thick, claggy streams from my pried jaws.
There are times I am unhappy.
***
I have always thought of very broad, blanket desires when tossing coins into wishing wells. “I wish to be truly happy, one day… I wish to be shown true happiness… I wish for those I love to find happiness.” I always hope for the same things. My earliest memory of a wishing well was outside the National Gallery of Victoria, as a child. I was very careful that day, to keep my wish a secret. I tucked it neatly in my mind; under my mousy brown braids and my small red ribbon. That day, I wore my favourite little red swing dress over a snug white skivvy. Winter, 2005. My family had taken me to the Dutch Master’s exhibition. I remember running my hand through the water wall; liquid dancing at my fingertips. I flipped a gold coin into the fountain, scrunched my eyes, shut and wished.
***
Just like Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer and Pieter Brueghel, you are an artist. Your life is art. Your existence is the carefully crafted and refined expression of your experiences, values and beliefs. I think it is important to dismiss the notion that happiness alone is the key to life. As I age, my grasp on what it means to feel alive is evolving. I am dismissing the notion that happiness is the epitome of human existence. We would not have art if we did not open, about our struggles and understandings. Humanity’s greatest romances are not emptily smooth and happy. Shakespeare’s’ greatest works were horror romance and tragedy. We must romanticise our lives; our coffees, our commute to work, each sunset- to avoid a dull mundane. The thought that the fullness of our lives is solely based on how happy we are leaves us with dangerous and unattainable expectations. It’s okay to not be happy. I do not mean romanticise mental unwellness; but to dismiss the notion that happiness is always critical. Obsessively striving for happiness can leave us feeling as though we are doing something wrong or falling short. It seems that we have programmed ourselves into believing emotions other than happiness are personal failures. However, eudemonia does not come from a dilute, lukewarm, “happiness”; it comes from a flourishing life, compiled of moral virtue, practical wisdom, passionate experience and great understanding and the hunger to understand. We have a whole spectrum of emotion to experience. To only strive for happiness is linear and limiting. Would you want to look at thousands of years’ worth of the same soft lemon coloured painting? Or, would you prefer to consume the intense creations of Vincent Van Gogh and David Foster Wallace? For the same reasons we break away from lullabies, to the work of Beethoven. Non-conformity and unhappiness are quintessential in creating a non-linear masterpiece from our human experience.
“Calm seas may bring you peace, but storms are where you’ll find your power”- Spirit Daughter.
2. If someone was asked to describe me, and the first word that sprung to mind was “nice”, I would be disappointed. Similarly, if the only word that sprung to mind to describe the most important days of my life was “happy”, I would be disappointed. Perhaps, in these cases one would benefit from building a more accurate vocabulary. When I think about the liveliest moments of my time on earth, I think of passion, pride, infatuation, devastation, romance and pain. Looking back on your richest experiences, do you think of earth shuddering concerts, intense romances and your breakthroughs/ accomplishments; does your mouth sting with the memory of homemade ouzo and dancing naked on top of coffee tables? Is your brain branded with a certain humans’ irises and do your ears bleed with the sleepy voice of your loved ones? Or, do you hold most dear the quiet, comfortable nights you spent in bed, watching Netflix and eating the popcorn you ordered from Hoyts on Uber Eats? “Emotion, in my view, is the “awareness of self-in-circumstance,” a condition that helps persons realize their possibilities in situations. Emotions are “constructions” or “productions” assembled and maintained by both physical and symbolic patterns. They reflect different kinds of levels of awareness and, indeed, are built upon the more basic forms of recognizing-and-responding that other creatures have. The different words we use to describe our emotions — and there are hundreds of these — express those levels and subtleties of assessment. Happiness and sadness are not our most basic forms of awareness. Much more fundamental are the feelings that attend acts of “noticing,” perceiving some discrepancy or change in an environment. We live between latitudes of boredom and anxiety and experience feelings like interest and surprise. There are also the feelings that come from “evaluating,” where we apply personally held standards to what we’ve noticed. By those standards — cognitive, moral, aesthetic, and practical — we judge occurrences to be “good” and “bad.” At times, we are content with what is going on; at other times we are dissatisfied, even disgusted. However, these feelings of propriety — or of their opposite, “trouble-sensing”– are not equivalent to happiness.” (Hendrix, T. (2016). The happiness Cult).
Oscar Wilde once said “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
3. Happiness can be synthesised. Synthesised happiness is created when we don’t get what we actually wanted; synthesised happiness is what Ringo Star’s blindsided replacee created when he said he was happier he never got to tour with the Beatles, after they blew up. Similarly, happiness can be manufactured by ripping bongs from a gatorbeuge all day, with a bag of Doritos, in a Frankston South back yard. This addiction to an emotional façade of cheap, artificial and somewhat empty comfortability and happiness can evoke addition to stimulus (or, over stimulus). The modern-day emphasis on the supposed critical nature of happiness encourages false serotonin highs through often antisocial behaviour including drug, alcohol, sex, gambling and social media abuse. However, we rationally value natural happiness over synthesised happiness. Because, happiness alone is not always the measure of a good life. Instead of undergoing a practical journey towards a purposeful and rich life- the over stimulating spectrum of choice and freedom available to us often leads us to building our sense of identity, belonging and livelihood on weak foundations of quick and short-term happiness. If we do not see immediate results of the actions we take in attempts to achieve purpose, we often give up. It is difficult to build a sense of self-importance in our communities if we spend significant portions of our lives in “non-places”. Non-places being a concept developed by the French anthropologist, Marc Auge, to describe spaces of “transience, where humans remain anonymous and that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as places”- ie: clubs, work places with high turn overs (some hospitality jobs, call centers, strip clubs etc), gambling facilities and the social media realm. This behaviour of seeking happiness and validation from platforms and places which are not based in communal reality is counterproductive. It is critical to persevere through difficult emotions and situations, in order to progress in ones’ journey towards building own esteem and the sense of worthiness.
4. “Ruthlessness is a surprising bedfellow to scientific success.” (Ross, P. (2013). Isaac Newton: Was He a Jerk Due to Asperger’s?). Let’s talk leadership. Think Gordon Ramsay. Actually, maybe don’t think Gordon Ramsay. Think Winston Churchill: suffered debilitating depression yet one of the greatest leaders and statesmen of all time. Josef Stalin: although a complete megalomaniac, a very powerful leader. There is a trend of anti-happiness in strong leadership and achievement. When you are happy, you are comfortable- so, there is no thirst for further accomplishments. To achieve, you need to sense something was wrong, lacking or not achieved; you need to sense that something needs changing. So, fuck contentment. You cannot feel full, without first feeling hungry. When you are discontent you are uncomfortable; the contrary to happiness; the fuel for hunting. Those who make great changes take the largest steps from comfort to pursue the constant and hopefully unattainable quest towards contentment.
5. “Happiness is a prison… …Happiness is the most insidious prison of all… You’re afraid because you can feel freedom closing in upon you. You’re afraid because freedom is terrifying.” — Alan Moore, V for Vendetta. The admittance of unhappiness is the acknowledgement of your call to action, to believe in and respect yourself. Oftentimes, being bound in an unhappy situation lets us feel a lack of accountability for our own happiness or lack thereof; we delegate the responsibility of our feelings to the situation we feel trapped by. To become aware of your wants and needs can be difficult, as opposed to naively shying away from the elements of your life which are not serving you. Discomfort can therefore be revolutionary. It is imperative on our journey of fulfillment to value and generate original thoughts; to break away from cultural, religious or societal expectations which do not support our best interests. This deranged focus on positive thinking often pushes us away from taking responsibility and control of our lives; the environments we belong to and the choices we make. In this way, happiness can act as a prison; chaining us within the familiarity and one minded direction of what we find mind numbingly comfortable.
6. Freedom is generally more valued on an individual level than short term happiness. I’m sure we have all seen a zombie apocalyptic film- or show, like Westworld- in which all authoritarian structure is abolished and humans run rogue, acting however they primitively desire; murdering, raping and stealing. While I have spent many classes day dreaming about where I would hide in a zombie apocalypse (generally an iron barred portable in Mount Erin’s F block), I hope we never end up in a situation like that. Because, if everyone was able to live out all their dirty, antisocial fantasies in their pursuit for happiness and (the hope of) satisfaction, our society would obviously not function. In civilisation we help each other to function. While I also daydreamed about the joy I would feel in setting fire to my high school, it unfortunately is deemed antisocial, in our society. I would like to say my senses of ethics and morality are why that school is still standing but I feel more so that I did not want to become a convicted and detained arsonist… There are concepts we generally value more than happiness, on an individual level. Yet, as a culture, we compulsively speak of happiness and positivity as though it is the epitome of human experience. We all measure the good of our lives subjectively- because, there are many ways of living a worthy life. Hendrix also explores this in his blog post. Hendrix explains modern day society’s default understanding of happiness is often based around “short term and frequently self-centered fascinations” as opposed to previous generations who grew up more often basing their happiness around their ability to “maintain themselves, their families and their communities.” Hendrix speaks of happiness as a social construct which is highly malleable, in society. We also (generally) make willing sacrifices to said personal happiness, for the betterment and functionality of society.
***
I have always thought of very broad, blanket desires when throwing coins into wishing wells. Always wishing to be happy. And as always, I was very careful on that winter day in 2005, to keep my wish a secret. I tucked it neatly in my mind; under my mousy brown braids and my small red ribbon. I didn’t want to jinx it. But now I want to jinx that wish. For if happiness is all I ever wanted, all these years of growth and craft and evolution would have been a waste and I could have simply continued kicking back with those nacho supreme Doritos in Frankston South (they were good).
***
Sometimes I feel like I cannot omit myself, but
sometimes I feel like I can.
Like there are seeds in my bloodstream
Like my pores are bursting with new growth
Sometimes my brain is an overflowing greenhouse
And my neurotransmitters are an irrigation system
crafted to mechanical perfection
Sometimes my thoughts are so pure they blossom from my eye cavities
so fast I cannot catch all of the petals n my palms
Like my lungs are home to roses
and my heart bleeds creativity, when it brushes their thorns
Sometimes when I sit in the sun I feel buttery
like I’m oozing sunflower oil from my skin
Sometimes I package the things I never got to say
in little blueberries
Like my sister and I could throw them at strangers
from a balcony, during sunset
There are times I am happy.
__________________________________________
WORDS: TAMARA CLARK | https://medium.com/@tamaraclark/on-happiness-ca97a0275b66 | ['Tamara Clark'] | 2019-03-08 01:26:53.241000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Psychology', 'Happiness', 'Thoughts', 'Positivity'] |
Who is Brandon Richardson? | He’s known as Brandon Quantavius Richardson, a military veteran who turn into entertainment and listed himself as an actor.
He was born to Kenneth Smith and Bernice Richardson (Green) on September 23, 1984. He has served two war tours in Iraq, before he and his fellow soldiers was ambush. An IED (improvised explosive device) which took out his convoy, killing three and injuring him by the effect of the explosion.
Richardson recovered from his injuries and left the military behind. He studied business at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida before he pursued acting. Graduated with an bachelor degree in business management, he took on numerous jobs.
Before landing a cameo role in the Mike Jones documentary movie, “The American Dream”. He also played a role in the reality show, VH1 Tough Love (series) along appearing in numerous television shows like LA Ink, Keeping Up With Kardashians and Bad Girls Club with all was filmed in Miami.
Richardson has a few credits under near his belt in the entertainment industry. He was cast in Horrible Boss 2, The Heat, and Jurassic World just to name a few. Even feature in a Gatorade commercial, entitled “Nightmares” featuring NBA stars Kevin Durant and Dwyane Wade.
Richardson has verified social medias, which his Twitter has 33,000 followers and 20,000 followers on Instagram.
He has one child, named Princeton Cartier Gates-Richardson which he has posted on his social media platforms.
Currently he is living in Miami, and has open a couple of business venues. | https://medium.com/@billparish/who-is-brandon-richardson-3d2d544bc073 | ['Bill Parish'] | 2021-07-25 17:59:19.204000+00:00 | ['Celebrity', 'Film', 'Media', 'TV'] |
Morpheus Labs and Tiny Island Productions (TIP) signs a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) exploring the possibilities of entering the Metaverse realm. | Morpheus Labs and Tiny Island Productions (TIP) signs a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) exploring the possibilities of entering the Metaverse realm. Morpheus Labs Dec 30, 2021·4 min read
Morpheus Labs is pleased to announce the signing of Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Tiny Island Productions (TIP). The signing of MOU signifies that both Morpheus Labs and Tiny Island Productions (TIP) will support one another in marketing related activities when appropriate; both parties will also explore collaboration in the blockchain solution development such as metaverse based on the solutions and products offered by both parties.
This opens new opportunities for both Morpheus Labs and TIP to tap on each other’s strengths for their business development and progress ahead. There are many opportunities for both parties to leverage each other’s strengths, especially in a world where blockchain, metaverse and gaming collide. Furthermore, the bi-partisan MoU also includes a common valued partner; HUAWEI CLOUD Singapore.
Tiny Island Productions (TIP) is a computer graphic (CG) animation production company based in Singapore, with over 19 years of animation experience and specializing in both CG and stereoscopic 3D productions. Some notable award-winning projects of Tiny Island Productions are Dream Defenders television series and Ben 10: Destroy All Aliens, which attained the prestigious ‘Best 3D Animated Program’ category at the 2012 Asian Television Awards.
Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Island_Productions
Tiny Island Productions has indicated interest in venturing into the metaverse and had also signed a MOU with a leading global provider of information and communication technology infrastructure, Huawei. TIP will be able to leverage on HUAWEI CLOUD’s resources to support and create their immersive virtual experience.
Tiny Island Productions (TIP) will also be able to branch out to the different metaverse applications to meet their business objective with the versatile and flexible Morpheus Labs (ML) SEED Sandbox. ML SEED offers a security mechanism for running separate programs to minimize system failures and/or software vulnerabilities’ from spreading.
Having both ML SEED and HUAWEI CLOUD, TIP will be able to pivot and navigate with ease around the various blockchain networks to meet their metaverse requirements using ML SEED while having access to world-class cloud technology by Huawei.
Therefore, allowing TIP to pioneer and increase their competitive advantage and leave a digital footprint in the up-and-coming exciting Web3.0 era.
David (left), founder of Tiny Island Productions together with Pei Han (right), CEO of Morpheus Labs after the signing of the MOU in December 2021.
This MOU with Tiny Island Productions is a testament that Morpheus Labs is not only able to cater to customers in the Financial Services Industry (FSI), but also leading companies in the media and entertainment industry with its core product, ML SEED. Companies can experience the wonders and simplicity of blockchain exploration, in one place, just by using ML SEED.
“This unique opportunity between Tiny Island Productions (TIP) and Morpheus Labs is second nature. We (Morpheus Labs) are in the blockchain realm, crossing paths with TIP whose strengths lie in animation, concept design which is essential in the metaverse (blockchain) realm. This accelerates both parties’ agenda with mutual respect as both parties continue to make strides in the metaverse (gaming) realm. Our MLSeed platform and TIP expertise, who work with renowned international clients, is a good match in the metaverse space.”
Pei Han, CEO of Morpheus Labs
“We are very grateful to have this relationship with Morpheus Labs. They have been a great advisor. They will definitely be a great help in building our Metaverse project. Morpheus Labs solution, the MLSeed platform is a good tool in aiding in the development of our Metaverse quest in the blockchain realm. Furthermore, the team at Morpheus Labs and Tiny Island Production share common partners like HUAWEI CLOUD and the macro goals are aligned with each other”
David Kwok, CEO and founder of Tiny Island Production
Providing the convenience and a more efficient allocation of scarce resources. Cost saving can be achieved by utilizing ML SEED platform instead of sourcing for various solutions by different providers to explore which solution would best suit the prospective companies.
Morpheus Labs is thrilled and is looking forward to the partnership with Tiny Island Productions. This exciting collaboration opens many new doors of opportunity for both companies and increases each other’s competitive advantage. Morpheus Labs is confident that their core product, ML SEED will continue to attract other high-profile companies and establish many more exciting partnerships.
—
Important links:
Tiny Island: https://www.tinyisland.net/
Morpheus Labs: www.morpheuslabs.io | https://medium.com/@morpheuslabs_io/morpheus-labs-and-tiny-island-productions-signs-a-memorandum-of-understanding-3a33e16d0780 | ['Morpheus Labs'] | 2021-12-30 12:33:00.720000+00:00 | ['Metaverse', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Business', 'Nft'] |
Draw a Colorful Coronavirus with Matplotlib | Most people use Matplotlib for data visualization, but YOU can also use it to create graphics, especially if you have time for a new hobby.
Complete with a huge color palette (including CSS color names) and a myriad of markers, Matplotlib provides great value for an aspiring artist.
We will create a crude imitation of the cross-section view of the virus, shown on the right in this diagram:
The code is a few dozen lines of Python which can run in Jupyter notebook. I am using (jupyter==1.0.0, matplotlib 3.1.1, numpy 1.17.2) with Python 3.7.4. The resulting image is all the way at the bottom.
%matplotlib inline
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np # Overall setup. Remove all labels. Use black background.
bgcolor = (0,0,0)
fig = plt.figure(facecolor=bgcolor, figsize=(10,10))
ax = fig.add_subplot(111, projection='polar')
ax.set_facecolor(bgcolor)
ax.grid(False)
ax.set_yticklabels([])
ax.set_xticklabels(['']) # Designate set of angles at which to place markers
delta = 0.01 # smaller delta for higher resolution
rads = np.arange(0, (2 * np.pi), delta) # Overall parameters
radius = 7
squiggliness = 12
rna_w = 1.8
env_r = radius + rna_w * 1.2
hema_space = 7 # spacing (more means longer HE dimers)
n_hema = 20 # number of hemagglutinin-esterase (HE) dimers # Loop through each angle and add markers per component
for radian in rads:
rna = radius + rna_w * np.sin(squiggliness * radian) # sinusoidal genetic material shape
ax.plot(radian, rna, '.', color='fuchsia')
ax.plot(radian, env_r, 'o', color='crimson') # envelope
hema_rad = (radian * 100 // n_hema) / (100 // n_hema) # angle at which to place HE dimer
displacement = (radian - hema_rad) * hema_space
ax.plot(hema_rad, env_r + displacement, 'v', color='deepskyblue') spike_rad = hema_rad - delta * n_hema / 2 # spike glycoprotein goes in between HE dimers
ax.plot(spike_rad, env_r + displacement, '.', color='gold')
ax.plot(spike_rad, env_r + hema_space * n_hema * delta + displacement, 's', markersize=10, color='gold') # Add the darker red color inside envelope
ax.add_artist(plt.Circle((0,0), 9, color='maroon', transform=ax.transData._b)) plt.show()
The result has a few flaws, and may be rejected from the MoMA, but is probably good enough to become motel bathroom wall art. | https://medium.com/@lindagcai/draw-a-colorful-coronavirus-with-matplotlib-2f7c96b927b2 | ['Linda Cai'] | 2020-03-15 20:44:13.195000+00:00 | ['Outbreak', 'Art', 'Matplotlib', 'Python', 'Polar'] |
UX Lessons from Pornhub: Insights from an NSFW Website | Photo by Max Rovensky on Unsplash
Inspiration can come from unusual places. In the case of this blog, it came from PornHub.com’s (<- click at your own risk depending on your company’s blocked sites… and, if you’re at home, be sure the kids aren’t standing in the room) outstanding website taxonomy and user experience. Allow me to explain. Please.
One of Red Door Interactive’s clients has a particular audience segment they want to reach — millennial men, at its most vague — and in an effort to find them online where they’re most, ahem, attuned to visual stimulation, RDI recently explored advertising on Pornhub.
Make no bones about it: the Internet and pornography have a symbiotic relationship. Per data collected by digital intelligence platform Similarweb, Adult Websites are the sixth most visited website category, accounting for 5.3% of web traffic between September 2018 and August 2019, ahead of categories like Financial Services & Banking, Games, and Sports. Pornhub itself is the 22nd most trafficked site in the world, 11th most trafficked in the United States, and the second most trafficked adult website (Top honors go to www.xvideos.com. Again, be wary of clicking).
Moreover, the Internet grew up with pornography. The first computerized image was of a woman in pin-up style, and pornographic web board communities were early pioneers in streaming video, live video feeds, and online credit card transactions, including anti-fraud measures like matching a user’s IP address to the credit card address to deter theft. More to the point of this blog, though, is that pornographic websites continue to innovate and refine web UX, which you can see simply by visiting these sites. Let’s dive in.
Were you to visit Pornhub, (I shouldn’t need to tell you — again — that the site is NSFW; office URL restrictions made this blog a real chore to write) you’d be immediately presented with an extraordinarily immersive sensory experience that could be quite overwhelming. Sidenote: shout out to www.fotor.com for its quick, easy photo pixelating editor. But if you have an inkling to your personal sexual interests and proclivities, the site is incredibly easy to navigate. Prominent predictive search gets you into the search results and content quickly with even just two or three keystrokes. Results include video titles, actor profiles, and content channels, letting you quickly find the content you’re interested in.
If you’re feeling more adventurous or exploratory, you can elect to navigate the site by content genre or category, with 90 categories from which to choose. Selecting the Category option in the home page’s top navigation bar takes you to a tile-based menu of content genres. Again, the focus is on visual immersion rather than a dropdown list of category names. Pro tip: image-based navigation is more visually titillating than text-based lists. I won’t include a blurry photo of the category tiles; just use your imagination or your web browser.
Pornhub clearly understands its users’ behaviors and intent and makes video discovery a key element of the initial navigation. Hovering over the Videos category provides you with the options to choose from trending videos, those that are most viewed over specified amounts of time, highest rated by other users, or, you can click into curated video channels, amongst other options. You can also see what searches are trending if you’re looking for your own search inspiration.
Beyond design and information architecture, UX also encompasses taking user feedback into account. Here Pornhub excels. Its feedback forum fosters the opportunity for users to provide suggestions for new features and refinements of current ones. Pornhub community managers frequently respond to posts with insights about advanced search and filter features:
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
Design with user intent and content type in mind. Pornhub makes it easy to quickly find desired content via its predictive search functionality or to explore and discover new content based on what’s trending or what genre a user seeks.
Organize your content in ways useful to you and your users. This applies both to onsite navigation and information architecture. Pornhub uses its intricate tag system to organize content in meaningful ways and create links across videos, also making it easy for users to find their preferred content pieces and types. On your own site, think about how you could taxonomically organize content in ways that are both intuitive and navigable for your users, but also useful to your own site infrastructure.
Use user behavior and interest to add value to their experience. In Pornhub’s world, it’s fairly safe to assume that a user watches the types of content they find appealing. Therefore, Pornhub uses this to continue to stream related content, constructing playlists of similar content for its users. Doing so allows the site to act as something of a pornographic guiding light, adding value to their onsite experience.
Listen to your users. Your site audience knows what they want, and they can have useful input in design innovations and tweaks. Solicit their feedback and make a good faith effort to incorporate their best ideas. You’ll find that this fosters user loyalty and an investment in your site on their end.
There is good web UX inspiration to be found across all genres and site types, and pornography websites have been driving the UX train for decades. Hopefully, I’ve distilled the lessons from my discovery here so that you don’t have to, and you can incorporate more of these principles in your own web design. And, if you’ve noticed any other stellar performers (pun intended) in the UX realm, leave us a comment below so we can check them out. | https://medium.com/@designthad/ux-lessons-from-pornhub-insights-from-an-nsfw-website-a0825c43a8e6 | ['Arun Varghese Kurian'] | 2019-10-17 05:59:29.802000+00:00 | ['Design', 'UX', 'User Experience Design', 'Website', 'User Research'] |
Discussing the Potential Health Risks of Sitting Down All Day | Discussing the Potential Health Risks of Sitting Down All Day
Sitting down all day — is it the new killer born from the deadly legacy of 2020? It’s not that humans have just begun to sit all day long since the world has been in lockdown, but, within six months, we can see the drastic effects it has had on our children’s health and wellbeing. ReadWrite Follow Sep 23, 2020 · 6 min read
Having to stay home from school and not having the regular peer interaction that is so important to their social development, they sit indoors and do their school work, unable to go outside to run around the playground. Then they play video games and watch TV.
The Research
We might be able to ignore the daily toll the sedentary lifestyle takes on ourselves day after day, but for our children? In the famous words of one Sue Sylvester from Glee, “It will not stand!” Take a moment to let it sink in, perhaps stand up while you think about it. — The research results are in.
Linked Illnesses
The list of illnesses directly related to the act of sitting down for prolonged periods is not a conspiracy theory. No one is sitting quietly on the medical facts; they are released to the public, so why are we not personally changing our lifestyles to avoid heart disease, stroke, and cancer risks, dementia, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, obesity, deep vein thrombosis, varicose veins, muscle and bone deterioration, nerve damage, mental illness, and, ultimately, premature death?
Are these not scary enough reasons to get off the couch and out for a walk? Horrible Histories, the comedy sketch television show, has a segment called ‘Stupid Deaths’ which is quite entertaining in a cringe-worthy way. Could sitting down for long intervals every day be the ultimate stupid death? It does seem like a dumb way to die. Extreme only for its pedestrian and preventable, even voluntary nature.
Leading Signs
And what of the physical signs leading up to these deadly medical conditions? The pinched nerves, numbness or tingling in the legs, feet, and hands, poor blood circulation, acute stress and anxiety, increased abdominal fat and weight gain, lethargy and muscle weakness, backaches and muscle tension. Maybe we recognize some of these in our lives already?
Like that our glute muscles just aren’t firing anymore when we walk up the stairs, the climb makes us puff, and the hips ache after walking over the road to the café for our morning coffee. Or, maybe the pants are a tight fit or don’t even fit, and come to think of it, the GP mentioned high cholesterol, blood pressure, or blood sugar levels at our last physical check-up? What’s our wake-up call going to be, and how will we react when we get that call?
Reaction
It is time to react to the news that prolonged sitting leads to serious health risks and death. The human form is naturally designed to stand up and be mobile, and it doesn’t like that we choose to sit more often than not, which it’s clearly showing us by acting out against our sedentary choices. Knowing our body’s ill-mannered, physiological reaction to these choices, how will we react to avoid developing a diminished quality of life, or, worse, becoming one of the ‘stupid death’ statistics?
What steps can we take to mitigate the risks of developing one of the above potentially deadly diseases and noxious conditions?
Pro-action
Forming a plan to be proactive in the prevention of serious medical conditions for ourselves and especially for our children is the first of several steps we should take to establish a healthier way to live. What might that plan look like?
Begin with determining why, when, and where we sit down, then cut back on each instance, even if it is just incremental, simple changes to start. Taking forward steps in the right direction is good, and we naturally walk one step at a time. We get to where we are going by taking continuous individual steps, one after another.
Work and School
So, traditionally, children sit down to study and we sit down to work. We may not be able to stand up all of the time, but we can arrange to stand while working. Stand-up and adjustable desks have been trialed in the workplace for several years now, and we are beginning to see positive health results come from those trials. Not that it takes years to reap benefits.
Some short-term results are increased energy, more calories burned, relief from sciatic pain and other musculoskeletal soreness, and better posture. Long-term benefits are the prevention of disease and the unraveling of the knots in our body caused by sitting down all day at work.
If children are unable to stand at school while doing their classroom tasks, they might be able to stand while doing their homework. If we consider investing in a stand-up desk for our home office space then the whole family can take advantage of its benefits.
Meals
Other times we sit down, are for our meals, so another way to cut back on sitting is to stand up while we eat. We can trade the neglected dining table in for a cool bar lean and start standing for our meals at home.
Often, when weight-conscious people are revamping their nutrition habits, we are told to make sure we sit down to eat. This is primarily so we take our time to eat healthily and think about what we are eating, which we should still do, but sitting down is not actually the necessary component.
Arranging walking lunches at work can be a great alternative to eating in the lunchroom, and definitely better than sneaking a bite at our desks. At least with kids, they tend to play after they eat their lunch at school. Adults, not so much.
But we might be able to go to the gym at lunch for a quick workout, or even a walk on the treadmill if it’s raining outside. If not, perhaps we can run the stairs in the office building.
Commuting
There isn’t much we can do about standing during our commute to and from the office unless we are taking the tube or other crowded public transport. A car is a sit-down zone, but if the distance between work and home is close enough, we can arrange to cycle there and back at least some of the time.
Watching TV
At the end of the day, or all day on the weekends (yeah, right!), the couch calls us by name. Again, yet again, we sit down to binge-watch our favorite TV shows or a movie marathon before going off to bed. No more!
Stand up and do some lunges and squats. Involve the whole family in a nightly physical challenge while watching TV, provided no one pants too loudly, or just turn up the volume.
The bottom line
Hours upon hours are spent sitting down on our backsides, probably more than the UK adult’s estimated nine-hour daily average. The results of our sedentary ways are catching up to us with deadly consequences. We can’t let it get the better of us. Be proactive and make a wellbeing plan. Choose to stand up and move around rather than sit down and be still. Our bodies will thank us for it. So will our children.
Image Credit: rgstudio; pexels | https://medium.com/readwrite/discussing-the-potential-health-risks-of-sitting-down-all-day-25bb351bb492 | [] | 2020-09-23 16:53:01.474000+00:00 | ['Risks', 'Health'] |
ネットワークデザインスタジオ卒業・修了制作展2016 | Lecturer of CSIS at the University of Tokyo / Social Geography / Participatory GIS / Neogeography / Volunteered Geographic Information / Qualitative GIS
Follow | https://medium.com/tosseto-info/%E3%83%8D%E3%83%83%E3%83%88%E3%83%AF%E3%83%BC%E3%82%AF%E3%83%87%E3%82%B6%E3%82%A4%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B9%E3%82%BF%E3%82%B8%E3%82%AA%E5%8D%92%E6%A5%AD-%E4%BF%AE%E4%BA%86%E5%88%B6%E4%BD%9C%E5%B1%952016-c03aefa6073c | ['Toshikazu Seto'] | 2017-02-07 14:56:48.723000+00:00 | ['Conference'] |
MAP Protocol: The Future of Cross-Chain — by Jay, Marketing Director AMA Recap | At 4 o’clock in the afternoon on August 19th, MAP community welcomed the guest Jay, Marketing Director of MAP Protocol, sharing the topic: The Future of Cross-Chain
The AMA started with sharing with the community on MAP Protocol new revamp websites and cross-chain solution upgrades. MAP Protocol also has just revamped our new official website, from ‘Chain-to-chain Interoperation Protocol’ to our new slogan ‘Blockchain Assets Freeway’.
The following was recorded of the guest sharing:
Qn: Following the boom of DeFi development, we have seen security breaches on DeFi, for instance, hacking incidents which caused eye opening uneasiness across the crypto space. First incident involving Chainswap, suffered an exploit resulting in $8mil worth of losses. After Chainswap, Anyswap made an announcement that the new V3 cross-chain liquidity pools have been affected, resulting in a total loss of 2.4mil USDC and 5.5mil MIM respectively. On 10Aug, Poly Network was hacked and $611mil worth of crypto assets were pilfered off in what it could be the largest DeFi hack in history.
We have seen frequent security breaches/hacks on cross-chain projects, what is your view on this?
Ans: Based on analysis of results shown from recent hacking incidents, firstly, it was due to loopholes found on smart contracts and in the protocol itself. Secondly, the cross-chain private key management was not in place.
The MAP contract is an account without special authority management and is decentralized.
Where mass assets are controlled by a handful of operators, we are building a whole solution in a more trustless and decentralized way. Users’ assets are guarded by transparent and bulletproof smart contracts where the movement of assets can only be triggered by cross-chain messages backed up by valid cryptographic proofs. The verification of the cryptographic proof is based on the light clients maintained by the MAP chain. Using a dedicated blockchain to maintain all the light clients gives MAP protocol the flexibility to integrate necessary features to connect to all kinds of blockchains that might come up.
Let’s describe through an example. To interoperate with Cosmos Hub, following the interchain standards specified in github.com/cosmos/ibc, we are able to build a module for MAP chain to do cross-chain communication, and with the reference to the paper “A Tendermint Light Client” by Braithwaite et al., a light client for Cosmos Hub can be built and maintained.
Qn: As we all know MAP Protocol is a cross-chain based infrastructure layer project and it has been around for more than 2 years. Can you tell us why MAP Protocol chose this cross-chain track? And how does this bring significant impact to the blockchain industry?
Ans: Following the development of blockchain technology, there are many public chain unicorns with large amount of funds in the market. At the meantime, the assets size of these public chains are increasing exponentially every day. However, there is one big problem, they are all built and developed on own their silo chain, assets on different chains cannot be freely exchanged and circulated. Many of the emerging public chains are still lacking in this infrastructure.
Therefore, each public chain needs to introduce assets on other chains into its own public chain through cross-chain, in order to break the information silo between chains.
When there is no cross-chain, users’ assets cannot be interoperable, just like putting money on two islands, and the conversion process is complicated.
First, to deposit the assets of Ethereum into the exchange, sell on exchange and exchange for MATIC tokens, followed by withdrawing MATIC tokens to the Polygon chain and exchange the assets needed through centralized exchange. Only then the user can participate in mining. This process is inefficient and time consuming. Therefore, a cross-chain bridge is needed for direct assets exchange.
Cross-chain, refers to a system that can support transfer of encrypted assets between different blockchains. Cross-chain can be realized through asset migration between all different blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, realizing through interconnection of blockchain. Through cross-chain, two chains with different protocols, rules and governance models can be safely interoperate and exchange assets through a cross-chain bridge.
Qn: Sounds great!! Decentralized cross-chain solution seems to be the next big thing! Can you share with us more about the new version of MAP Protocol?
Ans: Okay. First and foremost, what is MAP Protocol? Map Protocol is the ‘Blockchain Assets Freeway’. Map Protocol is a cross-chain bridging protocol tool that aims to be a secure end-to-end solution for any blockchain to move assets freely. To fulfil this role, MAP protocol is built on three layers simultaneously.
Qn: Can you tell us more about these three layers of MAP protocol?
Ans: Firstly, the MAP Chain. A dedicated blockchain served as the infrastructure freeway connecting all kinds of blockchains to break the barriers.
Secondly, the MAP Assets layer where all kinds of assets are mapped to MAP chain in a non-custodial style via trustless smart contract.
Thirdly, the DeFi Application layer that allows all kinds of applications including but not limited to DEXs, games and NFTs can be built with the cross-chain capabilities enabled by the MAP chain and MAP assets.
MAP Protocol’s 3-Layer Structure
You can imagine these three layers as a three-lane highway where first is the MAP chain layer (to swap tokens like Ethereum, COSMO, Polygon and etc), second layer is the Asset Vaults (to swap ERC-20 tokens etc) and third is the DeFi Applications layers (swap through wallets, Telegram, DEXs etc)
Qn: What is the core characteristic of MAP Protocol three layers’ system?
Ans:
1) MAP Chain — Maintaining light client of interested blockchains is the foundation of cross-chain verification.
2) MAP Assets — One-stop boundless assets transfer by wrapping all assets on MAP chain.
3) DeFi Application — Fast trades of NFT tokens in cross-chain decentralized manner and applications can be easily built with the underlying light client and assets vault.
Qn: What is the main key advantages of MAP Protocol now?
Ans: The four main key advantages in MAP cross-chain upgrades are;
1) Decentralized: it is secured by 100+ validators and maintained by thousands of relayers.
2) Trustless: driven only by cryptographic proof other than human decision.
3) Randomness: unbiased on-chain randomness is supported by thousands of relayers.
4) Feeless: nearly-zero fees for cross-chain assets transfer or swap by MAP token compensation.
Qn: What is the new roadmap of MAP Protocol?
Ans: Currently we are in the midst of testnet testing. We hope all of you can participate later on.
Qn: What is the current plan and future plan of MAP Protocol?
Ans: MAP upgrades & launch Relayers
One of the most distinctive features in MAP chain is that the network is maintained by thousands of relayers and secured by 100+ validators in order to achieve distribution of trust and moving towards increasing decentralization. Due to the vital position of the relayers, all relayers in MAP protocol are incentivised by measuring the work completed.
We are launching Relayer very soon. All users will be able to participate and earn high MAP token rewards.
Meaning to say, you as a user can run as a Relayer on MAP Chain, and you will be incentivised with MAP token after complete works done. Yeah😊
Prior to the launch, we will invite 10 persons to be the first 10 relayers as volunteers, starting tomorrow.
We encourage everyone to register and participate, do reach out to our Community Manager if you’re interested to be a relayer on MAP Protocol.
Community Q&A session:
Q1: What are your plans in place for global expansion, are you focusing on only market at this time?
Currently MAP large number of users mainly from Asia. We are expanding our footprint into US and Europe region to cooperate with many of first line media and KOLs etc..
Q2: What is the main difference between the MAP bridge solution and other bridge solutions?
Unlike other inter-blockchain communication projects, where mass assets are controlled by a handful of operators, we are building a whole solution in a more trustless and decentralized way.
1) MAP Protocol solution is more decentralized. It is secured by 100+ staked validators and maintained by 1000+ relayers. This is to preserve the features towards decentralization.
2) On-chain Randomness. Relayers can participate in the on-chain random number generation process by submitting a random number of their own. All random numbers submitted will be merged to forge true on-chain randomness to support various DeFi applications.
Q3: When will the mainnet be completed?
The estimated timeline is in Q4 2021. MAP team will deliver according to the roadmap as planned!
For more information, visit maplabs.io | https://medium.com/@marcopologlobal/map-protocol-the-future-of-cross-chain-by-jay-marketing-director-ama-recap-aae68f73d6a6 | ['Map Protocol'] | 2021-08-23 09:28:25.942000+00:00 | ['Crosschain', 'Map Protocol', 'Blockchain', 'Maps'] |
The Four Noble Truths | The Four Noble Truths
(a)dalailama — Instagram
Life is Dukkha the Buddhists say
Understanding this is the Middle Way
Life is Suffering the Beatniks translated
Reclaiming the gap the Bible created
Dukkha is better said as being Stuck
This is the cause of Life running Amok
Like the Wheel of a Cart which does not roll
It Drags you Aside and you Fight for Control
Our Wheels are that which pesters our Mind
We Want what we Lack or Rid of some Bind
The Roots of the problem are Fear and Desire
They Haunt our Mind or even set it on Fire
The Fear is of Losing what we hold Dear
Desire to Gain what we want to be Near
So we Cling to one and Grasp for the other
These are the Actions that make us Smother
Neither are bad it’s all in how we React
There’s surely a way to stay Sane and Intact
It is Simple they say; just Stop clinging and grasping
Then Life will be Freedom … … Everlasting
Just follow the Path prescribed forthwith
The Eight Fold Path, this is Buddha’s gift | https://medium.com/@monkeno/the-four-noble-truths-5c799a395d30 | ['Monk Enō'] | 2021-02-28 04:43:45.901000+00:00 | ['Rhymes', 'Zendorhymes', 'Buddhism', 'Poetry', 'Dharma'] |
COVID-19: The Cockblock of Closure | 50 WORDS
COVID-19: The Cockblock of Closure
Thrifty Words Theme Challenge #18: Closure
Image by Klaus Hausmann from Pixabay
Humans crave closure. Graduation ceremonies, retirements, and weddings are shared closure events in our lives. Funerals are the ultimate forms of closure. COVID-19 has blocked us from these forms of closure.
And how many long-distance relationships have ended during the COVID-19 quarantine without an opportunity for a final closure fuck? | https://medium.com/the-bad-influence/covid-19-the-cockblock-of-closure-80e1cdd948fb | ['James Knight'] | 2020-12-30 10:01:34.557000+00:00 | ['Thrifty Words Challenge', 'Writing Prompts', 'Closure', 'Covid 19', 'The Bad Influence'] |
Understanding “this” in JavaScript | Function in javascript have properties, Just like javascript Object have properties. And when function get execute, It get the this property
Lets Take a closer look at “this”. this is a special character/keyword in javascript, As we know working with this is little tricky because it can change value when you and you are not expecting
Let see how we can track this
First we check this in global context
When we use this in global context that’s mean its not written inside a function scope. It refers to window object in browsers because window object is the top level global object in browser
console.log("This is: ", this);
It will return the window object in browser
Whenever you create a global variable its added to a property of window object. Let see an example these both methods will work same | https://medium.com/knoldus/understanding-this-in-javascript-9556f24b1eb | ['Knoldus Inc.'] | 2018-02-08 22:18:49.552000+00:00 | ['Angularjs', 'JavaScript', 'HTML', 'Jquery', 'Ajax'] |
Don’t waste your time… | Time is not precious, It is priceless. You always can get back the money you lost, by your efforts. It seems that everything is possible when you have money. But the reality is, you simply can’t get extra “One-minute” by spending all money. It’s the time which makes successful people. Don’t complain you have no capability or money or time, you have manage it wrong and just wasted it.
Everyone has the same 24 hours time frame. Those who utilize the time well, attain success. And those who don’t, have regretting for rest of life. So take your time seriously, it’ll let to reach where you want to go. Don’t waste your time, because later on, you have only regrets, not recovery for losing time.
When you respect your time, you will never waste it
The more you give respect the time, the less you waste it. If you have value for time, then you’ll spend it wisely. All your goals, your actions, your plans you’ll decide accordingly. And that’s a way you can achieve all your goals & desires.
Spend time in the things which lift you upwards
Spend your precious time in learning. In things which add values to your life. Don’t waste your time, just doing things anyway. Do the things which give you understanding. Spend your time with those who learn something valuable. And this all shows you value your time because you spend it for a useful cause.
Make a habit to plan for the next day’s schedule
Everyone here has certain life goals in mind. We can achieve all goals, and there’s no denying. But we need to make sure that we use our time well to achieve that. In order to manage all our actions, we have to plan accordingly, so that we can use our time wisely.
Valuing time: sign of a future leader
Take an example of the leader of any industry, there is one thing common in all. And that is they valued their time, they manage it properly. That’s why there achieve the lead position, stop complaining about your life. They also have the same 24 hours as you, not much or less.
A day with same 24 hours. But they have done something valuable & manage time well.
Time management, itself shows where you’ll in future
Management means to do things happen, in the limit of available resources. Live an economical budget, you can also plan your Daily budget of time. That way you can allocate the work as per specific work hours.
Manage your time and time will manage your future, itself. The things what you are doing right now will be the reason for the future & where you belong.
Time is money. Do you waste your money anyway ??
Do you spend your money on things, which are not useful?? Then why to waste your precious time like that. Remember money can be re-earned, But lapsed time, Gone forever.
Don’t waste your time on things which are not useful, and not beneficial in your life.
Ask your elders about their regret of wasting time
You’ll understand the value of time when you see someone having lifetime regret for not using time well. Ask your elders’ what they have regret in life and they’ll be like,” I have regret for wasting my time on things doing that not useful and sometime i wasted by doing nothing at all..”. At the end they advise you not to repeat the mistake as they did.
If you are in your 20s, make something meaningful in life, plan your career and life accordingly. Because your 20s are the best time in life. Otherwise it’ll be a regret like, i wish i knew this in my 20s like most of others who have waste this precious age of life.
Are you sure you get the opportunity again??
There is no denying that everything has a specific time to do. But that doesn’t mean, we always have to wait for the right time. Seize the moment and get the things done, when you have an opportunity.
Don’t just let that opportunity go, just by thinking that you’ll get the chance later. No, that’s where we make mistakes. Who knows you get that time back again or not.
Don’t think you have a lot of time
The about to make a big mistake when we think that we have enough time and we’ll do it later, But not now. We have a habit to let go of the precious time doing nothing at all. But when we have to do something helpful, we tend to delay it, because we have a belief that we have so much time.
Most of us are having that slave mindset of our negative thought, which control us grab the opportunity we have. And make us believe that we will get this opportunity in future as well, but that’ll not happen.
Set your goals. For a specific time frame
I know you have desires to fulfill, goals to achieve and a reputation to build. All that’s possible, but all because of the managing time well. Having a lot of desires in mind is not a bad thing, But staying lazy with that goal in mind is bad.
So manage your time according to your goals, prioritize your goals as per their needs.
The way you manage your time.
Itself shows how much you value that,
And reflects where you will be in the future.
Originally posted at:
Stop wasting your time: You can never recover that later | https://medium.com/@monkat25/dont-waste-your-time-b0d76a83f3f | ['Monk At'] | 2019-11-21 06:57:12.546000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Lifehacks', 'Learning', '20s', 'Time Management'] |
Scan Business Cards to Excel With BizConnect | With OCR software you can scan business cards to excel effortlessly and quickly. The scanning is done with a high-resolution card scanners or even high-definition scanners depending on the requirement. They can do the scanning in just a few minutes without the need of any special paper for the scanning. There are many OCR software available in the market that can do the scanning to Excel. Converting the scanning to an Excel file is also very easy and simple. Since scanning to Excel involves several steps such as, title removal, elimination of the blank spaces, alignment, and resizing, you will have to do all these tasks again to get an Excel document from the scanned business card.
So, to scan business cards to excel, you must have an OCR program like BizConnect, Onenote or any other good OCR software. Since the OCR software has its own format for the document, using it is easier. There are three ways to scan business cards to excel format. Firstly, you can use OCR software that is based on OCR accuracy. Second, you can use everyone or other OCR applications that have their own OCR format conversion tools. Thirdly, you can export business cards to excel through other OCR programs.
Bizconnect Export business cards to Excel — To export business card to Excel from OCR software, you need to select the file that you want to export, then choose “batch scan.” Then, choose “Fit to Exit” from the drop down menu. You will be prompted for a name, password if necessary. The batch scan should take a minimum of 5 minutes.
Bizconnect — To scan business cards to excel through Bizconnect, you need to download the free version of Bizconnect. Next, download and install the free version on your computer. Open Bizconnect, then click on “Card Scan.” If you are using the full-text option, choose all cards and click “scan.” If you are only using the image option, choose one card at a time and scan it.
Bizconnect Choose output tab — to scan business cards to excel format by using OCR software, you need to choose the tab “output” and choose “file.” In order to view the resulting document in Excel, you need to choose the “table” option. Then, you need to go to “sheets” and click on “table.” In the table, you can choose the appropriate columns for the data that you want to display.
There are many apps to scan business cards to excel file. However, not all of these apps are made for easy use. There are apps for business card scanning and there are also apps that allow you to editable formats. If you are unsure which of these apps you should use, you can hire the experts to help you can use Bizconnect. | https://medium.com/@bizconnectus/scan-business-cards-to-excel-with-bizconnect-d23849a1b02f | [] | 2021-06-17 10:19:17.937000+00:00 | ['Business Cards', 'Free', 'Business Card Reader', 'Readers'] |
⚡️9 ETFs rejected, we DID expect that ! | ⚡️9 ETFs rejected, we DID expect that !
Chainfund weekly report 24/08/2018
Dear Investors,
As of the 24th of August, the share prices of our portfolios are the following: $70 for the Dynamic and $69 for the Extreme.
As mentioned on the last weekly report, around 80% of retail traders were short bitcoin which is actually close to an all-time high. I mentioned that so many short-oriented traders should actually push bigger whales to liquidate them. What happened? Bitmex closed its platform “for maintenance” and the BTC price increased by 7%. I am not saying Bitmex did something bad, I rather say it is really unfortunate… All the technical analysis in the world could have not predicted that move. As a retail trader: never short bitcoin, that’s the best way to lose money. Of course, some may win but a very large majority will lose. Better to split towards a long entry. I am very confident that bitcoin will continue growing..
Chainfund Weekly Reports are communicated to investors prior to publication on Medium
This week, we had 9 ETFs being rejected by the SEC. We did expect that. The market already priced in that as the bitcoin price did not move. Actually it went slightly higher. The only date to be remembered is the 30th of September where I continue to believe that we would see the acceptation of the CBOE & VanEck SolidX ETF. As I mentioned last week, this ETF has two important features: the price of the ETF will be based on the OTC market and not derived from an exchange price (less subject to manipulation) and all the BTC will be insured. The other applications got rejected because of potential bitcoin price manipulating fears. That is not a surprise.
Yes ETF will make things very easy for investors to buy bitcoin. It means that all the wealthy people could easily add one BTC to their portfolio in one single click. But ETF is only a financial product and I believe that while being an important news, there are more important news out there.
In particular I believe that Bakkt is way more important than the ETF approval. This company is supported by Microsoft, Starbucks, BCG (!!!) and so on, this may actually is the biggest bullish news of the year
Bakkt is a platform launched by the New York Stock Exchange’s owner, targeting institutionals to buy, sell, spend and STORE cryptocurrencies, in particular Bitcoin. It is worth noting that that cybersecurity risk is very important in crypto and not everybody (even institutional companies) are not willing to take on that risk. That is where Bakkt is a game changer. There won’t be any cash settlement or margin trading.
To finish, something rather distracting also happened this week on Twitter. People now mentioned a new contrarian indicator based on what the CNBC Fast Money account is actually tweeting. This indicator has been on point at 95% since last December. Another proof that no one should ever listen to mainstream medias before doing any type of investment. It fits well into my “Sentiment Indicator” to rate the market. They go with the flow.
Talk to you next week,
Yann Quelenn | https://medium.com/chainfundch/chainfund-report-24th-august-9b66c8403cec | ['Yann Quelenn'] | 2018-08-25 06:01:01.434000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Chainfund Report', 'Weeklyreport', 'Chainfund', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
How to do widget properties testing in Flutter while you run E2E tests | How to do widget properties testing in Flutter while you run E2E tests Artur Korobeynyk Feb 12·3 min read
Lets take a very generic flutter test of the default flutter application from the basic tutorial (https://techwithsach.com/code-snippets/default-flutter-application-main-dart/):
import 'package:flutter_driver/flutter_driver.dart';
import 'package:test/test.dart';
void main() {
group('Counter App', () {
final counterTextFinder = find.byValueKey('counter');
final buttonFinder = find.byValueKey('increment');
FlutterDriver driver;
setUpAll(() async {
driver = await FlutterDriver.connect();
});
tearDownAll(() async {
driver?.close();
});
test('starts at 0', () async {
expect(await driver.getText(counterTextFinder), "0");
});
test('increments the counter', () async {
await driver.tap(buttonFinder);
expect(await driver.getText(counterTextFinder), "1");
});
});
}
In order to run this test with our application we need to enable the flutter driver extension in it and that is how you probably do it already in your E2E tests:
import 'package:flutter_driver/driver_extension.dart';
import 'package:my_app/main.dart' as app;
void main() {
enableFlutterDriverExtension();
app.main();
}
But now lets imagine that you need to test button background color or form background or text font. How would you do it within your flutter driver? Some may say it is impossible but if you know how to extend your flutter driver extension functionality you can easily do the widgets’ properties testing within your E2E test.
So lets see how can you extend the flutter driver functionality. If you use some data handler within your enableFlutterDriverExtension function you can extend it with custom commands that can be sent from tests to app in order to trigger some functionality within your app. Example:
enableFlutterDriverExtension(handler: (payload) async {
if(payload == "myOwnCommand") {
// TODO: I can do anything here
}
});
If we define a data handler separately for convenience it can return something back into the test:
Future<String> dataHandler(String msg) async {
switch (msg) {
case " myOwnCommand ": {
// TODO: I can do anything here
return "Result";
}
default:
throw AssertionError("No such command");
}
} enableFlutterDriverExtension(handler: dataHandler);
Now within your test you may call the requestData method of the FlutterDriver in order to send that command to the application and get something out of it:
test('Check button color', () async {
String result = await driver.requestData("myOwnCommand");
// TODO: Place to verify button color
});
Now lets get back to the application. We need to be able to find our button widget within it. Reverse-engineering the internals of flutter driver extension I found a function called collectAllElementsFrom. It is used by the flutter driver within its internal widget finders. We can reuse it and write a simple function that can return list of any requested type of widgets that we need.
import 'package:flutter/material.dart';
import 'package:flutter_test/flutter_test.dart';
import 'package:flutter_test/src/all_elements.dart'; List<T> findWidgets<T extends Widget>() =>
collectAllElementsFrom(
WidgetsBinding.instance.renderViewElement,
skipOffstage: false)
.map((e) => e.widget)
.whereType<T>()
.toList();
This function uses flutter_test package functionality collectAllElementsFrom and loops through the rendered elements in the elements tree returning the list of all related widgets that has specified type. Sounds hard but works like a charm. This coding style should be more familiar to developers with Java and C++ experience.
Pay attention to how this function looks like. It is bread and butter of this approach. You can use this function like List<Text> wdg = findWidgets(); and function will return list of all Text widgets. You can use it then like List<RichText> wdg = findWidgets(); and it will return list of RichText widgets without any changes in the function itself. Almost magic!
Now in our dataHandler function in order to search for any widget we may do following:
case " myOwnCommand ": {
List<FloatingActionButton> btns = findWidgets();
FloatingActionButton btn = btns.first;
return btn.backgroundColor.value.toString;
}
Then in our test:
test('Check button color', () async {
String result = await driver.requestData("myOwnCommand");
expect(EXPECTED_COLOR, int.parse(result));
});
And as you can see here, flutter driver extension gives you possibility to verify ANY property of ANY widget and even interact with those.
You need to get the font of some text widget? No problem:
case " myOwnCommand2 ": {
List<Text> txts = findWidgets();
Text txt = txts.first;
return txt.style.fontFamily;
}
Now you just verify that value within your test and that is all. Does not seems so hard and impossible now, right?
Well awesome tool, in general ) | https://medium.com/@arturkorobeynyk/how-to-do-widget-properties-testing-in-flutter-while-you-run-e2e-tests-6a775d47def9 | ['Artur Korobeynyk'] | 2021-02-12 20:30:26.341000+00:00 | ['Widget Testing', 'Development', 'Testing', 'Flutter', 'Dart'] |
The 50 Best Plants to Grow Indoors | If you’ve ever wanted to tend a garden but don’t have appropriate outdoor space to do so, don’t worry.
There are plenty of plants you can easily grow indoors.
No experience required.
This massive list of the 50 BEST plants to grow indoors covers everything from fruits, flowers, houseplants, veggies and herbs.
Plus, you’ll find plants that work for different indoor setups, whether you’re growing in containers or hydroponic systems, with windows or with grow lights.
1. African Violets
African violets are almost always grown indoors in North America because their leaves need to stay dry.
Keep the soil about as damp, as a squeezed-out sponge, using room temperature water.
Additionally, be sure to keep the leaves and flowers dry to avoid spotting.
These tropical flowers come in vibrant shades of purple, red, blue, pink and white.
For the best flower, color and bloom, grow an African violet in bright, indirect sunlight or under artificial light.
2. Anise Hyssop
Anise hyssop is known for its licorice flavor, but did you know it’s great for indoor gardens?
This flowering herb is fragile, even strong winds will damage it.
That’s why it grows so well indoors!
Whether you choose to grow it hydroponically or in a pot, it’s best to sow the seeds directly in its permanent home, as transplanting can damage it.
Harvest, store, and dry the seeds for later use.
3. Anthurium
The anthurium’s beautiful, colored petals are actually leaves!
These plants are great for growing indoors because they tolerate all levels of indirect light.
However, you should keep in mind that the lower the light, the slower it will grow.
Plus, anthuriums are susceptible to sunburn if left in direct sunlight.
Water your anthurium when soil is dry to the touch, but don’t leave too much time between watering, as the roots can be difficult to rewet.
4. Arugula
When grown indoors, arugula is harvestable all year.
With a south facing window that gets full sun for at least four hours a day, you can grow it without the help of grow lights!
Otherwise, you need only give your arugula 10 to 14 hours of artificial light per day.
As a leafy green, arugula grows well in hydroponic systems as well as soil containers.
This plant grows quickly — harvest when it’s about 6 inches tall, usually within six weeks of planting.
5. Basil
Basil is another fast-growing crop that becomes harvestable year-round when grown indoors.
It also does well for both hydroponic and soil growing.
For basil, you’ll almost always want to provide artificial lighting, at the very least to supplement natural light.
In general, basil requires a bit of pruning for harvesting and maintaining the health of the plant.
For more information on growing basil, read our article “Foolproof Advice For Keeping Your Basil Healthy.”
6. Bird’s Nest Fern
Bird’s Nest Ferns are the perfect decoration for well-lit bathrooms.
This houseplant thrives in warm and humid environments, so the steam from a hot shower will do wonders for the fern.
These plants prefer indirect light, growing in the shade of trees in nature.
It also works as an air purifier, filtering benzene, formaldehyde, xylene, and toluene out of the air.
Plus, it’s not toxic to pets, so you won’t have to worry about your furry friends ingesting one of its leaves.
7. Borage
Borage, also known as starflower, is a flowering herb.
It’s most commonly used to add a cucumber flavor in food and beverages or in medicines to treat various skin disorders.
This herb grows well in hydroponic systems with plenty of artificial light.
It also makes for a beautiful ornamental plant, but it will need a deep container for it’s long roots.
Borage grows best if directly seeded rather than transplanted, as it’s roots become pot bound quickly.
8. Burro’s Tail
This houseplant grows best when ignored.
As a succulent, the burro’s tail is particularly tolerant to dry climate and droughts.
You’ll want to water it carefully, as excess water will rot the roots.
In fact, burro’s tails only need to be watered once a month.
This plant thrives in bright, direct sunlight, making it suited to window growing.
9. Calathea
Calatheas stand out from other plants with their maroon and green leaves.
It’s a popular choice for homes and offices because they thrive in low light environments.
In fact, it’s best to place your calathea away from any direct sunlight.
These plants prefer humid environments and being evenly watered.
As a result, be sure to keep the soil moist, but not wet, and avoid letting it dry out.
10. Carrots
Growing carrots in containers is even easier than growing them in the ground!
Baby carrots will thrive in almost any sized containers, but bigger varieties will need enough room to stretch down into the soil.
With proper sun exposure, a carrot plant won’t even need artificial light.
However, this crop does need some special attention paid to it’s watering schedule.
Keep the soil constantly moist and use a liquid fertilizer every two weeks.
11. Celery
Recycle the chopped off base of store-bought stalks of celery to grow your own plants!
Simply, place the base of the celery in small saucer warm water near a sunny window.
After about a week, little leaves should start growing out of the center.
Place it into a pot, and cover everything but the leaves with potting soil.
Water it thoroughly and keep the water damp as it grows.
12. Chervil
Chervil, related to parsley, is another easy herb you can grow indoors.
This fine herb doesn’t stand up to heat too well, making it better suited for indoor growing in warm climates or during summer.
When planting chervil, be sure to start it in it’s permanent container as it doesn’t transplant easily.
These plants grow to be, one to two feet tall and benefit from frequent clippings.
If your plants are producing seeds too quickly, you can prolong its life by reducing the amount of light it gets.
13. Chinese Evergreen
Though the Chinese evergreen originates in tropical climates, it’s incredibly resilient to drought, dry air, and poor light.
It’s so easy to grow it’s extremely popular as a houseplant.
Chinese evergreens thrive in low to medium light with moderate watering.
Allow the soil to dry out some, but not completely, before watering again.
Though younger plants are beautiful on their own, older plants will kick it up a notch by producing flowerlike leaves.
14. Chives
Grow chives in, or near your kitchen, for easy instant access, to fresh herbs in your cooking.
This plant needs six to eight hours of full sunlight, so supplement with artificial light if needed.
Chives prefer humid climates, if that matches your situation great!
If not, grow it with other plants, use a humidifier, or regularly mist it to increase humidity.
Chives don’t need to be watered too frequently, so you should do so when the surface soil is dry to the touch.
15. Christmas Cactus
Put your stereotypes of sharp spines away for this cactus.
Christmas cactuses don’t have spines, instead they have flat, fleshy stems.
It gets its name from its brightly colored pink flowers, which bloom in winter.
It prefers a bit more water than most succulents, but it recovers quickly from dry periods.
Give the Christmas cactus 10 hours of bright, indirect sunlight each day to ensure beautiful blooms.
16. Cilantro
Cilantro is a bit harder to grow indoors than it is outdoors, but the extra effort is greatly rewarded.
Give your cilantro plants a container with plenty of drainage.
It thrives with deep watering versus frequent watering.
As a result, be sure to water until it seeps out of the drainage holes and then allow the soil to dry before doing so again.
Supplement a few hours of sunlight with grow lights for best results.
17. Dill
Did you know dill has been cultivated for at least five centuries?
Plus, growing it indoors is so easy that it’s one of the more popular indoor crops.
Dill grows well in both containers and hydroponic systems.
It does best when planted from seed and not transplanted.
Be sure to give it at least six hours of direct sunlight, or 12 hours of artificial light.
18. Dracaena
The dracaena is a low-maintenance, easy-going plant.
It easily adapts to different levels of lighting, though it prefers indirect sunlight.
Dracaenas grow tall, reaching 6 to 10 feet in height, but pruning can keep them under control.
Different dracaenas will come with different benefits.
Some variations excel at air purification and others are more resilient, so match the type to your needs.
19. Kale
In addition to making for a popular salad addition, kale is a popular crop for indoor farmers.
Kale grows very well in hydroponic systems, taking as little as nine weeks to be ready for harvest from seed.
Its nutrient needs are very similar to other leafy greens, so it can be easily grown with other salad greens in one system.
Keep in mind, it needs a bit more light, than some of the other plants we’ve mentioned so far.
Be sure to provide it with ample artificial light.
20. Leaf Lettuce
Like kale, leaf lettuce grows particularly well in hydroponic systems.
You don’t even need fancy equipment to grow leaf lettuce hydroponically — a simple DIY setup should suffice.
Compared to other varieties, the best part about growing leaf lettuce, is that you can continue to harvest its leaves, rather than having to harvest a head at a time.
Like kale, provide it with plenty of artificial light.
You can also grow leaf lettuce in containers by keeping the soil moist.
21. Lucky Bamboo
This small houseplant is nearly indestructible, so it’s perfect for growing indoors.
Lucky bamboo often has its stems manipulated into spirals or shapes while it’s young for decorative purposes.
These plants are more tolerant of too much light than too little, so be sure to give it ample sun or artificial light.
Lucky bamboo doesn’t even need soil to grow, and it requires very infrequent fertilizing.
Grow it with pebbles, filtered water and a drop of liquid fertilizer for best results.
22. Microgreens
These young plants are a little more mature than sprouts, but more immature than baby greens.
They’re also packed with nutrients and extremely easy to grow.
Microgreens need four to six hours of sunlight, which is easily supplemented with some basic grow lights.
You’ll be able to harvest microgreens within two weeks of planting!
Read our microgreen guide for more information.
23. Mint
Mint grows all year if grown indoors.
This herb is especially vigorous, allowing it to thrive easily in pots or hydroponic systems.
Mint plants prefer indirect or artificial light to direct sunlight.
Try to keep the environment humid for proper growth.
And if growing in soil, be sure to keep the plant evenly watered.
24. Money Tree
Unfortunately, money doesn’t really grow on this tree.
These trees are known for their twisted trunks, so they’re commonly used in décor.
In nature, money trees grow up to 60 feet tall! But indoors, these plants stick to a manageable three to six feet.
This houseplant prefers bright indirect light, but it does well in low light as well.
It also grows best in humid climates, but you should let its soil dry between watering.
25. Mushrooms
Mushrooms thrive in cool, dark places, making them great for an unused closet or cabinet.
Certain varieties of mushrooms are quite profitable as well, so you can make a little money off your hobby.
The medium you use to grow them in, will depend on the variety you choose.
Mushrooms require a bit of control over temperature and frequent misting, but not much more maintenance than that.
Be sure to purchase spores from a reputable source.
26. Oregano
We’ve been cultivating oregano since the time of Ancient Greece.
This key Italian ingredient grows easily in soil and hydroponic systems.
Give oregano six to eight hours of natural sunlight or plenty of artificial light.
Be sure to not overwater this warm weather crop, or let it sit in wet conditions for too long.
For more information on growing oregano, check out our guide “How to Grow Oregano Hydroponically.”
27. Panda Plant
Panda plants are known for their leaves, which are covered in tiny silvery hairs.
This succulent prefers medium to bright light.
It also needs very infrequent watering.
Allow the soil to dry out completely and then water it fully, avoiding the leaves.
As a houseplant, it’ll grow to be about one to two feet tall.
28. Peace Lily
Peace Lilies are known for their beautiful white flowers. But they aren’t actually flowers.
Peace Lilies grow big, white leaves that have been modified for pollination.
This houseplant is also a popular air purifier, as it both cleans and adds oxygen to the air.
Generally, the plant prefers low to medium light intensity, but the brighter it is, the more it will bloom.
Additionally, it’s very susceptible to overwatering, so water only when the leaves start to droop.
29. Pea Plant
Just about any variety of pea plant can be grown indoors.
In this case, grow lights work better than natural light.
You don’t want your pea plants to grow so tall they reach the lights, so stick to dwarf varieties.
Trellises aren’t completely necessary, but they will keep your plant upright, providing better airflow and easier access to all branches.
Harvest pods when they’re deep green and firm.
30. Peppers
While fruiting plants are a bit harder to grow indoors, peppers can still double as an indoor crop and houseplant.
The best pepper plants to grow indoors include smaller varieties, like habaneros or chiltepins.
While these fruits won’t get nearly as large as they do outdoors, they will pack as much heat and flavor.
You’ll need plenty of light for a pepper plant, either natural or artificial.
A pepper plant will grow well in both hydroponic systems and soil.
31. Philodrendon
Philodendrons are one of the most common houseplants.
These long vines grow to be longer than 10 feet, so they work well for hanging planters.
The philodendron is also low maintenance and great at expressing what it needs!
It grows best in bright, indirect light.
Allow its soil to dry out between watering for best results.
32. Pothos
The Pothos is a trailing vine plant with a reputation for being one of the easiest plants to grow.
This plant prefers bright, indirect sunlight, but it also thrives in little sunlight.
It’s also prone to overwatering, so let its soil dry out completely before watering again.
Pothos plants are most often grown as houseplants for their abilities to purify air.
It’s able to filter common indoor air pollutants benzene, formaldehyde, xylene, and toluene, making it particularly suited for small apartments, dorm rooms and offices.
33. Radishes
Radishes are one of the easiest crops to grow, indoors or out.
You can also find success growing radishes in hydroponic systems.
Make sure to provide your radishes with plenty of space to grow, and stick to varieties that don’t get too large.
In order to use shallow containers and hydroponic systems, use radishes that grow round rather than long, such as the perfecto variety.
Radishes also make great microgreens, so feel free to harvest early if desired!
34. Red Vein Sorrel
Sorrel is most commonly found in French cuisine.
It’s sometimes difficult to find in grocery stores, making it a great addition to any indoor garden.
A red vein sorrel plant also acts as decoration, with its beautiful red coloring .
Growing sorrel is similar to other herbs, but it requires careful timing for harvests.
For more information on growing sorrel, read our guide “How to Grow Red Vein Sorrel Hydroponically.”
35. Rosemary
Rosemary is an extremely versatile herb, used for its aroma, flavor and
and medicinal properties.
While it’s a bushy crop, that can grow to be quite big, young rosemary plants can be grown indoors fairly easily.
Just be sure, to not get it wet, or let it sit in water for too long.
Even if you have a sunny window, you should probably supplement with artificial lighting as rosemary loves light.
To learn more about growing rosemary, check out our article “How to Grow Rosemary Hydroponically.”
36. Sage
This easy herb is almost evergreen outdoors, so it’ll surely last you all year indoors.
Whether you grow it in pots or a hydro system, it tastes the best when given lots of light.
Sage is resilient to drought, so don’t worry if you wait a little too long to water it.
While it can be a bit challenging to grow from seed, it’s easy to start from cuttings.
Harvest sage as needed.
37. Scallions
Scallions, also known as green onions, are very versatile.
They grow easily in both low and full light conditions, one of the few vegetables that can do so.
You can plant scallions a few different ways.
Seeds take awhile to germinate, so using a seedling is the easiest.
But you can also grow scallions using the bottom few inches of a store bought one, like celery.
38. Snake Plant
Snake plants are especially resilient, perfect for so called “black thumbs.”
These houseplants require infrequent watering and can grow in basically any light.
Like the Pothos and Bird’s Nest Fern, snake plants are great at air purification, filtering out irritating chemicals.
Even though it’s native to tropical regions, the plant is drought resistant.
The snake plant flourishes at room temperatures above 70 degrees and prefers indirect light, but it will adapt to most conditions.
39. Spider Plant
Spider plants are considered one of the most versatile and easy houseplants.
These long leaved plants require bright, indirect sunlight, making them great for rooms with big windows.
Spider plants produce “spiderettes,” baby plants that are easily propagated.
That way you can grow more Spiders from one!
Allow the soil to dry out between watering.
40. Sprouts
Sprouts are so easy to grow, you can do it from a jar!
Plus, they only need a few days to grow.
At its most basic, all you have to do to grow sprouts, is to rinse seeds with water a few times and leave them in a jar.
Be sure to research which plants are edible as sprouts before starting.
Common seeds used for sprouts include sunflower, pumpkin, and chia.
41. Strawberries
In general, fruits are not easy to grow indoors or hydroponically.
But strawberries are the exception!
Strawberries don’t need too much light, so about 12 hours of artificial light should suffice.
When growing strawberries, starting from seed is not the best option, as it’ll take two to three years before you see any fruit.
Instead, purchase a runner from a garden store or nursery.
42. String of Pearls
The string of pearls has a unique look.
It’s made of long, stringy vines with small, green balls hanging off.
This succulent grows fast and easy, preferring indirect sunlight.
In fact, it gets easily sunburnt if exposed to too much direct sunlight, so even fluorescent bulbs are enough to sustain one.
This decorative plant is sensitive to overwatering as well, so water one to two times a month or as needed.
43. Tarragon
Growing tarragon inside, is an especially good choice for those who live in colder climates.
Unlike most herbs, tarragon grows best with low light — any window not facing south should suffice.
When watering, try to err on the dry side.
Water thoroughly, allow to dry and repeat.
Harvest by clipping leaves as needed for cooking.
44. Thyme
Thyme is one of the easiest herbs to grow inside.
Clay pots work the best for growing thyme, as it allows the soil to dry between watering.
Thyme prefers dry, bright conditions.
As a result, water somewhat infrequently and be sure to provide ample light.
You can start harvesting thyme as soon as it has enough foliage.
45. Tomatoes
Tomatoes are one of the most popular fruiting plants for hydroponic systems.
They’re not quite as easy to grow as leafy greens, requiring a bit more maintenance.
But the effort is worth it.
Since tomatoes are summer crops, they’ll need a fair amount of light.
Start at about 18 hours a day of artificial light and adjust from there.
46. Umbrella Plant
The umbrella plant is another common, easy houseplant.
These plants grow tall, reaching 8 to 10 feet indoors, and up to 30 feet outdoors.
Since they’re so big, you’ll need a bigger container to grow them in.
Umbrella plants grow best under indirect bright light but are tolerant to direct indoor light.
Additionally, an umbrella plant is more likely to survive underwatering than overwatering, so allow soil to dry completely between watering.
47. Viola
Flowers often grow best outdoors, but violas, family member to violets, do well inside too.
To grow violas indoors, use grow lights and place them in a cool or air-conditioned room.
These flowers like a lot of water, so they work well in hydroponic systems.
For best results, cut off dead buds quickly and don’t allow seeds to form.
Keep these purple and yellow flowers in your home for a splash of color.
48. Watercress
This nutritious, adaptable vegetable has been eaten by humans for centuries.
Unlike most vegetables, it prefers being waterlogged.
It’s great for recirculating hydroponic systems, but it can also be grown in pots without soil.
Watercress doesn’t need too much light.
Give it a few hours of direct light in the morning, and switch to indirect light during the hotter parts of the day.
49. Zebra Plant
Zebra plant leaves grow striped and large, making it a perfect windowsill decoration.
This tropical plant will flourish in warm, humid climates, so place it in a well-lit bathroom if your air is on the dry side.
The zebra plant is suited to indoor growing, due to its desire for bright filtered light, rather than sunlight.
Zebra plants require constantly moist soil, enjoying the occasional misting.
It’ll grow best in a greenhouse, but with careful care, you can find success growing one as a houseplant.
50. ZZ Plant
The ZZ plant, or Zanzibar Gem, is especially suited for environments with little light.
It comes from a drought-prone area, so its stems grow thick and deep in the soil to store water.
As a result, it takes very infrequent watering — about once a month should suffice.
It also grows slowly, making it a good houseplant, since you won’t have to replace its container often.
Plus, it’s resistant to pests and diseases.
You’ve now learned about the 50 best plants to grow indoors.
With the right amount of dedication, you can start your own successful indoor garden or farm!
For more information on indoor plants, farming and more, visit our website or call 602–753–3469. | https://medium.com/@PureGreensAZLLC/the-50-best-plants-to-grow-indoors-192df3c3e67 | ['Pure Greens Arizona Llc'] | 2020-05-20 17:56:45.981000+00:00 | ['Plants', 'Growing', 'Indoor Plants', 'Indoor Farming'] |
Downsampling and Exporting Google Cloud Monitoring Data | Update: This post has been updated to include changes to the platform since this was first posted:
Stackdriver was rebranded to Google Cloud Monitoring. There were breaking changes to the Cloud Monitoring Python API. See the Migration Guide for more details.
Google Cloud Monitoring contains a wealth of information about cloud resource usage, both for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and and other sources. This post will explain how to use the Cloud Monitoring API to read, downsample, and export data to BigQuery. Pub/Sub metrics will be used to demonstrate this. You can change the metric to a type more relevant to you or follow the [Pub/Sub Quickstart](https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/docs/quickstart-cli) to generate the metric type used in the example here.
You may want to export monitoring data for a number of reasons, including
Ad-hoc queries of data, say for shifting and comparing of time series or to analyze data in a dimension other than time. This can be especially useful for identifying waste, like virtual machines with low CPU, wasted disk space, or data that is never accessed. Or you might have made a change to your application and want to compare efficiency and performance.
To keep metrics data for longer than the standard retention period. The post will also explain how to downsample the Timeseries data to reduce the volume of older data from the default 1 minute intervals that Cloud Monitoring uses to 1 hour intervals. Downsampling reduces data storage costs. Data over the extended period data can be used for long range forecasting or or analyzing long term trends. You may want to overlay external data, such as economic conditions or seasonal events.
To save data from a special event, like a performance test or a marketing launch
Colab is a variant of the iPython provided by Google. Colab is an ideal tool to implement our goal because it allows scripting with the Python client API to experiment and explore data. Colab also has many for Google APIs built in and supports executing some shell commands. When you get the exporting of your data working in Colab you might want to move it to a regular job driven by cron or Google Cloud Scheduler.
To get started, import the monitoring_v3 APIs into Colab with the command
!pip install --upgrade google-cloud-monitoring
The command uses the Colab ! directive to execute a shell command.
Authenticate to GCP with the Python statements
from google.colab import auth
auth.authenticate_user()
This will open a new browser window for authentication.
Import the monitoring API and create a client object with the following statements
from google.cloud import monitoring_v3
client = monitoring_v3.MetricServiceClient()
Let’s set up some variables to hold input values:
import datetime target_project = '[Your project]'
start = datetime.datetime(2019,3,5, 0, 0, 0, 0)
end = datetime.datetime(2019,3,6, 0, 0, 0, 0)
topic_bytes = 'pubsub.googleapis.com/topic/byte_cost'
We are going to collect data from the target project for the one day period beginning on 2020–11–10 at 1:00 am and ending on 2020–11–10 at 2:00 am UTC. Suppose we have many projects, then we can change the value of target_project and export the data to a home project. That will enable collection of metrics data from many projects into a central location.
One of the Pub/Sub metrics that we will export is topic/byte_cost. There are many more GCP Metrics that you could choose from, as well as other clouds and open source metrics.
We can find out about the metrics with the function below
def list_metric_descriptors(client, project_resource, metric):
resource_descriptors = client.list_metric_descriptors(
project_resource,
'metric.type="{}"'.format(metric))
for descriptor in resource_descriptors:
print(descriptor)
This will give details on the metric kind (DELTA in this case), value kind (int64), description, and other details. If we look at the metric in a monitoring dashboard we will see something like the chart below for a low traffic application:
Topic Bytes Delta metric Type Chart
From this chart we can see that a volume of approximately 4.88 KB are sent over the Pub/Sub service every 5 minutes.
We can downsample the time series with the function below
from google.cloud.monitoring_v3.types.metric_service import ListTimeSeriesRequest
from google.protobuf import duration_pb2 as duration
from google.protobuf import timestamp_pb2 as timestamp def to_csv_delta_metric(client, project_resource, filter, start, end, frequency, colname): """Exports downsampled metrics to a string buffer in CSV format
Exports the timeseries created between start and end with given
frequency in seconds to a string buffer in comma separated
variable format
"""
end_time = timestamp.Timestamp(seconds=int(end.timestamp()))
start_time = timestamp.Timestamp(seconds=int(start.timestamp()))
interval = monitoring_v3.types.TimeInterval(end_time=end_time,
start_time=start_time)
aggregation = monitoring_v3.types.Aggregation(
alignment_period = duration.Duration(seconds=frequency),
per_series_aligner =
monitoring_v3.Aggregation.Aligner.ALIGN_DELTA,
cross_series_reducer =
monitoring_v3.Aggregation.Reducer.REDUCE_SUM
)
req = ListTimeSeriesRequest(
name = project_resource,
filter = filter,
interval = interval,
view = monitoring_v3.ListTimeSeriesRequest.TimeSeriesView.FULL
)
results = client.list_time_series(req)
csv = '{0},{1}
'.format('time', colname)
t = int(start.timestamp())
ts_array = []
for ts in results:
ts_array.append(ts)
if len(ts_array) > 0:
ts = ts_array[0]
for p in ts.points:
t += frequency
v = p.value.int64_value
csv += '{0},{1}
'.format(t, v)
return csv
else:
print('Did not get any results back')
A filter is applied to select the relevant metrics, so more than one time series could be retrieved. This downsampling function is appropriate for ‘delta’ type metrics. See Kinds of Metrics for details on delta and other metric kinds. The series are aligned with a delta reducer. Delta type metrics are typically summed, which is what we do with the Aggregation object above. The results are put in a string buffer in comma separated form that we will load into Google Cloud Storage (GCS) below.
The buffer can be uploaded to GCS with the function
def upload_gcs(bucket, buf, filename):
fname = '/tmp/{}'.format(filename)
with open(fname, 'w') as f:
f.write(buf)
print('head {}:'.format(fname))
!gsutil cp {fname} gs://{bucket}/
These functions can be called with the code below
metric_names = ['topic/byte_cost',
'subscription/byte_cost',
'topic/send_request_count',
'topic/message_sizes']
colnames = ['topic_bytes',
'sub_bytes',
'send_request_count',
'message_sizes']
frequency = 3600 # 1 hour
for i in range(len(metric_names)):
filter = 'metric.type="pubsub.googleapis.com/{0}"'.format(metric_names[i])
filename = '{0}.csv'.format(colnames[i])
csv_buffer = to_csv_delta_metric(client,
project_resource,
filter,
start,
end,
frequency,
colnames[i])
upload_gcs(bucket, csv_buffer, filename)
This will export time series for the four Pub/Sub metrics given downsampled to one hour intervals. To find out more about extracting metrics using the monitoring_v3 API see Reading Metric Data.
The data can be loaded into BigQuery with the statements below
for i in range(len(colnames)):
filename = '{0}.csv'.format(colnames[i])
tablename = colnames[i]
!bq --project_id={home_project_id} \
--location=US load \
--autodetect \
--source_format=CSV {dataset}.{tablename} \
gs://{bucket}/{filename}
Once the data is loaded into BigQuery we can query on it. We could have done queries on it above after reading the timeseries from Stackdriver above but, in general, we want to load the data into BigQuery on a regular basis and then come back some time later and do ad-hoc queries on it.
Let’s do a simple query to verify that the downsampling is correct. The data can be queried from BigQuery in Colab with the BigQuery client API.
from google.cloud import bigquery bq_client = bigquery.Client(project=home_project_id)
df = bq_client.query('''
SELECT
time, topic_bytes
FROM `{0}.topic_bytes`'''.format(dataset)).to_dataframe() print(df)
The data from the query is read into the Pandas Dataframe df.
The data can be viewed using a Python graphics utility, such as matplotlib. Pandas can also be used to create a simple chart with the statement below
df.plot.bar(y='topic_bytes',
title='Topic Byte Cost',
color=['darkgrey'])
This results in the chart
Downsampled data (x axis is time, y is bytes)
Let’s check our math. Notice that we downsampled for frequency of one hour over a total interval of one day. There are 24 bars in the chart above, so the time adds up to the original period. Eyeballing the average hourly value is slightly below 60,000 bytes. From the chart above, we had 4.88 kB in a 5 minute interval. 12 * 4.88 = 58.56 kB per hour, which is close to the expected value (that is a relief). | https://medium.com/google-cloud/downsampling-and-exporting-stackdriver-monitoring-data-c3483e88a352 | ['Alex Amies'] | 2020-11-11 01:00:01.136000+00:00 | ['Cloud Computing', 'DevOps', 'Google Cloud Platform', 'Monitoring'] |
Making effective DIY masks | A few weeks ago the prevailing school of thought was an N-95 or nothing because everything else seemed useless in preventing COVID-19 infection. Even surgical masks were portrayed as having little or no preventive abilities against the virus by some news outlets. I think some of the initial misinformation disseminated stemmed from the fear that people would panic buy masks and hoard them as they did with toilet paper and disinfectant. But now thanks to the CDC’s recommendations masked faces are slowly becoming a norm in our dystopian present.
To Mask Or Not to Mask
Here are a few reasons to join the mask ‘trend’, If you are still on the fence ….
COVID-19 spreads through respiratory droplets from breathing sneezing or coughing
Even the most basic masks, your respiratory droplets will have a shorter projectile hence reduce the likelihood of spreading it.
Many carriers are asymptomatic, so you could be infected and a mask would slow the rate of spread.
If you get an N95 or a well-made home mask (made with the right materials) then you can actually decrease the likelihood of becoming infected with COVID-19 from another person’s droplets.
The Spectrum
SARS-CoV — 2 ranges from around 0.2 to several hundred microns.
Smart Airfilters.com
The N95 Respirator, considered the best mask to have, is able to prevent about 90% of particles as small as 0.3 microns when fitted well. Then there's the medical-grade surgical mask made of polypropylene, which has a filtration rate of 60–80%. And then there's the home mask which is useful for larger sized particles and primarily as a way to prevent others from your droplets. Here’s a great table of masks. Of the many materials tested scarfs and bandanna masks were deemed the least protective.
Research
A research article published in the Cambridge Journal of Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness in 2013 titled: Testing the Efficacy of Homemade Masks: Would They Protect in an Influenza Pandemic, compared homemade masks to commercially available masks.
It was shown that although homemade masks made with cotton t-shirts reduced the number of microorganisms expelled via respiratory droplets, surgical masks were proven to be 3 times more effective against influenza viral particles.
The conclusion of the study considered homemade mask ‘as a last resort to prevent droplet transmission from infected individuals, but it would be better than no protection’. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2013;0:1–6)(Cambridge)
Although this is true we have found that the efficacy of a homemade mask is dependent on the materials used. According to the study by Dr. Prof. Supratik Guha at University of Chicago:
Homemade masks made of natural silk or chiffon and high thread cotton may boost protection. Using this combination was proven to prevent 80–99% of aerosolized particles.
tai’s capture — Unsplash
The Light Test
Dr. Scott Segal, of Wake Forest Baptist Health, states that a simple way to determine which fabrics are better than others is to do a light test. Which is hold up the material against the light the more you can see the light through the material the worse it is.
Non-cloth materials
Air filters have been tested with allergy-reduction HVAC filter being the best. The problem is, these filters have tiny fibers that can be inhaled. To prevent this, the best method is to place an air filter between a cloth mask. Other household items like coffee filters are great for filtering but have low efficacy because it’s difficult to breathe with.
Quick tips for materials
Combo 1: chiffon + natural silk or polyester-cotton flannel
Combo 2: No Sewmask Combo but place HVAC air filter in the middle
Combo 3: A cotton quilt with cotton-polyester batting
Make your mask multilayer — 4 layers better than 2
Natural fibers are generally better than synthetic fibers.
Mask should be washed regularly — more care tips here
Your mask is only as good as its weakest link — make sure it has a snug fit!
How to Determine your Mask is a good fit and Comfortable
(1) normal breathing,
(2) deep breathing,
(3) head moving side to side,
(4) head moving up and down,
(5) talking aloud (reading a prepared paragraph),
(6) bending at the waist as if touching their toes, and
(7) normal breathing
(Source: Cambridge)
No-Sew Mask
If the idea of attempting to sew anything is causing anxiety, then check out the CDC’s super easy No-Sew mask instructions
TL:DR | https://medium.com/ukeme-daniel/making-effective-diy-masks-dd5b98e79ded | ['Ukeme Daniel'] | 2020-05-20 20:48:33.075000+00:00 | ['Homemade Mask', 'Covid 19 Crisis', 'Health', 'Mask'] |
How I made over $33,000 on the Figma plugin without writing a single line of code 👈 | Figmaster Sales up until now
I’m a product designer and I specialize in creating design systems and component libraries in @figmadesgin. Design Systems are becoming so popular because they make products more consistent, accessible, improve their usability, and reduce design decision-making.
After a great success of my previous products www.antforfigma.com and www.systemflow.co I decided to create an educational resource to teach people how to design such systems. I wanted to show my way of doing this step-by-step.
I had this idea of a plugin for Figma, a workbook that will teach people how to build their own modern design system from scratch.
But why not a video course? Video courses are so popular in education! You may say.
I often find that when I watch a lesson I forget most of the things the author mentioned in the long video. Another problem is jumping between the video player and the software I’m learning. It distracts me a lot. That’s why in Figmaster everything happens in Figma — without jumping between 3rd party apps/websites, without pausing the video, etc.
OK, cool! I have an idea that I think is great.
But how do I know if people will like this form of learning? How do I know if my audience wants to learn how to build their own design system? 🤔
I had to validate it somehow because I didn’t want to write all lessons without knowing that!
👉 I wanted to have at least 500 people on the email list to launch the pre-order.
👉 I wanted to have at least 100 pre-orders to start working on a full course. | https://blog.prototypr.io/how-i-made-over-33-000-on-the-figma-plugin-without-writing-a-single-line-of-code-9a5ca50f2cc8 | ['Matt Wierzbicki'] | 2021-09-10 11:20:45.880000+00:00 | ['Design Systems', 'Passive Income', 'Figma', 'Creator Economy', 'Figma Plugin'] |
BSA named a top foreign firm for India related work | BSA is proud to have been recognised by the India Business Law Journal’s 15th annual review, as a top foreign firm for India related work.
The firm was included in the ‘Regional & Specialist’ category, where recognition was given to senior associate Anand Singh, who leads the firms India desk, and matters including the Gulf Petrochem FZC insolvency-related restructuring:
“BSA AHMAD BIN HEZEEM & ASSOCIATES has more than 120 lawyers spread over nine offices across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Iraq and Lebanon. Anand Singh leads the India desk and specialises in advising insurance companies, reinsurers, insurance brokers and agents on incorporation, distribution strategy, regulatory, compliance and other matters. BSA was engaged to assist Gulf Petrochem FZC, a multinational company with multiple subsidiaries in India, on its insolvency-related restructuring. The deal required a multipronged approach in order to address corporate restructuring, intellectual property, cybersecurity, litigation, insolvency, insurance, commercial contracts, maritime contracts and other issues. Other highlights include assisting BookMyShow, an online ticketing company headquartered in India, on its operations in UAE and Saudi Arabia. Gaurav Malhotra, associate vice president for legal and compliance at Tata AIA, endorses Anand Singh for his “professionalism and solution-oriented approach”, while Tem Nathan, general counsel at Stockal adds that Singh is “approachable and punctilious”.”
The full list and write-ups can be read here: Top Foreign Forms for India 2021.
The full annual report is available here: India Business Law Journal.
https://bsabh.com/bsa-named-a-top-foreign-firm-for-india-related-work/ | https://medium.com/@bsa-law-llp/bsa-named-a-top-foreign-firm-for-india-related-work-b107dd5172b6 | ['Bsa Law Llp'] | 2021-08-27 10:38:37.529000+00:00 | ['Law', 'Legal', 'India Law', 'Uae Lawyer'] |
Top 4 EdTech Trends I’m Watching as a Seed Stage Investor | It’s now been a few months since attending the ASU GSV Summit, and here I am holding myself accountable! I’m going to focus on some of the learnings from my favorite session this year, COVID Has Changed K-12 Forever — Meet the New Leaders, featuring the following panelists:
Garrett Smiley, Co-founder, Sora Schools (A live, accredited, virtual high school)
Kelly Smith, Founder, Prenda (In-home micro-schools)
Ryan Delk, CEO, Primer (all-in-one homeschooling alternative for students aged 7–14)
Vlad Stan, Founder & CEO, Galileo (self-directed online school for students aged 8–18)
Amir Nathoo, CEO, Outschool (live online classes and clubs for kids aged 3–18)
Below I’ll discuss the key takeaways from my point of view, and also how each of these shifts my investment framework for evaluating companies at the seed stage — some build off the themes I listed above, and others are new!
Takeaway #1: “Power to the Parents“ a.k.a. parental involvement is at an all-time high, and brings student agency into the fold as well.
I’m a big believer that the future of education is hybrid — students will return to in-person learning (as many have this fall, at least in the U.S.) with a combined virtual approach. However, because of the past few months, many parents were forced to become more involved in their children’s education as the classroom moved abruptly into the home. There are more distractions than ever, a lack of motivation among students in a virtual environment, and lastly, students can simply walk away from their screens — teachers don’t have as much command as they did in a traditional classroom environment. That’s where parents come in, looking to:
Keep their children engaged & connected in school (ie: ClassDojo, Google Classroom, Zoom, Seesaw)
(ie: ClassDojo, Google Classroom, Zoom, Seesaw) Keep them engaged outside of core learning hours due to sub-par virtual learning experiences (ie: Outschool)
Kelly Smith, the Founder of Prenda, noted that “Visibility + Access = Empowerment. This is the big striking shift — parents can see everything in education right before our eyes.” Parents are having many more questions and conversations, and actually asking about alternative or supplementary educational options beyond the classroom — and students are developing a sense of agency as well, knowing that there are more options that work for their learning styles.
What this means for my investment framework: Lerer Hippeau has been an investor in ClassDojo since the beginning, and we’ve seen the success first-hand of teacher-driven K-12 distribution for a free product evolving into a B2C paid product overtime. The B2C landscape today for supplementary education in early childhood and K-12 is becoming increasingly crowded. I’m most bullish on platforms that begin as a supplementary platform, but add enough value overtime through personalization and community that there becomes an opportunity to replace some of the traditional classroom components. A great example of this in practice is Fiveable, which began as a study tool for high schoolers taking AP exams, and is now launching their own actual AP courses.
Takeaway #2: Remote work is changing the way parents approach educating their children, as there’s more optionality for high quality education when you’re not tied to school districts.
Ryan Delk, the CEO of Primer, had mentioned during the panel that the #1 reason why people choose to live where they live is because of a job. The #2 reason is actually tied to education and school districts, which is above even family proximity in terms of priority.
Now that many companies are embracing remote work permanently, you’re seeing many families leaving expensive hubs like the Bay Area and NYC for more cost effective cities like Austin or Miami (hi, Francis Suarez!). With remote work, that #1 motivator around location effectively disappears, and the same can be said for the #2 reason around school districts. With the rise of alternative methods of education like the companies featured on the panel, there’s now optionality for parents to choose high quality education regardless of where they live.
What this means for my investment framework: For me, it’s confirmation that the future of work and the future of education are becoming increasingly intertwined. Macroeconomic factors will continue to have an impact on the future of education, and there continues to be opportunity around solutions that provide optionality and flexibility to parents and students alike.
Takeaway #3: The importance of community and peer-to-peer learning cannot be understated, especially with remote and distanced learning.
One aspect of school that’s difficult to replicate in a digital environment is the sense of community and camaraderie, which is absent from traditional conferencing platforms like Zoom and Google Classroom (a.k.a. the modern staples for many K-12 students and teachers across the country). IMHO, this is partially responsible for the lack of engagement people are experiencing in virtual classrooms everywhere. It’s harder to keep in touch with friends and learn together.
The panelists brought up two important points in my mind:
Amir Nathoo, the CEO of Outschool, noted that “Historically when thinking of alternative education (ie: homeschooling), people have thought there’s this tradeoff of putting kids at a disadvantage because they’re not able to build relationships with kids their age in school. With advances in tech and their services, they’re eliminating that tradeoff while enhancing social relationships that are not restricted to your local group.”
Garrett Smiley, the co-founder of Sora Schools, noted that “You have to think about what is the role of a school specifically in this decade and century going forward. It’s not content creation — instead, what schools should do is focus on the community building and discussions/labs — that’s what a school should be focusing on.”
What this means for my investment framework: Next-gen providers that are reimagining the educational experience MUST have a focus on community-building and engagement. And when I say engagement, I don’t just mean between students and teachers. I mean peer to peer, parent to teacher — basically any and all stakeholders, but always keeping the needs and priorities of the student front-and-center. I think that’s why cohort-based learning has gained so much steam and interest over the past few months. People are seeing the value in learning with a peer set and having those shared experiences. On Deck is a great example of this in practice, and I’ve been keeping an eye out for news on Wes & Gagan’s new stealth startup focused on cohort-based course infrastructure.
And this holds true for enterprise/education infrastructure companies as well — cracking the code on engagement and collaborative learning through technology will be an important area to watch. ClassEDU is one to watch here, solving for the gaps not currently being addressed by Zoom for higher ed with more education-specific use cases (ie: group presentations, one-on-one discussions, watching videos, etc.). The key is having technology that not only works for the students, but also solves pain points for professors/admins as well (ie: assessments, attendance, etc.). We’re going to continue to see the unbundling of Zoom across verticals (and building on top of Zoom — in the case of ClassEDU), and there is a large market opportunity in EdTech for enterprise providers.
Takeaway #4: On the topic of accessibility and true mass market appeal, partnerships with corporations and the government offer a path forward for private EdTech companies.
One of the questions from the audience during the panel asked about how next-gen EdTech startups with paid offerings can ensure that low-income families aren’t being left behind. Accessibility to high quality education at affordable price points will continue to be an issue that many need to address in the coming years, and some startups have already started taking action. For example:
Primer is able to offer scholarships because their marginal costs are much lower than operating a traditional school.
Sora Schools offers sliding scale tuition, offering reduced tuition for some and a more expensive price for those that can afford it.
Others like Outschool and Prenda are attempting to form partnerships with both corporations (ie: offering education as a benefit for their employee’s children) and existing school systems / governments in order to create that access and affordability.
What this means for my investment framework: I meet with many early consumer tech and D2C companies, and one thing I’ve been emphasizing lately is the idea that every B2C company needs to have some type of B2B or partnership strategy [see an interesting case study I tweeted about here, when Cameo (B2C) partnered with Sendoso (B2B)]. It doesn’t have to be on day one, but it’s something to think about and include in your roadmap — this mindset and approach is something that’s resonated very well with founders thus far. It’s an effective way to combat rising customer acquisition costs via traditional avenues like Facebook and Instagram marketing, and similarly, get your product into the hands of more consumers and increase mindshare. The same is true for EdTech, where the idea of forming strong, impactful partnerships has an even more important mission — it not only helps with increasing brand awareness and distribution, but also in making the product more accessible in cases when a corporation or the government can provide sponsorships to low-income families. | https://medium.com/@meaganloyst/top-4-edtech-trends-im-watching-as-a-seed-stage-investor-a0756cc47c70 | ['Meagan Loyst'] | 2020-12-22 15:17:28.862000+00:00 | ['Remote Working', 'Parenting', 'Distance Learning', 'Education', 'Edtech'] |
SEO has opening of Search Engine Optimization. | SEO has opening of Search Engine Optimization. But it’s became popular as SEO, for this reason in this article I use it as SEO. Abstractly SEO means activities that are done to get higher positions in search engines for specific searches.
Meaning of becoming at top positions in search engines is that people who looking for something your company does, will see in search engine result page firstly. Especially with mobile device revolution, search engines became a very big opportunity to promotion and pull someone into a place. In SEO activities, first step is setting a target. The target in SEO is keywords that describe business your company does or your product you want to sell. People put the keyword in to search box in the search engines. For example, an auto mechanic firm could have a target keyword of “automotive spare parts”.
SETTING A TARGET AND PLAN
Targets have a great importance for SEO study. Because most of studies are conducted depending upon the targets. With opportunities Google provide to us, we can see search count of the keywords and we can compare with other keywords. In this manner, we can figure out true keywords that would provide maximum benefit to us.
While we are setting the targets, state of the website is very important. Both of them are possible either SEO activities would be done with your current website or they would be done with a new website. Usually official websites don’t have plenty of content, they have a home page, about us, services or products and, contact page. But in SEO activities, we need content very much. But if creating a blog in corporate website would be effective. Second option is creating a new website whose domain name matches up target keywords like “automotivespareparts.com” for our book store example. The website includes telephone numbers and addresses of your company. When possible customers desire to get contact, they call your telephone numbers. Generally online store websites don’t need a blog because these websites have very much product pages.
After setting a target, we need a plan. To set a plan, detailed analysis of the website and competition analysis required. Depending upon competition in the target keyword, plan of the achieving the target is generated. Per month, works the SEO firm done and the progress is reported to the customer.
WHY IS GETTING HELP OF A SEO EXPERT NEEDED?
SEO has very changeable parameters. First search engines weren’t very successful at rounding up spam web sites and activities. But now they have very complicated algorithms for spam SEO activities.
Search engines use algorithms to rank websites. Per algorithm assess the web site from a different viewpoint. One of them looks for your links, other one looks for quality of your contents and other one looks for social accounts of your website. There are more algorithms than we wrote.
When Google is created, spam technics that manipulate search results and trick search engines have been very common. As to Google have developed the algorithms for the issues and when it rounded up spam technics, it has punished websites that implement the spam technics. For example most of SEO punishments are implemented due to wrong link building. Link building is most risky thing in a SEO study. It has plenty of criteria to do correctly and it is not easy. When a website has a wrong link profile, the website will lost their current place in search engine and locate worse place. If a website has too wrong link profile, Google will punish it. For example your website has gained 100 backlinks in a day. But 100 people didn’t visit your website in that day. This circumstance is not reasonable and it doesn’t look like organic. Entire the SEO activities should be organic, natural. Otherwise the website can be have punishment or locate worse places.
To avoid from punishment, SEO expert has great importance. Because doing a wrong SEO study is worse than not doing SEO study. Google give punishment to websites that try to trick it like removing the website from search results. For a useful SEO study, help of a SEO expert is needed.
HOW TO CHOOSE A SEO EXPERT?
When you decided to take a help of expert about SEO, you should be careful. There is no certificate, degree or etc. about this topic. But references of an expert would be helpful for you. Numerous customers of a SEO expert show that the expert does this job successfully.
An expert who guarantees the success without analysis is reasonable and trustful. For example in Google search results; university websites have a great importance. So passing the websites is very hard and it needs very much effort. If someone is saying that your website would locate first place in ‘mechanical engineering’ and the website would remain at the same place for ever to you, this person probably is liar. If your web site is not a buddy, chamber or etc. of mechanical engineers, passing university links is not very possible or it needs very very much effort. You can’t say anything in SEO without competition analysis and you can’t give a guarantee for ever. Because algorithms are changing day to day, search results too.
When you decided to take a help about SEO, we recommend take into account all things above. We provide a professional service and reasonable targets to our customers. To use our services, only contacting with us is enough. | https://medium.com/@veneraseo/seo-has-opening-of-search-engine-optimization-9918d4a1920e | ['Venera Seo'] | 2016-10-10 10:11:11.016000+00:00 | ['SEO', 'Seo Agency', 'Seo Services'] |
MacGyver Season 1 Episode 5 Hacks | You know what would be great for these posts? Images or gifs of the different hacks from the show. Maybe someday I can add those. For now, It’s just science and stuff.
Episode 105: Toothpick Redirect a heat-seeking missile
(physics, infrared radiation, barely plausible)
I don’t like to use the “barely plausible” tag — but let’s be honest. It’s going to be pretty difficult to redirect a heat seeking missile. I guess it’s not impossible though.
A heat-seeking missile has an infrared receiver to look for “hot” objects. Usually, this hot object is the jet engine exhaust for an aircraft. So, for this hack, MacGyver wants to get the “attention” of this missile using a flood light. Yes, these things get hot — but not jet engine hot.
Normally, a plain light would radiate energy in all directions. Imagine this light as an expanding sphere with a particular radius. Since the light must be even over the surface of this expanding sphere, the intensity of light decreases with distance. The area of a sphere is proportional to the square of the radius — so this is where we get the “inverse square law” for light.
Of course the inverse square law means that a bright (and hot) flood light won’t do much if it is far away. One way to fix this is to use a parabolic dish to refocus the infrared light — a spot light. Yes, you can do this with a plain metal dish for infrared.
So, in the end MacGyver has an infrared source he can focus on the heat-seeking missile and perhaps get its attention.
Electric Razor Taser
(electric, plausible)
MacGyver makes a type of taser (not really a taser) out of an electric shaver. The basic idea behind a taser is to shock a person with an electric current. There are two types of current — there is direct current (DC) like the stuff that comes out of a battery. This current just goes “one way” in a circuit. Shocking people with DC current is a little bit more complicated.
The other current is alternating current (AC) in which the current constantly switches directions with some frequency. In the US, AC current is at a frequency of 60 Hz. Why does this matter? It matters because if it’s a plug-in type razor then you already have AC current and it’s easier to shock someone with AC.
So, to make a plug-in razor taser you just need to take the main power lines coming into the razor and connect them to something on the front. When a human victim touches both of these wires, the human becomes part of the circuit and gets shocked.
Don’t try that at home.
Toothpick gun jam
(mechanical, seems real)
If you don’t clean your gun, it probably won’t work. A toothpick in the move-y part will probably mess it up. Not a gun guy. Oh, I don’t think this would make the gun misfire — just jam. But you can see where the name of this episode comes from.
Smoke grenades in a jacket
(physical, seems real)
So, MacGyver puts two smoke grenades in a jacket . Really, there’s not much to say here.
Metal Belt Buckle Attack
(physical, real)
In a classic MacGyver move — he uses his belt buckle as a weapon.
Fork Lock
(physical, real)
MacGyver uses a fork to lock a door. This is a sliding door — but I was thinking of something like this:
Torpedo attack
(explosive, probably real)
MacGyver uses a train torpedo to attack a dude. Not much to say here.
Thermite
(chemical, based on real thing, plausible)
MacGyver uses a pipe to hold the stuff — magnesium shavings and iron oxide shavings. Boom — thermite. Thermite is a chemical reaction that gets SUPER hot. It’s actually pretty awesome but not easy to make. You need to get the metal into a very fine powder. But if you do that, here’s what happens.
Stopping a train
(electric, physics, partially plausible)
How do you stop a train? One way is to mess with the DC motors. Yes, most trains are diesel-electric. They have diesel engines that power electric motors. If it’s a DC electric motor, you can switch the polarity of the wires and the motor will rotate the opposite way.
This might not stop the train right away — but it’s a start. Here is a demo you can try at home. Oh wait — I can’t find the video. Well, here’s what you do. Get a battery powered toy car with a motor (a cheap one). Switch the direction of the batteries and the car will drive backwards.
I found the video. Here it is. | https://rjallain.medium.com/macgyver-season-1-episode-5-hacks-c6e31285b117 | ['Rhett Allain'] | 2020-12-19 21:45:11.974000+00:00 | ['Science', 'DIY', 'Macgyver'] |
How to use the UNNEST function in BigQuery to analyze event parameters in Analytics | Oh, dear. That’s… a really weird error message.
The problem here is that event_params is essentially an array (actually in BigQuery parlance it’s a “repeated record”, but you can think of it as an array). So while it might contain several rows that themselves have a key field, it doesn’t have one itself.
This is where the UNNEST function comes in. It basically lets you take elements in an array and expand each one of these individual elements. You can then join your original row against each unnested element to add them to your table.
To use a simpler example, let’s imagine we have a table full of spaceships. And crew is an array, much like event_params was in our analytics tables.
Right now, if I wanted to find spaceships that contain a crew member named Zoe, I couldn’t do that with a line like this.
SELECT * FROM `spaceships` WHERE crew = "Zoe"
But if I were to write something like this…
SELECT * FROM `spaceships` CROSS JOIN UNNEST(crew) as crew_member
What BigQuery will do is take every individual member in my crew array, and add it on as a new column in my row called crew_member It will repeat my original row as needed to accompany each new value. Kinda like in this nifty animation:
Once I’ve done that, it’s easy to select spaceships with crew members named Zoe.
SELECT * FROM `spaceships`
CROSS JOIN UNNEST(crew) as crew_member
WHERE crew_member = "Zoe"
You’ll find that in practice, though, most BigQuery developers will replace the CROSS JOIN with a comma, like so:
SELECT * FROM `spaceships`,
UNNEST(crew) as crew_member
WHERE crew_member = "Zoe"
It still does the same thing, it just looks cooler. (BigQuery developers are all about looking cool.)
So going back to our example, we essentially have an array (or repeated record) of event_params . So if I were to say:
SELECT * FROM `my_analtyics_table`,
UNNEST(event_params) as param
…what BigQuery will do is take each individual event parameter and expand them out into a new column called param , and repeat the original row as needed. Like this:
You’ll notice that param itself is still a nested object. But it’s a single record, not a repeating one. (Again, kinda like a struct.) So we can query for things like param.key or param.value.int_value . Specifically, we can now look just for rows where param.key is equal to “value” .
Since, in practice, it’s a little weird to have the full repeated event_params object alongside each unnested parameter, I usually drop it and just look at the param object instead.
So with all that in mind, let’s go back to the task of analyzing the average score for users who complete a quickplay level. I can now grab just those events along with the unnested value parameter.
SELECT event_name, param
FROM `firebase-public-project.analytics_153293282.events_20180915`,
UNNEST(event_params) AS param
WHERE event_name = "level_complete_quickplay"
AND param.key = "value"
And then, it’s really easy to grab the actual value of the value parameter by looking at param.value.int_value .
SELECT event_name, param.value.int_value AS score
FROM `firebase-public-project.analytics_153293282.events_20180915`,
UNNEST(event_params) AS param
WHERE event_name = "level_complete_quickplay"
AND param.key = "value"
From there, I can perform interesting tasks like calculating the mean, getting some quantiles, and figuring out the standard deviation…
SELECT AVG(param.value.int_value) AS average,
APPROX_QUANTILES(param.value.int_value, 2) AS quantiles,
STDDEV(param.value.int_value) AS stddev
FROM `firebase-public-project.analytics_153293282.events_20180915`,
UNNEST(event_params) AS param
WHERE event_name = "level_complete_quickplay"
AND param.key = "value"
Hey, maybe while I’m at it, let’s make a quick histogram of all the values!
SELECT param.value.int_value AS score, COUNT(1) AS count
FROM `firebase-public-project.analytics_153293282.events_20180915`,
UNNEST(event_params) AS param
WHERE event_name = "level_complete_quickplay"
AND param.key = "value"
GROUP BY 1
ORDER BY 1
So… this is interesting. There’s a pretty big peak around 21 or 22 moves… but if you keep looking, it seems like there’s also a couple of smaller peaks around 29 moves and in the 34–36 range.
The reason for that is the other parameter I was talking about — the board parameter. While the vast majority of games are being played on a small board, there’s a number of games being played on medium and large boards too, and those probably account for those smaller peaks.
In fact, we can kinda see that by looking at both the board and the value parameters for our event.
SELECT param
FROM `firebase-public-project.analytics_153293282.events_20180915`,
UNNEST(event_params) AS param
WHERE event_name = "level_complete_quickplay"
AND (param.key = "value" OR param.key = "board")
Sure enough, it seems like the “value” parameter is higher when it follows a board of M or L .
But how can we actually prove this out in BigQuery? Right now, making this analysis is kinda difficult because we have different values in different rows.
Now, there is a way we can bunch these rows together. If we add back the pseudo_user_id (essentially, a unique ID assigned to each app instance) and event_timestamp to each of our columns, we can then group together parameters for the same event based on those two values.
SELECT MAX(if(param.key = "value", param.value.int_value, NULL)) AS score,
MAX(if(param.key = "board", param.value.string_value, NULL)) AS board_type
FROM (
SELECT user_pseudo_id, event_timestamp, param
FROM `firebase-public-project.analytics_153293282.events_20180915`,
UNNEST(event_params) AS param
WHERE event_name = "level_complete_quickplay"
AND (param.key = "value" OR param.key = "board")
)
GROUP BY user_pseudo_id, event_timestamp
And then we can analyze score by board type…
SELECT ANY_VALUE(board_type) as board, AVG(score) as average_score
FROM (
SELECT MAX(if(param.key = "value", param.value.int_value, NULL)) AS score,
MAX(if(param.key = "board", param.value.string_value, NULL)) AS board_type
FROM (
SELECT user_pseudo_id, event_timestamp, param
FROM `firebase-public-project.analytics_153293282.events_20180915`,
UNNEST(event_params) AS param
WHERE event_name = "level_complete_quickplay"
AND (param.key = "value" OR param.key = "board")
)
GROUP BY user_pseudo_id, event_timestamp
)
GROUP BY board_type
But this seems like a pretty awkward way of doing things. Wouldn’t it be better if we could find a way of more easily getting multiple values in the same row? Well it turns out you can, and we’ll find out how… in my next post! (Woo! Cliffhanger ending!!) | https://medium.com/firebase-developers/using-the-unnest-function-in-bigquery-to-analyze-event-parameters-in-analytics-fb828f890b42 | ['Todd Kerpelman'] | 2019-03-11 17:03:18.466000+00:00 | ['Google Analytics', 'Analytics', 'Bigquery', 'Firebase', 'Big Data'] |
The Hidden Voices of Long Covid Project | “I am 11 years old…In December 2020 I tested positive for covid…I started to feel a bit better and then after 2 weeks I started to feel unwell again…The doctors said this was because of the covid and I should feel better after a couple more weeks…I struggled with eating because every time I did I was in severe pain and it would go straight through me…they came back that I had inflammation in my gut…I was put on medication but this didn’t help…I had gone weeks without eating properly but still having diarrhoea which has lead to my body to struggle and on the verge of shut down…I have been living with a feeding tube which I am connected to every night for 12 hours and feed is pumped into me through my nose…I now suffer with many symptoms of long covid every day such as constant nausea, eye pain, hot and cold sweats, headaches, fatigue, dizziness and many more.”
“I contracted covid late March 2020. Usual symptoms but was back at work after 3 weeks with just a lingering sob on exertion and the occasional twinge in my chest…Started work for the ambulance service in early May 2020…In September we had a mass outbreak in the control room…From then on things went downhill…Increased levels of breathlessness and chest pain, dizziness, constant cramp in my lower left leg and foot, external swelling around my neck, sensations of choking, intermittent hoarseness and a couple of episodes of fainting. Was sent home from a shift on December 12th and haven’t been able to return as yet.” “I have already had one written warning for absence under the school sickness policy and if I go back off, it won’t be long before I’m dismissed.”…If I could go back to November last year, I’d have isolated my daughter in her bedroom and tried to prevent the rest of us getting it.”
“I’m 29 years old and I caught covid March 2020. I was previously very fit and active; I travelled alot and thought nothing of walking 6 miles at a time. It’s completely taken over my life. I’m still not working and my activity is limited. I’m at the stage where a low energy social outing means a two day recovery. I have SOB, aches, brain fog, pins and needles, sickness and fatigue. It took 7 months to convince a doctor to do any sort of test. Over a year on I now use an inhaler and am waiting for an appointment for a long covid clinic.”
“I was 27 when I first got symptoms…antibiotics for pneumonia…Out of nowhere long covid hit and I was floored again and because of this my work place sacked me and after 15 months the symptom list keeps getting longer and all the tests come back with nothing wrong…I am now 28 but I feel like I’m 88…physically mentally and financially is horrendous especially when you feel like your not believed, so if you know some one with long covid please don’t doubt them we are living a shadow of our old lives and we just want them back.”
“I am a full time senior lecturer…I was diagnosed with Covid...I thought I would then feel better but it was just the start. Palpitations, nausea, sweating alongside other symptoms 24/7. I have felt as ill as I did in the ambulance on the way to hospital. Without the Long Covid Facebook page I believe I could have gone under…So many tests come back normal and yet I can be in bed for 22 hours a day ! We need to be acknowledged and this illness recognised for the sake of all those who will sadly follow us……”
“I am 36 and caught Covid in March 2020, most likely whilst at work as a nurse…I was floored for 3 months, breathless with severe fatigue and many more random symptoms…I was left bedbound after an increase in my hours. For the last 6 months, I have had debilitating fatigue, insomnia, shortness of breath, brain fog, chest pain, altered smell and taste, headaches, pins and needles…After having an AZ vaccine I have become similar to last year…but my GPS’s are definitely taking it seriously this time…It’s been 15 months of having no life, feeling so unwell…my career potentially ruined.”
“...I was working full time as a respiratory consultant in a major teaching hospital..I acquired COVID19 from work in November 2020..my initial illness was mild; however a month later I developed a number of new conditions as part of Long Covid…I’m now confined to bed for a large part of the day…I do not know when I will be able to return to work…I worry about the future, as Covid pay it’s only for one year. After that, continuation of pay is at my employers discretion…despite being a senior doctor myself, I have sometimes had to fight to obtain the necessary investigations and treatments.”
“Before I caught Covid 29/12/2020 I worked full time in A&E as a nursing assistant. I’ve been diagnosed with long covid induced pots and am on medication to control my heart rate and blood pressure… In order to take my daughter to the park I have to go in a wheelchair. I’m hoping to get better, and we need to raise awareness of long covid.”
“I tested positive for Covid October 2020. Like many people I assumed once the acute symptoms had subsided, I’d be back to my normal self…Each morning I woke up feeling like I’d been drugged with intense headaches and brain fog…couldn’t walk and talk at the same time without getting out of breath…the breathing practices continue to help manage my symptoms…the doctors are learning from us. And that’s quite a scary place to be…”
“I’m a nurse aged 28 and caught covid in October 2020. Prior to that I had lived an active and outdoorsy lifestyle. For the past nine months I have been housebound, needing help from my family members with my daily needs and unable to be a mum to my 2 young children…have been diagnosed with POTS, blood clots, Vasculitis, Raynauds, MCAS and I am waiting for tests for peripheral neuropathy.“
“…Tested positive Jan 2021. Had a failed return to work in Mar and have been off poorly since with a whack a mole of symptoms, including fatigue, breathlessness, chest pain, muscle pain, dizziness etc etc…Joining the FB support group was one of the best things I did, I no longer felt alone…They offered practical advice and emotional support…I’m worried about what the future may hold. I go to half pay in August.”
“I am 54 and (was) a gastroenterology consultant. I am month 15. I went to A and E in March 2020 with severe chest pain and was discharged despite covid pneumonia on my CT and low oxygen levels…At month 9 , I was finally diagnosed with multiple pulmonary emboli and treated…my breathing has only marginally improved on anticoagulants. I am housebound. I can only walk a few yards. I don’t know if I will ever recover. I can’t be a doctor and I don’t know if I ever will be again.”
“Age 26 and a very keen cyclist, probably doing around 100 miles a week on my bike…I caught Covid-19 at the tail end of October 2020…I had mild disease…I’ve honestly had worse colds…Around November I started experiencing severe insomnia…into June I seemed to have suffered some sort of relapse and my energy levels and brain fog began to get worse again; trigger unknown!” “I’d also like to point out that in Scotland currently we have NO Long Covid clinics and our care is in entirely the care of our GP…now an additional 86,000 people in Scotland…getting referred to specialists seems like some sort of uphill battle.”
“Yes is it anxiety, we’re all incredibly anxious; but that’s because our health has been taken away from us and help is so hard to come by…I’m thirty years old and had Covid for three weeks last June…Before having the virus…I was working out four days a week at home including running on my treadmill…I’m still unable to do more than walk on my treadmill without lying awake all the next night with chest pain and a painful chesty cough…When it comes to seeking help…turned away, and generally…told that told that I’m fit and healthy (“so don’t worry”).
“Consultant Genetic pathologist and Cancer Geneticist…Infected 28 Feb 2020…affected badly, but not admitted, so not tested…lateral flow antibody test 24th March (day 21) which is positive…I start feeling awful again…then I realise I’m on a chronic relapsing path…bizarrely official NHS Wales policy is that there should not be LongCovid clinics…report comes back in 2 days that I have blood clots in two of the large veins in my brain…Totally shocked, stunned, frightened almost beyond belief at the thought of what this could have done.”
“I am 47 currently employed but not working due to illness…tested positive for COVID Boxing Day 2020. I was not hospitalised to begin with…I was diagnosed with Long Covid which had left me with tachycardia heart, 2 blood clots, pneumonia scarring in lungs…the specialist really can’t figure out why I have been left like this…I have gone from a very healthy person…to now not being able to walk down the stairs without sounding like I smoke 100 a day and just run a marathon.”
“I tested positive for covid on 1st December 2020…I am 45, normally in excellent health and keep fit and active. I was unable to do the most simple of activities such as cook a meal or walk even a short distance. The mental toll on being so unwell was huge. Fortunately I was one of the lucky ones given the Moderna vaccine. My fatigue lifted overnight and the rest of my symptoms cleared within a week. I feel like I have been given my life back.”
“We were victims of the first wave catching covid in March 2020..the lingering effects have been soul destroying and have never left myself and my girls aged 10 and 11. Fifteen months on my 10 year old is still suffering from ongoing fevers, fatigue and breathlessness. She had gone from being the most physically active child with numerous sporting activities to getting so out of breathe, exhausted and turning a bright share of red through any exertion. Not only the physical effects but the mental impact of not being able to do what she used to has been soul destroying for her.”
“…age 16…I’ve been referred to a long covid clinic as I’m still not better..only to be told I’m too young to be put on the program…I’m not doing a low histamine diet (as well as trying everything else) which has given me a bit more control over my hands, all from mine and my parents own research…It just feels so unfair I can’t get medical help…Before covid I danced and worked out 5 times a week, did a full week of school…now I’m lucky if I can do 3 days at school a week and missing out on lots as I’m only 16…I just feel so ill everyday.”
“…Symptoms are worse than the initial symptoms…I get fatigue, muscle pain. Deep bone ache. Migraines. Breathlessness. Chest pain. Chest pressure. Palpitations, dizzyness, neck ache, rashes, fuzzy vision, body vibrations, tinitus. Bloating, diarrhea, nausea, constipation. Pins and needles. Numbness. Weird neurological stuff…I have tried to get my fitness levels back up a few times. But every time I get so far I get a relapse. Prior to covid I walked 10,000 steps a day. I ran and did dance and yoga classes weekly.”
“He scoffed at me and said: we are a covid ward here and we don’t know anything about this *waves hand* “long covid”.”
“I’m a doctor who caught covid in our 2nd wave in Oct 2020…I felt pretty ill for a week but nothing serious & as my days of isolation were up, I headed back to the frontline…I honestly thought I was dying of a heart condition…I’ve had a heart MRI & I’m on beta blockers, waiting for follow up…The NHS needs us more than ever but so many healthcare workers are long haulers. Much of the medical community doesn’t know about long covid. I’ve heard ignorant remarks. I also want the government to count long covid!”
“I’m 21 years old…I trained for powerlifting five times per week..my initial symptoms with covid were relatively mild…within a day, I slipped immediately into depression and crippling insomnia. The depression is very much not like me. I was extremely happy with myself..fast forward six months and I’m here. Overall, I’ve actually become worse over time…I struggle walking more than 30 minutes at a time without incurring some form of PEM.”
“I’m 22...I was previously fit and healthy, would go for long walks with my dog, now I can’t go far at all. I was a nursery assistant but since catching covid I’ve been unable to do my job…My whole life has been turned upside which has affected my mental health majorly.”
“I used to walk 13 miles a day but now I’m bed ridden due to the pain 24/7. I worked in a forrest doing conservation work…no pre-existing conditions, mild infection. Dr’s kept telling me this was anxiety..It feels like I’ve died but am forced to watch the rest of the world move on.”
“I’m 23 years old..had long covid since 28th June 2020.. I now can’t walk independently without 2 crutches, I am incredibly fatigued, I have heart failure..medics don’t know what to do..I struggle to see a life worth living.”
“I was a triathlete..a marathon runner…after contracting a mild case of Covid in March 2020, I suffered chest pains (at one point I called 999 thinking I was having a heart attack), heart palpitations, mental fog, sharp stabbing heart pains, chest pressure..I am still unable to run, 15 months later.”
“Writing to you as a fellow long hauler with identical symptoms to yours. Got so desperate that I ordered Ivermectin, a drug which many people in Survivor Corps (FB group) reported helped them — within literally hours chest pains greatly subsided, HR came down SUBSTANTIALLY and after a week I could walk down the street again.”
“I’m 28, no pre-existing conditions, was athletic..cycled to work everyday prior to catching covid last March. Since then, I have been bed-bound disabled and unable to work for 3 months..” “…I very much hope to be referred and with the help of your and others’ stories, hoping i will be taken seriously now.”
“My now 12 year has been suffering horrific symptoms since September. He caught covid in school within 8 days of returning. He was been hospitalised, now needs to use a wheelchair. He hasn’t returned to school since. He was a fit football and rugby player who never sat still, he has been pretty much bedridden for 7 months.”
“I was 30 when I got Covid in Oct…I had mild illness with 2 weeks off & started recovering, then a relapse rollar coaster…Remaining symptoms are fatigue like struggling to leave the house or lift my arms to hang laundry, breathlessness even while resting which makes talking difficult, cognitive issues like memory & concentration, heart palpitations, &purple covid toes…The Royal Brompton have been excellent, we’re investigating possible mini blood clots on the lungs. I want people to know that it’s not just death or recovery outcomes, there are a lot of young healthy people with long term issues.” | https://medium.com/@mylongcoviddiaries/the-hidden-voices-of-long-covid-5109fed0d79b | ['Jasmine Hayer'] | 2021-07-25 15:14:34.963000+00:00 | ['Long Covid', 'Lockdown', 'Corona', 'Post Covid 19 Recovery', 'Coronavirus'] |
“Full Cyrkle!” Spotlight on The Cyrkle’s Don Dannemann | By Spotlight Central. Photos by Love Imagery
The Cyrkle is a 60s-era rock band which is well-known for their hits, “Red Rubber Ball” and “Turn Down Day.” Founded by lead singer/guitarist Don Dannemann, the band toured with The Beatles, opening for them at the Fab Four’s final show at Candlestick Park in 1966. After breaking up, The Cyrkle reunited nearly a half-century later with Dannemann at the helm, performing concerts around the country, including their first revival show at The Strand Theater in Lakewood, NJ.
Spotlight Central recently caught up with Dannemann to ask him about his early musical memories, his rise to fame with The Cyrkle, his recollections of touring with The Beatles, and what he’s been up to lately.
Spotlight Central: We understand you were born in Brooklyn to a mom who played the piano. Is it true that your mom said you were already humming songs when you were only 10 months old?
Don Dannemann: Yes, that’s actually true. My mom told me that when I was only 10 months old, she was diapering me and she was humming the song, “Little Brown Jug,” and I hummed it back to her. Now, I don’t remember that, obviously, but that’s what she told me.
Spotlight Central: You’ve said that in fifth grade, you can recall listening to Alan Freed’s 1010 WINS show on your transistor radio. What kind of music were you interested in at the time?
Don Dannemann: As a family, I remember when we would travel in the car, we would listen to Martin Block’s Make Believe Ballroom, and I was always interested in the music he played. But around 1955, for my birthday, I got a transistor radio, and I was sitting on the front porch of our home in Brooklyn when I came upon Alan Freed’s rock and roll show on WINS in New York and I was transfixed. The first song I heard was a song called “Story Untold” by The Nutmegs and it just caught me. I remember listening and listening — to the point where I even missed my favorite TV shows — and thinking “I want to do that! This is great!”
Spotlight Central: After taking piano lessons, influenced by Elvis, you started taking guitar lessons. Tell us about how, as a youngster, you began your recording career with a tape recorder you received as a gift.
Don Dannemann: It’s interesting you mention that. This would have been, probably, around eighth grade or so. I had gotten a tape recorder as a present, and not long after, I was given a second tape recorder. As soon as I got the second tape recorder, the first thing I did was put the two tape recorders next to each other to record myself performing the song, “In the Still of the Night.” I recorded the first part [sings] Sh-doo, shoo-be-doo/Sh-doo, shoo-be-doo” into the first tape recorder. Then I put my head next to the speaker of the first tape recorder and I took the mike of the second tape recorder and I put it in front and sang the second part, the harmony. Then I went back and forth a few times with that between the two recorders, and finally sang the lead. It was an awful recording — it was hissy and there was room noise and all that — but it was correct. It was the way overdubs were done later on and even now — where you can sing along with yourself — and I did exactly that with my two tape recorders, so I guess you could say I got started with multi-track recording pretty early on.
Spotlight Central: As a high school student, you played in different groups and then, at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, you founded a band called The Rhondells. What kind of music did you play and where did you perform?
Don Dannemann: The Rhondells got started at a freshman mixer at Lafayette College during my freshman year. A couple of guys started playing when the hired band took a break and a friend of mine said, “Hey, Don, you should go play with them.” I got my guitar and went down and started playing with them, and it was one of those magic moments where we all went, “Wow, we can play the same stuff!” It was basically rock of the time — Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, and some doo-wop stuff. Soon after, we started rehearsing and a major thing happened at Christmas when my high school girlfriend broke up with me. It really made me very sad, but it freed me up to say, “All right, my girlfriend’s gone. I don’t care about seeing girls on party weekends, so if you guys want to get some jobs for the band, let’s do it.”
My bandmate, Jim Maiella, who was our first drummer at college — Marty Fried, the original Cyrkle drummer, came about two years later — got us a job playing a fraternity party at Lehigh University, which was just down the road a bit from our college. So we started playing fraternity parties doing the rock and roll music of the time and, over the course of our stay at Lafayette, we became the band to get for fraternity parties. | https://medium.com/spotlight-central/full-cyrkle-spotlight-on-the-cyrkles-don-dannemann-24c92b104912 | ['Spotlight Central'] | 2020-08-05 17:21:58.433000+00:00 | ['60s', 'Music', '60s Music', 'Rock', '60s Rock'] |
1968 | For months we had been bombarded on television with horrendous, uncensored images of the war in Vietnam. In March, American soldiers massacred 347 at My Lai. Two weeks later, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, the target of anti-war rage, said he would not seek re-election. In April, Martin Luther King had been assassinated on the balcony of a Memphis Hotel, and the inner cities exploded. Just days later SDS students at Columbia barricaded themselves in the president’s office while black students occupied a separate building. In May, Parisian students went on strike, tearing up the cobblestones of Paris. A few weeks later, moments after victory in the California primary, Bobby Kennedy was murdered in the kitchen of a Los Angeles Hotel. A few days before, a marginal member of Andy Warhol’s circle, Valerie Solanas, also founder of SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men, shot him in the stomach. Prior to the shooting, she had written a manifesto calling for “systematically fucking up the system, selectively destroying property, and murder.”
It was June of 1968. And Sarah was on the Illinois Central, heading downtown, on a humid morning shortly after her wedding. She’d been on her way downtown to apply for a passport — they were going to Europe on their honeymoon — when something in her perception altered. All spring she’d begun to feel her sense of safety in the world compromised. But it was subtle — a tendency to listen to her own heartbeat, a bit of unease when she woke up in the morning. Then, on the train, those vague feelings of unease took a more palpable shape. One moment she was sitting there, in the unfocused state that characterizes most experience, hardly noticing her surroundings, not really thinking of anything at all. And then, without warning, she was suddenly aware of becoming faint. Sarah had never actually fainted in her life, but once, when she was ten and had a stomach flu, she almost had, and she’d never forgotten the feeling-of sounds growing more and more distant, tiny spots accumulating in her field of vision, threatening to overtake her sight, the clarity of her senses abandoning her. She’d been on the brink of losing consciousness when she’d thrown up, and immediately felt better.
On the train, over ten years later, the physical sensations of impending loss of consciousness hadn’t gotten anywhere near what she’d felt at school that day, but she’d felt sure that’s where they were heading. The rumble of the train seemed to come through cotton in her ears, and instead of simply seeing things, she became aware of her vision itself, which now seemed to be holding the world together like a Seurat painting, a painting that she was certain was going to decompose into thousands of tiny particles. She was going to faint, she knew it — and the thought that this was happening was as terrifying to Sarah as if she were going to die. She looked around, as if to find relief somewhere, but couldn’t; everything on the train, from the imitation leather seats to the people themselves, seemed old and worn and ugly. “I’ve got to get out of here,” she thought. The need was so strong that nothing else mattered, not the bewildered faces of the other passengers, or the frightened look on the conductor’s as she clutched his arm. He suggested she put her head between her knees, but Sarah knew there was only one remedy. “Please, please, I just have to get off this train. I have to. Can you get them to stop it?” So they did, and the conductor helped Sarah to Union station, where her senses began to clear, and she called her fiance Simon to come get her.
In their small South Side apartment, snuggled under her mother’s orange and green quilt, watching “General Hospital,” Sarah felt briefly better, but something new, which would be constant, ever-present for almost a year, had attached itself to her-the fear of it happening again. She tried to banish the idea from her mind, to get back to how she had felt a moment before, immersed in Luke and Laura’s problems, but found it was impossible. And she began to stew about what she would do if “it” did happen again would she grab at people, babble like an idiot, make a terrible scene?
The next day, as she got ready to go to work, she began to think about the five blocks to Book Express, five blocks she had routinely traversed with barely a thought, and which now seemed like a boundless ocean that lay between one safe habor — her home — and another — the bookstore. As long as she could imagine being able to tum back and run home, should it happen again, she felt relatively calm. Book Central, where the books themselves felt like comforting friends and she knew Jack Cohen, the manager, had a crush on her, felt safe, too. But there were all those streets between, and as she got to the end of the first street and was about to cross it to the other, the space between the two curbs grew wide, like a movie pan in which a broad vista suddenly opens up. Her body felt odd, numbish. Soon, if she kept going, she’d be in the middle of the ocean, having swum too far from one shore to go back but still too far away from the other to reach it in time, should anything terrible happen to her. Her skin grew clammy, and her heart began to beat irregularly. Am I having a heart attack now? What’s happening to me? She turned around. By the time she reached her apartment, she was drenched with sweat and collapsed into Simon’s arms.
The next day, she asked Simon to walk her to work; the next, to accompany her to the comer grocery shop; the next, to come with her while she belatedly applied for the passport. Even as she was filling in the forms, going through the motions, Sarah knew she’d never be able to get on the plane, unless something miraculously cured her in time. The fear of it happening had rapidly became attached to a whole variety of venues malls, crowded stores, busy streets, empty streets, crowded elevators, empty elevators, large, open spaces, small, cramped spaces, and-of course-trains. The sphere of safety grew smaller and smaller. She quit her job, and at a certain point, even their own apartment no longer felt sheltering. Eating, once her solace, became difficult, and one day she noticed that when she ate, he left hand was clenched in a fist. She lost twenty pounds, and stopped wearing a bra; she felt she couldn’t breathe freely with one on.
Simon insisted she see a therapist. She wound up seeing several. The first, a Freudian, noting that she was not wearing a bra or make-up, immediately zeroed in on Sarah’s “inability to accept her feminine role” now that she was married. The second--the only woman she saw — took out a pad of paper, on which Sarah expected her to record a full history of her symptoms, turned to her and flatly asked, “Do you have orgasms?” The third was a psychiatrist, a cold, dark-suited rail of a man who prescribed a regimen of anti-psychotic drugs that made Sarah’s tongue thick and her brain feel like it was stuffed with cotton.
Then, on the fourth try, she found Dr. Silber. He was one of those dignified but homey Jewish men of Sarah’s father’s generation who looked like they could just as easily have been rabbis as professionals. Tall, slightly stout but well-built, bald, with a face that was not quite handsome but nice to look at; he invited Sarah to sit down and tell him about herself. When she launched into a description of her symptoms-something that always gave her an odd kind of relief — he stopped her. “Let’s save that for a bit later. For now, tell me some other things — -where you come from, your family, what your life was like before all thi s happened, and so on.”
Sarah, at first, found it surprisingly hard to reconstruct her past. Her present life was so dominated by minute-to-minute hyper-awareness of her own body, anticipations, fears, that reaching back to any time before the train incident felt like she was entering someone else’s life. As far as her childhood went, she didn’t want to even think about it, much less talk about it. Not about her hyper-critical, rage-filled father or her depressed mother, who’d never learned to drive a car and whose many physical complaints were continually dismissed by her doctors as hypochondria. Nor did she want to talk about the eight-year old, overweight and shy, who loved putting words together in poems. By ten, the teachers had discovered she had “talent” and began making her read the work out loud to a snickering class. So of course, she gave it up. Instead, like a samurai in training, Sarah methodically transformed herself, body and soul, into a perky pre-teen, abandoning her Tchaikovsky records for Fabian and Ed “Kookie” Byrnes, and Louisa May Alcott for Annette Funicello. She tamed her unruly hair in by setting it in huge rollers, and put tissue paper in her bra to look more like a curvy mouseketeer.
As the fifties crashed into the sixties, it suddenly became more important to be “cool” and political than to be curvaceous. In awe of the hip, male authors and radicals who dominated popular culture at that time, Sarah discovered there were ways to be a writer and be admired by the boys at the same time: sarcasm, cynicism, and lots of dirty talk. Her “coming-out” piece was a parody of a neighborhood newspaper called “The Jewish News.” It got her sent her the principal’s office for ethnic offense, but dazzled the only people who counted at that time in her life: the boys. Her ambition in life was to be the next Norman Mailer.
In high school, when she was still a virgin, she’d fallen in love with a boy in her class who was much “faster” than she was. At parties, he’d play around with Sarah, trying to see how far he could go; she’d pretty much let him do whatever he wanted, short of actual intercourse. But she knew she was just a side diversion. He had two other girlfriends, with whom he had regular sex — one a long-limbed, hip-talking, Black girl with a guitar and a wonderful singing voice, the other a frizzy-hair politico, several years older, who was instrumental in founding the Newark chapter of SDS. Sarah was in awe of these girls, who were accomplished in all the ways that really counted, while she was always just short of the mark: cute but not in the right way (Judy Collins, not Sandra Dee, had suddenly become the ideal,) “hip” tastes in literature and music but much too serious about her schoolwork, all the correct political ideas but mistrustful of ideologues. And most of all, too vulnerable, too yearning, too sensitive. Not cool.
When she finally had intercourse with Curtis, on her seventeenth birthday, home on break from college, in the attic apartment of one of his SDS friends, it was awful. Sarah was extremely nervous, to be completely naked in front of him, but he didn’t even seem to be looking at her at all. He was stoned, and when he took the rubber out of its package (about five minutes after they’d taken their clothes off,) he ripped too hard and it went flying across the room. Curtis found this hysterically funny. He leaped out of bed, retrieved the rubber, and, bounding back into bed like a child on a trampoline, smacked Sarah jovially-but quite hard — on her thigh. The sex itself lasted three minutes. Then he got up and put his clothes on to join the bluegrass session downstairs. Afterwards, she’d gone out to Ming ‘s with her girlfriends, for chow mein and to celebrate the end of her virginity. By then, she’d almost convinced herself that she’d had a great time with Curtis. It was good to have done the thing, anyway, to finally get it out of the way.
Sarah had applied to the University of Chicago because it had a reputation for being intellectual and hip. In her first semester, she received a “D” on her first critical essay, because she “dared” (as the teacher wrote on her piece) to liken King Lear to her own father. Later that fall, she watched her roommate nearly die from a botched illegal abortion. In the spring, one of her professors became annoyingly flirtatious. Sarah, like everyone else at the time, did not think there was anything wrong with student/teacher affairs, but she was put off by the way his eyes would glisten as he talked to her, as though he were surveying something edible. And he was ugly. When, after some perfunctory chit-chat about the pre-Socratics, he’d asked her to dinner, she said no, appreciatively but firmly. From that moment on, he took every opportunity to needle her-about her politics, her love life, her clothes.
One day, in an open doorway in full view of a classroom full of (male) students waiting for a class to begin, he’d slapped Sarah on the bottom; “Time for class, dear,” he’d smirked, jovially. Sarah, at first, couldn’t believe that he’d actually done it. The last person to smack Sarah’s behind had been her father; she was five, and annoying the men at her father’s pinochle game, pulling on their pants legs under the table. Professor Dilman’s little whack, about a tenth as hard as her father’s, made her feel five again. “What?. …” She’d been speechless, her face hot with humiliation. “Oh, Sarah, don ‘t be so sensitive, Dilman replied, and walked into the classroom, smiling, shaking his head. Sarah ran down the hall and went straight to the department chair, who okayed her request to drop out of class on the condition that she cite “personality differences,” as the reason. She didn’t have a problem with that; there was no sexual harassment in 1968. When, a few months later, the Dean took back her scholarship, arguing that it could be used to keep a young man out of Vietnam, Sarah saw nothing wrong with his reasoning.
Dropping out of school had seemed liberating at first, to be free of droning professorial voices and always having to read what was assigned to you. She liked having a paycheck, paltry though it was, and enjoyed her two housemates, a divorced faculty wife and an Australian exchange student in psychology. But by the time Simon had come into the bookstore, with his rimless glasses, goatee and patched-elbow tweed jacket-the unmistakable signs of professordom — Sarah felt tired and soiled, from too many drunken nights and too many regretful mornings, cooking breakfast for one guy or another that she’d fallen into bed with. Plus, Simon recognized her from the part-time job she had briefly held, doing editorial work for an economics journal, and Sarah was gratified to have someone acknowledge that she was something more than a sales-clerk. “You ‘re the one who was always reading that awful left-wing crap,” he said — and it felt like a compliment.
For a while, it was delightful simply to be a part of the couple buying the Sunday Times rather than the one selling it, and to be situated-if only by romantic association- on the other side of the faculty/student divide. Simon adored having a smart girlfriend to take to faculty parties, and was particularly pleased that Sarah could keep up the banter with his mentor, Milton Friedman, the guru of the “new economics.” On her part, Sarah tried hard to overlook the fact that her husband and his friends were just the kind of people her own friends — former SDSers now drifting into the Weather Underground and just-sprouting radical women’s groups — saw as the enemy. She was suspicious of the groupthink and coercive ideologies spreading through left politics. But the other extreme, which her new husband inhabited, was just as creepy. The week after she moved into his townhouse, Simon suggested that because the “opportunity cost” of his doing the dishes was far greater than Sarah’s — he being a well-paid professor and she unemployed at the time — it was only rational that she be the family dishwasher. Another time she overheard Simon and his colleagues, who were lounging in the living room, drinking beer and smoking pipes, doing a cost-benefit analysis of mass extermination of the Black Panthers. There was nothing racist about it, Simon explained; it was simply a thought experiment.
By the time that they were married, just six months later, she was already feeling as though she’d walked into a trap — although who had set it she couldn’t exactly say. “Believe it or not,” she told Dr. Silber, “I knew it was all wrong even while I was walking down the aisle. “The Bach was playing, the rabbi was waiting, and all I could think of was running away. After the wedding, my father took my sister and a bunch of my friends over to Coney Island, and I wanted to go with them, rather than with Simon! But, you know, I was in a kind of fog, I just sort of let things carry me along. When I think back to that week-end, I remember Sergeant Pepper playing all the time on the radio, and every time I heard any of the songs, it felt like a requiem for my freedom and ….I don’t know …some lost dream of some sort. I still can’t hear it without all those feelings corning back.”
And so it was that she found herself, in June, on the Illinois Central, going to downtown Chicago for a passport that she would never use. When, in August, the city she lived in erupted in the chaotic violence of the Democratic National Convention, she was already too immersed in her own misery to muse, as she would years later, about the synchronicity of her own nervous breakdown and that of the country around her. The “personal” and the “political” were still disparate realms in her analysis, and by now she had far less interest in the violence downtown than the rhythm of her own heartbeat. Other people in her apartment hooted, shouted, cheered, and jeered while Sarah lay, curled up on the couch, feeling like an invalid who had long given up her investment in any kind of revolution. She didn’t even notice it when, just a few weeks later, the first major demonstration of the Women’s Liberation Movement — the “No More Miss America” protest — was held in her home state of New Jersey, in Atlantic City, where her father had sometimes driven the family, to take refuge from the summer Newark heat, and to do a little gambling.
One day, Dr. Silber asked a truly surprising question: “Would you mind if I read some of your writing?” Sarah picked a paper on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, another on Sartre’s concept of “The Look,” and just for fun — a review she’d done of “Bonnie and Clyde.” The session after he read the pieces, Dr. Silber came into the waiting room, took Sarah’s two hands in his own, and looked into her eyes like a parent about to deliver a lecture to a disobedient but adored child.. He said her name two times, shook his head, then: “You’re a writer. We’ve got to get you writing again.”
It was June of 1971, and the sixties were over. By now, the Beatles had broken up. Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix were dead. 4 students had been slain by national guardsmen at Kent State. And Richard Nixon was president. But Kate Millet had published Sexual Politics. Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch. Shulamith Firestone, Dialectics of Sex, Robin Morgan, Sisterhood is Powerful. Toni Cade, The Black Woman. Maya Angelou, Now I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Nikki Giovanni, Black Talk/Black Judgement. My therapist’s advice was no longer the heretical prescription it would have been in 1968. My marriage would limp along for a few more years — and with it, my agoraphobia. But the recovery began at that moment. | https://medium.com/engendered/1968-687e084d1744 | ['Susan Bordo'] | 2020-12-04 15:08:08.042000+00:00 | ['Feminism', 'The Sixties', 'Memories', 'Short Story', 'Agoraphobia'] |
Aaron Kelly | in In Fitness And In Health | https://medium.com/a-teen-view/aaron-kelly-830386e66b1 | ['Arin Segal'] | 2016-11-04 00:42:25.803000+00:00 | ['Idol', 'Aaron', 'Music', 'Kelly', 'American'] |
Embracing Uncertainty To Grow Your Business: What Works For Co-Creating Inclusion Founder Alethea… | The Nitty-Gritty:
How Co-Creating Inclusion founder Alethea Fitzpatrick took a long & winding road to creating her new company
Why embracing uncertainty has helped her stay flexible while building her business
The many pivots she’s made from architecture to photography to operations management to diversity consulting
Why respecting her Zone Of Genius has kept her from getting caught up in expectations
Starting a business is a risk.
Running a business is a risk.
Growing a business is a risk.
Ostensibly, we’ve all signed on for this risky life as an entrepreneur. But, we often find ourselves searching for certainty and hunting for the “sure thing.”
We do it every time we think another $2000 course is going to answer all our questions about building a successful business. We do it every time we wait a few more months to launch a new offer into the world. We do it every time we avoid reinforcing a boundary because it might upset a client.
In our last episode, Episode 241 with Charlie Gilkey, we talked about how striving for certainty keeps us stuck.
When we aim to choose the “sure thing,” we hesitate, procrastinate, and avoid.
Charlie advocated for building our courage by finding all the moments in the day when we can choose the option that has room for growth, for vulnerability, for risk… and yes, for uncertainty.
I was reminded of that idea during my conversation with today’s guest, Alethea Fitzpatrick.
Alethea is the founder of Co-Creating Inclusion, a diversity, equity, and inclusion consulting firm with a mission to shift culture and drive equity through workshop facilitation, leadership development, and business integration.
But Alethea has also been the founder of a host of other ventures!
To continue our focus on resilience and entrepreneurship, I wanted to talk with Alethea about the long and winding journey she’s taken to get to where she is now. Because where she is now is authentic, organic growth and a whole new level of success doing work that is incredibly important to her (and to the world).
We’ll get to how she’s achieved that in a minute — but first…
…let’s take another look at how having the courage to tolerate uncertainty, to even embrace uncertainty, can work in a business.
Later in the conversation, Alethea shares that she’s chosen clarity of her Why and her What but she’s remaining open to how it’ll all come together. She’s choosing to be strategic about designing a container that’s flexible enough to hold different outcomes.
I think this is a beautiful example of what Charlie was talking about in our last episode — but it also seems to be the secret sauce for how Alethea has gotten where she is right now. She has always followed clarity while allowing for openness and uncertainty so that she could grow into the direction of her goals.
Keep that in mind as Alethea and I talk about the journey she’s taken to get to where she is now.
Alethea and I also talk about the businesses and jobs that predate Co-Creating Inclusion, the moment she realized there was a new opportunity presenting itself, how the transition into consulting felt, and how her Zone of Genius keeps her from getting caught up in expectations.
Now, let’s find out What Works for Alethea Fitzpatrick! | https://medium.com/help-yourself/embracing-uncertainty-to-grow-your-business-what-works-for-co-creating-inclusion-founder-alethea-76690b69a1a6 | ['Tara Mcmullin'] | 2019-10-08 13:38:28.965000+00:00 | ['Small Business', 'Resilience', 'Podcast', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Business'] |
Things You Wanted to Know About Networking | Things You Wanted to Know About Networking
…and some corny networking jokes that you didn’t.
What the heck is TCP/IP?!
TCP/IP is a model for describing how communication across networks typically occurs from the application layer of a source machine (HTTP), through to the physical layer, through to the destination machine and an application layer on that machine receiving a packet.
TCP/IP uses IP addresses to communicate between a source and destination host across a network.
A TCP packet walks into a bar and says, “I’d like a beer.”
The bartender replies, “You want a beer?”
The TCP packet replies, “Yes, I’d like a beer.”
…🥁
So… IP Addresses?
In simple terms, an IP address is a number identifying a device on a network.
There are two forms of IP address — IPv4 and IPv6.
IPv4 address usage is still the most commonly used — this is despite the creation of IPv6 in 1998 as a means to address the inevitable future shortfall of IPv4 addresses.
In this article, I won’t focus on it, but you can learn more about IPv6 below:
IPv4 addresses are divided into 4 octets of bits and represented in dot-decimal notation.
The four octets of bits have the following possible ranges:
[0 - 255].[0 - 255].[0 - 255].[0 - 255]
An example IP address can be found below (this one is for OpenDNS):
208.67.220.220
An IP address can be converted to a binary form, and this often happens when working with IP addresses. Here’s the above IP address in binary form:
11010000.01000011.11011100.11011100
The best thing about IPv4 jokes is that you can tell them 254 times before they’re exhausted.
…🥁
Are some IP addresses special?
Yes. Across the 2³² possible IPv4 addresses, we have the following reserved ranges:
10.0.0.0/8 IP addresses: 10.0.0.0 — 10.255.255.255
IP addresses: 172.16.0.0/12 IP addresses: 172.16.0.0 — 172.31.255.255
IP addresses: 192.168.0.0/16 IP addresses: 192.168.0.0–192.168.255.255
According to RFC-1918, each of these ranges (including the loopback address range — 127.X.X.X ), are reserved for private use only — that means they can’t be allocated for public use over the public internet.
Trying to connect to an IP address in these ranges will not work unless you have a network interface on your private network which has routes defined for these ranges.
For example, many people’s home router management IP address falls somewhere in the range of:
192.168.0.0–192.168.255.255
If I connect to 192.168.0.1 , I’m not going to connect to your home router management interface, instead the connection will route through my wlo1 network interface — which you can see is responsible for the part of the range which contains 192.168.0.1 :
3: wlo1: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state UP group default qlen 1000
link/ether 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
inet 192.168.0.37/24 brd 192.168.0.255 scope global dynamic noprefixroute wlo1
valid_lft 860858sec preferred_lft 860858sec
Tell me about subnets!
Subnets are just subdivisions of a larger network. You can subnet both a private and a public network.
Congested Networks
Subnetting as a concept can serve many purposes, but one of the original purposes was to ease network congestion.
In the past, when a network became too monolithic, the traffic running across the network would run more slowly.
The sheer volume of traffic would overload network hubs and there would be an excess of “packet collision” incidence.
This is where packets sent at an identical time would collide and destroy one another, thus leading to a delay and packet ‘reset time’, before packets would be able to be resent.
Subnetting a network into chunks means that traffic always stays within a designated subnet unless it is destined for an alternate subnet — only at that point will a given transmission packet cross subnet boundaries via a router.
This concept ultimately means broadcasted packets are more distributed across nodes in a network, as opposed to overwhelming specific network communication hotspots and therefore causing congestion for the network as a whole.
This practice of subnetting for easing network congestion is still somewhat relevant today, however, due to the emergence of the practice of using physical “switch” based networks — which routes traffic directly from a source machine to a destination, as opposed to “hubs” — networks of today generally do not suffer as much from the adverse effects of network congestion.
So why do we still subnet our networks?
Easing Administration
Another one of the most common purposes of subnetting is to facilitate the identification of machines on a network and for easing the burden of administration of them.
Let’s take an example — say we have a corporate network that spans the following private IP range:
10.0.0.0–10.255.255.255
That range has 16,777,216 potential IP addresses - this really is an awful lot of addresses to keep track of for a network administrator who, for whatever reason, might need to perform patches, upgrades and other work on specific isolated groups of hosts.
To ease this burden, we could choose to subnet this network to make the best use of it — then with the subnets, allocate them for specific and different real-world purposes.
Subnetting by Geography
Let’s split our hypothetical 10.0.0.0 — 10.255.255.255 network into 2 subnets by geographical boundaries, and have the following address range for machines in our hypothetical US office branch:
10.0.0.1–10.127.255.254
And the following address range for the machines in our UK branch:
10.128.0.1–10.255.255.254
Subnet Identifier and Broadcast Address
You’ll notice that I’ve omitted the first and last IP addresses of each of the ranges I’ve described — i.e. 10.0.0.0 , 10.127.255.255 & 10.128.0.0 and 10.255.255.255 are all omitted in the above ranges.
The first and last IP addresses of a subnet serve special functions on a network and the above ranges I’ve written are just the “usable” IP addresses of the subnet — i.e. the ones that can be assigned to a host.
The first IP address of a subnet range is known as the subnet identifier — this is an IP address which is effectively never assigned to a host and is instead just used as a signpost to a specific subnet.
— this is an IP address which is effectively never assigned to a host and is instead just used as a signpost to a specific subnet. The last IP address of a range serves as the broadcast address —this is a special IP address in a subnet, where whatever packets are transmitted to it will be broadcast to all hosts attached to the given subnet.
The worst thing about a broadcast joke is that you have to tell it to everyone in order to find the one person who gets it.
…🥁
…Anyway, if we are trying to find the origin of an IP address on our hypothetical corporate network such as the one below:
10.0.0.231
Because we have subnetted our hypothetical network by real-world geography, at a glance, we can easily identify the IP address as originating from the US office building. Hooray! 🇺🇸
The above is a very contrived example, but this is a pretty handy thing to be able to do when your network is very large and responsibility for it is spread out across multiple different offices, countries or continents.
We don’t need to stop there, and we could further subnet our subnets, to break down this IP address range even further — perhaps we could have a subnet per department, room or floor of these office buildings?
There aren’t many hard and fast rules on what is good subnetting practice, but often real-world physical divisions and real-world geography can make perfect sense as network divisions too.
Classful IP Addressing
With 4 groups of 8 bits, an IPv4 address has a size of 32 bits, which means of the pool of possible IPv4 addresses in this address space, there are 4,294,967,296 (2³²) IPv4 addresses.
With this relatively large address space comes the problem of how do we most efficiently use it, how do we decide who owns what and what segments of this address space should be reserved for what specific purposes?
As a solution to this need to carve up the growing internet, IPv4 classful IP addressing was introduced. It essentially broke all IPv4 addresses into distinct classes which had specific purposes.
Class A IP addresses were to be used for huge networks, like those deployed by Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
Class A IP addresses support up to 16 million hosts — hosts are any device that connects to a network (computers, servers, switches, routers, printers…etc.) and a Class A network can be divided into 128 different networks.
0.0.0.0 - 127.0.0.0*
*Any address starting with 127.X.X.X is considered a “loopback” address and therefore not allocated to by via public or private networks. A loopback address is an address which routes back to the originating machine.
Class B IP addresses were to be used for medium and large-sized networks in enterprises and organizations.
They support up to 65,000 hosts on 16,000 individual networks.
128.0.0.0 - 191.255.0.0
Class C addresses were the most common class and were to be used in small business and home networks.
These support up to 256 hosts on each of 2 million networks.
192.0.0.0 - 223.255.255.0
Class D and E addresses were not commonly used.
Class D was reserved and was only to be used for special cases such as for applications to stream audio and video to many subscribers at once. Class E addresses were reserved for research purposes by those responsible for Internet networking and IP address research, management, and development.
224.0.0.0 - 255.255.255.255
Network Prefix and Host Identifier
IP addresses can be broken down into two portions:
The network prefix , the part of the IP address which is used by routers to determine where on the network a packet for a given IP address should be routed to.
, the part of the IP address which is used by routers to determine where on the network a packet for a given IP address should be routed to. The host identifier, the part of the IP address which provides specific information on the destination host once a packet has reached the correct locality of the network.
In classful networking, the rules for deriving these divisions of an IP address are specific to a given class:
Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR)!
In 1993, the state of the Internet changed with the introduction of CIDR. CIDR was introduced to replace classful networking and to help slow down the depletion of usable IPv4 addresses.
IPv4 address space walks into a bar and shouts:
“One strong CIDR please, I’m exhausted!”
…🥁
Unlike Classful IP addressing, the CIDR system uses non-fixed host and network portions of IP addresses. Instead of being fixed, with CIDR the network prefix and host portion of an IP address range was made to be derivable through a subnet mask.
Amongst many other things, this change resulted in the ability for organisations to more flexibly and efficiently size their corporate networks — where previously with classful IP addressing — large and medium-sized organisations were left to choose between networks composed of either 256 hosts or the next possible size up: 65,536 .
Subnet Masks and CIDR Notation.
So we’ve learnt that subnets are just “chunks” of a larger network, where a network itself is just a range of IP addresses. We also have learnt about classful and classless IP addressing architecture.
I was going to tell you a joke about the CIDR block, but you’re all too classy for it…
…🥁
…So the question you’ve all been wondering about…
How Does a Network Router Know Where to Send a Packet?
As previously covered, IP addresses can be divided into two fields, the network prefix and the host ID/portion.
In classful networking, depending on whether an IP address is of class A, B, or C, the general rules of each specific class would determine what part of this IP address corresponds to a network prefix.
With the network prefix available, the router can know which route to send a packet to reach a destination host.
With the advent of CIDR, the parts of the IP address that are designated as the network prefix and host ID are no longer fixed, and therefore you cannot determine whether a given IP address is on a local or remote network from the IP address alone (although designated IP addresses such as the loopback address you can) — this is where subnet masks provide the missing piece of the puzzle.
Example Subnet Mask
255.255.255.0
The above subnet mask can be used in combination with an IP address to highlight the portions of an IP address that correspond to the network prefix and the portion that corresponds to the host ID.
This is through a conversion of both the subnet mask and IP address into a binary form and then a subsequent bitwise AND (&) operation on the bits:
11111111.11111111.11111111.00000000 (255.255.255.0)
And the IP address (10.0.0.231) in binary form:
00001010.00000000.00000000.11100111 (10.0.0.231)
And the bitwise AND combination of the two:
11111111.11111111.11111111.00000000 (255.255.255.0)
&
00001010.00000000.00000000.11100111 (10.0.0.231)
Allowing us to derive (from the masked and unmasked portion of the IP address):
Network Prefix
00001010.00000000.00000000.00000000 (10.0.0.x) Host ID
00000000.00000000.00000000.11100111 (x.x.x.231)
You can view the subnet mask as the answer to the question:
“…what are the significant bits for identifying the network prefix of this IP address?”
CIDR Notation
CIDR notation can be seen as a shorthand for communication of an IP address or range and a given subnet mask.
The CIDR notation works by combining a given IP address, followed by a number in a range of 0–32 that is prefixed by a slash, e.g.
10.0.0.0/24
The above CIDR block communicates quite a lot of information and it can be easy to interpret once you understand the derivation.
CIDR blocks can be used to communicate IP address ranges, all possible IP addresses in IPv4 space ( 0.0.0.0/0 ), as well as representing a single IP address. For instance, a single IP address in CIDR notation is:
<some-ip-address>/32
For example, if we take the Google DNS IP address:
8.8.8.8
In CIDR notation, this would be 8.8.8.8/32 . Where /32 corresponds to a subnet mask of: 255.255.255.255 — which when applied to an IP address, gives no masked portion — therefore serving as a pointer to a single unique IP address in IPv4 space.
To calculate an IP address range from a CIDR block is relatively simple.
Worked Example:
For the CIDR block:
10.137.1.0/24
Take the number trailing after the slash (denoted here as n ) and calculate 32-n .
The resultant value will give you the number of bits that corresponds to your subnet mask for the given subnet.
32-24 = 8
Convert 255.255.255.255 into binary; starting from the right-hand side, set the value of each bit to 0, up until you’ve done this 32-n times.
This will give you a binary form of the subnet mask that you can apply against your IP address block.
11111111.11111111.11111111.11111111 (255.255.255.255)
Successive removal of bits from the above:
11111111.11111111.11111111.00000000
Convert the binary subnet mask block back to dot-decimal notation.
The value you are left with is the subnet mask which you can then apply over your IP address.
11111111.11111111.11111111.00000000 (255.255.255.0)
Apply the subnet mask over your IP address using a bit-wise AND operation.
You should then be able to derive the IP address range.
11111111.11111111.11111111.00000000 (255.255.255.0)
&
00001010.10001001.00000001.00000000 ( 10.137.1.0)
And from this you can derive:
Network Prefix
00001010.10001001.00000001.xxxxxxxx (10.137.1.x) Host Portion
xxxxxxxx.xxxxxxxx.xxxxxxxx.00000000 (x.x.x.[0-255]) Subnet Range:
10.137.1.0 - 10.137.1.255
Thanks For Reading!
That’s it for now. I hope it’s been enjoyable, informative and given you a taster of some of the principals of networking. I leave you with:
What do they call a group of network engineers? An outage.
…🥁 | https://medium.com/swlh/things-you-wanted-to-know-about-networking-b9537c00d3d3 | ['Andy Macdonald'] | 2020-06-08 14:10:12.148000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Software Engineering', 'Software Development', 'Networking', 'DevOps'] |
8 forms of marital infidelity | One or both parties to the relationship may fall into marital infidelity, and it is not intended here only physical infidelity.
Get to know us about forms of infidelity.
Openness and honesty are among the strongest pillars on which the relationship between spouses must be based.
In fact, it is not easy. After marriage, many may be surprised by fundamental differences in thinking, behavior, and habits.
This requires a double effort for the success and continuation of the relationship.
The meaning of infidelity:
Marital infidelity is basically a breach of covenants, and marriage covenants are of two types, explicit covenants, and implicit covenants.
Breach of covenants is a breach of the integrity of the relationship between the two parties and a loss of trust and safety between them.
The extent to which infidelity affects the marital relationship depends mostly on the behavior of the betrayer of the covenant.
The traitor who admits his mistake and desires reform is different from the traitor who denies the mistake and even insists on it with more lies.
There are many types of marital infidelity such as:
1- Emotional betrayal:
An emotional relationship is a heart relationship, which may include a close connection, the exchange of secrets, and the secrets of the soul.
Rather, it may extend to discussing the marital life itself with the other party in this relationship.
Pushing all these feelings into an extramarital relationship drains positive feelings from the marital relationship itself.
And know that emotional infidelity can be more devastating to a marriage than a physical relationship, relationships that are usually difficult to break out of in peace.
2- Lying to the husband :
Even in simple matters, lying in a marital relationship cannot be justified.
If one spouse discovers that the other has lied to him, this usually breaks the trust between the spouses into a murder.
The problem is exacerbated by the greater the lie or the greater the topic to which it relates.
Lying in a marital relationship must be confronted positively.
Sometimes the problem may be in the recipient as a result of different concepts between the spouses, or a lack of respect for the other’s desires and freedom.
3- Exploiting the weaknesses of the other party:
Exploiting the other person’s weaknesses often stems from a love of control or from past life experiences.
Such as the husband’s refusal to work only with his wife, because he suffered from the problems of his parents’ work when he was young.
Or the husband deliberately criticizes the wife’s behavior because he is aware of her weak personality and her inability to confront.
4- Click on the other side to change:
Each spouse must learn to accept the other as “he”, not as he would like or wish his partner to be.
This acceptance must include all the personal and formal qualities of the other.
A wife should not pressure her husband to change his political ideas, for example, or to lose weight because of her personal desire to do so.
A person does not usually change unless he feels that he needs this change.
Pressure on the husband to force him to make some changes in his life may be the beginning of the dissolution of the relationship between the spouses.
5- Emotional Distancing :
Emotional distancing is the neglect of the other person’s emotional needs.
This situation is evident in cases of preferring the company of friends over the wife.
Spending free time with friends while the wife suffers from neglect and emotional emptiness.
Emotional separation inevitably leads to physical separation sooner or later.
6- Failure to support the other:
The failure of one party to support the other in the face of a problem is an abandonment of a major role expected of the spouses.
The wife should not accept the husband’s criticism from her mother if they disagree.
The wife must remember that she is the one who chose this husband to spend her life with, and her defense of him is a duty.
How do you support your husband in his problems?
7- Taking the marital relationship for granted:
A marital relationship can tempt one or both spouses to believe that the existence of the other party is taken for granted.
This may open a great door to neglect the feelings of the other party, and stop appreciating him and his efforts to continue the marital relationship.
This usually drives the other party to resentment and anger and causes endless accumulations that end in emotional separation between the spouses.
8- Talking about the peculiarities of the marital relationship and the disclosure of secrets:
Talking about the peculiarities of the marital relationship and divulging secrets are also marital infidelities, and both husband and wife may fall into it.
But it is more prevalent among wives, as most wives tend to talk to their friends about the details of their relationship with their husbands.
And this may carry insults and insults to the husband.
Signs your husband cheating:
A woman may feel that her husband is cheating, but at the same time, she has no evidence of this, which may expose her to anxiety.
Learn from this article on the signs your husband is cheating. | https://medium.com/@ahappyfamily/8-forms-of-marital-infidelity-823c0e294fce | ['The Way To A Happy Family'] | 2021-09-10 16:21:24.103000+00:00 | ['Sex', 'Infidelity', 'Married', 'Family', 'Baby'] |
Video Advertising and Marketing | Using video footage to prepare for a brand’s promotional process and promote its products or services to its target audience, video marketing is a very effective marketing campaign.
Changes in human behavior and society were interestingly represented in video marketing as a result of the pandemic.
Content creators and consumers have begun to embrace YouTube, which is the first social sharing network that comes to mind when thinking of video marketing in emerging markets.
Because of the rise in online communication brought on by the digital marketing pandemic, there has been a tremendous surge in online product debuts, which have begun to be produced by brands on YouTube.
What Is It About Online Product Launches That Makes Them So Appealing?
Content creators adapted to changing trends by inviting the target audience to participate in a joint event or action.
Brands began to assess this approach by live-streaming product or service promotions on YouTube.
Live and simultaneous watching contribute to a sense of community in the audience, which is the fundamental cause of customer interest.
People began to forget that they were members of the community as they began to stay at home because of the pandemic and spend a lot of time by themselves.
As a result, spending time with people he didn’t know other than himself, as if he were a member of a community, and sharing common interests satisfied the audience’s desire to connect.
Viewers are looking for material that is relevant to them as part of the new video trend.
During the pandemic, we began to use it in our homes, offices, schools, and other places, as if Buddha had destroyed societal and private borders.
As a result, it was personalized, specialized material that had the most substantial boost in video viewing rates.
However, offering unique video experiences where you may find solutions to your target audience’s daily concerns is a great way to engage with them.
This makes it easier to form an emotional connection.
You can instill a sense of belonging by capturing a sense of togetherness with the items you produce in such a way that you and your target audience form an emotional relationship.
Video material allows people who are going through new processes as a result of the epidemic to connect and participate with others.
Despite the fact that these patterns formed during the quarantine time, it appears that they will persist through the formation of new habits.
In order for brands to continue promoting on channels like Youtube, they must collaborate with content editors that keep up with the latest trends and continue to offer value to their brands.
Video marketing will rise as new trends emerge in both developing and developed countries.
It is critical for companies to participate in YouTube-related video sharing platforms during this phase. | https://medium.com/@ozcanahmet/video-advertising-and-marketing-94eed4c88242 | ['Ozcan Ahmet'] | 2021-11-22 18:37:56.844000+00:00 | ['Video Marketing', 'Video Publishing', 'Video Advertising'] |
What If recommends using NordVPN — get it with a special discount! | What If is a popular YouTube channel with more than 3.8 million subscribers. Even though the name of the channel contains two simple words, it gives lots of questions not only of what this channel is about but also it often appears in our daily lives and various situations. A simple question ‘‘What If?’’ can bring us to different discoveries, inventions, theories, and many other unexpected things. The YouTube channel What if contains documentary web series and talks about hypothetical worlds and possibilities here on earth and somewhere far in the universe. In this channel, you can find videos answering questions like “What If Planet Nine Exists?”, “What If You Only Live For 24 Hours?”, etc. Although it mainly has nothing to do with cybersecurity, the channel tries to inform the viewers about its importance. By offering a special NordVPN discount, What If channel encourages increasing your security online.
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Why get NordVPN?
NordVPN is a premium quality VPN that has a lot to offer to the users. It has a strict no-logs policy and doesn’t store both connection and usage logs, which was even confirmed by an independent audit. It’s also based in Panama and is outside 5 and 14 eyes alliances, which gives NordVPN an ability not to obey the mandatory data retention laws. This premium VPN is one of the very few that works with such streaming services as Netflix, BBC, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc. Not to mention that it’s a good pick for other cases like torrenting, gaming, traveling, and many more.
What is a Virtual Private Network?
It’s widely used online security software that helps to surf online securely and anonymously, also helps to overcome geo or other blocks. VPN encrypts users’ internet traffic and can be compared to a secret tunnel that protects the information which is coming from users’ devices to the broad waters of the Internet. Also, it protects from intruders like hackers, the internet service provider, or even the government.
Not only can it be used for security purposes but also for other daily activities like torrenting, streaming, gaming or using a wireless network in public places like libraries, coffee shops, etc. | https://medium.com/@longscarl992/what-if-recommends-using-nordvpn-bf8afe74dcb7 | ['Carl Longfellow'] | 2020-06-02 13:34:10.593000+00:00 | ['VPN', 'Coupon', 'Discount', 'Offers'] |
Samsung Galaxy S21 FE Full Phone Specification: Everything You Need to Know | Galaxy Samsung Galaxy S21 FE Full Phone Specification: Everything You Need to Know
in this blog you can get information related to the general specifications of the product Samsung Galaxy S21 FE Full Phone Specifications, Galaxy S21 FE by Samsung and also mention the expected price and launch date. Remember the thing that we are not responsible for the whole information in this blog, there is might be few changes.
Source: whatmobile.com.pk
Samsung Galaxy S21 FE Full Phone Specification
Samsung Galaxy S21 FE uses built in Android 12 OS with OneUI 3.1 UI.
This device Galaxy S21 FE by Samsung is supported 2G, 3G, 4G LTE, and 5G band as well.
It contains Octa Core CPU, with Exynos 2100 Chipset and Adreno 660 GPU.
This device named S21 FE has display size of 6.4 inches with 1080 x 2400 Pixels, Dynamic AMOLED 2X Capacitive Touchscreen, and Multitouch with Gorilla Glass Protection and 120Hz of refresh rate.
Source: whatmobile.com.pk
Galaxy S21 FE Pro has built in 128/256GB memory and 6/8GB of RAM with dedicated SD slot available (up to 1TB).
The device contains Triple Rear Camera of 12MP + 12MP + 8MP with LED Flash, and containing 32MP of front camera.
Source: whatmobile.com.pk
S21 FE has fingerprint sensor (under display) for security, Audio, Browser, Games, Torch, Messaging, and lot of extra features.
The battery that is used in S21 FE Galaxy is 4500mAh with 25W fast battery charging and 15W of wireless charging.
Connectivity: The connectivity of the device Samsung’s Galaxy S21 FE is WLAN, Bluetooth, GPS, USB, NFC (Yes), Radio (Yes), and Data.
Samsung Galaxy S21 FE Price
Source: whatmobile.com.pk | https://medium.com/@chsb28745/samsung-galaxy-s21-fe-full-phone-specification-everything-you-need-to-know-5afaeefbe07 | ['Ch Sb'] | 2021-12-19 05:28:23.461000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Samsung Galaxy', 'Samsung', 'Mobile', 'Android'] |
How to enter a game | Game Name — Make sure you use the full name of the game. For example, ‘The Legend of Zelda’ not just ‘Zelda.’ Or ‘The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’ not just ‘Breath of the Wild.’ Also, check on the spelling of the game name, you will be amazed at how many games use non-standard spellings!
Game Description — Give a clear full description of the game. Avoid detailing the plot of the game and focus on a high-level description. Avoid copyright violations and DO NOT just use the promotional copy from the games website, or copy the first paragraph from the Wikipedia entry!
Game Image—Select an iconic image from the game. This is an academic not-for-profit site and fair use should apply to screenshots you use of a game. However, any image you enter will be automatically credited and linked back to it the image source, so respect copyrighted images.
Game Trailer—Enter the code from a youtube link in this field. For example, the bold section of this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACZpHzBKCqU.
Gameplay Video— As with the Gameplay Trailer this field takes the code from a youtube link. It is preferable to use a longer if not full walkthrough here and to find a no-commentary video.
In the following sections, you click the blue outlined ‘Add…’ button to open an add block for that piece of content, for example, click ‘Add Available Link’ to open the entry block and add a link to the ‘Available Through’ section.
You can add as many of each of these sections as you would like, however you must fill out each entry before adding the next.
I think that the text entry prompts are clear so I will just present those:
The release type from the drop-down and the year will appear on the game’s reference page, the release name and notes will appear in the information (i) mouseover.
The next four sections are slightly more complicated. Many Developers, Publishers, Game Types, and Platforms have already been entered into the site. When you want to add any of these to a game always first check to see if the one you want to add has already been created for a different game. To do that you should click on the ‘Add…’ button. For instance, click ‘Add Developer to Game’ to see a drop-down of all the developers already available. These fields are autocompleting so you can start to type in the field to filter the dropdown.
You can add as many of each of these items as you would like, that is to say, that if a game has two developers you can add both of them. You must select an item from the drop-down before you add another item of that type. The add button will be disabled until you do.
If you can not find the Developer, Publisher, Game Type, or Platform in the drop-down list you may then decide to enter it into the site. To enter a new item you click the ‘Enter New…’ button. This will open a block allowing you to enter the information for that item. For each of these four items, the long description will appear in the information (i) mouseover.
After you enter a new item you still have to add it to your game! The new item will be added to the top of the ‘Add…’ drop-down for your convenience.
Add multiple game types to fully describe the game you are entering. For instance, you might add the Digital, Single-Player, Multi-Player, and FPS types if you were creating an entry for Doom. | https://perspectivesingamedesign.com/how-to-enter-a-game-61375a0c5f5 | ['Chris Barney'] | 2020-12-06 13:52:02.054000+00:00 | ['Pattern Language', 'Game Design', 'Pattern Library', 'Game Development', 'Videogames'] |
My Lowest Points of 2020 | We’re entering that time in December when everyone shares their accomplishments from the past year: pieces they’ve published, projects they’ve completed, exciting new gigs they nailed. Well, I’m here to say that I don’t want to hear about any of it. Haven’t we suffered enough this year without having to bear witness to other people’s success?
In that spirit, I’d like to share my absolute lowest points of 2020, so that you might find comfort and joy in my misery. Auld Lang Syne, bitches. | https://medium.com/@lizgalvao/my-lowest-points-of-2020-e1a211cc8816 | ['Liz Galvao'] | 2020-12-21 19:20:27.031000+00:00 | ['Humor', '2020', 'Personal Lows', 'Lists'] |
Annual Employee Pulse or Pressure? | Going beyond the retaliatory opinion survey to relationship-building.
Numbers Too Good To Be True
The company was considered “one of the best places to work” and had for years gotten a 98% employee satisfaction score. The results were touted in talent acquisition, company investment literature, and HR association PR.
I had moved up to the inner circle, and now I was in the room when they rolled out the much coveted results. Sitting in groups by region, we were told how important it was to not figure out who said what. No sooner had my boss, whom I happened to be sitting beside, gotten his binder than he found his summary page and discovered his score had dropped significantly. It was clear one person in particular had scored him at the lowest level. As panic started to rise in me, he turned to me and said “I think we have a problem with so-and-so; he seems to have scored me very low”. I was equal parts relieved but also incredulous.
A trusted colleague told me her boss outright told his team the numbers “better be good” when the survey went out. Of course, he scored 100% even though he had a hallway reputation as a biased, difficult boss.
Later one of my direct reports came to me concerned that comments they had made were redacted because they were detrimental to the C-suite. Taking my leadership role seriously, I contacted HR about this. They denied it fervently and somehow knew who made the comments, even though the survey was supposed to be anonymous.
Used For Good
I believe wholeheartedly in getting employees opinions. I have worked in and with multiple companies and departments where annual surveys were used for good, making things better for the company and for the employees.
Employee opinion surveys are done well when they are:
Completed anonymously.
Given at regular, comparable intervals— such as annually.
Administered and/or broken down with enough people to not reveal who said what.
Conducted by a neutral, independent party.
Ask questions employees are directly involved with rather than higher-level strategy questions out of their scope — eg would you recommend this as a place to work, do you feel valued in your department, etc.
The numbers are used internally for improvement only and not as bragging rights.
Results are reported to an equally influential body, not HR, that can hold leaders at the very top accountable, such an advisory board.
If things aren’t in place to maintain the impartiality of the survey, employees should be wary of being truthful. If employers aren’t setting up their surveys this way, they probably aren’t getting the truth.
Used For Bad
Employees are told they should view the survey as an opportunity to tell the company how they really feel so that the company can make things better. Unfortunately, if a bad boss wants to know who is going to threaten his/her power, an employee opinion survey hands them the answer.
An institution I worked with used the annual survey results as a hit list for people to fire. To maintain that power, the boss additionally made sure HR reported to his cronies.
Middle Ground: Improving Employee-Employer Relationship
If a company really wants to understand how employees feel and if employees really want to be able to speak up, the employee opinion survey, done right, is one of multiple options to foster a productive, thriving employee-employer relationship.
The board, advisors, and the C-suite should look at other metrics to know what is really going on.
Glassdoor and other company review sites do have their downside. Either companies or HR professionals are putting in their own reviews or disgruntled ex-employees are bad-mouthing the company. Whatever the reality is, this is a data point prospective employees and current management should track and consider.
Exit interviews can also have the same issues and impact. Either nothing is said or it is a place to air dirty laundry. But when information is given, it needs to be examined.
Look also at voluntary turn over, particularly by department, boss, gender, age, race, and other demographics. When looked at objectively, the data and patterns can help indicate a possible problem.
Set up alternate complaint systems such and an ombudsman. Informal, neutral, and truly confidential, only the ombuds officer knows of the complaint. According to HBR, “thirteen percent of U.S. companies have them, to handle issues ranging from bullying to termination.” Employees are more willing to bring complaints to an ombuds officer and the officer, in turn, can alert leaders to problem areas.
Employees want to be heard and want to be happy at work. Employers aren’t always the best at managing that. They need to find ways employees can speak up truthfully, and management can hear it without their ego getting in the way. Everyone wants the company to thrive and satisfied employees. | https://medium.com/from-grind-to-thrive/annual-employee-pulse-or-pressure-3ae9bc73089f | ['Steph Barry'] | 2021-01-02 16:56:05.563000+00:00 | ['Business Strategy', 'Employee Engagement', 'Organizational Culture'] |
What is the ExpressibleByIntegerLiteral Protocol in Swift? | What is the ExpressibleByIntegerLiteral Protocol in Swift?
Substitute your actual type with an Int
Photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash
In this short article we will explore the ExpressibleByIntegerLiteral protocol in Swift based on a simple Xcode Playground example.
We generally use this protocol when we want to substitute our custom type with an Int . Using it in right situations helps you write more concise code.
Let’s Start
Say we have this simple struct called CustomNumber :
Now if we want to create an array of CustomNumber s we would write something like this:
How can we make it nicer? Let’s conform to the ExpressibleByIntegerLiteral protocol (notice that we no longer need the previous initializer):
We can now create that array in a much nicer way:
Which correctly prints out each member of our array:
We can add even more flexibility by conforming to an ExpressibleByStringLiteral , so we could also use String values:
There are lots of similar protocols available to suit your needs: | https://medium.com/cleansoftware/what-is-the-expressiblebyintegerliteral-protocol-in-swift-e71ad4a37a96 | ['Zafar Ivaev'] | 2020-08-08 09:55:17.962000+00:00 | ['Swift', 'Mobile', 'Programming', 'iOS', 'Xcode'] |
Letter To My Newborn Son | You are two weeks old, so there are only a few things we know about you. Your hair would make a pop star jealous, all slicked down dark brown with frosted blonde tips. Your “poo face,” with your mouth drawn in an off-center O, could be a meme. You smell like cream and mint, and I’m sad I can’t bottle that scent and revisit it for years to come. And if sleeping were a competitive sport, you stand a good chance of bringing home some medals to adorn your nursery.
When we heard that you were going to be a boy, I confess that I was nervous. I know what it is to be a girl and a woman growing up in this country. My female friends and I have swapped countless stories about life with these X chromosomes. When your older sister was born, as unprepared as I was for stepping into this new role of mother, as different as her upbringing and cultural identity would be from mine, I felt at least that I would understand her. Because I’ve been there.
You on the other hand… well, I have pretty much zero experience with little boys. I have no siblings, and none of my friends growing up were boys or had brothers. What is it like to grow up a boy? I know this only from a distance, from children’s books and boy band ballads and the reminiscences of grown men.
What will your life be like?
Every day, like a book, I try and read another page of you so I can witness your plot unfolding. But right now, your story still largely exists in my imagination. You are a swaddled little bundle of potential, and the triumphs and trials of your future loom yet unknown. And yet, while your father and I don’t know whether you’ll prefer trains or banjos or playgrounds, while we don’t know what passions you’ll pursue, or whom you’ll love, we talk about the values we hope you will live. Because they are on us to demonstrate. Because it is our responsibility to help you shape them.
I hope, first and foremost, that you will understand where you came from. There is a myth in our culture that we like to tell: that we, as self-reliant individuals, make our lot in life based on our talents. It is a lovely myth because the message is meant to empower: no matter who you are or what your origins, you can create for yourself the life that you want.
This isn’t entirely wrong — certainly I will never tell you that any dream is out of your reach — but the idea that any of us is completely self-reliant, or that our society is a true meritocracy, is misguided. We humans are social creatures, and the histories, traditions and beliefs we hold — however right or wrong — are as much a part of our identity as the cells within our body. The context under which we live matters, and you should understand that context to understand yourself and the broader world.
This is your context: you have won the world’s birth lottery. You are a citizen of the United States, the most democratic and powerful nation in the world. You were borne into a family that loved you from the moment we were aware of you, and that has the resources to take care of your every need and want. You are born a boy, and your skin is light.
These things do not guarantee you a smooth future, nor will they shield you from your own personal hardships ahead. And yet, these simple facts of your birth will make many situations easier for you, not because of anything you have done, but simply because that is how the world is wired to work. You will find that people are more likely to listen to you, agree with you, show you kindness, and give you second chances while someone else equally deserving would not get the same treatment. When you find yourself in a position where you can use your privilege to bring about greater equality, I hope you seize it.
The second thing I wish for you is that you surround yourself with people who enrich your life and make you better. We are the average of those we spend our time with. Don’t waste your energy on the trolls and takers who feel big only when others feel small, or the narcissists who think life is about keeping score with money or right swipes or membership into exclusive clubs. Ignore the ignorance of those who tell you to be cool and adhere to a tobacco billboard’s version of a man. Instead, find people whose energy lifts you up and who share their passions generously. With your true friends, you don’t need to pretend to be someone else to impress them; you don’t need to play games or conform to arbitrary rules. They will teach you new perspectives and inspire you to love the things that they love. And you, in turn, will inspire them.
Out of those friends, I hope the dearest and best one— that person you think to call when anything good or bad happens, whose conversations with you melt the hours away, whose presence in your life brings on a parade of happy days — is the one you build your family with. There is much in life you can’t control, but with whom you spend your time is up to you. Choose wisely.
Third, I hope that you will always harbor a deep curiosity for the world. I don’t doubt that you will learn much in the span of your years, but the universe is vast compared to the tiny speck that is human knowledge. It may be tempting at a certain point to pronounce yourself “made” — an expert, a fully realized individual — but I hope your ego never prevents you from undertaking the hard, tangled and often unglamorous task of gleaning for truth. Take time to behold the wonder of the universe; be humbled by all the ways you are still a beginner.
I hope you will be wrong many, many times, because you tried. I hope you can admit your failures and apologize to others when you are at fault, so that past mistakes hold no power over you. I hope you revel in the journey and not just the results, because it is in that path of growth and mastery that one’s story is made.
And finally, I hope that no matter what, you can hold these two truths in your heart at once: that the world is beautiful beyond imagination, and that it is woefully short of perfect. No matter how good or bad things are, it can be better, and it can be worse. How you feel and what you make of it will be a matter of perspective, and the greatest battles you fight will take place inside your head. The art of living well, then, lies in the balance of these two truths. May you find joy in the simple, everyday moments: the gentle undulation of your baby’s breath, the laughter over a dinner table, the sweet taste of summer fruit. May you hold fast to hope and optimism, even when other people disappoint you and break your heart, as surely they will. But may you also recognize that at every moment, there is suffering that can be reduced, injustice that should be questioned, and a better future that you can run towards.
As you lay sleeping next to me, your little fist barely bigger than my thumb, I am grateful that you are here, and I am overjoyed to be your mother. Sleep well, my little one. I can’t wait to get to know you tomorrow, and in all our tomorrows to come. | https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/letter-to-my-newborn-son-833491540844 | ['Julie Zhuo'] | 2016-09-23 05:16:08.344000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Life', 'Parenting', 'Motherhood'] |
The ultimate list of keto diet do’s and dont’s | If you’re talking about dieting or losing weight, you’ll almost obviously come across the ketogenic, or keto, diet.
That’s because the keto diet has become one of the most popular ways to lose weight and improve health around the world.
According to studies, adopting this low-carb, high-fat diet can help you lose weight and even improve illnesses like type 2 diabetes and cognitive decline.
This article discusses what foods to consume and avoid on the keto diet, as well as a eight week keto meal plan to get you started.
Here’s what you might know about the do’s and don’ts of the Keto Diet.
Foods to Eat here on Keto Diet:
Keto-Friendly Foods
These foods are ideal for a low-carb diet.
Fruits
When adopting a keto diet, you should limit your intake of fruits that are high in sugars or carbohydrates. Organic berries and avocados (yes, they’re fruit!) are fantastic on a keto diet, but keep your berry intake minimal to prevent ingesting too many sugars.
Vegetables
We don’t usually think of veggies as high-glycemic foods, but there are some that are, as well as some that are low glycemic. Here are a few examples of low-glycemic vegetables:
Broccoli
Summer squash
Zucchini
Cauliflower
Brussels sprouts
Celery
Cucumbers
Asparagus
Mushrooms
Cabbage
Lettuce
Artichokes
Bell peppers
Eggplant
Onions
Leafy greens, like arugula, kale, and spinach
Olives (not overly processed)
Because carbs break down during cooking, the longer veggies are cooked, the higher their glycemic index. That is why cooked veggies like onions and beets get sweeter.
Fats
Despite the fact that keto foods are heavy in fat, not all fats are created equal. It is beneficial to examine labels to verify that fats are of excellent quality, such as the following:
Avocado oil
Grass-fed ghee or butter
Extra virgin olive oil
MCT oil (medium-chain triglycerides)
Virgin coconut oil
Pasture-raised egg yolk
Bacon fat (no-sugar-added bacon)
Protein
High fat consumption is one of the features of current keto diets, not necessarily high protein consumption, therefore protein does not need to make up the majority of your diet. Around 20% protein is a reasonable starting point for the keto diet, but this may vary based on your own goals.
Consider consuming meat pieces with natural fat levels rather to those that have been trimmed or treated to remove fat. Also, make sure all of your meats are grass-fed, including organ meats, eggs, dark-meat chicken, and beef. High-quality salmon and other fatty fish are also good sources of protein, but watch your portion size.
Legumes, Nuts and Seeds
Legumes, nuts, and seeds are carefully avoided on a keto diet. You can include small amounts of raw nuts, such as almonds, cashews, and walnuts, as well as their flours, but be mindful of your intake. Coconut is a fantastic keto food that can be enjoyed in a variety of ways (coconut flour pancakes, anyone?).
Condiments
Avoiding processed condiments is one of the most difficult aspects of transitioning to a keto diet. Everything from ketchup to salad dressing contains filler ingredients and sugars that will not induce ketosis in your body.
Fortunately, there are a plethora of delicious garnishing options for keto foods. Here are a few examples:
*Apple cider vinegar (ACV): Excellent for salad dressings and other uses.
*Coconut aminos are an excellent substitute for soy sauce, teriyaki sauce, and salad dressings. It’s lightly sweet and goes well with foods that benefit from extra seasoning, such as cauliflower rice.
*Spices: Most fresh herbs and spices can be enjoyed on a regular basis. Use salt sparingly, as with any healthy diet.
Do you want to try a keto-friendly meal? For lunch, try a salad with bitter arugula greens, a hard-boiled egg, avocado, olives, free-range grilled chicken or grass-fed steak, and a delicious homemade dressing.
Foods to Avoid
It’s important to know what you can eat on a keto diet, but it’s also vital to know what you should avoid, especially some common foods you might not think of.
Fruits | https://medium.com/@ksuneelkumarreddy1/the-ultimate-list-of-keto-diet-dos-and-dont-s-404d04b5264b | ['K Suneel Kumar Reddy'] | 2021-12-31 14:17:15.754000+00:00 | ['Ketogenic Diet', 'Weight Loss', 'Fitness', 'Keto', 'Keto Diet'] |
Have you ever tried folding up a baby stroller in front of your wife? | Have you ever tried folding up a baby stroller in front of your wife?
Talk about pressure.
I’ve had some tough bosses before, but nothing like the silent stare of an impatient wife holding a crying baby and wondering why she didn’t marry the guy in school that was good with tools and geometry.
There was a time when I felt strong, confident, and smart. But now that I’m a father, I’ve never felt dumber than when I try to break down the stroller into a nice, compact shoulder strap carrying device. Or the worst part is watching me try to swaddle our baby. It’s the ugliest sushi/burrito roll you’ve ever seen.
My wife folds the stroller and swaddles our baby up so fast, neat, and clean it looks like a magic trick.
It’s time high schools start teaching mandatory parenting skills. | https://medium.com/@kevinervinkelley/have-you-ever-tried-folding-up-a-baby-stroller-in-front-of-your-wife-366739c9b21c | ['Kevin Ervin Kelley'] | 2020-12-09 16:06:02.082000+00:00 | ['Men', 'Relationships', 'Parenting', 'Fatherhood', 'Marriage'] |
Words That Vacate Empty Space | Are you alright?
Really alright with your words vacating empty space?
Sometimes we write on an online platform because we feel that even if no one reads our stories, our words will still have some sort of impact on the world.
Words do matter, and stories can still change people’s lives. You owe it to yourself to give God (I won’t hold back to share my faith)— to give the universe — your story. No matter how ordinary the narrative may seem, you owe it to yourself to make your narrative come alive.
When there are moments when you feel you lose your voice and are drowning in an ocean of several stars in a nebulous cloud of distractions, that’s when you know you must pull back and retreat.
Retreat and write your story instead on your heart.
That’s the best place where your story can be written.
The more you write on your heart and from it, the easier it will become to get you through times of nebulous clouds of distractions and overload.
We’re on this earth, but granted, that does not mean we have to conform our ways to the prescribed ways of the world.
We are here to navigate the world to journey closer to the real treasure within our hearts.
Maybe you’ve found your treasure. Keep it safe if that’s the case.
The jewel of knowing your purpose without losing sight of what you are meant to do is precious. Many people lose their way because of navigating the roadmap of life without the inner compass to guide the way.
Whatever your inner compass is, follow it.
Or have you not found it yet? Are you searching for your inner compass….or have you lost it?
Whichever case, I’m excited for you — for that’s an adventure in and of itself.
If we lived life like it was a never-ending rollercoaster, perhaps we’d be scared to live the lives we’re meant to live.
However, our life should be lived like an adventure with moments where we choose to step out of our comfort zone.
How amazing it is to know that even though today might be a crappy day for you (or the best), you still have a say on how you view the day upon reflection. Can you find ways to laugh and poke fun at yourself at times when you are too hard on yourself?
Are you able to love yourself and strengthen yourself with inner encouragement when you feel you are unworthy.
Those little moments count.
The comfort zone of staying within suffering and complacency is the way of the world.
But I have faith that you will venture out of the norm and take some chances — no matter how small or big of a jump it may seem — there is one constant that you can depend on.
You have got yourself for the long run. What will you do with yourself in the mean time?
With love. ❤ | https://medium.com/the-loners-hideout/words-that-vacate-empty-space-e5da402c5ae9 | ['Laura Gulbranson'] | 2019-06-15 19:31:00.738000+00:00 | ['Self Love', 'Self Improvement'] |
We’re Craving Access to Culture During COVID-19 and Museums Can Help | Though isolation and a lack of context can result in a vortex, virtual access to culture provides connection and hope, serving as a beacon in lieu of reference points.
“It will mean a different rhythm of life.”
— UK Mental Health Foundation
Museums are especially primed to support the pressing human challenges during this time, shed light on this moment in a historical context, and provide the levity and perspective we collectively need. At the same time, museums face a challenge in fulfilling this role: staying relevant so we have them around for the future.
This connection isn’t being lost on museums. In light of mass closures prompted by COVID-19, museums and institutions likely see and feel the value of a fully integrated experience, including digital exhibitions. Though it’s a challenge to react nimbly and meet these changing needs under the current circumstances, museums persist in their missions. Outcomes of this effort will impact virtual and in-person museum-goers and would-be museum-goers well into the future.
How Museums Are Responding
Museums, institutions, educators, and individuals alike are leveraging museum content that can be experienced online in order to add value to their learning processes and supplement their new realities of people all over the world. Over three-quarters of the country’s museums have temporarily closed since the spread of COVID-19 in the states, according to Laura Lott, the president and chief executive of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM).
One-third of temporarily closed museums may face permanent closure if the virus-imposed shutdown, however necessary, persists.
— American Alliance of Museums (AAM)
The AAM has provided museums with closed physical locations guidance on leveraging their digital assets to continue to serve and connect the community during this time. These recommendations include the use of live streaming, virtual tours, and special social media campaigns. They recommend taking the physical contents of museums and making expedient efforts to move them to where people are — online.
Though the need for remote access has been made apparent by the current public health crisis, make no mistake, it’s been a pressing need for some time. This moment serves to highlight the ongoing and increasing need for comprehensive museum content to be accessible to all — educators, students, researchers, tourists, and the broader public — across platforms and without travel to a physical location whether we’re in a crisis or not.
7.7 billion people in the world, with 3.5 billion of us online.
— Our World in Data
Today, the physical health risks associated with being in proximity to others coupled withthe mental health risks associated with physical isolation stress the necessity of digitally integrated museum solutions. While we wouldn’t wish this international health crisis on anyone, ever, it underlines the value of digital exhibition undertakings, such as the one proposed by the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), which aims to take their Slavery and Freedom exhibition online.
Benefits Beyond the Pandemic
Creating a dynamic, comprehensive, and integrated online exhibition serves the public not only in times of crisis — but all the time, and from anywhere. Additional benefits to an online exhibit include:
Opening content to global audiences, beyond local community Extending accessibility during peak seasons Extending brand relevance and value to unplanned benefactors Providing greater accessibility and increased methods of interaction and exploration digitally Fostering positive change through education, empathy, and connection Allowing for remote staffing and curation of content; extended employment and collaboration opportunity
We strive to build inclusive digital products and services, including those like the one proposed by NMAAHC. If your organization wishes to prioritize digitally integrating museum content, contact us to set up time to talk. | https://medium.com/coformaco/museums-give-access-to-culture-during-covid-19-85b4e23dbc2c | ['Ashleigh Axios'] | 2020-05-05 22:27:39.546000+00:00 | ['Virtual Museum', 'Covid 19', 'Culture', 'Design', 'Museums'] |
‘Upload’ ~ Series 1 Episode 1 Online :: FullShow | ❏ STREAMING MEDIA ❏
Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a provider. The verb to stream identifies the process of delivering or obtaining media in this manner.[clarification needed] Streaming refers to the delivery method of the medium, instead of the medium itself. Distinguishing delivery method from the media distributed applies particularly to telecommunications networks, as almost all of the delivery systems are either inherently streaming (e.g. radio, television, streaming apps) or inherently non-streaming (e.g. books, video cassettes, music CDs). There are challenges with streaming content on the Internet. For instance, users whose Internet connection lacks satisfactory bandwidth may experience stops, lags, or slow buffering of the content. And users lacking compatible hardware or software systems may be unable to stream certain content.
Live streaming is the delivery of Internet content in real-time much as live television broadcasts content over the airwaves with a television signal. Live internet streaming takes a form of source media (e.g. a video camera, an audio tracks interface, screen capture software), an encoder to digitize the content, a media publisher, and a content delivery network to distribute and deliver the content. Live streaming does not need to be recorded at the origination point, although it frequently is.
Streaming is an option to file downloading, a process where the end-user obtains the entire file for this content before watching or listening to it. Through streaming, an end-user can use their media player to get started on playing digital video or digital sound content before the complete file has been transmitted. The word “streaming media” can connect with media other than video and audio, such as live closed captioning, ticker tape, and real-time text, which are considered “streaming text”.
❏ COPYRIGHT CONTENT ❏
Copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to make copies of a creative work, usually for a limited time.[1][2][3][4][5] The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself.[6][7][8] A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States.
Some jurisdictions require “fixing” copyrighted works in a tangible form. It is often shared among multiple authors, each of whom holds a set of rights to use or license the work, and who are commonly referred to as rights holders.[citation needed][9][10][11][12] These rights frequently include reproduction, control over derivative works, distribution, public performance, and moral rights such as attribution.[13]
Copyrights can be granted by public law and are in that case considered “territorial rights”. This means that copyrights granted by the law of a certain state, do not extend beyond the territory of that specific jurisdiction. Copyrights of this type vary by country; many countries, and sometimes a large group of countries, have made agreements with other countries on procedures applicable when works “cross” national borders or national rights are inconsistent.[14]
Typically, the public law duration of a copyright expires 50 to 100 years after the creator dies, depending on the jurisdiction. Some countries require certain copyright formalities[5] to establishing copyright, others recognize copyright in any completed work, without a formal registration.
It is widely believed that copyrights are a must to foster cultural diversity and creativity. However, Parc argues that contrary to prevailing beliefs, imitation and copying do not restrict cultural creativity or diversity but in fact support them further. This argument has been supported by many examples such as Millet and Van Gogh, Picasso, Manet, and Monet, etc.[15]
❏ GOODS OF SERVICES ❏
Credit (from Latin credit, “(he/she/it) believes”) is the trust which allows one party to provide money or resources to another party wherein the second party does not reimburse the first party immediately (thereby generating a debt), but promises either to repay or return those resources (or other materials of equal value) at a later date.[1] In other words, credit is a method of making reciprocity formal, legally enforceable, and extensible to a large group of unrelated people.
The resources provided may be financial (e.g. granting a loan), or they may consist of goods or services (e.g. consumer credit). Credit encompasses any form of deferred payment.[2] Credit is extended by a creditor, also known as a lender, to a debtor, also known as a borrower.
FIND US:
✓ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/
✓ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/
✓ Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/ | https://medium.com/upload-1x1-new-%D0%B2%D1%8B%D0%B3%D1%80%D1%83%D0%B7%D0%BA%D0%B0/4khd-online-stream-watch-upload-season-1-episode-1-1-1-full-episode-upload-season-1-episode-1-a4a66d4f18bb | ['M Axh A V E Lar'] | 2020-12-27 16:04:58.279000+00:00 | ['Comedy', 'Scifi Fantasy'] |
Junior High Dance, Spring 1992 | Junior High Dance, Spring 1992
Photo by Haley Lawrence on Unsplash
The boys gazed awkwardly at the equally shy girls. Which one of us are they giggling at? they all wondered.
The DJ hit play. “Ice Ice Baby” thumped through the speakers. Timmy knew it was time to make his move.
He stepped onto the floor, doing something only he could call dancing. The other boys laughed. Most of the girls gaped in horror.
But not Amanda. The freckled girl with streaks of pink hair smiled, her braces sparkling in the glow of the disco light. She stepped onto the dance floor, not scared of making a fool of herself too. | https://medium.com/centina-pentina/junior-high-dance-spring-1992-f8716ece2d1 | ['Eddie Becker'] | 2020-12-17 02:27:47.315000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Storytelling', 'Pentina', 'Teens', 'Dance'] |
What Stand By Me Can Teach Us About Today’s Workplace | Credit: Columbia Pictures
“Alright, alright. Mickey’s a mouse, Donald’s a duck, Pluto’s a dog. What’s Goofy?”
It was August of 1986, and I was preparing for my junior year of high school by getting lines shaved into the hair on the side of my head and coloring them green for effect. Yeah, I did that. Mercy.
With the end of summer rapidly approaching, the box office was still awash with blockbusters. Yes, in those days of 80s yore, movies actually stayed in theaters longer than a fortnight. In fact, some continued to sell tickets for months before eventually going the way of the VHS tape and the “coming soon” board with white plastic lettering in your local video store. The Fly, with the gracefully aging Jeff Goldblum; the sci-fi horror classic Aliens; and the wax on, wax off of Karate Kid 2 were amassing massive sales of $3.00 movie tickets. Oh, and lest we forget, the world was being introduced to Maverick, Goose, and Iceman in the American classic Top Gun.
Stand by Me, starring River Phoenix, Wil Wheaton, Jerry O’Connell, Corey Feldman, and Keifer Sutherland, and directed by Rob Reiner, hit theaters on August 8th of 1986. Originally a short story by Stephen King titled “The Body,” it was included in his book Different Seasons, which also spawned the absolutely amazing Shawshank Redemption.
The coming-of-age comedy drama follows four junior high school boys — Gordie, Chris, Vern, and Teddy — who go on an adventure to find a missing neighborhood kid whose body is supposedly located somewhere near the railroad tracks. The story takes place in the fictional town of Castle Rock, Oregon over Labor Day weekend in 1959. The movie is narrated by Richard Dreyfuss, who is actually the main character Gordie decades later. He’s now a published writer recounting their journey after reading that Chris, played by River Phoenix, has been stabbed to death trying to break up a fight at a fast food restaurant.
It’s Rob Reiner telling a classic Stephen King story, and the result is an introspective and nostalgic look at the friendships we all had during our late-stage childhood years of wonder, adventure, and innocence. It was the time in our lives when every summer day seemed to literally last forever and each school day did last forever. Those were the friendships that taught us many of the lessons we would later use to help us succeed in the workplace. And as Gordie so eloquently states at the end of the movie:
“I never had any friends like I did when I was 12. Jesus, does anyone?”
So, what can four brazen and adventurous but innocent and naïve 12-year-old kids teach us about today’s workplace?
There really are no stupid questions.
During their journey, the boys are sitting around a campfire in the woods, discussing the important topics of the day, such as what food you would eat if you could eat only one for the rest of your life — which, according to Vern, is “cherry-flavored Pez . . . no question about it” — and why they never get anywhere on the show WagonTrain. They just “keep on wagontraining,” Gordie says in frustration. And then the conversation turns to Goofy when Gordie asks, “Alright, alright. Mickey’s a mouse, Donald’s a duck, Pluto’s a dog. What’s Goofy?” Teddy replies that “Goofy is definitely a dog,” to which Chris says, “He can’t be a dog. He wears a hat and drives a car.” At this point, Vern chimes in with “God. That’s weird. What the hell is Goofy?”
On the surface, it would seem that Goofy is a dog, and asking what he is would be the definition of a stupid question. But this is where we get our lesson. Sometimes, the question with what appears to be the most obvious answer is actually the best one to ask. It’s the one that ultimately prompts the largest discussion and can be the beginning of a robust brainstorm.
I think back to the first acronym I can recall, which was K.I.S.S. or Keep It Simple Stupid. I’m not even sure that they are allowed to use that in schools anymore, but it always stuck with me. Unless we are in a room full of Neil deGrasse Tysons, when we ask complex questions during a business meeting, they often go unanswered, or worse yet, each person tries to top the other by answering with a consistent string of nonsense buzzwords that would make Lewis Carroll, the author of the Jabberwocky (a poem built on a foundation of nonsense words and phrases), feel a tinge of envy. You know the person — we will call him Buzzword Bob — who says, “Let’s table that while we drill down into these bowling pins and see if we can move the needle with limited bandwidth. But, for now, let’s take it offline, because I need a bio break, so make sure to put a pin in it and ping me later.” Everyone nods in agreement, and you are onto the next topic without actually answering the question.
“Stupid questions” with what appear to be simple answers create an environment in which everyone feels they can contribute and perhaps provide the answer the team or the business needs to move forward. It lessens or even eliminates the impact of Buzzword Bob, and when everyone contributes, you may actually discover that the simple answer isn’t so simple. And this may help you uncover the differentiator, messaging, positioning, or product that will ultimately lead to the success of your team and your business. More importantly, you create an inclusive and open environment that provides you with an opportunity to find your company’s future thinkers and leaders.
So . . . what the hell is Goofy, anyway?
Goals are achieved by embracing individuality over conformity
“We knew exactly who we were and exactly where we were going. It was grand.” — Gordie
When Vern said to the others, “You guys wanna go see a dead body?”, he set them on a course to achieve a goal that would change their lives forever. Innocence would be lost, and the challenges of the real world would become, well, real. But he also created a situation in which four best friends would actually have an opportunity to really get to know each other as they faced multiple challenges throughout their quest. The challenges were vast and varied: the local criminal gang on the same mission to find the body; some very hungry leeches; a train barreling down the tracks, trapping the boys on a bridge hundreds of feet off the ground; the accidental misfiring of a gun; multiple losses of confidence; and something all of us are familiar with from being in teams at work and with our families at home — infighting.
But what they learned along the way was that overcoming these challenges and reaching their goal was ultimately due to their differences rather than their similarities. Yes, they were all 12 years old; yes, they lived in the same small town (insert classic John Cougar Mellencamp song reference here); and yes, they all had a shared sense of adventure, but it was how very different they were from each other that got them to their destination.
Gordie is quiet, smallish, and a creative storyteller. Vern is heavyset, nervous, and very much a follower. Teddy has a quick wit and a quicker tongue but has an angry darkness buried inside him. Chris is the most complex — outwardly confident with leadership qualities but inwardly insecure due to his poverty-stricken and very dysfunctional family. He is highly intelligent but doesn’t realize it. Ultimately, each found something in himself that helped the team face and conquer a specific challenge, which let the members of the group see the true individuality within each other. Because they embraced this individuality over group conformity, the boys ultimately reached their goal and found success.
Credit: Columbia Pictures
Healthy businesses and teams embrace the individual. When employees are allowed — better yet, encouraged — to be “exactly who they are” as Gordie stated, it creates an environment in which everyone has a chance to thrive on their own terms. And this is when really great things happen.
One of the coolest examples I’ve seen of achieving a goal while embracing the individual was when a space probe landed on a comet for the first time. There were cameras in the control room, and as you would expect, everyone was cheering and crying. It was an absolutely incredible moment.
But this is what made it super cool: As they panned the room, what you saw was not wonky rocket scientists with pocket protectors and thick bifocal glasses. Not even close. What you saw looked more like the crowd at an alternative rock show. Here was the incredibly diverse group of men and women — some with tattoos, others wearing hoodies and a few with visible piercings — who had just steered a hunk of super-high-tech metal through space and landed it on a comet. Yes, landed on a comet.
I’m guessing that most of us don’t land things on space rocks for a living (although we might sing “Space Age Love Song” by Flock of Seagulls from time to time), but we and our teams do have goals to achieve. And if you find that your team is achieving its goals, but the results are typically of the vanilla variety, thereby not providing breakthrough solutions and leaving all of you consistently underwhelmed, try removing any conformity and embracing the individuality of each team member.
Approach the next goals or strategy session by encouraging everyone to shed their corporate skin, remove their work mask, and be exactly who they are. You might be pleasantly surprised by the outcome, and if nothing else, it will create an atmosphere of acceptance that will make everyone more comfortable with each other and themselves. And that, my friends, as Gordie would say, is “grand.” | https://medium.com/@cclews1/what-stand-by-me-can-teach-us-about-todays-workplace-33967e374c22 | ['Chris Clews'] | 2020-09-16 18:52:14.065000+00:00 | ['Movies', 'Teamwork', '80s', 'Meetings', 'Workplace Culture'] |
Best digital marketing strategies for customer retention | In this digital world, starting a business is very easy. You can develop best strategies for improving sales, You can fabricated an extraordinary digital system. With an assortment of directs and incredible informing set up, you are starting to gain new customers in an effective and manageable manner.
Be that as it may, shouldn’t something be said about retention?
Indeed, in any event, expanding the customers who remain with you by 5 percent can build your benefits by up to 95 percent. That is on the grounds that holding your current customers is both less expensive and has an essentially higher possibility of achievement. To kick you off, here are 5 different ways you can use your digital methodology to improve customer retention. Get free suggestions from best digital marketing company in USA.
1. Retarget From Customer Pages
Retargeting is an amazing apparatus to keep your image top of psyche for your audience. Through Google, Facebook, or an assortment of other digital channels, you can show promotions explicitly to individuals from your target audience who have visited your website in the new past.
2. Offer Customer Exclusive Content
A huge piece of getting your customers to stay with you comprise of giving them a nonstop stream of reasons why. The more crucial your item or administration, the more uncertain they’ll be to leave.
3. Give Outstanding Digital Customer Service
Via web-based media, that implies a devotion to customer administration. Set up social listening systems to get brand makes reference to and take care of issues. On your website, then, live talk can turn into a center instrument to open correspondence channels with your current customers. On the off chance that you are a neighborhood business, try to put resources into improving your online customer audits. Get free help from best digital marketing company in Delhi.
4. Construct Retention Email Workflows 5. Offer Retention Incentives
At long last, don’t think little of the basic intensity of motivating forces to persuade your customers that remaining with you bodes well for them. Dependability programs, particularly, have become a center apparatus of helping customer retention.
Notwithstanding prevalent thinking, devotion programs are not age explicit. Truth be told, 80% of Generation Z customers would be happy to sign onto a program in return for impetuses. Yet, 85 percent of your customers will need admittance to their devotion program internet, making it a center piece of your digital retention procedure.
Does your digital system represent retention endeavors? It should; as per Forbes, brands that up their spending on retention endeavors increment their odds of picking up piece of the overall industry by 200 percent. Luckily, the above can kick you off in building a retention methodology that is ready to accomplish practical development and amplify your main concern. If you really want to improve the outputs from digital marketing, do connect with DigiRoads. Digiroads is the best digital marketing company in Jaipur whose workforce goes beyond the limits to sustain and retain customer. | https://medium.com/@ravikantsaini-60248/best-digital-marketing-strategies-for-customer-retention-12de69e5e3e9 | ['Ravi Kant Saini'] | 2020-12-29 06:18:09.997000+00:00 | ['SEO', 'PPC Marketing', 'Google Adwords', 'Digital Marketing', 'Google Analytics'] |
Experimentation & Measurement for Search Engine Optimization | We hypothesized that this landing page would increase relevance with its clearer content, and decrease page load time with its lighter code structure, among many other improvements. This would consequently lead to to a higher ranking for our page on search engine results.
But since we can’t know the exact ranking of our pages, we rely on traffic as a proxy for an increase in rankings. That is, when our ranking for our San Francisco search page jumps, we’d expect to see an increase in the traffic to this page from search engines. But how can we measure this effect?
Limitations of A/B Testing
Our Growth team leans heavily on iterative experimentation for nearly every product change to make sure that we can measure effectiveness and to learn as we build. Most data scientists are able to leverage a traditional A/B test at the device- or user-level for all of their experimentation needs. In this setup, users that enter the experiment are randomly bucketed into the treatment groups, and we can directly compare the outcome of the treatment group with that of the control group.
A/B tests have very good power and allow for complete randomization. At Airbnb, they are useful for measuring the treatment effect on metrics pertaining to engagement and conversion. These are events that we log on the Airbnb site, and we can easily measure the incremental uplift in these metrics through a difference-in-means hypothesis test, such as a t-test.
However, in the case of our new “Magic Carpet” page, an A/B test will not allow us to measure an increase in traffic caused by a change in its external search engine ranking. A given page will look different across various search engine bots, and therefore we cannot isolate the effect of Magic Carpet on our rankings.
Therefore, quantifying the impact of such a product change requires a more sophisticated approach.
Leveraging a Market-Level Approach
A key realization is that our search results page isn’t just a single page; in fact, there are many different versions for different cities, towns, and regions. Each of these have what is called a unique “canonical URL”, and we actually have over 100,000 of them that are surfaced on search engines! Therefore, instead of assigning a single visitor to treatment or control, we can set the unit of randomization of our experiment to be a specific canonical URL. We’ll then measure the effect using an approach commonly used in market- or cluster-level experiments.
For example, the San Francisco search results page may be in treatment, and we’d update it with our Magic Carpet design. Meanwhile, the Paris page in the control group will be left the same. This random assignment will then continue to be applied to each of our ~100,000 URLs. This way, when a search engine bot scrapes our site, it will consistently see the same treatment for each page, and the ranking for that page will update accordingly.
However, a more nuanced statistical approach needs to be taken in this case, because we cannot simply make a direct comparison between the traffic of treatment and control URLs. This is because the baseline traffic between different URLs can differ substantially, and many times this difference is larger than the treatment effect we wish to detect. The San Francisco page may have a similar amount of traffic as Paris page, but it probably has something like 100% more traffic than the page of a smaller city, such as New Orleans. This makes it very difficult to measure something like a 2% lift in traffic!
For this reason, we need a mechanism to account for the inherent differences that exist between these URLs by leveraging pre-experiment data, before the change took effect.
Developing a Model: Difference-in-Differences
A difference-in-differences framework is one technique that utilizes pre-experiment data to control for these baseline differences in the absence of any interventions. We can use this method to measure the treatment effect and its statistical significance by using an estimator from a linear model, where for each page i and day t:
Our principle variables include:
traffic_it = number of landing page impressions to page i on day t. We apply a log to this outcome variable to account for its right-skew, and to regularize the heteroskedasticity commonly present in traffic data.
treatmentᵢ = treatment group indicator (equal to 1 if in the treatment group, 0 otherwise)
post_t = pre/post-period indicator (equal to 1 if in the post-period, 0 otherwise)
However, there is still a lot of variation across time and markets in our traffic data that may hinder us from detecting a treatment effect. The difference-in-differences approach allows for an elegant solution to this problem; we can simply add in covariates to our model in order to control for the various effects:
aᵢ = fixed effect (or mean) for a page, to allow for flexible intercepts of each URL
t = time index, to account for overall time trends
dowⱼ = weekday indicators, to account for weekly seasonality
Since we’d like to know the effect of the treatment group in the post-period, the b₂ coefficient reflects the “difference-in-differences”, and therefore the treatment effect that we wish to estimate.
In simpler terms, we’re looking for the incremental effect on the treatment group after the experiment started. | https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/experimentation-measurement-for-search-engine-optimization-b64136629760 | ['Brian De Luna'] | 2020-01-13 21:05:24.614000+00:00 | ['Causal Inference', 'Experimentation', 'SEO', 'Data', 'Data Science'] |
A Bad Trip Won’t Kill You. But it Might Make You Wish You Were Dead. | I was pretty set on how I was going to approach this week. I knew that I wanted to write about the clandestine factions of the environmental movement. I thought it would be an interesting counterpoint to the Self Immolation in the Best Possible World essay. There was a great quote I was going to deploy and a man I was going to memorialize but then research got in the way and it felt confused and poorly thought out, which is pretty much in keeping with the entirety of the subject. Ethically correct and strategically hollow. Had it been more pessimistic it might have gone somewhere but it wasn’t so it didn’t.
Then I realized it was going to be Halloween (and likely is Halloween or even more likely was Halloween). So in honor of America’s only likeable holiday I decided to write about my one and only paranormal experience.
Granted I’ve done a lot of psychedelic drugs and lived a strange life so there are points at which the highly weird has waved its hand in my face. Even the story I’m going to relate takes place in this context, but has been verified by a second party (although yes, the other party was fucked up too).
There’s a renewed interest in ‘cosmic horror’ that is playing out in film and television, although film itself might be dead and shambling. Stories that fall into this framework are generally concerned with the soul-crushing awareness that forces far beyond our control are not so much hostile towards our species as they are indifferent. This awareness, at least as far as my reading goes, generally drives the protagonist insane. There are monsters, but on the whole we are just incidental bit players in larger dramas. This seems uncomfortably close to the experience of living ‘normal life’ except instead of eldritch gods we have traffic and the nightly news to remind us of how unimportant our hopes, dreams and comforts are.
Then there is the sort of ‘folkloric’ horror that is exemplified by a film like Midsomer in which a modern and rational person stumbles into some variety of indigeneity or degenerate past. I suppose we could lump a variety of films into this framework, though it gets somewhat messy. HBO’s recent miniseries The Third Day is another example of this. I find the stories that fall into this compartment of the genre to be particularly silly. There is nothing so horrifying as our own culture, and any depiction of a departure from it sounds like a dialing down of the level of terror that humanity experiences on a given day.
One of the classifications in the genre is ‘apocalyptic horror’ of the type that predominates in zombie stories. Again, I have a fairly hard time believing that an event that led to the downfall of human civilization in the 21st century would be any worse than simply living in the 21st century. Fighting my way through a shambling army of rotting corpses would likely be an improvement over working in a cubicle. The take home from these stories is that humans are the real monsters. And while this might be the case, I wonder why we’re never offered a zombie utopia. All the shitty things people do occur in a particular milieu and in the absence of that it seems equally likely that a societal collapse would provide us with an opportunity to transcend our shittiness rather than ramp it up.
I’ve seen a fair share of media directly draw upon psychedelia for scares. While I’ve had extremely bad trips in my life, all in all it is consensus reality that is truly terrifying. I would rather confront the world of spiritual significance in all its ugliness than live in the endless purgatory of a well-ordered brain. Being locked in a never-ending loop of normalcy is just as frightening as an encounter with madness. Psychic horror rings true where so many other sub-genres miss the mark.
And this is where I finally arrive at the beginning of a point. The history of psychedelic studies could very well be the set-up for a subversion of horror tropes. It’s got Europeans penetrating the Amazon in search of mystically significant plants. It’s got fussy academics in a laboratory uncovering the foundational components of a radically different worldview and grazing the hull of mysticism. It’s got cultish charismatic leaders and true believers hurling themselves with abandon into the architecture of their minds. It’s got the CIA chucking someone out a window as they experiment with mind-control. It’s got a stripped down clinical world ready to introduce indigenous knowledge into the arena of psychic suffering. It’s at least as much a tale of stolen magic as it is a story of scientific progress and colonialism in all its grim triumphs haunts the mansion of the modern mind.
There are numerous ethnographies of the indigenous cultures that have kept and held sacred the visionary plants of the psychedelic pantheon. It is far less the case that the modern white guys studying these things have been able to grasp a cosmology that is in tension with their advancement through the rungs of popular and professional recognition.
Combined with the realization on the part of nation states that these departures from the states of consciousness brought on by cars, refrigerators, television and single family homes were a threat to the reproduction of labor power under capitalism, we get a less thorough engagement with what these substances have to say to our culture, the one we’ve so enthusiastically forced upon the world as a universal good. It might be the case that the infantile grasping of western empiricism has taken up the (renewed) study of these substances too late to save us from ourselves. Thus do sacraments become drugs.
Of course there are celebrations of the white men who ‘pioneered’ the study of these things, such as Gordon Wasson, who provided the Western imaginary with psilocybin and only ruined one indigenous woman’s life and faith to do so. And there are the self-aggrandizing depictions of a band of merry pranksters forcing themselves into the interior of Mesoamerican shamanism in search of ayahuasca offered by Terrance McKenna, who in the grim light of 2020 looks clueless and embarrassing.
But perhaps I’m not extending sufficient agency to the organisms themselves in this discussion. While non-Western epistemology extends agency to the non-human world, our Abrahamic mode of knowing denies voice and motive to plants and fungi. They are accidental occurrences riding a wave of natural selection, not beings with knowledge and reason. But even with a dismissal of them to the realm of silence it is still evolutionarily advantageous to hitch a ride with people (a la The Botany of Desire), even if we’re going over the falls.
With this being said, these are the exceptions that prove the rule. We have little understanding of the arc of thinking of figures such as Alexander Shulkin, a man who was filled to the brim with contradictions; or Richard Doblin, one of the driving personalities in the mainstreaming of psychedelia; or Stanislov Grof, a psychiatrist who went so far out of the box that he fell on the floor.
All this is to say that I can’t figure out why the hell the monoamine oxidase inhibiting alkaloid harmine used to be called telepathine.
Or, more to the point, I can’t figure out who started calling it that and why they stopped. In the work of Dennis McKenna, brother of Terrence, entitled Sacred Vine of Spirits: Ayahuasca, he discusses a number of botanists working in the Upper Amazon in the latter half of the 19th century who recorded the widespread use of a diversity of psychoactive plants. These early sojourners occasionally participated in ceremonies with the people whose traditions they were examining.
It is strange that ayahuasca has only been an object of interest for ugly Americans for the last 20 years or so. Considering the relatively early western contact with the sacrament, literary works by both Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, and the proselytization of Terrence McKenna one would think that it would have been afforded a position of honor in our pharmacopia. Perhaps it’s that we’re so loaded up on other drugs and hate and folly that we simply can’t handle it.
In the early 1900’s chemists began isolating alkaloids from botanical specimens collected by these field researchers. Evidently aware of the reputation of these plants in the cultures that they were taken from, chemists originally referred to the alkaloid they were extracting from Banisteriopsis caapi as telepathine. This seems an appropriate moniker. All sorts of weird stuff happens on visionary substances, one of them being the (apparent) manifestation of psychic phenomenon. Thus, the weird fluorescent alkaloid in B. caapi received an honorific that inserted a tiny bit of paranormality into a wound carved by the exacting knife of quantitative study. In the present, searching for telepathine on Wikipedia will just result in your being redirected to harmine.
This chemical is produced in a number of plants but in especially high concentrations in the aforementioned B. caapi and in Peganum harmala, the Syrian Rue. This herbaceous perennial, which derives its scientific name from its relative abundance of monoamine oxidase inhibiting alkaloids, occurs in the wild throughout the Mediterranean and is happy to migrate with human assistance. It has a long history of use in traditional medicine, and for a wide variety of ailments. It has talismanic importance in some cultures, guarding against witchcraft. It’s as good at taking down an evil spell as it is at banishing tapeworms.
As an added benefit, its seeds are super cheap and readily available on the internet. While it is intoxicating it has avoided any scheduling in the U.S. (although the Aussies will lock you up for having it) and so there’s no anxiety attached to waiting for it to arrive in the mail.
A tea made from a couple of grams of seeds doesn’t taste bad and produces an experience that’s not entirely unlike being drunk but without the requisite stupidity and bad decisionmaking. There’s a lucidity to it that you don’t normally encounter in things that get you high.
On the downside, if you’re taking the wrong medications it can kill you by inducing serotonin syndrome. Among many traditional users of plants containing these alkaloids the dosages consumed are reported to be far in excess of what it would require to temporarily inhibit monoamine oxidase. It is thought that these higher dosages induce a visionary psychedelic state distinct from what one experiences when it is combined with plants rich in demethyltryptamine.
With that said, ingesting any of the serotinergic drugs after consuming harmine and harmaline is far different than taking these substances on their own. Monamine oxidase inhibition turns the dial way up on mushrooms, LSD and smoked DMT. The experience is deeper, longer and far more in control. There is no turning on the TV and popping a benzo to wait it out. It has you.
I was something of a regular smoker of extracted DMT in my early thirties and there wasn’t a moment of these experiences that wasn’t fascinating. It was not unusual to encounter elves, angels, guardian spirits and blueprints for multi-dimensional apparatus. Smoking DMT is the psychoactive equivalent of being shot from a cannon or leaping from an airplane. It is exhilarating and terrifying and healing and where the boundaries of these things might be is not clear.
At a point I tossed my stash of DMT in a fit of paranoia. When I turned it around and was no longer under the impression that a no-knock warrant was going to result in early morning flash-bang grenades and armed SWAT cops killing my dog I felt extremely sheepish. These are not the kind of drugs you can just buy. You have to work for them.
So I was excited when a friend extracted some DMT. I figured we’d smoke and then hang out swapping stories afterwards. I had recently gone off of antidepressants for what felt like the thousandth time in my life and while I was on shaky ground it freed me up to experiment with Syrian Rue. I was drinking it in the evenings and hoping against hope that it would deliver me from the searing anxiety I was experiencing. My nighttime tea was mellow. I didn’t encounter the wild and chromatic world of what I thought of as the ‘true’ psychedelics but it soothed my miserably nervous brain and body somewhat.
Knowing that MAOIs could strengthen and lengthen the effects of smoked DMT I brought Rue seeds that I had punished a coffee grinder with and we drank about 2mg each, steeped in hot water, both of us feeling the stonedness of it. I was excited. I wasn’t someone to shy away from a drug at that time, excluding the ethically and culturally disgusting morass of cocaine, meth and heroin.
After sitting around and smoking spliffs for an hour he offered me the first session and I took it. I laid down on his bed with a bowlful of pot that I liberally sprinkled with DMT crystals. I invoked my patron, a tripartite mushroom spirit, and then hit the pipe. I heard the all-encompassing hum of the come-on.
Instead of gates of gold or welcoming spirits I was plunged into darkness. I felt as though I had been dipped in oil. Faces appeared before me, angry and distorted, hostile to my intrusion. I don’t remember all of what I saw, but I remember what I felt. I remember thinking (and this is the exact phrasing) “What the fuck is this shit?” I don’t even recall what ‘this shit’ was, just that it was noxious, offensive, horrible. And then it appeared.
Floating above a parched and dead plane was a thing that looked much like a rhinovirus, a ball wreathed in spikes that radiated menace and hatred. I was overwhelmed by the horror of it and a certainty washed over me- I was a bad person. I always had been and I always would be. There was no saving myself from the knowledge of my debased failure to be good. What I had thought of myself up until that moment was shattered and pulverized- I was not powerful. Not kind. Not loving. Unforgivable.
I lived in this state for what felt like a lifetime and I knew I deserved it. This was hell and I was just catching a glimpse of what was in store for me as I aged and failed, crawled my way towards nothing but death. Aeons later I started to surface but the filth was upon me and in me. Panic in my throat. Panic in my chest. In my stomach. Behind my eyes.
There came a time when I could move though I did not want to. I stepped out of my friend’s room into the kitchen where he sat at a table, looking alarmed as I entered. He said, “I could feel that.” He went on to say that as he got higher from the tea he had attempted to ‘breathe in’ to my trip, settling into a meditative state and then trying to expand into what I was experiencing. After some sustained effort he had opened his eyes and given up, and at that point, upon withdrawing, he felt a wave of rage and disgust emanate from where I had dosed. He said he had felt frightened, concerned that I would emerge from the room in a homicidal frenzy.
I told him what had befallen me. That something wrong had occurred and that I was consumed by thoughts of my own wretched evilness, every great and minor sin I had ever committed infused in the cells of my body. A physical and spiritual degradation had occurred. I didn’t know if I would ever be alright again.
Over the course of an hour I chain-smoked rolled cigarettes and unburdened myself of my transgressions, but the burden went nowhere, staying inside me, coming home to roost. I didn’t want to go home, to ride my bike through the city streets filled with a possessing spirit who craved me prostrate and weeping. I didn’t want to go home to my fiancee, a person I’d come to hate over time, whose heart I would inevitably break when I reached my breaking point.
Things were never the same. I deteriorated. Waking life was breaking me and the spirits of wild had been driven from within me by that wicked orb.
What do I make of this? Do I interpret it through the empirical lens of the modern monster in which the sickness lives inside us? Or did I fall victim to something? And what of my friend’s perception of this experience? Was it merely the product of two stoned minds convincing themselves that a prosaic event was something else, an effect of non-localized consciousness or spiritual forces so malignant that they were experienced by two minds? And what of his experience? Was it my rage and disgust or was it the rage and disgust of the plants themselves? When psychedelics are an object of worship it is difficult not to take a harsh trip personally.
I choose to remain ambivalent. It’s a good story regardless of interpretation. I’d rather it be secondhand, an anecdote relayed instead of a direct experience, but we don’t always get the succor of ignorance we wish for. Among enthusiasts there is a tendency to regard all trips that don’t result in a psychotic break as ‘difficult’ or ‘challenging’ rather than ‘bad’. The thinking here is that hard trips contain wisdom and knowledge that may be difficult to come to grips with but that is necessary for spiritual development.
I think I can get on board with this. The experience detailed above was the fall of a psychic hammer upon a nail that had been put in place by a far different experience of glowing love and forgiveness. In tandem they served to remove the corrosive and toxic masculinity and anger that had animated my life for many years. It hurt terribly, but sometimes terrible pain is the best teacher. | https://medium.com/@paulcervinus/a-bad-trip-wont-kill-you-but-it-might-make-you-wish-you-were-dead-523a2d0b5090 | ['Paul Cervinus'] | 2020-11-21 02:18:52.456000+00:00 | ['Psychedelics', 'Mental Health', 'Drugs', 'Telepathy'] |
How a mind of a 17 year old works | How a mind of a 17 year old works K13 ·Dec 24, 2020
So this is a sneak peak of my first storie:
Im a 17 year old boy who is going to give you the insights of my mind, you are going to know everything from my happy days to my bad days but with a really good depth.
We are a day of xmas and my family are quite distant so im trying to figure out ways to make them come together.
if you want to know how im going to do it check the storie i published!! | https://medium.com/@kjj69677/how-a-mind-of-a-17-year-old-works-bb5eadb4f766 | [] | 2020-12-24 01:50:29.524000+00:00 | ['Happiness', 'Life Lessons', 'Fashion', 'Lifestyle', 'Life'] |
This Math Problem Will Test Your Attentiveness To Detail | This Math Problem Will Test Your Attentiveness To Detail
Are positive numbers and their negative counterparts equal?
Photo by Lum3n from Pexels
I have a friend who occasionally brings math problems to me to solve. Once in a while, he would bring a piece of paper, sit beside me and begin to scribble a few lines of algebra that “prove” that 1=2 or that 0/0=3.
Knowing that I am a math enthusiast, he often wants to test me and show me through any means necessary that math is broken. But every time, it isn’t math that is broken, it is his math that is broken.
Most of the time, his so-called “proofs” employed a division by zero and that was the problem. However, the last time he brought me a “proof”, everything was different. I couldn’t see any division by zero shenanigans and everything looked correct. Yet, he had managed to prove that 1=-1. I began to freak out. Did he finally manage to do it? Is math really broken?
Here’s what he did:
1=√1=√(-1)(-1)=√(-1)√(-1)=(i)(i)=i²=-1
And by so doing, he managed to prove that 1=-1.
It turns out that he violated a math rule in order to make this happen. Before I reveal what it is and why it’s so important, I suggest you try and figure it out yourself.
The Problem with The proof
In a nutshell, the problem with what my friends wrote was the portion where he stated that √(-1)(-1)=√(-1)√(-1).
He thought he was obeying a rule about multiplying square roots of numbers when he actually wasn’t. He was trying to apply the formula √(a)(b)=√(a)√(b). It’s called the Product Rule for Radicals.
Here’s where attentiveness to detail is important. The product rule is guaranteed to work only when both values a and b are non-negative. When this rule is stated in math texts, there is a preamble that makes this clear. It is stated that “if a and b are non-negative real numbers” then √(a)(b)=√(a)√(b).
The rule isn’t guaranteed to work if both numbers are negative, and that’s exactly why my friend was able to find a case where the product rule “failed”. He hadn’t disproved the product rule, he just misapplied it.
In fact, if one isn’t aware of this, it is possible to use the same approach to prove that x=-x for any positive real number x(in other words, all positive numbers are equal to their negative counterparts). That’s exactly why a and b need to be suitably constrained to avoid math from breaking.
Leonhard Euler explored this concept in his 1770 book The Elements of Algebra.
What’s the Lesson here?
This particular math problem taught me a valuable lesson: it’s extremely important to pay attention to the preambles and hypotheses of rules, laws and theorems. The importance of this lesson cannot be overemphasized.
When pressure is placed on students, it can get really tempting to just memorize the formulas in the theorems and ignore the hypotheses. The danger is that such behaviour can come back to bite us when a friend brings us a proof that 1=-1.
The good news is that math isn’t broken…yet. It’s just our understanding and memory that might be. | https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/this-math-problem-will-test-your-attentiveness-to-detail-b61171784dd0 | ['Kwame Afriyie Osei-Tutu'] | 2020-09-20 08:54:02.893000+00:00 | ['Problem Solving', 'Math', 'Logic', 'Mathematics', 'Mathematics Education'] |
What is Managed Banking, and how will it help my business? | Freemarket works with businesses to accelerate their growth by giving them access to cross-border payments and currency exchange optimised for their needs. Our managed banking platform gives challenger brands access to speed and cost benefits previously reserved for only the biggest businesses.
Managed Banking is a simple to use, but flexible approach to finding and maintaining the right banking relationships, payment infrastructure and currency corridors; all offered as a service in support of business requirements.
Currently, a business with emerging cross-border needs must approach and negotiate with numerous prospective banks in order to secure and set up one relationship. With Managed Banking we have done the heavy lifting in the background. Our managed banking platform offers customers access to a global network of bank partners ready to take on their business. We handle all of the relationships and compliance, managing KYC and AML for the banks and providing customers with a simple access point via an API, web-based dashboard or white-label integration.
Managed banking isn’t just lines of code
There are many start-ups offering APIs to connect to existing payment pathways, but this is different. Freemarket offers far more than a simple technical ‘on-ramp’ to the banks’ infrastructure. Instead, we work with customers to define their precise business needs and then create an optimised infrastructure that makes the best use of all of our relationships to deliver fast, cost-effective cross-border payment solutions based on each individual customer’s requirements. Think of us as a service-based offer that uses the best available connections, infrastructures, technology and relationships, including those from 3rd parties, to create a bespoke solution for your business.
The right relationships for your business
For example, some will want or need a tier one bank relationship; others may want a wider pay-out network and others may be interested in blockchain-based infrastructure. Using our insight and experience we will select the right parties from across our network to deliver exactly the cross-border solution the customer needs. We will also partner with them to understand their evolving needs and ensure that not only does the managed banking solution keep up with changing requirements but is proactive in helping to develop them.
A win-win for banks and businesses
We can do this because we offer a win-win to both our banking partners and our customers. For the banks we bring KYC’d customers and aggregate flows, allowing them to cost-effectively reach smaller businesses in a risk-managed way. Integrating with Freemarket brings flows from numerous smaller businesses creating significant economies of scale for the bank. And because we handle the KYC and AML work on their behalf — we effectively broaden their market reach with minimised risk.
For customers, because we aggregate flows from many smaller players, we provide significant business to our bank partners. So we have negotiated access to the wholesale currency exchange rates usually reserved for big business clients.
And, ultimately, this is the vision for the company. Our aim is to provide real-time cross border payments for challenger businesses — giving them the same advantages enjoyed by big business, but at a cost, they can afford.
Managed Banking lets you get on and grow your business.
Get in touch see how we can help your business. | https://medium.com/@wearefreemarket/what-is-managed-banking-and-how-will-it-help-my-business-5e9de85df8b0 | [] | 2020-02-20 15:43:13.127000+00:00 | ['Banking', 'Finance', 'Financial Services', 'Fintech'] |
The best football manager game available 👏 | I have been playing Eleven Kings Football Manager Game for almost a year now, and it has to be said how much the game has grown. The developers have done a tremendous job in listening to the users feedbacks and integrating the updates into the game!👏
A big example of this is the new and redifined User Interface in the homepage and the gameplay.
The game let’s us train players, upgrade stadiums, transfer players, set tactics and much much more. The game also has amazing leaderboard feature, where we can try to become No.1 in global and local rankings.
I highly recommend everyone to try out this amazing football manager game and to explore all these amazing features 😊.
Trust me, you won’t regret it!
To download the game, click the link below:
https://goo.io/rz3S5FP
Enjoy the game! 😊 | https://medium.com/@fcbayern.hub/the-best-football-manager-game-available-7bdcf5693e16 | [] | 2020-12-18 18:50:48.417000+00:00 | ['Football', 'Android Games', 'Eleven Kings', 'Football Manager', 'Soccer'] |
Airbnb IPO: The most anticipated IPO in 2020 | “When the market is ready, we will be ready,”- CEO, Brian Chesky
Even though 2020 has been impeccably bad timing for IPOs the Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said to be still considering an IPO in 2020. While after the stock market rebounded back many companies are now rushing to go public including Robinhood, Door Dash and Airbnb. Airbnb said the IPO decision came after the company booked more than 1 million nights in a single day for the first time since the start of the pandemic.
Airbnb stands for Air Bed and Breakfast; it is an online marketplace for short-term rentals and experiences. The company was founded in 2008 by Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nate Blecharczyk. They are now in over 81,000 cities with 6 million properties listed on their home-sharing website.
“We had to put it on the shelf a little bit because we had a bit of fire-fighting to do. We’ve now kind of dusted that off. And we’re back to working and being prepared.” Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said. “We also don’t want to go public if the world’s not ready for us, if people are really nervous about travel if they aren’t really clear about Airbnb, then the market’s not ready” he added.
Airbnb’s business has been hit hard by coronavirus, the company abruptly halted online advertising to cut costs. Airbnb has lost around 16% of its pre-coronavirus value of $US31 billion. The San Francisco-based company recently laid off 1900 of its 7500 employees. While Airbnb has shown some small signs of a rebound since then, reporting in June that bookings had surged as some travel resumed. “Our business has not recovered, but we are seeing encouraging signs,” the company said.
When can we expect the Airbnb IPO?
The company had previously scheduled its IPO to March but set aside those plans after the company raised an additional $2 billion in funding during the pandemic and started cutting costs across its operations. According to Reuters, Airbnb, valued by investors at $31 billion before the pandemic, has received offers to go public through a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.
“We’re not ruling it out this year, but we’re definitely not committing to a timeline right now,” Chesky said. “We’re still a little early in this crisis for me to feel clear enough about how this is going to play out.”
Gain Access to Expert View — Subscribe to DDI Intel | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/airbnb-ipo-why-it-is-one-of-the-most-anticipated-ipo-in-2020-f5766d576a73 | [] | 2020-08-08 20:09:31.757000+00:00 | ['IPO', 'Travel', 'Online', 'Airbnb', 'Covid 19'] |
how to apply full coverage foundation | Technical Tips | how to apply full coverage foundation
The best way to apply full coverage foundations is with a brush. A makeup artist may use their fingers, but the problem with that technique is that it doesn’t give you an even application and can cause streaks in your foundation. Start by applying primer to your skin if necessary. If you’re using liquid foundation, squeeze some onto the bristles of your brush and then start patting it on your skin until you get an even look. You could also use a sponge or beauty blender instead of a meeting for this step, but make sure they are clean!
In addition, there are many more main steps of how to apply full coverage foundation. When you follow it, you can get the best result.
FACE CLEANSING:
One of the essential parts of your morning routine is cleansing. The type and frequency of this step will depend on your skin’s needs, but it’s crucial always to cleanse before putting any other products on your face. This ensures that you remove all traces of dirt and oil from the day before.
MOISTURIZING CREAM:
moisturizing cream is a great way to improve the texture of your skin because it’s full of natural ingredients. You can feel the difference just by rubbing it into your hands.
SERUM:
The serum is a great anti-aging product. It helps you look years younger, and it’s easy to use. And it’s better to use first if you want the best result for a full coverage foundation.
PRIMER:
primer is Playing a significant role in full coverage foundation. Creating a primer in your makeup is an excellent way to do your eye shadow. To make it, you’ll need a primary palette and some shadows of color. Then get a brush and dip it into the white shade. Apply this on the eye. For More Keep Reading | https://medium.com/@beautician/how-to-apply-full-coverage-foundation-technical-tips-36e4d23d3739 | [] | 2021-11-20 11:02:49.606000+00:00 | ['Skincare', 'Beautician', 'Foundation', 'Makeup', 'Girls'] |
Seven Ways to Create Object in JavaScript | JavaScript is often considered as a functional programming language. But there are ways by which developers use it like Object Oriented too. One of the most discussed keywords in object oriented programming is Object.
So what is Object?
Objects are the instances of a class in object oriented programming pattern. Consider first image of this blog, if you fill all the values and store it somewhere then you can say it is a Person class object.
There are mainly seven ways to create object in JavaScript:
Using the inbuilt object constructor
var object = new Object();
2. Using Object’s create method
var object = Object.create(null);
3. Simplest of all, using object literal syntax
var object = {};
4. Using function constructor
function Person(name){
var object = {};
object.name=name;
object.age=21;
return object;
}
var object = new Person("🇮🇳 Ashish 🇮🇳");
5. Using function constructor with prototype
function Person(){}
Person.prototype.name = "🇮🇳 Ashish 🇮🇳";
var object = new Person();
6. Using ES6 Class syntax
class Person {
constructor(name) {
this.name = name;
}
}
var object = new Person("🇮🇳 Ashish 🇮🇳");
7. Using singleton pattern (Similar to #4)
var object = new function(){
this.name = "Sudheer";
}
Conclusion
Every uses their favourite ways to create object. Sometimes it also depends on your use case. | https://medium.com/@ashishaugust22/seven-ways-to-create-object-in-javascript-9a832e68d572 | ['Ashish Sharma'] | 2020-12-19 04:53:53.040000+00:00 | ['Javascript Tips', 'JavaScript', 'Object Oriented', 'Objects'] |
To Live or Try Dying | It is no surprise that life is hard and we must weigh that against the payoffs we receive from attaining our goals and satisfying our needs, but do we place too much value on the prize, our satisfaction, and not enough on the sometimes arduous journey that we take to get there?
When I look back on the entirety of the forty-some years I have lived on this earth, I can see a constant struggle, speckled with points in time when I reached a goal or learned something new and achieved some level of enlightenment along the way. I do not think I follow linear paths that result in monumental achievements. Does anyone? Is it possible that our grand achievements exist in the lessons we learn along the way?
It is easy to look at someone else’s life and admire what they have achieved, but we do not see the other side, the journey they took to get where they are, and we cannot peek into their private lives to see the difficulties they still face.
According to Rudolf Steiner, the early 20th century philosopher and founder of Anthroposophy, the value of our lives can be quantified by how much pain we can accept to feel pleasure. He indicates that pain is inevitable and pleasure is not a guarantee. He believes life satisfaction is solely based on whether we live with purpose and that our purpose is found in what motivates us to get up every day and live, and our ability to create something tangible from our inner motivations to contribute to the greater good of society.
When we feel depressed, we are essentially experiencing the separation of our bodies from our soul lives, our ability to live in the truth of who we are, what I identify as our soul life or soul purpose. We temporarily forget our purpose. We have so many external demands in our lives, it can be difficult to remain present and true to ourselves. This can create the illusion that we are frozen in time or stuck in a rut, a temporary death. Once we refocus on our priorities and rediscover our purpose, we feel renewed or born again.
Individuals who have thoughts of suicide, I believe, are locked in a state of perpetual rewind. They cannot see a way out from under the prison they have built in their minds. External forces have corrupted their internal dialogue and thus the separation of body and soul enters a state of temporary death. Without a healthy psychological state of mind and immediate external support systems, a choice to end one’s existence plays into the equation.
We are truly complex beings and our minds can be feeble when we lack the skills to cope with balancing pain and pleasure. I believe mindfulness, healthy patterns of behavior, external support systems, self-reflection, and refocusing our priorities are the keys to living in our truth and fulfilling our purpose. Most of all, get up every day and do something healthy that makes you feel good. | https://medium.com/@thefifth/to-live-or-try-dying-dca1a0d36c2a | ['S. Angell'] | 2020-12-11 19:32:14.646000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Life', 'Health', 'Suicide', 'Life Lessons'] |
Rent Strike! Why are We still Paying? — King David | Times have changed, quickly. I first compared COVID-19 spread to that of MERS and SARS in early February. I laughed it off. Surely, the virus will never reach California! It’s now May 1st and this is my 45th day of quarantine. Normally, I’d be marching in solidarity with my fellow workers on May Day, praising the former union members who gave me the right to the weekend!
This novel coronavirus didn’t seem that contagious and I figured the virus would be contained to Asia. I couldn’t have been more wrong! While MERS and SARS had higher death rates, COVID-19 spread with an outstretched red right hand. I really thought that 2020 was really going to be our year. I’m also one of the fortunate to have a regular paycheck during the crisis. I’m not here to advocate for myself, but for my constituents. So, if you’re out of a job, why should you be forced to pay rent?
Why should landlords stand to gain from your misfortune and suffering? Why is rent still due if evictions have been temporarily outlawed? I can understand paying some rent with unemployment, but what about your impending student loans, and credit card debt, medical bills, and other bills of no fault of your own? What happens when the unemployment runs out? If you’re without a job or income in a global pandemic, you should be exempt from rent or other bills. While the government is happy to bail out large corporations, often without restrictions on stock buybacks, shouldn’t they be able to help you out as a worker? Workers pay taxes and a large portion of their paycheck is given to government programs. While taxes are necessary, surely the Feds should be providing more to some citizens than a measly $1200 in a time of crisis.
Landlords made an investment with considerable risks. Owning property does not entitle you to automatic income! If I buy a stock and the value goes down, that’s a decision I have to live with. If Intel decides to reverse its dividend to save the corporation’s cash flow, that’s something I can’t predict as a small-time investor. If states and localities enact rent control, that’s a risk those landlords have to take. Why don’t more landlords recognize that providing housing for someone is a far greater opportunity than sending them into debt and eventual homelessness? Why is rent such a casual concept on a global scale? Why are elected officials so eager to aid homeowners and not renters? Demand that your elected officials provide you and your neighbors with adequate renters’ protections and debt forgiveness in times of hardship. The message is simple. If you have no income, don’t pay rent.
Don’t deplete your savings for the sake of making your landlord richer. They’ve been collecting rent from you and providing far less in return for the sake of their greed. As a tenant, I’ve dealt with roaches, leaks, and a flooded apartment. When my old apartment flooded, the landlord had the chutzpah to ask me to clean up the mess. Later on, that same landlord would return only half of my security deposit. In a 12 unit building that’s been fully occupied for years, they were making a fortune! What power to buy a building! I’ve had friendly and approachable landlords, too, but my negative experiences far outweigh the good.
If you have the money and a solid income, there’s no shame in keeping the regular cycle going. Those who’ve held property for decades and centuries will continue to rule over the poor. While it seems idealistic to demand free housing, it’s not out of reach. There are over 17 million vacant homes in America! Housing is a human right, yet we have thousands sleeping on the streets and in crammed cars. Landlords must take a risk on their investments and are not entitled to automatic income. Renters deserve the same protections homeowners do. No one deserves to live on the street. If rent comes due and you can’t pay, organize! | https://medium.com/@davidgoldberg_21160/rent-strike-why-are-we-still-paying-king-david-a0abf3b65950 | ['David Goldberg'] | 2020-05-18 03:45:00.506000+00:00 | ['Strike', 'Saving Money', 'Landlord', 'Rent', 'Covid 19'] |
Tarsus Group Strengthens Tyrexpo Asia with New Thailand Show | Tarsus Group, the organisers of the Tyrexpo Asia exhibition, have announced that they plan to annualise the event, making it rotate between Singapore (odd years) and Bangkok (even years).
Tyrexpo Asia Expands into Thailand
The inaugural Bangkok edition will be launched in 27–29 April 2022. The next upcoming edition will be in 17 to 19 NOV 2021, Singapore.
With growing opportunities in Southeast Asia, Tyrexpo Asia 2022 Bangkok will be held in Thailand, the largest automotive hub in Southeast Asia. This strategic event will bring together regional emerging markets like Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, further growing the Southeast Asia tyre market. It will be held at the Bangkok International Trade and Exhibition Centre (BITEC) in Bangkok, Thailand.
Alwin Seow, Events Director at Tarsus said: “The tyre industry has been resilient during the pandemic, and both events targeting at different geographical regions are a good platform for recovery for top buyers and sellers to gather. We expect to attract 120 exhibitors and 3,000 local and international attendees, where both shows will provide a valuable opportunity for leading and emerging international regional suppliers to promote their services within the tyre, equipment & tools and tyre accessories market sectors.” | https://medium.com/@retreadingbusiness/tarsus-group-strengthens-tyrexpo-asia-with-new-thailand-show-c35a2f9e9ca7 | ['Retreading Business'] | 2020-12-07 18:24:18.717000+00:00 | ['Thailand', 'Singapore', 'Exhibitions', 'Busines', 'Tyres'] |
The Poet | On November 21, 1978 — a cold day, wet and misty — Ruth spent her lunch break running errands downtown. She wore a red print blouse, a black jacket, and black pants. As she crossed North Market Street after leaving a greeting card shop, her path was suddenly blocked by a blue-green 1964 Chevrolet Bel Air that screeched to the curb. The only other person she could see was an elderly woman walking far up the street. Ruth froze in horror as the same man who had confronted her twice previously leaped from the car. This time he wore black frame glasses, a jean jacket, and a sweater. “Have you got my money?” he asked, delivering a sharp kick to Ruth’s shin. As she folded over in pain, the man grabbed her and shoved her into the car’s tattered, junk-filled backseat. He climbed in next to her and slammed the door.
In the driver’s seat sat a man swigging from a bottle wrapped in a paper bag. Ruth’s attacker called him “Buddy.” Ruth looked frantically for a means of escape, but the door handle on her side was broken. On the floor she saw a gas can, pieces of concrete, chains, and rags. The car’s rear left window was covered with plastic, and the torn up dashboard was criss-crossed with white tape.
Ruth’s abductor told her to give him her purse. Pawing through it, he found Ruth’s money and her safe deposit key. “We’ve struck it rich!” he cried. But his mood turned grim as he came across Drowatzky’s business card, which he showed to Buddy. Then, cursing, he picked up a chunk of concrete and slammed it into Ruth’s head. “You damn stupid bitch!” he said. Dazed, Ruth collapsed in her seat.
The car sped off, headed northwest, the two men jabbering back and forth so rapidly that Ruth found it difficult to follow their conversation. At one point Buddy stopped at Twin Lakes Shopping Center and yammered on about Sears’ inability to properly fix his car. “We’ll get rid of her but not here,” her abductor said at another time, sending an added jolt of fear through an already terrified Ruth. She thought of the Mace can she had hidden in her purse, but she felt too scared to reach for it.
Outside the car, the weather grew increasingly colder as the afternoon turned to dusk and dusk to night. Buddy continued driving a seemingly random route around the city. “Do you like beer?” her abductor leered. “We’ll get some beer and have a party. I’ll be real nice to you.”
Finally, four hours into her ordeal, Ruth summoned the courage to speak. “I have to pee,” she said, but the men just laughed. Ruth forced herself to gag. “I’m going to throw up if I don’t go to the restroom!” she said.
“You won’t do that,” Ruth’s abductor replied, but he told Buddy to stop next to a small park near West 21st Street and Salina. Before the men let Ruth out of the car they made her remove her shoes and sweater so she wouldn’t run away.
“This is going to be fun,” Ruth’s abductor said as he escorted her down into the park. “I’ll watch you and you’ll watch me, don’t that sound like fun?” Ruth, walking next to him, dug her hand inside her purse until she found her can of Mace.
When they reached a little lake, the man let go of Ruth’s arm, saying he would pee first. As he unzipped his fly, Ruth withdrew her can of Mace and pressed the nozzle. The man collapsed coughing as Ruth bolted off barefoot into the park.
Spotting a large bush behind which she could hide, Ruth crouched, fearful and shivering, thinking she could hear the man tracking her. “You’ll freeze if we leave you here!” she heard the man shout. “Come get your shoes and your coat and we won’t bother you anymore!”
Though her feet were turning numb from the cold, Ruth stayed crouched in the dark until long after the man stopped shouting. When her discomfort grew overwhelming, she scrambled to the top of a small rise. Looking down, she saw no sign of the men’s car. Had they finally driven off?
Exiting the park, Ruth dashed into a liquor store across the street. “Someone’s after me,” she told the store’s owner between gasping breaths. The owner immediately called the police. “Please, can you call my husband too?” Ruth asked him.
When Ed picked up the phone and heard a strange man on the line, he demanded to speak with Ruth. Ed had spent the past hours feeling panicked and helpless after Ruth had been reported missing from work. Now, on the phone, Ruth reassured him that she was out of harm’s way, that the store owner was helping her, but Ed remained wary. By the time he arrived at the liquor store 30 minutes later, the police had already taken Ruth to headquarters.
Ed found Ruth hunched in a chair at the station, her eyes and cheeks red from crying, her hand still gripping her Mace can, though she was doing her best to project an aura of calm. Her mother had always taught her that tears were a waste of time.
Ruth remained seated as Lt. Drowatzky told Ed that the kidnappers had stolen her $315 paycheck and a $100 dollar U.S. savings bond. Not wishing to further alarm Ruth and Ed, Drowatzky kept private his growing suspicion that Ruth’s tormentor might be the BTK Strangler after all. Overlaps of key words between the BTK’s letters and the letters received by Ruth had the police fretting that Ruth might be the killer’s next victim.
The next day Detective Richard Zortman drove to the park where Ruth had escaped her kidnappers. He found Ruth’s shoes and sweater and traced her footprints, but was unable to recover any additional clues. Zortman and Drowatzky then ran a check of every 1964 Chevy Bel Air in the city, doggedly locating each vehicle, but no plausible suspects emerged from their work.
For the next five weeks, detectives in the downtown area threw a blanket of protection around Ruth during her lunch hours, but they observed no suspicious activity. Detective George Anderson, with Ruth and Ed in tow, drove 155 miles east to Fort Scott for a two-day investigation into Ruth’s teenage assault there, hoping to uncover a possible suspect. Ruth examined all the mug shots on file at the Fort Scott police department. Later that month Anderson returned to Fort Scott for another two-day visit, but neither trip provided any leads regarding the possible identity of Ruth’s tormentor.
Looking to establish contact with the suspect, Lieutenant Drowatzky participated in a talk show sponsored by KEYN radio. He described for the audience Ruth’s strange tale. As the show progressed, Ruth and three detectives listened in on the studio telephone line to all incoming callers. None of the voices sounded to Ruth like that of the man who had been stalking her.
During this same period Ruth found herself plagued by daily headaches and wrenching stomach cramps, and while she knew the symptoms might be psychosomatic, she never considered requesting help. Her mother had taught her that asking for help was a sign of weakness, something to be avoided at all costs. Ruth also hated to be an object of gossip or speculation; in her world, calling special attention to one’s self was tantamount to a sin.
Ruth’s discomfort only grew in December, when Drowatzky received a letter from her attacker accusing the detective of “protecting a whore from death.” Drowatzky, for his part, was enraged. He felt that Ruth was a good, kind woman, and his inability to find her attacker was proving a source of deep frustration.
Meanwhile, Ruth and Ed’s nights reflected their new reality. While Ruth slept — or, rather, attempted to sleep — in their bed, Ed would drag his 12-guage shotgun into their backyard. There he would lie behind the bushes and wait for hours, fantasizing all the while that Ruth’s attacker would make an appearance.
As the weather warmed and spring turned to summer, the letters for Ruth kept piling up. The words were written in rhyming verse — Ed called the writer “The Poet” — and the messages were violent, enraged, grotesquely sexual. “The whore bore her guilt in her bed of slime/ From selling her ass & not charging a dime/ Slept with strangers in evil bed/ Enraged demon hunters saw blood was red/ All bitchs shuld keep there names and faces secret….”
In July 1979 the letters stopped, however, and Ruth and Ed again grew hopeful that The Poet had moved on. They even felt comfortable enough to plan their annual summer trip to a dude ranch in Colorado. Ruth wanted a new pair of jeans for the trip, and so on August 13, after work, she told Ed she was heading to Dillard’s department store at the Towne East Mall. Ed felt nervous about Ruth venturing out by herself, but Ruth said she would be fine.
By the time Ruth walked out of Dillard’s with her new jeans, the summer dusk had settled in, casting shadows over the enormous, nearly deserted mall parking lot. Ruth, aware of her vulnerability, hurried to her vehicle, eyes scanning the lot for potential danger. She was almost to her 1979 Oldsmobile two-door when she heard a male voice call, “Hey, Ruth, I didn’t know you were going to make this so easy!”
She turned around and recognized with horror the man who had kidnapped her one year earlier. Ruth ran for her car, but before she could unlock the door the man came up from behind and grabbed her wrist, then shoved her head against the window. “Get in,” he ordered, saying he wanted to take her to a bridge near August Airport Road. He threw a brown paper shopping bag through the partially open rear window onto the back seat. The bag held clothesline rope, white tape, a red bandana, and a half empty bottle of wine. “We’ll go to a nice little place where it says ‘Keep Out,’” he said.
Ruth broke free and tried to step around the car. The man withdrew an 8-inch boning knife and stabbed her — twice in the back and once in the side. On the third stab, the knife stuck in Ruth’s flesh and she felt the man lose his grip. She ran to the passenger side seat, slammed the door, and began rolling up the window.
To her horror, Ruth saw the man reaching in after her. His hand got caught in the window; as he withdrew it, his brown cotton glove remained stuck between the window and the doorframe. Ruth drove off with the glove still dangling there. In her rearview mirror she could just make out the man staring after her in the twilight.
Ruth felt woozy as she turned from the parking lot into the street’s steady traffic. When she stopped at a red light she finally noticed a burning pain in her left side; looking down, she saw the knife still jutting from her side. Her energy was slipping. Blood from her wounds dripped down onto the car seat.
At the corner of Douglas and Rock Road, Ruth spotted a gas station and pulled sharply into its driveway, stopping in front of the station’s pay phone. Staggering from the car, she dialed 268–4181, the only police number she knew.
At police headquarters Captain Al Thimmesch, Drowatzky’s boss, picked up the phone. Ruth began to introduce herself.
“I know who you are,” Thimmesch cut her off. “What’s going on?”
“I’ve been stabbed.”
An alarmed Thimmesch said he would send an officer over immediately. Ruth, however, was frightened that her attacker might show up at the gas station. After hanging up the phone, she returned to her car and, feeling increasingly weak, drove the five minutes back to her house, certain that at any minute her attacker might pull behind her. She was so distracted and in so much pain that she almost missed her street.
In the meantime Captain Thimmesch had called Ed and told him the shocking news. When Ruth pulled to the curb, a panicked Ed was waiting in front of the house. Ruth nearly fainted as she opened the car door. She urged Ed to remove the knife from her side, but Ed feared that would increase the bleeding. As gently as possible, he moved Ruth into the passenger seat. Then he jumped behind the wheel and sped for St. Joseph’s Hospital.
Lt. Drowatzky met the Finleys at the hospital, where he found Ruth lying quietly on an emergency room bed. When he asked what happened, Ruth lifted her body to show him the long knife sticking from her side. Drowatzky whistled at the size. A minute later, as he discussed the situation with the emergency room doctor, the knife slid from Ruth’s body and clattered on the floor.
The doctors found deep gashes on Ruth’s back and left arm, and a two-inch deep wound where the knife had been lodged. Any deeper and the knife, the doctors said, would have killed her. After the doctors sutured the wound, Drowatzky commandeered a nearby room in which to station a guard while Ruth recovered.
That night the local TV news stations blared the story of Ruth’s stabbing, while the Wichita Eagle-Beacon featured the headline “Woman Stabbed Resisting Abduction.” A follow-up article in the Eagle-Beacon included a police sketch of the suspect and a warning that he was “extremely dangerous.” Drowatzky told the newspaper that the suspect had been writing letters to at least one other woman in the Wichita area.
Ruth remained in the hospital for nine days. The day after she was released a nurse told police that a man fitting the description of Ruth’s attacker had visited the nurse’s station to inquire about her. An alarmed Drowatzky was positive this was their suspect. He stayed at the Finleys’ house for the next 48 hours in case the man showed up, but to no avail.
That September Ed hit upon the idea of trying to contact Ruth’s attacker by leaving messages in the newspaper. In the classified section of the Eagle-Beacon he placed an ad that read, “Poet: Tell me what I owe you. R.S.F.” Local reporters quickly picked up on the nickname “The Poet,” employing it from then on in their coverage of Ruth’s case. Even the suspect appropriated the name: he began signing his letters “The Poet.” He also began communicating with Ed through the classifieds — “To R.S.F.: The price of my service/ To stay alive/ Can now be settled at 5” — though he never shared any personal information. To The Poet it seemed little more than a game. He called Ruth “the seventh and hardest to find,” raising further speculation that he might be the BTK Strangler.
In October the Eagle-Beacon revealed that The Poet had been sending the newspaper taunting letters for the past six months. “If any had a brain no one wold have pain/ Good or evil my secret shall not be known/ I unnoticed go my way/ I may just prosper for 1 day,” The Poet wrote. In an apparent reference to BTK, he warned, “Make sure you don’t confuse the executioners again.” The paper also printed another composite sketch of The Poet, resulting in 25 calls from local citizens who said they had seen or knew the man in the sketch. Ruth’s story had transfixed all of Wichita, eclipsing for the moment even BTK.
In response to the public outpouring, the police redoubled their efforts to catch The Poet, combing their files for any suspects who had committed kidnappings or knifings. They also surrounded Ruth with eight undercover officers while she shopped at Towne East, and they wired her for sound whenever she walked in potentially risky areas. Still they failed to turn up any plausible suspects.
Meanwhile The Poet appeared to be stalking the Finley’s house. One morning Ruth found a letter from The Poet on their front porch, and at night loud noises seemed to emanate from their garage. “A fucked up childhood causes anger and hate,” The Poet wrote, “Players of games are forced to wait.”
With no other leads, the police decided to try hypnosis, setting up two sessions between Ruth and Dr. Donald Schrag, a Wichita psychologist and police consultant who had also worked on the BTK case. Ruth found the experience of being hypnotized wonderfully calming, though she grew agitated when recalling her kidnapping, repeatedly yelling, “I want out of the car! I want out of the car!” Few new details about her attacks emerged from her sessions, however. The Poet “has serious, serious emotional and mental problems,” Dr. Schrag announced. “It’s likely he’s had psychological treatment and possibly been in a state institution.” He added that The Poet’s letters showed signs of high intelligence.
In January 1980, Ruth’s case was taken over by Captain Mike Hill, while Drowatzky was promoted to vice and organized crime. Drowatzky and his wife had grown close with Ruth and Ed over the previous two years, and the two couples frequently socialized. Their shared Republican politics and dry senses of humor meshed easily and well.
The dark-haired Captain Hill was built like a football player and had the previous year taken over the department’s Special Investigations Section, which was spearheading Ruth’s case. He’d also put in long hours on the BTK Strangler case. Unlike Drowatzky, Hill had no personal connection with either of the Finleys, and so, as he reviewed the files on The Poet, he couldn’t help but wonder if Ruth or Ed might be the culprit. But he quickly changed his mind after reading the medical report, which established firmly that Ruth couldn’t have stabbed herself with such force at that angle. Meanwhile Drowatzky and the other detectives assured Hill that the devoted Ed would never hurt his wife. The Poet quickly took notice of the change in command, writing a letter to Hill that began with the line, “There once was a Capt who had a asshole for a heart.”
On Christmas Eve the Finleys’ phone lines were cut for a second time, leading Southwestern Bell to bury the replacement lines underground. Ruth and Ed fitted their back gate with an alarm system, while Captain Hill installed a surveillance camera in their backyard and assigned detectives to watch the monitors 24-hours a day from the Finleys’ dining room. Ruth, feeling guilty that the detectives had drawn such a dull assignment — though the $1,200 in overtime pay the officers earned each weekend made up for the boredom — plied them with homemade desserts. She also entertained the detectives by reading aloud from The Poet’s letters, though it gave her a powerful headache to do so.
On January 25, 1980, Ruth reported an afternoon phone call at work from The Poet, who told her he had left a surprise in her office lobby. When detectives arrived, they found a 12-inch butcher knife wrapped in a red bandana in the lobby’s phone booth. Two witnesses reported seeing a man at the phone booth who resembled the police sketch of The Poet. “Shut your eyes and think of the 12-inch blade,” The Poet wrote Ruth. “Will you remember the hole it made?/ Dream of me and obey my commands/ Think of me with a knife in my hands.”
The frequency of The Poet’s letters increased over the following weeks. On February 19 he sent Ruth a chilling Valentine’s Day message that read, “Here’s to you a tender valentine/ Red with blood and tied with twine/ Nothing too much for a valentine/ Gone from here by whim of mind.” A strip of red bandana was included in the envelope, along with a letter that said, “I am about ready to start telling about you now….It will just be yur word against mine.” Ed drove Ruth to and from work every day as a measure of protection.
By this point the police had investigated over 300 people, but they still had no plausible suspects. Frustrated with playing a passive role, detectives developed a risky plan to draw The Poet out into the open: They would put Ruth in a bulletproof vest and let her stroll around downtown Wichita, shadowed by six to eight plainclothes officers. More detectives would cruise the streets in unmarked cars. But the elaborate ruse failed to turn up any suspects. Disguised as a wino, Detective Richard Vinroe then spent the next several weeks lurking downtown, in a futile attempt to spot The Poet on the street.
Local media remained riveted by Ruth’s case, and on the Fourth of July the story broke nationally with a detailed — and remarkably accurate — story in the National Enquirer titled, “She’s Living a Nightmare: The Victim of a Crazed Tormentor” that included an interview with Captain Hill. Apparently Ruth’s story needed no exaggeration to enthrall the Enquirer’s regular readership.
The Poet continued his barrage of Wichita businesses, sending out more than fifty letters in a six-month period. One letter told a local mortuary to contact Ruth about its services, saying she would be requiring them soon. Letters to the gas and electric company instructed them to turn off the Finleys’ utilities. The health department was told that Ruth was spreading venereal disease. A construction company was solicited to tear up the Finleys’ driveway, and the DMV was asked to confiscate Ruth’s license because of her “hazardous” and “dangerous” driving habits. Ruth’s bank was ordered to transfer all of her money. A local florist received a five dollar bill with the request that one black flower be sent to Ruth.
Still seeking a break in the case, the police grew innovative, installing a camera camouflaged in a birdhouse in the Finleys’ backyard. Two vice and narcotics officers were given the mind-numbing assignment of combing through all of the Kansas Gas and Electric Company’s letters to see if any other envelopes bore similar handwriting to The Poet’s, a task that consumed four days. Lt. Drowatzky also sent copies of The Poet’s letters to Dr. Murray S. Miron , a prominent psycholinguist at Syracuse University who had gained national attention for his work on the Son of Sam case in 1977. Dr. Miron wrote a profile stating that The Poet was “clearly and severely psychotic,” “virulently pathological,” “schizophrenic,” “extremely dangerous,” “a wily and elusive quarry,” and “a loner.” He also said that while “the style and pathology” of The Poet and the BTK Strangler were “highly similar,” he did not believe they were the same person.
Yet BTK speculation continued to be fed by The Poet’s repeated references to a “fox” he had killed, an apparent allusion to Nancy Jo Fox, BTK’s most recent victim, slain in December 1977. “Mingled with blood and tears from my stormy life,” The Poet wrote Ruth at around this time, “tortured oppression needs death to end the strife/ With no repentance I will be free/ Locked in her grave I will return to being me.”
At the beginning of June Ruth received a letter from The Poet postmarked from Oklahoma City, the first letter to be sent from outside Wichita. Captain Hill grew hopeful when the Oklahoma police then received an anonymous call from a woman regarding a man who resembled The Poet. Police discovered the man had worked in Wichita and had been fired from his job about seven months earlier, after which he had moved to a trailer west of Oklahoma City. His psychological profile also matched that of The Poet. Hill and his team were thrilled — surely they had their man. The suspect was flown back to Wichita for a police lineup at the Sedgwick County Courthouse, but Ruth, after careful consideration, declared that he was the wrong person, despite the physical similarities.
The Poet’s harassment continued at a frenzied pace. He left an ice pick and a bottle of urine on the Finleys’ front porch, followed by a bag of feces. He left Molotov cocktails and broken glass on the Finleys’ steps, broke the lock on their gate, and sliced their garden hose. He left firecrackers, cigarettes, hair, matches, and trash in their mailbox. Ruth found a rock wrapped in The Poet’s signature red bandana in the back yard, along with a pair of wire cutters.
“’Twas the night befor Xmas/ and all through the house/ Ruth wasn’t stirring/ Yur as quiet as a mouse/ Yur stocking was tight/ around yur neck with care/ I hoped the Lt./ wuld not soon be there.” At Christmas, as Ruth and Ed watched television in their basement, the wreath hanging outside their front window was set on fire; the heat of the flames cracked open the window with a boom. Running upstairs, Ed knocked the wreath to the ground with a baseball bat. After stomping out the flames, he grabbed a pair of garden shears and tore off into the night, yelling that he was going to kill The Poet.
In March The Poet wrote that he was going to kill Ruth at the St. Patrick’s Day parade, and on April Fool’s Day pieces of concrete were flung on the Finleys’ front porch. But neither the neighbors nor Ruth and Ed saw anything suspicious.
Despite the hundreds of hours of diligent police work that Hill, Drowatzky, and the other officers had put into Ruth’s case, the winter and spring of 1981 found them no closer to identifying a suspect. Chief Richard LaMunyon, a highly respected and well-liked administrator who gave his detectives free reign over their cases, faced a constant barrage of questions from the media: Why haven’t you caught The Poet? Are The Poet and the BTK Strangler the same person? How could this be happening in Wichita? But despite the pressure, LaMunyon resisted any calls to intervene; he had full faith in his detectives’ capabilities. Unlike his men, who had formed close personal bonds with Ruth and Ed, LaMunyon kept both the case and the Finleys themselves at a remove.
Then, on Friday, September 4, 1981, Drowatzky approached LaMunyon with an update. The Poet had sent a new letter in which he announced that after taking care of Ruth, he was going after LaMunyon’s wife, Sharron. He knew the make of Sharron’s car and the path she drove home from work. Angry and offended, LaMunyon decided the time had come to step away from his preferred administrative role and take a personal interest in the case.
That evening LaMunyon took the voluminous case files back to his house. He spent the weekend poring over every document, visualizing every incident, making detailed notes. By the time he finished he knew the identity of The Poet.
On Friday, September 11, LaMunyon called a meeting of sixteen of his officers in a windowless basement room at the county courthouse. The Civil Preparedness room had been specifically designed to keep city officials safe in case of natural disaster. LaMunyon wanted to keep the meeting confidential.
Not one for drama or formalities, LaMunyon took his seat at the head of the table. “The Poet,” he announced with little preamble, “is Ruth Finley herself.”
Before his men could reply, LaMunyon began listing his reasons: 1) There had never been a single witness to any of Ruth’s encounters with The Poet, though they all occurred in public places. 2) The Finleys lived on a dead end street with little traffic, yet none of the neighbors or stationed police officers had ever spotted The Poet, nor were any footprints ever discovered. 3) Detectives found only a single set of footprints — Ruth’s — in the park where she had supposedly Maced her kidnapper. She also said her kidnapper had struck her in the face with concrete, but her face showed no injury. 4) Ruth called the Central Investigations office in the police department when she was stabbed. Why not emergency dispatchers? And she got out of the car to make the call, then back in the car to drive home. How could she do that with a knife in her back? 5) Captain Hill received a letter from The Poet as soon as he took over Ruth’s case, but only Ruth, Ed, and police knew Hill had assumed command. 6) As soon as the recording camera was placed in the birdhouse — a camera of which only the Finleys and the police were aware — The Poet stopped appearing in Ruth and Ed’s backyard. 7) The Poet’s messages to Ed in the Eagle-Beacon’s classified section stopped whenever the Finleys were on vacation, and resumed as soon as they returned.
Ruth was the only suspect who made any sense, LaMunyon told his men. “Unless it’s Ed, and I don’t think it is,” he said. LaMunyon felt that his lack of a personal relationship with Ruth provided him with the emotional distance to identify her as the suspect. The friendship that his detectives had developed with the Finleys had blinded them to reality. In person, Ruth was too kind, too gentle, too modest — too normal — to suspect of such outrageous behavior. The question of whether Ruth was genuinely “crazy” or just conniving remained to be answered.
During the three-hour meeting LaMunyon told his officers they would spend the next two weeks performing around-the-clock surveillance on the Finleys, with narcotics and vice officers providing additional support. The officers would work 12-hour shifts; a van situated at the service station in Eastgate Mall Shopping Center, two blocks from the Finleys’ house, would serve as the command center. LaMunyon warned his men not to breathe a word of the surveillance to anyone, including their spouses. If the media received any tips, he would fire every person in the room.
The detectives were stunned by the news that Ruth might be The Poet, but they kept their faces impassive. (Drowatzky, in particular, was devastated, given how close he and his wife had grown with the Finleys.) Privately, many of them thought LaMunyon was deluded. What about all the experts — the doctors, the psychologists, the linguists — who had sworn Ruth and The Poet could not be the same person? But LaMunyon, an enormously self-confident man, thought the experts were wrong. “I don’t believe any of them, and I don’t believe anything [Ruth] says either,” he said.
After the meeting, LaMunyon, for the sake of procedure, again asked Dr. Schrag if Ruth could be The Poet, but Schrag responded with a vehement “no.” LaMunyon then gave the medical reports to his own personal physician, who agreed with Ruth’s doctors that it was physically impossible for Ruth to have inflicted her stab wounds. Still LaMunyon remained convinced that Ruth and The Poet were one and the same.
Dear Ruth
The game is over
The players are dead
I play any part
Coming out of my head
On Monday, September 14, the surveillance of Ruth and Ed began. For the next two weeks, the police would document the Finleys’ every move. At least one police car and one helicopter would follow them at all times. Inside the command center van at Eastgate Mall, two officers watched through a camera with a long-range lens. The lens was trained on the mailboxes just opposite their vehicle.
Three days later, the police helicopter provided the first break. At 8:30 am, Ed steered his black Oldsmobile into the Eastgate Mall parking lot and stopped at a mailbox. Ruth reached out the passenger side window, placed some mail in the slot, and Ed drove off. The helicopter pilot didn’t know what he had just witnessed — his instructions had specified only that he should follow the Finleys’ car at all times — but he notified officers nonetheless. At 1:30 pm, 30 minutes before the mail was to be picked up, a postal inspector called by police opened the mailbox and retrieved its contents. He took the mail to the downtown post office and presented it to Drowatzky and a detective from vice and narcotics.
The detectives focused on five pieces of mail lying on top of the mailbag. One was a personal letter from the Finleys. Two were bill payments from the Finleys. And two were letters from The Poet — one addressed to Ruth, and one to KAKE-TV. “Hickory, dickory, dock,” the latter message read. “The name on this face is Smock/ Heat the iron for the brand/ Cooperate for games planned/ Hickory, dickory, dock.” Police had seen Ruth place letters in the mailbox, and they had discovered Poet letters in the mailbox. Still, this did not provide incontrovertible proof. “What if somebody came along after them and mailed those letters?” LaMunyon asked.
Several days later, on Saturday, Sept. 26, the Finleys returned to the Eastgate Mall mailbox at 4:15 pm. Detectives snapped color photographs as Ruth’s arm extended out the passenger window and dropped letters in the slot. As soon as Ed drove away, an undercover police car pulled in front of the mailbox to block anyone else from accessing it. Detectives popped the car’s hood and feigned engine trouble in order to avoid suspicion. Again the postal inspector was called, and the process of retrieving the mail repeated.
Four letters from the Finleys were grouped together on top of the pile: a utility company bill, a payment to J.C. Penney’s, a personal letter, and a Poet letter addressed to Ruth. “No dumb-ass bitch will get the fucking law to get me,” the letter read. When the detectives had finished, the postal service resealed the envelopes and delivered the letters on to Ruth and Ed. The two bills were sent to their destinations, where the police then retrieved them in order to establish a chain of evidence.
The next morning the Finleys found The Poet letter, and Ed, following long-established procedure, brought it to the police.
Events launched into overdrive.
Detectives rushed to the post office and pored through thousands of envelopes at the businesses to which the Finleys had mailed their payments, looking for a match with Ruth’s handwriting. Police also swarmed the drop box located in the located in the lobby of Ruth’s employer, Southwestern Bell. Several Poet letters were recovered from the box.
That same day, detectives — tipped off by a suspicious employee and armed with a waiver from Ruth’s boss, Joe Horvat — searched her office at the phone company. They discovered a book of poetry, a sheet of torn carbon paper with The Poet’s handwriting, and a red bandana, one of The Poet’s trademarks, wrapped in a used yellow Kleenex in Ruth’s desk. Torn pieees of Big Chief tablet paper covered with The Poet’s writing were found in the trash.
On Monday, Sept. 28, the police began the process of obtaining search warrants for the Finleys’ house. Although the police were now certain that Ruth was The Poet, there was still no physical evidence to tie her to the letters. That evidence would be needed if any charges were to be filed.
On Wednesday, Chief LaMunyon and his wife Sharron returned from a police convention in New Orleans to find another Poet letter waiting for Sharron in their mailbox. The letter had been mailed from Southwestern Bell on Friday, one day before police began monitoring the mailbox in the company’s lobby. The lower half of the page was torn.
The next day, microscopic fracture analysis proved that the bottom of the letter perfectly matched a ripped piece of paper found in Ruth’s office trash. Analysis also showed that the stamps on the envelopes retrieved from the businesses where Ruth and Ed had sent their bills came from the same cardboard container as the stamp on The Poet’s recent letter to Ruth.
The investigation was complete. The only remaining question was whether Ed Finley had been involved.
On Thursday, October 1, at 1:15 p.m., Ed came to the fifth floor of City Hall, where he had been told there was another Poet letter to pick up. (The police had always returned The Poet’s letters to the Finleys.) Ed was taken to an office in the special investigations section, where he was met by Captain Hill and Detective Jack Leon, a newcomer to the case. The police hoped Detective Leon’s fresh perspective would bring an element of objectivity to the questioning. Hill and Leon brought Ed to a drab, cramped interview room, where they read him his rights. Ed was puzzled but obliging; in his world, the police were always correct, and if they wanted to read him his rights and question him, he wouldn’t object.
Hill and Leon began the interview by asking Ed to detail his early years: his childhood, his family, his career as an accountant. Ed’s answers were truthful and concise. He was equally plainspoken as Hill and Leon took him step-by-step through the events involving The Poet, beginning with Ed’s stay in the hospital in 1977 and culminating with The Poet’s most recent letter. Hill felt confident that Ed had been wholly unaware of his wife’s activities.
Two hours into the interview, it was time to reveal the truth. “It’s coming down today,” Hill told Ed. “I know who The Poet is.”
Ed was thrilled; he had waited years for this moment. “I hope the hell you do,” he told Hill, a joyful expression on his face. “Let’s go get him.”
“First we want you to look at some pictures.” Hill presented Ed with the color photographs of Ruth mailing four letters from the Finleys’ black Oldsmobile at Eastgate Mall. “One of those is a Poet letter,” he said. “I can verify she has mailed five Poet letters in the last two weeks.”
“You have to be kidding,” Ed said.
“No, I’m not kidding. I wish the hell I was.” Hill told Ed about the materials the police had found in Ruth’s office.
Ed sat silently, stunned by the news.
“The Poet is Ruth,” Hill said, prodding him.
“Oh my God,” Ed answered, his voice nearly a whisper. Nothing in his life had prepared him for a moment like this. What was the proper response? “Oh my God.”
Hill assured Ed that the police weren’t mad at Ruth. They simply wanted to make sure she received the help she so clearly needed. “I’ve hit you with a lot, haven’t I?” Hill asked.
“You certainly have.” Ed’s mind was whirling: The Poet is Ruth? The Poet is Ruth.
“I have to eliminate you,” Hill said, “and the only way I can do that is for you to take a polygraph.”
“That’s fair.” Maybe Ruth had written the letters, Ed was thinking, but what about the kidnapping and the stabbing? What about the men who had called the house?
Hill drove Ed to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation’s headquarters on East Third Street for a lie detector test. Ed’s only request was to stop at a gas station along the way to buy cigarettes.
The test lasted nearly an hour. Ed, as Hill expected, easily passed.
With the polygraph complete, a group of detectives, accompanied by Ed, converged on the Finleys’ house. They discovered a string of items tied to The Poet: a book of poems titled Maniac and Other Poems, pencils, pens, letters, carbon paper, a ruler guide, a writing tablet, and pieces of red bandana. Ed’s shock was tempered with relief: if Ruth was The Poet, if no crazed stalker was out to harm her, then at least she was safe.
At 5 p.m. that afternoon, Lt. Drowatzky greeted Ruth in the lobby of Southwestern Bell. He asked if she would come to the station to examine mug shots, a ritual she had performed many times in the past. As always, Ruth readily agreed. Drowatzky delivered her to the same room where Ed had been questioned just hours before. Hill and Leon were waiting.
Hill, his tone affable, began by explaining to Ruth her legal rights, and then, as he had with Ed, asking her to walk him through her life, from her childhood up through the events of The Poet case. Although Ruth, like Ed, didn’t understand why Hill had recited her rights or why he wanted her to rehash such familiar material, she immediately obliged.
“Ruth,” Hill interrupted, as she described The Poet’s activities, “either you or Ed could have done every one of these things.”
“We’ve discussed that,” Ruth said mildly. “We’ve said, ‘You know, they probably suspect one of us.”
After Ruth finished her narrative, Hill decided to change tack. Up until this point he had played the friendly, helpful questioner. Now he placed a pile of Poet letters on the table. “Have you ever written any of these?” he asked Ruth. She said she had not.
“What if I called you a liar?” Hill said coldly. “Because I got evidence that shows you have.” His expression was grim.
“Mike!” Ruth cried, shocked by his change in attitude.
Hill pressed on. “Now do you want to keep playing your game? You got a problem, lady.”
“When did I mail those letters?” Ruth asked plaintively.
Hill showed her the surveillance photo. Ruth, astounded, said nothing. I’m The Poet? she thought. Ruth’s body sagged and a vacant look washed over her face. An image appeared in her mind: she was sitting in her basement writing a letter. The image was only a fragment, not a full memory. She wasn’t sure it was real.
Hill softened. He listed the items police had recovered from her office wastebasket. “Ruthie, why?” he pleaded. “It’s time, it’s time to tell me why. I’m not mad at you, Ruth; I want to know why you are doing this.”
“No….” Ruth replied, her voice barely audible.
“Do you need some help?”
“Yes.” Ruth’s mind was racing, but her thoughts seemed out of reach. Occasionally a lucid image surged into view; the rest was confusion. Had she known she was The Poet? Hill seemed so confident — surely he wouldn’t lie to her. Ruth had a flash of a red bandana in her hands.
Hill pressed on. “Why did you make up a story about the abduction? Sweetheart, why did you do it?”
“I don’t know,” Ruth answered, her eyes wet.
“Why did you stab yourself?”
“I don’t know.”
Hill asked about the assault in Fort Scott when she was sixteen years old, when a man had branded her legs. Had she made that up, too?
Her tears now flowing, Ruth insisted that attack had been real.
Hill assured Ruth that she wasn’t a criminal. “I’m not mad at you,” he said. “I just want an explanation.”
“I don’t have one,” she said.
As Hill continued his questioning, Ruth admitted she had written The Poet’s letters, she’d placed the butcher knife in her office’s lobby phone booth, she’d left the ice pick and urine and feces on her porch, she’d siphoned gas for Molotov cocktails from her car. She said that on the day of her supposed abduction she’d taken a bus to Twin Lakes, then walked to the river to leave her sweater and shoes for the police to discover.
But even as she was recounting these details, Ruth wasn’t sure they were real. She was just telling Hill the most logical possibilities. She had no memory of the acts she was describing. But Hill was angry, and Ruth was terrified of anger. She wanted to please him. The only thing she knew for sure was that she had done horrible things, because Hill was telling her so.
Ruth said she stabbed herself in her car that summer night at Towne East Mall.
“Did you mean to hurt yourself as bad as you did?” Hill asked.
“I don’t know.” She also didn’t know what was going through her mind when she wrote The Poet letters, and she didn’t know how long it took her to write them. The only memories she had felt like they belonged to someone else.
“Ruth, there’s no hard feelings between you and me,” Hill said.
“There should be.”
Ruth shook her head when Hill asked if she had ever intended to hurt anybody. She said Ed never knew. “There is not a nicer person anywhere than he is,” she insisted. “I can never face him again.”
“How do you feel, Ruth?” Hill asked, reaching over to lift her head so she would look at him.
“I wish I was dead.”
Hill dropped her head so abruptly that it banged the table. “Ruth, right now the world has come to an end, but it hasn’t,” he said. “Do you think you need to see a doctor now?”
“I am sure I do,” Ruth said, her voice breaking. “I must be crazy.”
“You are just ill,” Hill said. “You only have a disease, just like any other disease in the body.”
Hill briefly left the room. When he returned, he was accompanied by Dr. Schrag, the psychologist who two years earlier had hypnotized Ruth. As Schrag entered the room, Ruth dropped her head.
“Hi, gal, would you look at me?” Schrag asked. “What would you like to do now?”
Ruth’s voice was flat: “Go home. Just die.”
“My feeling is that if you let someone help, in a few months you will be back at work and you will live a very normal happy life,” Schrag told her.
Ruth was silent. Then she said she wished Schrag knew the good side of her, because she was really a good person. Schrag promised her he knew that.
“I tried to figure out what was wrong,” Ruth said. “But I couldn’t stop it.”
At 9 p.m. that night, Ruth was put in a squad car, with Ed nestled beside her. She was whisked to St. Joseph’s Hospital and placed under 24-hour-a-day psychiatric watch.
Meanwhile Wichita authorities were deciding whether to press charges. The case of The Poet had cost the police department the enormous sum of $370,000, and while some detectives were sympathetic to Ruth’s psychological struggles, others — Chief LaMunyon prime among them — thought she was a criminal, and wanted to punish her. But after reviewing Ruth’s psychological report, the Sedgwick County district attorney announced he would not be pursuing criminal prosecution, because her actions as The Poet were “not malicious.”
On Friday, October 26, 1981, Ruth gave her first public statement since confessing to the police. “I think I may have died and gone to hell,” she said. “I think I’m coming back, though.” Seven days later, Ruth entered twice-a-week therapy with Dr. Andrew T. Pickens, a 38-year-old graduate of St. Louis University medical school who was an ardent practitioner of psychoanalysis. Dr. Pickens, who sported an enormous black mustache, viewed the role of the psychiatrist as akin to that of a detective; both searched for clues, for hidden pieces of a puzzle, which would solve a larger mystery, whether psychological or criminal.
Under Dr. Pickens’ care, Ruth began the painful, laborious process of excavating her Depression-era childhood on a farm in rural Richards, Missouri. As part of her therapy, Ruth composed lengthy poems, which she initially found a more comfortable vehicle for expressing her emotions than speaking about them face-to-face. At first Ruth told Dr. Pickens that her childhood had been impoverished but normal, and yet the poems she wrote about those years were suffused with images of violence. She kept having visions of a red bandana, which for unknown reasons filled her with revulsion.
After three months of repeated attempts Ruth and Dr. Pickens uncovered the source of Ruth’s terror: When she was a girl, an adult neighbor and family friend had used a red bandana to tie her up. Later he took her to his barn and shoved the bandana in her mouth as he sexually abused her.
The neighbor continued abusing her for almost a year, producing in Ruth enormous feelings of guilt. Her taskmaster parents punished her whenever she ran away or sobbed during the man’s visits to the farm. Ruth grew convinced the abuse was her fault; she was a “bad girl,” evil at heart, and she deserved it. The man threatened to kill her if she told anyone about their “secret.”
During the assaults, Ruth dealt with her horror by, as she put it, “floating off to heaven.” She could see what was happening to the girl down below, but “somehow it wasn’t so bad if it wasn’t me. I was just watching it.” This is a common occurrence among victims of childhood trauma, known clinically as dissociative disorder. Sufferers experience a disconnect between their identity, consciousness, actions, and surroundings. This dissociative state allows them to escape reality, to hold the traumatic experiences at bay.
Ruth had kept the memories of her childhood sexual abuse buried for forty-three years, until, Dr. Pickens believed, the stress of Ed’s hospitalization for a possible heart attack and the background specter of the BTK Strangler had forced her repressed trauma to the surface. (The branding attack in Fort Scott, Ruth always maintained, had been real as well.) Ruth had dealt with the emotional deluge by creating another self, The Poet. It wasn’t split personality disorder — The Poet was not a fully developed personality, nor an entirely separate identity — but an alternate consciousness, one Ruth had no memory or awareness of when in her regular conscious mind.
Ruth spent the next seven years in intensive therapy with Dr. Pickens, slowly working through the torment of her childhood. During these raw, emotionally devastating years, Ed stuck fiercely by her, as did her children and siblings. Though Ruth lost some friends, many others expressed only sympathy for her suffering. (Chief LaMunyon, however, remained doubtful: “I think she’s lying,” he said. “She knew everything she was doing. Maybe something happened in her childhood, but not what she says.”) Eventually Ruth felt healed enough to allow her story to be told by a local news station, hoping it would help other survivors.
Her hope was well placed: The outpouring from viewers was overwhelmingly positive, erasing for Ruth the lingering disgrace she felt for her actions as The Poet. She had, with prodigious effort, and after years of struggle, triumphed over her abuse and achieved the stability she was seeking. Her story had a happy ending. She never wrote poetry again.
Author’s Note: GENE STONE served as a source for this story. For more, read Little Girl Fly Away by author and consultant, Gene Stone.
COREY MEAD is the author of The Lost Pilots, Angelic Music, and War Play. He is an Associate Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY.
For all rights inquiries email here. | https://medium.com/truly-adventurous/the-poet-526595afdde8 | ['Corey Mead'] | 2021-08-19 01:17:01.178000+00:00 | ['Crime', 'Horror', 'Suspense', 'True Crime', 'Nonfiction'] |
5 Reasons Why Meetings Are Killing Your Company | Business Productivity
5 Reasons Why Meetings Are Killing Your Productivity and 5 Actionable Tips to Prevent It
Meetings should be the last resort, not the first option.
Photo by Virginio Sanches on Pexels
Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, and Jeff Bezos know it: Meetings are a waste of time and kill productivity.
In my ten years of professional career, most meetings felt like a frustrating waste of valuable time. Maybe 6 out of 10 sessions. Maybe even more.
You should reduce meetings to the absolute minimum. They are the last resort, not the first option.
Here is why Musk, Cuban, and Bezos are right.
It all starts with a poor invitation.
Most invitations are useless and don’t provide you with any helpful information. They lack an informative headline, and you don’t get a real idea of what the meeting is about. Most senders neither communicate a clear goal nor the critical questions that will be discussed. That leaves you blank. You can’t prepare properly.
Actionable tip: If you can’t avoid setting a meeting, clearly state in the headline what the topic is. State the goal and the questions you want to discuss so that people can prepare.
Or try “The Jeff Bezos”: Hand out a detailed summary of the topic upfront so everyone is on the same page when the meeting starts, and you can dive right into a purposeful conversation.
Immediate responses increase the odds of poor decision making.
Many meetings are decision-orientated. It’s an ongoing back and forth; different viewpoints are communicated and evaluated.
Your colleagues expect you to give immediate responses based on the information you just heard, and you had no time to think it through properly. That, in turn, leads to rushed judgment and, therefore, poor decision making. Rushing makes conversations always worse.
Besides, not all people that are valuable for a decision can make it to an appointment. It increases the odds of a poor decision because necessary expertise or input might be missing.
Actionable tip: Instead of setting a meeting, make all key players write down their opinion and share them with everyone. That allows people to soak in new information and think it through before responding. You can filter your thoughts. Often, what’s left afterward is worth saying it.
Also, speaking helps everyone in the room. But writing helps everyone.
Meetings interrupt flow states and kill productivity.
Meetings in a company are like taking leave: there is never really a good time for it. And an essential ingredient for good communication is saying the right things at the right time in the right way with the fewest side effects.
But mostly, you can’t say the right things at the right time in the right way when you have to do it in a meeting that doesn’t fit into your schedule.
You have to delay tasks to participate. You are interrupted from flow states where your productivity peaks. Most employees’ schedules read like Swiss cheese: there are meetings everywhere with only some holes in it, where you have to squeeze in tasks hastily that actually need your undivided attention for hours.
Taking 3 or 4 hours to dig into a task and get into a flow state to get something done? Your schedule won’t allow it.
Actionable tip: Do not set or participate in a meeting if you can write down what you have to say. Writing is independent of schedule. You can do it when you have the time for it without being pulled away from your current task.
Chat dissolves quickly and leaves room for misinterpretation compared to the written word.
A chat with colleagues dissolves quickly into thin air and can’t reflect all relevant information. The right communication in the wrong place or way might as well not exist at all.
Once Chinese whispers about what you said or didn’t say start, it’s hard to stop false information. Poor verbal communication creates more work because you need to invest time in cleaning the mess up, get facts right, or debrief people about what was discussed.
If your words can be perceived in different ways, rest assured, they will be. And often, it happens in the way which does the most harm.
The written word is more precise, more thoughtful, and leaves less room for interpretation.
Actionable tip: If it’s important, write it down.
Meetings demotivate employees.
Did you ever sit in a meeting, fighting to keep your eyes open, frustration growing because it feels like a complete waste of time? I did. More often than not, to be honest.
Meetings are rarely productive, but instead, they keep you from getting stuff done. You tend to stick around, even if you don’t have to say anything at all or already made your points. It leads to even more frustration. You feel it’s rude to leave.
Let’s see what Elon Musk told his Tesla employees about it:
“Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave; it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.”
Actionable tip: Leave the meeting the moment you can’t add any more value, and it can’t provide you with any.
Final Thoughts.
Too many meetings pave the way for poor decision making through rash judgment. They kill productivity, frustrate employees, keep everyone from getting things done, and foster miscommunication.
Almost anything is better written down and handed to all relevant players than sitting in a room full of unprepared people. Especially important information and decisions need time to be processed. This process can’t happen in a meeting where people expect an immediate response.
Does that mean there shouldn’t be meetings at all?
No. Sometimes it is inevitable to get the right people into a room together. But use meetings rarely, and if you do, make sure they are efficient.
Most of the time, a well thought through e-mail can accomplish things that all the meetings in the world couldn’t. | https://medium.com/live-your-life-on-purpose/5-reasons-why-meetings-are-killing-your-productivity-and-5-actionable-tips-to-prevent-it-af35c04d3a91 | ['Robin Noethen'] | 2020-11-15 15:02:56.918000+00:00 | ['Business', 'Business Strategy', 'Productivity', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Corporate Culture'] |
Complete Guide to Terraform: News, Updates, Tips | Photo by Ramón Salinero on Unsplash
From Terraform to DevOps: A Modern Revolution
Before we can even begin to dive into Terraform best practices, we need to take a step back and look at the modern-day revolution that is DevOps. A long, long time ago (actually, more like 10 years ago), it was once an IT tradition to have two separate teams in an organization: the development and operations teams. The development team was tasked with handling the code and design, as well as making sure the right product was deployed with functional code. On the other side of the office was the operations team, who were exclusively tasked with checking the operation of the code, its performance, and creating bug reports to fix errors. As with many silos, unnecessary workflows were created, with one team unnecessarily pushing code to the other due to communication gaps. Eventually, a new process was created: DevOps.
DevOps is a process that merges the two teams, their practices, and tools, ensuring that an organization may deliver the product at a rapid pace without compromising on the quality of the product.
Over the years, this simple process has improved and revolutionized the complete development process of a product. While initially created to remove the communication differences between the two teams, it has now transformed into a very widely used, continuous concept right from planning the product, all the way to production and then for change releases.
It’s key to remember that DevOps is about people, process, and how those operational processes can create value for developers. Another key takeaway: teams lose their most precious resource, time, when DevOps isn’t implemented or is implemented badly.
While DevOps isn’t only a set of tools, there are some helpful tools when it comes to DevOps:
Git: A developer’s best friend to track source code and changes Docker: Looking to build a containerized app? Here’s your answer. Selenium: Browser automation for testing Jenkin: Open-source automation for Continuous Integration Ansible: Automate IT and infrastructure Puppet: Open-source configuration management
These tools create the foundation for the conversation.
Terraform Best Practices: DevOps or Tools?
Should you embrace DevOps or Terraform first? Whenever such a question comes up in an engineer’s mind or in an organization, it is always important to remember that Terraform is just a tool, while DevOps is a complete process that involves skilled people. If you as an engineer or as an organization do not understand and accept DevOps first, irrespective of which tool you use, the chances of failing are higher. Therefore, when you plan to move towards DevOps as your development process, you should understand and embrace the process first and then the tool that you will be using. For a complete breakdown of Terraform best practices, check out our recent blog post “5 Pieces of Advice: Terraform Best Practices” to go more in-depth.
Terraform Tutorial Basics Pt 1: What is it?
Infrastructure as Code or IaC is the management of your infrastructure in a descriptive model, where the same source code generates the same binary. IaC enables the fact that your infrastructure is governed by the same rules as the rest of your code. This means that instead of a configuration that is managed manually, the operational infrastructure such as version control, continuous monitoring, etc., are applied to your code which governs the management of your infrastructure. As an important point in this Terraform tutorial: code is written to define the state of the new machine and does not have to be set up by your system admins.
The main advantages that IaC offers can be summarized as:
1. Efficient and Robust SDLC: The infrastructure can be scripted once and used any number of times without wasting additional time and effort on manual configurations every time. This allows developers to focus more on application development.
2. Enhanced Security: Since the complete architecture gets provisioned as code, the deployment remains constant and no additional resources have to be deployed for change approvals or review.
3. Faster speed with consistency: IaC enables the omission of manual process and hence, the wait time for the admin or operations team to set up and manage infrastructure manually gets eliminated completely. The consistency is never lost throughout the process, as any changes can be applied globally without having to worry about the system configuration changes.
4. Cost Efficient: We can have a very precise environment for our development and testing whenever we need it, and not pay for it when it is not in use. IaC also ensures the reduction in repetitive work for the engineers and also helps in reducing the cloud computation costs by taking down the unused resources and environments.
5. Greater experience for customers: By deploying infrastructure as code, we are ensuring that the same rules and versioning as the code are applied to infrastructure as well. This reduces any errors or system downtime that could occur due to a change in system configurations.
Check out Infrastructure as Code: DevOps done right for more information.
Terraform is an open-source tool that is specifically dedicated to creating, modifying, and even deleting infrastructure on cloud, focusing on “Infrastructure as Code.” It was first released in July 2014 by a Hashicorp and allowed for users who attempt to build their infrastructure to employ a declarative language known as HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), as well as JSON. It was written in “ GO “ language and can work on most of the major operating systems such as Linux, Windows, macOS, Solaris, and so on. Over the past few years, many Terraform best practices have started to spring up from frequent users. We encourage you to explore those and keep your eyes open to any helpful resources.
HashiCorp is a pioneer in DevOps and Infrastructure as Code. They have created process improvements and revolutionized the DevOps space in highly impactful ways. The HashiCorp “boom” that is spoken about in DevOps circles didn’t happen overnight — it was 10 years in the making.
Terraform Tutorial Basics Part 2: Getting Started
1. Selecting a cloud provider
Selecting a cloud provider can change your entire infrastructure outlook. While most Terraform tutorial guides breeze past this decision, we believe that this conversation will frame your entire experience, and is therefore worth a deeper dive.
Cloud is now the backbone of an IT environment and over the years, has been helping every IT company, whether small or big, in transforming their capabilities and offering various advantages over conventional setups. One of many Terraform best practices is to first select a cloud service provider. Let’s look at a few of the major advantages that cloud service providers provide:
-Business efficiency
-Cost-benefits
-Recovery
-Security
-Reliability
-Storage capacity
-Automatic integration and updates
-Pay-per-Use
With many other benefits, selecting a cloud provider for your infrastructure is usually the right choice before you define your infrastructure configuration.
2) Terraform Commands
Once you’ve familiarized yourself with which cloud provider you’d like to choose, it’s important to learn commands as the next step in your Terraform tutorial. While many tutorials will provide you with a tedious list of commands that you may not need at first, here’s a simplified list of the top 5 commands you’re likely to use when deploying infrastructure. Visit our Terraform Tutorial Guide if you’re looking for a more in-depth explanation of each command.
3) Terraform Configuration
Any Terraform tutorial will also guide you through the configuration process. Modules create configuration files. A module is a group of resources and relationships defined between those resources (such as virtual networks or DNS records). Within a configuration file, you can find a group of modules, including a root module, where the execution process begins.
Before we dive into syntax, we want to share some Terraform best practices with you: watch syntax rules closely. Because Terraform is syntax-sensitive, it’s important to get your syntax correct early on, to avoid future problems. Syntax consists of blocks, arguments, and expressions. A block is a container that holds onto the configuration of an object or resources. Within a block, basic statements known as arguments occur. Lastly, expressions are values which you may find under arguments or see as a subsection of other expressions.
4) Terraform Advantages
Terraform has continued to revolutionize DevOps with its simple and extremely efficient ways of managing infrastructure. The simple fact that Terraform isn’t restricted to any particular cloud service provider makes it a handier tool when compared to others. This also means that it’s easier to implement Terraform best practices when you aren’t restricted to a single cloud service provider.
Some other major advantages include:
Declarative Code: Unlike other infrastructure provisioning tools, it is not a procedural tool, so there aren’t any step-by-step procedures to reach a desired state. A Terraform best practice that is built into the tool itself is to declare and inform the tool of the changes that need to be done to the current state of the server.
Documentation: The declarative language is simple enough to read and figure out the current configuration through documentation.
Vast Handling: It can not only be used as an Infrastructure as a Service, but can also be used as a Platform as a Service. It can also be used for storing variables such as tokens and encrypted credentials in “Terraform Registry.”
Client-Only Architecture: There is no need for additional security checks and having multiple configuration management servers. It conveniently uses the cloud provider’s API for provisioning the infrastructure.
Immutable: Updates to the current configuration, are recorded as a new configuration and removes the previous configuration. This avoids bugs and security threats related to configuration.
Everything is controlled on an easy-to-use command-line interface with simple commands. If you’re enjoying this Terraform tutorial and are interested in a complete list of commands, check out here.
5) Other Resources
When it comes to being a practitioner, it is always good to keep in mind a set of Terraform best practices that you may follow. If you’d like to discuss these practices or need any support, you can join our Slack community to meet other DevOps professionals and continue the conversation.
2020 Outlook: Challenges for Small and Medium Businesses
Though the usage and growth of IaC have been exponential, it is still a concept that is being figured out by many organizations on how and where it fits into their DevOps process. As a small and medium business, you may watch every Terraform tutorial on earth and still fall short of your goals. The major challenges that come up with Infrastructure as Code are:
1. Dependence on Coding: Infrastructure in such cases is highly dependent on the developer’s coding skills and their knowledge in languages such as JSON, HCL, YAML, etc., which are commonly used for IaC. This means that such efficient programming resources need to be available in the organization. This also means that simply watching or reading a basic Terraform tutorial might be difficult for those who don’t code. While Terraform documentation is clear, there’s still room for improvement to better fit the needs of small and medium-sized businesses.
2. Monitoring: As an organization, additional and efficient tools will have to be dedicated to tracking the provisioning of resources. The major tracking required here would be: “who” provisioned the resource, “what” was provisioned, and “how” much does it cost to have the resource.
3. Human Error: Though most of the process is automated, we still have humans writing the parent or source code. This leads to the possibility of minor human errors such as duplication. There is no Terraform tutorial that will eliminate human error from the equation. As a side note, we also have to make sure that the changes to the configuration have no outside interference.
While we can’t eliminate the fallibility of mankind, we can try to make Terraform easier to use for small and medium businesses, through an open-source solution that puts the power back in the hands of you, the developer. You can use our CLI to create a custom HCL file that fits your exact specifications.
We encourage you to try our CLI and provide us with feedback as we continue to grow. Through our Slack community, we’re fostering a conversation around Terraform best practices, as well as providing expert resources and opinions at your fingertips. Join our Slack community to connect with other DevOps professionals and continue the conversation. | https://medium.com/swlh/complete-guide-to-terraform-news-updates-tips-85e3b9a03ffd | ['Raphael Socher'] | 2020-10-27 22:05:38.984000+00:00 | ['Infrastructure As Code', 'Terraform', 'DevOps'] |
Is Belle Delphine’s OnlyFans Worth It? | I have extremely particular porn tastes, so it’s a very exciting day when I discover a performer or producer whose work I can fall in love with.
The first time I paid to see a woman take her clothes off, it was Cherry Crush.
Her videos had all the aesthetic qualities I was looking for. Mainly, a cute, sweet, playful girl with colorful hair having sex in a room full of bright, soft, fuzzy things.
I looked for more porn that had a similar vibe, and I was surprised by how rare it was. I haven’t been able to find anyone else who even comes close to nailing that look the way she does.
That’s why I was so excited when Belle Delphine announced that she started an OnlyFans. If anyone could bring that much cuteness to porn, it would be her.
I don’t really know much about her. She’s known for her cute cosplay Instagram feed and selling her bath water to the kinds of people who actually mean it when they say “She’s so hot I would drink her bath water.”
But to me, she’s just super attractive. I’m not a gamer at all, but I find it hard to resist the gamer girl look. I was kind of a proto e-girl in high school, mixing up punky emo clothes with bright splashes of color — like the pink pants I loved to wear with just about everything and the rainbow dress I wore to prom. I’m still head over heels for that style, but now I mostly admire it in other women.
I couldn’t wait to see her adult content — until I saw the price tag.
It costs $35 a month to access Belle’s OnlyFans — or about $47 for me, since I’d be paying in Canadian money.
That’s a lot more than I would normally pay for an OnlyFans subscription, especially without knowing what kind of content I’d be getting.
I couldn’t see myself putting down that much money when I can see plenty of extremely cute girls doing extremely explicit things for a portion of the cost.
But the music video she released as an announcement lured me in. The video itself didn’t do much for me. I mostly thought it was ridiculous. Some things were promising, though. It was very colorful, super playful, and it gave a clear view of her jiggling butt.
(youtube.com)
If a subscription gave me access to porn versions of this (minus the song itself please), I wanted in.
Plus, for that much money, there must be loads of great stuff awaiting me.
So, I ponied up the money and got access.
And I already have a feeling I won’t be renewing my subscription to her page.
What $35 Gets You
There are currently no videos on Belle’s account, only posts and photos. That much you can see before signing up, so I was expecting it.
The posts themselves aren’t much. There have been a couple of brief announcements and the rest are just minimal text to accompany the images she’s posting. They’re flirty and cute and they make the photo sets a little more fun.
But the main attraction, obviously, are the photos themselves. And that’s, sadly, where it just didn’t click for me.
A few of her photosets show her playing with food. If there’s a theme to her OnlyFans so far, that would be it.
The one that I feel I should comment on first is the photoshoot she did wearing a bikini in a bathtub filled with Doritos while playing with a bottle of Mountain Dew.
A girl in a tub filled with Doritos strikes me more as a novelty than a turn-on. And it looks super uncomfortable. But hey, all the love to her for doing something strangely original.
If I was a gamer, maybe this would hit me right in the feels because Doritos and Mountain Dew might have some emotional association for me. But, nah.
Another photo set has her playing with broccoli. She’s cute as always in it, decked out in a green skirt, striped green t-shirt, frog ears, and thigh-high socks. But it was an odd theme. I eat broccoli very regularly but never once have I thought of it as a sexy veggie.
In some shots, the broccoli is just set dressing and it’s easy to ignore it. The rest of the time, she uses them to cover up the interesting bits and that made me wish she was shooting without them.
I like watching girls get messy and playing with food. It looks like a lot of fun and can be kind of hot. But I only find it enjoyable when it’s sploshy — wet, sticky, slick.
When Belle covers herself in paint for her music video, that really works. It looks like it would feel really cool, and that you could enjoy running your hands all over the slicked up skin.
When she’s sitting on a bunch of pointy chips, though, it doesn’t inspire the same kind of vicarious tactile fun and it’s not as visually appealing to me. Looking through those photos, I mostly felt bad for her ass being attacked by pointy chip corners.
That brings me to the third of her food-based photo sets. In this one, she’s wearing a blue and white t-shirt with matching shorts, cat ears, and those thigh-highs make another highly welcome appearance. This time, she’s sitting in bed with three jugs of milk.
It’s unfortunately not very vegan, but it does have the potential to get silly, messy, and wet. Except it doesn’t. The first clue is that she’s playing with the jugs on a bed with a comforter, not a tarp. She hams it up with the jugs, holds them up, covers up strategically with them, but never even unscrews the cap.
So, it’s food play, but it’s really mild. None of it even touches her skin, so it’s more suggestive than anything.
Other photos have her in underwear, lingerie, or dressed in something skimpy.
But what I really want to talk about are the nude photos. Because, let’s be honest, that’s why most of the people subscribing put down some cold, hard cash to see.
In some shots, Belle pulls her shirt up to reveal her breasts. In others, she’ll pose in ways that display her pussy. Occasionally, she’ll show her ass in all its cuteness.
At least, that’s what she comes close to doing.
Her shots are censored.
These shots are what might have made the heavy subscription cost pay off. It’s not cheap to get in the door, but if you get to see some full frontal nudity when you get in it might be worth the price of admission.
Instead, it’s like paying for a peep show where no one gets undressed.
The little white hearts superimposed on her nipples and the censor bars blocking the sight of her pussy is what disappointed me the most about Belle’s OnlyFans account.
The lack of uncensored nudity is actually one of my gripes with OnlyFans accounts in general. I really appreciate when creators are extremely clear about what you’ll get in their account descriptions. If the nudity is censored, that should be spelled out up front.
I know OnlyFans is not technically a porn platform and it’s not just for people stripping bare. But that’s what you usually expect when someone announces they started one. And I’m sure that’s exactly what everyone expected when Belle announced it by jiggling her paint-covered ass on YouTube.
Instead of a description of what she’ll post, though, Belle just gives links to her social media and her Amazon wishlist.
Is It Worth It?
There’s one aspect of her OnlyFans I still can’t speak to. It’s possible that one of the big perks is getting direct access to Belle herself. Maybe she’s responsive to private messages from her subscribers.
I have no clue because I didn’t try sending her one. I imagine if I did, I’d be drowned out by the seventeen thousand other fans she has vying for her attention there.
Plus, I don’t really roll like that. I’m not the type to reach out to content creators who make me thirsty. I’m a shy girl and I’m just here to see some tits and ass. And sadly, there was very little of that.
There’s still a lot to love about everything she’s released so far. She’s undeniably cute. Her ass is gorgeous, even though you don’t get to see it revealed in its fullest glory. I could spend a lot of time staring at her thighs. And her aesthetic choices are great. She’s got the perky, bright content that I’m completely here for.
And you do get photos that are exclusive. They’re not naughty enough to need to be slammed behind a paywall — most of it could be posted to Instagram without getting her shadowbanned. But anyone who can’t get enough of Belle dressing up and being cute might enjoy their subscription quite a bit.
And her account is still new, so it might get better. She’s also been posting multiple times a day. If she keeps that up, the sheer quantity of content might make it worthwhile.
So, is it worth it?
For me, no. When I pay for something naughty, I prefer it to be dirty. And when I pay $35 to access one girl’s content, I want it very dirty.
But it’s not a total loss. Belle is nothing if not creative, and I will really enjoy scrolling through her photoshoots all month.
If you’re a really big fan of hers and you don’t mind the nudity being partial and the food play being very dry, this could be a good way to ogle at an adorable lady for a few minutes a day. Which isn’t a bad use of your time.
But if you want something that’s more than just a tease, you’ll need to look for some other cute OnlyFans girls. The good news is, there are plenty of them who will do a lot of naughty stuff, and won’t even cover up their nipples when they do. | https://medium.com/love-emma/is-belle-delphines-onlyfans-worth-it-911c99940e3f | ['Emma Austin'] | 2020-06-27 11:21:38.178000+00:00 | ['Sex', 'Pornography', 'Life', 'Review', 'Social Media'] |
The jar | Tick tock. Tick tock. William looks at the clock. He rocks back and forth. He can not bring back the time. He was thinking, why did he do this? Not even he knew truly. He just just guessed the anger inside was building up from the first time he was called a loser. He also kind of thought that he wasn’t worthy of life after the things in his disturbing jar but he couldn’t help it. He had to keep them. He looked down and realised it was his time to go.
Beeep. Beeep. Beeep. His alarm clock was going off. He woke up and got dressed. It’s time for him to go to the place that makes him the most angriest. School. The place where no one likes him. As he leaves the house darkness emerges and it starts to rain. He knows it’s going to be one of the worst days ever. As he arrives at school he hears the words ‘loser’,’pale ghost’ and ‘neek’. He sits on the table in the corner plotting his revenge. Rachel walks up to him and says “what are you doing later? Can I come over?” He tells her sure. He feels as if he may have finally found a friend. Rachel had long, lucious brown hair and pretty brown eyes. She was new here and he thought she didn’t know that he was a loser. They spent the rest of the day together. They even had lunch together. For some reason people laughed at them together.
At three o’clock they left school together. It was almost like they knew each other for years. When they arrived they went straight to his room. He went to get some snacks and then he heard, AAAAAHHHHH. He returned straight away. She found it. The jar that if ever was found he would be done for. The items inside were just so disturbing. This is one of the worst things anyone could have seen. He knew exactly what to do. BANG. She was conscious but not really present. Her body on the cold floor of his basement. He looked at the clock two hours till his parents returned. He knew he had to rush. He grabbed her. Then he taped her to a table. He began cutting. He started on her arm. She screamed for a little bit, but then turned pale. The dark red blood was everywhere. THUD. One arm in the bucket. THUD. Another arm in the bucket. THUD. A foot. THUD. Another foot. THUD. THUD. Two calfs. THUD. A thigh. THUD. Another thigh. All that was left was the trunk of her body and her pale lifeless head. He got a spoon and scooped out her eyes and plopped them in a jar. He put his foot on the sturdy chair that was against the wall, then held tightly onto her hair, pushed down on her shoulder and pulled. Pop. He ripped her head off with the help of the gash across her neck. In each bucket William poured hydrofluoric acid, which is extremely corrosive, and waited.
As he was pouring the last of the acid in he heard the door open. It was his parents. “William!” they screamed. BANG. BANG. William had just picked up his fathers armalite AR-15 and shot them in cold blood. He felt no empathy. He realised he had some more cleaning to do. There were blood splatters all over the wall. His parents’ faces were now deformed from the bullets but the eyes were untouched. He then scooped out their eyeballs and plopped them into the same jar and then shut it. He then poured Rachels liquid body down the bath. After that he returned back to the bath with his parents limp bodies and placed them in the bath. He then corroded their bodies as well and let them go down the drain. Now it was time for him to tackle the mess in the basement. He got down on his knees and started scrubbing. After hours and hours he had finished cleaning everything, even the walls. He then had to get out of his bloody clothes. He opened the basement door. It was bright out. He looked at the clock and it was almost time for school. He started to rush. He didn’t want anyone suspicious about why he was late to school. He had a hot shower and scrubbed so hard that his arms turned red. He had to get all that dried blood off. He put on some fresh clothes and headed off to school.
It was around ten fifteen in the morning when two police officers came into Williams English lesson and took him out. They sat him in a room and asked him questions about Rachel. They asked him “Where did you go”,”Was anyone else there”,”What happened” and “When did it happen”. He responded “We only went to my house”,”No one else was there”,”We just had some snacks and told me that she had to go home soon” and “It was around three to four because we went straight to my house after school”. They then let him go. He knew they were on to him when they told him that he was the last one to see her. He ran straight home.
Gun to his head, soaking with tears, questioning his existence. All he could hear was tick tock, tick tock. He looks at the clock. Rocking back and forth. He was thinking, why did he do this? Not even he knew truly. He just just guessed the anger inside was building up from the first time he was called a loser. He also kind of thought that he wasn’t worthy of life after the things in his disturbing jar but he couldn’t help it. He had to keep them. He looked down and realised it was his time to go. He then got a match and lit the ethanol trail. BANG. | https://medium.com/@epiczebra18/the-jar-6eab3903076d | ['Shrek ._.'] | 2020-12-26 12:25:58.296000+00:00 | ['Murder', 'Stories', 'Crime Fiction'] |
Testing App Startup Performance | Testing App Startup Performance
Testing launch performance can be tricky, but it doesn’t have to be
Shell Command for Testing Startup
I wrote this article to explain more about performance, startup testing, and the reasons behind the pieces I used for testing startup. But if you just want something quick here it is:
Lock the clocks if possible (see far below) Run this on the command-line (while your device is connected):
$ for i in `seq 1 100`
> do
> adb shell am force-stop com.android.samples.mytest
> sleep 1
> adb shell am start-activity -W -n com.android.samples.mytest/.MainActivity | grep "TotalTime" | cut -d ' ' -f 2
> done
The command above loops 100 times, launching an app, outputting the startup duration, and killing the process to get ready to do it all again.
Testing startup performance is… not obvious
I needed to test the startup performance for an app recently (while playing around with the Startup library to see how that affected things — more about that in a future article). And I discovered, like I have on previous strolls down this path, that testing startup performance is… not obvious.
If you’re testing a piece of runtime code, there are various ways to go about it, from the trivial “write a tight loop and calculate the delta in System.currentTimeMillis() ” to something more sophisticated and useful, like the facilities provided by the AndroidX benchmark library.
But much of the process of application startup happens, by definition, before the system gets around to calling your code. So how do you figure out how long it took to get there?
I poked around in logcat, looked at some low-level APIs, and asked some of the engineers on the platform team, and found a few things to help. Better yet, I was able to use facilities in the adb shell tool to completely automate my testing and output information in a way that made it easy to pop the results into a spreadsheet and analyze them.
I’ll describe the pieces I used that went into the command above, to give you just 1–2 simple steps you can use if you need to test startup performance.
ActivityTaskManager startup log
As I wrote before in an earlier (and unfortunately outdated and incorrect) blog, there’s a handy log that the system has been issuing since the KitKat release. Whenever an activity starts, you’ll see something like this in the logcat output:
ActivityTaskManager: Displayed com.android.samples.mytest/.MainActivity: +1s380ms
This duration (1,380ms in this example) represents the time that it took from launching the app to the time when the system consider it “launched,” which includes drawing the first frame (hence “Displayed”).
This Displayed duration does not necessarily include everything your app needs to do before it’s ready to go. You can supply that extra information to the system by calling Activity.reportFullyDrawn() whenever your app determines it’s completely done loading and initializing. If/when you call that optional method, the system issues another log with that timestamp and duration:
2020-11-18 15:44:02.171 1279-1336/system_process I/ActivityTaskManager: Fully drawn com.android.samples.mytest/.MainActivity: +2s384ms
I only wanted the Displayed duration, so the built-in log was good enough for my purposes.
Automating startup
Performance testing should always involve running a test many times, to reduce the inherent variability in results; the more runs you do, the more faith you can put in the averaged results. I try to run tests a minimum of ten times, but doing even more is even better. Depending on how variable the results are in your situation, and how small the timings are (since variability would have larger impact on smaller durations), doing many more runs might be necessary.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
- Albert Einstein
Performance testing Corollary:
Insanity is doing the same thing only once and expecting the results to be definitive. - Not Albert Einstein
Tapping on an app icon to launch it many times in a row is… pretty tedious. And doing so in a predictable and consistent way (to avoid introducing variability, like if you happened to launch another app by mistake, or otherwise made the system do extra work throwing off timing results) can be a problem.
So what I really wanted was some way to launch the app from the command line. Then I could run that command to do the same thing over and over, and avoid the variability (and tediousness) of manually launching the app by hand.
adb (Android Debug Bridge, a tool probably familiar to anyone who’s read this far) provides just the thing I needed. More specifically, adb shell provides a command-line interface to launch an app: adb shell am start-activity . The command should also block until the app has finished launching, so we’ll use the -W argument as well (this is necessary for the next step, where we’ll tack on a follow-up command to kill the app post-launch). Here’s the complete launch command:
$ adb shell am start-activity -W -n com.android.samples.mytest/.MainActivity
The last argument is the package+component information for your app. You can see that they are the same here as in the ActivityTaskManager log output in the section above.
Running this command launches the app (unless the app is already in the foreground, which is not what you want; we’ll deal with that next), and then outputs the following information:
Starting: Intent { cmp=com.android.samples.mytest/.MainActivity }
Status: ok
LaunchState: COLD
Activity: com.android.samples.mytest/.MainActivity
TotalTime: 1380
WaitTime: 1381
Complete
Check out that TotalTime result: this turns out to be exactly the same information that we see in the log:
ActivityTaskManager: Displayed com.android.samples.mytest/.MainActivity: +1s380ms
This means that we don’t have to troll through logcat to get this information. Instead, we can get it directly from the console where we run the launch command. Better yet, we can strip the extraneous text and leave just the launch result, making it easier to extract this data for use elsewhere.
To convert the output above to just the launch duration, I pipe the output through grep and cut shell commands (there are various ways to do this, I just picked one at random):
adb shell am start-activity -W -n com.android.samples.mytest/.MainActivity | grep "TotalTime" | cut -d ' ' -f 2
Now when I run this command, I get a single number as a result, as desired:
$ [start-activity command as above...]
1380
Startup Is a Dish Best Served Cold
When examining startup performance, it’s good to understand the difference between “cold start” and “warm start.”
Cold start happens when your application launches for the first time after installation, reboot, or when it is not otherwise in the background.
Warm start, on the other hand, is what you get when the application has already been launched and is running (but has been paused) in the background.
Both scenarios are valid to test and understand. But in general, testing your startup performance in a cold start scenario is a better place to start, for two main reasons:
Consistency : Cold start ensures that your app is going through the same set of operations every time it starts. If your app is being launched in a warm start scenario, it is not as obvious which steps are being performed and which are being skipped, so it’s not clear what you are actually timing (and whether you are testing things consistently between repeated runs).
: Cold start ensures that your app is going through the same set of operations every time it starts. If your app is being launched in a warm start scenario, it is not as obvious which steps are being performed and which are being skipped, so it’s not clear what you are actually timing (and whether you are testing things consistently between repeated runs). Worst case: By definition, cold start is the worst-case scenario; it is the longest startup duration that your users will see. You need to keep your focus on that worst-case statistic, rather than the best-case warm start situation. You can’t fix the big problems if you ignore them.
In order to force a cold-start situation for every run, you need to kill the app between runs. Again, doing this on the screen (by, say, swiping it out of the Overview list in launcher) would be tedious and error-prone. Once again, adb shell comes to the rescue.
There are a couple of different shell commands that can be used to kill activities. The most obvious is adb shell am kill … but it doesn’t actually do the trick. After you’ve launched your application, it’s in the foreground and kill won’t kill the foreground app. Instead, you need the force-quit command:
adb shell am force-stop com.android.samples.mytest
where you use your app’s package name to tell it which app to stop.
I Like to Loop It, Loop It
Now you have commands that you can run together to launch the app, output the launch duration data, and quit the app, making it ready to launch again. You could type this in the console over and over, but hey, we’re in a shell; let’s put it in a loop and run it repeatedly with just one command.
In doing this, you want to avoid running the app too soon after it’s killed, in case there are side-effects associated with the app being torn down (such as the system pulling the Launcher to the foreground as the app is torn down). To do this, I added a second of sleep to insert a small buffer between operations.
Here’s the final command I used, which includes killing the app, waiting a second, then launching it. I looped it for 100 iterations, which provided a reasonable sample size for my situation:
$ for i in `seq 1 100`
> do
> adb shell am force-stop com.android.samples.mytest
> sleep 1
> adb shell am start-activity -W -n com.android.samples.mytest/.MainActivity | grep "TotalTime" | cut -d ' ' -f 2
> done
When I run this, I get the launch duration output onto the console as each launch completes, which is exactly I wanted to track and analyze.
Note: There’s actually a much simpler way to loop start-activity using -S (which force-stops the activity first) and -R COUNT (which runs the start-activity command COUNT times), so I could have used this instead:
$ adb shell am start-activity -S -W -R 100-n com.android.samples.mytest/.MainActivity | grep "TotalTime" | cut -d ' ' -f 2
But to ensure a buffer of inactivity between teardown and startup, I wanted that sleep 1 command, so I went with the more verbose loop approach. Besides, shell script code is sooooo elegant, right?
Lock Your Clocks… When Possible
One of the factors in mobile device performance is the CPU architecture, and the CPU frequency in particular. Specifically, one of the main ways that mobile devices preserve battery life, and avoid major problems of overheating, is by throttling the CPU speed.
CPU throttling is great for battery life, but not so great for performance testing, where consistent results are critical.
Ideally, you should have control over the CPU frequency when running performance tests. Unfortunately, your ability to do this depends on the device(s) that you have; you need to have root access to a device to control the CPU governor, which controls the frequencies, and different devices may have different ways of altering this behavior.
The following information only pertains to you if you happen to have access to a device which allows it, and for which you can get root access. On the device front, I know that Pixel devices allow this access; I can’t speak for other devices.
In any case, if you can lock your clocks, I suggest you do so. It may not matter significantly for your particular testing situation (and in fact the system generally runs the clocks at a high frequency specifically when starting up apps, so that might already provide the consistency you need). But it’s good to at least eliminate CPU frequency as a variability factor.
Unfortunately, locking CPU frequency manually can be tricky. Fortunately, the AndroidX benchmark library makes it simple. In fact, you don’t even need to write code for the benchmark APIs; you can use the library just to get the handy lockClocks and unlockClocks utilities that it provides.
First, add the benchmark library as a dependency in your project-level build.gradle file:
classpath "androidx.benchmark:benchmark-gradle-plugin:1.0.0"
Next, apply the benchmark plugin by adding it to your app-level build.gradle file:
apply plugin: androidx.benchmark
Now you can sync your project (Android Studio is probably nagging you to do this already), after which the locking tasks will be available to use from gradlew .
Now you can lock your clocks by running this on command-line (I ran it from the Terminal tool inside of Android Studio, but you can run it outside the IDE as well):
$ ./gradlew lockClocks
When I did this, I saw this output in the console:
Locked CPUs 4,5,6,7 to 1267200 / 2457600 KHz
Disabled CPUs 0,1,2,3
That output was a pretty good indication that it worked on my Pixel 2. An even better indication was that my startup tests now took significantly longer than they did before. But wait, why are locked clocks slower?
The benchmark utility locks clocks at an easily sustainable level, not a high-performance level. If the clocks were running as high as possible instead, you might get better performance, but:
You want test results with realistic, or even poor, performance, like many of your users will see in the field. You do not want to only see best-case performance, which is not what people would typically see in reality.
Running the clocks at high frequencies for too long tends to make them overheat. I don’t know how the system would respond to this (hopefully it would down-clock them or shut down the system automatically before there were serious problems), but I don’t really want to find out.
Note that you will want to unlock the clocks when you are done with your testing. The device will unlock them on reboot, but you can also unlock them by running the opposite gradle task:
$ ./gradlew unlockClocks
… which simply reboots the device to perform that reset.
(If you want more information on benchmark’s locking facilities, check out the user guide).
And… Done!
After locking the clocks, I had everything in place: a system that could reproduce my startup situation with reliable consistency, and a simple command-line I could execute that would return a stream of results. I was able to copy the results, paste them into a spreadsheet, and analyze them (by comparing my startup averages to various before/after situations I wanted to experiment with).
Ideally, I wouldn’t need an article to explain how to do all of this. And honestly, you don’t need all of the explanation above. (But it’s always more interesting to know how and why things work, isn’t it?) All you really need is the single for() loop shell command, along with the optional approach of locking the clocks.
Lock the clocks if possible (see far below) Run this on the command-line (while your device is connected):
$ for i in `seq 1 100`
> do
> adb shell am force-stop com.android.samples.mytest
> sleep 1
> adb shell am start-activity -W -n com.android.samples.mytest/.MainActivity | grep "TotalTime" | cut -d ' ' -f 2
> done
In the interests of simpler performance testing and analysis, and better application performance in general, the team is investigating ways to simplify this process. Stay tuned for more on that when we have anything to share. But in the meantime, I hope the commands and information above are helpful for your startup testing needs. | https://medium.com/androiddevelopers/testing-app-startup-performance-36169c27ee55 | ['Chet Haase'] | 2020-11-25 17:54:29.225000+00:00 | ['App Performance', 'Performance', 'Android App Development', 'App Testing', 'Android'] |
For the Commonwealth: Assistant District Attorney Kara Heininger | For the Commonwealth highlights the important work our prosecutors are doing to help secure justice in specific cases brought by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office.
Assistant District Attorney Kara Heininger of our Family Violence and Sexual Assault Unit helped secure justice in a case involving a defendant convicted of sexually abusing a niece. The survivor reported the abuse she endured as a child after becoming an adult. The defendant will be sentenced by the Hon. Sierra Street. | https://medium.com/philadelphia-justice/for-the-commonwealth-assistant-district-attorney-kara-heininger-4ff93ad8cd6a | ['Philadelphia Dao'] | 2020-11-16 20:01:57.897000+00:00 | ['Criminal Justice', 'Philadelphia', 'Prosecutor'] |
Orphaned Alone | My name is Henry Johnson, and I’m ten years old. I have had a very rough past. See, I don’t have any parents. And I’m extremely poor. I live on the streets trying to find a way to eat. I sometimes steal from the stalls in the market. It would either be a loaf of bread or an apple. But I always get caught. The seller of one of their stalls actually threw a shoe at me, which hit me on the head. But sometimes I’m extremely sneaky, and manage to get away with the stolen loot.
People already know that I’m a beggar. They always look out for me. But there is only one, extremely kind person that I like. She’s called Sophie, and she sells scrumptious buns. She always lets me have a little treat, especially when I look extra hungry. It’s not hard, you just pout and make your eyes go wide. One day, when I was looking particularly forlorn, she let me have a chocolate eclair! It was delicious.
Sophie’s very pretty. She’s about thirteen or twelve, and she is very tall. She ties her blonde hair in a ponytail everyday, and she’s got unforgettable blue eyes. She’s got dimples when she smiles, and some freckles, which makes her even prettier than at first glance. She always rushes up to me when she sees me, and then takes my hand and drags me to her stall. She sometimes lets me choose a bun. It can’t be very big, she says, so I sometimes take a little cupcake or a muffin or a macaroon. I always give her a big grin and a thank you, only to come back another day to repeat the process.
I woke up one day, feeling extra hungry and weak. I’d known for a while that I was ill, but I couldn’t tell Sophie. She would fuss over me too much. I clambered upright, and a wave of dizziness nearly made me double over, but I ignored it. I could tell that I was getting sicker everyday. I stumbled towards the stalls, and there was Sophie. She smiled when she saw me but noticed that I looked a bit pale. ‘Are you alright, Henry?’ She asked caringly, running her hand through my red hair. ‘I’m okay,’ I assured her. She looked at me as if she knew I was lying. ‘Are you selling well?’ I added, hastily changing the subject. Sophie snapped into the presence, looking worried. ‘I don’t know,’ She said anxiously. ‘I think the bank might shut me down. I’m not making enough money to pay the fees.’ I just stood looking at Sophie, feeling agonized. ‘They can’t shut you down. What about me? What will you do?’
I knew that Sophie was poor, but I never thought that the bank would shut her down. ‘They can’t do that to you!’ I cried, as tears sprang into my eyes. ‘They can’t shut you down! It’s not fair.’ ‘But I can’t do anything about it. they will shut me down, whether it’s today or tomorrow or in a week,’ She said. Her eyes sparkled with tears. I know she was as sad as me. She had sold buns for years, trying to make a living. And the bank was going to shut her down. ‘Come on, cheer up. It’s not that bad.’ she was trying to make me feel better, but it wasn’t working. We stood there looking at each other for a moment. ‘I, uh, I need to go,’ I stuttered. I turned and ran off before Sophie could give me a word of comfort.
I glanced over my shoulder and saw her watching me helplessly. I continued running and emerged in an alleyway. I leaned against the brick wall, breathing hard. Sophie was my only friend. She couldn’t go. I needed her. I knuckled my eyes roughly. Just then I heard screaming. And yelling. Two men and a young woman ran into the alleyway. I recognised the lady immediately. ‘Sophie!’ I yelled.
She looked at me. Her face was filled with pure terror. The two men dragged her into the alleyway and pushed her away. She fell on the ground with a thud. I let out a tiny squeak. One of the men leered unpleasantly, showing his blackened teeth. I gagged. ‘Well look who we got ‘ere, Mike. A boy. What’s yer name, kid?’ I wanted to speak but I couldn’t. From the ground sophie mouthed something. HELP.
I had to do something. But before I could the men turned back to Sophie. ‘Leave her alone!’ I stammered. Mike and the other ignored me. Sophie looked as if she were about to pass out. Her face was ghostly pale. Mike kicked her in the stomach. Sophie screamed. ‘Stop it!’ I cried. They ignored me. ‘Why don’t you finish her off, Jack,’ Said Mike. ‘And leave the little runt to me.’
I didn’t think. I just ran. I ran and kept going. As I turned the corner I looked behind me. Mike and Jack weren’t chasing me. I could see the figure of sophie lying on the ground blood was trickling down her forehead. I think she was unconscious. I panted as I ran. I clutched a stitch on my side. I wasn’t looking where I was going. I was too upset about Sophie. I tripped over a small ledge that led onto the footpath. ‘Ow,’ I muttered as I picked myself up. I shook myself off and looked around. My eyes popped.
I was surrounded by banknotes. There were swirling all around me. Before I could think, I tried to snatch one off the air. And another. I wondered where all the money had come from. I stuffed my pockets with the notes. There were fives, tens, and I even spotted some fifties. I laughed madly despite of what had just happened. I had never been this rich. My pockets were full to the brim with the money. I even stuffed some up my sleeves. I looked back. There was a man there, that I had never seen before.
‘Buy yourself some food, kid,’ He chuckled. I stared.
He had soft green eyes that twinkled and a warm smile. He walked away without another word. ‘Wait!’ I called out. He stopped and turned around. ‘What’s your name?’ I asked breathlessly. I had a million questions zooming around my brain. Who was he? Why did he give me that money? where did he come from? Is he an enemy? ‘Bill Cook’ He replied, after hesitating. I just stood there.
‘Well, goodbye then, Henry,’ Bill Cook said with a twisted smile. With that, he walked away. ‘Wait up!’ I called. I couldn’t believe it. I had never told him my name. ‘How did you know my name?’ I added desperately. But he ignored me this time, and then came to another bend, and vanished from sight.
I snapped back to the real world. I was immediately worried. Was Sophie okay? And what was I to do with all the money? I was scared of going back to the alleyway. The men -Jack and Mike- could still be there. and I was only ten. I was no match for them. I stood there considering what I should do. The notes felt itchy on my skin. I couldn’t keep them there. They would either be blown away or stolen. It was too much risk.
I looked around. The street was empty. A few paper bags blew around my feet. I thought of keeping the money there, but I thought it was insecure. It needed to be kept in a safer place. I trudged up and down the street miserably. Just then I saw it. It was leather pouch. This would do. Apart from it being slightly musty and old, it was in perfect condition.
The strap was still intact. I opened the pouch delicitaly. An explosion of dust met me. I coughed and spluttered. After a bit I was able to stop but my eyes were still streaming freely. I looked around, then stored the banknotes inside. There was so much money that it nearly overflowed. The pouch was bigger than both hands put together, so imagine how many notes there would’ve been.
It was then that I wondered two things: What should I buy with the money? And, should I go check on Sophie, or are they waiting there for me? I put the pouch around my neck, hoping that if I went through any struggles it would stay there. Then I retraced my steps, before coming to the alleyway where poor Sophie had been ambushed. There was no sign of the men. I thought I could see Sophie lying on the same spot, so I went there to check. Sophie was there and I felt relieved that it wasn’t Jack or Mike in disguise.
I crouched down beside Sophie. She was still knocked out. I shook her. ‘Sophie,’ I muttered. ‘Wake up, Sophie, please wake up.’ I shook her some more. Her head lolled limply on her shoulders. I sighed. She might not wake up for hours to come. I clutched her hand, willing for Sophie to wake up. But she didn’t.
Suddenly I knew what to do. I glanced around, then took Sophie by her arms. I dragged her behind some dustbins and sat her up against the brick wall. Then I ran full speed out of the alleyway, trying to find the nearest phone booth. I spotted one not so far away, and sprinted to it. I opened the door, shut it behind me, and dug around in my pouch. There was also a lot of coins, so I picked up 20p, and pushed it into the slot. I waited for a bit, unsure of what to do, because I’d never used this before. I copied of other people doing it, but I didn’t know what to do at the end. I just saw people pushing the buttons.
I peered around hopefully, looking for a sign of help. There was one poster someone must’ve stuck on the side of the booth. I’ve never had much experience reading, but Sophie had recently taught me to read and recognise sentences. The poster said:
An emergency? Has someone been injured?
Dial 999 or 112 for the emergency number.
This was it! I pushed a few buttons. There was a sound of ringing at the other end of the line. Then I heard someone reply.
‘Hello. Is it medical or police attention that you require?’
‘Medical,’ I replied nervously.
‘And what is the situation?’
‘My friend, she’s been attacked by two men, in an alleyway. She’s unconscious and I don’t know what to do. Her head is bleeding.’
‘Okay. I will pass you over to the ambulance.’
‘Right’
‘Where was this alleyway?’
‘Faulkner’s Alley, Farringdon.’
I heard the sound of the phone being passed. Then I heard a man’s deep voice.
‘Faulkner’s Alley, Farringdon?’ He said.
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Were you with your friend when it happened?’
‘Yes, I saw it all. I told them to stop, but they ignored me. Then one of them threatened me, and I had to scram.’
‘Do you know the name of the men?’
‘Well, one is called Jack and the other one is Mike. I didn’t catch anything else.’
‘So, no last names?’
‘Nope.’
‘Okay,’ Said the man. I heard him scribbling at the other end of the line.
‘Thank you for the help. We will send an ambulance there as soon as we can.’
‘Thank you,’ I answered, and hung up.
I stepped out of the phone booth. I had to check that Sophie was still there. I sprinted back into the alleyway, and crouched behind the dustbins. Sophie was still there. She seemed better than before. In fact, she looks more asleep than unconscious.
‘It’s okay,’ I whispered into Sophie’s ear. ‘Help is coming’. I realised then that the pouch was still hung around my neck. I took it off and placed it beside me.
The sky was already darkening. I shivered. The late Autumn breeze ruffled my ginger hair. I was in for a rough night. I stayed closed to Sophie. My eyelids felt heavy. I badly wanted to sleep. But I couldn’t sleep. The ambulance ought to come soon. I didn’t want to miss it. I wanted to say goodbye to Sophie before she was lifted into the stretcher.
I don’t know how long I stayed awake. But not much. Maybe only ten minutes. After that I drifted off. I must’ve slept for about twenty minutes, maybe more. I was woken up by the sound of tyres along the road, the squeal of brakes and the loud rumble of noises.
I blinked, feeling disorientated. It was still dark. The people talking grew louder as they came closer. I tried to cower behind a dustbin. But then two people in fluorescent jackets saw me. They ran up to me. They were two women. Nurses, I realised. This must’ve been the ambulance coming to pick Sophie up. I sat up straight. ‘Sophie’s here.’ I gabbled. ‘She, she got hurt by these two men and I-’ My speech was cut short as a nurse placed her hand on my shoulder.
‘It’s okay, dear,’ She said. ‘ We have been told about it. Sophie will be okay.’ I heard them shouting to some other people. Doctors. They dragged a stretcher over. to Sophie and lifted her into it. Sophie’s foot knocked something as she was moved.
My pouch! I’d totally forgotten all about it. I hugged it to my chest feeling closer than ever to it.Then they started to carry Sophie away. I tried to follow them ‘Please,’ I pleaded. ‘Sophie’s my friend. I need to know if she’s okay!’
‘We will contact you when she makes a full recovery.’ I knew the doctor meant well, but I couldn’t help feeling upset. I watched the ambulance drive off until I couldn’t see it, then I started to walk away. I felt empty. What was I to do without my best friend?
I had all that money, but it couldn’t buy friendship or love. Suddenly I detested that money. I growled. ‘Bill Cook,’ I muttered angrily. I kicked a pebble at my feet.
I didn’t know what to do. As much as I hated that money, I needed it. It would buy me shelter, clothes, food, I could be like any other child in the world. I walked out of the alleyway, wanting to leave the bad memories behind. Shops began to open. It was around nine o’clock. I realised. Shops open at about now.
The sky began to lighten up. Birds chirped. People started up their cars. Dogs barked. I wondered what shop to go to first. Maybe the supermarket. I didn’t know much, but I think it opened about an hour ago.
I went to the nearest supermarket- Sainsbury’s -and stepped inside. It was the first time walking into the supermarket. I’d only been to stalls, but they barely sold five things. The supermarket was like a mansion to me. Glorious food. Refreshing drinks. warm, comfy clothes. All I’ve ever had was was fast foods. Sometimes I stopped at the diary. Or forgotten microwave food I’d found in a charity shop.
I had never had a vegetable in my life. And the only fruit I’d had was an apple and a clementine. As for water, not any better. I had once found several buckets either in a junkyard or tip. Then when it rained I had held up those buckets to the sky. And I only ever owned rags. I had jeans that were ripped at the knees and a patched shirt.
It used to be a tartan shirt, but it was so filthy that it looked brown with dirt, and discoloured with age. I also had another shirt. This one had long sleeves. It was cleaner than my tartan one. Sophie had gifted to me a year ago. It was plain white with a little yellow star on the breast pocket. It was several sizes too big for me, but I liked it.
I glanced around. No wonder people were looking at me strangely. I was undoubtedly the most scruffiest kid here. But I ignored me. I wandered through the aisles. Then I started buying food. First I went to the fruits- I bought the freshest apple, the yellowest banana, the juiciest orange, The roundest kiwifruits, the tiniest cherries, the sweetest grapes, the biggest mango and the greenest pear.
The I started buying some savoury- The goldest pies, the fattest sausage, the biggest slice of quiche ( whatever that is ) The brownest meatball, and the yummiest looking sausage roll.
Then I moved onto the sweet stuff- The cookie with the most chocolate chips, the biggest handful of candy, the most chocolatey kit-kats,the packet with the most pancakes in it, the largest box with ice blocks in it, and finally, an enormous box of Ferrero Rocher chocolates.
I also bought some junk food- The meatiest burger, the chewiest fries, the crispiest chicken nuggets, the greasiest chicken drumsticks, the most cool looking pizza, the fattest hot dog and the longest rashers of bacon.
After that I bought several bottles of water. Well, more than several. Liters and liters- enough to last me more that a month.
Then I went to the clothes section. Here I bought some shoes. I bought two pairs of sneakers, one pair of sport shoes, slippers, gumboots, some fancy converse shoes and then some more sneaker.
For the actual clothes, starting with the pants, I bought jeans, track pants, shorts, winter pants, and sport pants.
For the shirts I bought a lot- Long sleeves, short sleeves, plain black and white ones, ones with tigers on it, ones that said ‘Born to eat’, stripy shirts, checked shirts, and shirts about rock bands.
Then I bought the second layers- Hoodies, sweaters, jumpers, ponchos and jackets.
I also bought three pairs of pyjamas, thick winter ones, cooler summer ones and a onesie.
Finally! All the needs were done. But I still needed much more. I bought toiletries, books, toys and a puzzle.
It all cost over three hundred pounds, but it wasn’t even half the money gone. I could’ve bought three houses with all the money.
A house! Of course. I had bought all this but I needed a place to live, after all. But how? I peered around Sainsburys. There was a technology aisle further along. I ran to it, the basket bouncing up and down. ‘Excuse,’ I said to a kind lady on the counter. ‘Can I try out a computer, please?’ ‘Sure,’ She replied. I went on the nearest one — a macbook — And started typing away. I went on some sites that sold houses. I went to options. There were cheap, luxury and other. I clicked on luxury. There were house that cost four million pounds.I breathed out deeply. Wowie. I looked at the picture of the house. It had four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a backyard of a hundred metres across, a pool, a garage, and it had three storeys. I casually clicked on ‘buy’. I don’t know how I was supposed to buy it. I saw numbers- a phone number — and beside it said, ‘Call me if you want to see this house’.
At the phone booth, I rang the number.
‘Hello,’ A bored but familiar voice replied.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I would like to see the house you were selling? Four million pounds?’
The voice laughed. ‘Oh, young Henry,’ It chuckled. ‘I’ve been expecting you.’
‘Bill Cook!’ I cried out.
‘That’s me,’ Bill said. ‘I knew you would buy a house with all that cash I gave you.’
‘Yeah,’ I murmured, feeling dazed.’I’d like to buy the house.’
‘Wouldn’t you like to see it first?’
‘No. You see, I bought all this stuff… I’m going to be robbed if I don’t have anywhere to keep it.’
‘Do you have the stuff with you?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, patting one of the bags.
‘Okay,’ he answered. ‘Meet me tomorrow at the alleyway. You will give me the money, and I show you the way to your home, ‘kay?’
‘Yep,’ I sighed. Then I hung up.
That night, I crept into the alleyway again and behind the dustbins. I dreaded being here, again, with the fear of Jack and Mike growing stronger each minute. But I managed to calm down, and I settled down to sleep. I used the bags as my pillow and my jumpers as blankets. I actually fell asleep after a little bit, and woke up to the sound of birds. I jumped up.
‘Bill!’ I called out.
‘Henry,’ Bill said calmly. He was right in front of me. I jumped back, startled.
‘Get your stuff,’ Bill said. ‘And let’s go.’ He helped me carry some of my bags as we walked.
‘So,’ I said, wanting to break the uncomfortable silence. ‘Where’s the house?’
‘Up the road in Benjamin Street,’ He replied dully.
We walked a bit more, then we arrived at Benjamin street. ’14 Benjamin Street,’ Said Bill. ‘Here we are.’
The house was huge, and make of white brick with a red,tiled roof. It was the biggest house on the street. Bill handed me the bags.
‘Now,’Said Bill. I noticed he looked a bit nervous. ‘I have to say something to you.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I’m your father.’
There was a long, shocked silence. Suddenly he looked familiar. His eyes looked the same to mine. The exact shade. Even if our hair wasn’t the same color, he did look alike. He had the same eyebrows. The same nose.
‘But.. how?’ I said. My father took a deep breath. ‘My name is not Bill Cook. It is Brett Johnson. Your mother, Linda, left me when you were a tiny tot. We were poor then. I couldn’t keep you. I didn’t have the money to spare. I gave you to an orphanage. You were there a week. It is said that a hateful boy put you into a box and into the river. Then you appeared here. Fortunately I’d gotten a fantastic job. I made buckets of money. Then when I saw you that day, I couldn’t believe it. My Henry. After all those years. My little boy.’
We looked at each other in the eyes. Then Brett hugged me.I didn’t resist. I had never been hugged, and it felt good.
‘Can I live with you, Henry?’
‘Of course!’ I said.
He took me by the hand. Suddenly Brett’s pocket vibrated. he took his phone out of his pocket. He beamed as he listened to the call. He took the phone away from his ear.
‘Good news,’ He said. ‘Sophie made a full recovery.’ This was my new life now. And I loved it. | https://medium.com/@olivia.seguin.sanchez/orphaned-alone-1defa0690b44 | ['Cat Kid'] | 2019-02-01 05:54:31.673000+00:00 | ['London', 'Fiction', 'Short Story', 'Poverty'] |
Dale’s Triple-Feature — Killer Robots | From an age of rapid technological progress, here are three movies that tap into our fear of it getting out of control. After decades of being promised shiny, polite, robotic servants, some filmmakers looked at the horror of advanced robotic beings.
Moontrap (1989)
Moontrap (1989)
A mission to the moon awakens a dormant technology, unleashing killer alien cyborgs that wreak havoc.
Hardware (1990)
Hardware (1990)
In a post-apocalyptic future, the disembodied head of a self-repairing killer robot is discovered and unwittingly brought back to life.
Virus (1999)
Virus (1999)
A Russian research vessel gets infected by an information virus from an alien power surge and begins to grow killer alien cyborgs. | https://medium.com/@daley-paley/dales-triple-feature-killer-robots-80d3a866a73c | ['Dale Thomas'] | 2020-12-24 01:46:02.343000+00:00 | ['Movies', 'Movies To Watch', 'Lists', 'Robotics', 'Science Fiction'] |
Board Duty to Manage is Confusing | The duty of a board to manage can be confusing. We know that the board and management carry out separate functions. A board provides strategic direction and management implements this direction. Boards do not actually do the work. So, what do we mean when we say there is a duty to manage?
Essentially a board has to make sure that management is taking place. The board members do not answer the phone, but they make sure that the phone gets answered. Typically, the board supervises the executive director, and the executive director takes care of the rest of the hiring and supervises the remainder of the employees.
Each board will find their own balance between what the board handles and what the Executive Director takes care of — keeping in mind the idea about the boards’ role to set direction and management’s role to implement. A board should give the executive director enough responsibility to manage the day to day operations of the organization. The board should stay out of implementation decisions. “Nose in — hands off” is a popular way to describe this.
There are examples of board members who would like to be more involved. One person even asked if they could have an office at the organization. There are also examples of management who would like to be in charge of all aspects of the organization, including setting the strategic direction. These types of managers do not enjoy reporting to the board and on some occasions even believe that the board should simply rubber stamp whatever decisions they make.
A long serving executive director may have more experience than some of the board members and as such could provide more direction on the issues that the board is considering. An experienced board with a new executive director might provide advice on some operational issues. Adjustments can be made in the division of duties, as long as the board and management understand that their roles are fundamentally different.
The executive director reports to the board and serves in that role only if the board members are happy with their performance. This is the balance.
Another facet of the duty to manage is making sure that staff and board members understand the role of the executive director (ED). The board does not provide direction to any other employee but the ED. It is not appropriate for a board member to give orders to an employee who reports to the ED. Employees should be instructed that they interact with the board through the ED not directly. The organizational chart should be clear.
If an employee is experiencing some issues with the executive director then they contact the Human Resources committee, who will bring any concerns about the issue to the board. Employees should know that there is an avenue for them to explain their concerns to the board but that in general they do not contact the board directly.
The duty to manage can be misunderstood by both board, management and employees. It is worth the time to clarify this duty with the interested parties. | https://medium.com/governance-guru/board-duty-to-manage-is-confusing-23c110df7eb3 | ['Debi Peverill'] | 2020-12-21 13:47:51.083000+00:00 | ['Governance', 'Strategic Planning', 'Productivity', 'Meetings', 'Roles'] |
9 things that helped in my remote onboarding | Face to face meetings, lunches, coffee breaks and small talks in the kitchen — I still cannot believe we live in times without all of this physically. These things make a fresh start so much easier, so we have to rely on ourselves now first! And technology of course :)
I have experienced my first ever remote onboarding at Amazon and want to share some thoughts and learnings on what helped me and still helps to stay mindful, focused and productive during this period.
Waking up early and having a morning routine not connected to your job — helps to increase productivity!
Whether it is a cup of coffee with a book on a balcony; 10 min. meditation or even a 15 min. exercise — it actually helps you to wake up your body and mind on a positive note. Distinguishing personal time and private time is always a good idea and if you have possibility to switch rooms — that’s even more perfect! You normally start your working day at 9 am? Well, try to wake up earlier and have at least 1–2 hours for yourself and your routine first! Plan and structure your day and tasks.
Help your brain not to get overwhelmed with the amount of information. This might sound not new to you, but believe me, if you have a lot of trainings to do and you really want to make use of them — combine them with some other activities.
And plan it! It is much easier to follow an agenda than to hectically jump from task A to task B. I really enjoy exploring new techniques and Eat a Frog technique — is one of my favorite ones! The idea here is that you tackle the biggest, hardest, and least appealing task first thing every day, so you can move through the rest of the day knowing that the worst has already passed. Ask for help if you feel like
Got lost in defining your priorities? — Don’t be shy to speak up! Communication is the key! Continuing step 2, check-in with your teammates or manager on what they find crucial for you to complete first and do not overwhelm yourself! There are certainly some things that can wait and you do not need to be a superman/superwoman and complete the whole trainings in 1 week. Have an onboarding buddy program in your company? Make use of it!
For example at Amazon majority of trainings are defined with priorities. We also have an “Onboarding Ambassador” program — 2 peers, one within your team and one outside your team that help you with onboarding. Super useful, can save a lot of time and help to connect with your peers! Have a break during the day!
Our brains need to rest, even if we don’t feel like. I remember when I just started my career, I did not have a habit of having actual breaks, going out for lunch and I once had a burnout. Now, within my 6 years in recruitment, I learned it is necessary and really follow the rule of having a proper break during the day. This study shows that 38% of employees are not into taking a break, although it can actually increase your creativity and improve mental well-being!
Easy as it sounds — just block some time in your calendar, so you make sure to have it as a reminder and no-one can steal it with a meeting :) Leaving your phone in another room before you go to bed!
Scrolling the news or social media on your phone in the bed and doing this as first thing in the morning — is a real waste of time and will only hurt your mental health in the long run. You don’t believe me? Well, check your “Phone screen time” and see how long you spend time on it. Although, sometimes it feels like 5 min., I know :) Our crazy brain is constantly asking for dopamine’s and all the addictive tools just make us want to use them more. Get the vibe of the company culture or “Every day is Day 1”
“Every day is a new day, every day the world changes, and we must look for the change, create the change, and adapt to change. It’s a lesson to every manager and leader. It’s the meaning behind Forever Day 1”
Learning and trying to get into the company culture is an essential thing to everyone who wants to set themselves up for success. Do not ignore all the resources, blogs, videos you get during your onboarding and get the most of it! There is a reason why employees put a lot efforts in creating this content.
My Day 1 at Amazon. WFH setup
7. More and more culture or “Learn and be curious”
Yes, apart all the content you get at work, if you are into reading — try to find some literature or blogs that can either help you to learn about the business or the industry. Before my start at Google, I read “Work rules” by Laszlo Bock and this book really helped me to onboard and better understand how the company operates and why certain things work the way they do. So try your best to keep the curiosity with all that you do when you start a new journey.
So I went to Amazon.com and purchased a book a book about Amazon :)
With all the love to my Kindle, I wanted a paper version of this one!
8. You need to give yourself permission to be human!
“We learn, we make mistakes, we fix them and we move on :)” I absolutely love this phrase and I got it once from my manager. Allow yourself not to be perfect with some things at the very beginning. When you feel like you did something wrong, try to remember all the other things you did right — and move on! When you’ve acknowledged your mistake, think about what you could do to prevent it from happening again. For example, if you didn’t follow a process properly, consider introducing a more robust checklist or a clearer process document.
9. Recognize team support and be grateful!
Last but not least! I got really lucky to get into a team at Amazon that is quite unique in a way. Since my very first days they care a lot about me and always ask how I feel and if any help is needed. Every one of them are ready to jump on a quick call and explain something, even if their days are full of calls and meetings.
Most of us are based in different countries and cities, and with all the remote onboarding I have not met my team in person. With that being said, the team vibe I get is just fantastic! So if you see someone investing their time in you — be thankful and appreciate these efforts!
Happy onboarding to all the folks who start their new journeys! | https://medium.com/@sviti/8-things-that-helped-in-my-remote-onboarding-51237ac76ac3 | ['Svitlana K.'] | 2020-12-24 13:43:53.498000+00:00 | ['Amazon', 'Remote Working', 'Onboarding', 'Recruiting', 'Onboarding Process'] |
Alternative to Cryptomator | Cryptomator is a great, open-source tool that allows anyone to client-side end-to-end encrypt any files uploaded to traditional, less secure cloud storage services (Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud, etc). You install it on your computer and it encrypts the files before these get uploaded. This, essentially, transforms a cloud service like Dropbox into a more secure service like that offered by Tresorit, Sync, or pCloud. While it’s great, here we want to showcase a better alternative to using Cryptomator.
Cryptomator is a highly technical service, and thus if you aren’t diligent at all times and accidentally upload a set of files unencrypted. This is an unnecessary hassle, given that there are plenty of open-source cloud storage services that are client-side encrypted.
Internxt Drive is a highly secure cloud storage service, that shards files and client-side end-to-end encrypts these. The main advantage of using Internxt Drive instead of using Dropbox + Cryptomator is the ease of use. Unlike Dropbox & co, Internxt Drive already has its encryption mechanism built-in, without the need for third-party apps like Cryptomator. But ease of use isn’t only it.
The fact that files are not only client-side encrypted but also fragmented in a way that and a machine never hosts a whole file, also makes it more secure against hackers.
Make the switch to a more convenient, innovative, eco-friendly, and secure alternative to your current cloud service + Cryptomator. Make the switch to Internxt Drive. | https://blog.internxt.com/alternative-to-cryptomator-217310e9e715 | ['Fran Villalba Segarra'] | 2020-06-14 06:53:04.516000+00:00 | ['Security', 'Encryption', 'Cloud Computing', 'Cloud', 'Cryptomator'] |
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