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Celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month | REGINA SHKLOVSKY
Illustrator of Little Loon Finds His Voice
Regina Shklovsky is an illustrator and graphic designer based in Sonoma County, California. She illustrated the 2018 picture book, Fun in the Mud, which was a 2019 Moonbeam award winner and a 2018 Nautilus award winner. She is passionate about bringing stories to life with pictures and thoughtful design. Her work is rooted in traditional drawing and painting, mixed with vector graphics. She collaborates with local entrepreneurs and authors, as well as independent publishers.
What are ways you celebrate your heritage?
At the age of five my father discovered fishing in the freshwater lakes of Massachusetts. He continued this hobby into adulthood, giving our family a tradition of camping in the summer and spending the whole day on the boat fishing for bass and swimming in the cool lake water. Having summers like this in my childhood gave me a strong connection to the outdoors that has carried forward to today. I celebrate this part of my heritage with my own family, spending time exploring nature whenever and wherever possible.
How do you channel your identity into your work?
My mother is Mexican-American with roots in Zacatecas, Mexico. My dad was born to a Japanese mother and his father was half Cherokee Indian, half African-American. I am all of these colors and also none at the same time, often checking the box of “other.” My identity these days is unattached to race. So, as in my youth on the lakes, I return to nature. I channel this part of my identity by using plants, animals and landscapes in my visual storytelling.
MISASHA SUZUKI GRAHAM
Co-author of Dear White Women: Let’s Get (Un)comfortable Talking About Racism
A graduate of Harvard College and Columbia Law School, Misasha has been a practicing litigator for over 15 years, and is passionate about diversity, equity and inclusion in the legal profession as well as in her communities. She is a facilitator, writer, and speaker regarding issues of racial justice and children, and co-host of Dear White Women, a social justice podcast. Misasha, who is half-White and half-Japanese, is married to a Black man, and is the proud mom of two very active multiracial young boys. They live in the Bay Area of California with their largely indifferent cat.
What are ways you celebrate your heritage and how do you channel your identity into your work?
Growing up biracial, your identity is a key part of who you are — as others try and define it for you, you are forced to stand strong in who you are. For me, being the daughter of a Japanese immigrant, growing up culturally both Japanese and American, and spending time in both countries is central to who I am. I celebrate who I am in the names I’ve given to my kids, in lifting up voices and stories of people who look like me, and in making sure my family’s story is always part of my decision making process in how I move in this world. It is this deep love of my own identity that makes me so proud to co-author a book about how we see and show up for each other in this world, especially for those who have the privilege of being able to look away from questions of race and identity. I hope that my doing so will continue to encourage other Asian voices, especially Asian female voices, to share their own stories.
SARA BLANCHARD
Co-author of Dear White Women: Let’s Get (Un)comfortable Talking About Racism
Sara helps build community and connection through conscious conversations, which she does as a facilitator, TEDx speaker, writer, and consultant. After graduating from Harvard and working at Goldman Sachs, Sara pursued the science and techniques of well-being and is a certified life coach, author of Flex Mom, and co-host of Dear White Women, a social justice podcast. Sara is half-White and half-Japanese, married to a White Canadian man, and is raising their two White-presenting girls to be compassionate, thoughtful advocates. They live in Denver, Colorado, with their incredibly lovable dog.
What are ways you celebrate your heritage?
We celebrate my Japanese heritage in the house in two main ways. One is the Girls Day celebration on March 3, which starts a few weeks earlier when we set up the Hina dolls to wish for the growth, happiness, and prosperity of my two young girls. On the day itself, the girls love the tradition of getting dressed in kimonos and taking photos to commemorate the occasion, and we finish up with a small in-house celebration. Two is the annual deep clean, or “osouji,” right before the new year. The way I grew up, it’s understood that the way you usher in the new year sets the tone for the entire year ahead, so we clean to purify the home (and in tradition, welcome in the Shinto deity of the new year) and set up kagamimochi decorations, and enjoy some traditional Japanese food.
How do you channel your identity into your work?
Reflecting on it, the first half of my life was spent embracing my Japanese identity; the second half of my life was spent really diving into my Whiteness. Now that we’ve been doing social justice work for several years now, I feel comfortable owning that my life and values are a healthy mix of both of these traditions, and that I need both actively in my life to feel at home in my skin. As for work, having grown up in a bicultural home, I’m able to understand from deep in my DNA that there are many stories and perspectives in the world, and I naturally offer a bridge to help share these truths.
CHERYL YAU CHEPUSOVA
Author of Noodles, Please!
Cheryl Yau Chepusova is a designer, writer, and author of the Big Cities Little Foodies travel series. As a Hong Kong native and city dweller, she has traveled around Asia and also lived and worked in Toronto, New York, and most recently San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in Design Observer, Metropolis, Print, and others. She spends her days designing apps and software for companies like Slack, Pinterest, The New York Times, and Squarespace. She enjoys picnics with her two children, teaching them multiple languages, and learning about the world together through picture books.
What are ways you celebrate your heritage?
I try as much as I can to maintain my culture for myself and my two children with frequent visits to my family in Hong Kong (pre-pandemic we would see them every 6 months) and continuing to teach my children my native languages and traditions. We are a mixed race family and both my husband and I speak in languages other than English, so my children regularly speak 4 languages at home. From my side of the family, we speak Cantonese and Shanghainese, and both my children go to a Mandarin immersion preschool as well, where they support our language learning and teach them a lot about overall Chinese culture with nursery rhymes, foods, poetry, and activities. At home I cook a lot of foods I’m familiar with and a lot of family recipes are Shanghainese, so my children are really used to eating various Chinese regional cuisines and using chopsticks from a young age. I didn’t move to the US until I was in my mid-twenties so it feels really natural for me to continue sharing this part of my background with my family. Language and travel experiences especially are a gift I can give them and enable them to stay in touch with my heritage.
How do you channel your identity into your work?
I write about things I am familiar with, things that are special and unique to cultures outside of America, and hope that it will resonate with my young readers who don’t feel represented in mainstream media. I didn’t grow up with a lot of American traditions like the tooth fairy or Thanksgiving, and I generally miss a lot of cultural references simply from not having lived in the US for long enough. It’s easy to feel like an outsider, even around Asian Americans who look and speak like me. I love that we are beginning to see and celebrate more Asian representation in books and movies, and I try to bring a different angle to the dialogue. Having Western storylines with Asian faces in the illustrations is not enough for me. I imagine there are children who currently live in the US like myself, who identify with Asian culture more than American, and still want to feel a sense of belonging and acceptance in this country. My identity as an expat definitely shapes the stories I want to tell and how I tell them. | https://medium.com/@thecollectivebookstudio/celebrating-asian-american-and-pacific-islander-heritage-month-4bd385bc40c | ['The Collective Book Studio'] | 2021-08-17 16:43:51.367000+00:00 | ['Aapi Heritage Month', 'Pacific Islander', 'Writing', 'Asian American', 'Publishing'] |
The Ultimate List of the Best Productivity Resources | The Ultimate List of the Best Productivity Resources
Where the most productive people go to get the latest tips
What’s your go-to resource for all things productivity?
We asked, you answered.
And the best tips and tricks are now rounded up here, in one handy list. With blogs and podcasts to check out, people to follow, and apps to try, we’ve got the ultimate list of where to look when you’re in need of some solid productivity advice.
Blogs + News
Podcasts
Evernote Podcast — iTunes, SoundCloud, Overcast — Dive into the realms of achievement, entrepreneurship, and creative thinking
— iTunes, SoundCloud, Overcast — Dive into the realms of achievement, entrepreneurship, and creative thinking Cortex Podcast — Each episode, they get together to discuss their working lives
People
Apps + Tools + Approaches | https://medium.com/taking-note/the-ultimate-list-of-the-best-productivity-resources-5ad2f648875b | [] | 2017-11-15 22:03:33.186000+00:00 | ['Apps', 'Productivity', 'Self Improvement', 'Advice', 'Personal Development'] |
Der Bitcoin-Standard (EN) | A fundraiser to realize “The Bitcoin Standard” in the German language
(Beschreibung auf Deutsch: https://tallyco.in/s/derbitcoinstandard/)
Image from Pixabay
Hey everyone! We are Stefan & Fabio - two Bitcoin enthusiasts from Germany. Since we wanted to help Bitcoin spread in the German speaking region (Germany, Switzerland & Austria), we bought the rights to translate and publish one of the most popular books about Bitcoin in German:
The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous
We are now searching for sponsors (companies) and donors helping us to fund the translation and get the German version out there as soon as possible! We thought tallyco.in is the perfect platform to contact the Bitcoin community and ask for support. To be able to accelerate and finance the translation, lectorate and someone who does graphics and editing on a professional level, we need a minimum of 13.200€ which matches approximately 15.000 USD.
To give everyone donating an incentive to support our project we came up with the following perks:
$ 5 Receive a “Thank You!” sticker when we’re publishing the book even when not reaching the goal.
$ 10 Take part in a raffle to get 1 of 10 copies of the final book signed by Saifedean Ammous himself! You can participate multiple times.
$ 25 make sure you get your copy from the first batch! And get in touch with us via the Perk instructions!
$ 250 (15x times) Make sure you get a copy of the final book signed by Saifedean Ammous himself! First come, first serve.
$ 3000 (only 2x times left, other 2 slots are sold) Make sure your company logo will be printed on an “Acknowledgements” page in the book! (Please contact us in advance: [email protected], we keep the right to choose the logo sponsors)
We clarified the additional page and the signed copies with the author and publisher. Please keep in mind, although we plan on releasing the book in 2019, it might take a longer time until we have raised enough to be able to publish the book. So don’t have a high time preference. :) But the faster we completed the funding, the faster we can get it done.
Of course you can also donate smaller amounts or something in between, we are thankful for every contribution. If you are taking part in the Perks you will get to see further details. If you donated the amount directly, you can send an Email with your transaction ID (Subject: Tallycoin) telling us which perk you qualified for (first Email per transaction counts). In any case, contact us here: [email protected]
If you want to stay up to date you can subscribe to our German newsletter on www.aprycot.de or follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/fabthefoxx! We are thankful for any kind of support! Please keep in mind that your support is a donation making the book open source unfortunately was not possible because of legal issues. We plan on selling the book as a paperback and ebook as soon as everything is set.
This is the link:
Want to stay up to date to when the book is coming out? Sign up to the newsletter: https://www.aprycot.de/
Thanks a lot to:
Oliver Gugger, Max Hillebrand & the guys from Bravis for their support. As well as to DJ Booth for the super cool tallyco.in link and the beautiful permissionless platform he built!
Thank you for reading this! If you liked this it’d be great if you give me a clap and a follow here: Twitter or here Aprycot | https://medium.com/aprycotmedia/der-bitcoin-standard-b71cf1ee4edc | ['Fab The Fox'] | 2019-08-17 18:39:55.710000+00:00 | ['Standards', 'Saifedean Ammous', 'Gold', 'Bitcoin', 'Buch'] |
Machine Learning Made Simple With Excel | Building the Model
Our data is now ready and we can proceed to build our model. As a reminder, this model works by comparing the unknown data point we wish to classify to its nearest, or most similar, neighbors. To do that we will need to take each point in our test set and calculate its distance to each point in the training set.
The Concept of Distance
Distance is the way mathematicians determine which points are most similar in an n-dimensional space. The intuition is that the smaller the distance between the points the more similar they are. Most of us are used to calculating distance in a 2-dimensional space, such as an x,y coordinate system or using longitude and latitude. There are several ways to calculate distance but to keep it simple we’re going to use the Euclidean distance. Below is a visualization of the Euclidean distance formula in a 2-dimensional space. As you can see, the formula works by creating a right triangle between two points and determining the length of the hypotenuse, the longest side of the triangle, as identified by the arrow.
Graphic by the Author
Our data set is 4-dimensional. It’s difficult for us to visualize spaces beyond 3 dimensions, but regardless of whether or not you can visualize it we can still calculate the distance between two points the same way regardless of the number of dimensions. Here is the generic formula for Euclidean Distance:
Screenshot from WikiPedia under Creative Commons License
In plain language this is saying is that the Euclidean distance between two points, q & p, can be determined by taking each dimension for each point, starting with the first dimension, and squaring the difference between them iteratively until you’ve done so for all dimensions and added the differences together. Then we take the square root of that sum and we have the Euclidean distance. It sounds complicated but you’ll see that it is actually quite simple to use once we get back into our data.
Calculating The Distance
In our workbook, create a new worksheet called “Distance.” Our goal for this sheet is to create a 45X105 matrix of the distances between each data point in the test set and the training set. In our case, each row will correspond to one data point in the test set and each column will correspond to one data point in the training set. Starting in A2 and working down line by line until you hit A46, fill each cell with the numbers 1–45. Again, the fill handle is useful here so you don’t have to type the numbers one by one. Now, working from B1 and then column by column horizontally across until you hit DB1, fill each column with the numbers 1–105. Your matrix should look something like the screenshot below which shows a small portion of it.
Screenshot by Author
Before moving on, you’ll need to convert your matrix to a Table so we can keep things organized. Select your entire matrix and hit Ctrl+T and then name the table “Distance_Table” and select to create the table with Headers. Next, you’ll want to name your first Column “Test ID” by typing that into cell A1.
Now that our table is set up we can start our calculations. We’ll start in cell B2 which will calculate the distance between the first point in our Training Set (ID #1) and the first point in our Test Set (ID #1). We can apply the Euclidean distance formula quickly by using the VLOOKUP function in excel to find the values for each dimension and then preforming the calculations as necessary. It’s best to copy and paste this formula into your formula bar in Cell B2 as it handles a couple peculiarities of the Table feature in Excel, but make sure you understand that all this formula is doing is applying the Euclidean Distance formula we discussed earlier. As written you can then drag this to fill your entire table.
=SQRT(((VLOOKUP(NUMBERVALUE(Distance_Table[[#Headers],[1]]), ‘Training Set’!$A$1:$F$106, 2, FALSE)-VLOOKUP(Distance_Table[@[Test ID]:[Test ID]], ‘Test Set’!$A$1:$F$46, 2, FALSE)) ^ 2+(VLOOKUP(NUMBERVALUE(Distance_Table[[#Headers],[1]]), ‘Training Set’!$A$1:$F$106, 3, FALSE)-VLOOKUP(Distance_Table[@[Test ID]:[Test ID]], ‘Test Set’!$A$1:$F$46, 3, FALSE)) ^ 2+(VLOOKUP(NUMBERVALUE(Distance_Table[[#Headers],[1]]), ‘Training Set’!$A$1:$F$106, 4, FALSE)-VLOOKUP(Distance_Table[@[Test ID]:[Test ID]], ‘Test Set’!$A$1:$F$46, 4, FALSE)) ^ 2+(VLOOKUP(NUMBERVALUE(Distance_Table[[#Headers],[1]]), ‘Training Set’!$A$1:$F$106, 5, FALSE)-VLOOKUP(Distance_Table[@[Test ID]:[Test ID]], ‘Test Set’!$A$1:$F$46, 5, FALSE)) ^ 2))
You should end up with something like this:
Screenshot by Author
Finding Nearest Neighbors
At this stage we have calculated the distance between every point in our test set and every point in our training set. Now we need to identify the closest neighbors to each point in our test set. Create a new worksheet called “Nearest Neighbors” and starting at A2 work down line by line to fill the cells with the numbers 1–45 to correspond with the points in our Test Set. Our columns are not going to represent the Training Set like they have on previous sheets. Instead, these are going to represent the 6 closest neighbors, starting with the 1st closest and then the second closest and so on. The 1st closest neighbor has the smallest distance, the 2nd closest neighbor has the second smallest distance and so on. Your sheet should look like this:
Screenshot by Author
As we have before we will write a formula in cell B2 that can be dragged to fill the rest of our matrix. Our approach is to identify the smallest value in our corresponding row (2) in the distance table, find the column number for that value, and then return the column name since that will give us the ID of the value in the Training Set. We will use a combination of the Index and the Match functions to achieve this. Note that we’re able to make this formula simple because we had the foresight to set up our Distance matrix as a table in Excel and so we can easily pull in the headers.
=INDEX(Distance_Table[#Headers], MATCH(SMALL(Distance!$B2:$DB2, 1), Distance!2:2, FALSE))
Drag this formula to fill the top row of your nearest neighbors matrix. You will need to manually adjust the bold value in the SMALL() function to represent the neighbor we’re looking for. So for example, to find the second nearest neighbor the formula would be as follows.
=INDEX(Distance_Table[#Headers], MATCH(SMALL(Distance!$B2:$DB2, 2), Distance!2:2, FALSE))
Remember your values will be different since your random sample used to form the Test Set is different from mine.
Screenshot by Author
At this stage, I usually take a minute to double check one of the rows manually when feasible just to make sure my formulas are working as expected. At scale you’ll want to use automated testing, but for now we’re keeping it simple.
We have one last step: we need to identify the classification of each of our nearest neighbors. We’ll go back to the formula in B2 and modify it to do a VLOOKUP of the ID in the Training Set and return the classification. We’ll then drag that to fill the matrix.
=VLOOKUP(NUMBERVALUE(INDEX(Distance_Table[#Headers], MATCH(SMALL(Distance!$B2:$DB2, 1), Distance!2:2, FALSE))), ‘Training Set’!$A$1:$F$106, 6, FALSE)
Taking A Step Back
Let’s take a step back and look at what we’ve accomplished. You’ve now identified for each point in your test set the classification for the 6 nearest neighbors. You will likely notice that for all or almost all of your data points the 6 nearest neighbors will all fall into the same classification. This means that our data set his highly clustered. In our case, our data is highly clustered for two reasons. Firstly, as we discussed at the start of the tutorial the data set is designed to be easy to work with. Secondly, this is a low-dimensional data set since we are only working with 4 dimensions. As you deal with real-world data, you will typically find that it is far less clustered especially as the number of dimensions increases. The less clustered your data, the larger the training set will need to be to build a useful model. | https://towardsdatascience.com/machine-learning-made-simple-with-excel-1bffd7901502 | ['Oscar Armas Luy'] | 2021-01-04 16:18:20.401000+00:00 | ['Data Analytics', 'Data Science', 'Excel', 'AI', 'Machine Learning'] |
Dad Devotional Day 27 | Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes
Judith
My son and I are reading the story of Judith. This short novella is famous from the many paintings and sculptures of the beautiful heroine depicted in the act of cutting off the villain’s head or triumphantly carrying her trophy. The wonderful story begins in a little mountain town on the outskirts of Israel standing against the undefeated Assyrian army. As their food and water supplies dwindle, so too does the people’s hope, and they convince their city leaders to capitulate in five days. Into this scene, a beautiful rich widow contrives a scheme to rescue the town and save the rest of Israel.
Leaving the town, she descends to the encamped army in her “going out clothes” looking for the man in charge. She tells a bold face lie to the Assyrian general about her defection, desire to aid his army, and begins seducing him. On the night when the general plans to “ahem,” Judith removes his sword and cuts off his head while he is passed out drunk. The rest of the story is boiler plate murdered armies and victorious Israel. Wonderful children’s story, thanks, Bible…
We are not the kind of family which typically has issues discussing sex and bloodshed in the Bible. These elements are part of our human story. But what about the bold-faced lie and deception? What about violating number eight (false witness) and number five (murder) of the Ten Commandments? How do I lionize this heroine in light of her deceit?
Lest, I castigate Judith alone, there are many examples of females lying to save lives in the Bible. Sarah lies to Pharaoh about her marriage, the Hebrew midwives deceive the Egyptians about birthing male children, and Rahab lies to protect spies in Jericho just to name a few. Each of these stories has a clear life and death consequence to telling the truth and each time life takes precedence. Which is a great lesson to learn when Nazi’s SS bangs on the door asking if we are hiding Jews in the attic? But maybe something is going on here and maybe a lifeline to fathers seeking to instill Christian values in their children.
This search brings us to a key question: What to do when a choice must be made between two sins? Lie and murder to save life or tell the truth and be an accomplice to murder. This conflict is a clashing spark that illuminates the darkness of our understanding. The world is a muddy place and as comfortable as black and white moral questions are, there is a vast spectrum of greyness we live in.
Christ arrived into a world struggling to answer this question. The religious leaders elevated the Law to God status while the disciples faced the danger of disregarding law all together. Both approaches are logical opposites of the same fallacy. Christ tells us in Matthew 5:17, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” Christ is inserting himself right in the middle between His followers and the scripture. We must place all of the scripture in its proper place relative to Christ. Only then can we actually have, “righteousness [that] surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, [and] enter into the kingdom of heaven” (v.20).
Christ does not free us from obligations to follow the scripture, but the scripture only makes sense when we look at it in entirely with Him. Judith is a heroine, because she understood that the Ten Commandments show us God more clearly, but they are not God.
Is Judith a children’s story? That’s up to you to decide, but where else can you read about war, lying, seduction, and murder and it only makes sense because of Jesus? And that is the essence of a children’s story. Thanks, Bible. | https://medium.com/@daddevotional/dad-devotional-day-27-dd5251e5bae3 | [] | 2020-12-18 16:47:21.057000+00:00 | ['Bible', 'Jesus Christ', 'Judith', 'Old Testament', 'Childrens Stories'] |
The Case Against Tradition | Not all traditions are bad. It’s important we delve into this topic with the understanding that traditions can be a great thing — we just need to figure out exactly which ones.
Defined as, “the transmission of customs or beliefs from generation to generation,” tradition plays an integral role in various personal dimensions such as culture, family, celebration, and the broader characterization of one’s own identity. Humans tend to like tradition, and whether it’s because we gravitate towards ways of honoring the people and ideas that came before us, or we’re just suckers for a bit of ceremony, traditions exist within every facet of our lives.
In any logician’s argument, appeal to tradition is outlined as a fallacy of invalid reasoning. In other words, the fact that something may, or may not, be considered a tradition, does not provide adequate justification for its continued observance — We need a better defense than the declaration that, “it’s always been done this way.”
What’s more is that we’ve already come a long way in recognizing that certain historical systems of belief, and the traditions and behaviors they have given way to, largely act as a hindrance for societal progress. We realize that tradition does not excuse acts of injustice, and that the maintenance of harmful customs should be something we, as a society, actively oppose, rather than pursue continued engagement with. Yet, as has been made increasingly apparent in the recent socio-political climate of the West, we are so defensibly hesitant to accept that there is more work to be done in dismantling damaging tradition.
Often times, claims of tradition act as a form of normalized, and socially- acceptable camouflage for the harmful perpetuation of double standards, racial bigotry, environmental neglect, and acts of violence towards both human and non-human animals, alike. Though the question of whether defendants of the claim to tradition directly profit from its ongoing practice, or just wish to persist in willful ignorance of its problematic origins, remains unanswered by and large, there is, rightfully so, a growing degree of scrutiny for outdated and oppressive convention.
Everyday norms such as men paying on the first date, or women taking their husband’s last name upon entrance into wedlock exemplify what remains pervasive of sexist attitudes and otherwise purposeless actions within our culture. This is not to dismiss the validity of those individuals who might feel as though their participation in these traditions possesses a degree of significance wholly unrelated to the processes that created them. After all, it is the fact that these customs are so normalized that almost guarantees their assured maintenance, and this will largely, and understandably remain unchanged until the norms themselves, are subject to change.
From seasonal celebrations such as the Super Bowl or Thanksgiving, to the persisting notion of meat consumption being intrinsically linked to masculinity, the rationalization of slaughtering billions of animals per year rests on tradition, alone. Around 600 million chickens are killed to be eaten each year on Super Bowl Sunday, yet amidst the outbreak of a global pandemic (one of zoonotic origins at that), unprotected slaughterhouse workers were forced to cull millions of U.S. factory farm animals due to severe decrease in demand. The sheer pointlessness of traditions that fuel environmental unsustainability and contribute overwhelmingly to the rising rates of heart disease, cancer, and worldwide obesity, is obscured only by the determination of affiliate sectors to profitize from its continuation.
The passing of the recent holiday on the 4th of July was accompanied by conflicted sentiment from civilians, as so many of the freedoms that the United States prides itself on have felt further out of reach for many, than they have been acknowledged as being. In addition, the usage of fireworks and explosives to commemorate American independence bears an innumerable range of consequences ranging from wildlife fatalities, air pollution due to chemical toxicity, as well as distress for small children, animals, and individuals with PTSD. When we examine the negative ramifications in conjunction with the necessity of these traditions, we are left, unsurprisingly, empty handed.
The controversy surrounding the second Monday of October provides us with an opportunity to shift tradition in a way that benefits the celebration of an incredible culture, rather than the falsely defended reputation of a dead man. Perhaps changing the name of a federally recognized holiday from Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day seems like a simple perhaps superficial way to maintain historical accountability, yet there are hordes of individuals who protest this alteration, nonetheless. Juneteenth, a day that marks the signing of the Emancipation proclamation in the United States, and the first step towards the ending of slavery, is yet to be recognized on the national level. With such a seemingly opportune, yet poignant, occasion for the creation of new traditions, ones that seek to dissolve the foundations of oppression and violence, it is a mystery why we cling so tightly to our cement statues, instead.
It is not the goal of this case against tradition to remove ceremonial pillars of joy, freedom, and heritage within society. On the contrary, it is the aim of this discussion to spark the understanding that all these things can be eqaully derived from a new, and better place. Therefore, personal identity is not held stagnant in the customs and belief systems of the past, rather it is decided upon consciously through the manner in which we move forward, the manner in which we engage with the present, and the manner in which we fight against oppressive tradition.
Alexandra — July 2020 | https://alexandrawalkerjones.medium.com/the-case-against-tradition-f492a8ee29ab | ['Alexandra Walker-Jones'] | 2020-07-16 11:23:02.243000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Life', 'Culture', 'Philosophy', 'Equality'] |
Lean LaunchPad — For Deep Science and Technology | We just finished the 11th annual Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford — our first version focused on deep science and technology.
I’ve always thought of the class as a minimal viable product — testing new ideas and changing the class as we learn. This year was no exception as we made some major changes, all of which we are going to keep going forward.
1. A focus on scientists and engineers. We created an additional Spring section of the class with a focus on commercializing inventions from Stanford’s scientists and engineers. The existing winter quarter of the class remains the same as we taught for the last 10 years — taking all students’ projects — e-commerce, social media, web, and mobile apps. This newly created Spring section focuses on scientists and engineers who want to learn how to commercialize deep science and technology — life sciences (medical devices, diagnostics, digital health, therapeutics,) semiconductors, health care, sensors, materials, artificial intelligence/deep learning, et al.
This allowed us to emphasize how to differentiate a technical spec from a value proposition and expand on the parts of the business model that are unique for science and engineering startups. For example, life sciences versus commercial applications have radically different reimbursement, regulatory, clinical trials, scientific advisory boards, demand creation, etc. In addition, we found we needed to add new material on Intellectual Property, how to license inventions from the university, and discussions about team dynamics. Going forward we’ll continue to offer the class in two sections with the second class focused on science and technology.
2. Remote Discovery — As the pandemic forced teaching remotely, we’ve learned that customer discovery is actually more efficient using video conferencing. It increased the number of interviews the students were able to do each week. When Covid restrictions are over, we plan to add remote customer discovery to the students’ toolkit. It remains to be seen whether customers will remain as available on Zoom as they were during the pandemic. (See here for an extended discussion of remote customer discovery.) Remote discovery also allowed a bigger pool of potential interviews not bounded by geography. The quality of interviewees seemed to improve by this larger pool.
3. Class size/configuration — For the past decade our class size was 8 teams of 4. This year we accepted 12 teams of 4. Previously all teams needed to sit through all 8 weekly presentations. That was tough in person and not sustainable via Zoom. This year, by moving into two breakout sections, we cut the number of presentations that each team sat through by half. The new format allowed students and teaching staff to devote greater attention to each presentation.
4. Adopt a team — in past years all instructors had office hours with all the teams. This year each instructor adopted three teams and saw them weekly for a half hour. Students really appreciated building a closer working relationship with one faculty member.
5. Alumni as guest speakers — Most weeks we invited a past student to guest speak about their journey through the class, highlighting “what I wish I knew” and “what to pay attention to.”
Below are the Lessons Learned presentations from the Lean LaunchPad for deep science and technology, as well as additional learnings from the class.
During the quarter the teams spoke to 1,237 potential customers, beneficiaries, regulators — all via Zoom. Most students spent 15–20 hours a week on the class, about double that of a normal class.
Team Gloflow
Started on Week 1 as a pathology slide digitization service.
Ended in Week 10 as response prediction for cancer treatments.
If you can’t see the Gloflow video, click here
If you can’t see the Gloflow slides, click here
Team Loomia
Started on Week 1 as flexible e-textile circuit looking for a problem.
Ended in Week 10 as easy-to-integrate components for automotive suppliers.
If you can’t see the Loomia video, click here
If you can’t see the Loomia slides, click here
Team Skywalk
Started on Week 1 as wearable gesture control device for real and virtual worlds.
Ended in Week 10 as a future-proof gesture control solution for AR headsets and the Department of Defense.
If you can’t see the Skywalk video, click here
If you can’t see the Skywalk slides, click here
Team EdgeAI
Started on Week 1 as a custom silicon chip with embedded memories and a Machine Learning accelerator targeting low-power, high-throughput, and low-latency applications.
Ended in Week 10 as a chip enabling AI vision applications on next generation battery powered surveillance cameras.
If you can’t see the EdgeAI video click here
If you can’t see the EdgeAI slides, click here
Team MushroomX
Started on Week 1 as Drone pollination of crops.
Ended in Week 10 as autonomous button mushroom harvesting.
If you can’t see the MushroomX video, see here
If you can’t see the MushroomX slides, click here
Team RVEX
Started on Week 1 as a Biomimetic Sleeve as a Left Ventricular Assist Device.
Ended in Week 10 as a Platform technology as a right heart failure device.
If you can’t see the RVEX video, click here
If you can’t see the RVEX slides, click here
Team Pause
Started on Week 1 as a Menopause digital health platform that connects women to providers and other women.
Ended in Week 10 as a D2C Menopause symptom tracking app and on-demand telehealth platform that offers women a personalized and integrative approach to menopause care.
If you can’t see the Pause video, click here
If you can’t see the Pause slides, click here
Team Celsius
Started on Week 1 as an IOT hardware sensor for environmental quality and human presence.
Ended in Week 10 as hybrid work collaboration + employee engagement.
If you can’t see the Celsius video, click here
If you can’t see the Celsius slides, click here
Team TakeCare
Started on Week 1 as a platform for finding and managing at-home senior care.
Ended in Week 10 as a B2C platform for scheduling on-demand at-home senior care.
If you can’t see the TakeCare video, click here
If you can’t see the Take Care slides, click here
Team CareMatch
Started on Week 1 as AI to Match Patients to Post-Acute Care.
Ended in Week 10 as Skilled Nursing Facility-at-Home for Wound Care.
If you can’t see the CareMatch video, click here
If you can’t see the CareMatch slides, click here
Team NeuroDB
Started on Week 1 as Unstructured data Tableau-like tool.
Ended in Week 10 as Cloud-based Pandas dataframe.
If you can’t see the NeuroDB video click here
If you can’t see the NeuroDB slides, click here
Team Drova
Started on Week 1 as a provider for autonomous drone delivery for restaurants and grocery stores.
Ended in Week 10 as Fleet management software for autonomous drone delivery.
If you can’t see the Drova video click here
If you can’t see the Drova slides, click here
Student Comments
I normally don’t include student comments in these summaries, but this year’s summarized why — after a decade — we still teach the class. The students find the class hard and exhausting, and say their instructors are tough and demanding. Yet in the end, the class and the work they invest in is highly rewarding to them.
“Awesome course- one of the best I’ve taken so far. You get out what you put into it, but find a team you like working with, get ready to hustle and work hard, and trust the process. A must-take for entrepreneurs!”
“Absolutely crucial to starting a company for a first-time founder. Couldn’t imagine a better teaching team or learning environment.”
“Very worth taking, whether you want to do a start-up your own or not.”
“Recommend to everyone considering entrepreneurship or want to learn about it.”
“Great class if you are interested in learning about the Customer Discovery Model, but takes a lot of time and work.”
“Intense course where you learn through experience on how to build a startup. I came with a product and I learned to find a solution and how to build from there.”
“Incredible experience — really glad I took the class and happy with the outcome.”
“Steve Blank tells you your slides are ugly”
“Take this course if you get a chance, especially if you are a PhD student. Super useful and a different kind of learning than most case-based classes. Extremely experiential.”
“A great class to learn about customer discovery and entrepreneurship methodologies! The teaching team is incredibly experienced and very honest in their feedback. It is quite time intensive and heavily based on your team. Make sure to clarify expectations with your team beforehand and communicate.”
“Definitely recommend this course, it’s a great experience and will give you tools to launch your idea.”
“A really excellent course to take to learn about entrepreneurship! An invaluable opportunity you might not find anywhere else. The instructors are extremely knowledgeable veteran entrepreneurs who give all the support and encouragement needed.”
Diversity
In past years, the students in the class were mostly men, reflecting the makeup of the applicants. While Ann Miura-Ko was part of the original teaching team, having all male instructors for the last five years didn’t help. Mar Hershenson joined the teaching team in 2018 and made an all-out effort to recruit women to apply. In this new Spring section of the class Heidi Roizen and Jennifer Carolan joined us as instructors. Mar, Heidi and Jennifer are all successful VC’s. They sponsored lunch sessions, mixers and meetings with women entrepreneurs and alumni for female students interested in the class and for male students looking to work with a more diverse team. I am happy to report that as a result of many people’s hard work the gender balance in the class substantially changed. Our Spring cohort focused on deep science and tech had 51 students — 25 were women.
The lessons for me were: 1) the class had been unintentionally signaling a “boys-only” environment, 2) these unconscious biases were easily dismissed by assuming that the class makeup simply reflected the applicant pipeline, and 3) when in fact it required active outreach by a woman to change that perception and bring more women into the pipeline and teams.
Teaching Assistants (TAs)
Our Teaching Assistants keep all the moving parts of the class running. This year their job was even more challenging running the class virtually and they made it run like clockwork.
Each year’s TAs have continued to make the class better (although I must admit it was interesting to watch the TAs remove any student uncertainty about what they need to do week-to-week by moving to a more prescriptive syllabus. Originally, I had designed a level of uncertainty into the class to mimic what a real-world startup feel like.) However, the art of teaching this class is remembering that it wasn’t designed by a focus group.
A Great Class Endures Beyond Its Author
I’ve always believed that great classes continue to thrive after the original teachers have moved on. While I created the Lean LaunchPad methodology and pedagogy (how to teach the class), over the past decade the Stanford class has had ten additional instructors, thirty-three wonderful TA’s and ninety volunteer mentors.
In addition to myself the teaching team has been:
2011 Instructors: Ann Miura-ko, Jon Feiber
Lead TA: Thomas Haymore, TA’s: Felix Huber, Christina Cacioppo
2012 Instructors: Ann Miura-ko, Jon Feiber
Lead TA: Thomas Haymore, TA:, Stephanie Glass
2013 Instructors: Ann Miura-ko, Jon Feiber
Lead TA: Rick Barber, TA: Stephanie Glass
2014 Instructors: Jeff Epstein, Jim Hornthal
Lead TA: Soumya Mohan, TA: Stephanie Zhan, Asst: Gabriel Garza, Jennifer Tsau
2015 Instructors: Jeff Epstein, Steve Weinstein
TA’s: Stephanie Zhan, Gabriel Garza TAs: Jennifer Tsau, Akaash Nanda, Asst: Nick Hershey
2016 Instructors: Jeff Epstein, Steve Weinstein
Lead TA: Jose Ignacio del Villar TA’s: Akaash Nanda, Nick Hershey, Zabreen Khan, Asst: Eric Peter
2017 Instructors: Jeff Epstein, Steve Weinstein
Lead TA: Eric Peter TA’s: Nick Hershey, Lorel Sim Karan Singhal Asst: Jenny Xia
2018 Instructors: Jeff Epstein, Steve Weinstein, Mar Hershenson, George John
Lead TA: Jenny Xia TA’s: Anand Upender, Marco Lorenzon, Lorel Sim Asst: Parker Ence, Trent Hazy, Sigalit Perelson
2019 Instructors: Jeff Epstein, Steve Weinstein, Mar Hershenson, George John, Tom Bedecarre
Lead TA: Parker Ence, Trent Hazy TA’s: Marco Lorenzon, Sigalit Perelson, Lorel Sim Asst:, Ashley Wu
2020 Instructors: Jeff Epstein, Steve Weinstein, Mar Hershenson, George John, Tom Bedecarre
Lead TA: Marco Lorenzon, Ashley Wu TA’s: Sigalit Perelson, Gopal Raman
2021 — Winter Instructors: Jeff Epstein, Mar Hershenson, George John, Tom Bedecarre
Lead TA: Erica Meehan, Anand Lalwani, TA’s: Gopal Raman, Andrew Hojel
2021 — Spring Instructors: Steve Weinstein, Heidi Roizen, Jennifer Carolan, Tom Bedecarre
Lead TAs: Sandra Ha, Lorenz Pallhuber TA: Manan Rai
Our Decade of Mentors
The mentors (industry experts) who volunteer their time have been supported and coordinated by Tom Bedecarre and Todd Basche. Each mentor’s contribution gets graded by the student team they coached.
Bryan Stolle, Charles Hudson, Dan Martell, David Feinlab, David Stewart, Doug Camplejohn, Eric Carr, George Zachary, Gina Bianchini, Heiko Hubertz, Hiten Shah, Jason Davies, Jim Greer, Jim Smith, Jonathan Ebinger, Josh Schwarzapel, Joshua Reeves, Justin Schaffer, Karen Richardson, Marianne Wu, Masheesh Jain, Ravi Belani, Rowan Chapman, Shawn Carolan, Steve Turner, Sven Strohbad, Thomas Hessler, Will Harvey, Ashton Udall, Ethan Bloch, Jonathan Abrams, Nick O’Connor, Pete Vlastellica, Steve Weinstein, Adi Bittan, Alan Chiu, George Zachary, Jeff Epstein, Kat Barr, Konstantin Guericke, Michael Borrus, Scott Harley, Jorge Heraud, Bob Garrow, Eyal Shavit, Ethan Kurzweil, Jim Anderson, George John, Dan Manian, Lee Redden, Steve King, Sunil Nagaraj, Evan Rapoport, Haydi Danielson, Nicholas O’Connor, Jake Seid, Tom Bedecarre, Lucy Lu, Adam Smith, Justin Wickett, Allan May, Craig Seidel, Rafi Holtzman, Roger Ross, Danielle Fong, Mar Hershenson, Heather Richman, Jim Cai, Siqi Mou, Vera Kenehan, Phil Dillard, Susan Golden, Todd Basche, Robert Locke, Maria Amundson, Freddy Dopfel, Don Peppers, Rekha Pai, Radhika Malpani, Michael Heinrich, MariaLena Popo, Jordan Segall, Mike Dorsey, Katie Connor, Anmol Madan, Kira Makagon, Andrew Westergren, Wendy Tsu, Teresa Briggs, Pradeep Jotwani.
And thanks to the continued support of Tom Byers, Tina Seelig, Kathy Eisenhardt, Ritta Katilla, Bob Sutton and Chuck Eesly at Stanford Technology Ventures Program (the entrepreneurship center in the Stanford Engineering School).
Steve Blank writes about teaching entrepreneurship at www.steveblank.com. | https://medium.com/@sgblank/lean-launchpad-for-deep-science-and-technology-eb142bfa0dc7 | ['Steve Blank'] | 2021-06-24 14:49:19.393000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneurship', 'Teaching', 'Higher Education', 'Technology', 'Lean Startup'] |
Julian Vergov Bitcoin — Review. “Bitcoin Trader Julian Vergov” Click… | “Bitcoin Trader Julian Vergov” Click Here To Join!
Check out my analysis to see how we compare to other auto-traders in the crypto industry.
Here’s my brief review of my Bitcoin Dealer.
I got together with Bitcoin Trader to keep it quick, and I added $250 to my account because it’s the sum recommended to maximize your earnings ultimately. Today is my sixth day using the software, and I was able to hit $11,000+, but I’m still trying to reach my $21,000 target by the end of the week.
My Honest Analysis of Bitcoin Auto Trader:
Bitcoin Dealer has a super-speed program that exchanges a large number of trades every day. The framework uses the existing business establishment and rapid AI, which gives this program a favorable position over the other systems.
This item has an unfortunate speed of just .07 percent after more than six years of automatic trade. This means you’d have a very low chance of losing your cash, like less than 1% of the probability of misfortune. Take the divider lane!
The machine signal carries out transactions with 163 exchanges in 35 countries, and the amount of trades it is getting to is disconcerting-4 million!
After looking at the association behind this signing scheme, I found that it was on favorable terms. In 2018, this Trading Application earned $723 million in benefits, which was 11 percent more than the Merchant of 2019. A beautiful return.
This year, regardless of how the market sectors are in a state of unrest, this bitcoin merchant has determined that he will start picking up $650 million in benefits amid immense misfortunes on world securities exchanges.
I’ve been wildly looking for some real technique to pick up money online from home for as long as two years. I was looking for a dream that I couldn’t get my all-day pound by working my hours and making shrewd speculations. So when I caught the breeze of the broker robot on my Facebook channel, the thought provoked my curiosity.
How does it work?
You start by opening a record to use Bitcoin Dealer. At the hour of my registration, they provided a record master to walk you through the cycle and “hold your hand” for your first projects. For the calculation to make trades, it needs assets to work with, so I just stacked the base to start with $250. In any case, writing this out of what’s to come, I’m thinking about how much better my earnings would have been if I had started higher. When I stacked the assets, Bitcoin Broker dominated and started to do business for me!
Having used Bitcoin Merchant for a couple of days, I’m very excited about the performance. Bitcoin Broker can consistently trade when the conditions are acceptable, but it is inactive as a general rule. However, I’ve found out on the off chance that you’re only keeping your PC running with the intention that it can do business at whatever point it needs to, you have the best results. So I just let it go and let it get me some cash while I’m resting!
My Score of Bitcoin Trader: 4.75 /5
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“Bitcoin Trader Julian Vergov” | https://medium.com/@kelsihewitt9/julian-vergov-bitcoin-review-db46674f28ef | ['Kelsi Hewitt'] | 2021-06-22 11:52:36.629000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin Wallet', 'Bitcoin Mining', 'Bitcoin News', 'Bitcoincash', 'Bitcoin'] |
Predicting Visitor-to-Customer Conversion for an Online Store via Supervised Machine Learning- Part 1: Introduction to Business Case and Exploratory Data Analysis | Predicting Visitor-to-Customer Conversion for an Online Store via Supervised Machine Learning- Part 1: Introduction to Business Case and Exploratory Data Analysis Bharat Sethuraman Sharman Oct 27, 2020·10 min read
In this two part series, I will write about my experience working on a Kaggle Data Challenge (Here’s the Link) as a part of a graduate course on Statistical Learning that I took at the University of Waterloo as a Masters Student in Statistics.
In the first part, I will talk about the following two topics:
Business Case behind this Data Science problem Exploratory Data Analysis
So, let’s dive in straight into the problem:
Business Case:
The owner of an online jewellery shop wants to figure out a way to increase her revenues. In particular, she wants to accurately predict whether a visitor to her website will end up purchasing a jewellery product.
At a surface level, this looks like a simple issue. Let’s say she gets 1000 visitors to her website on an average per week and 10 of them buy a product. So all she has to do is analyze web-data about 10 these people and generate targeted advertisements to get them buy more in the future.
Let’s stop and think about the intricacies of this issue. These people have already purchased her product. So they are likely to make purchases in the future too. Out of the remaining 990, are there customers similar to these customers who left just short of making a purchase ? If so, what features underlie this similarity ? Where are the customers located, when do they make the purchase, can the non-buyers be nudged to make a purchase if we come to know that some of them spent a while on pages where a discount was running, how many of the people who did not make a purchase this week are existing customers and how many of them are new visitors ?
As we see, the task of increasing the revenue of an online store through predictive analytics is far from trivial. There are many variables and in such a multi-dimensional setting, we can leverage the power of Machine Learning to improve the accuracy of customer prediction and uncover insights from the patterns that we can then leverage to achieve our objective of increasing sales.
2. Exploratory Data Analysis
Imbalanced Dataset
The training and the test datasets can be found here on my GitHub page of the project.
The training and the test datasets consist of 8630 and 3700 visitor entries respectively. The predictor variable Revenue is set to1 for visitors who turned customers and 0 otherwise.
The dataset is highly imbalanced i.e. out of the 8630 visitors in the training dataset, only 1335 turned customers, i.e. a conversion rate of 15.4%.
This is important to note because we want to make sure that our prediction algorithm does not err on the side of the majority class and simply predict every entry as a non-customer. So we must choose the right metric to evaluate the results of our predictive algorithm. An example will make this clear:
Let’s say that we have an algorithm that simply labels every entry as belonging to the majority class. In our case, out of every 100 entries, 85 will belong to the majority class (Non-Revenue ) and therefore, the algorithm that simply labels each entry as non-revenue will achieve an accuracy of 85%. The downside however is that it has a 0% accuracy over entries that belong to the minority class as it will classify every Revenue entry as Non-Revenue.
So Accuracy is not the right metric here. Instead, we choose a metric that captures how well the algorithm classifies the minority class. The ROC AUC score is one such metric. ROC AUC stands for Receiver Operating Curve — Area Under Curve. The ROC AUC score ranges between 0 and 1 and a high value signifies that the model has high skill in separating the positive and the negative examples. It is a commonly used metric to evaluate the performance of models especially in cases of imbalanced datasets. A good explantion of the underlying theory and intuition can be found here
Data Attributes
The dataset has 17 predictor attributes that are either numerical ( continuous and discrete) and categorical, a customer ID and the revenue output variable that takes either 0 or 1.
I have created a word document here that has a brief description of each of these attributes.
Missing Values
I sorted the training dataset (online_jewellery_shop_train.xlsx) in Excel to see if some entries had some attributes that were missing. There were 8 entries that had 8 missing attributes. As these 8 entries represent less than 0.1% of the training dataset, I removed them from the dataset. Similarly, the test dataset had 6 entries that did not have these 8 attributes and I removed them too. I approximated the visitor to customer conversion probability for these missing test set entries by assigning the average value of the predicted probabililty of the whole test class to each of them. While this is an approximation, given that the missing entries are very few (~0.1%) and the pattern of missing attributes is consistent, I felt this would be an acceptable thing to do in this case. If the number of entries with missing values were significant, say 5–10% of the dataset, then this strategy of removing missing values could lead to a loss of valuable information. An alternative strategy, such as imputing missing values would be needed in that case.
The missing attributes of the training and the test datasets are shown in the tables below:
Missing Values in the Training Dataset
Missing Values in the Test Dataset
The training and the test datasets after removing the entries that have missing attributes can be found here (input_training_data.csv and input_test_data.csv).
Trends from Exploratory Data Analysis:
I present some trends that I observed from the EDA that I performed on the Training Data. The underlying theme behind my EDA is the following:
For each categorical attribute, I have plotted the percentage of Revenue (0) and Non-Revenue (1) visitors and compared that to the average value of Revenue visitors, i.e ~15%. By doing so, I hope to check if there are some attributes whose specific values result in disproportionately high or low revenue generating visitors. I have used the terms revenue visitors/revenue generating visitors and customers interchangeably.
For example, on plotting the percentage of revenue generating visitors vs the number of jewellery pages they visit, it is clear that those visitors who visit more than 20 pages have a signigicantly higher conversion rate than visitors who visit less than 20 pages.
This suggests that if the website is made appealing for people to stay and browse jewellery pages, people might buy more. This is a correlation and might not mean causation, i.e. those visitors who eventually buy might be spending more time on jewellery pages. However, one can do an experimental design and test the hypothesis that appealing webpages make people stay more and eventually buy more as well.
Conversion Rate vs Number of Pages visited on the website
For example, when I plotted the customers as per the number of administrative pages that they visited, I observed that there is no particular trend in terms of the percentage of customers (Revenue=1) and the number of administrative pages that they have browsed except the fact that out of those visitors who do not browse any adminstrative page (3994 of them), only 9% (362) made a purchase. So prima facie, the number of administrative pages seems to be a non-significant factor for revenue generation except for this tid-bit of observation.
I have shared the results of my exploratory data analysis here
Here’s the summary of my EDA findings:
Page Values: There is a strong positive correlation between the number of jewellery shop pages visited and the conversion rate. People who visit more than 20 pages have an especially higher conversion rate (>70%)as compared to the people who visit 20 or less pages (~10%). This suggests that if the website is made appealing for people to stay and browse jewellery pages, people might buy more. This is a correlation and might not mean causation, i.e. those visitors who eventually buy might be visiting more jewellery pages. However, one can do an experimental design and test the hypothesis that appealing webpages make people stay more and eventually buy more as well. Exit Rate: There is a strong negative correlation between the Exit Rate and the conversion rate. Exit rates of 0.02 and above are associated with a below average rate of conversion. Bounce Rate: There is a strong negative correlation between the Bounce Rate and the conversion rate. Bounce rates of 0.01 and above are associated with a below average rate of conversion. Time spent on Product Related pages: There is a strong positive correlation between the time visitors spent on Product Related pages and the conversion rate. People who spent beween 3200–6400 units of time on product related pages had a conversion rate of ~30%. This insight can help in boosting sales by for example, installing a time tracker on the website and as soon as people exceed a threshold of time spent on product related pages, they can be offered a discount to prompt them to buy a product. Time spent on Informational pages: There is a weak positive correlation between the time visitors spent on Informational pages and the conversion rate. While there is clearly a jump at 130 units, i.e. people spending over 130 units have at least 25% conversion rate as compared to 15% for those spending less than 130 units of time, those who spend 520–650 units have a conversion rate of only 27%. Time spent on Administrative pages: Similar to the case of informational pages, there is a weak positive correlation between the time visitors spent on Adminstrative pages and the conversion rate. Number of Product Related Pages visited: There is a strong positive correlation between the number of Product Related pages visited by people and the conversion rate. It is quite likely that there might be a strong correlation between this variable and the time spent on product related pages. I have not checked for such correlations in this data challenge but will address this issue in a separate post. Number of Administrative Pages visited: Overall, there does not seem to be a correlation but those visitors who do not visit administrative pages at all buy at a significantly lower rate (9%)than those who visit one or more pages (20%). Again, this variable could be strongly correlated with the time spent on adminstrative pages. Number of Informational Pages visited: The trend seems to be quite similar to the time spent on informational pages. So these two variables could be correlated. Closeness to a special day: It might seem counter intuitive, but closeness of the day of visit to a special day results in a lower conversion rate. This of course depends on how we define the degree of closeness but if 0 means that the day of visit is far from the special day and 1 means that the day of visit is on the special day, then there is clear a negative correlation. Month of visit: November seems to be the month having the highest conversion rate (26%). This store can use this observation to sell more during this month, i.e. try channeling more traffic to the website during November and see whether it results in even higher sales. Weekend: Weekends result in higher conversion rates as compared to weekdays, 17% vs 15%. Visitor Type: A new visitor has a significantly higher conversion rate (25%) than a returning visitor (15%). This means that if a new visitor is coming to the website, one can leverage the novelty of experience to make a sale. This can be opportunistic but can be acted upon if the site experience is good enough for a sizeable majority of the new visitors to return. Traffic Type: Traffic Type 2 results in the maximum number of conversions (587) and has a relatively high rate as well (20%). The IT team can investigate why the highest number of revenue generators belong to this type and if this variable is alterable, then can other people also be converted to traffic of this type ? Region: This does have any effect on conversion rates. So region based marketing might not be helpful for this store. However, by far the maximum number of revenue generating visitors are from Region 1 (549). So the marketing team must be careful to make sure that they guard their position in thos region from competition. Browser: Most buyers seem to use Browser 2 but the type of browser does not seem to have only a weak correlation with conversion rates. Operating System: While Operating Systems 2 and 1account for most revenue generating visitors, there is no correlation of conversion rates with this variable either.
So the key business insights that I got from the EDA are the following:
A. Focus on Web-Design: Investing in making the Website more appealing and user friendly can potentially result in higher sales: There is a strong positive correlation between variables such as Page Value, Number of Product Pages visited etc and the conversion rate. So, there seems to be a business case for investing in increasing the retentive capacity of the website. One can confirm this hypothesis by designing, running and analyzing experiments.
B. Fix technical issues of the website: A low Exit Rate and Bounce Rate have high conversion rates. So reducing these two rates are also likely to result in a higher conversion rates.
C. Give special care to new visitors : New visitors to the website have a higher conversion rates than existing visitors. So, if a new visitor is coming to the website, the marketing team can offer discounts / special deals to convert these first time visitors to revenue generating visitors.
D. Certain months result in higher conversion rates: November seems to be the golden month. So, the marketing budget can allocate a higher portion of spending to the weeks leading to November and the month of November itself.
E. Special Days: Contrary to what one might think, conversion rates on special days are lower than normal days.
That’s it for Part 1! I Hope you found something here that you can apply in your work.
In Part 2 (see here), I will be covering Data Preprocessing and Implementing Supervised Classfification Algorithms ( Random Tree and XGBoost). | https://medium.com/@bharatss/predicting-visitor-to-customer-conversion-for-an-online-store-via-supervised-machine-learning-d5943b4a0e04 | ['Bharat Sethuraman Sharman'] | 2020-10-28 04:10:41.843000+00:00 | ['Predictive Analytics', 'Data Science', 'Supervised Learning', 'Machine Learning', 'Digital Marketing'] |
Biblical Lessons in Strategic Planning from Joseph’s Life | We all know about poor little Joseph. His story takes 14 chapters in Genesis from 37 through 50, a whopping 28% of the entire book. He was his father’s favorite, his mother died in childbirth with his baby brother Benjamin, his half-brothers from other mothers hated him and sold him into slavery.
He refused sex and did prison time on false attempted rape charges. He had a penchant for interpretting dreams and visions. He masterfully hid his identity from the jealous brothers and then created a scenario that forced them to admit their wrongs and allowed him to reveal his true identity.
It could be argued that Joseph was really the first recorded strategic planner. What does a strategic planner do? According to JobDescriptions.net, a strategic planner “ is responsible for guiding the company through financial obstacles and helping to achieving its goal of continued profitability and growing revenues.”
Also:
a strategic planner determines where an organization is heading over the next year or more. He formulates strategies or suggests changes or improvements to current business plans, policies, and procedures. It is his job to formulate feasible recommendations to the management on how to optimize near-term growth.
Strategic planning is the process by which the executive management establishes the long-term direction of an organization. Basic steps include assessing the company’s environment and resources, defining the mission and vision, identifying priorities and objectives, and selecting valuable strategies.
Clearly, in Genesis 41, Joseph functions as a strategic planner. He helped Pharaoh identify a coming crisis to the entire country, which could be viewed as a mega-corporation. He recommended the path forward to Pharaoh for a policy of storing the harvest in plentiful years and set procedures for distributions from the stores in the drought. The plan was long-range and involved nearly 15 years of planning and execution. He assessed current resources and developed a strategy for managing those resources during the lean years.
But he wasn’t always a world-class strategic planner. He had a lot of hard times. Any of those hard times could have knocked him down and out, depressed and oppressed him to the point of never being more than a slave.
So, besides faith in God, what was it that he had that prepared him for serving Pharaoh? It was his teachability, his willingness to learn from situations. What lessons did he learn?
Dreaming big doesn’t necessarily mean dreaming for the now or that you’re ready (Joseph 37:5–11)
God gave Joseph two dreams. In one all the wheat sheaves in his family bowed to his wheat sheaf. In another, the sun, moon, and 11 stars bowed to him.
While these dreams were big, they weren’t for the immediate now. And when he shared them, he showed that he had the rash, reckless impetuosity of youth that were irritating and came across as prideful and arrogant. He just wasn’t ready to handle them.
Some dreams just take years to plan and execute. Others take a lifetime. On the path to the dream, you have to learn and grow along the way.
Unjust circumstances can be a prison or a stepping stone (Genesis 39)
Potiphar purchased Joseph and placed Joseph in a position of trust running Potiphar’s household. Joseph faithfully executed his duties, including refusing to sleep with Potiphar’s wife.
A scorned woman, Potiphar’s wife managed to set in place circumstances that made it look like Joseph tried to rape her. That landed him in prison.
Joseph could have gone into a massive pity party; instead, he lived faithfully and righteously with his God and earned the warden’s favor so that Joseph ran the prison for the warden.
A strong person properly expresses negative emotions (Genesis 42:24, 43:30–31, 45:2)
Along the way to developing and following the plan to save Egypt, Joseph was wounded by his brothers. They separated him from his family and sold him. He was lost to them, and they and his father were lost to him. He could have been so angry and bitter that he never left a place of slavery. Or he could have been so brutal and cruel that he killed his tormentors outright.
Instead throughout his life’s journey, he learned wisdom and people skills. Not only could he manage goods, he attained self-mastery that allowed him to be self-controlled when he needed to be and express his emotions in a private setting where it didn’t affect his strategic efforts for all of Egypt.
Accumulated wealth is not evil and can be used for good (Genesis 47:13–26)
As the famine continued and food got scarce, food could no longer be given away. It had to be sold. The people first sold their goods and their livestock. When that was gone, they sold their land for food. They became pharaoh’s slaves.
Now it could be argued that pharaoh should have just given away the food. But if we go back to the idea of Egypt as a mega-corporation, most corporations are in business to make money. Therefore, selling the food made sense. The good thing that pharaoh did was that he used the money to keep his own people alive (albeit as slaves) instead of spending it for opulent and decadent living (at least at first). | https://medium.com/kittie-phoenix-the-next-edition/biblical-lessons-in-strategic-planning-from-josephs-life-539e136536 | ['Kittie Phoenix'] | 2017-05-09 22:01:01.172000+00:00 | ['Strategic Planning', 'Bible', 'Life Lessons'] |
My Green List | In the past few years I’ve made several changes to be more ecologically responsible—use less, reduce, reuse, recycle. These seemingly small changes, though relatively easy in a place like New York, took a lot of effort. I want to acknowledge others like myself, battling away silently in homes and offices, and hope to lend them a hand. This list is for them, and those who want to join in, do more.
Guiding principle
Avoid stuff unless it’s absolutely essential, will be used for a long time, replaces one or more items, and can be recycled or reused. Teaching myself to want, and therefore, need less was the hardest part.
The List
Still need help with | https://medium.com/green-lists/my-green-list-5153763ce558 | ['Ritwik Dey'] | 2020-12-24 18:21:19.087000+00:00 | ['Environment', 'Reduce', 'Eco Friendly', 'Recycle', 'Consumerism'] |
Why is Investing important ? We Explain ! | Let us have a look at another example-
The above image explains-
At Age of 30 years- to reach your goal of Rs 10 lacs , you have to invest Rs 7234 every year for next 35 years.
At Age of 40years- to reach your goal of Rs 10 lacs , you have to invest Rs 15,811 every year for next 25years.
The later you start the difficult it becomes to achieve the kind of wealth that you would like to generate. This is because of the importance of Compounding Returns.
What are Compounding Returns?
The compound return is the rate of return, usually expressed as a percentage, that represents the cumulative effect that a series of gains or losses has on an original amount of capital over a period of time. Compound returns are usually expressed in annual terms, meaning that the percentage number that is reported represents the annualized rate at which capital has compounded over time.
Basically, Fixed Deposit or PPF are examples of Simple Interest and equity related instruments like Stocks & Mutual Funds etc. are examples of Compound Interest . Let me show you how.
Power Of Investing early with Compounding
You invest Rs 1 lakh today in Fixed Deposit and Interest Rate is 6% , so what you get is Rs 6000 as income every year .
But if you buy a Company’s Share( One share is for RS 10,000)for Rs 1 lakh- what you get is 10 shares | https://medium.com/@daksh-rustagi-investing-101/why-is-investing-important-we-explain-5834dce7e3a5 | ['Daksh Rustagi'] | 2020-12-19 11:37:44.826000+00:00 | ['Gold', 'Financial Advisor', 'Stocks', 'Bitcoin', 'Investing'] |
The Allure of the Bad Boy | Why do women love bad boys? Why did I?
1. You are an emotional adrenaline junkie.
Bad boys are always a little jittery, a little live-wirey, a lot unpredictable. You can hear the thunder, but never know where the lightning is going to strike.
The euphoria you get from them telling you that they love you or having sex with them is so intense that you crave it like an addict craves their next hit.
You want those highs so badly that you stick it out through the terrible lows, like when they aren’t calling, when you have a fight that was so bad it has you wondering whether it may or may not have been abuse.
Really, the lower the lows, the higher the highs feel, so to you, it’s worth it.
2. You know he has so much potential.
It’s always that fairy tale crap. You think he hasn’t met the right person. He’s listless, unfocused, drinks too much, doesn’t have the right job, and/or has some issues he needs to work out on a therapist’s couch.
What your ego tells you that he just hasn’t met you. You will be able to help him be the man you think he can be.
People who are afraid of commitment often attempt to commit to people who are inappropriate or unavailable. They choose them specifically because they subconsciously know a long-term relationship isn’t possible with them.
4. You’re ovulating.
I hate even writing that because it reads so incredibly sexist. Hormones are going to make women like bad boys?? But we are animals and thus are not immune to our bodies’ responses. In a study by Christina M. Larson and others, it was found that women are more attracted to “masculine” or “alpha” males during the ovulatory part of their cycle. The conclusion is that women (and other female animals) are drawn to “males with traits associated with fit genes that they can pass on to their offspring.”
In another study by Gregory Louis Carter and others, it was found that some men may have developed a “Dark Triad” personality as an evolutionary short-term mating strategy. The “Dark Triad” refers to men who exhibit narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Since women find “alpha” males more attractive during ovulation, they would inevitably be drawn to these Dark Triad figures who exhibit dominance, power, aggression, and assertiveness.
5. You’re young.
Sigal Tifferet and Daniel J. Kruger in their study surveyed 1,365 women, ranging in age from 14 to 68, about their preferences in a male partner. The women were asked to rate how likely they would be to have a long-term or short-term sexual relationship with a “dad” or “cad.”
Women generally preferred the “dad” type for a long-term partner and the “cad” for a short-term sexual affair. However, older women tended to prefer the “dad” type for all relationship lengths. Young women, in contrast, were more likely to consider brief sexual affairs, particularly with the cad.
The authors suggest that this effect might be due to changing fertility. Younger women may be more interested in securing “good genes” from attractive men, even if that means a short-term sexual affair. Older women, in contrast, may change focus away from sex and getting pregnant, toward securing good provisioning and resources for themselves and any existing children. | https://tarablairball.medium.com/the-allure-of-the-bad-boy-3071d48658c2 | ['Tara Blair Ball'] | 2019-07-08 16:21:49.890000+00:00 | ['Women', 'Relationships', 'Mental Health', 'Love', 'Psychology'] |
Growing up is the realization that you are both the sculpture and the sculptor, the painter and the portrait. Paint yourself however you wish | Growing up is the realization that you are both the sculpture and the sculptor, the painter and the portrait. Paint yourself however you wish Onu Nov 19, 2020·5 min read
Life is a journey of twists and turns, peaks and valleys, mountains to climb and oceans to explore.
Good times and bad times. Happy times and sad times.
But always, life is a movement forward.
No matter where you are on the journey, in some way, you are continuing on — and that’s what makes it so magnificent. One day, you’re questioning what on earth will ever make you feel happy and fulfilled. And the next, you’re perfectly in flow, writing the most important book of your entire career.
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What nobody ever tells you, though, when you are a wide-eyed child, are all the little things that come along with “growing up.”
1. Most people are scared of using their imagination.
They’ve disconnected with their inner child.
They don’t feel they are “creative.”
They like things “just the way they are.”
2. Your dream doesn’t really matter to anyone else.
Some people might take interest. Some may support you in your quest. But at the end of the day, nobody cares, or will ever care about your dream as much as you.
3. Friends are relative to where you are in your life.
Most friends only stay for a period of time — usually in reference to your current interest. But when you move on, or your priorities change, so too do the majority of your friends.
4. Your potential increases with age.
As people get older, they tend to think that they can do less and less — when in reality, they should be able to do more and more, because they have had time to soak up more knowledge. Being great at something is a daily habit. You aren’t just “born” that way.
5. Spontaneity is the sister of creativity.
If all you do is follow the exact same routine every day, you will never leave yourself open to moments of sudden discovery. Do you remember how spontaneous you were as a child? Anything could happen, at any moment!
6. You forget the value of “touch” later on.
When was the last time you played in the rain?
When was the last time you sat on a sidewalk and looked closely at the cracks, the rocks, the dirt, the one weed growing between the concrete and the grass nearby.
Do that again.
You will feel so connected to the playfulness of life.
7. Most people don’t do what they love.
It’s true.
The “masses” are not the ones who live the lives they dreamed of living. And the reason is because they didn’t fight hard enough. They didn’t make it happen for themselves. And the older you get, and the more you look around, the easier it becomes to believe that you’ll end up the same.
Don’t fall for the trap.
8. Many stop reading after college.
Ask anyone you know the last good book they read, and I’ll bet most of them respond with, “Wow, I haven’t read a book in a long time.”
9. People talk more than they listen.
There is nothing more ridiculous to me than hearing two people talk “at” each other, neither one listening, but waiting for the other person to stop talking so they can start up again.
10. Creativity takes practice.
It’s funny how much we as a society praise and value creativity, and yet seem to do as much as we can to prohibit and control creative expression unless it is in some way profitable.
If you want to keep your creative muscle pumped and active, you have to practice it on your own.
11. “Success” is a relative term.
As kids, we’re taught to “reach for success.”
What does that really mean? Success to one person could mean the opposite for someone else.
Define your own Success.
12. You can’t change your parents.
A sad and difficult truth to face as you get older: You can’t change your parents.
They are who they are.
Whether they approve of what you do or not, at some point, no longer matters. Love them for bringing you into this world, and leave the rest at the door.
13. The only person you have to face in the morning is yourself.
When you’re younger, it feels like you have to please the entire world.
You don’t.
Do what makes you happy, and create the life you want to live for yourself. You’ll see someone you truly love staring back at you every morning if you can do that.
14. Nothing feels as good as something you do from the heart.
No amount of money or achievement or external validation will ever take the place of what you do out of pure love.
Follow your heart, and the rest will follow.
15. Your potential is directly correlated to how well you know yourself.
Those who know themselves and maximize their strengths are the ones who go where they want to go.
Those who don’t know themselves, and avoid the hard work of looking inward, live life by default. They lack the ability to create for themselves their own future.
16. Everyone who doubts you will always come back around.
That kid who used to bully you will come asking for a job.
The girl who didn’t want to date you will call you back once she sees where you’re headed. It always happens that way.
Just focus on you, stay true to what you believe in, and all the doubters will eventually come asking for help.
17. You are a reflection of the 5 people you spend the most time with.
Nobody creates themselves, by themselves.
We are all mirror images, sculpted through the reflections we see in other people. This isn’t a game you play by yourself. Work to be surrounded by those you wish to be like, and in time, you too will carry the very things you admire in them.
18. Beliefs are relative to what you pursue.
Wherever you are in life, and based on who is around you, and based on your current aspirations, those are the things that shape your beliefs.
Nobody explains, though, that “beliefs” then are not “fixed.” There is no “right and wrong.” It is all relative.
Find what works for you.
19. Anything can be a vice.
Be wary.
Again, there is no “right” and “wrong” as you get older. A coping mechanism to one could be a way to relax on a Sunday to another. Just remain aware of your habits and how you spend your time, and what habits start to increase in frequency — and then question where they are coming from in you and why you feel compelled to repeat them.
Never mistakes, always lessons.
As I said, know yourself.
20. Your purpose is to be YOU.
What is the meaning of life?
To be you, all of you, always, in everything you do — whatever that means to you. You are your own creator. You are your own evolving masterpiece.
Growing up is the realization that you are both the sculpture and the sculptor, the painter and the portrait. Paint yourself however you wish. | https://medium.com/@onu823/growing-up-is-the-realization-that-you-are-both-the-sculpture-and-the-sculptor-the-painter-and-59a5d65406ea | [] | 2020-11-19 19:11:44.557000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Sports', 'Social Media', 'News', 'Live Streaming'] |
“How Do We Get Users to Stop Craving Human Interaction?” | “How Do We Get Users to Stop Craving Human Interaction?”
A tech short story.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
“You all know the head of the support team. They provide customer service. They’re great. We honor them with pizza parties and beer every time our company survey reveals they’re suicidal. We absolutely love them, and ignore the anti-corporate memes on their social media pages. We are here with the support team to ask a very vital question.”
“Happy to be here. Happy to help.”
“Are you?”
“No. But I perfected feigning sincerity at my AA meetings.”
“…Very good. So our question is this: How do we get users to stop craving human interaction?”
“What?”
“See, you provide customer service and we love you for it. Absolutely. What you do is so important. So, so important. We’d be nothing without you. Please don’t fall off the wagon. But if we could get fewer people writing and calling in, well, you know, that would be less work for you.”
“Uh, okay.”
“But surveys show that even when the support section answers a person’s question, and even with the most convincing bots, people still prefer human interaction. They want to feel like a human being is listening to them.”
“Right.”
“Yes. So, how do we stop that?”
“You want people to stop preferring talking to an actual human…so that I don’t have a job anymore? Why would I help you do this? I mean, honestly, I don’t think it’s possible. I think if you understood anything about people, you’d know this isn’t possible. But aside from that…why would I help you fire me?”
“We wouldn’t be firing you. No one is using that language here. We would be freeing you to perform other tasks.”
“…Such as?”
“Coding!”
“What? I don’t want to learn to code.”
“You don’t?”
“No, and I’m tired of everyone in tech pushing this women who code narrative onto me. My job is important. I like talking to people and working with people. I’m tired of being treated like something is wrong with that, and that I have to level up. I have skills dealing with people. Well, not you, but like…people who like people. I am tired of devaluing what I know is a useful skill.”
“But…didn’t the support job drive you to drink?”
“No, it was all the free alcohol and never getting a raise that drove me to drink.”
“We’re getting hung up on the wrong things and frankly, I’m afraid we’re getting off-course. Back to the topic at hand…Why don’t you think it’s possible?”
“To make humans stop wanting human interactions? Because it’s the very nature of being human. If you automate the entire world, it’ll be more efficient, but everyone will hate it. People get angry at self-checkout. Not everyone is you. Maybe you like it, and you think it’s more convenient. But a lot of people like seeing a familiar face and hearing a familiar voice. You know when you don’t have enough money for something, and your local grocer tells you to just take it and pay them next time? People want a world like that. They want the kind of world you’re trying to eliminate.”
“People want things to be less efficient?”
“If it means being more flexible and more human, yes. Not everyone prioritizes efficiency above all things. Some people value warmth.”
“And you really don’t want to work as a programmer?”
“Not really, no.”
“So then…why did you volunteer to help our AI learn how to automate support?”
“So I can teach it wrong. When a customer threatens to sue our company, the robot sends 16 smiley face 😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊 emojis now.”
“What?!”
“This might be a good time to tell you I’m quitting.” | https://medium.com/are-you-okay/how-do-we-get-users-to-stop-craving-human-interaction-730de655818e | ['Lisa Martens'] | 2020-12-25 20:36:23.139000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Support', 'Social Media', 'Customer Service', 'Tech'] |
Got It! | This morning I surpassed 18,000 km on my bike.
There is something surreal about accomplishing this in my basement, without moving an inch forward during the 90+ minutes of riding.
Hit my goal: 18,000 km
G2 and stretching before hand are crucial to getting in the 50 km ride. Seems ridiculous now that I think about it, but I became so cavalier with my outdoor cycling, I got to a point where I stopped stretching, just leaving the early kilometers of the ride to loosen me up. Riding outside, this wasn’t much of a problem, though the omission probably manifested itself in excess soreness the next day.
The number is arbitrary. The goal is meaningful only to me. I’m unsure if I’m even doing this for fitness, at this point. I’ve hit a plateau with cycling where I just cannot go a day without it. There was a day in the summer (where the weather certainly conspired in my favour, rarely raining me out) where a day of ridiculous rain kept me indoors. I got a needed rest, but more than once I stood at narrow window next to my front door like a little kid, waiting to see if the rain wouldn’t suddenly cease and the sun come out and make everything all right. I crawled the walls that day. Ran on my wife’s treadmill and did an hour or two of yoga, but nicotine-tick of my cycling addiction was not sated.
Today’s totals
I thought I would get to around 15,000 km this year, and would have loved to hit 20,000 km, but that’ll be next year. My January and February were quite lackluster, so it’ll be easy to improve upon them now that I have a good, reliable trainer. I’ll head outside when I can, but heading into the least hospitable months, I won’t push it. No slides on the ice for me! | https://medium.com/the-kilominator-chronicles/got-it-4cb82f060928 | ['Matthew St. Amand'] | 2021-12-24 22:27:37.837000+00:00 | ['Cycling', 'Mental Health'] |
Why and how you should protect your Web Applications in the cloud | Public Internet is brutal. It is essential to have a Web Application Firewall (WAF) and powerful Content Delivery Network (CDN) capabilities to protect your Web applications and Web sites. But what vendor shall we choose and why?
The average cost of a data breach has risen to $3.92 million. Reports show a 1.6% increase in costs in 2018 and a 12% rise over the last five years. Fines for violating the regulation can range from up to €20 million ($22.5 million) to 4 per cent of a company annual global revenue — whichever is greater.
Top Cases of data breaches
Globally, just under 30% of organizations are likely to suffer at least one breach over the next 24 months. U.S. organizations face the highest costs with an average of $8.19 million per breach, driven by a complex regulatory landscape that can vary from state-to-state, especially when it comes to breach notification. In the UK the figure is slightly lower than the global average, at $3.88 million. The size of the average data breach is now 25,575 records, an increase of 3.9% compared to 2018. The average breach size in the U.S. is higher at 32,434 and slightly lower in the UK at 23,600 (both figures up over 2018). Each record lost costs around $150 on average globally; in the U.S. that figure rises to $242 while in the UK the cost is $155 per record. While the loss of thousands of records at a time is becoming common, Equifax-level breaches involving millions of records are still relatively rare. A “mega-breach” of 1 million records could cost a company $42 million — up from $40 million last year — while the loss of 50 million records might cost a company $388 million.
On the other hand, the prices of Attack services are becoming very low.
Attack services are inexpensive
For example, for $327 per week, bad actors can perform a DDoS attack on your Web application paralysing your business costing you thousands or millions.
Executives start getting these messages. Companies start setting better security practices. The penalties significantly outweigh savings from inaction.
One of the most effective ways to protect your Web applications is to introduce Proactive Defense mechanisms. Proactive Defence infrastructure “predicts” cyberattacks before it happens and mitigates in real-time. Modern cyberattacks are sophisticated and massive. For example, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt normal traffic of a targeted service by overwhelming the target with a flood of Internet traffic. A DDoS attack is like a traffic jam clogging up with highway, preventing regular traffic from arriving at its desired destination. Unlike other types of cyberattacks, DDoS attack defence requires extensive infrastructure that can absorb malicious traffic while letting regular traffic through.
A DDoS attack in Layman's terms
Other types of cyberattacks include sending maliciously-formed requests with the expectation to disrupt Business services. Many attack types can be detected in real-time by Web Application Firewalls (WAF). WAF analyses the incoming traffic and automatically blocks undesired communications.
WAF blocks malicious traffic
There are hundreds of Security software and hardware solutions on the market. This post is about modern cloud web applications and therefore, we shall analyse only modern cloud platforms capable to protect from enormous DDoS attacks. We shall go through four major players on the market.
Microsoft Azure
The Microsoft Azure solution has a rich set of functionality that is built from various Azure components. Building and deploying multiple components may bring higher costs and may be prone to errors and misconfigurations. Ongoing support may also require more advanced Security Operations knowledge and skills.
Azure DDoS protection service provides defence against DDoS attacks. There are two options: Basic DDoS that comes at no extra costs, and Standard, a paid option, which can provide better services, access to logs, monitoring, L7 protection via WAF.
Azure DDoS protection
Azure Application Gateway with WAF is a web traffic load balancer that manages Web Applications traffic while providing the centralised protection of web applications from common exploits and vulnerabilities. A centralised WAF helps make security management much simpler and gives better assurance to application administrators against threats or intrusions. A WAF solution can also react to a security threat faster by patching a known vulnerability at a central location versus securing each of individual web applications.
Azure Web Application Firewall
Cloudflare
Cloudflare is one of the world’s largest networks. Cloudflare provides security solutions to businesses, non-profits, bloggers, websites and apps. More than 20 million Internet properties are on Cloudflare. The Cloudflare network is growing by tens of thousands each day. Cloudflare powers Internet requests for ~10% of the Fortune 1,000 for more than 1 billion unique IP addresses per day.
Cloudflare provides security by protecting Internet properties from malicious activities like DDoS attacks, malicious bots, and other nefarious intrusions. Cloudflare has an excellent reputation with the very advanced DDoS protection, WAF, Content Delivery Network (CDN), TLS traffic encryption, automatic certificate management and many other features.
Cloudflare model
Cloudflare administration includes a common control plane over multiple well-integrated services. The configuration can be done via an intuitive, secure Web portal.
Configuring DNS zone in Cloudflare portal
Akamai
Akamai is a very advanced solution in Web Application Security and Content Delivery. The combination of Akamai solutions covers the requirements of the most demanding customers. However, the solution can be an overkill in specific applications. Akamai has a multitude of products. Kona and Ion products can cover the majority of the requirements related to Cybersecurity and Web Performance.
Kona Site Defender provides application security at the Edge — closer to attackers and further from applications. With 178 billion WAF rule triggers a day, Akamai harnesses unmatched visibility into attacks to deliver curated and highly accurate WAF protections that keep up with the latest threats. Flexible protections help secure the entire application footprint and respond to changing business requirements, including APIs and cloud migration, with dramatically lower management overhead. Akamai reported that it successfully protected a customer experiencing the largest (1.3 TBps) DDoS attack.
Akamai Kona Site Defender features
Ion is a suite of intelligent performance optimisations and controls that helps deliver superior web, mobile app experiences. Built on the SLA-backed availability of the globally distributed Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform™, Ion continuously monitors real user behaviour — applying best-practice performance optimisations automatically — and adapting in real-time to content, user behaviour, and connectivity changes.
Akamai Ion
Amazon AWS CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds, all within a developer-friendly environment. CloudFront is integrated with AWS — both physical locations that are directly connected to the AWS global infrastructure, as well as other AWS services. CloudFront works seamlessly with services including AWS Shield for DDoS mitigation, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing or Amazon EC2 as origins for your applications, and Lambda@Edge to run custom code closer to customers’ users and to customize the user experience.
AWS CloudFront logo
Amazon CloudFront is a highly-secure CDN that provides both network and application-level protection. Your traffic and applications benefit through a variety of built-in protections such as AWS Shield Standard, at no additional cost. You can also use configurable features such as AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) to create and manage custom SSL certificates at no extra cost.
CloudFront edge locations map
Conclusion
We have described four major players on the market. It is important to go through a particular system’s requirement to make your choice. We deliberately not including Gartner Magic quadrant charts here. These companies are jumping in the quadrant quite fast. The quadrant also presents some parts of the Security feature set. It is much better to look at the feature set and prices of the services that you want to use.
In my opinion, in general, the Cloudflare solution provides the best combination of well-integrated security services at a very reasonable price. Cloudflare also has entry-level plans, including a free plan for a simple single domain. The solution has a proven history of defending from massive-scale attacks. The Cloudflare solution is capable of absorbing an attack with the traffic that is 15 times higher than the world’s largest registered DDoS attack to date. Cloudflare is relatively easy to implement. It is a solution that works out-of-the-box without extensive engineering efforts. The solution offers a very nice and easy administration Web portal.
John Yoon
Solution Architect | https://medium.com/the-cloud-builders-guild/how-to-protect-your-cloud-web-applications-with-waf-and-cdn-what-vendor-to-choose-874e31534058 | ['John Yoon'] | 2020-02-26 23:12:57.976000+00:00 | ['Cdn', 'Cloudflare', 'Waf', 'Azure', 'AWS'] |
The call time lessons from 2020 you need for 2021 | We analyzed over 150,000 donors from the 2020 cycle to uncover any lessons that campaigns could put into practice in 2021 — here is what we learned.
The four levels of donor outreach
A cluster analysis of one-to-one calls, emails, and text messages to donors revealed four distinct approaches to donor outreach, and the level of giving that may have caused:
Low Touch: this group of donors received an average of just 1.9 calls each, as well as 10.5 individual emails, and 0.43 text messages. Their average contribution was $315
Medium Touch: the average donation from this group jumps up to $550, and they received an average of 6.5 phone calls, 12.5 emails, and 0.67 texts.
High Touch: this group received nearly twice as many phone calls on average as the Medium Touch group (12.3), slightly fewer emails (10.5), and 0.79 text messages. Their average donation was $675.
Very High Touch: this group received a whopping 22 calls, on average, but the smallest number of emails (9.5), and more than double the average number of text messages as the next highest group (1.7). Their average donation was $825.
Importantly, donors in the Very High Touch cluster were those most likely to be called by multiple campaigns, whereas that was quite rare in the other groups. Donors in this Very High Touch group represent just 2% of all donors in our sample, which suggests that there is a lot of competition for the attention of a tiny fraction of the donor universe. That’s not terribly surprising. However, when combined with the data from the other clusters, it appears as if campaigns might get more mileage increasing the amount of outreach they’re doing to contacts a bit closer to them, rather than chasing some of these more “usual suspects.”
Try again before trying someone else
While the Very High Touch group make up just 2% of our donors, the Low Touch group represents a stunning 69% of all donors! That means the overwhelming majority of donors are receiving only the lowest level of outreach from campaigns.
This suggests there may be room for improvement in the average donation of a campaign’s existing donors, if they continue to invest in outreach to those donors. While the data does not prove causality, it is worthwhile to note that donors in the Medium Touch group received an average of 4.6 calls more than those in the Low Touch group, and also contributed an average of 75% more.
In some ways this, too, is unsurprising. Many campaigns take a “volume” approach to fundraising. They want to call through as large a universe of prospects as quickly as possible, for example, presuming that only a small percentage will ever answer and become donors. What this misses is the relational aspect of fundraising. The most financially successful campaigns are ones that know how to nurture and grow their relationships with prospects and donors. This means staying in touch over the course of the campaign, providing updates, and re-soliciting them.
It could be that this is what we are seeing in the data here, and suggests that campaigns should prioritize taking another pass at their existing list before too quickly hunting for a new one.
Text message is an under-utilized tool in call time fundraising
While one-to-one individual emailing was fairly consistent across all outreach groups, text message sending per donor nearly doubles between the Low Touch and High Touch groups. However, the overall level of text message sending is still very low across all groups.
Campaigns in 2021 should further explore how to utilize this mode of communication as part of their call time fundraising operation. While a text is probably too impersonal to serve as the main outreach to anyone but a small-dollar donor, text messages can be great tools for increasing connect rates of calls, and decreasing outstanding pledge balances.
To increase call connect rates, campaigns should consider sending text messages immediately after leaving a voicemail, from the same number used to place the phone call. Campaigns using this strategy in 2020 reported a significant increase in the rate of call backs, and a higher degree of success in connecting subsequent calls. The text message indicates to the donor that you are not just a telemarketer racing through a list — you are a candidate really trying to reach them to have a meaningful conversation.
To decrease outstanding pledges, send a text message with the link to complete a donation before even ending the call on which the pledge was made. Campaigns that employed this model in 2020 saw 80% of their pledges fulfilled within an hour of being made — this means far less time spent chasing these pledges later, and lets you start putting those dollars to work now. | https://medium.com/call-time/the-call-time-lessons-from-2020-you-need-for-2021-8e9b925ef99a | ['Andrew Blumenfeld'] | 2020-12-12 18:33:12.339000+00:00 | ['Fundraising Advice', 'Running For Office', 'Political Fundraising', 'Political Campaigning', 'Fundraising'] |
How To Build a Simple Bill Splitter in JavaScript | The JavaScript
Let’s move onto JavaScript!
JavaScript can grow to be very messy, particularly when you’re a beginner coder. Try to be as tidy as possible.
Let’s take a look at the code step by step:
let total = parseInt(document.querySelector('#total').value);
let people = parseInt(document.querySelector('#people').value);
let tipPercent = document.querySelector('#tipPercent')
Inside the first function: “splitting”, I used querySelectors to select the input fields for the total amount of money to pay, how many people are going to pay, and the one for the tip, which is visible only when you click on “Add a tip” inside the form.
document.querySelector('#addTip').addEventListener('click', (e) => {
e.preventDefault();
showTipInput();
})
Here, we have an event listener attached to “Add a tip”.
When the words are clicked, the function showTipButtons() is called and an input field will appear (more below).
Now, a couple of things to pay attention to:
Here, we are calling the method .preventDefault() , which is always a good thing to add inside a form. Why? Because inside forms, a button’s default behavior is refreshing the form. We don’t want this. So always remember to add it. Currently, on JavaScript, we cannot attach event listeners to text nodes. So, in reality, “Add a tip”, although it may look like normal text, is a button. CSS magic, that’s all. That’s also why I added the .preventDefault() method.
Here it is, the above-mentioned function.
This simply toggles the visibility of the input fields for the tip. By default, they are hidden.
Inside the same function, I added a conditional statement:
If the input field for the tipPercent is not empty, take the value entered by the user and save it in a constant.
How do you figure out a percentage?
In case you’re a bit rusty like I was, here’s the formula:
Multiply the number (the total of the bill, in our case) by the percent, and divide the answer by 100.
We also need to divide the above result by the persons paying the bill.
I will make the result appear inside the innerHTML of the querySelector(‘#perPerson’) , which is zero by default.
To avoid an annoying amount of digits after the decimal point, I added .toFixed(2) to limit this number to, well, 2.
The else part is for when no tip is added. In which case the math is easy. Grab the total and divide it by the people.
I selected the big SPLIT button and added an event listener, with, again, the method .preventDefault() .
Below, I call the splitting function, explained earlier.
Here, we have the “reset” button. I added an event listener to the button, with, of course, a preventDefault() method.
What happens when you click on a reset button?
Well, all the input fields become empty. JavaScript has a very handy method, .reset() , that does exactly this.
I attached the method to the form, and, at the same time, every result previously shown in the final result #perPerson will return to the default value zero.
And that’s it, you’ve built a basic bill splitter. | https://medium.com/better-programming/lets-build-a-simple-bill-splitter-in-javascript-9c67da4fa18 | ['Valeria Ragonese'] | 2019-07-23 20:23:20.355000+00:00 | ['Beginner Coding', 'Programming', 'Js', 'JavaScript', 'Projects'] |
Winter Solstice provide power to manifest wishes. | The manifesting energies of a winter solstice are very powerful.
Inspiration can manifest anything you desire.
The solitary thing preventing you from turning your dreams, desires, wants, fantasies and or wishes into a reality is you.
You might have heard about manifestation or the laws of fascination & attraction. It’s something I have spoken about frequently, yet being able to do it yourself is all together something you miss out on everyday.
You control a great deal by your considerations, ponderings and fantasies. but you lack the focus needed to bring them into your life in the way you want. At the point when I began to sort that out for myself I began my life long journey to learn everything i could about the power to manifest things desired.
after about 40 years of pure dedication to the art of manifestation, most of my clients say that i have become a master of it. It helps that i do hold a degree in reiki, as energy channeling plays a he role in the Manifestation process
Manifesting someone's wish is an amazing thing to partake in. I have witnessed it again and again. in case you don't know what i talking about, i will be more than happy to try to explain it to you.
Basically, its about bringing something unmistakable into your life through clarity, conviction, focus and the transmutation of energy for example in the event that i think it, it will come. it will materialize.
if you have the will power and time to invest, you can also become a master at manifesting the thing you want in your life. But if your not sure that's a path you want to take, However you still have a wish you want to become a reality, the winter solstice is the perfect time to ask for my help
Winter solstice Spells
.
#smile #smiles #snapchat #sneakerlove #soblessed #soblessed #socialmedia#socialmediamarketing
#sograteful #someoneilove #sorcery #sorceryworld #soul #soul2soul #soulfood #soulmate #soulmates
#soulmortal #soulmusic #soulpath #souls #soulsearching #soulsister #spellbound #spellcaster
#spellcasting #spellcraft #spells #spellwork #spirit #spiritguides #spiritual #spiritualawakening
#spirituality #spirituallifecoach #spontaneous #spotify #spreadhappiness #spreadinghappiness | https://medium.com/spiritual-truth/winter-solstice-provide-power-to-manifest-wishes-41217617ab26 | ['Shiloh Cyrus'] | 2020-12-18 15:10:26.115000+00:00 | ['Winter', 'Spirituality', 'Manifestation', 'Spells', 'Magic'] |
Flask web server 與 API 實作 | 運用python flask架設輕便網頁伺服器, 並用 API 進行串接.
架設web server:
from flask import Flask # declare Flask object
app = Flask(__name__) # initialize Flask object
@app route(‘/’) 建立主網域下的 ’/’ 網址. 如: http://www.Lawrence.com/
def function(): # 在 app route之後定義的函數, 當該網域app被呼叫時就執行此function
return (‘Welcome to your first website!’) | https://medium.com/@lawrence123/flask-web-server-%E8%88%87-api-%E5%AF%A6%E4%BD%9C-8c1c0bbd18a7 | [] | 2020-12-22 08:40:43.032000+00:00 | ['Flask'] |
How does the express entry program work? | The Express Entry form of immigration is Canada’s primary source of skilled foreign workers. It was first introduced in 2015 and helps Canada choose skilled workers based on their skills and ability to contribute to its economy. Express Entry manages applications for three economic immigration programs:
● Federal Skilled Worker Program
● Federal Skilled Trades Program
● Canadian Experience Class
Provinces and territories can also recruit candidates from the Express Entry pool through the Provincial Nominee Program to meet local labour market needs.
It is the most widely used form of immigration used by migrants to make themselves permanent residents of Canada, under this program the applicants selected can live and work anywhere in Canada except Quebec who have a special program to manage their workforce.
Eligible candidates are issued scores under the Express Entry’s Comprehensive Ranking System(CRS), which awards points for factors such as age, education, skilled work experience and proficiency in English or French.
Having a job offer is not necessary under this program but there are extra credits given to applicants who have a job offer with a canadian employer.
Canada’s first Express Entry draw of 2020 has issued 3,400 invitations to apply for Canadian permanent residence.The minimum Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) score required to receive an invitation in the January 8 draw was 473
There is a minimum requirement of CRS required for a candidate to be eligible for applying immigration through Express entry, then again there varying minimum eligibility one must have for three different immigration programs offered under express entry.
The Express Entry Program accepts applications under three federal programs: Federal Skilled Workers Program (FSWP), Federal Skilled Trades Program (FSP) and the Canadian Experience Class (CEC). You need to be eligible for any one of three programs to be able to set foot into the Express Entry group of applicants, where each applicant is assigned a CRS score.
● FEDERAL SKILLED WORKER PROGRAM (FSWP)
The minimum requirements for this program are as follows:
● skilled work experience
● language ability
● education
If the candidate meets all the above requirements then he is judged upon the following factors
● Age
● Education
● Work Experience
● Valid Job Offers
● English and or French proficiency
● Adaptability
The above mentioned factors make a hundred point grid on which the applicants are judged
● FEDERAL SKILLED TRADERS PROGRAM (FSTP)
To be eligible under this program the candidate must meet the following requirements
1. language levels for each language ability
● Writing
● Reading
● Listening
● Speaking
2. He/She must have at least 2 years of full-time work experience (or an equal amount of part time work experience) in a skilled trade within the 5 years before you apply
3. Meet the job requirements for that skilled trade as set out in the National Occupational Classification, except for needing a certificate of qualification
4. He/She also must have either a valid job offer of full time employment for a total period of at least 1 year OR have a certificate of qualification in that skilled trade by a Canadian Provincial ,territorial or federal authority
● CANADIAN EXPERIENCE CLASS (CEC)
The Canadian Experience Class is for those skilled workers who have Canadian work experience and want to become permanent residents (PR)
The minimum requirement for applying under this program are as follows:
● meet the required language level needed for your job for each language ability
○ writing
○ reading
○ listening
○ speaking
● have at least 1 year of skilled work experience in Canada, in the last 3 years before you apply. The work experience must be:
○ full-time or
○ an equal amount in part-time
● have gained your work experience by working in Canada legally.
Steps to apply for the Express Entry Program
Step 1: Create your Express Entry profile
First and foremost step is to create your own Express Entry profile. This profile should include your age, education, work experience, language proficiency, etc. You will be given a score based on these details.
Step 2: Complete your ECA
Educational Credentials Assessment or ECA is provided to people who have done their education outside Canada. It should be with immigrants applying for the Express Entry Program. ECA proves that a foreigner’s educational qualifications are equivalent to those recognised in the Canadian educational system.
Step 3: Finish your language ability tests
The next step is finishing the required language proficiency tests. The minimum score is 6 bands in IELTS which is equivalent to CLB 7. Your test score should be less than 2 years at the time of application.
Step 4: Calculate your CRS score
If your profile gets selected in the Express Entry pool, it is ranked based on the Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) score. Certain factors like age, work experience, education, etc determine your CRS score. Your profile is included in the Express Entry pool only if you have the required CRS score.
Step 5: Acquire your Invitation to Apply
If your profile makes it to the Express Entry pool, you will receive an Invitation to Apply (ITA) from the federal government after which you can commence the documentation for your PR visa. | https://medium.com/@abhishke/how-does-the-express-entry-program-work-d144bc79d106 | [] | 2020-12-25 12:10:19.257000+00:00 | ['Crs Points Calculator', 'Canada Pr Visa', 'Immigration'] |
Google Cloud Data Catalog — Live Sync Your On-Prem Hive Server Metadata Changes | Disclaimer: All opinions expressed are my own, and represent no one but myself…. They come from the experience of participating in the development of fully operational sample connectors, available at: github.
The Challenge
Entering the big data world is no easy task, the amount of data can quickly get out of hand. Look at Uber story, on how they deal with 100 petabytes of data using the Hadoop ecosystem, imagine if every time they would sync their on-premise metadata into a Data Catalog, a full run was executed, that would be impractical.
We need a way to monitor changes executed at the Hive server, and whenever a Table or Database is modified we capture just that change and incrementally persist it in our Data Catalog.
If you missed the last post, we showcased ingesting on-premise Hive metadata into Data Catalog, in that case we didn’t use an incremental solution.
To grasp the situation, a full run with ~ 1000 tables took almost 20 minutes, even if only 1 table had changed. In the Uber story, that would be no fun, right? | https://medium.com/google-cloud/google-cloud-data-catalog-live-sync-your-on-prem-hive-server-metadata-changes-4f5e661626d8 | ['Marcelo Costa'] | 2020-05-19 21:44:35.355000+00:00 | ['Database', 'Big Data', 'Google Cloud Platform', 'Apache Hive', 'Data'] |
How I use social media influence to give back to the community | Back in 2015, my family began starring on a reality TV show called I am Jazz on TLC. Once the show aired, I began to gain a large following across all social media platforms. On the show, I serve as a supportive brother to my transgender sister, Jazz Jennings, so that was initially the foundation of my brand.
More recently, I recognized that my story was important and that sharing my passions, beliefs, and experiences could inspire and help even more people. I realized I was so much more than just a supportive brother, but I was also a passionate humanitarian, creative strategist, and an outgoing guy. Therefore, I began to be more active across platforms and shared the daily occurrences in my life. Since starting to dive deeper into my personal experiences, I have doubled my following and inspired many more people than I ever thought I could.
Business Goals
Now that I have grown my following to over 120,000+ people, I use my platform to share powerful messages, give back to the community, and inspire others to be their authentic selves. The first goal of my brand is to create meaningful partnerships with brands. As an influencer, digital strategist, and creator, I recognize the importance of only entering into partnerships that will benefit both the brand and me. Going forward, I aim to find or be found by brands and create strong campaigns that promote inclusion, diversity, and the product they want to be promoted. Secondly, I want to use my platform to help others. I am involved in many organizations that raise money for people who need it most. For example, recently, I used my social presence to raise $11,500 for children born with incurable diseases. I went live on Instagram for a week straight and shared my personal stories to encourage my followers to donate to the cause.
Lastly, I have created my website and begun to release products that promote my brand message of being an ally to all. I hope to spark social change through my products and donate some of the proceeds to charity. These business goals will help me continue to build my brand and serve as a role model for many.
Social Goals
People are drawn into following people who can provide them value. Just like a business hopes to provide value, I want all of my followers to look forward to the messages and experiences I am always sharing. My social strategy is to have people resonate with my content and share it with others that they believe it will help. One major thing I am going to focus on in 2020 is to try to seek more directly to my current target audience, which consists of many LGBTQ+ individuals, specifically women. The messages I will spread to them will be to encourage them to share my content with their ally friends. In doing so, I will be able to leverage my audience to try and reach the family and friends of LGBTQ+ people. I will measure the success of my social strategy through the engagement (likes and comments) on my posts, the number of replies or direct messages I am receiving and the number of shares my posts receive. As I begin to produce more inspirational content related to being an ally, I hope to see an increase in all of these key performance metrics.
Let’s change the world
I want to make the world a better place and continue to help people. Through my business and social goals, I know I will continue to change the world. If you would like to work with me or have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to @sander_54 on Instagram or to my e-mail [email protected]. | https://medium.com/@sanderjennings/how-i-use-social-media-influence-to-give-back-to-the-community-2782882e74cc | ['Sander Jennings'] | 2020-04-22 18:51:25.830000+00:00 | ['Influencers', 'Influence', 'Humanitarian', 'Influencer Marketing'] |
The U.S. Navy’s $100 million checkbox | Part 2: Human-Centered Design
There were at least 14 crew members on the bridge at the time of the accident. The bridge contained at least nine screens displaying information about the ship’s situation. When the 18-year-old helmsman lost control of the ship, why was no one else in the room able to remedy the situation? It is hard to believe, but despite all these people and all this data, nobody could figure out who was steering the ship. This is a failure of design.
Good design isn’t simply choosing the right buttons or checkboxes. Creating a strong interface requires an understanding of the users and their environment. By empathizing with the person using the interface, a designer can prevent errors, reduce cognitive strain, and help people recognize and recover from mistakes if they should happen. This empathetic approach is called human-centered design. Let’s try to put ourselves on the bridge of the McCain and think about how design failed these sailors.
First, let’s understand the bridge layout. The highest ranking officers have seats at the front corners. There are two control stations in the front and two additional stations behind them. Touchscreen controls provide a feature unavailable to older ships constrained by physical levers, knobs, and buttons. Now anyone at any of the McCain’s four stations could take control at any moment. For emergencies there was also a physical wheel on the rear station.
How could a crew be fooled into thinking their ship is out of control? Imagine that you are starting your shift. To maintain a straight trajectory, the previous sailor may have set the rudder 5 degrees right in order to compensate for wind or water current. By design, when the steering controls are passed to your station, your defaults are applied and the rudder is set to zero degrees. From your perspective the boat should continue heading straight, but instead it starts turning left. This causes an illusion of loss of control. Add inexperience, insufficient training, and lack of sleep to the situation and you have a recipe for disaster. Your tiny error gets magnified and compounded as mistakes spread through the crew.
Shouldn’t there be processes to reduce this confusion? Yes, and they are already in place. To avoid a situation where five people are adjusting steering at the same time, procedures exist to transfer controls from station to station. Steering control can be requested by a station or it can be assigned to a station. In either case, the transfer has to be accepted by the other station. This little two-step dance ensures that you don’t send control to an unmanned station and that you don’t receive control of the steering unknowingly. In the case of emergency, there is a big red button that you can press to bypass everything and force everything into manual mode. More on that later.
In the minutes prior to the collision steering on the McCain was transferred four times. Above is the timeline showing how in three minutes the ship’s trajectory got worse instead of better with each adjustment the crew made. Below is the user interface that allows the transfer of steering between stations.
This interface deserves some criticism. It is unclear whether the transfer of steering control is achieved by the field at the top (is that supposed to be a dropdown menu?) or the options at the bottom (are those green diamonds checkboxes or radio buttons or something else)? Does white or black text indicate the steering location is selected? It appears that multiple steering locations are active (white) which probably isn’t possible.
It is hard to even comment on the controls in the center because they are so cryptic and confusing. Perhaps this is describing the conditions of the right/left propellors. Even assuming the acronyms and terminology is understood by a sailor it is unclear what would happen when the buttons are tapped. If I tap “engage” does an action occur instantly or do I have to tap “Accept” below first? Why is the close button the primary option?
The three buttons at the bottom are unnecessarily confusing. What is the difference between cancel and close? Does the accept button apply the settings I have just changed, or am I accepting settings that someone else has transferred to my station?
It is also important to note that this screen introduces a new concept that we haven’t discussed yet. Notice the second menu where a “steering mode” can be chosen. There are five modes that offer varying degrees of computer assistance from autopilot down to backup manual mode. Not every station can support every mode. Confusion is inevitable because when you receive control at your station you need to understand what level of computer-assistance you are also inheriting along with the transfer.
Despite being recommended only for emergencies, commanders say they are more comfortable in backup manual mode. As a result computer assistance is often turned off completely, as was the case on the McCain. A dangerous side-effect of operating in backup manual mode is that it turns off the two-step process where control of the ship must be requested and accepted be both stations. Put more simply, in manual mode anyone can receive control of the ship at any moment without warning.
Like a game of hot potato, steering controls get tossed around blindly. Just like in your car, to confirm that your steering wheel is working, you turn the wheel right and left. This was attempted by the sailors as they tested the only physical steering wheel at the rear station. This proved that the wheel wasn’t active, but it unfortunately left the wheel in a turned position. In the final seconds when control was passed to this manual wheel it turned the ship in the opposite direction from where they wanted to go.
Confusion around steering eventually caused somebody to give a command to reduce speed. Because the throttle controls were still unganged (and probably spread across two stations) the speed was only reduced on one engine. This caused the ship to turn even more sharply. Confusion turned to panic as the boat seems to slip further out of control.
As the sailors were trying to figure out who was steering the ship, the real reason the ship was turning was under their noses. The speed of the propellors was mismatched. How could they miss this? Let’s understand how thrust controls are transferred.
Similar to the transfer of steering to different stations, the thrust of the boat could likewise be passed around. The transfer of thrust comes with an additional level of complexity because the propellors must be transferred one at a time. Half way through a transfer the boat is in a situation where one propellor is controlled by one station and the other is controlled by someone else. At this moment the checkbox labeled “Gang” is automatically unchecked. It wasn’t a human who mistakenly unchecked a box, it was designed to work this way.
It is unclear how the screens appeared in this state, when the thrust controls are spread across two screens. Did half the controls become disabled? Did the gang checkbox disappear? If the checkbox was visible could you tap it? If you could tap on it, would the other station have to approve your request to take full control? This is the moment when good design could have rescued the ship. Blindly adding a checkbox to a screen may meet technical requirements, but without a human-centered design approach the nuances of life-or-death decisions are unlikely to be addressed when the interface is being built.
The photo below is not from the McCain, but it does give some clues to how confusion about which station has control could arise. In this picture we can see that the “Lee Helm” is in control of both thrust sliders. The screen on the station to the right appears to display the same information, a mirror of the first screen. If you don’t know or forget which station is the Lee Helm (and the stations don’t appear to be labeled) it is impossible to know which station has control.
As mentioned earlier, there is also a big red button in the center of the rear control stations. While it is technically called the “Emergency Override To Manual Button” crew members call it the “big red button.” I find it noteworthy that in the midst of so much nautical jargon, sailors occasionally speak like humans. The irony of this button is that it forces the ship into manual mode, the same mode that the ship was already operating under. So it should come as no surprise that even though everyone on the bridge knew there was an emergency, there was no operational benefit to hitting the big red button. Presumably, the big red button might initiate additional emergency functions, perhaps sending a radio message to nearby ships that the boat was in distress, but my research has not verified this assumption. The big red button might as well have been for decoration.
After three minutes of confusion, the throttle is finally unganged and steering is recovered. Unfortunately the crew didn’t have enough time to maneuver out of the way of the oncoming ship. Repairs to the McCain were estimated at $100 million dollars, a price tag that ballooned to $223 million after additional damage was caused during transit to the repair facility. | https://uxdesign.cc/the-u-s-navys-100-million-checkbox-af2baf17dec4 | ['Adrian Hanft'] | 2020-02-09 17:19:36.031000+00:00 | ['Usability', 'Design', 'Ts', 'UX', 'UI Design'] |
I Want A President that Will Be Truthful, Honest, Caring, | AND Places God, Country and the People Above All Else.
******************************************************
I am so tired of the False Accusations that President Trump Continues to make, Especially Regarding the Claim that he Won the 2020 Presidential Election. There are over 7 Million Votes that have been cast for President Elect Joe Biden. And his Deliberate Attempt to Defraud the Nation of the Democratically Elected President needs to come to an end.
West Pointe Students take an Oath to Their Honor Code. “A Cadet will not Lie, Cheat, Steal, or Tolerate those who do.” If you fail to tell the truth you can be removed from the academy. One of President Trump’s False Claims is that he Is the Greatest General Ever. He never would have made it through West Pointe.
For month’s we have been hearing about all the Election Fraud. One Fact that Stands Out Predominantly is “None” of His Attorneys have been willing to Testify and Admit before any of the presiding Judges hearing the countless cases of litigation, “That There Was Fraud” When directed by the Judges to Answer that Question, “Is this Case About Fraud?” they have “All” answered “No”, “There has been No Fraud Committed”. Even Mr. Rudy Giuliani the Head Attorney, has Refused to Admit in a Courtroom to his Claim of Fraud. Why? Because there hasn’t been any that they can find and provide evidence to. And they are afraid to perjure themselves.
Of course, outside in the Halls of the Media, he Shouts that there has Been Serious Fraud of Epic Proportions. Why not admit that inside the Courtroom? Perjury. Plain and Simple. A Real Fact. He spouts Having Evidence that Proves all of his allegations. Unfortunately, The Courts have not seen any of the Evidence, it has not been presented to date, nor has the Public seen any of his evidence, as he continues to hold it away from any examination. As the Public must bear the Brunt of his Accusations, as it is Their 7 Million Votes that he is trying to overturn. Where is the Evidence. After 7 Weeks. We still have not been able to see one Iota of Proof.
What we do have are many Government Officials from various offices and departments proclaiming that the Election was the Largest and Freest from any sort of Fraud or Dishonesty. The most open, honest, and accurate counting of the most votes ever tallied for the Office of the President of the United States.
Yet we continue to listen to a chorus of cacophony of misrepresentations from Republican Representatives casting their Oath to God and Country aside for the mere individual who lies and continues to distort the truth to them and all of us. Basic Propaganda. Yet offers no proof, no evidence, just accusations of the Perpetuation of Fraud. Yet Still: Afraid to admit to those same allegations in a Court of Law.
The American public needs to wake up and break themselves away from the mistruths, misdirection, and sleight of hand tricks that this organization continues to perform. Our Democracy needs to stand Tried, Tall, and Strong. Against the weakest of claims, that “There” must be Fraud, otherwise I, Donald Trump would have to admit to that I lost the Election.
The allegation of statistical evidence proves that he won, is so skewed and inaccurate that it is a joke to write and try and justify. There have been No ballots shown that were Manufactured, Doctored, Perjured, or Altered. None. It is impossible to get a Machine to read the same ballot twice. There are so many control codes on a Ballot to make sure this does not happen. When they ask to take examine Ballot Machines, it always involves removing the machine to some location of their own for Their Forensic Examination. Where sleight of hand will prevail.
There is No Rampant Evidence of Tens of Thousands of Ballots that would turn the Results of the Election Around.
It is time to allow Biden and Harris to make the Transition. Too many people are dying from the COVID-19 Pandemic and the mishandling, to continue, this theatre of comedy and drama.
May One Day Honesty Prevail in Politics and Government Leadership
Respectfully Robert M Tonkavich | https://medium.com/@wiremonkey557/i-want-a-president-that-will-be-truthful-honest-caring-c6ea40a185ca | ['Bob Tonkavich'] | 2020-12-27 21:18:35.318000+00:00 | ['Honesty', 'Politics', 'Democracy', 'Leadership'] |
New scientific data stops climate change deniers | Climate change is being a controversial subject these days. We can see all over social media denial and skeptic people. However, every day scientists come up with new data raising awareness about the consequences of our habits. But, humans are really causing global warming? According to science, yes. Now, three studies published on Nature this month show that scientific consensus is likely to have passed 99%.
One argument used by climate change deniers is the idea that the Earth already experienced similar dramatic peaks and troughs in the past. Two examples are the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Climate Anomaly. So, the shifts happen due a natural cycle. However, these new studies indicate that none of these shifts took place in all planet at the same period. Besides that, the current climate change process is faster than any other in the past.
The researchers used reconstructions based on 700 proxy records of temperature change, such as trees, ice and sediment, from all continents.
Mark Maslin, professor of climatology at University College London, was interviewed by The Guardian. He said that “this paper should finally stop climate change deniers claiming that the recent observed coherent global warming is part of a natural climate cycle. This paper shows the truly stark difference between regional and localised changes in climate of the past and the truly global effect of anthropogenic greenhouse emissions”.
What the new papers about Climate Change say
No evidence for globally coherent warm and cold periods over the preindustrial Common Era indicates that in the past, temperature change didn’t happen in more than half the globe at any one time.
They studied the Little Ice Age, the coldest epoch of the last millennium. The results indicate that the coldest temperatures occurred during different centuries around the world. It took place during the 15th century in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean, during the 17th century in northwestern Europe and southeastern North America. However, the remaining regions experienced the coldest temperatures only during the mid 19th century.
Which means, the spatial coherence does exist over the preindustrial Common Era.
This is consistent with the spatial coherence of stochastic climatic variability. “This lack of spatiotemporal coherence indicates that preindustrial forcing was not sufficient to produce globally extreme temperatures at multidecadal and centennial timescales. By contrast, we find that the warmest period of the past two millennia occurred during the 2oth century for more than 98% of the globe. This provides strong evidence that anthropogenic global warming is not only unparalleled in terms of absolute temperatures, but also unprecedented in spatial consistency within the context of the past 2,000 years.”
Last phase of the Little Ice Age forced by volcanic eruptions explain the strong global fluctuations in the first half of the 18th Century.
The researchers explain how the world started to move from a volcanically cooled era to a climate warmed by human emissions during the 18th Century. “During the first half of the nineteenth century, several large tropical volcanic eruptions occurred within less than three decades. […] Only after the 1850s did the transition into the period of anthropogenic warming start. We conclude that the end of the Little Ice Age was marked by the recovery from a sequence of volcanic eruptions, which makes it difficult to define a single pre-industrial baseline.”
Consistent multidecadal variability in global temperature reconstructions and simulations over the Common Era show how since the late 20th century, temperature rises have been the most rapid in the past two millennia.
In this study. the authors present 2,000-year-long global mean temperature reconstructions using seven different statistical methods that draw from a global collection of temperature-sensitive palaeoclimate records. The results indicate that the largest warming trends at timescales of 20 years and longer occur during the second half of the twentieth century, highlighting the unusual character of the warming in recent decades.
As the article published on The Guardian explains, previous studies have shown near unanimity among climate scientists that human factors — car exhausts, factory chimneys, forest clearance and other sources of greenhouse gases — are responsible for the exceptional level of global warming.
These infographics are helpful to understand the greenhouse effect:
You can read more about it on:
Now, we need to raise awareness about the consequences of climate change. Talk to people about and try to decrease our impact are ways to do something. What are we doing about it as a scientists? | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/new-scientific-data-stops-climate-change-deniers-mind-the-graph-7114b1df98da | ['Mind The Graph'] | 2019-08-20 20:14:26.304000+00:00 | ['Global Warming', 'Ecology', 'Climate Change', 'Infographic', 'Science Education'] |
AWS Proton: First look and hands-on at the preview edition | AWS has added another gem for the deployment lifecycle by making AWS Proton available for public preview since 1st December. Pay extra attention to “preview” here which means that it is not yet recommended to be used in the production environment and will be available to limited region namely Europe (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio) and US West (Oregon).
This also means that it is not added directly to the AWS CLI and you will have to manually configure a model for it if you’re a CLI fan. You can do the same using the following command
aws s3 cp s3://aws-proton-preview-public-files/model/proton-2020–07–20.normal.json .
aws s3 cp s3://aws-proton-preview-public-files/model/waiters2.json . aws configure add-model — service-model file://proton-2020–07–20.normal.json — service-name proton mv waiters2.json ~/.aws/models/proton-preview/2020–07–20/waiters-2.json rm proton-2020–07–20.normal.json
Core concepts
Before we move forward, let’s understand a few terminologies that you will be hearing in this article
Account Role — An IAM role with admin permissions which will be used by Proton to create and deploy resources
Environment — Any resource which will be needed by the application to be hosted like an ECS cluster or to be supported like a database etc.
Service — The application which will be deployed. It defines how we want our application to run within a given environment.
Schema — A file defining all the inputs and outputs that can be provided to the CloudFormation template during deployment.
Setting up
Let us now create our first Proton setup
1. Configure account role
Proton will be creating and managing resources on your behalf. Hence, you will have to acknowledge this by providing IAM permission to in the form of an Account Role.
To do this, create an IAM role with Admin privileges and choose this role under the Configure account roles menu.
2. Register an environment template
An environment template is a collection of template versions each having a set of CloudFormation, Schema and Manifest file.
At this point, you can just create an environment template by simply providing a name and an optional display name and description. We will create the templates in the next step.
3. Create a version
A version refers to a set of templates bundled into a .tar.gz file. Template bundles contain all of the information Proton needs to deploy environments and services. Template bundles become re-usable, standardized and curated once you create and register them as templates with Proton.
To create a version, simply bundle up your templates and push it to an S3 bucket. Now click on Create new version button and refer to the bucket and the tar inside it. This will by default create a minor version, however, you can check the option saying ☑Check to create a new major version.
Here you can see that the version status is set to Draft as it is not deployed yet.
So what should this tar include? 1. A CloudFormation template defining the resources as you can see in this example 2. A manifest file which will define the CloudFormation template to be used and which engine you will be using to provide the inputs and outputs through schema. One such manifest file can be seen here. 3. A schema file in which you specify the inputs and outputs for the CloudFormation files as shown here. The directory structure can be seen here
4. Publish version
Once the version is created and successfully registered, select the version and click on the Publish button.
Once published, the status will change from Draft to Published.
5. Create an environment
In this step, simply select the environment template created in the previous version and provide the parameters. This will deploy the last published environment.
6. Register a service template
Follow the same drill as you did for the environment templates to create a Service Template. While creating this, you can mention the environment template that this service will be using as follows
7. Create and publish a version
Unlike Environment, here you will create one more template, that will be the pipeline template. Deployment scripts and methods will vary from application to application and hence it is bound closely to the service.
An example can be seen here.
8. Deploy service
Once the version is ready, deploy it just as you deployed the environment and you are good to go!
So what do I get?
The biggest benefit here is version management. Until now, we had to use an external tool to manage which version is deployed and running in different environments but now Proton takes care of that.
Secondly, it provides a central management dashboard from where you can easily view, manage and upgrade the application and its infrastructure with just a few clicks.
Parting note
AWS has created a service for every step from development to deployment, may it be Cloud9 at the very beginning of your lifecycle to CodePipeline for the final deployment. Proton will fit right in this catalogue. | https://medium.com/@rajputvaibhav/aws-proton-first-look-at-the-preview-edition-9963778f9dc3 | ['Vaibhav Rajput'] | 2020-12-25 16:26:58.016000+00:00 | ['AWS', 'Cloud', 'Web Services', 'Deployment', 'Latest'] |
Guide to GDPR Compliant Cookie Declaration Using Wix.com. | Step by Step
Prepare your Wix.com Site
Open your Wix.com website and if not already created, add a new page for your Data Privacy Policy. Place a simple paragraph text element anywhere on your page and label it LOADING COOKIE DECLARATION... or so. Please note that you have to name it exactly this way if you’re planning to use the below scripts without modification. Please also note that this text can appear within any other text on your site, e.g. your very long Data Privacy Policy statement.
Make sure the placeholder text has a paragraph style (not a heading) applied to it and is surrounded by line breaks (hit enter).
Keep everything open, as we’re soon coming back to your Wix.com website.
Placeholder for the Cookie Declaration on Wix.com
Google Tag Manager
In Google Tag Manager, click Create Account and configure your new Container accordingly, accept EULA and click all the way through till you end up in the main interface. Skip these steps in case you already have a configured Google Tag Manager environment for your Wix.com website.
At this point note your Google Tag Manager Id which is located right next to the Preview button. We’re going to use that one later.
Google Tag Manager — Create Account
Google Tag Manager — Main interface with Container Id
In the Google Tag Manager main interface create two variables of type Constant.
Variable Cookiebot Domain Group Id
It contains your Domain Group ID taken from Cookiebot.com. You find it in your Cookiebot.com account under Your scripts. Variable Cookiebot Placeholder Text
It contains the text of the placeholder element you’ve set on your Wix.com website in the previous step.
Google Tag Manager Variable for Cookiebot Domain Group Id
Google Tag Manager Variable for Cookiebot Placeholder Text
Next, we create the necessary Tag in Google Tag Manager which is more or less just a plain JavaScript injected code snippet that is leveraging the previously created variables. The tag will listen to an event fired by your Wix.com website which we create later on.
In Google Tag Manager go to Triggers and add a new Trigger of Type Custom Event.
Add a new Trigger
Custom Event Trigger
Name it something like On Inject Cookie Declaration Event and use the exact Event name InjectCookieDeclaration and hit Save.
Custom Event Trigger Configuration
Now we’re ready to create the Tag. Go to Tags in Google Tag Manager and click Tag Configuration.
Add Tag in Google Tag Manager
From there find the Custom HTML Tag and add it.
Custom HTML Tag
Name it something like Inject Cookie Declaration and paste the below script into the HTML box.
Custom HTML Tag Configuration
When you hit the Save Button you’ll be asked to Add Trigger. Doing so results in the following view where you can select the previously created On Inject Cookie Declaration Event trigger. Add the Trigger and Save everything.
Choose Trigger Event
This should be your final view. Now hit the Submit button to publish all of your work.
Final View in Google Tag Manager
Next, we need to tell your Wix.com website to trigger the event InjectCookieDeclaration which we’ve created previously. To do so, head over to your Wix.com website builder interface and Turn on Dev Mode through the Dev Mode menu.
Turn Dev Mode on for Wix.com
When in Dev Mode, open the code editor by clicking the Page Code bar in your editor footer section.
Page Code Editor on Wix.com
Add the following Script to your Page Code and publish your site again. This little script uses the Analytics Layer (a.k.a. Data Layer) to signal various events to other listeners.
In our case, it is the Google Tag Manager connected to your Wix.com website which ist listening for this custom event to trigger the injection of your Cookiebot.com Cookie Declaration. We’re almost there!
Signal Event to Data Layer on Wix.com
Now we’re taking the final step in connecting your Wix.com website with your Google Tag Manager. To do so, open the Tracking & Analytics Dialog in the Settings menu.
Tracking and Analytics Settings on Wix.com
From there click New Tool and select Google Tag Manager. Prompted for your Google Tag Manager Container ID, enter the ID that is shown in your Google Tag Manager's main interface, as mentioned before.
Connect Google Tag Manager to Wix.com
Google Tag Manager ID
Save all your work and make sure you published your Wix.com website, your Google Tag Manager work and your Cookiebot.com settings.
Now it’s time to test our implementation. Visit your Wix.com website and head over to your Data Privacy Policy page to watch the magic happen. First, see your text label appear indicating a loading action through its placeholder text.
Loading Cookie Declaration
After a few seconds and after Google Tag Manager received the Event from your Wix.com website, the Cookie Declaration from Cookiebot.com gets loaded on the fly. Note how nicely it is applied to your website having exactly the style you want it to have (refer to the problem statements above).
Injected Cookie Declaration
Before you go, consider a small donation 💗
I wrote this for you! And I made it free for everyone. Think about how much time and money you saved and consider a small donation of $100, $50, $25, or even less. It now powers your website🚀! Thank you so much!
Summary
That’s it. I hope you like this introduction on a concrete GDPR/EU ePrivacy Cookie Declaration implementation and it helped you to make your website compliant.
Make it so.
- Sebastian | https://medium.com/leantify/complete-guide-to-gdpr-eu-eprivacy-compliant-cookie-declaration-using-wix-com-acfd2a88ad87 | ['Sebastian Zolg'] | 2020-07-30 09:38:19.273000+00:00 | ['Google Tag Manager', 'Gdpr', 'Website Development', 'Cookiebot', 'Wix'] |
The Four Year College Degree — Does It Make Sense Anymore? | NYU professor of marketing and entrepreneur Scott Galloway was recently quoted in a Business Insider article as saying “Education, other than maybe healthcare, is more ripe for disruption than any other $100 billion-plus industry in the US”.
And it’s true…
The cost of education and healthcare have both increased dramatically over the years, while the quality of their product hasn’t really improved.
The Coronavirus pandemic has upended our conception of how a classroom has to work. Online universities used to be considered the lazy uncle of traditional academia, but now every school from the University of Phoenix to Harvard and MIT are teaching their classes in the same format. Although quality of professors and rigor of classes may vary, it seems harder and harder to justify the difference of cost between your local college and an elite university when the format is becoming more equitable. Not only that, does the traditional college degree model even make sense?
This isn’t a new concept, but it’s very important right now.
While the pandemic has raised our awareness of new classroom options, innovations in education have been around for awhile. Now just may be the time that these innovations are more widely used and accepted as the norm. Online education isn’t restricted to public or private universities. Quite the contrary, open education platforms like Coursera, Udemy and Edx (among many others) have been around for years offering free or low cost education on specialized topics. Google has begun their own online certification programs, and have put their money where their mouth is by promising to put graduates into Google apprenticeships. MIT and Harvard have many options available through online platforms, and MIT offers MicroMasters programs, where you take graduate level classes online and get a certification at the end.
This enables students across geography and income level access to a world class education.
Programs like these are cost effective and scalable. The MIT example entails proctored exams so there’s at least some level of human feedback during the learning process. Although I don’t know the insider details of how MIT scales and delegates final grading, it’s completely conceivable that a few top-level professors create and record the actual content, tens of thousands of students participate in the program, and then the final grading can be delegated to numerous assistants and contractors who are completely qualified to do so. This enables students across geography and class access to a world class education.
Online courses such as these also offer self-pacing. This could mean taking additional time to learn something if life disrupts your learning process. This also means speeding up your own learning. Scott Young, the author of the book Ultralearning, has an entire strategy for learning quickly and deeply. His “Ultralearning” projects include completing an MIT computer science curriculum in 1 year vs 4, and learning 4 languages within 1 year. Although you can debate whether his strategy is realistic or even viable for deep learning, the evidence points towards the traditional educational path not being the most effective for everyone.
These options also enable students the ability to built a wider range of knowledge and explore topics they may not have known they were interested in. I didn’t know what career I wanted when I was deciding on a college major (frankly, I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up), and forcing 18 year high school graduates to make such a large decision is not only daunting, but it’s an unethical pressure that our society currently enforces.
Personally, I’m beginning a pathway of further education utilizing these resources myself (more blogs to come about that). I earned a degree in Public Relations at a traditional university and ended up in a digital marketing analytics career. While my degree absolutely helped prepare me for my professional career, there are major skills that I can develop with online courses that will directly benefit my career advancement, without having to sacrifice the time and resources to go back to college. This seems to be the story for many in my field. While marketing analytics is a growing field, very few universities directly prepare students to become digital analysts for ad agencies or marketing departments. That’s one example where these types of online education options come in handy.
Whether you’re interested in learning deeply about a hobby topic, or furthering your career options, online learning seems to be here to stay. The four year college degree, while it may be absolutely necessary for some career paths, needs to be debated an optimized. What has to come for the future economy is acceptance and normalization of a new educational pathway, and I hope that’s one positive outcome of how the 2020 pandemic has changed our world. | https://medium.com/@jriddledigital/the-four-year-college-degree-does-it-even-make-sense-anymore-1cfdd69bf599 | ['James Riddle'] | 2020-12-13 21:00:37.172000+00:00 | ['Education Technology', 'Mooc', 'Edtech', 'Education'] |
How to Manage the Protected AEM Resources through OAuth 2.0 | OAuth 2.0 Server Functionalities in AEM — Deep Dive | How to Manage the Protected AEM Resources through OAuth 2.0 Albin Issac Follow Aug 13 · 11 min read
This tutorial explains how to use Adobe Granite OAuth 2.0 Server functionalities to grant resource access to external clients in AEM(Adobe Experience Manager).
The OAuth 2.0 protocol allows the users to grant a third-party web site or application access to the user's protected resources without necessarily revealing their long term credentials or even their identity.
OAuth 2.0 allows clients to access user’s (resource owner’s) resources on resource servers via authorization servers in a secure, reliable, and efficient manner.
Adobe granite OAuth 2.0 server implementation(com.adobe.granite.oauth.server) provides the support for OAuth 2.0 server functionalities in AEM.
Access tokens are the thing that applications use to make API requests on behalf of a user. The access token represents the authorization of a specific application to access specific parts of a user’s data. The external application should receive the access token to access the protected user resources from AEM.
Grants
The OAuth 2.0 specification describes a number of grants (“methods”) for a client application to acquire an access token (which represents a user’s permission for the client to access their data) which can be used to authenticate a request to a protected resource.
The Granite OAuth Server supports the below grant types
Authorization Code
Refresh Token
JWT Bearer Token
Authorization Code:
The authorization code is a temporary code that the client will exchange for an access token. The code itself is obtained from the authorization server where the user gets a chance to see what the information the client is requesting, and approve or deny the request.
When the user authorizes the application, they are redirected back to the application with a temporary code in the URL. The application exchanges that code for the access token. When the application makes the request for the access token. The application retrieves the required resources through the access token, the access token is short-lived e.g 1 hr.
Refresh Token
The Refresh Token grant type is used by clients to exchange a refresh token for an access token when the access token has expired.
This allows clients to continue to have a valid access token without further interaction with the user.
The user grants the approval once to get the refresh token, subsequently, the application request the access token whenever required and access the required resources without the user's online interaction.
JWT Bearer Token
JWT Bearer Token is mainly used for server to server integration, this will helps us to enable the server to server integration without the resource owner interaction e.g retrieve or upload files without user interactions.
The client forms the JWT Token with specific configuration data, the token should be signed by the AEM OAuth Client private key, and exchanges the token to the server to get the access token, the access token can be used to retrieve the protected resources.
Scopes
The scope is a mechanism in OAuth 2.0 to limit an application’s access to a user’s account. An application can request one or more scopes, this information is then presented to the user in the consent screen, and the access token issued to the application will be limited to the scopes granted.
The default scopes supported in AEM
Profile — Get the basic profile details on user authorization.
Offline Access — Access the resources offline without resource owner interaction, the offline Access scope should be used with other scopes to receive the offline refresh token.
Replicate — Replicate the resources.
Custom Scopes
AEM supports to define custom scopes to provide additional access to the external applications, the extensible OAuth scopes allow access control the resources from a client application that is authorized by an end-user.
To define the custom scopes
Define a class implements com.adobe.granite.oauth.server.Scope or com.adobe.granite.oauth.server.ScopeWithPrivileges, extended Scope interface for scopes that defined required privileges on their content paths. The privileges defined in the scope will be created by the OAuth Server using the oauthservice user. It is the responsibility of the scope developer to ensure that oauthservice has the necessary privileges to do this.
user. It is the responsibility of the scope developer to ensure that has the necessary privileges to do this. Implement the getName and provide the name for the scope e.g “dam_read”
Implement the getDescription and provide the name for the scope e.g “Read DAM Assets”
Implement the getResourcePath and provide the parent resource path that is enabled for the custom scope e.g /content/dam/digital, the scope enables the access to the child resources under /content/dam/digital based on the privileges defined in the scope.
Implement the getPrivileges and provide the required privileges to execute this scope e.g jcr:read, rep:write, etc
OAuth End Points
OAuth Client Registration — http://localhost:4502/libs/granite/oauth/content/clients.html
Resource Owner Authorization Page — http://localhost:4502/oauth/authorize?response_type=code&client_id=&scope=&redirect_uri=
Token End Point — http://localhost:4502/oauth/token
Profile Data — http://localhost:4502/libs/oauth/profile
Revoke Token — http://localhost:8080/libs/granite/oauth/revoke
Let us now enable the required configurations to enable different scenarios.
Enable OAuth Server Authentication Handler
As a first step enable the OAuth Server Authentication Handler, by default AEM won't enable the OAuth Server Authentication handler.
System Console →Main →JASS
To enable the OAuth Server Authentication Handler, change the “jaas.ranking.name” value to 1100 in “Adobe Granite OAuth Server Authentication Handler” and save the configuration — http://localhost:4502/system/console/configMgr/com.adobe.granite.oauth.server.auth.impl.OAuth2ServerAuthenticationHandler
OAuth Server Authentication Handler is enabled now.
Register OAuth Client
Register a new OAuth client through http://localhost:4502/libs/granite/oauth/content/clients.html — every external application requires OAuth authentication should be registered as a OAuth client in AEM.
Enter a name and redirect URI — After a user successfully authorizes an application, the OAuth server will redirect the user back to the application with an authorization code to the configured redirect URL.
Copy the client id and client secret and keep them safe.
Setup Demo User
Setup up a demo user with all possible profile data and required permissions — complete read-only access and full access for “/content/dam/digital”
Profile Data
Let us now see how to retrieve the profile data of the user.
As a first step, access the authorization URL(in real scenario redirect the user to authorization URL when the user clicks on a link in the application) — http://localhost:4502/oauth/authorize?response_type=code&client_id=jgqd0beimj5q4ofi281cc56i6a-_d-xzn-e&scope=profile&redirect_uri=http://localhost:8080/testapp
If required, pass an additional parameter with name state with any random value e.g state=AlbinTest, the same state value will be returned in the response. This will helps us to verify the integrity of the data.
Login with the demo user created in the earlier step, this will display the authorization screen with permissions granted to the external application.
Now the user authorize the request, the user will be returned to the client application with authorization code as the parameter.
http://localhost:8080/testapp?code=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJhdWQiOiJqZ3FkMGJlaW1qNXE0b2ZpMjgxY2M1Nmk2YS1fZC14em4tZSIsInN1YiI6ImFsYmluIiwiZXhwIjoxNTk3MTEyNzcxLCJpYXQiOjE1OTcxMTIxNzEsInNjb3BlIjoicHJvZmlsZSIsImN0eSI6ImNvZGUifQ.aX1fRez64FmY5dMdIuoTP3QpQhjc5Kyo50TJzZJ7fT4&state=null
Now get the access token through the authorization code, I am using curl command for demo
curl -H “Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded” -d “code=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJhdWQiOiJqZ3FkMGJlaW1qNXE0b2ZpMjgxY2M1Nmk2YS1fZC14em4tZSIsInN1YiI6ImFsYmluIiwiZXhwIjoxNTk3MTEzMTI4LCJpYXQiOjE1OTcxMTI1MjgsInNjb3BlIjoicHJvZmlsZSIsImN0eSI6ImNvZGUifQ.TbsP8xptOPwcYpJKK-STkVJ2E6_62MbhRf0_2otV21o&grant_type=authorization_code&redirect_uri=http://localhost:8080/testapp&client_id=jgqd0beimj5q4ofi281cc56i6a-_d-xzn-e&client_secret=mpuprfm0rob20ed5cv87bhfoe4" http://localhost:4502/oauth/token
{ "access_token":"eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJhdWQiOiJqZ3FkMGJlaW1qNXE0b2ZpMjgxY2M1Nmk2YS1fZC14em4tZSIsImlzcyI6IkFkb2JlIEdyYW5pdGUiLCJzdWIiOiJhbGJpbiIsImV4cCI6MTU5NzExNzE4MywiaWF0IjoxNTk3MTEzNTgzLCJzY29wZSI6InByb2ZpbGUiLCJjdHkiOiJhdCJ9.PKBvXeFU3UDKHPFh23Nq2D6qSMa4GkMkPBYaXPoVFlM","expires_in":3600
}
Now get the profile data through the access token
curl -H “Authorization: Bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJhdWQiOiJqZ3FkMGJlaW1qNXE0b2ZpMjgxY2M1Nmk2YS1fZC14em4tZSIsImlzcyI6IkFkb2JlIEdyYW5pdGUiLCJzdWIiOiJhbGJpbiIsImV4cCI6MTU5NzExNjUwMywiaWF0IjoxNTk3MTEyOTAzLCJzY29wZSI6InByb2ZpbGUiLCJjdHkiOiJhdCJ9.c-A9wVja2JGfdDURPirLQPlZSisa8lAIlcTvBduhaFQ” http://localhost:4502/libs/oauth/profile
DAM Read & Write — Custom Scopes
Let us now enable a custom scope to read the DAM data, configure as required and deploy the scope
Enable the required access to “oauthservice” service user, I am enabling the read access for root folder “/”, and full access for /content/dam/digital folder(ReadACL is mandatory for the folder configured in the Scope).
As a first step, access the authorization URL and receive the authorization code(refer the profile data section for more details)
http://localhost:4502/oauth/authorize?response_type=code&client_id=jgqd0beimj5q4ofi281cc56i6a-_d-xzn-e&scope=dam_read&redirect_uri=http://localhost:8080/testapp
Receive the Access Token with the authorization code
curl -H “Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded” -d “code=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJhdWQiOiJqZ3FkMGJlaW1qNXE0b2ZpMjgxY2M1Nmk2YS1fZC14em4tZSIsInN1YiI6ImFsYmluIiwiZXhwIjoxNTk3MTE4NjU2LCJpYXQiOjE1OTcxMTgwNTYsInNjb3BlIjoiZGFtX3JlYWQiLCJjdHkiOiJjb2RlIn0.K6e3wfk1Kz0BWBPm85-nUf2TbOuqtNOBr2ZlHtGr5iI&grant_type=authorization_code&redirect_uri=http://localhost:8080/testapp&client_id=jgqd0beimj5q4ofi281cc56i6a-_d-xzn-e&client_secret=mpuprfm0rob20ed5cv87bhfoe4" http://localhost:4502/oauth/token
Now retrieve the asset data through the access token
curl -H “Authorization: Bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJhdWQiOiJnNmIzajl2aTk4bDM5ZmFvNzFpdmc0aDlraC1xM2dydGdoaCIsImlzcyI6IkFkb2JlIEdyYW5pdGUiLCJzdWIiOiJhbGJpbm9hdXRoIiwiZXhwIjoxNTk3MjA5MTM5LCJpYXQiOjE1OTcyMDU1MzksInNjb3BlIjoiZGFtX3JlYWQiLCJjdHkiOiJhdCJ9.kVtKYwG_d-CyQNTCF1D1PaeBoUEZ_JCQAj8AqOk9D74” http://localhost:4502/content/dam/digital/en/asset.jpg > asset.jpg
The specified asset is now downloaded to local machine.
Let us now enable a custom scope to upload the DAM data, configure as required and deploy the scope
The required access to the service user — “oauthservice” is already enabled.
As a first step, access the authorization URL and receive the authorization code(refer the profile data section for more details)
http://localhost:4502/oauth/authorize?response_type=code&client_id=jgqd0beimj5q4ofi281cc56i6a-_d-xzn-e&scope=dam_write&redirect_uri=http://localhost:8080/testapp
Receive the Access Token with the authorization code
curl -H “Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded” -d “code=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJhdWQiOiJnNmIzajl2aTk4bDM5ZmFvNzFpdmc0aDlraC1xM2dydGdoaCIsInN1YiI6ImFsYmlub2F1dGgiLCJleHAiOjE1OTcyNjEyNTUsImlhdCI6MTU5NzI2MDY1NSwic2NvcGUiOiJkYW1fd3JpdGUiLCJjdHkiOiJjb2RlIn0.L-8AU3lLDvwG5rR9U6G4XynEbeb3ktICzaG_mC2NfIE&grant_type=authorization_code&redirect_uri=http://localhost:8080/testapp&client_id=g6b3j9vi98l39fao71ivg4h9kh-q3grtghh&client_secret=83lsvr0glu3opumdthijrnudl8" http://localhost:4502/oauth/token
Now upload the asset data to /content/dam/digital folder through the access token
curl -H “Authorization: Bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJhdWQiOiJnNmIzajl2aTk4bDM5ZmFvNzFpdmc0aDlraC1xM2dydGdoaCIsImlzcyI6IkFkb2JlIEdyYW5pdGUiLCJzdWIiOiJhbGJpbm9hdXRoIiwiZXhwIjoxNTk3MjY0NjA4LCJpYXQiOjE1OTcyNjEwMDgsInNjb3BlIjoiZGFtX3dyaXRlIiwiY3R5IjoiYXQifQ.G2C7KLuy7nQ8PlCHfEotxga_p10U_w_acazAe9y0MJo” -X POST -F file=@C:\Users\albin\Desktop\salesforce-cms-connect-to-aem http://localhost:4502/content/dam/digital.createasset.html
The asset is successfully uploaded now.
Offline Access
Let us now retrieve the offline token to access the resources without resource owner interaction every time. I am going to receive the offline access token to fetch the user’s profile data whenever required. The offline_access scope should be combined with other scopes e.g profile to fetch the offline token that can be used whenever required to fetch authorized scope data offline e.g profile
As a first step, access the authorization URL and receive the authorization code to fetch the basic user profile data offline(refer the profile data section for more details)
Receive the Access Token/refresh token(offline access token)with the authorization code
curl -H “Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded” -d “code=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJhdWQiOiJnNmIzajl2aTk4bDM5ZmFvNzFpdmc0aDlraC1xM2dydGdoaCIsInN1YiI6ImFsYmlub2F1dGgiLCJleHAiOjE1OTcyNjQ0MDksImlhdCI6MTU5NzI2MzgwOSwic2NvcGUiOiJvZmZsaW5lX2FjY2Vzcyxwcm9maWxlIiwiY3R5IjoiY29kZSJ9.ktynif6GQOlldITxizCioLntyj5SiI8QCOW_KcyODWI&grant_type=authorization_code&redirect_uri=http://localhost:8080/testapp&client_id=g6b3j9vi98l39fao71ivg4h9kh-q3grtghh&client_secret=83lsvr0glu3opumdthijrnudl8" http://localhost:4502/oauth/token
{"access_token":"eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJhdWQiOiJnNmIzajl2aTk4bDM5ZmFvNzFpdmc0aDlraC1xM2dydGdoaCIsImlzcyI6IkFkb2JlIEdyYW5pdGUiLCJzdWIiOiJhbGJpbm9hdXRoIiwiZXhwIjoxNTk3MjY3NDk4LCJpYXQiOjE1OTcyNjM4OTgsInNjb3BlIjoib2ZmbGluZV9hY2Nlc3MscHJvZmlsZSIsImN0eSI6ImF0In0.3qu1Qi7zk931senoXVdwmvlnWSxabks0Xfdnm0Y95LM","refresh_token":"eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJhdWQiOiJnNmIzajl2aTk4bDM5ZmFvNzFpdmc0aDlraC1xM2dydGdoaCIsImlzcyI6IkFkb2JlIEdyYW5pdGUiLCJzdWIiOiJhbGJpbm9hdXRoIiwiZXhwIjoxNjI4Nzk5ODk4LCJpYXQiOjE1OTcyNjM4OTgsInNjb3BlIjoib2ZmbGluZV9hY2Nlc3MscHJvZmlsZSIsImN0eSI6InJ0In0.ePDaFSO19PAIZdhKXCkmnv0i4kzf1g49yNYM6cUrsfM","expires_in":3600}
The access token is valid for 3600 sec and can be used to receive the profile data within that time limit, the refresh_token can be used to receive the access_token whenever required to fetch the user’s profile data without the interaction from user.
curl -H “Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded” -d “refresh_token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJhdWQiOiJnNmIzajl2aTk4bDM5ZmFvNzFpdmc0aDlraC1xM2dydGdoaCIsImlzcyI6IkFkb2JlIEdyYW5pdGUiLCJzdWIiOiJhbGJpbm9hdXRoIiwiZXhwIjoxNjI4Nzk5ODk4LCJpYXQiOjE1OTcyNjM4OTgsInNjb3BlIjoib2ZmbGluZV9hY2Nlc3MscHJvZmlsZSIsImN0eSI6InJ0In0.ePDaFSO19PAIZdhKXCkmnv0i4kzf1g49yNYM6cUrsfM&grant_type=refresh_token&redirect_uri=http://localhost:8080/testapp&client_id=g6b3j9vi98l39fao71ivg4h9kh-q3grtghh&client_secret=83lsvr0glu3opumdthijrnudl8" http://localhost:4502/oauth/token
{"access_token":"eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJhdWQiOiJnNmIzajl2aTk4bDM5ZmFvNzFpdmc0aDlraC1xM2dydGdoaCIsImlzcyI6IkFkb2JlIEdyYW5pdGUiLCJzdWIiOiJhbGJpbm9hdXRoIiwiZXhwIjoxNTk3MjY3OTAxLCJpYXQiOjE1OTcyNjQzMDEsInNjb3BlIjoib2ZmbGluZV9hY2Nlc3MscHJvZmlsZSIsImN0eSI6ImF0In0.hYVOVztkzXDhkpHVF3UlfGvS6NFfVhBYLlpr6fn1Gow","expires_in":3600}
The access token can be used to fetch the user’s profile data(or other scope data authorized by users)
JWT Bearer Token— Server to Server integration
Let us now see how to use the JWT Bearer token to enable the server to server integration without the resource owner’s intervention.
As a first step, download the AEM OAuth client private key to sign the JWT bearer token also note the private key password(keep the private key and password safe)
Now generate the public certificate from the downloaded private key, execute the below command — Enter the private key password.
openssl pkcs12 -in store.p12 -out store.crt.pem -clcerts -nokeys
Extract the private key
openssl pkcs12 -in store.p12 -passin pass:notasecret -nocerts -nodes -out store.private.key.txt
Let us now create a JWT token signed with the private key generated in the previous step.
You can use any JWT libraries to generate the JWT token for real scenario’s but I am using https://jwt.io/ for demo.
Header
{
"alg": "RS256",
"typ": "JWT"
}
Payload
{
"aud": "<Token Endpoint",
"iss": "<Client Id>",
"sub": "<user name>",
"exp": <Current time in Milliseconds+expiry>,
"iat": <Current time in Milliseconds>,
"scope": "<scope>",
"cty": "code"
}
Enter the public certificate and the private key generated in the previous step.
Now the JWT token is ready, the token can be used to retrieve the access token from AEM.
curl -H “Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded” -d “assertion=eyJhbGciOiJSUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJhdWQiOiJodHRwOi8vbG9jYWxob3N0OjQ1MDIvb2F1dGgvdG9rZW4iLCJpc3MiOiJnNmIzajl2aTk4bDM5ZmFvNzFpdmc0aDlraC1xM2dydGdoaCIsInN1YiI6ImFsYmlub2F1dGgiLCJleHAiOjE1OTcyNzM4OTA5NDA2LCJpYXQiOjE1OTcyNzM4MDk0MDYsInNjb3BlIjoiZGFtX3JlYWQiLCJjdHkiOiJjb2RlIn0.EmXLGX9RK-i4OPh-kA8YSTxi8PSJxVtk7uWsYLcMqXY4Z-ZI6pJK_1uLZdJbFxurs3tLqkg300w6w3M99PTrHZg54J2s9SafZyB7psAh6K8ycEvJDHsUDD1ovZvMfQ__tqhMC8yzGFlODLWaAx095fVHO-ce4pewxdzwv3TQK593xwjtwL_hPRqLkjy6Kvt6Cu0TEJd6YFoMNiftca9KxIMEG9fMOpNkHe4rIo_oSqdmiDzbqBZ-0P_3j4gDO_AYnULF9h42NHOrgAxOucfwZbfxgHc8UODUiLw3f1Mw9WGK9POzdFPeruHcknjRf4J60BwestDbFjfHb_8owXAJwA&grant_type=urn:ietf:params:oauth:grant-type:jwt-bearer&redirect_uri=http://localhost:8080/testapp&client_id=g6b3j9vi98l39fao71ivg4h9kh-q3grtghh&client_secret=83lsvr0glu3opumdthijrnudl8" http://localhost:4502/oauth/token
Now you should be able to download the assets from /content/dam/digital through the access token(based on the scope used while generating the JWT token)
curl -H “Authorization: Bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJhdWQiOiJnNmIzajl2aTk4bDM5ZmFvNzFpdmc0aDlraC1xM2dydGdoaCIsImlzcyI6IkFkb2JlIEdyYW5pdGUiLCJzdWIiOiJhZG1pbiIsImV4cCI6MTU5NzI3NzYwNSwiaWF0IjoxNTk3Mjc0MDA1LCJzY29wZSI6ImRhbV9yZWFkIiwiY3R5IjoiYXQifQ.g-AXNazPxnAP1VbB8Ym1NB_UFW2MuCmYvsPWuZY-jfQ” http://localhost:4502/content/dam/digital/en/asset.jpg > asset.jpg
Token Revocation
The access token granted by the OAuth authorization server(AEM) can be used by the clients to access the protected resources from AEM. Sometimes we may need to revoke the access tokens granted to the clients due to various reasons, AEM provides different options to revoke the tokens.
Client Token Revocation — Revoke all the access tokens granted under specific OAuth client. In this scenario, the tokens can be revoked by the user who created/manages the OAuth client in AEM(my case “admin” user).
As a first step, enable the client revocation through system console — “Adobe Granite OAuth Client Token Revocation Endpoint” http://localhost:4502/system/console/configMgr/com.adobe.granite.oauth.server.impl.OAuth2ClientRevocationServlet
Now you should have “Revoke All Tokens” option in OAuth Clients to revoke all the access tokens issued for that specific client.
Revoking Individual Tokens — Revoke the specific individual tokens granted to the clients.
As a first step, enable the individual token revocation through system console — “Adobe Granite OAuth Token Revocation Endpoint” http://localhost:4502/system/console/configMgr/com.adobe.granite.oauth.server.impl.OAuth2RevocationEndpointServlet
Now the individual token revocation is enabled, the individual tokens can be revoked through — http://localhost:4502/libs/granite/oauth/content/tokens.html. The individual tokens should be revoked by the user who granted the access tokens, in my case “albin”
Revoking Individual Tokens through Service — AEM provides API to revoke the access tokens granted to the clients.
As a first step, enable the API revocation through system console — “Adobe Granite OAuth Revocation Endpoint” http://localhost:4502/system/console/configMgr/com.adobe.granite.oauth.server.impl.OAuth2RevocationEndpointServlet. The individual token should be revoked by the user who granted the access tokens, in my case “albin”
Now the API token revocation is enabled, the individual tokens can be revoked through http://localhost:4502/libs/granite/oauth/revoke
curl -u “albin:Welcome123!” -H “Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded” -d “token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJhdWQiOiJnNmIzajl2aTk4bDM5ZmFvNzFpdmc0aDlraC1xM2dydGdoaCIsImlzcyI6IkFkb2JlIEdyYW5pdGUiLCJzdWIiOiJhbGJpbm9hdXRoIiwiZXhwIjoxNTk3MjgwODA2LCJpYXQiOjE1OTcyNzcyMDYsInNjb3BlIjoiZGFtX3JlYWQiLCJjdHkiOiJhdCJ9.rsAguVQgBSLS-SM-WeIo-t3gKyAaCZTPDIqvP9wyY7s” http://localhost:4502/libs/granite/oauth/revoke
As a conclusion, Adobe granite OAuth 2.0 server implementation(com.adobe.granite.oauth.server) provides the support for OAuth 2.0 server functionalities in AEM. The AEM OAuth 2.0 server functionalities can be used to manage the protected resources from AEM through external clients. The required grants and scopes can be used to manage the resources, if required custom scopes can be defined to provide custom resource access. | https://medium.com/tech-learnings/how-to-manage-the-protected-aem-resources-through-oauth-2-0-851ce4c7a5ef | ['Albin Issac'] | 2020-08-14 20:23:46.609000+00:00 | ['Aem', 'Authentication', 'Programming', 'Oauth', 'Software Development'] |
Your Body Is Your Own | Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise
Taken by the author in Avallon, France, July 2019
It wasn’t until the summer before I turned 40 that I realized how deeply ingrained was a belief I had that my body was not my own, that it was made primarily for a man to enjoy.
I have always remembered a reading from college by W.E.B. DuBois, an African-American Harlem Renaissance author who wrote The Souls of Black Folk. In this sociological work, he explains that black people walk around with what he calls a “double-consciousness,” operating on two levels simultaneously. On one level, they move through the world like people. On another level, they move through the world with the consistent reminder, or consciousness, that they are black. Because wherever a black person goes, he is viewed through a double lens.
Until recently, as a woman, I have also felt the effects of that double lens. I don’t know when it started, but I felt as though my more prominent role in life was to be seen, rather than to see. That I was the object of someone else’s life rather than the subject and author of my own. And this particularly related to my relationships and interactions with men, because there was a sense that I was only good enough, or worthy, if a man I desired deemed me relevant. Attaining his love or attention and admiration would set everything in order, I seemed to believe. His love and adoration and cherishing would right every wrong, fix every flaw within me.
I am sad that I held onto such a damaging belief, not even wholly aware it was living in my flesh and bones. But it is not surprising. It is what we women, through centuries of domination and dishonor, have been told, both outright and implicitly.
Oh, how I hope and pray that my daughters will not fall victim to the same trajectory. How I hope and pray that we can teach young girls a new way forward. But in order to do that, we must acknowledge it, recognize it, heal the wound.
This false belief women have about our bodies, about the very essence of being female, is particularly aflame in those of us who didn’t grow up with a nurturing, warm, solid father figure. Who didn’t grow up with fathers who showed us what it looked like to be a good man, an emblem of gentleness, kindness, and compassion. A father who encouraged us to lead, to be true to ourselves and our instincts, to grow. A father who lifted us up, who demonstrated respect and honor for a woman’s wholeness, for her living into every part of herself.
We have all been sorely lacking in these models, both in family life, in politics, in corporations, and in churches.
So let me tell you the truth, as a way to heal the damage of the past.
Your body is solely, completely, unequivocally yours, to do with what you want. It is whole and perfect and beautiful, just as it was made, no ifs, ands, or buts. Your body may change and grow in all kinds of ways, and that is part of its power, its mastery, and its mystery. Regardless of what it looks like, it is still, and will always be, yours. It is the most special home you’ll ever live in, and it is the home you take with you wherever you go. You can invite people into this home, you can share it with others, but all of that is your choice. Your choice. Yours. Every single minute of every single day of every single breath, into the eternity of breaths you take. Your choice.
You and your body were not made for pleasing anybody else, though pleasing someone can be a cool side-effect. Catering to others’ needs and wants and lusts and desires was not the purpose of your being born. You do not have to alter your body to make someone happy, or “fix” it in some way to get someone to love or acknowledge you. You do not have to open your body to anyone to gain respect and acceptance, for that respect and acceptance already lies implicit within you. You do not have to let someone use your body for their own aims.
Your body is not an object for anyone else. It is the source of your power, and it is your church. It is your temple, your sacred altar.
And no matter what your body looks like, or what your body has been through, God thinks it is beautiful. Every single day. You are not a number to God. You are not a size, or a shell, or an image of brokenness.
And no matter what you decide to do with it, God will always love you and your body.
God’s deepest wish, in fact, is that you would feel the same. | https://medium.com/the-sacred-sensual/your-body-is-your-own-408b49b575cf | [] | 2020-12-17 23:58:16.640000+00:00 | ['Spiritual Growth', 'Spirituality', 'Women', 'Womens Rights', 'Body Image'] |
Pray — The Story of a Priest, the Rosary and the Power of Prayer | Pray — The Story of a Priest, the Rosary and the Power of Prayer RJ Carr Follow Oct 7 · 10 min read
On October 9th, Pray — a documentary about Father Patrick Peyton, will come to many local theatres around the country. The movie tells the story of an Irish immigrant ordained a Holy Cross Father in the Roman Catholic Church who brought people all over the world to their knees — praying the Rosary.
The film includes never before seen footage from the archives of Father Peyton’s media work.
I spoke with Fr. David Guffey, CSC, executive producer of Pray, about the movie and Father Peyton’s story.
[Father Guffey’s words are in bold. Mine are anything not in bold.]
I saw Pray actually this morning and I knew about Father Peyton, but I didn’t know how little I knew. It was a powerful biography. I greatly enjoyed it. What brought you to do this movie at this time?
We thought that we were able to really show Father Peyton and use his voice and his words and that would help get his message out again for this age.
It was just so clear that the family has so many struggles today. Father Peyton thought the family had struggles in the early 1940s when he started the Family Rosary Crusade. It’s nothing compared to the pressures that families have today from outside influences as well as from all the kinds of pressures that families have always had relationally and spiritually. So, it’s bringing those two things together. It seemed like it would be good to introduce the world anew to the message and the person of Father Peyton.
I was fascinated by what would be considered maybe his lowest point — wanting to go to the seminary but getting tuberculosis and it basically sidelined him for a year. It was there that his whole vocation actually came together.
He was in his last year at the seminary (1938). Our theologate [theology school] at the time was in Washington, DC. Holy Cross had a college connected to Catholic University there and in October he coughed. He had a spot of blood and then he had tuberculosis and that really knocked him out.
He and his brother entered the seminary at the same time. They always wanted to be ordained together but this really just stopped him in his tracks. He had a severe case of tuberculosis and that’s really in that time when he was flat on his back and really became more and more helpless. He discovered the importance of prayer in his life and turned to it in a huge way, especially prayer asking for the intercession of the Blessed Mother. As the story goes, he was healed, he believed, through the intercession of the Blessed Mother.
The next couple of years, his big question was ‘How do I respond to this?’ I think often when people have a powerful experience of grace, there’s such gratitude that it happened and then you have to figure out what you do with it. He knew he’d always have a devotion to the Blessed Mother but he didn’t want it just to be a devotional expression of gratitude. Although that could have been enough. He wanted to do it with his whole life.
It’s in that kind of convalescence, he had he had a little job. He started out as a chaplain at the Holy Cross Brothers High School in Albany, New York. That last year of theology, the deacon year and early priesthood that he really prayed and came up with the call of his life, which was to spread the message of family prayer, especially the rosary. He spent the rest of his life single-heartedly pursuing that.
What you described is that whole focus of prayer was not there prior to the disease. He was interested in becoming a priest but it was there that he really learned prayer because that is what saved his life.
It was. He grew up praying the rosary daily because it was part of his devotional life. There’s a difference between praying because it’s a habit, praying because it’s a nice thing in your life and really discovering that prayer is your life. Prayer is what makes your life what it is. | https://medium.com/writings-from-the-catholic-abbey-to-the-secular/pray-the-story-of-a-priest-the-rosary-and-the-power-of-prayer-3e4ffc9efbfb | ['Rj Carr'] | 2020-10-24 17:25:41.712000+00:00 | ['Rosary', 'Film', 'Prayer', 'Patrick Peyton', 'Catholic'] |
Sanctified Yogi — A God of My Own | But our lessons are hard. Campus is like the Black Coliseum, where you compete, argue and debate against the best and brightest every day. Along the way, all of your ignorance is exposed and old ideas and assumptions get swept away. In a single class, Black women dropped bombs on my whole worldview. First they say:
You can be an oppressed Black man AND a part of the patriarchal system that keeps Black women down!
And I’m like:
WHAAATTT?!
Then they say:
Oh, yes! They went on. And you can be as progressive as you wanna be and still be homophobic.
BUT HOWWWW?!?
My African classmates tell me, “No, we have never lived in the jungle! And even if we did, we are still better students than you lazy Americans!”
My Black Muslim and Five Percenter classmates ask “How y’all brothers still reading The White Man’s Bible? You know Christianity didn’t start in Europe, right?”
Anybody from New York, New Jersey and Philly
“Y’all country!”
The rest of us:
“Fuck y’all! The South got something to say!”
It’s wild! But you thrive in this culture of competitive intellectualism and when you finally grab that diploma, you are iron sharpened by iron, Black Excellence in The Flesh and ready to claim the Good Life you deserve:
You marry a beautiful sorority sister from a well to do family.
You make “good money” at a world class, multinational business with incredible benefits and you work with people from all over the world.
You develop a sophisticated, urbane worldview, mixed with black nationalism, progressivism, corporatism, hip hop and Jesus. I register independent but vote liberal. I attend foreign film festivals and eat fancy shit like figs and prosciutto.
Put me in any room — black or white, suburban or urban, academic or thug — and I’m good.
But it’s not enough.
You thought your first home, a hundred year old rowhouse with modern amenities, was a good purchase. You thought your historic neighborhood, centrally located in the middle of a world class city, was a great location. But to the real estate market? You bought in a ‘bad’ area, filled with ungentrified Black folks who had the audacity to stay in the homes they grew up in. And so you slowly begin to understand that to live with your own people means losing wealth and guarantees your family will never have quality services or education. Black lives actually do matter — but only because in America, a Black life is a ‘dangerous threat’ and White folks don’t bring their money anywhere near it. Even if it is fancy and sophisticated like you.
And so you realize — Black Excellence cannot erase White Fear because it cannot erase Black skin. Was it that same fear that made them burn down Sister So and So’s house? That makes banks devalue your home? That empowers police to use lethal force, including murder, to eliminate us and soothe that fear?
You hear a terrible voice down in the secret places only you know. No matter what you do, it says they will still kill you. Speak well. Dress nice. Be respectable. Nobody cares. The path you took from Howard has brought you to a dead end. Came 700 miles all the way to DC and guess what? You’re still trapped just like The Old Folks!
So how will you ever find peace?
A Black person who cannot answer that question is a soldier trapped in a war-zone with no weapons. Your church mothers knew sooner or later, their naive son would lay up with that trifling bitch America and if you didn’t know the Lord she would take everything you had. Only now, as a young Black man in a far off city, do you appreciate what they tried to give you. And for that you love them even more.
But you can’t go back. If home had the answer, you would still be there. But you know one thing without a doubt — you cannot make it without God.
So you go looking in a new space.
You shop for new churches like you’re buying your first nice car with your first big paycheck. You look at every option. Pentecostals? Too wild, too weird. Suburban evangelicals? Too white, too conservative. You try non-denominational vineyard churches, gigantic mega churches, even tiny store fronts in the middle of nowhere. Nothing fit.
You move to Charlotte and you hear the Presbyterians are trying a new thing. You find this urban, multi-racial church filled with creative, liberal seekers like you. But more importantly, they have Black leadership. The preacher is Black, his wife is Black, the choir is Black and they saaanng. This spiritual food has just enough soul to satisfy my hunger and before long all manner of Black folks from every denomination and every social bracket pull up a seat at the table. In the segregated South, we have the audacity to worship like the book of Revelation, where “a vast multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and language” stand before the throne of God. The White folks outnumber Black folks three to one, but a lot of ’em love hip hop, Star Wars and Obama just like you. You think to yourself “maybe I can find my answer here.”
It’s never easy, this mishmash of Black worship and White doctrine. For Black folks, church is a celebration, for White folks, it’s an examination. We clap and dance. White folks chill. We love Moses the liberator, White folks love Paul the evangelizer. Imagine two people who are opposites get married. Now imagine the families of the bride and groom at the reception, trying as hard as they can to get along. That’s our church. But the vision of a multi racial community gathered around the throne of God keeps us together. We want to seeGod’s church “on Earth as it is in heaven.” Just like Jesus told us.
Then in Florida, Trayvon Martin is murdered steps from his own home and his killer never sees justice. When Barack Obama expresses sympathy, says Trayvon could be his son, many White folks are outraged. Polling shows 67% of White people believe he deserved to be shot and 51% thought his killer should be acquitted.
….in Missouri, Mike Brown is killed by police, who leave his body rotting in the street for hours.
…in New York, Eric Garner is still choked to death for selling cigarettes.
…in Texas, Sandra Bland is found hanged in a jail cell after a routine traffic stop and nobody explains why.
At some point, Black NFL quarterback Colin Kapernick begins to protest. Before every game, he takes a knee during the national anthem, his way of confronting police brutality. But our newly elected President, Donald Trump, calls him and the players that join him “son of a bitches.” Many White Christians agree and one pastor ripped up his Nike gear in counter protest. His congregation loved it and across the country, one thing becomes very clear — disrespecting a piece of cloth is more offensive than actual Black people suffering.
And the killing continues.
…in Minnesota, Philando Castille is murdered by police in front of his partner and 4- year-old child, despite having a permit for the firearm in his possession.
….In Baltimore, Freddie Gray was murdered by police.
And when Keith Lamont Scott is killed here in Charlotte, your multi ethnic, progressive church offers you no relief. Even here, many of my Jesus serving, Black culture loving brothers and sisters still voted for President Trump. So we reached out to others. We invite Black theologians like the sisters from Truth Table who speak comfort to our pain. Directly from the pulpit, they voice the anger, pain and frustration many of us feel being Black Christians in white spaces. We felt validated and supported and seen — especially the Black women in our church. We were energized and liberated by their unapologetic, pro-Black rhetoric but many of our White churchmates were upset and frustrated. For them, centering our needs threatened the unity of peace of the church and later we were encouraged to have “thoughtful group discussions” so that “both sides could explain their perspectives.” But who wants to chat with your abuser when you’ve been abused? Especially when justifying their behavior was more important than understanding how they hurt you in the first place.
You expected too much, you realize later. Believers imitate their God and the God of these White Presbyterians is not like mine. Back home, we sang “Jesus is on the main line, tell him what you want!” We had a two way relationship with God and even though he “might not come when you want, he was always right on time.” As Renita Weems once said, we could call on our God and She would come see about you, like a Good Mother.
Calling on The Presbyterian God was pointless. This God was a Sovereign King who could predetermine who suffered, who lived or who died and a Holy Judge who had no equal and therefore could not be questioned. If The Presbyterian God said it, it was right by default, so what was the point of arguing or crying or wailing? Your fate, Trayvon’s, Sandra Bland’s,George Floyd’s, Breonna Taylor’s? The Presbyterian God had already condemned them to die a racist death before they were born. No wonder we could not appeal to our White Christians friends. If their God could not be bothered to intervene, why should they?
Instead, they offered up the same gift they got from their Holy Father. The afterlife. The greatest gift this God can offer is escape from my troubles, VIP access to a shiny, gated community in heaven where there is no pain, no suffering, no lack. And the good news? they tell you. It’s FREE! Apparently, the bill was paid 2000 years ago, because this God had already preordained racial violence against another person of color. And his name, I am joyfully reminded, is Jesus. And you can go see him, too. After you die.
And now you truly see. Hell is not just some underground fire pit, where bad people burn forever. Hell is America killing people like me with state sanctioned violence and God killing people like me with theological violence. You are a lamb who can only join the heavenly country club if you die in the slaughterhouse. But who wants an invitation written in their own blood? And do you really wanna sip cocktails with the ones who printed it?
No.
You will never trust this God. You want The Old Folk’s God, the one who planted spiritual seeds that refreshed and nourished their hungry souls. Seeds that bore fruit like joy and peace, fruit that gave them the strength to face oppression with their head up and their back straight.
You will not stay in Egypt, you decide, worshipping a God who would let you starve. You will eat in your own Promised Land. You just need a map to find it.
Turns out, it was on my yoga mat the whole time. | https://medium.com/@michaeltsales/sanctified-yogi-81ab72f83e95 | ['Mike Sales'] | 2021-01-14 23:35:53.955000+00:00 | ['Christianity', 'Yoga', 'African American', 'White Privilege', 'Religion And Spirituality'] |
Announcement on Adjusting USDT Transfer Fee in ThunderCore’s Ecological Applications | Announcement on Adjusting USDT Transfer Fee in ThunderCore’s Ecological Applications ThunderCore Follow Sep 2 · 3 min read
Dear Users,
In the past one year since ThunderCore opened cross-chain asset transfer service, ThunderCore’s ecological users are increasingly active, and transfers of digital assets are gradually increasing. As Ethereum network becomes increasingly congested and GAS cost continuously hits record highs, the GAS cost of ThunderCore cross-chain transfer service keeps rising as a result. We hereby decide to adjust the minimum amount of USDT and TT-USDT cross-chain transfers in ThunderCore’s ecological applications like ThunderCore Hub (excluding transfers inside ThunderCore).
At present, all users still enjoy GAS fee subsidies for cross-chain transfer service. However, in order to ensure the smooth transfer of users’ digital assets, we will temporarily raise the USDT transfer threshold to give priority to those big amount users with urgent asset transfer needs. The specific rules are as follows:
From 2020/9/3 14:00 (UTC+8) to 2020/9/8, the minimum amount of transfer out will be adjusted to 100 USDT, and the transfers will continue to be exempted from GAS service charge; At 2020/9/8 14:00 (UTC+8), the minimum amount of transfer out will be recovered to 10 USDT; at the same time, cross-chain asset transfers will no longer enjoy exemption from GAS fees, and the fixed transfer fee will be 5 USDT/transfer; All asset transfers into ThunderCore are free of charge.
ThunderCore announced the opening of ThunderCore stablecoins in August 2019, successfully building a bridge across chains and allowing other chain assets to be created and used on ThunderCore. That helps the industry break barriers among public chains and makes it possible and efficient the scalability and connectivity of blockchain. The first assets supported by ThunderCore are MakerDao’s DAI and Tether’s USDT.
Holding of the stablecoin “TT-USDT” can help development teams deploy applications on ThunderCore, enjoy more efficient performance of ThunderCore, and integrate the characteristics of these assets. For instance, the cross-chain asset TT-USDT can endow USDT with seconds-level TT confirmation, high TPS (up to 4,000 times/S) and other characteristics, so that both parties of transaction wait for no time.
ThunderCore’s cross-chain asset technology can be used to import and use assets on Ethereum, such as ETH chain assets represented by TT-USDT. This will allow ThunderCore users and developers to take advantage of diversified public chain asset ecosystems, and will also help to share resources and attract more users from huge communities of other public chains.
Nowadays, the most popular ThunderCore cross-chain asset is TT-USDT — many communities around the world are actively promoting it, and many project applications are steadily completing TT-USDT implantation. For example, wallets like ThunderCore Hub and Trust Wallet can already support TT-USDT deposit and transfer; TT-Swap can provide direct conversion between TT and TT-USDT.
ThunderCore team
2020/9/2
T.me/thundercore_china
T.me/thunder_official
[ Reddit ] Reddit.com/r/thunder_official/
[ Medium ] Medium.com/thundercore
[ Twitter ] Twitter.com/ThunderProtocol
[ Linkedin ] Linkedin.com/company/thundercore | https://medium.com/thundercore/announcement-on-adjusting-usdt-transfer-fee-in-thundercores-ecological-applications-fd23c37ee8ce | [] | 2020-09-02 14:29:11.804000+00:00 | ['Crypto', 'Thunder Updates', 'Thunder Announcement', 'Usdt', 'Thundercore'] |
Philosophy As We Know It Is Dead | The Inability To Show What Constitutes Today’s Philosophy
An overview of contemporary philosophy has the particular problem of grasping its subject matter — how late Arthur Schopenhauer or Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, were received; Bernard Bolzano, for instance, would have fallen into oblivion without Edmund Husserl.
A further problem lies in the selection and interpretation — philosophy of the present means dealing with philosophers who are still alive or have recently died. Often a substantial part of the work has not yet been published. There are prominent philosophers such as Hilary Putnam, who changed their positions significantly during their literary work. However, the question of where the actuality for the present time lies by the wayside in this old-fashioned way of philosophizing.
In other words: Why cling to the old if it no longer reflects the reality of today?
I agree with Camille Paglia when she says that:
“The last truly important movement in the world of philosophy was existentialism, in the post-war Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir. There have been theories of language since then, but without the profound insight of the best philosophy. Post-structuralism and post-modernism, by their slippery relativism, have destroyed the concept of philosophy. No one cares about philosophers — cultural criticism has come to the fore. Media and glitzy pop culture dominate now, and people need help to negotiate and survive it.”
Has philosophy lost its claim to deal with the practical implications of our daily lives, or has it, at least in the western world, never been able to detach itself from this idea of the small circle of white men?
It must nevertheless be the goal of philosophy to concern itself with fundamental problems. As a guideline, philosophy must give a thought construct in which people can find themselves. Today, it appears that political goals and propaganda are surpassing philosophy. This is probably also the point of contact to existentialism. If there was a desire to redefine oneself after the Second World War, then there would have to be a renewed desire for identity constructs in the present day, wouldn’t there? | https://medium.com/the-apeiron-blog/philosophy-as-we-know-it-is-dead-fff572b0544c | ['The Unlikely Techie'] | 2020-11-27 18:11:17.620000+00:00 | ['Philosophy', 'History', 'Science', 'Culture', 'Social Media'] |
What Advantages do Advanced Reconciliation Solutions Bring? | The prospects of achieving speed and accuracy in reconciliation are becoming a lift with advanced technology-backed solutions.
The extremely valued reconciliation method is undergoing many makeovers as capital market corporations enter the digital age and leverage trendy solutions to drive the method. Technology firms square measure busy innovating, whereas capital market corporations square measure thirstily deploying solutions to reinforce operational potency and create mercantilism easier. As markets become a lot of dynamic than ever, and automation makes mercantilism fast, the need for high-speed and automatic reconciliation is turning into a lot of pronounced than ever. In response to the present, vendors square measure giving reconciliation platforms and solutions driven by AI and cubic centimeters.
The rising volume of trade has a semiconductor diode to the demand for high-capacity reconciliation platforms. A platform that permits a consumer to store and method immense quantities of information throughout reconciliation is taken into account valuable. Thus, trendy reconciliation ought to involve fast and effective capabilities to reconcile knowledge and rule out any discrepancies in money transactions and accounts. With computing and machine learning, service suppliers are able to add many fascinating options into reconciliation tools and platforms.
With Artificial Intelligence, backend systems acquire psychological feature skills that rule out the necessity for human intervention within the reconciliation method. This not solely improves the accuracy of reconciliation however additionally makes the method passing quick. once it involves machine learning, reconciliation processes gain the prophetic edge. Most of the capital market corporations rely on analytics solutions to predict money and liquidity functions. With ML-enabled reconciliation platforms, firms will eliminate separate analytics solutions and derive higher insights from the offered knowledge. Capital market corporations square measure currently having the ability to forecast the flow of payments and receipts throughout the course of operation, on a usual.
Together, AI and cubic centimeters will contour the reconciliation method to an enormous extent. Some service suppliers have additionally leveraged AI to enhance the standard of information that drive reconciliation. With AI, it’s easier to select relevant knowledge that enhances the standard of reconciliation outcomes. Ultimately, advanced reconciliation solutions gift capital market corporations with exceptional capabilities to reconcile effectively with minimum prices and efforts.
Top Portfolio Analytics Companies For Capital Market
Portfolio analytics solutions ar wide adopted by investors to navigate the capital market and manage their portfolios effectively. numerous portfolio analytics solutions have emerged out of late, proving to be a boon for investors as they supply important insights into the investment processes, by leverage comprehensive algorithms, serving to them derive profitableness, whereas conjointly prediction the profitable money instruments to take a position within the future.
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Source: Capital Markets CIO Outlook | https://medium.com/@emmaelice03/what-advantages-do-advanced-reconciliation-solutions-bring-80a68bf0812d | ['Emma Elice'] | 2019-11-15 07:05:12.701000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Technews', 'Reconciliation', 'Portfolio', 'Analytics'] |
Artist creating artwork on banana | Coronavirus and its devastation have spread all over the world. People are only bound to live in inner places. But many people used the opportunity to use their mind and hidden potential in a creative way. With limited access to the materials and space, the artist feels a desire to create.
Anna Chojnicka
Anna Chojnicka has worked in the Global Social Enterprise sector for 10 years. Firstly she worked as a social entrepreneur, then supporting innovative social enterprises to grow in the UK and East Africa. She has an intellectual and creative mind, who stunned the people with the masterpieces on the banana peel. Instead of canvas and paper, she uses banana and their peels and creates amazing artwork with the short tools she owns. | https://medium.com/@fukatsoft/artist-creating-artwork-on-banana-59c594cc0d14 | [] | 2021-02-10 07:51:03.561000+00:00 | ['Artist', 'Coronavirus', 'Artwork Wallpapers', 'Artwork', 'Banana'] |
Warring Women: Coney Barrett, Harris, Feinstein and the Battle for Women’s Equality | |Politics|Feminism|Society|
The complex dynamics now at play in the Senate confirmation hearings that began this week
Join me in taking in the view from the helicopter that now hovers over the American glass ceiling. Looking down, we can see the faces of Supreme Court nominee Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Senators Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein pressed to the glass, pulling one another’s hair, with society adding some oomph to the punch in the gut that is yet to come. Each women has shattered one glass ceiling after the next in order to achieve the level of success she has attained in her career thus far, and still, each is poised to delegitimize the other during the tense hearings now unfolding.
Amy Coney Barrett, Judge, beloved Notre Dame professor
If confirmed, Judge Coney Barrett will only be the fifth women ever to sit on the supreme court. That fact alone is testament to her contribution to womens’ equality in America. Just after finishing Law School, she earned a prized clerkship in the office of Justice Antonin Scalia, is recognized as an acclaimed and beloved professor at the University of Notre Dame, and has served on the bench since 2017.
Still, Coney Barrett is a bitter pill for feminist to swallow, even if she will preserve the ratio of men to women on the court following the death of feminist icon Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. A devout Catholic, not only do her conservative views threaten the status quo on a womens’ right to choose, her church “People of Praise” preaches subservience of women to their husbands in a manner reminiscent of a time long past, or places far from Washington D.C.
A photocopy of an undated membership directory of People of Praise, obtained by The New York Times notes that Amy Barrett is a member of that community bearing the designation “handmaid.” The term, inspired by the title given to Mary, mother of Jesus in the Bible “handmaid of the Lord,” is a position of leadership for women in the community (After the publication of the book Handmaid’s Tale, which some associate with People of Praise, the community changed the title to “women leader.”)
Even “handmaids” or “women leaders” in the community are “headed” by their husbands, meaning that unlike men and unmarried women, who are guided by male “community counselors,” married women receive careful direction on aspects of life and personal choice from their husbands. The tension between the modes of empowerment recognized by the distinction “woman leader” within the People of Praise and “Supreme Court Justice” boggles the mind.
The tension between the modes of empowerment recognized by the distinction “woman leader” within the People of Praise and “Supreme Court Justice” boggles the mind.
Senator Kamala Harris, Vice Presidential Nominee
Were feminists feeling deflated by Coney Barrett’s nomination, they could draw comfort from the presence of Senator Kamala Harris on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
100-years after suffrage and following Hilary Clinton’s 2016 win of the popular vote (though not the presidency), should she be elected Vice President, Senator Harris will have the best shot at winning the US Presidency of any women in history. What is more, at a recent debate performance, she demonstrated the poise and savvy longed for by many Americans during the years of the Trump presidency, skillfully navigating a wide range of issues, not phased by the distractions and accusations of Vice President Pence.
She is, undoubtably, a powerful woman.
It is an unlucky fate then, that Senator Harris sits on the Judiciary Committee, called upon to preside over a rushed confirmation of Coney Barrett less than a month before the presidential elections. Salivating, Democrats might enjoy seeing her bring the full force of her skills as a long-time prosecutor to the proceedings. She could, if she thought it wise, no doubt, tear Coney Barrett to shreds.
She could, if she thought it wise, no doubt, tear Coney Barrett to shreds.
It is not just the general decorum of the Senate that stands in Harris’s way. She is, after all, a junior member of the committee. Were she to endeavor to show her strength, she would need to do so with the approval of, or perhaps, at the expense of, the ranking democrat on the committee, fellow California Senator Dianne Feinstein.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, Ranking Democrat, Senate Judiciary Committee
Senator Dianne Feinstein began her opening remarks at Day 1 of the hearings by noting that the matter at hand during her first ever confirmation hearings was the confirmation of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. 27-years later, she finds herself the ranking Democrat on the committee, serving in an unfathomably complex and tense political climate.
Rich with accomplishment, of late, those years have not been kind to Senator Feinstein. Since her reelection in 2018, she is rarely present in the halls of the senate without an aide, and it has become commonplace for her office to need to make revisions to off-the-cuff remarks she may have shared while walking the halls of the Senate.
On September 23, 2020, Politico ran a story citing three unnamed democrats who were concerned that Feinstein at age 87 and the oldest member of the Senate today, would not be up to the task of leading the democratic resistance to Coney Barrett’s confirmation. Many fault her for poor management of similar proceedings two years ago, at the confirmation hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh. An esteemed Senator with an extraordinary record, the article quoted source after source who threaten to push her aside at the first show of weakness.
Serving six-year terms, Feinstein is not the first senator to appear impacted by the aging process. Famously, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond served until age 101, his regular and painfully dated outbursts an expected occurrence on the Senate floor in the last years of his life. Still, in a culture in which the status of sage regularly evades aging women, it would be a travesty to witness Feinstein pushed aside in that way. Society needs her to remain a towering figure, so soon after burying her friend Justice Ginsburg.
In a culture in which the status of sage regularly evades aging women, it would be a travesty to witness Feinstein pushed aside in that way.
The legacy of patriarchy captured by the expectation held by People of Praise, that women are inherently subservient to men, generates a second rule-book by which all women are expected to play. Meritocracy still a long way off, the idea that a powerful litigator would dethrone an aging woman, whose job it is to block the nomination of a woman to the highest court is fraught to the point that it seems impossible.
What is for certain is that it is highly unlikely.
For better or for worse, these three women, having achieved unprecedented levels of power, will likely behave as good girls, who speak politely and respect their elders.
Such actions, it seems to me, are a boon for the country but a blow for feminism, unless of course these three women succeeded in communicating a message never before heard in America; that “being a good girl”, placing decency and respect over victory, are precisely what America needs in 2020, that such decency proves women’s worth as leaders, not as those who must be “headed” by men. | https://medium.com/discourse/amy-coney-barrett-kamala-harris-dianne-feinstein-and-the-battle-for-womens-equality-3658c4520261 | ['Sarene B. Arias'] | 2020-11-06 12:29:13.896000+00:00 | ['Feminism', 'Women', 'Politics', 'Society', 'Supreme Court'] |
Worst Purchases During Quarantine | Recently, I saw a YouTube video that Shelby Church made. It is called “My 5 Worst Purchases During Quarantine.” I am irresponsible spender which made me think this could be a funny topic. Quarantine has drove me insane over and over again so I keep spending money.
I bought a Nintendo Switch Lite. It was almost $300 and I haven’t touched it in almost a month. Actually, I might even sell it. I never have time to play on it. I’ve bought at least 4 games too. In total, I have spent around $500 just on switch stuff.
Stuffed animals have been a comfort item for me nonstop. I have anxiety and soft items help a lot ,but the amount I have spent on stuffed animals is ridiculous. I wanted these Disney ones because I love Disney. It was around $90 for 3 and I got them on sale. Disney overprices their items though.
Fast food. I spend around $100 a month on fast food. It could be way worse , but I’m trying to save for college.
This is a short article because I am trying to get used to writing before I do longer topics. | https://medium.com/@efulm5212/worst-purchases-during-quarantine-5ae8ab533769 | [] | 2020-12-23 05:54:34.962000+00:00 | ['Quarantine'] |
We can’t find happiness inside of ourselves, it is between people! | Question from the Internet:
“People are trying to find happiness or contentment by looking all around them. Is there a way to put that energy into looking inside of them and find what they have been looking for all along?”
I think that the actual problem is that we try to find happiness inside ourselves.
Even when people look for happiness “around then", they are searching for what they can attain for themselves, by what can they make themselves happy.
But true happiness can’t be found inside, that is an illusion!
True happiness is a collective, mutual emotional impression that arises from perfect, positive, mutually responsible, mutually complementing Human connections.
Happiness — contentment in biological term — comes from the balance, homeostasis one achieved with one’s environment. Nothing, nobody can become happy, content on one’s own.
Thus for true happiness we need to build a completely new, unique Human environment that’s based on general balance and homeostasis, as reach only cares about the fulfilment, contentment, happiness of the others. Then they all benefit from an unprecedented, reciprocal flow of energy, communication which didn’t exist between them before, which gives a completely new, qualitatively much higher sense of existence.
And since we need to achieve, build this above and against our inherently egotistic, self-serving, self-justifying, subjective nature, we will feel this new life as an extraordinary, vivid, absolutely realistic, tangible way in the contrast achieved!
https://youtu.be/3dUOxJKrszQ | https://medium.com/@samechphoto/we-cant-find-happiness-inside-of-ourselves-it-is-between-people-ab5496e5d9e2 | ['Zsolt Hermann'] | 2020-12-13 20:35:14.477000+00:00 | ['Change', 'Progress', 'Happiness', 'Education', 'Connection'] |
On the “Universe is a Simulation” Garbage | It’s a silly question that doesn’t matter.
For some reason, this has become a hot topic among physicists, astrophysicists, astronomers, and philosophers, and I have to admit I simply don’t understand why. Here’s Nick Bostrom, in 2003, laying the hypothesis out:
Many works of science fiction as well as some forecasts by serious technologists and futurologists predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future. Let us suppose for a moment that these predictions are correct. One thing that later generations might do with their super-powerful computers is run detailed simulations of their forebears or of people like their forebears. Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great many such simulations. Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct). Then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race. It is then possible to argue that, if this were the case, we would be rational to think that we are likely among the simulated minds rather than among the original biological ones. Therefore, if we don’t think that we are currently living in a computer simulation, we are not entitled to believe that we will have descendants who will run lots of such simulations of their forebears.
He goes on to pose a “trilemma,” which goes like this. One of three things must be true:
(1) the number of civilizations that reach the stage where they could simulate reality is basically zero, or,
(2) the civilizations that reach that stage wouldn’t create a simulation of the universe anyway, or,
(3) basically (almost) everyone who has experiences like we have must be in a simulation.
And there’s an interesting logic to that, that is tied into the anthropic principle, but which gives a lot of people heartburn.
And it gets popularized because everyone loves The Matrix movie, and Total Recall, which was ripped from Philip K. Dick, and it generates click traffic, so then Neal DeGrasse Tyson adopts it for his twitter hits…
…and Musk drops it while getting high on Rogan…
…and we’re all talking about it. Why?
(1) Turtles All the Way Down
You can’t prove via mathematics that we’re not in a simulation, because of Godel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem. It’s a bit complicated, but intuitively, it basically states that logic can’t be used to prove itself. Any math showing that we’re not in a simulation, would itself be simulated, for the people who advocate the simulation hypothesis. The argument would play out eerily similarly to people who point at dinosaur bones to prove that the shortened time spans described in literal interpretations of the bible are wrong. The literal bible believer can simply retort, “god put the dinosaur bones there,” and you get nowhere. “Your mathematical proof that there isn’t a simulation is simulated.” Same thing, different context.
But here’s the counter positive, which is even stranger, and nobody on the pro-simulation side seems to be thinking about it. If you were to mathematically prove that the universe is a simulation, and we were being simulated from another universe, then that same mathematical proof could be applied to that universe as well. So now there’s two simulations, and we are a simulation inside another simulation. And then you can do it again. Three simulations. And four, and so on. Any mathematical proof that we are a simulation must by its nature prove not only that we are a simulation, but that there are an infinite number of simulations, stacked on each other, with no end.
And that’s just silly.
The question is unanswerable.
(2) It Doesn’t Functionally Matter
Thankfully, we don’t need an answer, because none of this matters anyway. If we are not in a simulation, and are living in the “real universe,” then our job as a species is to figure out the rules of that universe as best as possible, even understanding that we cannot (again by Godel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem) ever have a complete theory that explains everything. A Theory of Everything would, by its very nature, explain itself, which is a Godel(2) violation.
Why do we pursue knowledge about the universe when we know we cannot ever fully know the answer? Because along the way we pick up neat tricks, like dynamics and fluid mechanics and electromagnetism which give us gears and airplanes and Tesla Roadsters and glowing boxes on which we read Medium articles.
But if we are in a simulation, then our job as a species is identical. Figure out the rules of the simulation as best as possible, even understanding that we cannot ever have a complete theory that explains the simulation, and we do this for the same reasons as above. Therefore, it doesn’t matter which one of these we choose to believe in. Pick one, move on. The results are identical. Make more Teslas.
So why are we talking about this again? Is it just for the clicks? | https://medium.com/handwaving-freakoutery/on-the-universe-is-a-simulation-garbage-532002d45660 | ['Bj Campbell'] | 2018-11-06 02:56:36.462000+00:00 | ['Philosophy', 'Elon Musk', 'Mathematics', 'Random', 'Neil deGrasse Tyson'] |
Is Uber fare splitting fair? | Is Uber fare splitting fair?
Human behavior and game theory collide in the world of ride-sharing with friends. Ry Sullivan Apr 20·9 min read
Am I about to make ride-sharing less fun? Probably. Party on!
In my last blog post I combined two well known game theory exercises (the Unscrupulous Diner’s Dilemma and the Pirate game) into a new puzzle: the Pirate’s Diner Dilemma. The aim of the problem was to illustrate how the rationally optimal outcome differs from the solution expected from social norms.
Many friends questioned whether they wanted to dine with me again (I hope jokingly!). Others asked whether there was any practical use to the thought experiment. Wouldn’t all diners end up behaving based on emotion, psychology, and culture (i.e. splitting a check evenly) versus trying to be strategic and sneaky like pirates? What social activity will you ruin next, Ry?
These were good questions. The thought process that goes into dividing things amongst people raises a tension between what is rational and what people actually do in the world. Or more philosophically: What is fairness? Why do we think some things are fair and others aren’t? How does fairness change as we reimagine situations?
Rather than explore a theoretical and artificial game, I decided to seek a real-world example to understand fairness dynamics in the wild. I found one in a situation I face regularly but rarely think about while traveling around San Francisco (at least pre-COVID): Is Uber fare splitting fair? Time to ruin another social activity with math!
The Airport Problem
Before answering this question, I think it’s useful to take a step back and explore a well-known game theory thought experiment that deals with splitting costs: the Airport Problem.
Imagine three companies own and operate airlines. They decide to collectively build an airport with a runway that will support all of their different needs. Company A operates only small single-propeller planes and needs a short runway whose length costs $100 to build. Company B owns mid-sized jets that require a longer runway costing $200. Company C flies jumbo jets that need the longest runway costing $300 to build.
How should the airlines split the cost of building a single runway that they can all use?
The Airport Problem: How should airlines with different runway length needs divide the costs of a runway that they can all use?
If they all decide to split the total $300 cost evenly, Company A feels put out. If Companies B and C are willing to pay for the $100 of the short runway as part of their own cost, why should Company A pay $100 for this length? If Company A is asked to pay $100, why not just go build their own runway and not deal with Company B and Company C at all?
If Company A and Company B ask Company C to cover all the costs — e.g. “You were already going to build a $300 runway, so what’s the difference to you?” — Company C feels put out. Why coordinate on this project if Company A and Company B are going to freeload? Company C is better served by building their own airport runway.
Fairness in this case feels like it should exist somewhere between these extremes with each Company paying less than if they did things on their own. But what should the split be? The game theoretical mathematician Lloyd Shapley derived an answer to problems like these — earning him the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The Shapley value for this problem is achieved as each company splits the cost of the parts of the runway they benefit from using.
For the first $100 section of runway, all three companies benefit so each pays a third: $33.33 each. For the next $100 section of runway, only Company B and Company C benefit — so they split the cost: $50 each. For the final section of runway, only Company C benefits so they pay the full $100. Overall Company A pays $33.33, Company B pays $83.33, and Company C pays $183.33. All benefit from working together and pay their “fair” share of the runway length they need. Note this is one way (among many!) to divide the cost of the runway — but one that mathematically approaches fairness.
The Shapley value solution to the Airport Problem.
Non-linear Airport Problems
The Airport Problem works out nicely, partly because there’s overlap between what the airline companies need when building runways. The runway needed by Company A is part of the runways needed by Company B and Company C. In the real-world, things get complicated when things don’t line up so nicely. An example of this is available from Yale on Coursera which I’ve recreated below.
Imagine three friends (Rider A, Rider B, and Rider C) want to share a taxi home but who all live in different parts of town. If each took a cab home separately they’d spend a total of $32 dollars as illustrated below:
All riders live in different parts of town and could travel to their respective destinations solo.
However, if the friends share a single ride, they can collectively reduce the amount to $18 with each leg of the journey adding $6 to the trip. How should the friends divide the total fare. Or, put differently, how should the friends divide the $14 in collective savings amongst themselves? Should they split the fare at $6-$6-$6 or something else? If they do an even split, why would Rider A not just choose their own cab?
The optimal path for splitting a ride between the three destinations.
To answer that question, we’d need more information including the costs of taking alternate routes between the destinations. Using GPS and taxi fare predictions, we could draw the following payment map:
The routes and fares between all rider destinations.
With this information we can apply the Shapley value once again to find what each rider should “fairly” pay. The Shapley value for this scenario produces the following result: Rider A pays $2.83, Rider B pays $5.33, and Rider C pays $9.83, for a total of $18.00. Similar to our airport problem, each rider benefits versus taking their own ride. And the riders who live closest (Rider A) or provide the most route continuity advantages (Rider B) pay slightly less than under the scenario where the total fare is split evenly.
If you want a full explanation of the math and reasoning — which involves probabilities and logic (fun!) — you can find it here.
What happens in the real world? Enter: Uber.
Calculating fares down to the penny is awkward and tedious for riders. Asking them to make a rational decision by calculating the optimal path versus multiple alternate routes to produce a Shapley value is difficult and (dare I say) a little weird. I’ve certainly never seen that happen in real life. And I have nerdy friends.
But what if you’re a software company like Uber that can do those calculations as fast as riders enter in their destinations and doesn’t have to ask riders about their sense of fairness? What do you do? Do you split the fare evenly amongst riders or do you adjust the fares based on the destinations of the riders including distance and how much contributes to collective gains (e.g. a destination on the route of two other riders)?
Uber’s fare split feature as rolled out in 2013. Photo from Techcrunch.
According to Uber’s help website, they opt for the even-split option. Every rider who joins a fare split ride pays the same amount. They also add a +$0.25 cost per rider, which seems unnecessary in my opinion.
Screenshot from Uber’s website.
This is probably what most people expected. And while I’d love to imagine the Uber R&D and business teams asking profound questions about human behavior, rationality, and fairness I expect the reasons are simpler. Occam’s Razor suggests that the following explanations are more likely:
It’s easier to code dividing the fare by the total number of riders than doing a complex Shapley value calculation. I imagine the original pull request by Uber’s engineers focused on getting a solution into the market quickly versus spending time finding a more complicated optimized solution.
If fares aren’t split evenly, Uber would probably get support tickets and complaints from confused riders. For the riders in our example $6-$6-$6 makes sense, whereas $2.83-$5.33-$9.83 is confusing. Support tickets cost money and confusing/losing riders is bad. Uber is a business after all.
Uber can’t match specific riders to specific locations (assuming they’re not tracking the GPS movements of our phones that closely…). Either they would have to do something creepy (like GPS tracking) or ask riders to input this information. This extra rider friction isn’t worth the effort, and it might dissuade use of the feature.
Trying to cleverly calculate payments exposes Uber to all sorts of edge cases. For example, what if riders stop at a destination to drop something off, but don’t actually get out there and continue on?
But what happens if one rider lives really far away?
In the prior example, I believe most people would agree that splitting an $18 Uber fare evenly amongst riders is reasonable. It feels fair — and behavior usually trumps game theory rationality. Like I said, I’ve never even checked how Uber calculated fare splits until writing this blog.
But what happens if Rider C lives 2 hours away? Now the total cost amongst riders is $212 assuming the first legs of the journey remain the same and the last costs $200. The new journey is shown below:
The problem earlier — except now one rider lives quite far away.
Does an even split where each rider pays $70⅔ still feel fair? Probably not. Yet, if you chose the split fare option on Uber, that’s how things would be divided: $70.66-$70.66-$70.67 (Now that I think of it, I wonder who Uber decides to give the extra penny to…).
What I imagine happens in this situation is that Rider C simply offers to pay for the whole trip, allowing Rider A and Rider B to tag along for free. Maybe they strike an off-app bargain where they agree to buy Rider C a drink the next time they hand out. That’s what would happen with my friends anyway.
In other words, people will naturally self-select into the fare-split option when they think doing so makes sense. In extreme cases, they won’t. Imagine what would happen if Rider C suggested the fare split option in this case. You can play this awkward conversation out in your head.
Lingering questions
I’m now left with new interesting questions to ponder. For the Uber fare splitting case, at what point do people stop offering to fare split? Is it when Rider C’s additional leg is $10? $20? $50? Do decisions change if people think in terms of distance versus dollars? What if the ratios of the problem were the same but the split was for something bigger like a large development project in the millions of dollars: would $6m-$6m-$6m be preferable to $2.83m-$5.33m-$9.83m or is fairness also based on size? Who most often suggests to split the fare in real life— Rider A, B, or C? Why?
I bet there’s some interesting behavioral insights to uncover — and I’m betting they’re not rational. If anyone has seen studies like these, I’d love to read them. If not, I tried polling my friends on Twitter. So far I’ve just learned that they’re good people… 😂
Additional Reading | https://medium.com/@rysullivan/is-uber-fare-splitting-fair-b7760c5925e6 | ['Ry Sullivan'] | 2021-04-20 16:00:11.999000+00:00 | ['Shapley Values', 'Uber', 'Game Theory', 'Curiosity', 'Fairness'] |
Digest of top GEOs | Hello friends! 2021 turned out to be a little easier than 2020. The consequences of the pandemic, FB disruptions and increased demand for online gambling are classic for the modern affiliate marketer. Today we invite you to get acquainted with the GEOs that reached the top in 2021. They are rightfully considered the leaders in the number and quality of leads, and yet — Mostbet Partners considers these GEOs to be the most promising in 2022!
Azerbaijan
More details can be found here.
The largest country in the Caucasus offers solvent traffic. The residents have money and love to place bets. The mentality of Azerbaijanis is simple and understandable — they are kind and sociable people, often gambling. Dumping traffic is most effective before national holidays — these days Azerbaijanis do not work and are ready to have a good rest.
Creo should be approached carefully — in Azerbaijan they know Russian only by ear. The visual must either be voiced or written in Azerbaijani. CA — men over 30. On average, a targeted action costs $ 0.3. Because of the mentality in creatives, it’s best to appeal to emotions. For example, show the size of the jackpot or give an example of someone who has already won a large amount.
Bangladesh
More details can be found here.
Almost all Bangladeshi residents speak Bengali. There are those who speak English or Arabic, but there are very few of them. Hence — the choice of language for creo. More than 95% use Android, and the most popular resources are YouTube, FB, Instagram. WhatsApp and Telegram are in demand.
Bangladesh is a religious Islamic country. Gambling is prohibited. The exceptions are horse racing bets and multiple approved lotteries. There are no offline casinos here, and this is driving a wild growth in online users. They mostly use VPN.
This makes GEO unique — the number of users is constantly growing. Since there are no official casinos, the number of unlicensed ones is increasing. Residents understand that they can be thrown or leaked personal information, but continue to spend money in such establishments. The more guarantees there are in the creo, the better the envelope will be.
Kazakhstan
More details can be found here.
The gambling market in Kazakhstan is under strict government control. The paradox is that foreign bookmakers and casinos are almost without supervision. Kazakhs are used to foreign offers and trust them. More than 25% (over 5 million people) of the country’s population have made bets at least once. And almost 400,000 are regular players.
The mentality of the Kazakhs is a love of competition. They lose large sums of money without regret, spend on cool things and hope to hit the jackpot. The target audience is also attracted by the low minimum entry threshold — only $ 1.2 or 500 tenge. Despite the fact that the legislation prohibits gambling under the age of 21, there are many minor students among Central Asia.
Kazakhstan only fired in mid-2020 and by the end of 2021 it is still a fresh, unpressed GEO. The leader in terms of traffic volume is Almaty. The most popular sources are Google, FB, Telegram.
Poland
More details can be found here.
The relatively high incomes of the Poles and the love of gambling were brought to the top of this GEO. Despite the fact that Poland is an EU country, money is not counted here in dollars or euros. For creo, use exclusively Polish zloty, just like Polish.
According to the results research 27% of players run the risk of becoming addicted to gambling. This confirms the profitability of GEO — you need to work with such traffic a lot and actively. Especially during the period of pandemic restrictions, when online gambling is one of the few affordable and exciting activities.
The favorite pastime of Poles is betting. Most of the bets are on football. As for the target audience, this GEO should push aside stereotypes about men 30–35 years old. Age audiences also convert here, since there are more than 80% of active Internet users in the country. The main traffic sources are FB, Google, Allegro (analogous to Ebay).
Czech
More details can be found here.
The Czech Republic has been seriously affected by restrictions due to the pandemic. People sit at home in droves and almost go crazy with boredom. This stimulated a massive influx of GEO traffic. Even offline Czechs are an extremely athletic nation that loves to place a bet or spin a slot. In 2021, the most popular destinations for Czechs are still football, basketball and hockey.
There is almost no official regulator of online gambling. Study says that 25–40% are regular players, and almost 8% are addicted to gambling. Those who devote at least seven to eight hours a month to gambling and betting spend up to 6,000 kroons ($ 270).
For creo, Mpstbet Partners recommends using bonuses, promotions and sweepstakes. Any special offers strengthen the offer. It is worth focusing on national symbols, local sports teams, athletes popular in the Czech Republic. Best converts FB, Instagram, Twitter.
Uzbekistan
More details can be found here.
Uzbekistan is one of the cheapest GEOs in the world. More than 80% of residents speak Uzbek, so this is the main language for Creo. Gambling has been banned in the country for a long time. This is due to the religiosity of the population. But over time, unofficial casinos and bookmakers became more and more. In 2021, a presidential decree was issued — according to it, the gambling business was supposed to become legal. But this did not happen due to the lack of a legal system and control, and also because residents are already accustomed to foreign GEOs and trust them more.
Top traffic sources — Google, Twitter, FB, YouTube, Telegram. CA — men aged 25 to 44. The easiest way is to upload FB, although Google has more traffic and the envelope is higher. But Google is more expensive.
Russia
More details can be found here.
RF is an unexpected GEO in the top. It has sagged a lot over the past few years, but in 2020 and 2021 it quickly made it to the top and promises to be there at least in 2022. Target audience — young people from 18 to 29. Target audience in the segment is getting younger due to the growing popularity of TikTok.
In 2021, there were many changes in the issue of official regulation of the gambling market. Offers were rapidly declining. This “cleaned up” the webmasters who merged into other sources. So the GEO RF actually restarted. Now there is a lot of unprocessed traffic that you can work with stably.
Perfectly converts context, FB, Telegram and YouTube. Plus in the cheapness of GEO and in the available tests. Minus — there may be difficulties at the start of working with FB.
Conclusion
Mostbet Partners successfully works with all GEOs and quickly responds to requests from our affiliates. We help you to set up bundles without any problems and support webmasters at all stages of arbitration.
In 2022, we guarantee even more top-end GEOs! Work with Mostbet Partners and get the maximum profit opportunities! See you in 2022! | https://medium.com/@mostbet-partners/digest-of-top-geos-14e1d1d24184 | [] | 2021-12-22 13:35:06.137000+00:00 | ['Affiliate Marketing', 'Betting', 'Gambling', 'Igaming', 'Internet Marketing'] |
Building Your Drone Fleet. Where should I start? | How to turn your drone idea into a scalable business
Where should I start?
A great starter drone would be a DJI Spark or Mavic Mini. These are low cost, and let you get the hang of flying RC Quadcopters without investing too much. The cost to repair/replace is also cheaper than say, an Inspire 2. Bumping and crashing into things can (and most likely will) happen. There is a learning curve with drone flying, and it will come naturally to some more than others. Be smart and learn to fly with something that won’t do too much damage if things go bad.
It helps to have a background in photography, surveying, or videography before you decide on a business plan for your drone operation. If you don’t, just get the hang of flying and taking casual videos and photos first. See if you can come up with some ideas or use it in your daily life somehow. Post your projects on social media and get feedback.
If you enjoy flying and want to take it seriously, go and get the FAA Part 107 waiver. This will get you some credibility and the ability to sell your drone work legally. Get at least 100 hours under your belt, and you should naturally gravitate towards your drone niche; or drop the hobby altogether with minimal investment.
Which Path Should I Take?
Maybe you enjoy taking creative photos and want to create art prints with aerial photos. Or, you like to photograph architecture so you explore the possibility of being a real estate photographer, or building surveyor. Perhaps you have an idea for a startup, or know a company who could really use a drone pilot that utilizes thermal imaging in some way.
Focus on leveraging your strengths, and getting really good at what comes naturally and what you enjoy.
Some career paths for drone pilots include: Photographer, Videographer, Crop Duster, Search and Rescue Pilot, Building inspector, Software Developer, Drone Building and Repair, FPV Cameraperson etc, etc.
Keep in mind that whatever field you go into will require additional education, certifications and training. Many employers are willing to train someone with a solid background and a true passion for flying drones. Also, a flight log proving your in-flight time is valuable to have, so keep records.
When Should I Purchase Another Drone?
Once you have experience as a UAV pilot and have received FAA certification, you should think about expanding your fleet. A second drone is good to have as back up, or a different hardware configuration for specialized tasks. You will outgrow the ‘starter’ drones hardware limitations as you become a better pilot. You should have a minimum of two drones, one for back-up, or at least a pilot in your network with a similar drone you can call.
Once you have paid off the first drone from gigs, see if conditions are right to get a second drone. Check for discounts and sales around the holidays, or maybe a used drone if it is not too old. DJI is a solid brand, but there are others such as Autel and Yuneec that may be more budget-friendly. Keep the starter drone as a back-up, if it is still in good shape!
As of this writing, a Mavic 2 or Phantom 4 are great choices for a second drone. Mavic 2 would be perfect for a blogger, travel photographer, or independent filmmaker due to it’s portability. Phantom 4 is great for industrial applications like construction or mapping due to it’s durable design, and ease of take-off and landing in difficult spots (like a boat).
From there you can gather more experience and compare different drones. Maybe you want to film race car videos, so you decide to build your own FPV rig. Or you get hired to do construction project time lapses so you purchase a pair of Phantom 4 Pros. Sounds easy, right? Not exactly. Top pilots fly every day to keep sharp, so practice as much as you can.
Here are some current DJI consumer drones based on utility:
Creative:
Mavic 2 Pro —
Great All around drone for standard photography and video. Noted for it’s portability (folding fuselage).
Mavic 2 Zoom —
Same as the Mavic 2 Pro but with a zoom lens. Used for more creative shot planning (video and photo)
Inspire 2 —
Holds a selection of cameras ready to plug in, and a variety of lenses as well to nail the shot. 2 people can operate as needed; one controlling the camera gimbal and one to control the drone
Custom Heavy Lift Cinema & FPV High Speed Camera Drones —
These can be custom built or modified for your application
Industrial:
Mavic Enterprise —
Equipped with thermal imaging technology
Phantom 4 RTK —
Set-up with 3D mapping technology
Matrice series —
Heavy-lift drones for construction, police-work and military operations
Customized Industry Specific Builds (i.e., thermal imaging), Mine and Tunnel Inspections, and more.
Of course, you can’t forget the support gear. There are various monitors, stands, RC controllers, et cetera that you will need as you expand your fleet. As your team of operators grows you will need to get headset radios, additional controllers, displays, safety gear and insurance. It helps to have a co-pilot, especially with some of the larger UAVs. At least one back up drone is great to have on standby.
In short; combine something you enjoy and are skilled at with flying UAVs to figure out the best drone career path for you, or startup idea. There are so many use cases for drones and many emerging markets, like drone delivery or 3D mapping. Surely you can think of a way to utilize drone technology to leverage a skill you may already have? This will help you decide how to expand your drone fleet and upscale your business. | https://medium.com/@acesuplasvegas/scaling-up-your-fleet-of-drones-187ca42e4aa | ['Jeremiah Moore'] | 2020-12-23 23:09:03.136000+00:00 | ['Aerial Photography', 'Dji', 'Drone Photography', 'Drone Buying', 'Drones'] |
Does sustainable investing need “quality control”? | End of Week Notes
US SIF CEO Lisa Woll interviews Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey at the 2019 US SIF Conference in Minneapolis
With so many asset managers adding ESG criteria to their investment processes, does sustainable investing need “quality control”? I discussed that question with Justin Conway of Calvert Impact Capital, Michael Lent of Veris Wealth Partners, Meg Voorhes of US SIF, and a roomful of US SIF members this week at the US SIF Annual Conference in Minneapolis.
At Morningstar, our data team scours fund offering documents worldwide (prospectuses in the U.S.) for any language related to sustainable, responsible, ESG, or impact investing. Every month, it seems, the list grows, partly because new ESG or impact focused funds are being launched or, in some cases, being refashioned from existing funds. But in addition, a lot of established funds are adding a line or two in their prospectus saying they now consider ESG in security selection.
What should we make of these funds? On the one hand, I think it is encouraging to see so many mainstream asset managers adding ESG to their process. While they may be doing it for marketing purposes, it’s highly unlikely that their legal and compliance departments would allow any reference to ESG in a fund prospectus unless the investment team could actually demonstrate that it is incorporating ESG in the investment process.
On the other hand, how funds consider ESG factors is often vague and limited to security selection. Such funds should not be confused with those using a more comprehensive approach in which ESG analysis and, in many cases, impact analysis is a fundamental part of their investment process from security selection to portfolio construction to active engagement with companies they own.
If I were an intermediary — an advisor or someone who oversees a fund platform or DC plan — I might require ESG consideration to be a minimum standard for any fund that I recommend, pending clarification from managers on how exactly ESG criteria are applied. Why? Because in the world today, ESG issues affect nearly every company across the entire market and prudent asset management requires their careful consideration.
But for end investors who are interested in sustainable investing, and we know that large numbers of them are, the focus should be on funds that embrace the concept in a more comprehensive way.
Toward a U.S. Sustainable Investment Policy
Sustainalytics’ Diederik Timmer moderated an interesting breakout session at the conference on the EU Sustainable Finance Action Plan. At one point, he asked the audience, seated at tables, to discuss amongst themselves for five minutes what policies might be appropriate in the U.S. and then report back to the entire group. Besides being a great way to make a conference panel more interactive, it got me to thinking about what a U.S. Sustainable Investment policy might entail.
Four things came mind:
Making ESG a required element of fiduciary duty (effect: increases assets in ESG investments, especially retirement plans)
Protection of shareholder rights (effect: defends active ownership from attacks from right-wing business lobbyists in D.C. by preserving the ability of shareholders to surface material risks)
Tax incentives for certain targeted sustainable investments (effect: drives more investment into areas of need — renewable energy, climate resilience, mobility, affordable housing, underdeveloped economies)
Company impact disclosure (effect: clarity on the costs of externalities, encourages long-termism and positive corporate purpose)
I know that impact disclosure may seem like a stretch, and the more-common call is for required ESG disclosure, but impact disclosures would force companies to evaluate their negative and positive externalities, which would not only help investors assess a company’s long-term risks and opportunities, it would also help policymakers and the public better understand the cost of subsidizing negative externalities. It may also nudge companies to address their externalities (mitigate the negatives, focus on the positives) to avoid further regulation and lead them to focus on their long-term vision.
Weekend Reads
Many U.S. companies are taking note of the urgency of recent climate reports and are changing corporate policies…
… And climate-aware investing is on the rise:
Abu Dhabi’s $800 billion sovereign-wealth fund recently added a new question to its investment process: How will the Earth’s changing climate affect a potential asset’s price? This addition, without fanfare or press release, was driven, fund officials say, by a fiduciary duty to earn the highest returns and avoid risks. It wasn’t an attempt to brand the fund as more “green.”
When Bayer bought Monsanto, it inherited Roundup weedkiller and thousands of lawsuits alleging that it causes cancer. Shareholders roundly disapproved at this year’s company meeting, with more than half refusing to endorse management’s actions over the past year. Now, according to The Wall Street Journal, Bayer says it will:
cut its environmental impact by 30% by 2030 through new technologies and making weedkillers more precise, and that it would also be more transparent about the safety of its products.
Mainstreaming proxy voting. Now that you’ve read this far, let’s tie this in with the discussion of ESG consideration funds above. In addition to more funds considering ESG in security selection, we are also starting to see funds considering ESG more seriously in their proxy voting.
Barron’s notes that Parametric Portfolio Associates, which subadvises a slew of PIMCO equity funds, among others, as well as many institutional accounts, has harmonized its proxy voting so that it no longer votes one way on behalf of sustainable funds and another way on behalf of all the others. Its votes are now based for all funds on the principles it has used for sustainable funds.
Now that we have fund proxy votes data in-house at Morningstar, we’ll be taking a close look at how funds vote this fall after August 31, when funds have to report their votes from this year’s proxy season. | https://medium.com/the-esg-advisor/does-sustainable-investing-need-quality-control-8caa16e1d6c0 | ['Jon Hale'] | 2019-06-14 18:11:14.507000+00:00 | ['Wealth Management', 'Impact Investing', 'Sustainability', 'Climate Change', 'Investing'] |
Connect Tableau to a community web data connector | A quick tutorial on how to access data over http through web data connectors on Tableau.
Web data connectors can be versatile tools to let you connect to many different possible data sources across the web. Lots of popular websites give access to free APIs that can be convenient to connect to from Tableau rather than perhaps having to download all the website’s data and hosting it locally to run your analytics on.
Several of the community WDCs
For this tutorial we’ll be using a web data connector provided by Tableau on their community github page: https://tableau.github.io/webdataconnector/community/. As you can see there are many web data connectors readily available to the community, some connectors are made to be compatible with generic file types and parameters while others are more specific connectors for popular websites such as Instagram. Most of these connectors will be pretty straightforward to access, some may require social media authentication or parameter information. For this example I’ll be using the connector for “Confirmed Exoplanets” by “ZooGorilla”.
Webpage for the ExoPlanet WDC
Following these links brings you to the actual web data connector pages. Copy the url at the top and we will connect to this ExoPlanet database from Tableau. Open Tableau and under “To a server” in the “Connect” shelf, click on “Web data connector” as the data connection type. This will open a browser window. Paste the url copied from the previous step into this browser and click “Get Confirmed ExoPlanets” (there will be a similar type of activation on other connectors as well).
Connecting to WDC on Tableau
You should now be connected to your data source and be able to access it as you would any other data source on Tableau. You might not find a compatible web data connector for the website you want to connect to but Tableau also has several tutorials on building your own custom web data connector for specific websites or data connections that you can’t find a connector to. Here’s one on their official YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtGzBq4hw2s. | https://medium.com/@michelburnett27/connect-tableau-to-a-community-web-data-connector-7cb3ddc6fa6d | ['Michel Burnett'] | 2020-11-13 16:56:53.529000+00:00 | ['Data Visualization', 'Tableau', 'Tableau Public', 'Data Visualisation'] |
7 Ways Sobriety — sets you free…. In my seventh year of sobriety I’ve… | AINYF SHORTS
Ditch the drink — and get your wings…
In my seventh year of sobriety, I’ve gained enough perspective to see how alcohol had kept me trapped.. and to realise that now I am free!
Free at last!
Here are 7 ways sobriety will set you free…
Freedom from cognitive dissonance
For many years I’d had a nagging voice in my head which said things like “you’re drinking too much”, “you have to cut down” etc etc
The problem was that it was competing with another voice which said “but how will I socialise, how will I relax and deal with stress without wine?”
It was pretty noisy in my head so I took to drinking (more) wine to drown out the voices.
Only when I discovered and overturned the limiting beliefs I had around alcohol did I change my thinking about drinking and find peace.
Only when I realised alcohol added nothing (but trouble) to my life did I find freedom.
Freedom from guilt
No more waking up in the morning wondering what on earth happened last night and why my husband/best friend/son isn’t speaking to me today.
No more losing stuff — jackets, phones…and memory.
No more feeling guilty because, unlike so many people I knew, I was incapable of having “just one”.
No more feeling guilty because I’d gone over the top, again.
Freedom from failure
I was stuck in the “moderation trap” for a decade. Trying (and failing) to cut down over and over again — and feeling like a failure every time I crashed.
Once I accepted that I could never drink again everything changed.
Yes, it took six months of hard work to make the change — but then I was done, then I was finally free.
Are you ready to take the first step on the road to Freedom? Then take a break from the booze and sign up for our 66-day alcohol-free challenge here.
Freedom from anxiety and depression
I used to drink to cope with “social anxiety”
If I felt a bit down I would have a glass of bubbly to “perk me up”
Now I understand that alcohol is a depressant and that:-
Six months into sobriety I realised that the knot of anxiety that had resided in my stomach for years had simply melted away.
That felt a lot like freedom.
Freedom from dieting
I spent my twenties on a diet of “white wine and cigarettes” in a permanent quest to get thinner.
As I got older and(slightly) more sensible I began to eat more, eat organic, drink green juices, exercise, and do yoga but my daily wine habit persisted.
Unsurprisingly I never got thinner so concluded I had a “slow metabolism”
Then I ditched the booze.
Six months into sobriety those extra pounds that I’d spent decades trying to shift, simply melted away.
These days I eat what I want and never gain weight.
All I needed to do was to ditch the drink and my metabolism began to work properly -who knew?
Are you ready to take the first step on the road to Freedom? Then take a break from the booze and sign up for our 66 day alcohol free challenge here.
Freedom to enjoy restaurants
During a meal out, I would always engage the waiter in a debate about which wine to order and then keep my eye on him.
After all, he was the most interesting person in the room, he was the source of more wine.
I would also keep an eye on the glasses of the other people at the table so as to see whether they were drinking more than me (unlikely) or were they still on their first glass(incredible)!
More importantly, were they getting through our wine supply and when could we order more?
These days I can actually relax and enjoy the conversation.
That feels like freedom.
Freedom to find meaning and purpose
A lot of us drinkers are hedonists. We get addicted to the buzz and convince ourselves that we are “very social” when in fact we just want to create and attend more events so we can drink!
I felt a bit lost in early sobriety, so much time on my hands and no idea what to do with it.
It was a void and felt a lot like depression.
After a couple of months, it passed and my energy and creativity returned.
Then I created tribesober.com and never looked back.
Sobriety gives us the time and mental space to discover more meaning and purpose in our lives. | https://medium.com/ainyf-alcohol-is-not-your-friend/7-ways-sobriety-sets-you-free-6dee453f8a29 | ['Janet Gourand'] | 2021-09-12 17:46:54.640000+00:00 | ['Alcoholism', 'Alcohol', 'Sobriety', 'Addiction', 'Recovery'] |
Linux on Chromebooks — Can it really be used by software engineers | As you might know some Chromebooks are released with a feature that allows you to enable Linux and it is currently in Beta version. This is definitely an attractive feature and I wanted to explore it a bit more and see what it’s like to live with for a few days.
In order to better judge the efficiency and usability of this feature, I did the following:
Bought Pixelbook Go Chromebook with i5 processor and 8Gb memory for my son’s school work and for myself to experiment :)
Enabled the Linux feature (Debian version)
Did the usual: sudo apt update, and sudo apt upgrade
Installed pip3 for Python
Installed AWS CLI and configured it to point to my personal AWS account
Installed Visual Studio Code and enabled VIM plugin
Installed PyCharm IDE and enabled VIM plugin
Also installed Dropbox
Before I got to the point of installing Java OpenJDK and IntelliJ IDEA, I wanted to see how this Chromebook and Linux do with some of the basic development tools listed above.
Command-line:
It is a pleasure to use the command-line interface. It feels very responsive. I tested a few of my Python programs and I can say that applications/programs running in a terminal are responsive. There is a Python script that I use to test the CPU and memory performance of any computer and it ran in 21 seconds. To give you a perspective, the same script runs in over 30 seconds on my 2016 Macbook Air and 26 seconds on my 2017 Macbook Pro 15". I know Linux is optimized for these type of things.
IDEs:
When it comes to IDEs, things are different. Visual Studio Code being a lightweight IDE did a relative good job, but the smoothness that you get on Windows and MacOS with VS Code is not there. PyCharm IDE did not do that well. I tried using it for a few days, but it is not responsive. I am not sure if PyCharm itself is like this on other pure Linux machines, but it definitely felt sluggish in this environment. If PyCharm was not usable for me, installing IntelliJ was not even an option at this point.
Conclusion:
If you plan to do HTML, Javascript, NodeJS, and Python using Visual Studio Code or plain VIM editor, then Linux on Chromebooks is an okay alternative to MacOS, but if you are used to using full IDEs and doing Java and other type of programming, I would recommend to hold off on the decision and stick to your MacOS or Windows or pure Linux machines. Yes, the lightweight nature of ChromeOS with Linux is definitely attractive for us engineers who care about efficiency (a healthy balance between the cost and usability), but I am not fully sold yet. I really wanted this to work because I gave away my 2016 Macbook Air to my daughter and I have been using AWS Workspaces as my personal development machine and have been looking for a cheaper non-subscription alternative. I think Google and ChromeOS team has done a good job in this Beta version and I am looking forward to this being more optimized.
Thank you for reading this article. Keep geeking out !
Almir Mustafic | https://medium.com/@almirx101/linux-on-chromebooks-can-it-really-be-used-by-software-engineers-64d6bf2120ae | ['Almir Mustafic'] | 2020-12-24 00:13:08.630000+00:00 | ['Software Engineering', 'Linux', 'Software Development', 'Chromebook', 'Programming'] |
Why you should NOT go to Iceland during Christmas (seriously, you could die) | I come from Iceland or “the land of fire and ice“ as it‘s sometimes called (although I personally believe that´s just fancy for saying the weather is horrible). I have spent a few Christmases in the US and it is always very nice. There is something so comfortable about the typical American Christmas. Good food, friends and family, and of course „joy to the world“. In Iceland it‘s pretty much the same. We too spend time with friends and family, eat good food, (well, food we think is good) and pray for world peace. The only real difference is that all this cozy, heartwarming stuff comes second. Our priority during Christmas is to survive or more accurately, to not get eaten. You see there are surprisingly many ways you can get eaten during Christmas in Iceland. And it all starts with our Santa Clauses.
Yes, Santa Clauses. For we have not just one guy who wears shiny boots, flies around on a slay with reindeers and spreads joy and peace around the world. Oh no, we have 13. And they are in fact nothing like the typical good old Santa. First of all, they are all brothers and are often referred to as “the Christmas Lads” or “jólasveinar” in Icelandic. Each one comes on a specific night before December 24th and they are in fact not human. They are trolls and as you might have guessed, not a very nice group of trolls. Each of them has their own name which also indicates a certain thing they do to irritate you and in general make your life miserable during the holiday season.
There’s one named Kertasníkir or Candle-Stealer, for example. He comes to your home, steals all the candles he can find, stacks them up and eats them. Another one is Stekkjarstaur which translates to (and bear with me here) Sheep-Pole (seriously, I do not know what their mother was thinking). Sheep-Pole’s main purpose in life is harassing sheep. Why? I don’t know. But this is actually a good thing cause if you don’t have any sheep or something that vaguely resembles a sheep you should be safe from this one. Then we have others like Door-Slammer, Spoon-Licker and then of course there is one of my favorites. His name is Gluggagægir or Window-Peeper. Now this one simply sits himself down outside your window and looks. Cozy right?
So, there’s one thing I’ve always wondered about the American Santa Claus. Where does he come from? You see, the Christmas Lads have parents and a cat. And if you thought they were bad with all their mischiefs just wait till you hear about their parents. I mean it really is a wonder that the Christmas Lads turned out so nice!
Their father’s name is Leppalúði. He is a very lazy, small kind of troll who mostly just sits around their cave in the mountains and well, doesn’t really do much. Their mother though is essentially the core of every Icelandic child’s nightmare. Her name is Grýla. She is big and strong, has razor sharp teeth and claws, and a smile that will send shivers down your spine. Now you get coal in your stocking on Christmas morning if you’ve been naughty right? Well, the truth is, if you’ve been naughty in Iceland you can just kiss Christmas goodbye altogether. You see, if you’ve been naughty Grýla comes with her big bag, throws you in, drags you to her cave and then makes a big, steaming stew out of you and all the other kids who’ve been bad. I know you might be thinking this is a joke. But I’m not making this up. This has been used to keep kids in line for over 300 years. And it works!
Now not only do you need to behave and be careful of the Christmas Lads and their mother, you also need to watch out for their cat. His name is “Jólakötturinn” which basically means “the Christmas cat”. And don’t imagine a cute, little, fluffy kitten with a red bow and big sweet eyes. The Christmas Cat is everything but that. He is huge and black and can, as legend tells it, swallow you whole in one bite. Now in order to not get eaten by him you need to get at least one new piece of clothing for Christmas, so to break it down you could say that he is a sort of very strict fashion police…
Now, speaking of getting eaten. Contrary to popular belief we Icelanders don’t really eat anything very weird during Christmas. Just the usual salted fish, smoked lamb and the occasional rotten fish. It isn’t until a month later that our eating habits really begin to freak the rest of the world out. And this has a trigger warning. If you have a sensitive stomach I suggest you skip to the end of this or something, cause this next bit is not for the fainted heart. But a month after Christmas our favorite things to eat include fermented shark, raw horse meat, burned sheep heads and feet, haggis containing sheep organs and of course a lot of blood and jelly made from the insides of sheep heads.
But that is a story for next time. Hopefully you learned something and I’m sure that Iceland is now definitely on your bucket list (just maybe not during the holidays).
Anyway, merry Christmas or Gleðileg jól as we say in Iceland! | https://medium.com/@margret.maria.agustsdottir/why-you-should-not-go-to-iceland-during-christmas-seriously-you-could-die-5ba1566b0ba4 | ['Margret Maria'] | 2020-12-25 20:27:23.229000+00:00 | ['Food', 'Iceland', 'Christmas', 'Travel', 'Funny'] |
Thyme Destroys Strep Throat, Flu Virus And Fights Respiratory Infections | According to Christine Ruggeri, CHHC:
“The oldest Egyptian medical text, called Ebers Papyrus, dates back to 1550 B.C., and it records the healing values of thyme. The ancient Egyptians used thyme for embalming, and the ancient Greeks used it in their baths and temples; they believed that it brought on feelings of courageousness.
In the European Middle Ages, thyme was placed beneath pillows to aid sleep and ward off nightmares; the herb was also laid on coffins during funerals because it was believed that it provided a safe passage to the next life.”
It has a rich, strong, herbaceous aroma, and the name is derived from the Greek word ‘thymos’ which means ‘to perfume.’
Mrs. Ruggeri adds:
“Because the thyme plant is grown in many environments, climates, and soils, there are over 300 varieties with different chemotypes. Although they all look the same, the chemical composition is different along with the corresponding health benefits. The chief constituents of thyme essential oil typically include alpha-thujone, alpha-pinene, camphene, beta-pinene, para-cymene, alpha-terpinene, linalool, borneol, beta-caryophyllene, thymol, and carvacrol. “
Depending on the location the plant grows in, these chemical components of the oil distilled from the plant vary. For beginners, Linalool ct. Thymus vulgaris is the best oil, since it is not harsh for the skin, and can be freely used by the elderly and children. Other popular oils are thymus vulgaris ct. thujanol, thymus vulgaris c.t carvacrol, and thymus vulgaris ct. thymol.
Here are some of the properties of the most common thyme chemotypes, explained in an article published in The Truth About Cancer website:
Thymus vulgaris ct thymol — Between 60–70 percent thymol, this chemotype has strong antiseptic properties. It has a high level of antioxidants, with strong anti-inflammatory and pain-relieving benefits.
Thymus vulgaris ct linalool — One of the gentlest of thyme chemotypes, it commonly grows at high altitudes and has potent antifungal and anti-parasitic properties.
Thymus vulgaris ct carvacrol — Between 30–80 percent carvacrol (depending on when it is harvested), it also has potent anti-inflammatory, analgesic (pain relieving) and antioxidant properties.
Thymus vulgaris ct 1,8 cineole — Is 80–90 percent cineole, with an interesting array of benefits. It is a good expectorant (phlegm releaser), diuretic (increases the expulsion of urine), and analgesic properties.
Thymus vulgaris ct thujanol — About 50 percent thujanol, this chemotype is known to support the immune system. It is found mainly in the wild, known commonly as Sweet Thyme.
Thyme oil has powerful antibacterial antifungal, antiviral, diuretic, antiseptic, and antispasmodic properties, so it detoxifies the body, strengthens the immune system, destroys microbes, and supports the formation of white blood cells.
Thyme has a myriad of health benefits, as follows:
-It boosts blood circulation to accelerate healing, improves memory and concentration, and raises blood pressure.
-Its powerful antibacterial properties kill various bacteria, including staphylococcus, and purifies the air from Proteus, streptococcus, staphylococcus, and cryptococcal.
-It fights respiratory infections, coughs, colds, and the flu, bronchitis, sore throats, catarrh, asthma, and laryngitis.
-It is a powerful natural remedy in the case of psychological and physical weakness, as it revives the body and mind, so use it to treat chronic fatigue, depression, insomnia, and accelerate the recuperating after an illness.
-Thyme essential oil boosts the secretion of mucus and relieves dry coughs
Furthermore, this amazing essential oil offers countless other medicinal properties, such as: | https://medium.com/@jimronson00/thyme-destroys-strep-throat-flu-virus-and-fights-respiratory-infections-eab83e994d8f | ['Jim Ronson'] | 2020-03-07 20:00:36.944000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Coronavirus', 'Virus', 'Flu', 'Infection'] |
Magical Thinking: Odyssey | Welcome back to Magical Thinking, a look back at the art and cards of Magic: the Gathering, set by set, from the beginning. All from the view of a casual fan. Today we begin a new block with the Odyssey Block, and the titular expansion of the block, Odyssey.
Released in October 2001, Odyssey is set one hundred years after the events of Apocalypse. It’s a brand new Dominaria on a brand new continent, where five factions fight among themselves, and a barbarian named of Kamahl seeks his fortune and glory in the fight pits of the Cabal. Meanwhile the Mer empire wants to conquer the continent by flooding everything, and the White Mana aligned Order fights against the Cabal. And in the background there’s this weird magical thing called the Mirari, which is tempting everyone with dreams of conquest. What will happen next? Let’s find out.
Pretty sure Odyssey introduced Avens into Magic. It also began a trend that would continue with the Leonine and the Loxodon: using the animal type as the creature type. It’s a good idea that saves design space and makes the type more flexible since you can mix them with other non-Aven birds.
Hope you are packing some removal spells. Otherwise you got this guy to deal with, the ultimate chump blocker…who’s probably two steps away from launching into a Disney princess song.
What are they burning to get faces in the smoke? I think maybe they are burning something they shouldn’t be burning. I always thought that sort of thing was Green’s sort of thing.
The Odyssey block had a large overarching theme of “Graveyard matters”, so you got a lot of stuff that interacted with the graveyard. Like Threshold: If you have a big enough graveyard your cards do more stuff. If you’ve watched Mark Rosewater’s “Magic: 20 years and 20 lessons learned” then you know this was a disaster with players because they actually wanted to play their cards and not just put them in the graveyard, but still it’s an interesting experiment. Although one that probably just should have been for Black.
Here is the other graveyard related mechanic from this set: Flashback. If it has a gravestone next to the name, you can cast it from the graveyard then exile it. Not gonna lie, I think this one works better than Threshold.
Now this is a better Karma card than the karma card we got in the original set. Plus I like how it harkins back to the abstract art of older sets. Now instant Karma really is gonna get you.
This is a cycle of enchantment cards which shows the leader of every faction with their hands on the Mirari, which is basically what you would get if the One Ring was a Fushigi. I gotta say that bird’s Kubrick stare is freaking me out.
And here is the big bird himself in action. It seems this is also the point in Magic they began giving Legendary creatures actual creature types.
Although it’s not a great mechanic, I do like the flavor of Threshold, since it often shows a creature transforming over time. In this case growing wings and gaining magical power….
…Or corrupting into a hideous monster. I like this one because it literally goes from being Serra Angel to the Lord of the Pit. It’s like two classic monsters in one.
And here we have one of the Big Bads of this expansion. The big squid himself, who wants to drown out all the inferior air breathers. Considering Cephalid don’t really get much play anymore you can imagine how well that plan went.
Those lights on its side make it look like a cross between an eel and a bus. Like that cat bus from My Neighbor Totoro, only way more horrifying.
Hey, do you know how expensive a deep tissue brain massage is? Those magical tentacles are worth every cent.
Oh hey, it’s the card that will guarantee you never get invited back to game night. Because no one wants to play a guy with a 500 card deck who just cheats this monstrosity out and wins on curve. As a mill player I am especially offended this card exists.
Of course with all those Threshold cards, you need ways to fill your graveyard as well, right? Here’s one way.
There’s a Call of Cthulhu reference in here. I just know it.
TEEEEEEEFFFFFF
Seriously, dude. That looks like it hurts like Hell. Someone get that guy some Aspirin.
Eeesh, now that guy’s a mess. Although I do like the effect of discarding to make it stronger. Put that mana flood to good use.
Wow, and I thought the guy from Concentrate had it rough. Also, this is just a bad card. There is no way a 2/2 flyer is worth a reduced hand size.
“Drink….more….Ovaltine….HEY WAIT A MINUTE.”
Ah, Braids. I never read the tie-in novel to this set, so I don’t know how big a part she plays, but just from her cards she seems like a fun character. I always love the crazy unpredictable bad guy trope. Also she’s banned in Commander for good reason, endlessly making opponents sacrifice stuff is just no fun.
And here’s the big daddy of the Cabal himself. And of course his power involves sacrificing others to take down his opponents. Hell, he’ll sacrifice you twice; one from the playing field and once in the graveyard, if that’s what it takes.
Again, a big fan of the Threshold mechanic here, and I like the flavor of this card that it’s some kind of bogey man. Uncle Istvhan would be proud.
Love the flavor text on this one, although I’m pretty sure this is just one of those naked mole rats with wings. Hmm, I wonder if you could tape wings on a mole rate and pass it off as the son of the Jersey Devil? Let me make some calls.
This is probably one of the first attempts to create a lycanthrope type card that actually transforms. We’ll get a few more in this set, but it will take a while before WOTC gets it right in Innistrad.
You think a creature called Face of Fear would have fear all the time. Braids is right, this needs to go back to the drawing board.
Yeah I think there’s a bit more of a hint of insanity with this guy. I don’t know, maybe I’m being unfair.
Innocent Blood is one of my favorite removal cards from Black. It’s cheap, and since it’s a sacrifice effect it can bypass a lot of stuff even if you can’t aim it. I ran this in a ton of decks in my college days. To the point one of the people I played with tried to bullshit me that they made a ruling everyone playing needed a creature to sacrifice to it to play the card (which is not the case). Innocent Blood got into Arena via Jumpstart, so you can use it in historic mode. I suggest you do so, you’ll be glad you did.
It’s been a while since we’ve had a card that turns you into a lich. Just hope your opponent isn’t packing any enchantment removal or things might get messy.
This guy looks like a Mortal Kombat character to me. Maybe its just the pose, he does look like he’s doing martial arts. It’s not just me, right?
Okay, I like this card. Of course I am biased because Zombies are one of my favorite tribes in Magic, so let’s discard some cards and make some Zombies.
Hey, you can use an Anarchist to return the card Anarchy to your hand. That’s clever, right? Probably not.
I love the flavor here. It’s slow as Hell and very impractical, but it’s a lot of fun. You just need a way to delay your opponents while you blow up their creatures.
Wow, and I thought Battle of Wits was BS. Now I want to make a Rakdos deck with this and Tavern Swindler and just coin flip to victory.
Not gonna lie I am digging the Dwarves. I always felt they were under represented compared to Goblins, so it’s nice seeing them get their time to shine. All we need are some Hobbits and we’d be in business.
Flame Burst was the basis of one of my very first red decks in college. It was not a very good deck because this card isn’t very good. Even if you take into account Pardic Firecat (coming later).
Well maybe you should play a little more defensively, my dude. Because right now a rat could breath on you and kill you. At least Haktos has protection. And to think, this is the hero of this expansion.
And here is the card that goes with flame burst, so you can have at max a 10 damage flame burst if you have three other flame bursts and four cats in your graveyard. The problem is that means you never really want to play these things as creatures, you want them right in your graveyard. Which is kind of emblematic of the problem with this set: People want to play their cards, not just dump them in the discard pile. So make better cards.
HALITOSIS!
Not gonna lie, I want to buy a van just so I can have this guy airbrushed on the side of it.
I think we found Stephen Colbert’s personal Hell. How many Bears can you count in the distance?
Bears, Squirrels, Centaurs and Druids. that’s the name of the game in this set. They really need some sort of legendary Squirrel to tie all of this together.
Oh, and Elephants too. Can’t forget the Elephants. You know they never forget you. Not ever. That’s more ominous than I meant. OR IS IT?
Pretty sure Gorilla’s don’t have tails, but I’m not telling him that. Also, it’s weird while everyone is piling stuff in their graveyards here we have green clearing theirs out so they can have an 8/8 monkey.
Okay you can either have a giant gorilla or a giant squirrel, but not both. You know which one I’m going with (It’s the Squirrel).
That is one creepy looking centaur. Is it supposed to be a deer or something? Why is its head like that? What is going on here?
Snapping into a Slim Jim: The horrible truth. This is pretty much My Hero Academia the Magic card.
Another new race, the Nantuko. Bug people are always cool. I kind of wish these guys got more use.
Sorry, but it’s not a proper rite of spring unless it involves a sequence showing the rise and fall of the Dinosaurs (Granted this is Green so this isn’t out of the question).
And here we have the Green Legendary. He is certainly…there.
This is kind of neat. I like the flavor. Kind of surprised this didn’t come back in Theros, since it really fits the flavor there.
Another swing at an attempt to make a Lycanthrope card. Honestly, I’m just here for that terrible pun.
Here we go, baby! The Atogs are back, and now they’re multicolored, starting with the big grand daddy of them all, the Alpha Atog himself; AtogAtog. What does he eat? Other Atogs. Is he any good? Probably not, but I would love to use him as a commander someday.
This is probably the best Atog of them all, since it shows up again in some championship decks. Mainly because its pump abilities synergized and Blue and Black had plenty of ways to feed it. AtogAtog may be the king, but this guy is the Atog Du jour.
Here it is, the big macguffin everyone is fighting for in this block. It’s easy to see why, since it can copy your spells. It’s a pretty powerful effect, and can do some broken stuff. Where did this thing come from anyway? Who made it? And why?
Spoilers: It was made by Karn. Give him a break, he’s just starting out. Haven’t we all accidentally made the One Ring at one point or another?
Hey now I can play AtogAtog even faster.
And that does it for our look at Odyssey. Come back next time as we continue our look at the Odyssey block with Torment. Until then, stay Magical. | https://medium.com/there-will-be-games/magical-thinking-odyssey-9ffbc1cb1869 | ['Jessie Staffler'] | 2020-12-20 07:12:28.692000+00:00 | ['Hobby', 'Game Design', 'Magic The Gathering', 'Board Games', 'Gaming'] |
College Mania-the one that kills all | Currently I am a whimsical 12th grader churning through the tense year of final exams, random pieces of paper flying around, opposite yet hilarious advice from relatives, clueless grandparents, and COLLEGE ADMISSIONS!!!!!!!
How every person looks at their college application!!!
As every 12th grader and anyone who has been through the grueling college admissions process…It is the pain in your Ass!!! Moreover it melts your brain into useless garbage, tying the knotted structure of your brain even harder.
I am currently applying to 26 colleges in the U.S. Which if anyone reads, it is an overkill:
Amherst college : Bowdoin college : Brown University : Carleton College : Colby college : Caltech : Haverford College : Harvard : Harvey Mudd College: MIT : Pomona College : Princeton University : RPI : Swarthmore College : Stanford : UCB : UCLA : UCSD : UCSC : UChicago : UMichigan : UPenn : Vassar college : Wesleyan University : Williams college : Yale
I am a low-income student who currently lives in another country. When you are like me you need to apply for an abundant number of colleges for the chance of getting into a good college and study what you are passionate about. I love Physics and Astrophysics and thus I have applied to universities which have good programs.
Though as a low income student who cannot study in the country because they ask too much money for you Undergraduate since you are a Non-Resident. Your only choice is to apply to your country-U.S- and hope to get 100% financial aid.
I find that low-income students like me always have a story full of problems ranging from family to other issues which we find hard to tell. Thus colleges assume we are a student who has gone to a “good” school and come from a place which dilemmas have plagued their life and disturbed their peace of mind and heart both in academics and creativity in the most important part of their life : High school.
I feel I can talk on the behalf of the low-income society. We of the low-income apply to these colleges-not just the ones listed above but many more-because they promise fair application review for people like us. How are they able to figure out which of us have great amount of potential or ingenuity for their institution. We of low-income may not have chances to do many of the amazing extra curricular activities like other applicants or live in another country where there are few options for extra curricular activities or none at all. Sometimes we have to stay at home and help our families or parents or parent as a moral support mentally and physically by forgoing ECs.
How do universities look at low-income students and admit them? What if a low-income student like who has dreams of studying at MIT or Caltech supposed to compete with students with money and who has gone to a good school? We have so many setbacks and obstacles from-metaphorically-shuffling on our hands and knees through muddy ditches of sorrow, ripping our skin on the jagged rocks of betrayal of people you trust, braving the cold icy blizzard blowing through the treacherous mountain of stress and expectation you climb. EVEN after all this we fight through and try our best to succeed. EVEN if we do not have the right platform or the tools for our improvement or we cannot find people to help us, we still try and try again because all of us low-income student have learned to HOPE when there is none. We learn that no matter what we should never give up for any reason because WE BELIEVE we can be better than our torturers and murderers of our peace and use our benevolent tempered selves to help others and our families.
What we hope is for universities to judge us fairly and holistically on our academics but also on our story through which we have suffered through.
Sin is an easy serpent to let in your mind but Hope the eagle is the hardest but the most brightest thing in your life and can protect you from the slithering Sin — Me
Sincerely, H3retic4l_Human | https://medium.com/writing-under-the-sky/college-mania-the-one-that-kills-all-a24b81e1c6fc | ['Nithilan Pugal'] | 2020-01-27 16:45:54.061000+00:00 | ['Depression', 'First Post', 'College Application', 'Thoughts And Feelings', 'Stress'] |
The 4th of July, has nothing to do with me. | The 4th of July, has nothing to do with me.
You will never find me ridiculing people celebrating Independence Day. I would appreciate my lack of appreciation for it, like wise being respected. By 1776, my ancestors were being treated like pets…horses and vermin. I cant say “dogs”, as America has shown more respect and love for dogs, than Blacks, generally speaking. Like the U.S. Constitution, the nations flag, Christianity, etc., it didnt have anything to do with my family, save for being a descriptor forced upon them.
Since becoming a “conscious” Black man and learning truths about humanity and of course America, my thoughts, passions, love, lies with my ancestors. They went through so damn much, for so damn long, my heart wont let me dishonor them or their sacrifice for something not applicable to them from Americas heart and soul. “They” are who I owe my life and soul too.
The British, Americans…same diff, too me. They were then, as they are now, cousins. Both guilty of wrecking nations and lives for centuries…actually, milleniums. To sit back and now blame the descendants of the very families they have, perhaps, have ruined the remainder of their existence. So hell no. I wont accept someones Independence Day as mine, no more than I am accepting someone telling me this is the day to celebrate my God-given right of freedom.
When I became, conscious, woke, whatever, that was my period of feeling as good as others feel about their flags, days, monuments, 2nd Amendment, etc. Realizing who I really owed and all they had done and survived. You enjoy your symbols and days, while I enjoy my love, praise and adoration for my family. | https://medium.com/@menesfirst_62523/the-4th-of-july-has-nothing-to-do-with-me-8d4786b6862b | [] | 2021-07-06 00:30:06.331000+00:00 | ['4th Of July', 'British', 'Americans', 'Independence Day', 'Black Ancestors'] |
Strike York! | New York and baseball are the same old story…
With the exception of Staten Island, every borough of the city that never sleeps has seen a baseball team. Manhattan saw the first New York dinasty: the Giants. Brooklyn and the Dodgers saw barriers fall down and made history with the arrival of Jackie Robinson. The best player ever and the team with the most World Series titles of all time are in the Bronx. The first two teams chose to pursue the “California dream”, and thus the Mets were born in Queens.
Today, The Big Apple continues having stars and making history: NYC has the two most dominant pitchers in the ball game. Gerrit Cole with the Pinstripes, Jacob deGrom with the Amazins. After 5 and 4 starts respectively, both have 50 strike outs. If this number isn´t absurd enough, Cole has 1.71 ERA, 0.73 WHIP, in 31.2 IP. While deGrom has 0.31 ERA, 0.55 WHIP, in 29 IP. Jacob, in adition, is hitting for his own cause, and surpasses the hero in blue and orange, Tom Seaver, with a 2.55 career ERA.
It seems that the history of these teams, and therefore, of their pitchers, goes in diferent paths. The Yankees, despite of the low start, are historically tied to success and can take off at any moment. On the other hand, the neighbors of Queens seem to have been born in a tragedy and live for the drama. Each victory, each defeat is suffered. Both have their “aces” in the mountain. Each league has it´s “aces”. New York has it´s “aces”. The two most dominant, spectacular, entertaining, and even poetic players in the big leagues play under the lights of the big city.
Today the pitching style is pure New York style.
Daniel Cancino | https://medium.com/@dany-cancino/strike-york-3c4b1aa22846 | ['Dany Cancino'] | 2021-04-25 04:14:43.722000+00:00 | ['Jacob Degrom', 'New York', 'Baseball', 'Gerrit Cole'] |
Your Brand is What People Expect From You | Your Brand is What People Expect From You
Here’s what you can do about it
Photo by Nadine Shaabana via Unsplash
When people first meet you, they don’t know what to expect.
So they start judging you by your name, your profile picture, and the title of your blog post.
If you’re a writer, people will probably meet your words before they meet you.
What are your words saying to them?
I’m a nice person.
I know what I’m talking about.
I have a B.S. in History.
Of course, you can’t just say those things and expect us to believe them or be impressed. It’s better for you to prove it and let us draw these conclusions ourselves.
When we read your words, we’re after something. Maybe we’re bored and we want you to give us a distraction. Maybe we want an edge and we need your advice to raise our status. Or maybe we are interested in what you’re talking about and you happen to share our worldview.
You won’t automatically have our trust because we agree with you. But it’s a nice start, and perhaps the best route to get trust quickly.
The best way to gain trust is to keep showing up.
I’ve learned this lesson the hard way. There have been times in my life when my freelance work sucked all my time away. When that happens, I feel like I can’t be as generous with my words.
When you disappear, people forget.
Who was that guy who was so good? Yeah. What happened to him?
Hey, have you heard about this new writer? He’s hot. He knows stuff I never dreamed anyone could know. It’s like he can read my mind.
It’s amazing how fast that can happen.
Show up. Every day if you can. At least once a week. Find a regular rhythm and stick with it. And if you really want to dig deep, write twice as much as you think you can.
But what if it isn’t perfect?
It never will be, so quit worrying.
Your best today won’t be your best next week, next month, or next year. It’s your responsibility to push yourself. Stretch a little every time you write. Dig a little deeper than you did last time. Write something that scares you a bit more. Take a stand, and don’t back down.
In a world with millions of voice vying for attention, it’s the bold and committed that stand out.
Be you, always.
You have some control over what we expect.
It’s your choice to deliver the same thing again and again. Or maybe you ruffle our feathers a bit each week. You’ve got more room to play around in the beginning. But as your audience grows and gets more familiar with you, you need to be consistent.
What will your message be?
How will you deliver it?
Will your personality be friendly or businesslike? Will you challenge our assumptions? Will you draw us a better map? Will you take something confusing and break it down so we can understand it?
Being you means you do online what you’d do in real life. Spot the trends if you like, but approach them with your own style. When you’re fake, everyone will know.
Don’t chase dollars. Chase change. How will you leave your reader better than you found her?
In time, your audience defines your brand.
You set the first impression.
Your audience sets the expectation.
Wait a minute, you say. You just said I set the expectation for people.
You do, at first.
Then once it’s set, people expect you to live up to it. Mess that up, and years of trust can be lost in a moment.
So tread carefully.
If you want to change your message because that’s your conviction, go for it. Don’t do it because the trends say you should. If you get in the habit of chasing the latest thing for attention, you might as well chase the wind.
Here’s the part of the market you should pay attention to.
What does your audience want from you? If your message meets a need a lot of people have, that’s probably not going to change overnight.
Take writing for example.
For generations, the way to make it as an author was through books. If you published one or more, you were somebody. But you had to compete for the opportunity. You’d probably get rejected most of the time. Because publishers need to make money, they bet on what they thought would sell.
Today, anyone can write and publish a book. So, the problem the previous generation of writers faced is flipped. It’s a lot harder to get noticed in the market when your book is one of millions of choices.
So, writers blog and make money instead. Books are now email magnets and manifestos. If you have a large following, you can command a higher price for your work. Otherwise, price low and be glad to get your message out so you can charge more later.
If you don’t like the expectation you’ve set for your market, work to raise it.
There’s nothing stopping you.
It will take work. You’ll lose some people along the way. But you’ll gain more who are devoted to the same thing you are. It doesn’t take a huge audience to make it. It just takes an audience that is pleased enough to tell other people about you.
Be authentic. Serve others first. Be generous. The more people you can, the better your future will be.
Now go build a brand that matters.
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +406,714 people.
Subscribe to receive our top stories here. | https://medium.com/swlh/your-brand-is-what-people-expect-from-you-9ec346dd6a0e | ['Frank Mckinley'] | 2019-01-03 14:06:01.862000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Writing', 'Business', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Productivity'] |
Analytics Engineering at Spotify | Peter Gilks & Paul Glenn
Peter Gilks, Senior Director of Insights, Spotify Advertising
Since 2016 I’ve led the Insights team for Spotify’s advertising business. Our role is to provide guidance that enables the product and business teams we work with to meet their objectives through evidence-based decision-making and customer focus. We’re a multi-disciplinary team that covers both qualitative user research and data science, as per the Spotify model. Our work includes exploratory analysis, experimentation, metric setting, building dashboards, user testing, ethnography, and surveys.
The data scientists on the team spend a good chunk of time on that old favorite that never seems to go away — data preparation. At Spotify, we have a continuously evolving and growing volume of data at our fingertips. As we launch new features and develop new products, we instrument our product to capture the right data, transform it into something usable for analysis or experimentation, and build pipelines to keep it coming. And as we expand and transform our business, we are always looking at how we cut and slice that data to make sure we’re keeping up with the questions we are trying to answer. In short, we need to make our data ‘analytics friendly’ (thank you to Rishi Nalin Kumar from whom I picked up this term).
A few years ago, I recognized that this stage of data preparation, to make it ‘analytics friendly’, was becoming a challenge for my team of data scientists. They could do it, but they were doing it independently. Applying business logic, choosing levels of aggregation, grouping and transforming fields, checking data quality and cleaning data — these are all crucially important tasks, but they are also enormously time-consuming not to mention prone to error and inconsistency if they are done anew for each piece of analysis.
It struck me as I reviewed work that the SQL gymnastics my team members were each performing were at once both impressively masterful, but also disappointingly inefficient. So we set off to look for solutions — starting with considering what key datasets we could build that would be used by the whole team to save time and improve consistency. My goal as expressed to the team was “take a bunch of SQL this big and make it this small” [insert picture of me stretching my hands as vertically far apart as possible, followed by a short gap between my thumb and forefinger].
“As we expand and transform our business, we are always looking at how we cut and slice that data to make sure we’re keeping up with the questions we are trying to answer.”
We tried a couple of approaches to achieve this. One was to ask our friends in data engineering to help, but it was hard to make this work a smart priority for them for two reasons. One is that they have plenty of production work to do on our live systems, the other is that the understanding that is required to express how to make data ‘analytics friendly’ and helpful for a group of data scientists takes a lot of translation time, and back and forth.
The other effort was to do this work collectively ‘on the side of our desks’. But despite a keen start this effort also fell by the wayside as other priorities came along and questions of ownership became difficult to untangle.
This is the point at which I thought “what we really need is someone who does this as a full time job”. I wanted to find someone who had the experience of working in analytics and data science and understood the joys and the pains of that job, who was passionate about data quality, documentation and SQL efficiency, who was better at data engineering than most data scientists but who didn’t want to be a data engineer and who could coach others in these skills. Not much to ask for right?
So in early 2018 we put out a job ad for something called an ‘analytics data specialist’. The tagline of the job description read “We are looking for an expert in building out analytical data layers to join the band and help drive a data-first culture across the ad-supported business in Spotify”. Catchy.
Somehow we found Paul and he quickly got to work revolutionizing our approach to data. The impact has been enormous. We are more effective and efficient than ever before. The time it takes us to turn around analysis is vastly reduced, the confidence and consistency in our results is increased and because the ‘barrier to entry’ for data is reduced we can share and collaborate across teams seamlessly. We have since invested further, building out our own team and spreading the gospel throughout the company.
When we hired Paul he was quick to let me know that ‘analytics data specialist’ is a terrible job title. So we went with ‘analytics engineer’ instead…
“The time it takes us to turn around analysis is vastly reduced, the confidence and consistency in our results is increased and because the ‘barrier to entry’ for data is reduced we can share and collaborate across teams seamlessly.”
Paul Glenn, Senior Analytics Engineer, Spotify Advertising
At Spotify, we’ve spent the last two years initiating, defining and evolving the role of analytics engineer. Peter was not alone in his realizations about the key problems data practitioners at Spotify faced, and when Michael Kaminsky’s blog post on analytics engineering dropped just a few weeks after we’d settled on the same job title for my role, it was a very clear signal that we were on the right track.
Early on, I described the role of an analytics engineer as someone who “reduces the complexity surface data scientists need to engage with in order to create meaningful insights.” We try to achieve that in several ways:
1. Create, maintain, support, and evolve a clean data ecosystem
Spotify’s business is large, complex and constantly evolving, and our data is even larger, more complex and more rapidly changing. A model where data scientists are staffed to projects, learn about and clean the necessary data, gather and standardize business requirements, produce an analysis, and move on, is not sustainable. Our first analytics engineering project was to review the landscape of projects and business needs, then consolidate the data into a handful of tables that would cover 80% of the data scientists’ needs.
Such an effort had been undertaken several times before, but the difference this time was the presence of dedicated support. My team’s contract with our users is to make sure the data keeps flowing free of bugs, to quickly provide answers to questions about the data’s provenance, reliability and applicability, and to add new columns — or gracefully deprecate and replace datasets — as the business changes.
2. Provide engineering support to data practitioners, evangelize existing tools, and build new tools
It was once said that data scientists are data engineers who can do statistics. But with the evolution and growth of the role, and the complexity of our internal infrastructure, it’s not reasonable to expect a data scientist to know how to do every engineering task or understand every underlying system involved in their day-to-day role. In addition to supporting our datasets, analytics engineers at Spotify use their dual knowledge of the most important tools and infrastructure, and the day-to-day experience of the data scientists we closely work with to provide support for common engineering challenges. We help make sure that nobody is “reinventing the wheel” and provide training and on-boarding for new hires. When there are gaps in the overall workflow, we’re in a good position to recognize them and see potential solutions, leading to several new internal tools developed by analytics engineers.
3. Use our central position and knowledge of available data to coordinate and assist on cross-team projects
Many analytics engineers at Spotify were data scientists at one point in their careers, and most still like to throw on their insights hat and dive into the data from time to time. Because we get to touch a lot of different datasets and work with data scientists from many different teams in our day-to-day work, we’re well positioned to coordinate cross-team efforts and provide data support to very large projects. In addition to being sometimes our most visible impact, this sort of work allows us to engage with the challenges data scientists face every day and “eat our own dog food” to better understand and hone the datasets and tools we build and maintain.
While it may sound like we have analytics engineering all figured out at Spotify, one of the most exciting parts of the job is that we are in fact constantly evolving definition of the role — something that seems to be happening all over the industry. With every new blog post that comes out, whether from Michael Kaminsky, DBT, Netflix or the many others who have written on this topic, we see both echos of the journey we’ve already taken and ideas for new opportunities we can take on.
The flexibility to make the role of analytics engineer whatever it needs to be is certainly my favorite part of the job. I sometimes say that my career archetypes are editor and librarian. As an analytics engineer, I get to play both of those roles frequently. Like an editor works with a writer to hone and improve their writing, I think of a key part of my role as working with data scientists and other stakeholders to hone and improve their processes for gathering, understanding, and interpreting data. And like a librarian works with a researcher to identify and retrieve resources, we analytics engineers can use our understanding of the data landscape to direct our stakeholders to the right resources to answer the pressing business questions they’re faced with.
If you’d like to explore career opportunities in analytics engineering at Spotify, please check for postings on our job page. | https://medium.com/spotify-insights/analytics-engineering-at-spotify-f165180a6722 | ['Spotify Insights'] | 2020-12-04 09:18:00.446000+00:00 | ['Data Science Careers', 'Analytics Engineering', 'Data Science', 'Data Analytics', 'Spotify'] |
Our Year of Living Derangedly: Trump Hostage Syndrome USA ☣ | Our Year of Living Derangedly: Trump Hostage Syndrome USA ☣
America’s Mental Molestation: Trump Hostage Syndrome & the Scandal-Driven Corporate Media
Let’s begin with the baseline insanity of the American election cycle: for OVER A YEAR we’ve been assaulted hourly by campaign “news” consisting mainly of attacks, manufactured scandals, and once Trump entered, reality-TV sensationalism & bizarre megalomania, all enabled by ad-driven corporate media. Trump has played the American media like a devil-manifested musical instrument, daily dumping another dollop of scandalous attack, exaggeration, insinuation, lies, rants, ramblings, somehow always getting top billing on the “news” while jamming his nefarious whammy stick up the conspiratorial media’s asses.
This election “surreality show” would be hilarious & entertaining beyond belief if it weren’t so ultimately dangerous. Let’s start with the obvious incongruity of Trump himself, who has been continuously on TV for the past 2 decades. Footage of his previous support & friendship with the Clintons, all of the great things he once said, appears to be evidence that this man has either had a mental breakdown, a schizophrenic break with his former self, or possessed by talk-radio conspiratorial demons. Trying to follow his rambling speeches points to some level of dementia.
Need we also point out that the billionaire reality-TV Trump has ZERO political experience? Yet somehow, no matter how outrageous his attacks, vulgarities, outright racism, misogyny, conspiracy claims, threats or tantrums, the corporate media (including NPR) have continued to give him legitimacy & top billing on their “news.”
If Trump wins the White House, despite warnings of nearly every world leader, Pentagon official, intelligence agency, the Pope, even his own (GOP) party leaders, it will largely be the US corporate media that should held accountable.
At any point in the past year the US media could have taken pages from actual journalists like The Atlantic & expose Trump’s empire of fraud, deceit, cheating & organized crime connections. Seriously, the dots aren’t that hard to connect America: casinos, concrete, the Mob, pageants, molestation, bankruptcy, tax fraud, conspiracy, etc: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/donald-trump-scandals/474726/
Meanwhile, we’re assaulted with “email innuendos” regarding Hillary Clinton’s service as Secretary of State, which if one tries to follow the conspiracy thread, amounts to “she sent email” mostly handled by her aides. Currently we have the head of the FBI joining the ranks of Trump , the KGB & Wikileaks by somehow implying Clinton has a connection to Anthony Weiner because one of her aides received some email from her email server. What in the actual fuck is going on here? There is no crime, no legitimate information, not even a significant direct connection to Clinton. I mean, I receive email from the White House email server, but does that somehow implicate the White House in my activity? This is seriously dirty political manipulation & America’s corporate media trumpets along like a chicken with its head cut off.
Who will investigate the FBI if Trump takes over the White House & instead of vetting Trump’s organized crime connections & his casino empire, the FBI head was fucking around with baseless partisan email innuendos? Not even to mention the fraud & theft at Trump University, the many women having been molested by him, the connection to KGB hacking & Wikileaks… Will the FBI investigate the millions in “loans” he is planning on getting back from his own campaign, so he can turn a profit on the election?
Yes Donald Trump has his KGB Russians, another unprecedented madness being perpetrated on America while American media is played like the devil’s fiddle. However, we have this profound warning from one of Putin’s victims on what to expect from a Trump takeover:
Malcolm X prophetically warned of the danger of complicit, corrupted media, though he probably could never have imagined such an extreme, hateful candidate like Donald Trump being given legitimacy in the 21st century:
“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”
― Malcolm X | https://medium.com/@beezevans/our-year-of-living-derangedly-trump-hostage-syndrome-usa-af106785137a | ['Şpค Ēşhip ĒคRth'] | 2016-10-30 21:53:02.527000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Hillary Clinton', 'Election 2016', 'Donald Trump', 'USA'] |
The Thrilling Conclusion to the Homebound Bangs Saga | That shutter is closed as hell
https://www.dieselsweeties.com/ics/1012/ | https://rstevens.medium.com/the-thrilling-conclusion-to-the-homebound-bangs-saga-f1c47a3f418 | [] | 2020-04-24 03:01:49.169000+00:00 | ['Internet', 'Humor', 'Comics', 'Videos', 'Friendship'] |
Detailed Introduction to Application of Protease in Food Industry | With the improvement of living conditions, the flavor, taste and nutrition of food have higher standards, and the food processing industry is developing in the direction of safer and higher quality. Green, safe and efficient enzyme preparations are good substitutes for chemical agents in traditional food processing.
The most widely used in modern industry is protease, which is a type of enzyme that catalyzes the hydrolysis of proteins, and is the earliest and most in-depth enzyme in enzymatic research. It is closely related to human beings and involves all aspects of life. It is widely used in meat tenderization, polypeptide processing, beer clarification and bread quality improvement industries in the food industry. What role does protease play in food?
1. Change the functional properties of proteins
The sensory quality of food is mainly determined by the functional properties of food protein, and these unique functions are closely related to the size, shape and surface chemical properties of protein molecules. It is further related to the combination of protein molecules and flavor substances, which affects the taste of food.
The proteases used in food processing mainly include pepsin, trypsin, papain and microbial protease. Food protein is changed by protease enzymatic hydrolysis to change the structure of protein at all levels, so that the chemical properties of protein change. Thereby affecting its solubility, hydration, emulsification and other functional properties, which is conducive to the production of higher standards of various foods.
2. Improve protein utilization
Protein is an essential nutrient required by the human body and constitutes the main component of various tissues of the human body. Insufficient protein intake can cause various diseases such as anemia, aging, tissue and organ damage, and seriously threaten human health. Therefore, it is particularly important to improve the digestion and utilization of protein.
Adding protease to food is one of the main ways to improve protein utilization. From the initial stage of food processing to the process of food storage and transportation, protease can not only promote the decomposition of protein into small molecule peptides and amino acids, and improve the digestion and absorption of protein by the human body, but also can be used to produce new high-protein foods to solve children and elderly people. As well as the problem of protein requirements for special populations, it is helpful to improve the digestibility and utilization of protein in food.
3 Remove sediments and extend shelf life
Many foods need to be stored at a lower temperature to achieve the purpose of inhibiting enzyme activity and extending the shelf life. However, most liquid beverages are prone to a large amount of precipitation during storage. The main component of the precipitation is protein, and some also include polyphenol compounds or macromolecular sugars. In the production, storage and transportation of colloidal liquid beverages, a large number of macromolecules are prone to precipitate, which affects the quality and flavor of food and subsequent sales. Protease can effectively decompose protein and improve the precipitation caused by protein in beverages. Phenomenon, maintaining various sensory qualities of liquid foods and delaying the shelf life of drinks. | https://medium.com/@creative-enzymes/detailed-introduction-to-application-of-protease-in-food-industry-aac76712bfe6 | ['Iva Colter'] | 2020-12-17 07:53:46.072000+00:00 | ['Enzyme', 'Biology', 'Health'] |
Little One’s book 3 months | Little One’s book 3 months
Date: November 1, 2020 So yesterday I completed my 31 days of writing this month, bringing my total to 3 months of working on Little One’s book. That’s a record for me. I’ve already written for today, so now I’m working on it this month too. I’ve added it to my NaNo, and I have a goal, and hopefully I’ll surpass it, just like I did last year with a different story. There wasn’t many 12am writings as there was last month and that’s a relief. I’m still just writing as I go, and I had to even push myself to get some words a few times, but I’m really proud of myself for just staying dedicated to keep on writing this story every single day. There’s going to be a lot of editing needed on this story, and I’m surprised that I’m looking forward to it, when in other stories I didn’t think about it much, until this story. I still have the little glances of where this story could be headed, when I’m writing a piece, and I have to resist the urge to write down some notes. I might do that at a halfway mark, but time will tell. Despite not having a clear view of things, I’m finding it’s a bit enjoyable, and that’s a first for me, as I’m used to knowing where things are going and I usually end how I originally thought, but this story there’s a guessing game for me. It’s time to come up with a name for the story, as I had to make another different title for Ch4 now that I’m into November. Having a title will make it easier to just name the Chapter 1 etc, and not continue as Little One’s book. That is another thing, I always have a title and I stick with it, but again, this story doesn’t have one, yet. I’ll have to figure out if I want to make character mini bios at some point, again, normally have something before I start writing my stories. Currently, this is my longest story I’ve written in my life. Never dreamed I’d be writing a 31k book, and I’m still writing, and I know there’s plenty of edits in my future, so the story probably won’t even be this long by the time its ended, but still to see 31k for me is quite amazing. I do have the added encouragement because each chapter is only in short paragraphs and not my usual long ones, and that’s a relief to show my writing growth. I’m loving the idea and feeling more secure in knowing that I’ll actually have a completed book to add to my belt. That will be an amazing feeling once I write The End on this story. I’m amazed at my laser focus that I’ve had for 3, now 4, months straight on this story, every single day. I’ve reread Gone Too Soon, and I’m working to reread Angel’s Story. I’m hoping to start working on them again soon, or it might be after I finish this story, but since I don’t have an idea of when that’ll be, I want to work on these 2 stories as well at some point, to not get burnt out, but since I have an entirely different motivation to writing this particular story, I don’t see that happening any time soon, and I doubt my Little One would be happy with me if I did that, so I won’t let that happen. An entire new month of writing, I look forward to seeing what I’ve picked up by the end of this one. | https://medium.com/@writerpoetjamie/little-ones-book-3-months-7e4b4d31747f | ['Writerpoet Jamie'] | 2020-11-02 04:24:07.983000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Grief And Loss', 'Hope', 'Baby'] |
The Department (Prologue) | We exited the Old Ebbitt, and I followed his lead north. We crossed 15th Street NW, and turned west along Pennsylvania Avenue, long ago blocked off from motor vehicle traffic after a gunman fired an AK-47 at the White House and Timothy McVeigh perpetrated the Oklahoma City bombing a year later. It was a shame it had come to this; the area was now home to flocks of tourists and protesters. I never minded the tourists, but the protesters — regardless their ilk — were an equal opportunity nuisance, and they interfered with everyone else’s quiet enjoyment of the hallowed American landmark.
After saying nothing for a few minutes, Wilson interrupted my musings. “You’re the perfect candidate, actually,” he said without looking in my direction.
“ Really? How so?”
“We look for people who defy the conventional stereotypes. In your case, you just turned 50. The common stereotype is the people who do our kind of work are in their 20s or 30s; you know, it’s a young man’s game, right? Well, they’re wrong. People in their 20s and 30s have just enough life experience to think that they have some street smarts. But they don’t know what they don’t know, and they don’t have any wisdom. We, on the other hand, have greater life perspective. You and I have traveled more than they have, seen more than they have, experienced more than they have, had more relationships than they have.”
“They’ve never been to the places you’ve been, never walked into an ambush and had to fight their way out, never driven over an IED, never been fired at in a helo or had to return fire, never had to hump in on foot to recover a downed pilot or a hostage and then extract from some place like the Wakhan Corridor,” he said, now looking me straight in the eye for emphasis.
An eery feeling came over me. Whoever this guy was, he knew things that nobody else knew, not even my wife. Which meant he was cleared to the highest levels that existed.
He went on. “You’re better equipped at this point in life to do this kind of work than they are. You’re established. And yet you’re still able to do things physically at your age that most people in their 20s and 30s can’t do. These things are all extremely important to our mission.”
He paused for a few seconds, and continued. “Another factor is you already have a resume; you have a public identity that would explain why you would be traveling to certain places. It’s sort of another version of hide in plain sight, you know? No one’s going to suspect that an author on a book tour, for instance, is performing clandestine missions for his government,” he observed.
“This is not the Bourne Identity; you travel under your own name, you register in hotels under your own name, you fly under your own name. You operate in plain sight. You don’t use a fake identity because you already have a real identity; everybody knows who you are. That’s the brilliance of this program. And it’s the way we actually used to do it in the old days, if you recall the Office of Strategic Services.”
I did recall it, because I had majored in Political Science and History way back in my undergrad programs. Something told me Wilson already knew this. Something told me he already knew a lot of things about me.
It was time to get to the bottom of this. “So what are you guys?”
“I’m sorry; what are we?” he said with a narrowed expression.
“Yeah, what agency are you?”
“We call ourselves the Department.”
“The Department of what?”
“Just the Department.”
“I thought you said you worked at State,” I said.
“I do. We all do,” Wilson explained. “We work for State, and Justice, and Defense, and Homeland Security, and pretty much any other agency that needs our assistance.”
“But what organization do you fall under? Look, I’ve worked in government off and on long enough to know you have to be a part of something. Nothing exists off the books. As you said, there’s no such thing as Treadstone; that only happens in books and movies.”
Wilson nodded and smiled. He leaned in closer, looked me directly in the eyes and said, “Well, to use your phraseology, we fall directly under the Office of the President, and we report directly to him.” He let it sink in.
He stopped. “He we are,” he said, and looked up at the building we now stood just to the north of. I knew it immediately: The Eisenhower Executive Office Building, just west of the White House. We continued on between the concrete barriers and up the marbled stairs until we came to an entrance.
We stood at a heavy, wooden door. “Just place your entire hand on the door, palm down. Make sure all of your fingertips are touching. The door will automatically unlatch,” he said.
“How?” I asked incredulously.
“You’ve forgotten,” he said. “They took all of your prints. and your DNA at Quantico back in 1997. You’re in all of the systems.”
I looked him steadily in the eye, placed my right hand flat against the door, and after a couple of seconds, heard the unmistakable sound of metal machinery clicking somewhere. The door opened.
“After you,” he said. | https://medium.com/fiction-3000/the-department-399c7c863d08 | ['Glen Hines'] | 2018-08-18 18:41:40.405000+00:00 | ['Adventure', 'Mystery', 'Fiction', 'Short Story', 'Military'] |
Love in the Time of Corona. | Love in the Time of Corona.
Will it make sense to the reader if I actually confessed, that I anticipated a full scale war rather than a pandemic. South Asian Wonder Woman Mar 15, 2020·4 min read
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash — Partially self edited. Original Title: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez.
Any type of crisis instills fear in humanity but it also brings forth kindness. Or this is what I wanted to believe in. But amidst the Kashmir Lockdown, increasing world political tension, and now the novel Corona Virus, I have found myself questioning;
Where is the love?
When I heard about this massive outbreak, I anticipated that there would be a plan, an organised global scale plan to combat the virus, I wanted to believe that we live in a world of new medical breakthroughs and advancements of healthcare but we don’t. Its tiring to even type this with the heavy realisation that our world is much more prepared to go to war than to handle a viral infection.
There is no denying that the Corona Virus has affected the global economies, healthcare systems and personal liberties of individuals, but it has affected kindness more. This virus has put us in a fight or flight mode, an automated selfish response, if I must say. It has pushed a lot of individuals to go on survival instinct, a primitive response. But if there is one aspect of human life that has been affected more by our primitive response, its empathy and kindness.
We are not realising this, but there is a clear halt to the structure of life as we know, and even though it is not as bad in some parts of the world, just the idea of it is making people change plans. I am personally one of those people who felt like they are finally getting a hang of their life and were brave enough to make plans but now are directly effected by the outbreak of this virus. The idea of life, the tiny scribbled plan of tomorrow we had is somehow being put on a pause.The plans that were once based on inclusions now lack the basic courtesy of humanity. I have read numerous accounts were we as individuals have failed to show kindness, empathy and care to others in this massive healthcare crisis. The arena is suddenly about, to each their own. And that is terrifying.
From my personal experience and observation so far, I see people line up more and more in front of grocery stores, but I wonder how many people are actually informing the lesser informed individuals of the society. Yes, I know the media plays a major role in distribution of information and informing everyone, regardless of the social stratification but I don’t believe its able to solve religious myths and combat the rumors churning the global rumour mill.
The virus hasn’t reached Lahore, but clearly the tremors have. Yesterday, I was on a rikshaw ride and the driver expressed his views regarding the spread of the virus:
“Baji, yeh virus musalmano ko nahi hoge, app Allah par yakeen rakhti ho tou appko nai hoge.” Translation: “Sister, Muslims won’t get this virus, you believe in Allah, you won’t get this.”
Another interesting driver shared his deep concern over how this is a planned virus to effect China and its economy, to bring it down by the Americans. The misconception and rumors surrounding Corona Virus aren’t helping the situation. Even on the global front, China is seen as the culprit, there is a clear racist attack on the Chinese community all around the world. Comments and derogatory remarks, insensitive headlines have aided in creating more communal tension, lack of acceptance and open physical attacks on individuals and business.
This is NOT what we need right now.
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
I deeply feel that as much as self-quarantine is important and needed in these times, reaching out to others, communicating, and empathy are equally important.
This long self imposed periods of self-quarantine will end, the supermarkets that you are running to will soon have the supplies again, this viral outbreak will be over but what will be left behind, what you will be leaving behind, in the aftermath of all this, is your words and actions. What you do during this crisis, what you sow, is what will reflect of you in the future.
Typing this, all I know is that love doesn’t take much, it doesn’t need much, it is not just between two people, or in the three synchronised words. Love is kindness, love is caring, its the smile you give to a stranger, it is getting basic supplies for those who can’t afford, asking your neighbour if they need any supplies from the same supermarket that you are planning to stock up unnecessarily from, it is reaching out to the survivors of the virus, and equally to those who are suffering from it, a text from you won’t risk your life but will only show the care and hope. It is informing those who don’t have accurate information, it is reaching out, it is about creating a safe communal place where individuals can turn to, it is about inclusion.
Together, we have dealt with so much worse than this.
This too shall pass. | https://medium.com/@southasian.wonderwoman/love-in-the-time-of-corona-4a1bf02fe5e9 | ['South Asian Wonder Woman'] | 2020-03-15 02:33:32.737000+00:00 | ['Corona', 'Virus', 'Hope', 'Humanity', 'Love'] |
Comma.ai: Solving Self-Driving Cars — A Startup Investment Thesis by Mateen Asghari and John Gaidimas | Conclusion and Final Remarks
It is clear there is an extraordinary level of demand for self-driving technology in the near future. Comma.ai is a practical competitor in this field as they are one of the few in this industry who have a product out for consumers to purchase and use — the other notable company being Tesla. Estimates for self-driving technology being standard in all vehicles have varied throughout the years, though now it looks to be about 5 to 10 years on the horizon. Compared to its competition, comma.ai is relatively underfunded and seems to have gained less traction in the startup world. However, the intelligence of the team and universality of the product combine to create real potential.
Compared to their competitors, comma.ai has several advantages. Primarily, comma.ai has been able to outsource a significant portion of the cost of developing their technology to consumers who pay to use their EON DevKit. Unlike most of comma.ai’s competitors who must pay for the test fleet, test drivers, and all the equipment maintenance, comma.ai relies on early adopters to gather testing miles to train their machine learning algorithm. This strategy has allowed comma.ai to greatly reduce the costs of developing their self-driving technology. Additionally, comma.ai has actually shipped a real self-driving product that is actively being used by consumers. With the exception of Tesla, there is no other autonomous vehicle company who has opened up their technology to the mass consumer market. The experience comma.ai has gained with shipping a real product to real consumers should give them an advantage as their technology continues to grow.
However, comma.ai faces many difficulties and disadvantages when compared to their numerous competitors. The self-driving startup business is saturated by many of well-funded startups that have raised billions of dollars. Comma.ai will struggle to compete with these much larger and better funded startups. While comma.ai has an innovative strategy that will vastly reduce their development costs, they completely lack the advantages of a larger, better funded startup. Comma.ai cannot afford to spend money on advertising or a legal department, and as a result comma.ai remains a relatively unknown brand that sells their product through a legal loophole. This lack of regulatory approval and oversight will make it challenging for comma.ai to expand in the consumer market, and their lack of funding will make it difficult to deal with future regulatory issues. Because they are forced to sell their product as a dashcam instead of a self-driving system, comma.ai’s EON DevKit is not consumer friendly. It will be impossible for the everyday consumer to install this into a car, and the technical skills required to actually use comma.ai’s product vastly reduces their potential market. While comma.ai could certainly raise more funding to help tackle these issues, as things stand right now comma.ai is ill-equipped to effectively compete in the cutting edge self-driving startup industry.
The question of whether we would invest in this company still stands. To be frank, while we think their technology and team’s dynamic are impressive we would not invest in comma.ai after doing extensive research of the startup and looking at the numbers. The market for self-driving vehicles is crowded with big-name and massively-funded companies and comma.ai is just not a potent player in the business at the moment. This stems from their lack of funding, $8.1 million compared to Zoox’s $995 million, and limiting small team of 13 employees. This does not allow them for a lot of upward mobility and expansion and is a glaring concern for investors who look for big profits soon. Moreover, the future of comma.ai’s product does not seem to be promising if all vehicles in the future are built from their conception to be self-driving. At that point, only their technology would be valuable and even then large companies like Tesla and Waymo may have them beat. Despite our unwillingness to invest into the company, we do believe what they are doing is impressive and that they have potential. No other company, besides Tesla, has a product on the ground running for consumers to purchase that allows self-driving to be present on their commute. Moreover, the team at comma.ai is immensely talented and capable of great technological feats in self-driving applications. Though we would like to see comma.ai become exceptionally successful and believe they have a lot of room to grow, their current disadvantages loom too large for a serious investment to be feasible.
Disclaimer: All information in this report has been aggregated through numerous, public news reports/articles or comma.ai’s website itself. Any misrepresentation of the company is purely accidental. BV is more than willing to correct any mistakes. | https://medium.com/@uclabv/comma-ai-solving-self-driving-cars-a-startup-investment-thesis-by-mateen-asghari-and-john-9dc892573b02 | ['Bruin Ventures'] | 2020-11-18 03:33:09.534000+00:00 | ['Autonomous Cars', 'Self Driving Cars', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Startup'] |
It’s Time To Retire The Phrase “Work-Life Balance.” Why Company Leaders Should Focus On Employee Fulfillment, Not Vacation Time | It’s Time To Retire The Phrase “Work-Life Balance.” Why Company Leaders Should Focus On Employee Fulfillment, Not Vacation Time
First and foremost, “balance” means different things to different people.
By Brian Sweeney, CEO of Collide, CTO for Earl Enterprises
“Work-life balance” is often considered the holy grail of employee satisfaction.
But when you really break it down, you’ll find it’s hugely overrated and misleading.
When you think of the word “balance,” you might picture the scales of justice, where both sides are perfectly level. Balance denotes equal, though it’s sort of impossible to spend equal amounts of time working and playing. So, that picture is clearly out of sync. Sometimes you have major deadlines or projects at work that require more time spent in the office. Other times, work will be slower, and you’ll potentially have more free time to focus more on your hobbies and social life. And sometimes, life intervenes and you need to spend more time with your family.
That’s true balance. It’s not about being equal in numbers-it’s about the value to you, in the short term and in the long term.
And an equal split isn’t just difficult to maintain—it also doesn’t necessarily guarantee happiness. Many people love their jobs, and work enriches their lives, just as their lives outside the office reinvigorates them to work. Some people live to work and other people work to live. Neither is wrong.
So rather than getting hung up on giving your team more vacation time or fancy perks, focus on whether they’re generally happy in their lives, or have the flexibility to be that way at all.
Balance means different things to different people.
If you don’t need many material objects to be happy, you can live in a van on the beach. If you have a laptop, you can work from anywhere, and get by on the basic essentials.
The rest of the time you can spend surfing and looking at the stars.
But many people want a little more from life. They want intellectual challenges, to contribute a product or a service to society, or make a living to support their family. For example, as soon as I started having kids, I realized that I had to work that much harder to be sure I had the cash flow to put them through school, give them travel opportunities, fund their extracurricular activities, etc. I wanted to.
Either path is fine, as long as you’re working to sustain your specific needs—and wants.
Your work informs your life, and vice versa.
My primary issue with the term “work-life balance” is that it puts “work” and “life” at odds with one another. It assumes that work is bad and life is good—and that they’re completely separate things.
But in reality, work and life are intertwined for most people. If you enjoy your job and find it fulfilling, you’ll likely talk about it at social gatherings, and spend more leisure time with people in your industry. If you have a great home life, you’ll talk about your kids at work, and you’ll be more motivated to work harder on their behalf. You might even meet your significant other at work.
When I worked at GE at the dawn of the internet age, we brought cots into the office to get a few hours of sleep during all-nighters. That might sound intense, but here’s the thing: no one was pissed off about it. We were excited about the work we were doing and knew this was the best way to have the energy to keep going.
In other words, both work and life make you who you are. When I was sleeping in the GE office, work was my life. And while it wasn’t sustainable forever, it made me happy and fulfilled at the time.
Time off is important, but not everyone needs unlimited PTO.
Although most successful people put in all-nighters on occasion, everyone needs to take time away from the office.
When I worked at Hulu, we had an unlimited vacation time policy. But to be honest, most people didn’t take advantage of it. We almost had to kick them out of the roost sometimes.
I also try to make sure they’re not just using all of their time off on obligatory family visits, because (and I think we can all agree) that’s not really a break. Same with medical appointments and procedures. Instead, I encourage my team to go somewhere new, or rest on a beach with their partner-anything that will help them actually relax.
But not everyone unwinds in the same way.
Some employees get the break they need just from working at home. So as a leader, I try to give them the space to make that decision for themselves. When they do, they’re rejuvenated and ready to tackle what needs to get done in the office.
You have to keep checking in.
Employee satisfaction isn’t a given—you have to be paying attention.
I’m a big fan of giving out free company merch, and it’s a nice litmus test for whether employees are happy. If they’re willing to wear the company logo, there’s an element of pride.
On the other hand, if you can sense employees are dissatisfied, they might just be in the wrong role. For example, at a former job at a major tech company, we unfortunately had to let many people go. In the process, we identified a number of underperforming employees and offered them very different roles at the company. The ones that took us up on it ended up being amazing, long-tenured, excellent-performing employees.
This taught me that while sometimes underperforming employees just aren’t in the best role for them, as often as they aren’t right for your company. And often, underperforming employees are also unhappy and unbalanced. Getting them back to a healthy place work-wise is the key to bringing back their work-life balance.
Ultimately, employee satisfaction is a two-way street-you have to maintain an open line of dialogue with your team.
When you shift your focus from “balance” to whether your team is happy and fulfilled at work, you’ll end up with the strongest workforce you can have. | https://medium.com/the-mission/its-time-to-retire-the-phrase-work-life-balance-b78ede19764c | [] | 2019-06-10 23:44:22.266000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Success', 'Personal Growth', 'Personal Development', 'Work Life Balance'] |
Faster, cheaper and better transactions - Segwit for Bitbit is here! | We are thrilled to announce that we have fully rolled out SegWit-enabled addresses for all Bitbit users.
SegWit or Segregated Witness, was implemented on the Bitcoin network in August, 2017. The technical improvement aimed to scale Bitcoin and improve transaction speed.
As a sample computation, a Non SegWit transaction of 1 input and 2 outputs at around 226 bytes means you would have to pay about 0.00115034 BTC.
If it was a SegWit transaction with 1 input and 2 outputs at around 178 bytes means you would have to pay about 0.00089584 BTC
That’s a savings of $2.769!
Changes to your Bitbit Account:
1. You will receive a brand new SegWit-enabled bitcoin address. You will see this new address in the app.
2. Your old bitcoin address will no longer be visible inside your account.
3. You can continue to receive funds from external transfers to the old address and it will reflect o your balance but it is highly recommended that you use the Segwit-enabled address for better experience.
4. Your bitcoin balance from the old non Segwit wallet address is safe and carried over.
5. You will see that transaction fees will be much cheaper and confirmation will be faster when you send bitcoin.
We advise mobile users to always update your Bitbit mobile app to the latest version to enjoy new features that we are constantly delivering.
If you have any questions or feedback, please send us an email at [email protected] | https://medium.com/sci-ventures-blog/faster-cheaper-and-better-transactions-segwit-for-bitbit-is-here-7bc7d51f718d | ['Satoshi Citadel Industries'] | 2018-01-30 09:49:36.476000+00:00 | ['Segwit', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
The Dichotomy of Silicon Valley | The Dichotomy of Silicon Valley
“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
― J. Krishnamurti sumarius Jul 15·6 min read
Over the past ten years, Silicon Valley has infamously been a dreamer’s haven. A place where seemingly impossible ideas came to life in a matter of years or even months. Anyone could do it, all it took was an idea, a laptop, a strong belief and a shabby chic living room to affect change and disrupt an industry. Everyone, investors and employees alike, put their time and money to get in early and be a part of the next Google. Millions of dollars were invested in silly apps like Yo, only to disappear without a trace after a few months. Movies like the internship only cemented what a capitalist fairytale would look like to an average middle class parent. Why focus on reality when the promise of a unicorn exists?
We fell for this fantasy too. As young graduates, we weren’t interested in the ugly truth of life. We were more than willing to shell out half of our paycheck to live in a tiny 1 bedroom for a chance at this modern roulette. The allure of becoming a visionary is what got us hooked on Silicon Valley. We idolized leaders like Steve Jobs who convinced the market that they needed a smartphone and in doing that, completely changed the tech landscape. He got ‘it’ while the old suits didn’t. We loved him for his defiance to authority and the status quo. We were not the only ones who put him up on a pedestal. Silicon Valley built a mythology around his story and elevated the template that Jobs created.
The public was hungry for a narrative like this in the late 2000s. The country had just experienced the worst man-made financial crisis and people were losing trust in the financial system. Greed was aspirational in the 90s but the 2010s needed a heart. Silicon Valley presented that change. Companies were focused on changing the world and making it a better place to live. ‘Do no evil’, proclaimed the biggest giant in sharp contrast to Wall Street’s “Greed is good”.
Ten years later, the valley has lost some of its luster. The honeymoon period is coming to a close and we are now faced with having to make the marriage work. Interestingly, the pundits have been crying for the end of Silicon Valley for a while now but the party never seems to end even if the party goers are burned out, sick and addicted to substances. How did the valley sell us on the promise of a unicorn? As longtime residents, we can shed some light on the strange addiction and the dichotomy that exists.
Health vs wealth — the allure of an exit
We came to Silicon Valley and joined a hyper-growth startup. We immediately started spending 80+ hours a week delivering on key asks. However, despite the long hours, the work was fun and the chaos was addictive. We were no longer in a boring, corporate job. We had a chance to be a part of the next big IPO, a badge of honor in the Valley. The crazy hours were reinforced by rewards. At the end of the quarter, we learned how much closer the company was to raising the next round of funding while glossing over or omitting challenges the company faced in growth.
The effects of it, we left our health at the altar for the greater good, not of society but that of the company we work for. We put in crazy hours hoping for a payout and ignored the effects of the mounting stress on our mental and physical health. For example, waking up every morning to a veggie smoothie and a run and ending the night with four drinks after a long, stressful work day. Ultimately, we made choices to superficially take care of our health while, in parallel, ruining it — in other words, living our lives as a dichotomy.
The Infantilized Engineer
It is hard to distinguish Google’s campus from a nursery for grown ups. Employees are treated like children in the Valley with a fun office and exciting toys to engage our creativity but much like children, it also meant painting the world around us in the most positive, simplistic light — hiding problems from us. Let’s examine the ever increasing presence of the so-called listening parties — a modern way for the big bosses to pacify their employees. Everyone gets a chance to air their grievances and be heard. You can almost be convinced that companies care about our concerns and well-being up until when it actually matters.
In reality, this is just to protect the company’s interest. With all the PR efforts to promote women in technology, Google protected and paid Andy Rubin after sexual conduct allegations. From a business perspective, it made sense. The victim (a woman) in question was not a key hire. A town-hall was organized to soothe the anger. The employees were heard. Everyone promptly moved on to the next hot topic like children on their best behavior.
Nothing about this is particularly surprising. There is something cathartic about airing out concerns to an authority figure. Many religions have formal rituals surrounding this activity. It makes us feel like we are solving the problem. That illusion of progress is addictive even if it is just an illusion. What we forget to focus on is whether there is follow through.
The promise of changing the world
Millennials joined the workforce around the 2008 crisis when there was mounting criticism of Wall Street. Silicon Valley smartly marketed itself as the protagonist to the next generation of dreamers.
The valley felt like a place to achieve a higher level of consciousness. Rather than a stoic industry with a lot of red tape, we got to be part of something that was constantly at the brink of innovation. The novel business model of online advertisements made information free and abundant. The ever changing twitter feed made the morning newspaper obsolete. Nobody cared about what you wore or what car you drove because people were busy working on more impactful projects that were solving real problems.
This mindset continues to permeate the fabric of Silicon Valley to this day. There is still chatter on how we are morally superior to Wall Street. When faced with criticism, we remind the detractors that we freed the world’s information and birthed the iPhone.
We refuse to face the reality that we are hitting the messy and complicated part of human nature. Integrating technology with the more sacred aspects of humanity requires careful consideration of its impact on the community — the antithesis of the “move fast and break things” philosophy that worked so well for many years. As an industry, we shy away from answering these difficult questions because the nuanced challenges we are facing cannot be disrupted with a neat algorithm. Or maybe because it conflicts with the ability to make money quickly. The dichotomy of Silicon Valley is people are unwilling to see through the bullshit when it is coated in gold just like our Wall Street brethren.
Conclusion
Money and success have changed what the valley is but as an industry, we continue to perpetuate a vision of utopia. Employees compromise every aspect of their lives in hopes of hitting the jackpot — a successful exit or stumbling on the next Google. Companies prey on idealistic graduates by promising a chance to change the world for the better. In reality, the social good initiatives are often just PR stunts. As an industry, we continue to market our contributions to humanity. However, when faced with real decisions we shy away from taking any meaningful steps under the pretense of being just a technology platform.
Silicon Valley is not dead. It has afforded companies the chance to push boundaries and question norms for so many years. There is an immense amount of novel ideas, talent to execute on these ideas and money to fund these ideas. However, we must learn to separate fact from fiction. It’s time to realize that a horse painted white with a horn is not a unicorn. | https://medium.com/@sumarius5/the-dichotomy-of-silicon-valley-fe885349f132 | [] | 2021-07-19 05:53:30.410000+00:00 | ['Big Tech', 'Startup', 'Society And Culture', 'Silicon Valley', 'Technology Trends'] |
I know best (Day 35) | Before I had a baby, I was sure that it will be possible to let other people from our immediate family interact and take care of Otto. As I personally don’t have a problem with sharing him and the joy he brings, nature does. Or better said, no one smells as good as I do.
Well, my husband is next in line and then for a long time, no one he is all that comfortable with handling him. So as much as I would like to have time to do things that I enjoy or spend time alone with my husband while someone else steps in for an hour or two, there is literally no time at this moment to spare. All is spent on Otto’s wellbeing.
For the next few months.
And there is another thing nature provided mothers. The skill of knowing what’s best for our child. No advice from others (well doctors and other professionals, naturally — well, even then it’s also a subject to critical appraisal) trumps mother’s intuition. Since we got home from hospital my husband and I have been doing it on our own (having done tons of research before and we still are learning) and day by day we get to know our child a little bit better.
Because of that, I lost it today (again) when I got another “well-intended” advice about breastfeeding. True, it has been a challenge, but Otto is doing beautifully. For anyone to suggest I should get the quality of my milk checked because Otto is signaling he is hungry by putting his fingers to his mouth is showing that first, this person doesn’t know or has forgotten facts about babies and second, doesn’t know my son’s behavior.
I shouldn’t have reacted as I had and in normal circumstances, I probably wouldn’t. But for anyone who isn’t a professional, hasn’t had experiences for himself and doesn’t know my baby to assume to know best — well, I told them where to take their advice.
All the developmental literature speaks of the mother’s bond being the best and the most needed for a newborn to thrive. The benefits of the paternal bond are also emphasized in the physical and emotional growth of a child. We do take this very seriously and try to educate ourselves, ask about people’s experiences, rely on our intuition, etc. And again, Otto is one happy and healthy baby.
Motherhood in numbers: | https://medium.com/a-year-in-a-life/i-know-best-day-35-3230eaad1e2b | ['Sara Tomsic'] | 2019-10-22 18:21:55.080000+00:00 | ['Parenting', 'Baby', 'Mother Intuition', 'Newborn', 'Motherhood'] |
Is “showing up” enough? | If you’ve ever heard of the old saying, “Just showing up is half the battle” or “80 percent of success is just showing up”, you’re not alone. These messages have been replayed and recycled throughout my entire life. I think they’re good messages and encourages one to consistently work at a certain thing. But as an adult, I believe just showing up isn’t enough. There’s more to just going through the motion and expect results. If that was the case, there’d be a lot more successful people running around. What I’m talking about is showing up AND having a purpose for it.
Why a purpose?
Purpose is a game changer. Purpose defines the “why” in which allows us to make sense of what and why we are doing what we are doing. Purpose gives us meaning and calibrates the end goal for us. When you are doing something, do you have a purpose that aligns with that action? Basically your north star that gives you guidance.
What is purpose suppose to look like? If you’re a kid just showing up to class every day, will you learn anything worthwhile if you just “showed up”? A lot of us would agree that the education we received in school was just for memorization. There’s not much room for practicality. What if every time we went to class, we knew our purpose; in this case, learning. Now we can get more specific into what types of learning, but in this scenario, our purpose is to learn every time we come to class. Why is this so important? Isn’t this supposed to be expected every time we come to class? I don’t believe so because we expect the teacher to give us information but rarely do we take it upon ourselves to learn.
When your purpose is to learn, you start to become proactive instead of reactive. You’ll start to take actions that leads to more learning and thus the compounding cycle starts to begin. Now compare that with just coming to class and listening versus asking questions or doing a little extra research to satisfy your purpose. There might not be a huge noticeable difference at first but the act itself is in incomparable.
We can take other examples like going out to socials or professional events. If you kept showing up to these events, people will recognize you but you won’t build a stronger relationship than if you showed up AND have the purpose of connecting with these people. What used to be “it’s who you know” now becomes “it’s who you know and what they know you can do”. You begin to build a reputation and then it becomes your brand. Hopefully it’s a brand of trustworthiness and skillfulness.
Take it to the next level?
I do understand that being in a constant mode of purpose-driven mentality is tough, but the main key isn’t be at 110% at all times. What want to do is to turn our purpose into a habit, in which we no longer need to think about it, we can just put it on “autopilot”.
When establishing a habit, there’s a great deal of effort, both mental and physical energy. You have to be conscious of every step. But as it turns into a habit, it’s now the norm for you. If you continue to practice purpose-driven actions, it now becomes the standard for you.
The next step is to continue to push the threshold and make that the new standard. The pattern becomes do a little more, adapt and let that become the new standard, and repeat it. The trick is to not do so much that it drains you. Just a slight increase or decrease in whatever direction you want to take (again, hopefully positive).
The bottom line
While I’ll always push for doing more than just showing up, it is much better to just show up than to not be there at all. When you’re not even there, there’s isn’t an attempt at progress. Even if you’re dead tired, the probability of you learning something or doing something is significantly higher than not showing up.
If we think about it, we are all playing the long-term game with just showing up, with or without purpose. I’d figure if you are playing long term, why not get more out of it? Why not see improvements quicker and change your mindset on the ways you do things? The more you learn, the more you realized that you don’t know a lot about things.
So find a goal to start and let it gradually evolve to a purpose. Do more than just show up, be more involved and attend. You got nothing to lose with this em
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Podcast: Staying Konnected | https://medium.com/@stayingkonnect/is-showing-up-enough-3a8d99b9489c | ['Scott Nguyen'] | 2021-08-27 19:07:10.043000+00:00 | ['Process', 'Substack', 'Showing Up', 'Success', 'Hard Work'] |
Bill Seeks to Remove the Limit on Employment-Based Green Cards | blog:
The H-1B visa program for foreign workers
It is no secret that the dream of millions of people around the world is to come to the US to gain work experience and, possibly, to be able to stay in the country for a long time. Adding to that, hundreds of American businesses also use certain immigration programs to hire qualified personnel from abroad, constantly fueling their socioeconomic growth.
For instance, one of the options most used by local employers is the H-1B visa program, which allows them to hire highly qualified foreign workers. By this, we refer to foreigners trained to hold positions in important sectors such as science, technology, engineering and research.
Do you need help with a Business Immigration Case? Motion Law Immigration’s team can help you, regardless of whether you are a local employer or a foreign worker.
What is the current limit on employment-based Green Cards?
H-1B visa holders also have the possibility to apply for a Green Card after a certain period of time and as long as they meet eligibility requirements, which grants Lawful Permanent Residence in the US.
However, the process for foreign workers to apply for a Green Card has become increasingly difficult over the past decades. This is mainly because the US issues a total of 140,000 employment-based Green Cards annually, but there is a 7% per-country cap, which means that each country can get a maximum of 9,800 business immigration-related Green Cards.
This is naturally a disadvantage for countries like India and China which have extremely high population density compared to, for example, Nordic countries. Therefore, many qualified foreign workers from countries with higher population growth have to wait years or even decades to apply for a Green Card, which does not allow them to easily change jobs or create their own companies without having to start another immigration process.
It is evident that following the advice of experts when starting an immigration process of any kind is extremely important. Contact Motion Law Immigration and schedule a FREE Consultation with our experienced attorneys!
EAGLE Act: The bill that would remove the limit on employment-based Green Cards
On June 2, 2021, two bipartisan members of the US House of Representatives introduced an immigration bill called the EAGLE Act (Equal Access to Green Cards for Legal Employment), which proposes to remove the per-country cap for employment-based Green Cards, streamline pending immigration processes from high-population countries, and benefit highly-skilled foreign workers that could bring huge benefits to the local economy.
This bipartisan proposal seeks to phase out the per-country limit on employment-based Green Cards over a 9-year period through certain specific transition rules. Adding to that, this Act would also increase the annual per-country cap for Green Cards based on family ties from 7% to 15%.
The Representatives openly state that the current immigration system still operates with policies and laws that were necessary for the 20th century, but which do not come close to today’s global needs. They state that “The bipartisan EAGLE Act moves our country toward a system that de-emphasizes birthplace and better serves America (…) It will allow U.S. companies to focus on hiring smart people to create products and services, which creates jobs in our districts”.
Following the regular process, this immigration bill still needs to be reviewed by the branches of Congress before it officially becomes law, which could take a considerable period of time, but dozens of advocates are hopeful about the proposal.
Follow the advice of our team during your immigration journey!
If you, a family member, or a friend need help with an immigration case, please contact Motion Law today to schedule a FREE Consultation with one of our expert immigration attorneys. Our team will be happy to guide you through your immigration journey in the US.
Please contact Motion Law Immigration today at: (202) 918–1899. | https://medium.com/@media-27365/bill-seeks-to-remove-the-limit-on-employment-based-green-cards-152159d68ff4 | ['Motion Law Immigration'] | 2021-06-08 22:59:32.255000+00:00 | ['Immigrants', 'Immigration Reform', 'Immigration', 'Immigration Lawyer', 'Immigration Consultants'] |
Small, Medium or Large | What is happiness, without sadness? What is joy without pain? What would success be without failure? See, it's not up to us what we experience or choose to go through, only how we deal with those experiences and how we react to them. Without one, the other wouldn't be… you have to experience the lows to know how hard and prestigious it is to experience the highs, and to give you a chance to know which of the two you want to prevent yourself from feeling. Your devotion, your faith, your belief, and your sacrifice are all seeds being planted in the ground. They are healthy and lucrative investments you have the choice of making. You can decide whether you want to get something great and valuable out of all this time spent or whether you're going to go through it this and have nothing to show for it in the end. Of course, there will be doubt, confusion, pain, and disbelief. That's why being strong and faithful is a CHOICE. What's mandatory isn't what you choose, but that you choose. because there is no such thing as staying in the same place, there's only moving forward or backward. | https://medium.com/@gerriosrahming/small-medium-or-large-32e031205385 | ['Gerrio S. Rahming'] | 2020-09-03 16:59:53.479000+00:00 | ['Belief', 'Choices', 'Decisions', 'Focus'] |
Hibernate N+1 and Batch Performance Issue | N + 1
何謂N+1問題
在系統設計上，一對多、多對多的關係十分常見，也常常需要同時抓取兩張table的內容，如果是用SQL來處理你應該可以很直覺的寫出來，
SELECT * FROM TABLEA JOIN TABLEB ON A.XXX = B.XXX WHERE CONDITION
但使用hibernate的時候，在資料量為5(N=5)的情況下，則會執行6(N+1)次 824900 nanoseconds spent preparing 6 JDBC statements; 1602200 nanoseconds spent executing 6 JDBC statements;
也就是一行SQL可以解決的問題，hibernate會則需要執行N+1次，可想而知當資料量變大時，勢必會帶來效能問題。
DEMO
spring data jpa 、junit 5、h2database、mySql、testContainer
首先開啟相關的LOG來觀察
# 印出SQL
spring.jpa.show-sql=true
# 格式化SQL
spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.format_sql=true
logging.level.org.hibernate.SQL=DEBUG
# 印出統計數據
spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.generate_statistics=true
Company.java 公司entity
@Entity
@Table
@Data
public class Company {
@Id
@GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
private Long id;
private String companyName;
@OneToMany(fetch = FetchType.LAZY, cascade = CascadeType.ALL)
@JoinColumn
private List<Employee> employees;
}
Employee.java 員工entity
@Entity
@Table
@Data
public class Employee {
@Id
@GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
private Long id;
private String name;
}
CompanyRepository.java 繼承 JpaRepository
public interface CompanyRepository extends JpaRepository<Company, Long> {
}
關聯: 一間公司對多的員工 CompanyRepositoryTest 測試情境
saveTest 會儲存5間公司(Company)，每間公司各有一名員工(員工)，透過cascade all去同時儲存進DB，因為要讓兩個Test不同Transaction， saveTest 會先將結果commit，避免所有物件仍處於 entityManager 託管之下，影響測試結果。 testSelect 會透過findAll查詢所有資料後印出資料，藉此觀察LOG出的結果
@ExtendWith(SpringExtension.class)
@DataJpaTest
@Slf4j
@Transactional
class CompanyRepositoryTest {
@Autowired
private CompanyRepository companyRepository;
@Test
@Commit
void saveTest() {
for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
Company company1 = new Company();
company1.setCompanyName("公司"+ i);
List<Employee> employees = new ArrayList<>();
Employee employee = new Employee();
employee.setName("員工" + i);
employees.add(employee);
company1.setEmployees(employees);
companyRepository.save(company1);
}
}
@Test
void testSelect() {
companyRepository.findAll().forEach(company -> {
log.info(company.getCompanyName() + company.getEmployees().get(0).getName());
});
}
}
測試結果可看出Hibernate會先查詢出所有公司，但並不會馬上撈出相關的員工，而是當需要印出LOG的時候，才會一筆一筆去取得員工資料，導致查詢次數就是1次查詢所有公司，加上5次(間)公司的員工，總共6(5+1)。
2020-12-02 14:20:19.993 DEBUG 10388 --- [ Test worker] org.hibernate.SQL :
select
company0_.id as id1_0_,
company0_.company_name as company_2_0_
from
company company0_
Hibernate:
select
company0_.id as id1_0_,
company0_.company_name as company_2_0_
from
company company0_
2020-12-02 14:20:20.009 DEBUG 10388 --- [ Test worker] org.hibernate.SQL :
select
employees0_.employees_id as employee3_1_0_,
employees0_.id as id1_1_0_,
employees0_.id as id1_1_1_,
employees0_.name as name2_1_1_
from
employee employees0_
where
employees0_.employees_id=?
Hibernate:
select
employees0_.employees_id as employee3_1_0_,
employees0_.id as id1_1_0_,
employees0_.id as id1_1_1_,
employees0_.name as name2_1_1_
from
employee employees0_
where
employees0_.employees_id=?
2020-12-02 14:20:20.034 INFO 10388 --- [ Test worker] c.r.h.repository.CompanyRepositoryTest : 公司0員工0
2020-12-02 14:20:20.035 DEBUG 10388 --- [ Test worker] org.hibernate.SQL :
select
employees0_.employees_id as employee3_1_0_,
employees0_.id as id1_1_0_,
employees0_.id as id1_1_1_,
employees0_.name as name2_1_1_
from
employee employees0_
where
employees0_.employees_id=?
Hibernate:
select
employees0_.employees_id as employee3_1_0_,
employees0_.id as id1_1_0_,
employees0_.id as id1_1_1_,
employees0_.name as name2_1_1_
from
employee employees0_
where
employees0_.employees_id=?
2020-12-02 14:20:20.037 INFO 10388 --- [ Test worker] c.r.h.repository.CompanyRepositoryTest : 公司1員工1
2020-12-02 14:20:20.037 DEBUG 10388 --- [ Test worker] org.hibernate.SQL :
select
employees0_.employees_id as employee3_1_0_,
employees0_.id as id1_1_0_,
employees0_.id as id1_1_1_,
employees0_.name as name2_1_1_
from
employee employees0_
where
employees0_.employees_id=?
Hibernate:
select
employees0_.employees_id as employee3_1_0_,
employees0_.id as id1_1_0_,
employees0_.id as id1_1_1_,
employees0_.name as name2_1_1_
from
employee employees0_
where
employees0_.employees_id=?
2020-12-02 14:20:20.039 INFO 10388 --- [ Test worker] c.r.h.repository.CompanyRepositoryTest : 公司2員工2
2020-12-02 14:20:20.042 DEBUG 10388 --- [ Test worker] org.hibernate.SQL :
select
employees0_.employees_id as employee3_1_0_,
employees0_.id as id1_1_0_,
employees0_.id as id1_1_1_,
employees0_.name as name2_1_1_
from
employee employees0_
where
employees0_.employees_id=?
Hibernate:
select
employees0_.employees_id as employee3_1_0_,
employees0_.id as id1_1_0_,
employees0_.id as id1_1_1_,
employees0_.name as name2_1_1_
from
employee employees0_
where
employees0_.employees_id=?
2020-12-02 14:20:20.050 INFO 10388 --- [ Test worker] c.r.h.repository.CompanyRepositoryTest : 公司3員工3
2020-12-02 14:20:20.051 DEBUG 10388 --- [ Test worker] org.hibernate.SQL :
select
employees0_.employees_id as employee3_1_0_,
employees0_.id as id1_1_0_,
employees0_.id as id1_1_1_,
employees0_.name as name2_1_1_
from
employee employees0_
where
employees0_.employees_id=?
Hibernate:
select
employees0_.employees_id as employee3_1_0_,
employees0_.id as id1_1_0_,
employees0_.id as id1_1_1_,
employees0_.name as name2_1_1_
from
employee employees0_
where
employees0_.employees_id=?
2020-12-02 14:20:20.053 INFO 10388 --- [ Test worker] c.r.h.repository.CompanyRepositoryTest : 公司4員工4
2020-12-02 14:20:20.060 INFO 10388 --- [ Test worker] i.StatisticalLoggingSessionEventListener : Session Metrics {
611700 nanoseconds spent acquiring 1 JDBC connections;
0 nanoseconds spent releasing 0 JDBC connections;
975200 nanoseconds spent preparing 6 JDBC statements;
1671200 nanoseconds spent executing 6 JDBC statements;
0 nanoseconds spent executing 0 JDBC batches;
0 nanoseconds spent performing 0 L2C puts;
0 nanoseconds spent performing 0 L2C hits;
0 nanoseconds spent performing 0 L2C misses;
0 nanoseconds spent executing 0 flushes (flushing a total of 0 entities and 0 collections);
34500 nanoseconds spent executing 1 partial-flushes (flushing a total of 0 entities and 0 collections)
}
如何解決N+1問題
這邊先列出比較簡單的作法，其實使用Criteria query也能解決這個問題，EntityGraph也有更複雜的情境可以使用，但就不繼續深究了
JPQL的方式，使用 JOIN FETCH EntityGraph 是JPA2.1 之後提供的一種solution，可以比較動態的選擇如何讀取資料。
@Query("SELECT p FROM Company p LEFT JOIN FETCH p.employees")
List<Company> findWithoutNPlusOne();
@EntityGraph(attributePaths = {"employees"})
List<Company> findAll();
調整後LOG可以看出僅執行一次SQL而已
2020-12-02 15:48:52.746 DEBUG 17908 --- [ Test worker] org.hibernate.SQL :
select
company0_.id as id1_0_0_,
employees1_.id as id1_1_1_,
company0_.company_name as company_2_0_0_,
employees1_.name as name2_1_1_,
employees1_.employees_id as employee3_1_0__,
employees1_.id as id1_1_0__
from
company company0_
left outer join
employee employees1_
on company0_.id=employees1_.employees_id
Hibernate:
select
company0_.id as id1_0_0_,
employees1_.id as id1_1_1_,
company0_.company_name as company_2_0_0_,
employees1_.name as name2_1_1_,
employees1_.employees_id as employee3_1_0__,
employees1_.id as id1_1_0__
from
company company0_
left outer join
employee employees1_
on company0_.id=employees1_.employees_id
2020-12-02 15:48:52.787 INFO 17908 --- [ Test worker] c.r.h.repository.CompanyRepositoryTest : 公司0員工0
2020-12-02 15:48:52.788 INFO 17908 --- [ Test worker] c.r.h.repository.CompanyRepositoryTest : 公司1員工1
2020-12-02 15:48:52.788 INFO 17908 --- [ Test worker] c.r.h.repository.CompanyRepositoryTest : 公司2員工2
2020-12-02 15:48:52.788 INFO 17908 --- [ Test worker] c.r.h.repository.CompanyRepositoryTest : 公司3員工3
2020-12-02 15:48:52.788 INFO 17908 --- [ Test worker] c.r.h.repository.CompanyRepositoryTest : 公司4員工4
2020-12-02 15:48:52.793 INFO 17908 --- [ Test worker] i.StatisticalLoggingSessionEventListener : Session Metrics {
689600 nanoseconds spent acquiring 1 JDBC connections;
0 nanoseconds spent releasing 0 JDBC connections;
1469200 nanoseconds spent preparing 1 JDBC statements;
448800 nanoseconds spent executing 1 JDBC statements;
0 nanoseconds spent executing 0 JDBC batches;
0 nanoseconds spent performing 0 L2C puts;
0 nanoseconds spent performing 0 L2C hits;
0 nanoseconds spent performing 0 L2C misses;
0 nanoseconds spent executing 0 flushes (flushing a total of 0 entities and 0 collections);
29800 nanoseconds spent executing 1 partial-flushes (flushing a total of 0 entities and 0 collections)
}
Batch update/insert
當我們有大批資料需要insert Or Update的時候，常常需要考慮到效能問題，避免前端TimeOut(暫不考慮 Event-driven)，至少也要盡量縮短使用者的等待時間，這時開發速度很快的JPA就會產生一些效能問題。
DEMO
最簡單也最基本要做到就是不應該將 save 放到迴圈當中，增加DB的負擔
private final int totalCnt = 1000;
@Test
void saveEachTimeTest() {
for (int i = 0; i < totalCnt; i++) {
School sc = new School();
sc.setId(i+totalCnt);
sc.setSchoolName("學校"+ i);
schoolRepository.save(sc);
}
}
@Test
void saveAllTest() {
List<School> schools = new ArrayList<>();
for (int i = 0; i < totalCnt; i++) {
School company1 = new School();
company1.setSchoolName("學校"+ i);
company1.setId(i);
schools.add(company1);
}
schoolRepository.saveAll(schools);
}
一千筆大約就是10秒跟2秒的差異，而且仔細查看LOG其實並沒有真的使用到JDBC batches
2020-12-02 17:31:10.384 INFO 16916 --- [ Test worker] i.StatisticalLoggingSessionEventListener : Session Metrics {
1810300 nanoseconds spent acquiring 1 JDBC connections;
0 nanoseconds spent releasing 0 JDBC connections;
46370600 nanoseconds spent preparing 1000 JDBC statements;
2126224300 nanoseconds spent executing 1000 JDBC statements;
0 nanoseconds spent executing 0 JDBC batches;
0 nanoseconds spent performing 0 L2C puts;
0 nanoseconds spent performing 0 L2C hits;
0 nanoseconds spent performing 0 L2C misses;
2419325600 nanoseconds spent executing 1 flushes (flushing a total of 1000 entities and 0 collections);
0 nanoseconds spent executing 0 partial-flushes (flushing a total of 0 entities and 0 collections)
}
如何開啟
application.properties 增加相關設定，設定說明
spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.jdbc.batch_size=50
spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.jdbc.batch_versioned_data=true
spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.jdbc.order_inserts=true
spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.jdbc.order_updates=true
# spring.datasource.url= xxx?reWriteBatchedInserts=true <= url需補上設定
調整後可以看到的確實際上是有使用了 JDBC batches
2020-12-02 18:23:33.045 INFO 8864 --- [ Test worker] i.StatisticalLoggingSessionEventListener : Session Metrics {
2280700 nanoseconds spent acquiring 1 JDBC connections;
0 nanoseconds spent releasing 0 JDBC connections;
51895200 nanoseconds spent preparing 1001 JDBC statements;
2176671600 nanoseconds spent executing 1000 JDBC statements;
145272700 nanoseconds spent executing 20 JDBC batches;
0 nanoseconds spent performing 0 L2C puts;
0 nanoseconds spent performing 0 L2C hits;
0 nanoseconds spent performing 0 L2C misses;
218915000 nanoseconds spent executing 1 flushes (flushing a total of 1000 entities and 0 collections);
0 nanoseconds spent executing 0 partial-flushes (flushing a total of 0 entities and 0 collections)
}
但效能上似乎沒有差多少，原因是如果不為isNew的情況，JPA會走merge，就會先select出來在進行updateOrSave，導致效能低下。 SimpleJpaRepository.java
@Transactional
@Override
public <S extends T> S save(S entity) {
Assert.notNull(entity, "Entity must not be null.");
if (entityInformation.isNew(entity)) {
em.persist(entity);
return entity;
} else {
return em.merge(entity);
}
}
此時如果能夠確定此操作永遠只會是insert而不會有update，可以在entity實作 import org.springframework.data.domain.Persistable ， 將isNew 調整為 true，就不會先去select，實測一千筆從3秒左右降為0.5秒，這應該是JPA所能達到的效能極限，若有其他方式希望可以留言告知。
@Entity
@Table
@Data
public class School implements Persistable<Integer>{
@Id
private Integer id;
private String schoolName;
@Override
public boolean isNew() {
return true;
}
}
BATCH UPDATE
如果真的是需要UPDATE，建議不要使用jpa，改用JDBC TEMPLATE來實作BATCH UPDATE，實測約O.2秒，其實是最快的
@Repository
public class BatchSchoolRepository {
@Autowired
private JdbcTemplate jdbcTemplate;
public int[] insertOrUpdateSchool(List<School> schools) {
StringBuilder sql = new StringBuilder();
sql.append("INSERT INTO school");
sql.append(
" (id, school_name) ");
sql.append(
"VALUES(:id, :school_name) ");
sql.append("ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE");
sql.append(" id = VALUES(id),");
sql.append(" school_name = VALUES(school_name)");
List<Map<String, Object>> batchValues = new ArrayList<>(schools.size());
for (School school : schools) {
batchValues.add(
new MapSqlParameterSource("id", school.getId())
.addValue("school_name", school.getSchoolName())
.getValues());
}
SqlParameterSource[] batch = SqlParameterSourceUtils.createBatch(batchValues.toArray());
NamedParameterJdbcTemplate namedParameterJdbcTemplate =
new NamedParameterJdbcTemplate(jdbcTemplate);
return namedParameterJdbcTemplate.batchUpdate(sql.toString(), batch);
}
}
注意事項
若使用MySql DB，ID不可以使用generator自動產生，否則預設會關閉batch update/insert 若使用Mysql DB，URL需補上rewriteBatchedStatements=true才會生效 跑test時 要掛 @SpringBootTest(webEnvironment = RANDOM_PORT) 不能只有 @DataJpaTest ，推測是沒有吃到相關測定，還需要深入研究。
總結
JPA 雖然非常好用，增加開發效率，但在使用的同時要注意，若專案範圍較大，資料量不低的情況，建議同時有兩種repository，大量的情境改使用jdbc template，單筆使用JPA，就可以同時享受JPA的開發速度，也不用犧牲效能。
參考資料
https://medium.com/sipios/eliminate-spring-hibernate-n-plus-1-queries-f0bcf6a83de2 https://persistencelayer.wixsite.com/springboot-hibernate/post/the-best-way-to-batch-inserts-via-saveall-iterable-s-entities | https://medium.com/@believe67/hibernate-n-1-and-batch-performace-issue-md-122dc3c72517 | [] | 2020-12-03 07:26:58.116000+00:00 | ['Spring Boot', 'Jpa', 'Hibernate'] |
Free Courses — 05.05.2020. I share today’s free tutorials below. | I share today’s free tutorials below.
I hope it helps you guys. If you’re taking advantage and participate to the courses please comment below. So other friends who see what you write can also be motivated and take free courses.
Thank you very much.
Software Development:
Design & Video & Audio:
MS Office Applications:
Financial Analysis in Excel: Asset Management Ratios (19 hours to end)
Personal Development (Business):
Personal Development (You):
Language:
No new course today :(
Hobby World: | https://medium.com/freecourses/free-courses-udemy-training-05-05-2020-fb9475ce17d6 | ['Mert Alemdar'] | 2020-05-05 15:46:00.058000+00:00 | ['Udemy', 'Udemy Coupons', 'Free Course', 'Free Courses Udemy'] |
What Makes Email Scam Hard To Detect ? | CIO Advisor Apac scam news
CIO Advisor apac scam news has been helping enterprise providing a solution against scam and spam in the industry. Nowadays, attackers use advanced techniques to scam organizations to pay them a hefty amount via fake invoicing.
Fremont, CA: Email scammers are becoming sophisticated a day using advanced tactics for stealing from organizations across the planet . Earlier, scammers wont to send an invoice, letter, or invitation to be listed during a bogus trade directory or renew the web site name . Today, however, the attacker’s campaigns revolve around supply chains, espionage, and research. Attackers dupe their victims by injecting themselves into a legitimate email thread about finance. These attacks are difficult to detect, and victims will realize that they need been scammed when their vendor follows up about an unreceived payment.
According to researchers at Agari, email fraud is linked to a cyber-criminal gang operating out of Nigeria. referred to as Silent Starling, the group started in 2015 with romance scams and cheque fraud then later advanced to wire transfer requests and gift card scams. Employing new attacks, the group has duped over 500 companies in 14 countries with the bulk of their victims from the U.S., Canada, and therefore the UK. The group has hacked 700 employee email accounts and stole over 20,000 emails to assist cash-out campaigns successfully.Top Risk and Compliance Solution Companies
The attack begins with the hackers attempting to steal email login credentials using phishing attacks redirecting users to a spoofed version of tools like Office365 and other enterprise software. After gaining the credentials, the attacker’s login and found out a forwarding rule to automatically redirect copies of all the emails to a separate account they control. Further, they inspect the content of the emails to know their victims. Later, email scammers found out alerts for keywords like invoices and payments to collect information like the language employed by the important sender and therefore the times of day they have a tendency to be most active. Further, they gain access to the attachments and links utilized in the e-mail to make a fake invoice that appears completely legitimate.
The invoice requests are precise because the purchasers are going to be expecting an invoice from the seller . the sole detail which is different within the invoice is that the bank details, which redirects the cash to the checking account of the cyber-criminal. These attacks are longer and resource consuming as compared to a daily BEC campaign, but the reward is higher. These attacks are stealthy, and that they can’t be caught. within the meantime, the organizations can cross-check the outgoing payments to guard themselves from these attacks. | https://medium.com/@jackmathew/what-makes-email-scam-hard-to-detect-cio-advisor-apac-9ac4437d8af6 | ['Jack Mathew'] | 2021-06-17 04:35:51.685000+00:00 | ['Scam', 'Email', 'Technews', 'Apac', 'Technology'] |
Want your PS5 in a different color? There’s a faceplate for that | This was heavily rumored ever since a couple of Sony employees have promised that “the new PlayStation will be more customizable than ever before” back in June, but the company’s impressive teardown recently made it official: the two wing-shaped faceplates that make up most of PS5’s case are removable so they can obviously be replaced with different ones. We were all expecting Sony themselves and other third parties to offer alternative faceplates some time after PS5’s launch… but it seems that consumers will have options regarding those much, much sooner.
These four very nice colors are available to order right now — we refuse to show the Jungle Camo one, sorry about that (Image credit: PlateStation)
It turns out that a British company called PlateStation has followed the PS5’s development early on and that they somehow must have gotten hold of the exact specs of those removable faceplates… because now they are already selling online five different alternative sets. There’s the obvious matte black — which will better match the shiny black Sony chose for the rest of PS5’s case — but also a very nice “cherry red”, a really cool “indigo blue”, a “chromatic” color (we’ll have to see it in person to decide whether we like it or not) and even a “jungle camo” (this we dislike without having to see it in person — sorry). They are all available for both the PS5 and the PS5 Digital Edition.
Seems classy without being garish, that “cherry red” — your PS5 *will* stand out even more in any room, of course, but wouldn’t it anyway? (Image credit: PlateStation)
PlateStation does emphasize that — despite the clever name — they are not affiliated with PlayStation, meaning that these faceplates are unofficial and not “certified” or endorsed in any way by Sony. Well, as long as they are well-built and do not interfere with the PS5’s thermals, Sony’s stamp of approval is not really necessary — it’s not like the company designed the faceplates to be removable without expecting third parties to step in with their own faceplates, no? There is some concern based on the fact that PlateStation has not manufactured anything before, but it would be too risky to invite the wrath of vocal early adopters if these faceplates were not up to snuff… right?
This indigo blue set of faceplates seems like a safer choice, but if there’s not a lot of contrast between it and the rest of the shiny black case of the PS5, why not go all the way and choose the matte black set? (Image credit: Platestation)
At only $39.99/€34.95 and free worldwide shipping, a set of PlateStation faceplates is admittedly not a huge investment. For people who do not really dig the black/white default color combination of the PS5, ordering such a set now means that they will not have to be looking at it for long: PlateStation promises to start shipping these on or around November 12. There will be other manufacturers (including Sony at some point) that will offer faceplates like these in time but, for now, PlateStation managed to be the first and only one… and that is a newsworthy achievement. Oh, and black it is, of course! | https://medium.com/road-to-nextgen-2020/new-color-ps5-faceplates-already-available-bd9c2262ddab | ['Kostas Farkonas'] | 2020-11-02 10:50:34.370000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'PlayStation', 'Sony', 'Platestation', 'Playstation 5'] |
Implementation of Firebase App Distribution in Android Development | firebase.google.com
Firebase App Distribution makes distributing your apps to trusted testers painless. By getting your apps onto testers’ devices quickly, you can get feedback early and often. And if you use Crashlytics in your apps, you’ll automatically get stability metrics for all your builds, so you know when you’re ready to ship.
Firebase App Distribution is a beta release. This means that the functionality might change in backward-incompatible ways. A beta release is not subject to any SLA or deprecation policy and may receive limited or no support.
Get Started
In this article, you will learn how to distribute your Android app to users/testers using Firebase App Distribution.
From the IOS background, they have been using test flight to distribute their apps to testers, it has really made it easy to test an IOS app and distribute it.
All Thanks to the Firebase Team to add this feature to Firebase, it's now easy to distribute Android apps to tester securely.
Set Up Firebase App Distribution
Step 1: go to https://console.firebase.google.com/
Sign in to your dashboard and click App Distribution
Click the check box to accept the Firebase Crashlytics and App Distribution Terms of Service.
App Distribution only works with a Signed APK
Then Click Get started
Step 2: Drag an Apk or browse on your computer
in the Release Tab, you can drag an APK file to begin the upload process or you browse your PC to locate the saved location of you Signed APK.
In the Invite links Tab, you will be able to create an invite link for your tester.
In the Tester & Groups Tab, you will be able to create a group for each tester, see the list of testers in each group, and delete testers.
Step 3: Navigate to Tester & Groups Tab
Create a group for your app testers, so click on “ Add group”
give your group a name and proceed
The App Tester group is empty because it has no tester in it.
Step 4: Navigate to Invite Links Tab
Click on “ New invite link”
When you click on “New invite link” it will open this dialog box having your package name, a section to choose your tester group, and add restriction to the email domain.
Click on “ Create Link” it will generate a dedicated link for your tester, you can now copy and share with your testers.
invite link is created and ready for use
when you try the links in your browser you will see the below screen
Step 5: Upload a Signed APK
Firstly, Click on “ Add testers or group ” to select the tester group you have created.
At this point, you will have to refresh your browser so that the tester email you sent will reflect.
Then click on the “ Next” button to proceed to add release note.
Click the “ Distribute to 1 tester”, the reason for having one tester is because only one tester has applied to test the project
It has been sent to only one tester, the tester has not accepted it at the moment neither has he downloaded the app.
An invite email will be sent to the developer to accept and download for testing.
Step 6: Check your email address for an invite
Click on the “ Get setup” button
if you open it with your PC you will get the following message below
Open it with your mobile device and continue the setup process.
Check Chapter two of this tutorial to see the complete setup process
follow the below link
https://medium.com/@wise4rmgodadmob/implementation-of-firebase-app-distribution-in-android-development-part-2-bd8bf689ddb9 | https://medium.com/swlh/implementation-of-firebase-app-distribution-in-android-development-3c3370408a72 | ['Nwokocha Wisdom Maduabuchi'] | 2020-10-21 06:24:24.488000+00:00 | ['Firebase', 'Android', 'Firebase App Distribution', 'Android App Development', 'AndroidDev'] |
With 5 Unusual Strategies To A Powerful Network | The 5 unusual ways to a powerful network
1. Pay for VIP access
It took us a long time to admit it, but no matter how clever your strategy for building a powerful network, if you can afford it, there’s probably no quicker way to get VIPs than simply paying for them.
Why? For example, if you buy a VIP ticket to an event, you’ve paid real money and all the other VIP guests know it. So obviously you don’t have money problems and you are probably doing some things right as an entrepreneur. For that reason alone, many people will be happy to talk to you — including VIPs.
This perception from others puts you in a fantastic position and the barrier to approaching other VIP guests drops. After all, you are all part of a closed circle.
At almost every conference or event, there are regular tickets, business tickets and usually VIP tickets. Yes these tickets are overpriced and yes the buffet you get for them is certainly not worth 500 euros more than the normal ticket. But that is not the point. If you want to meet VIPs, you have to be where they are.
You will find that these guests rarely listen to the lectures or speeches, but mainly spend time together in the VIP area and get to know each other. With a VIP ticket, you can easily join them.
A 2,500 dollar ticket quickly turns into a new cooperation or an order. Above all, you gain access to completely new people and expand your network.
2. Organise your own event
If you are not yet able to raise the 2,500 or more dollars for the ticket, this option might be interesting. The host (or hostess) of an event automatically enjoys a high social status and prestige. After all, you are the “connector” who brought all the VIPs together.
All you need is an event location (doesn’t even have to be big) and a bit of time. Write to the different VIPs and tell them that you are organising a meeting.
You can invite the first VIPs for free and after you have the first guests you can even take a fee if you want. There are various groups and masterminds that cost 1,000, 2,000 or even 25,000 dollars per person per day.
Why do the VIPs come there and pay the money? Because they know that only people who are at least already financially successful participate there and that the investment will be paid back several times over.
3. Provide added value without being asked
Successful people value two things: their time and their money. If you do the thinking for them and add value that gives them either more time or more money, you are a valuable resource. If not, you’re a waste of time (and therefore a waste of money). Sounds harsh, but it’s true.
Successful people already have a large network full of successful people who support them and add value. So you need to give them a good reason why they should make time for you.
If every conversation with you does not raise new questions but brings solutions, insights and results, VIPs will automatically be attracted to you (and thus automatically help you).
So add value without being asked. Take a good look at your expertise/skills and analyse what the VIP should improve in order to get more time or money. Write or send him concrete ideas/suggestions and the exact benefits.
You are totally uncreative and have no ideas at all? Then suggest how you could save him time by taking some of his work off his hands.
But don’t write messages like: “Hi VIP, I’ll do anything you want. Just tell me something.” That’s annoying, you have to think.
You should suggest concretely what you will do, how long it will take and what results he can expect as a result. Bake the warm biscuits, so to speak, and put them right in front of the VIP. It’s hard to say no in this situation.
4. Market the VIP
Most VIPs are entrepreneurs and have a product, service, company, book or message they would like to share with the public.
If you help the VIP get more attention, they will be happy to give you their time. After all, it’s not about you and what you want, you’re investing work and time to make his brand and business better known.
Ways to market the VIP: Make rankings and feature him there, interview the person, make videos and feature him in a good light or share his news.
You will find that many VIPs are happy to spend time with you if you help them grow their platform and reach.
5. Speak at events
Admittedly, depending on the event, this strategy requires you to have a little expert status yourself or at least some references already.
But after your first presentation, others will quickly follow. Even if you give free talks, you automatically get VIP status yourself. The person who stands on stage and speaks to the masses exudes a certain authority.
After your talk, several things usually happen: either you will be approached by VIPs yourself or you can very easily approach them afterwards and talk to them. After all, you are no longer a nobody, but the one who has just entertained the whole room. | https://medium.com/@ttaylorshaw/with-5-unusual-strategies-to-a-powerful-network-6fe4c96974bf | ['Taylor Shaw'] | 2020-12-21 09:25:28.501000+00:00 | ['Management', 'Networking', 'Sales', 'Business', 'Selling'] |
Using Storybook as a Visual Testing Platform | I’ve always had visual testing on my to do list, until a few weeks ago when I finally decided to mark it as done.
In this article, I’m going to share my experience working with this strategy of testing (which does not replace the others), and the integration with my current development tool: Storybook.
In case you don’t know what Storybook is, this is the definition they provide on the official website:
Storybook is an open source tool for developing UI components in isolation for React, Vue, and Angular. It makes building stunning UIs organized and efficient.
Storybook Demo
Regarding visual testing, it’s a testing approach that consists of taking real pictures, and then comparing them with the previous version. This comparison is made by comparing both pictures and checking if the pixels match.
In case you already understand the concept of Snapshot testing; this is the same. The difference is that you compare a picture, and not some resulting code. | https://medium.com/better-programming/using-storybook-as-a-powerful-visual-testing-platform-3b71db953b4b | ['Ema Suriano'] | 2020-03-24 20:27:40.915000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Storybook', 'React', 'Visual Testing', 'Programming'] |
Lost in Thoughts — Contemplating on Creation | 🌃 Stare at the sky and gaze at the countless stars. “So look again: can you see any cracks?” Traverse the oceans and walk the plains “so walk in its paths and eat of His provision — and to Him is the resurrection.” Contemplate on the magnificent clash of night and day, the alternation of the heavenly bodies and the changing of time and age.
This article will be about contemplation on creation, and about rekindling the passion for discovery and exploration.
The earth is tempting and beautiful; with some experiences to give but…Paradise is where adventures live.
In the name of the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful Allah
Praise be to Allah, we praise Him, seek His aid, seek His forgiveness, believe in Him and rely upon Him.
الْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ الَّذِي خَلَقَ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضَ وَجَعَلَ الظُّلُمَاتِ وَالنُّورَ ۖ ثُمَّ الَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا بِرَبِّهِمْ يَعْدِلُونَ
Praise be to Allah , who created the heavens and the earth and made the darknesses and the light. Then those who disbelieve equate [meaning others] with their Lord. [6:1]
الْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ فَاطِرِ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ جَاعِلِ الْمَلَائِكَةِ رُسُلًا أُولِي أَجْنِحَةٍ مَّثْنَىٰ وَثُلَاثَ وَرُبَاعَ ۚ
Praise be to Allah , Creator of the heavens and the earth, [who] made the angels messengers having wings, in twos and in threes, and in fours [35:1]
الَّذِي جَعَلَ فِي السَّمَاءِ بُرُوجًا وَجَعَلَ فِيهَا سِرَاجًا وَقَمَرًا مُّنِيرًا
[Praise be to Allah] who has placed in the sky constellations and placed therein a lamp and luminous moon.[25:61]
الَّذِي جَعَلَ لَكُمُ الْأَرْضَ مَهْدًا وَسَلَكَ لَكُمْ فِيهَا سُبُلًا وَأَنزَلَ مِنَ السَّمَاءِ مَاءً فَأَخْرَجْنَا بِهِ أَزْوَاجًا مِّن نَّبَاتٍ شَتَّىٰ * كُلُوا وَارْعَوْا أَنْعَامَكُمْ ۗ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَآيَاتٍ لِّأُولِي النُّهَىٰ
[Praise be to Allah] who has made for you the earth as a bed and inserted therein for you roadways and sent down from the sky, water so (Allah ta’Ala) brought out thereby categories of various plants. Eat and pasture your livestock. Indeed, in that are signs for those of intelligence. [20:53–54]
I remind myself and you to have taqwa (caution) of Allah, and to hasten to Him.
Allah says:
فَفِرُّوا إِلَى اللَّهِ
So flee to Allah . [51:50]
فَاسْعَوْا إِلَىٰ ذِكْرِ اللَّهِ
So rush to the remembrance of Allah [62:9]
فَاتَّقُوا اللَّهَ مَا اسْتَطَعْتُمْ وَاسْمَعُوا وَأَطِيعُوا وَأَنفِقُوا خَيْرًا لِّأَنفُسِكُمْ
So be cautious of Allah as much as you are able and listen and obey and spend; it is better for your selves. [64:16]
Dear brothers and sisters,
Indeed the earth has been made sweet, and green, its plains are vast, and its ravines deep, and it provides ample space for exploration and discovery, for contemplation and realization, for thinking about Allah’s greatness, and His power and might and His beautiful names and high attributes.
اللَّهُ لَا إِلَٰهَ إِلَّا هُوَ ۖ لَهُ الْأَسْمَاءُ الْحُسْنَىٰ
Allah -there is no god except He. To Him belong The Most Beautiful Names. [20:8]
وَفِي الْأَرْضِ آيَاتٌ لِّلْمُوقِنِينَ * وَفِي أَنفُسِكُمْ ۚ أَفَلَا تُبْصِرُونَ
And in the earth are signs for the certain. And in yourselves. Then will you not see? [51:20–21]
Discovering the earth is a beautiful, lawful and pure entertainment. In the process you get to have adventures that last, memories that remain and abiding bonds between family and friends. It is a way of getting closer to your Lord, having fun, enjoying life, and experiencing a blessed joy and amazement.
It is time we rekindled the spirit of adventure within us, travel, discover and experience the earth, and walk its paths.
هُوَ الَّذِي جَعَلَ لَكُمُ الْأَرْضَ ذَلُولًا فَامْشُوا فِي مَنَاكِبِهَا وَكُلُوا مِن رِّزْقِهِ ۖ وَإِلَيْهِ النُّشُورُ
“It is He who made the earth tame for you — so walk in its paths and eat of His provision — and to Him is the resurrection.” (Surah Mulk, 67:15)
The word translated “paths” has different interpretations, including borders, paths, shoulders, etc.
Discover new things and untrodden lands.
وَأَوْرَثَكُمْ أَرْضَهُمْ وَدِيَارَهُمْ وَأَمْوَالَهُمْ وَأَرْضًا لَّمْ تَطَئُوهَا ۚ وَكَانَ اللَّهُ عَلَىٰ كُلِّ شَيْءٍ قَدِيرًا
And He caused you to inherit their land and their homes and their properties and a land which you have not trodden. And ever is Allah , over all things, competent. (Al Ahzab, 33:27)
وَاللَّهُ جَعَلَ لَكُمُ الْأَرْضَ بِسَاطًا * لِّتَسْلُكُوا مِنْهَا سُبُلًا فِجَاجًا
And Allah has made the earth for you as an expanse (a rug),
That you may travel along thereof by ways, passes. (Nuh, 71:19–20)
Look at the sky decked with a countless stars, and be lost in its wonders and signs.
إِنَّا زَيَّنَّا السَّمَاءَ الدُّنْيَا بِزِينَةٍ الْكَوَاكِبِ
Indeed, We have adorned the nearest sky with an adornment of stars. (As-Saffat, 37:6)
Experience the sweet breeze, the lush greenery, the refreshing aroma of flowers and spring, and the varying colors.
وَمَا ذَرَأَ لَكُمْ فِي الْأَرْضِ مُخْتَلِفًا أَلْوَانُهُ ۗ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَآيَةً لِّقَوْمٍ يَذَّكَّرُونَ
And whatever He created for you on the earth of varying colors. Indeed in that is a sign for a people who remember. (An Nahl, 16:13)
The poet said:
I gazed — and gazed — but little thought
What wealth the show (meaning of Daffodils) to me had brought
[William Woodsworth, poem on Daffodils]
Explore the rivers and seas, feel the cool breeze, and enjoy the ride in ferries and ships.
وَتَرَى الْفُلْكَ مَوَاخِرَ فِيهِ وَلِتَبْتَغُوا مِن فَضْلِهِ وَلَعَلَّكُمْ تَشْكُرُونَ
And you see the ships plowing through it, and that you may seek of His bounty; and perhaps you will be grateful.(An Nahl, 16:14)
وَأَنْهَارًا وَسُبُلًا لَّعَلَّكُمْ تَهْتَدُونَ
And rivers and roads, that you may be guided. (Al Nahl, 16:15)
The poet said:
If you could spend your night at Versailles
And I were to be your travel guide If you could roam the earth on private flights
To see California days and New York nights Drag your finger lazily across the water on a venetian boat
Or spend a Jordanian summer shepherding with a staff and goat, If Australia is where you play your water sports
And the safari [memories in your mind abodes] And you stand on the mountain of light every single year
And let Mecca’s dozens of athans ring your ears And the goose-bumps never fail nor hardly stop
When it seems like God’s praise is coming from the very mountain tops If you were someone considered well-travelled
And all of the earth’s mysteries unraveled And you had your lion’s share of pleasure, fun and bliss
Know that a single square foot of jannah is better than all of this The earth is tempting and beautiful
with some experiences to give but…
Jannah is where adventures live.
May Allah bless you and me with the Honored Qur’an. And benefit us from its verses and the wise reminder. This much I say and I seek Allah’s forgiveness for me and you and the rest of the Muslims. Seek Allah’s forgiveness. Truly He is the Extremely Forgiving, the Always Merciful. | https://medium.com/quran/lost-in-thoughts-contemplating-on-creation-30d445c916e2 | ['Samet Faruque'] | 2021-09-10 06:26:07.256000+00:00 | ['Creation', 'Quran', 'Thoughts', 'Muslim', 'Islam'] |
A Defense of Human Creativity in an AI-Crazed World | One could be forgiven for thinking that machines are creative. Numerous artificial intelligence projects appear to demonstrate that machines are capable of creating intricate works of art that rival those created by their inferior human creators. Just recently, IBM Watson created a movie trailer for the horror film Morgan (IBM). Google’s DeepDream AI fascinated the world with its eerie superimpositions of eyeballs, cats, birds, and iguanas onto everyday images in a seemingly creative way. The image above was transformed with this very net. Neural nets can even restore color to black and white images that the network has never seen before in a similar manner to a child with a coloring book — an example of this is below.
A black and white photo colorized by a neural net
Each of these demonstrations of the creative prowess of AI relies on new advances in the field of machine learning, which allows computer programs to compute things in a manner similar to the human brain. The key, however, to machines’ lack of true creativity lies in the word compute. Each example above utilizes a carefully constrained algorithm to achieve a very specific end goal. At its core, these algorithms are simply manipulating symbols then concatenating the results in a meaningful way. As John Searle argued in Minds, Brains, and Programs, this does not represent understanding. True machine creativity cannot be derived from a system that solely takes input, performs mathematical functions, and presents an output to the eager programmer that created it. As long as this is the case, the threat of machines completely displacing the human labor force is nonexistent.
This is not to say that machine intelligence won’t surpass, or hasn’t already surpassed, the intellectual power of the brain. Many try and make a direct comparison between human computational power or storage capacity and that of computers. This is not necessarily a useful comparison, but for the time being we can utilize it to demonstrate the compartmentalized superiority of machines. Storage accuracy and retention is one area in which computers have unequivocally bested humans. Any person thrust through the educational system is familiar with the struggle of attempting to memorize passages from a textbook or cram equations the night before a test. Recall of information is imperfect in human brains, and it takes a while until information is cemented in the brain securely enough to survive more than a few minutes of distraction. To the envy of these frustrated students, give the same task to a computer and it will happily retain anything you tell it to keep. Computers are simply better with data.
Parallel computation is another area in which computers have the advantage. Human brains do “process” things in a parallel manner, but clearly it’s difficult to have more than one train of thought at a time. Graphics processors, on the other hand, utilize hundreds or thousands of discreet processing units to do everything from sequencing the genome of primates to mining cryptocurrency. This amazing video by Nvidia provides a comparison between CPUs and GPUs — picture your brain as the single-threaded CPU:
The speed of the brain’s computation is also orders orders of magnitude slower than that of its electronic counterparts. Individual synaptic connections happen at most a few thousand times a second, whereas the transistors in your smartphone can switch on and off billions of times a second. Even the best mathematician cannot rival the sheer computational speed of a silicon-based system.
Computers have a distinct spec-advantage on paper, and this advantage does carry in some capacity to the labor market. Even before the era of computers machines rapidly displaced human workers. Luddite rebellions against the mechanization of the textile industry were perhaps some of the first examples of human resistance to machines. Now consider the modern labor market. CGP Grey summarizes this quite well in his video Humans Need Not Apply:
Grey shows how general-purpose robots are the current threat to humans seeking jobs, as it would be a slow process to replace every single manufacturing job with specialized machines.
Towards the end of his video, Grey begins to discuss the implications of artificial intelligence for creative work. He states how creativity is a supposed safe-haven that many run to in defense of the uniqueness of human labor. This particular argument is a form of a theory first purported by Keynes in Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. Keynes essentially says that by the year 2030 the market economy will satisfy all of humanity’s material desires, allowing the government and people to place an increased emphasis on the arts and improvement of the human condition. This will eventually result in an intellectual paradise where individuals can pursue knowledge and beauty. Grey characterizes one who performs this sort of artistic work as a “special creative snowflake.“ He goes on to describe how such a society inherently wouldn’t work, as many artists seek fame and recognition. This reliance on “popularity” can’t be sustainable in a society where everyone is a special creative snowflake. Grey also shows how robots can now perform many of these “creative” tasks, such as composing music, painting, or writing.
Everything discussed so far paints a grim picture for human labor in its current form. There is no place to run, the robots are coming. In large part, they are. There’s little debate that the labor landscape will be fundamentally reshaped in the coming years, and I’m not refuting this point. It’s the implications of this reshaping that many incorrectly characterize. A natural conclusion to make from the computational and physical superiority of machines is that humanity is doomed, and we will all be replaced by robots sooner rather than later. This sense of desperation and doom, to varying degrees, appears to be standard across much of the literature on this subject. This is primarily driven by the assumption that machines will be able to do everything that humans can do, and this is the key assumption leading much of the public astray.
Clearly humans are different than computers in their current incarnation. No computer has yet achieved consciousness, and, according to Searle, no computer of the current form will. Searle primarily utilizes his “Chinese room” thought experiment to argue this point. In it, he describes a scenario where an individual, having no knowledge of Chinese, sits in a room with a rule book. Other individuals outside feed Chinese characters to the person in the room. The person in the room takes the input, finds the proper output for that character or sequence of characters, and feeds the output to the people waiting outside. To them, it appears as if the machine has a true knowledge of Chinese. As we know, however, this is not the case. The same principle can be extended to all current forms of artificial intelligence; they may manipulate symbols in a clever way, but they are not conscious.
Source: wikicommons
Even consider the case where a machine truly is conscious: the “dancing qualia” thought experiment. Proposed by David Chalmers, this scenario is designed to illustrate that machine consciousness is indeed possible. The thought experiment is as follows: A piece of your brain has been removed, but it is still externally connected to your brain via some wires such that you notice no interruptions or anything out of the ordinary at all. Also connected to these same wires is a computer chip. This portion of your brain is specifically responsible for giving you the conscious experience of seeing that an object is red, and the computer chip is designed to replicate this phenomenon. A researcher controls a toggle that allows him/her to switch between the chip or your actual brain being connected. The researcher places a red apple in front of you and flips the switch back and forth. You experience no interruption in your perception of the apple. Even if the computer chip experiences red in a different way, the conscious experience of red is still the same for both you and your silicon counterpart. Therefore, Chalmers concludes, there is no functional difference between this portion of your brain and the computer chip, even if the chip may just be manipulating symbols to represent consciousness.
If such a conscious integrated circuit were possible it would still lack the foundations for true creative and spontaneous thought. Human brains have the remarkable ability to generate ideas in a true creative fashion which this conscious IC does not. In his TED talk, neuroscientist Henning Beck describes the remarkable characteristics of the brain that allow us to spontaneously generate thought:
As Beck shows, brains are imperfect, nondeterministic , and partially analog. These characteristics allow us to represent things as concepts rather than just pure data. When we think about some object we’re not recalling the actual object itself, but rather a conceptual idea of what the object is. This simple trait allows the brain to be incredibly adaptive, as it can observe completely new stimuli and utilize general conceptual understanding to immediately determine what these stimuli represent. Ideas are simply an association of concepts, linked in a new way by the synchronized firing of bunches of neurons.
Consider something as simple as numbers. Computers can easily represent numbers as a sequence of binary states, whereas the brain thinks about distinct numbers as concepts. Researchers tested this by showing subjects the idea of a number (let’s say three) using dots. Even if the presentation of this number varied, such as three dots on one page or three sequential dots on different pages, the same group of neurons responsible for the idea of “three” fired each time. This is why humans have such a hard time estimating large quantities or conceptualizing large numbers. We utilize the idea of “three” numerous times a day, so we have a well-defined idea of what it is. Other familiar numbers such as two or four feel completely distinct from three. The numbers 61,967,278 and 89,595,540, however, feel about the same to the human brain. Even though the difference between them is immense, we just conceptualize them as “large.” To a computer, 31,967,278 is just as distinct to 89,595,540 as three is to four.
It’s easy to say, then, that we should just make computers that mimic this conceptual behavior. Despite the efforts of researchers and theorists, this is intrinsically not the nature of how computers operate. In Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing uses the analogy of an onion to discuss human and machine consciousness. Turing argued that if one were to strip away, layer by layer, the inner-workings of a brain or machine and at one layer one encountered consciousness then this brain or machine actually is conscious. If at no point did this curious individual encounter consciousness then the item in question is really a machine.
Individual neurons are not conscious, but at some point consciousness emerges. With sufficient research, scientists could visualize the localized firing of bunches of neurons and analyze how these groups interact to form the conceptual understanding that underlies consciousness. Peel away the outer layer of a computer and there’s RAM, a CPU, a graphics processor, a crystal, and peripherals. Go further into the CPU and there’s cache, ALUs, timers, and controllers. Keep going, and there’s sequential logic. Peel another layer, and there’s logic gates. Delve into the logic gates and you find MOSFETs. Go further and you’re looking at individual atoms. The one thing you don’t find? Consciousness.
Humanity’s safe-haven in the coming years will be exactly that — consciousness. Spontaneous thought, creative thinking, and a desire to challenge the world around us. As long as humans exist there will always be a need to innovate, to solve problems through brilliant ideas. Rather than some society in which all individuals will be allowed to carry out their days creating works of art, the machine revolution will instead lead to a society in which anyone can make a living by dreaming and providing creative input to projects of all kinds. The currency of the future will be thought. | https://alexwulff.medium.com/a-defense-of-humanity-in-an-ai-crazed-world-70bc101d1967 | ['Alex Wulff'] | 2020-01-19 23:27:57.533000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Tech', 'Machine Learning'] |
The day that we have all been waiting for: the launch of the improved DEX! | The day that we have all been waiting for: the launch of the improved DEX! Narwhalswap Jun 17·4 min read
…
Dear Sailors and Bankers,
Narwhalswap and The Grand Banks are finally linked together through The Best Rate Swap!
Who are we and what is Narwhalswap?
In case you just joined us or never heard it before, we are Narwhalswap Team. We have been more active on The Grand Banks than on our DEX in recent times, because our mighty Narwhal deserved some rest for its hard work on BSC since the 15th of September 2020!
Therefore we decided to launch The Grand Banks, a result of our evolution, but it was never meant to be a stand-alone platform. We made the decision to launch it like a separate brand to attract a new type of investor, one that just wants simple yield farming. Because of the intricacies of Narwhalswap we didn’t want to scare away new investors by immediately bombarding them with so many great options to accumulate wealth. That being said, now is the time to integrate both platforms and communities more.
Let’s unleash the Narwhal!
The Best Rate Swap
The Best Rate Swap for a good reason
A. What is it!?
“Everyone deserve to swap at the best price without checking manually every DEX”
We follow what our pirate masters teach us and decided to launch a new version of our AMM: The Best Rate Swap.
The Best Rate Swap is a DEX Aggregator, which means that every time you swap two tokens, we will check that you pay the best price with the least impact.
The times you had to check if there is enough liquidity available or manually add your favorite tokens to 100000 DEX’s is over. Add it once, swap it twice or more…always for the best price!
B. The smallest fee of ALL the market
Every transaction you make will cost you a tiny 0.1% in fees. These fees will not go to the treasure chest of the team, but will be used to buy back and burn $NAR tokens.
But just between us, 0.1 % is still pretty expensive…and everyone deserves to save as much money as possible! That’s why we decided to do it just a bit different. Keep reading, you’ll be happily surprised.
C. The launch of the first FREE DEX in the WHOLE market!
Yes you read it well. We decided to add this functionality, to thank you for your support since the beginning: 0.0000000000000% fees for your swap!
“Rrrrr how can I use this function matey?”, you ask? Simple, by holding at least 1000 $NAR tokens in your wallet.
**Caution: Only $NAR held in your wallet are counted**
keep reading!
As long as you will hodl that amount every swap will be free for EVERY token you want. In that case it does mean, that there will not be any buyback and burn of $NAR tokens.
To make it simple, here are two examples of how it would work with holding more and less than 1000 $NAR tokens in your wallet.
Y̲o̲u̲ ̲w̲a̲n̲t̲ ̲t̲o̲ ̲ ̲b̲u̲y̲ ̲$̲G̲R̲A̲N̲D̲ ̲w̲i̲t̲h̲ ̲$̲C̲A̲K̲E̲ ̲a̲n̲d̲:
Wallet <1000 $NAR
enjoy the best rate
fees: 0.1 %
buy back and burn of $NAR
Wallet >1000 $NAR
enjoy the best rate
no fees
no buy back and burn of $NAR
Got it? Good :)
It’s $NAR rebranding time !
A new look
Like we said earlier, it’s time to unleash the Narwhal! After taking a long rest, it seems our mighty spirit animal is back with a brand new User Interface!
Looking good Narwhal!
Almost 50% of $NAR supply destroyed
More than ever the $NAR token is an utility token and a deflationary one! With a total supply of 21,000,000 almost 9,900,000 $NAR has been burned! Be sure to save your tokens while it’s still possible.
The Final Link with The Grand Banks, what’s next?
Many users are excited about the launch of $NAR pools on The Grand Banks, but because of our liquidity, it was not feasible. Don’t worry we didn’t forget you. When our new DEX attracts enough liquidity, you will see them appear.
For $GRAND holders, you will soon discover the power of governance you will have on the ecosystem! Be patient fellow Bankers, we’re on it…
We think that’s all.. No wait, one more thing. We told you, there is always more!
A strange book was discovered…
Recently while the members of the crew were searching for new places to explore after the Blizzard, HyperSwap, Beefy and ApeSwap Lands they discovered a strange book.
Written by K. Ross Chain, a legendary pirate famous for founding the first decentralized banks, it describes the process to jump from our current blockchain world to visit others.
After the stupefaction of realizing that we were not alone in the universe, we carefully read it and decided to try it…Next couple of weeks are going to be intense.
Narwhalswap Team — | https://medium.com/@narwhalswap/the-day-that-we-have-all-been-waiting-for-the-launch-of-the-improved-dex-3d50d37d98a8 | [] | 2021-06-17 12:11:21.616000+00:00 | ['Binance Smart Chain', 'Binance', 'Decentralized Exchange', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Narwhalswap'] |
Calculate Number of Working Days Till Current Time in SQL | Let’s say we have a datetime column and want to calculate the number of working days till the current time.
At first spot it seems like an easy thing, as SQL has the DateDiff function. However, it does not exclude the weekends:
The timezone issue and fraction of days
For better monitoring I prefer to see the fraction of days as well. So let’s calculate it to hour precision.
However, there is a big possibility of wrong calculation that we haven’t aligned the timezones. It could cause issues when the TimeStamp datetimes were stored in different timezone than the SQL Server’s timezone — or even the TimeStamp values have several unkown different timezones. The best and easier solution is to use everywhere one timezone — the UTC. This means we need to start storing the TimeStamp values in UTC when we update the table.
If this is all set, we can safely use GETUTCDATE() to getting current date and time:
This is better (and safer) but it still doesn’t exclude the weekends.
Exclude the weekends
Let’s calculate number of weekends between the two dates and subtract from the number of working days:
Remove leading weekend and add trailing working day
To get the precise working day, we need to subtract he first or last day fractions if those are Saturday or Sunday.
If the TimeStamp is on Sunday, the hours between the next midnight and the TimeStamp have to be subtracted:
DATEADD(d,1,DATEDIFF(d,0,TimeStamp)) as nextmidnight, DATEDIFF(HOUR, TimeStamp, DATEADD(d,1,DATEDIFF(d,0,TimeStamp))) as minusHoursIfSunday
If the current time is on Saturday, the hours between previous midnight and the current time have to be subtracted:
DATEADD(d,0,DATEDIFF(d,0,GETUTCDATE())) as prevmidnight, DATEDIFF(HOUR, DATEADD(d,0,DATEDIFF(d,0,GETUTCDATE())), GETUTCDATE()) as minusHoursIfSaturday
Adding these cases to the WorkingDays compute:
Final query
Let’s remove all calculation columns and see the cleared up final query for calculation working days with fractions: | https://otapi.medium.com/calculate-number-of-working-days-till-current-time-in-sql-ee6e25d09b1e | ['Barnabás Nagy'] | 2020-06-13 10:22:56.892000+00:00 | ['Datetime', 'Sql'] |
Productivity Culture Has an Empathy Problem | Productivity Culture Has an Empathy Problem
Consider who has the luxury of delegating
Photo: JGI/Jamie Grill/Getty Images
A few months ago, the day before I was supposed to interview a productivity expert for a story, I realized he had never confirmed the time. I fired off an email and then spent a couple stressful hours waiting for him to reply, scrambling to move around my calendar and reschedule other interviews so I could stay flexible for this one.
The next day, minutes before our interview, he finally emailed me back, telling me he could do it now, if I had time. I scrambled to move things around to accommodate him.
After we hung up, I remembered a piece of advice I’d read in this expert’s book: If you want to get stuff done, you have to stop bothering yourself with mundane tasks, like constantly checking email — or, apparently, giving a writer the courtesy of confirming an interview.
It seemed like reasonable advice when I read it. But now, on the receiving end of it, I was less on board. Because my interviewee hadn’t taken a minute to confirm a time, my own productivity suffered.
It also occurred to me, however, that I have done the exact same thing to other people. I always feel a little guilty when someone emails me to “circle back” about something I should have responded to already. Sure, I’m busy, but so are they. So is just about everyone.
We all have conflicting priorities, and we’re probably all guilty of prioritizing our own productivity at the expense of someone else’s. If you didn’t, you’d never finish anything. As the author Greg McKeown argues in his book Essentialism, by making more time for what’s “essential” in your life, you’re necessarily going to disappoint other people.
The advice is valid. But productivity culture is so fixated on the self — on your own focus, your own output, your own goals — that it rarely acknowledges how to navigate those efforts within any sort of community.
It assumes that we all live in a world where every task is easily delegatable. It glosses over the fact that most of the time, someone else is paying the price for your productivity — and that the people who do tend to be the most marginalized.
“Whenever ‘delegate stuff you don’t want to do’ comes up, no one even bothers to think about who the work would be delegated to,” says Wired editor Alan Henry, also a former editor at Lifehacker and the New York Times’ Smarter Living section. “Unless you actively try to reject some of the social conditioning that comes with gender, race, and sexuality, it’s all too easy to just step aside and let the shit roll downhill, as it were.”
In a recent New York Times piece, Henry wrote that his experience as a productivity journalist and a person of color forced him to “reckon with the notion that so much popular productivity advice… is accessible only to people who have the option to use it in the first place.”
“These tips and techniques assume an equal workplace, where everyone is treated fairly and equally and based solely on the merit of their work,” he tells me. “Unfortunately, we all know that in the real world that’s not how most offices operate.”
Indeed, in the real world, the same productivity strategies can play out dramatically differently, depending on who’s using them. “When you block off a whole day on your calendar as ‘deep work time, no meetings please,’ a white male worker, for example, may be seen as smart and productive, because it’s more likely that in majority white and male workplaces, he’ll be judged on his work,” Henry explains. “His black female colleague, however, comes with the social baggage of being seen as an ‘angry black woman’ or a ‘sassy black woman,’ so the exact same technique may be interpreted as laziness, or even worse, hostility, and an unwillingness to be a ‘team player.’”
And productivity culture, with its unwavering focus on the self, is set up to perpetuate a willful blindness to the inequities it creates. Will Storr, a journalist and author of the book Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us, argues that our obsession with productivity and self-improvement has created a culture of perfectionism that’s often odds with empathy and compassion — toward both others and ourselves.
“There’s so much out there that makes us feel not good enough,” Storr says. To compensate, “we’re driven to this toxic, perfectionist state of mind,” blocking out our awareness of others’ needs in the pursuit of working better, smarter, faster.
Of course, the end goal of so much productivity advice isn’t to get to a place where you can do less, but to have the freedom to do the kind of work that truly fulfills you. But the single-minded focus on reducing the time spent on shallow, menial tasks devalues not only that work but also the people who end up picking it up. “Productivity culture lionizes the flexibility of gig work and creative work,” Henry says, “claiming the ‘housework’ can go to someone you can pay a few bucks to do on your behalf so you’re free to do the big-brain stuff that you’re ‘born to do.’”
In workplaces, this type of “office housework” often falls on women and people of color, which makes it harder for those groups to make the case for a promotion or raise — the workers with the privilege to “get stuff done” have more leverage when it comes to negotiating a salary increase, for instance. When we talk about the systematic barriers that reinforce the wage gap, productivity culture may be a prime example.
This isn’t to say we shouldn’t all strive to do more of the work we feel we’re meant to do. But we should think about our productivity more inclusively: Assuming that the point of optimizing your life is to be happier and more fulfilled, productivity won’t help you get there as much as human connection will.
But sometimes: Just do the thing. Answer the email. Confirm the appointment. Show up on time.
That’s empathetic productivity.
That approach will make your workplace more productive, and it will make you more effective at your job. Part of being productive should be understanding the role we play in a larger system — and recognizing that we’re not the only ones doing the work truly essential to our lives. | https://forge.medium.com/productivity-culture-has-an-empathy-problem-c7636ce3080c | ['Kristin Wong'] | 2020-06-04 05:31:01.511000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Work', 'Empathy', 'Productivity', 'Self'] |
How to write explicit code? — Onload Code | In this article, we are talking about the concepts and examples about the topic of how to write explicit code
How to write explicit code?
You want to know what is explicit code to become an explicit programmer, don’t you? That is why you are reading this article. Unfortunately, you can not find the exact definition for your question anywhere because it is difficult for us to say for sure that explicit code is like this. In simple words, we can say this:
“Clear code is code that is easy to understand, easy to change, and performs fast.”
OK. Let’s go deep down into this statement.
You are not the only one who reads the code you write. Your colleagues, your tech lead, your project manager, or a developer who will handle the project after you may read your code many times. So when you or they read the code, it should be easy to read and understand. That means if someone takes less time to read and understand its logic and functionality, then it will be an easy-to-understand code. Moreover, an easy-to-understand code is less prone to guesswork and misunderstandings. Explicit code is easy to understand in all aspects.
It is easy to understand:
The flow of execution of the whole program
The way various objects cooperate with each other
The role and responsibility of each and every class.
What each function or method does
The purpose of each variable and expression
1. Well-named classes, methods, and variables comply with proper naming conventions and meaningfulness.
boolean variables’ names with is_, has_, or should_ prefix, e.g., $is_valid=FALSE;
Numeric variables with names that denote it is a numeric variable, e.g., $total_comments=50;
List variable names with plural names for connoting many items, e.g., $new_names=array(….);
Method names that describe its functionality, e.g.,format_comments()
2. Comments for describing the purpose of each variable, method, and class
3. Properly structured code with proper indentation
4. Compliance with coding standards and conventions
5. Consistency in coding style
For example,
a. the way you are placing braces in the code
b. consistent naming
6. Well encapsulated code
Wrapping variables and methods together as one unit.
7. Well organized code
Data and functionalities in a class fit together. You can not find extraneous dependencies among classes. So well-organized code does not seem like “spaghetti”.
8. Separation of concerns
In simple words, a code is divided into multiple chunks that are designed to perform one specific function.
9. Simplicity:
In simple words, not writing ten lines of code for something that can be done in 5 lines of code.
10. Straightforwardness
Straightforwardly doing a task without being clever
11. Modularity:
The entire source code is divided into multiple independent functional reusable units.
12. Elegance
In other words, less complexity in the code. If your code is given to another developer to work on and he or she can continue the work without much effort, then your code will most probably be an elegant one.
13. Minimum redundancy
This means a code with fewer unnecessary codes like dead codes.
14. Layers that do not mix with each other
For example, UI does not mix with business logic.
15. Properly structured README file
Briefly describing the overview of the code, its purpose, the approach, metrics involved, naming conventions, libraries, and packages that are used in the code, software license, software version, and author details.
As stated above, another attribute of explicit code is that it can be easily changed. This means your code should be easy to extend, easy to refactor, and easy to fix bugs. If the developer who makes the changes, can thoroughly understand the code and he or she is confident that the changes will not break the functionality of the rest of the code, then this can be easily achieved. An easy-to-change code has the following properties:
● Always use small classes and methods.
● Each class and method complies with the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP).
● Classes with concise public APIs.
● Classes and methods work properly as expected.
● Easily testable code
● Easy-to-understand and easy-to-change test cases
The last attribute of explicit code is its fast (efficient) performance. That means explicit code does not do useless costly operations. For example, a code that executes costly operations several times or triggers N+1 database queries is not a clear one.
If you write explicit code, then you are helping your colleagues and even your future self. You are making it easier for a new developer to learn your code. You are making it faster and easier for anyone to find anything that they are looking for in your code. You are minimizing the maintenance cost of your code. You are making time estimation for the new feature implementation easier. You are reducing the time that will take to find and fix bugs, implement new features, and review. You are improving the performance of the program. You are reducing the error rate. You are making working on your code less stressful and more fun for years to come. Basically, you are making life less stressful and easier for all the people involved in the project and increasing productivity.
Conclusion
We hope that this guide helped you to get an idea about what is explicit code. So what is explicit code? In simple words, if your colleagues understand your code easily and quickly, change the code in less time without breaking down the software functionality, and are happy and relaxed working on your code, then you are writing explicit code.
If you know any other tips on explicit code or any problems related to clear code, then feel free to mention them in the comment section. And also, do not forget to share this article with others to share the knowledge. Let’s end the discussion with a quote.
“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Clear programmers write code that humans can understand.” — Martin Fowler | https://medium.com/@jaya-maduka/how-to-write-explicit-code-onload-code-54fa34f38d19 | ['Maduka Jayawardana'] | 2020-12-09 14:18:39.066000+00:00 | ['Good Code', 'Clean Code', 'Explicit Code'] |
Flieger-My Buddy | “Reaching up the sky, beyond the limits”
Drones, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are a cool technology designed to ease the work of humans, in fact they do tasks which are quite difficult or sometimes impossible for us. The so-called robot-like vehicle, they are a perfect choice for the hardest of the work to be done then be it reaching the remote areas or spraying sanitizer, assistance in military bases to even being used in surgical strikes ( the URI strike where a bird shaped drone “Garuda” was used). Not only this, but they have also paved their way into homes of a hobbyist and are a biggest guide for a photographer. With a bag full of usage, drones are a perfect choice in this advancing world.
A pilot less flying vehicle, drones are operated using a Transmitter which is just like a remote control. The structure of the drone contains ESC’s, motors, Flight Controller, Frames, and a lot more stuff. The working mechanism involves the flight controller receiving signal from the Transmitter which in turn is given by the user. Drone changes its directions as Throttle (Up and Down), Pitch (Forward and Backward), Yaw (Rotation in Left and Right), Roll (Sideways moment in Left and Right).
Looking at the advantage’s drones have, we as a part of our Design Thinking and Innovation project, opted to give a try in making a drone “Flieger-My Buddy”. It all started with us looking into the issue of reaching out to people in remote areas during these unprecedented times of Covid19 and also, addressing the issue of sanitisation which is a necessity of the hour. After days of research, we came to the solution of making a Quadcopter Drone which would be quite useful for the future.
We commenced our development process by seeking more into the world of drones and doing courses on them over the internet. Also, we got in touch with some drone making experts to guide as a way far better. After getting an idea of what exactly we had to do and designing the UI diagram, we planned our execution strategy and worked towards it with full dedication. Along with this we also surveyed industry experts, potential users, friends, and family members for their valuable feedbacks on our idea and took them into great consideration. We also estimated the total cost required for our project, listed down some terms and conditions, thus working towards the documentation part of the project.
Our path to the end result was filled with challenges as this was our maiden attempt at drone development and also the rising cost of the components was a major factor of concern. Here, we are highly obliged to our university and Dr. Gaurav Singhal for providing us with some of the required components, thus helping us save money. Though there were several other challenges waiting for us on the way, we worked with an aim to finish at least a simple flying drone with a motto that “Challenges and Obstacles are a path of Life, If one can get over them, they have achieved the biggest victory”.
Now, after around 4 months, we are happy at where we stand. We have completed a simple quadcopter drone which is ready for flight.
However, our work is not complete yet. We plan to take our project further and attach a sprinkler, a carrier, camera, GPS module to it and make it a successful one in the coming months. We also plan to get it registered under the ministry of Civil Aviation and get its own Unique Identification Number (UIN). Further, we will be applying for a patent which if accepted would be quite beneficial for us. Thus, we have a long way forward with our drone and aim to make it capable for the use by the industry.
Here, it is worth mentioning that this project made us explore a new skill, something which we always wanted to put hands on. A skill which would help us in our future endeavours. After all, learning a new skill, open a bag full of great opportunities.
We pay our gratitude to Dr. Tapas Badal, Dr. Deepak Garg and CSE Bennett University for providing us with an opportunity to not only enrich our knowledge but also get an insight into how to prepare for projects at industry level.
An applause to all of us as a team for working together towards a great outcome. | https://medium.com/@creativewordspower/flieger-my-buddy-d70a6fa57a67 | ['The Power Of Poetry'] | 2020-11-15 06:55:13.046000+00:00 | ['Quadcopter Drone', 'Design Thinking', 'Quadcopter', 'Projects', 'Drones'] |
MEET MY RAHUL! | MEET MY RAHUL!
I met one Rahul today .
Big universities, access to best learning resources, guidance by the best teachers and mentors — so many people must be dreaming about such an education and yet a very small part of the world gets even the basic minimum education.
But is there any university that can teach better than life itself ?
After all, life is the greatest teacher and time is it’s strongest weapon. World is full of such examples of great people who could challenge their circumstances and rise despite coming from humble background.
When a tigress gives birth to a cub, he has to learn to fight for his survival.
Rahul was that one cub.
At the innocent age of 12, when kids ask their parents to buy them toys, Rahul was selling books to help his mother run the household.
He still managed to maintain a broad and the purest smile on his face. A smile that was contagious.
While I was everyday complaining about my job, relations, body, friends and foes, Rahul came as a breeze of fresh and cool air. My mind immediately asked me how was he so happy amidst so many adversities. Happiness is a choice, I now knew. I instantly forgot all my worries.
An hour spent with him had filled me with so much energy that was going to last with me for a very very long time, I was sure.
It was an evening well spent :)
Thanks Rahul for oozing out so much positivity, a raw and unadulterated innocence.
This world needs so much more of it.
I want to meet many more Rahul in future..
If you know someone in your vicinity, I would love to cover the story of that Rahul..
It is my way of uplifting the spirits of people around me by sharing these real life stories..
This post was originally posted on The phoenix Girl’s blog at https://thephoenixgirl86.blogspot.com/ | https://medium.com/@ag.sneha123/meet-my-rahul-756643da05f6 | ['Sneha Agrawal'] | 2019-01-20 16:29:01.801000+00:00 | ['Non Fiction', 'Life Lessons', 'Real Life Stories', 'Positivity', 'Life'] |
Whack A Meng — new Here Be Monsters mini-game made with Dart and StageXL | Hot on the heels of making my first game with Dart and StageXL at the London GameCraft 2013, I decided to strike whilst the iron’s hot and make a mini-game featuring characters from our MMORPG Here Be Monsters.
The result, is a whack-a-mole style game where the antagonist is ‘Meng the Terrible’ from the on-going Nanjing storyline in the world of Here Be Monsters.
Your task is simple, just whack him whenever you see him poke his head out of the rabbit holes!
To progress through the levels, you need to whack Meng enough times before the time runs out, and in later levels NPCs (other monsters from the world of Here Be Monsters) will pass by the rabbit holes. If you intentionally or accidentally end up whacking the NPCs they’ll no only show you their displeasure but also deduct your current score!
To show their support for your quest to vanquish the evil doers in their world, the NPCs will give you some words of encouragement at the end of each level depending on if you were able to accomplish your target.
Whilst by far not my strong suit, I have thoroughly enjoyed the asset production aspect of making this game. Whilst I’m still very much a beginner and learning plenty about Dart and StageXL, I have been pretty impressed by how productive they allow me to be in putting this game together so quickly on my own.
Links
Play the Game
Source Code | https://medium.com/theburningmonk-com/whack-a-meng-new-here-be-monsters-mini-game-made-with-dart-and-stagexl-f3d82a52dce0 | ['Yan Cui'] | 2017-07-03 20:54:45.594000+00:00 | ['Dart', 'Games', 'Here Be Monsters', 'Programming'] |
Add a Count of Ineptness | Terry H. Schwadron
Jan. 16, 2021
As if the impeachment document needed a second charge, here came the report in The Washington Post yesterday that even as Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar announced this week that the federal government would release COVID vaccines held in reserve, no such reserve existed.
That’s right. The Trump administration move to suddenly speed delivery of vaccines was based on a lie: They didn’t have any more in stock. HHS already had been shipping out what was available at the end of December, taking second doses directly off the manufacturing line.
That means that state officials who were counting on doubling the available vaccines health are confronting the fact that there’s no more in the delivery pipeline than what’s still being produced. The states had announced broader inoculation sites based on the promised delivery — adding a healthy dose of confusion to a much larger number of seniors, high-risk patients, first responders and teachers.
So, naturally, Azar blamed the states for not understanding what he had said, for not moving faster and generally for making him look like an idiot, Why did he make an announcement of sending more if he didn’t have it? Then again, Azar offered a letter to resignation to Trump yesterday — without resigning until the inauguration, using a letter that tried to distance himself from Trump without directly saying so.
It also is a setback for Joe Biden, who was busy trying to announce his renewed push campaign for 100 million doses in 100 days. He’s moving ahead towards opening federally underwritten mobile clinics putting federal employees in the field to offer injections, but the reality he faces is there is less vaccine immediately available than he had thought.
Cue the obstinance of Donald Trump in forestalling cooperation with the incoming group.
The amount supposedly held in reserve was for second-dose shots. Concern about rising numbers forced HHS to reconsider, and to announce release of the reserve. The sole saving grace here is that supply of vaccines is ramping up, and with arrival of a more aggressive Biden administration team, will continue to do so.
Nevertheless, in ites closing days, Trump’s HHS lied in a time of pandemic, and rather than calming the pandemic waters, is roiling them.
In the world I live in, that is a near-criminal offense, but certainly an impeachable one. In addition to everything else, Donald Trump should face a choice of being as the outgoing head of a government is inept or unwilling to do its job.
##
www.terryschwadron.wordpress.com | https://medium.com/@terryschwadron/add-a-count-of-ineptness-c5f4a3065838 | ['Terry Schwadron'] | 2021-01-16 12:32:29.933000+00:00 | ['Promises', 'Trump Administration', 'States', 'Vaccine', 'Coronavirus'] |
9 Ways to Deter Birds at Airports | Story written by Daniel Glover, FAA Office of Communications
Bentonville Municipal Airport has a Maverick on its team, but unlike the Maverick of “Top Gun” aviation movie fame, this one is no fan of Goose. The Maverick in Bentonville, Arkansas is actually a border collie, and his job is to get rid of the geese on and near airport grounds.
Training dogs to chase birds is just one of the creative ways that wildlife experts work to ensure safety at the nation’s airports. Their tactics range from audio, visual and chemical repellants to habitat modification, physical barriers and population management.
As the FAA’s wildlife strike database shows, plenty of animal species are attracted to the open fields and other features of the airport environment. Even alligators have been known to cause trouble on Florida runways. But the biggest threat is birds flying into the paths of airplanes, the most famous incident being the “Miracle on the Hudson.”
Shortly after takeoff in 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 struck a flock of geese and lost all engine power. Pilots Chelsey Sullenberger and Jefrey Skiles made an emergency water landing on the Hudson River and all 155 passengers were brought to safety. Photo by Greg L — originally posted to Flickr as Plane crash into Hudson River, CC BY 2.0.
Airports have learned through experience that some techniques to prevent bird hazards simply don’t work. Plastic owls are one example. The fake birds of prey might scare other bird species temporarily, but they eventually realize the plastic owls don’t pose a threat.
“They look great sitting in your office more than at the airport,” FAA wildlife biologist John Weller said.
But some deterrents are quite effective, especially when catered to the realities of each airport and changed as avian interlopers adapt. Here are nine tactics that work (to varying degrees):
Trained dogs and birds of prey. There aren’t many dogs like Maverick at U.S. airports because of the costs of maintaining and training the dog and training handlers, but they do exist. The Hawaii Department of Transportation recently invested in border collies, which were featured on the Disney+ show “It’s a Dog’s Life with Bill Farmer” this year. Trained birds of prey also are rare at U.S. airports because of the costs, but Anderson said Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport used them to chase roosting birds from a parking lot. She said the key with birds of prey is to focus on a small area with a specific target and use them consistently.
Bird effigies. Turkey vultures are large and like to soar, characteristics that make them a threat to aircraft. But they don’t like the sight (or smell) of their deceased friends. “If you hang up a real dead vulture or one that has been stuffed, every vulture will vacate the tower or wherever you’re trying to remove them from,” Weller said, noting a 2009 federal study of the practice. A National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine guidebook on addressing wildlife at general aviation airports noted that bird effigies frighten gulls and ravens, too.
Grape flavoring. “Drinking the Kool-Aid” doesn’t appeal to gulls, so it appealed to the operators of one airport trying to keep gulls out of the water that pooled after heavy rains. After staff spread grape-flavored drink mix into the pools, Weller said, one bitter taste was enough to discourage the gulls. Airports also use methyl anthranilate (grape-seed extract) as a non-lethal, budget-friendly method to deter geese and whitetail deer. It can also be safer: “Some of the chemical agents are very dangerous, and only people with licenses can use them,” FAA wildlife biologist Amy Anderson noted.
Golf tees. Weller said birds at one airport developed an affinity for perching on taxiway light posts, and their excrement inhibited the visibility of the lights. To address the problem, airport personnel glued golf tees to the light posts with the points facing upward. Suddenly the light posts were less on par (ahem) with the birds’ preferred perch.
Plastic projectiles. While paintball players are used to suffering hits during matches, that sting is enough to drive away nettlesome large birds like geese. Airports may prefer paintballs and other plastic projectiles over more toxic agents or deadly weapons. “It’s good because it’s not lethal, but it does have consequences,” Anderson said.
Remote-controlled vehicles. Some airports use remote-controlled cars and boats to flush birds. Weller worked with one team that used remote-controlled boats to corral about 200 geese during molting season and then march them out of the lake to a new location. Unmanned aircraft systems built to look like falcons are an emerging option, but they are expensive, require advanced training to operate and are limited by the Airborne Hunting Act.
Pyrotechnics and cannons. Birds are as spooked by fireworks as your dog on the Fourth of July. “That’s probably one of the most used tools,” Anderson said. “They are explosives, and they are regulated by the [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms], so you have to make sure you follow the rules.” Propane cannons work, too. But birds acclimate to both methods, especially if used at the same time every day. “I’ve seen birds perched on propane cannons,” Weller said. “You just have to mix it up to keep the birds guessing,” Anderson said of sound-driven deterrents.
Distress calls. Broadcasts of distress calls to lure birds to the source and away from air traffic are hit or miss because not all birds have distress calls. Their effectiveness also depends on the time of year, Anderson said. “You always have to have it integrated with something else.” The sounds could upset or prove annoying to nearby people who hear them more than the birds, Weller said, but distress calls have been used successfully at Dulles International Airport.
Handheld lasers. In the wrong hands, lasers are a threat to aviation safety with serious legal consequences for people who break the law. But the FAA also recognizes that lasers can help create separation between birds and aircraft. “They can be very effective if used correctly and for the right species,” Weller said. An FAA advisory governs outdoor laser operations.
Learn more about how the FAA researches and manages wildlife on or near airports. | https://medium.com/faa/9-ways-to-get-rid-of-birds-at-airports-555582625363 | ['Federal Aviation Administration'] | 2020-09-03 15:32:24.269000+00:00 | ['Birds', 'News', 'Wildlife', 'Aviation', 'Airports'] |
HomeTriangle Guides: Creating More Space Within The Same Footprint | Space is one of the biggest problems faced by people living in major Indian cities. But as they say, good things do come in small packages. So, you don’t have to fret that you have a home with small square footage because, with some help from professionals and a little bit of imagination, you can get the maximum out of the available space to get more space within the same acreage.
Check out our guide on some clever space-saving solutions using multipurpose furniture pieces, vertical storage, and more to maximize your available space.
1. Fluid Partitions
Although walls are a comfortable and recognizable architectural element that can define and divide space, they may take up your square feet. Flowing partitions, such as curtains or even screens, are a clever substitute. This is a cheap, simple, and inconsistent alternative. Lean against a wall or fixed partition. If you want light in but no field of view, you can choose translucent curtains.
Create a room in a room with a separate accordion-style folding grille to make the room stand out. They do not need to be installed and can be moved, anytime, anywhere. Just fold them up, and then put them away when you don’t need them.
2. Build-In Storage
The built-in custom storage compartment can turn a boring wall into a super functional area, reducing clutter and looking stylish in the smallest space. They are easy to use, unobtrusive, and have a great impact on storage. Endless layouts and configurations make the built-in storage space suitable for any room in the house.
3. Fold-Down Beds
Folding beds (also called Murphy or Folding Beds) are designed to fold up or put in a closet when not in use, so you can make the most of important valuable space. One such idea is to create a compact sleeping area without taking up too much space. This creates space for other activities during the day. Make sure you have a mattress specially designed to fold to fit the frame. This simplifies the folding process.
4. Vertical Storage
Vertical storage helps you make effective use of space without taking up space, especially the end-to-end and floor-to-ceiling cabinets are a clever technique to maximize vertical storage. The floor-to-ceiling apartment can be your savior in a narrow space. Choose floor-to-ceiling storage space instead of low cabinets. In the kitchen, pots and pans occupy a lot of cabinet space. Stand upright on the empty wall.
5. Storage Beds
The storage bed increases the function of the bedroom and optimizes the space under the bed for storing items that are not frequently used, such as seasonal clothes, extra bedding, and extra towels. Level and prevent dust from accumulating under the bed. Choose a bed with high-quality fixtures (such as passages and handles) to ensure long-term, trouble-free use, and maintenance.
6. Multipurpose Furniture
The storage bed increases the function of the bedroom and optimizes the space under the bed for storing infrequently used items such as seasonal clothes, extra bedding, and extra towels. Level and prevent dust from accumulating under the bed. Choose a bed with high-quality accessories (such as channels and handles) to ensure long-term, trouble-free use, and maintenance.
7. Sliding Doors
Sliding doors ensure a smooth transition from one area to another, separate open spaces or enclosed spaces. Compared with swing doors that require space to open, sliding doors work on the side. In order to create the illusion of more space, you can embed door accessories into the floor to hide the handrails.
Check out the best interior designers and interior decorators in the country only through HomeTriangle. Call 76 76 000 100 to book a service today | https://medium.com/@hometriangle/hometriangle-guides-creating-more-space-within-the-same-footprint-980696033060 | [] | 2021-07-06 05:51:46.499000+00:00 | ['Hometriangle', 'Home', 'Interior Design', 'India'] |
RULE SYNTACTICA | LA GRAMMAIRE DYNAMIQUE DE L’ANGLAIS
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Pour étudiants ou enseignants d’anglais francophones
English is a living language and as such it has a living grammar. That’s this living grammar I tried to capture in this textbook or description. It is in French, except of course the quotations and examples. The ordering party at the time of research and writing wanted it in French.
But a grammatical description of a language cannot help you with speaking the language, at times not even with reading it. Beyond the grammar, you may learn and understand you have to develop a practice of the language. Nowadays I am only working with advanced students who are engaged in advanced careers in medicine or in hi-tech, for instance, Artificial Intelligence. Up to last year, I also worked in the very specialized field of payroll and pay slip management.
The best method for “self” learning and teaching is to look for means to be in contact with oral and written English on a very regular basis and to be able to practice written and oral expression in English. Today with modern communication, the Internet, email, and the telephone, smart or not, one can have that constant contact with English, oral and written, reception and production.
That’s what I practice with the students I work with. I propose for example triads of activities based on documents available free in open source, both written (news articles and various reports) and oral (podcasts, news programs, films), and each stage of the triad (that has three stages) leads to a 1,000–1,200-word essay and a one-hour telephone conversation on tasks, topics set from the very start. | https://medium.com/@jacquescoulardeau/rule-syntactica-78cae944878 | ['Dr Jacques Coulardeau'] | 2020-12-20 20:27:31.186000+00:00 | ['Syntax', 'Grammar', 'Communication', 'Education', 'English'] |
Label images dataset in Jupyter notebook | If you are working with computer vision, then probably you have been dealing with the task of image dataset labeling. Many great utilities were created to help with this task, such as CVAT, but if you need to label several attributes quickly, CVAT functionality may be redundant. In this case, you can deal with image labeling without leaving the familiar Jupyter notebook.
We will consider the process of image labeling in a Jupyter notebook with a specific example. We will need basic knowledge of pandas DataFrames, Jupyter notebook widgets and some JavaScript magic.
As an example, we will label a dataset with images of people wearing face masks. This dataset is just a folder with images of people. In the process of labeling we will create a csv file with the first column containing the names of the images, and the second — the presence (1) or absence (0) of a face mask in each specific image.
We will need to install the Jupyter notebook widget qgrid, which adds the ability of pandas DataFrames interactive filtering and editing directly to the Jupyter notebook. To install qgrid, execute the following commands in the terminal:
pip install qgrid jupyter nbextension enable --py qgrid
Qgrid is a convenient and very fast widget. In my case, it displayed datasets with tens of thousands of records without any problems and delays, but by default it lacks the function we need, it does not know how to display images in cells. To solve this problem, we need a little bit of Javascript.
We will also need to install pandas, if you have not installed it yet:
pip install pandas
After qgrid and pandas are installed, we can create a Jupyter notebook next to the image folder and start the dataset labeling.
To get started, we will import the necessary modules for image labeling in a Jupyter notebook:
import os
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import qgrid
Next we will specify the name of the folder with images and create a DataFrame in two columns: image — the name of the image, mask — the presence or absence of a mask on the image.
fold = 'images/'
files = os.listdir(fold)
df = pd.DataFrame({'image': files,
'mask': 0
}
)
df.head()
In the next step, we will create and display a qgrid widget with certain parameters, which seem convenient for image labeling for me. You can read more about these parameters here.
qgrid_widget = qgrid.show_grid(df, show_toolbar = True, grid_options={'forceFitColumns': True, 'rowHeight': 100,
'highlightSelectedCell': True, 'maxVisibleRows': 5}, column_options = {'maxWidth': 150}) qgrid_widget
It is time for JavaScript magic. qgrid widget is based on the SlickGrid JavaScript component, which supports custom cell formatters. Let’s execute a snippet in the next cell, which will add a formatter to display images in the image column.
from IPython.display import Javascript, HTML display(Javascript("""\
window.slick_grid.setColumns(window.slick_grid.getColumns().map(x => {
if (x.id === 'image') {
x.formatter = (r, c, v, cd, dc) =>
(v = "<img src = images/" + v + "></img>");
}
return x
}));
"""))
Done! If we did everything correctly, then the images were displayed directly in the qgrid widget. Now we can quickly label the necessary attributes (in our case, only one mask attribute)
After the attributes are labeled, it is important not to forget to save our DataFrame. All changes made in qgrid widget are not saved in the original DataFrame, so firstly we need to get a copy of the DataFrame with the changes we entered, and then save it to csv file. To do this, execute the following commands:
labels_df = qgrid_widget.get_changed_df()
labels_df.to_csv(‘dataset_masks.csv’, index=False)
Congratulations! Through simple manipulations, we turned Jupyter notebook into an image labeling tool and labeled our dataset in it. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/label-images-dataset-in-jupyter-notebook-1081b185db4a | ['Rostyslav Neskorozhenyi'] | 2020-05-25 15:59:26.601000+00:00 | ['Jupyter Notebook', 'Data Science', 'Tips', 'Python', 'Labeling'] |
Brief Introduction to Regularization: Ridge, Lasso, and Elastic Net | Supervised Machine Learning is a currently used buzz word by many organizations to identify and solve business problems. There are two types of algorithms commonly used — Classification and Regression. In this article, we will focus on Regression. Regression analysis are the models which predict a continuous outcome. A few examples include predicting the housing market prices, sales of a retail store, weather prediction and many more!
What Is Regression?
Regression searches for relationships among variables.
For example, you can observe several houses of a locality and try to understand how their prices depend on the features, such as area of the house, type of utilities available, type of roof, role, city in which it is located, number of bedrooms and so on.
This is a regression problem where data related to each house represent one observation. The presumption is that the area of the house, type of utilities available, type of roof, role, city in which it is located are the independent features, while the price depends on them.
Generally, in multivariate analysis, you would like to seek out a function that maps some features or variables to others sufficiently well.
The dependent features are called the dependent variables, outputs, or responses. The independent features are called the independent variables, inputs, or predictors.
Regression problems usually have one continuous and unbounded variable . The inputs, however, are often continuous, discrete, or maybe categorical data like gender, nationality, brand, and so on.
It is a standard practice to denote the outputs with 𝑦 and inputs with 𝑥. If there are two or more independent variables, they will be represented because the vector 𝐱 = (𝑥₁, …, 𝑥ᵣ), where 𝑟 is that the number of inputs.
When Do You Need Regression?
Typically, you would like regression to answer whether and the way some phenomenon influences the other or how several variables are related. for instance , you’ll use it to work out if and to what extent the experience or gender impact salaries.
Regression is additionally useful once you want to forecast a response employing a new set of predictors. For instance, you’ll attempt to predict electricity consumption of a household for subsequent hour given the outdoor temperature, time of day, and number of residents therein household. Regression is employed in various fields: Supply chain planning, marketing then on.
First, we need to understand the basics of regression and what parameters of the equation are changed before getting playing around with various models. Simple linear regression, also known as ordinary least squares (OLS) attempts to minimize the residuals. The error, in this case, is the difference between the actual value and its predicted value.
The equation for this model is referred to as the cost function.
One common problem is the features of the data showing multi-collinearity, which is explained as predictor variables are correlated to each other and to the response variable. To picture this, let’s say we’re doing a study that looks at a response variable — patient weight, and our predictor variables would be height, sex, and diet. The problem here is that height and sex are also correlated and can inflate the standard error of their coefficients which may make them seem statistically insignificant.
The general solution to this is: reduce variance at the cost of introducing some bias. This approach is called regularization and is almost always beneficial for the predictive performance of the model. To make it sink in, let’s take a look at the following plot.
As the model complexity, which in the case of linear regression can be thought of as the number of predictors, increases, estimates’ variance also increases, but the bias decreases. The unbiased OLS would place us on the right-hand side of the picture, which is far from optimal. That’s why we regularize: to lower the variance at the cost of some bias, thus moving left on the plot, towards the optimum.
This graphic illustrates what bias and variance are. Imagine the bull’s-eye is the true population parameter that we are estimating, β, and the shots at it are the values of our estimates resulting from four different estimators — low bias and variance, high bias and variance, and the combinations thereof.
Both the bias and the variance are desired to be low, as large values result in poor predictions from the model. In fact, the model’s error can be decomposed into three parts: error resulting from a large variance, error resulting from significant bias, and the remainder — the unexplained part.
To produce a more accurate model of complex data we add a penalty term to the OLS equation. A penalty adds a bias towards certain values. These are known as L1 regularization(Lasso regression) and L2 regularization(ridge regression).
Ridge Regression
Ridge regression uses L2 regularization which adds the following penalty term to the OLS equation.
The L2 term is equal to the square of the magnitude of the coefficients. In this case, if lambda(λ) is zero then the equation is the basic OLS, but if it is greater than zero then we add a constraint to the coefficients. This constraint leads to minimized coefficients (aka shrinkage) that trend towards zerom the larger the worth of lambda. Shrinking the coefficients results in a lower variance and successively a lower error value. Therefore Ridge regression decreases the complexity of a model but doesn’t reduce the amount of variables, it rather just shrinks their effect.
Bias-Variance Trade-Off in Ridge Regression
Incorporating the regularization coefficient in the formulas for bias and variance gives us
From there you can see that as λ becomes larger, the variance decreases, and the bias increases. This poses the question: how much bias are we willing to accept in order to decrease the variance? Or: what is the optimal value for λ? There are two ways we could tackle this issue. A more traditional approach would be to settle on λ such some information criterion, e.g., AIC or BIC, is that the smallest.
Lasso Regression
Lasso regression uses the L1 penalty term and stands for Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator. The penalty applied for L2 is equal to absolutely the value of the magnitude of the coefficients:
Similar to ridge regression, a lambda value of zero spits out the essential OLS equation, but given an appropriate lambda value lasso regression can drive some coefficients to zero. The larger the worth of lambda the more features are shrunk to zero. This will eliminate some features entirely and provides us a subset of predictors that helps mitigate multi-collinearity and model complexity. Predictors not shrunk towards zero signify that they’re important and thus L1 regularization allows for feature selection (sparse selection). As a result, for top values of λ, many coefficients are exactly zeroed under lasso, which isn’t the case in ridge regression.
Elastic Net
A third commonly used model of regression is that the Elastic Net which includes penalties from both L1 and L2 regularization:
In addition to setting and selecting a lambda value elastic net also allows us to tune the alpha parameter where 𝞪 = 0 corresponds to ridge and 𝞪 = 1 to lasso. Simply put, if you connect 0 for alpha, the penalty function reduces to the L1 (ridge) term and if we set alpha to 1 we get the L2 (lasso) term. Therefore we will choose an alpha value between 0 and 1 to optimize the elastic net. Effectively this may shrink some coefficients and set some to 0 for sparse selection.
Implementation of Linear, Ridge, and Lasso on a dataset
So now let us play around Lasso and Ridge by applying both the algorithms to a housing dataset and then comparing their performance.
Loading the data.
Once we load the data, we do exploratory data analysis, clean the data and apply different pre-processing techniques.
checking for the missing values
After the running Linear Regression and Linear Regression with hyper parameter tuning on the above dataset. The code and results are :
The above output shows that the RMSE, one of the two evaluation metrics. Running basic linear regression and running regression after getting the best parameters from grid search cv and evaluation metrics.
After running both Lasso and Lasso with hyper parameter tuning on the above data set. The code and results are :
Code for lasso
Lasso Regression can also be used for feature selection because the coefficients of less important features are reduced to zero.
The above output shows that the RMSE values for the Lasso Regression model for different values of alpha on the training and test data respectively.
After the running both Ridge and Ridge with hyper parameter tuning on the above data set. The code and results are :
Ridge
The above output shows that the RMSE values for the Ridge Regression model for different values of alpha on the training and test data respectively.
Comparison of all the models
As you can see from the comparison chart above, we can see that with adding a penalty term to the OLS equation. The accuracy of the models on the complex data are better.
Elastic Net
Elastic Net first emerged as a result of critique on lasso, whose variable selection can be too dependent on data and thus unstable. The solution is to combine the penalties of ridge regression and lasso to get the best of both worlds. Elastic Net aims at minimizing the following loss function:
where α is that the mixing parameter between ridge (α = 0) and lasso (α = 1).
End Notes
To summarize, here are some salient differences between Lasso, Ridge and Elastic-net:
Lasso does a sparse selection, while Ridge doesn’t .When you have highly-correlated variables, Ridge regression shrinks the 2 coefficients towards each other.
Lasso is somewhat indifferent and usually picks one over the opposite . Elastic-net may be a compromise between the 2 that attempts to shrink and do a sparse selection simultaneously.
Ridge penalizes the larger errors quite it penalizes the smaller ones (as they’re squared within the penalty term).
Lasso penalizes them more uniformly. this might or might not be important. during a forecasting problem with a strong predictor, the predictor’s effectiveness is shrunk by the Ridge as compared to the Lasso.
You can find the whole code in my GitHub repository.
Do you have any questions about related to this post? Leave a comment and ask your question and I will do my best to answer it.
Thanks for reading! ❤ | https://levelup.gitconnected.com/brief-introduction-to-regularization-ridge-lasso-and-elastic-net-be62a7955dd | ['Sai Nikhilesh Kasturi'] | 2020-03-13 14:43:25.631000+00:00 | ['AI', 'Statistics', 'Data Science', 'Supervised Learning', 'Machine Learning'] |
UX vs Service Design: What’s The Difference? | UX vs Service Design: What’s The Difference?
Following on from a recent article I wrote about the difference between UX, UI, and Graphic Design — I wanted to explore how UX fits into Service Design.
Let’s start with some definitions:
Wireframe example by Career Foundry
What is UX design?
UX Design is the experience that a user / customer has each time they interact with a business or service provider — but having a real world example is always easier — so let’s talk in terms of something most people are familiar with: public transport.
The UX of public transport could range from checking train times on a printed timetable, to buying train tickets online, or checking the screens in the station for travel updates.
The Digital UX would include the digital parts of that journey — and the printed part would form the printed UX — unless of course the printed timetable became available online in which case the digital UX team should be made aware of it to ensure it’s user friendly and sticks to the rest of the guidelines which they have in place.
So UX is really concerned with moments or touchpoints in a user journey.
Service Blueprint example by Koo Service Design
What is Service design?
Service design is even broader than that. Think iceberg. Service Design is the whole thing and UX is really just the tip (… and User Interface Design is the frosting on the tip!).
With the public transport example, Service Design can affect all areas of the service, such as:
The design of the busses and how wide aisles are to allow easy wheelchair access;
Which locations get the most trains to meet growing demand;
How data feeds integrate with 3rd party products like Google Maps;
How people pay for their tickets — cash, card, or facial recognition?;
Or even… if busses use fossil fuels or hybrid power.
Service Design really is the whole iceberg!
Where is the line between SD and UX?
It’s often hard to grasp the scope of Service Design compared to UX Design.
Interviews, workshops and prototypes are typical outputs from both UX and SD, but here’s where their paths split:
While UX designers focus on individual (mostly digital) touchpoints, Service Designers focus on the full end-to-end experience which may include digital touchpoints — but also physical infrastructure, teams, and things that those teams do ie: processes.
Furthermore, while UX Designers mostly create things like Wireframes, Personas, and Prototypes; Service designers end up creating things like Service Blueprints, Customer Journey Maps, and Service Ecology Maps which help them plan and organise a business’s systems and resources in a human centred way.
Photo by Dietmar Becker on Unsplash
Service Design vs Good Service Design
But simply designing a service doesn’t mean it’s going to be good. It must strike a balance between meeting the needs of the users, and delivering profits for the business in such a way that is ethical and ideally, environmentally friendly.
However with that said, in the real world, ticking all of these boxes is not easy and often there are trade-offs. For example, the public transport business might invest in a specific ticket reading technology because it makes sense financially, but users lose out on a key feature they relied on in the past.
Zooming out we can see that without this ticketing solution there would have been no system — so that would’ve been bad Service Design. That’s a trade-off, and it’s like playing DJ — you have to calibrate everything as best you can to get the right mix.
Conclusion
The line between Service Design and UX Design can get blurry because of the overlap between the two disciplines. But what is most exciting about Service Design is the ability to map out problems at an organisational level, that go beyond a single product.
Being able to zoom in and zoom out, to co-create with the business and optimise systems for the increasing demand of growing populations is a shift in mindset that will stand many organisations in good stead in future. | https://uxplanet.org/ux-vs-service-design-whats-the-difference-2071fa03c947 | ['Justin Pybus'] | 2021-09-13 11:59:05.743000+00:00 | ['Service Design', 'User Experience', 'User Research', 'UX', 'Product Design'] |
545 reasons to vote for Biden/Harris and Stop Trump’s Abuse | A Minnesotans for Biden-Harris campaign sign in support of Joe Biden for President and Kamala Harris for Vice President ahead of the 2020 general election in a front yard in Hibbing, Minnesota. Photo by Tony Webster/CC
In the last debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, one of the most significant moments for me came when Biden, visibly angry and upset, talked about the 545 migrant children “ripped from their [parents’] arms and separated” at the border as per Trump administration policy.
Trump jerkily danced around moderator Kristen Welker’s question on whether he had a plan to reunite the 500+ children with their parents, claiming so-called “coyotes”and “lots of bad people” brought the children. During his disgraceful answer, you could see the frustration building in Biden. At one point he closes his eyes and bows his head, as if in prayer. The former vice president did not let Trump get away with his lies.
“These 500-plus kids came with parents,” he said, his voice raising with righteous anger. “They separated them at the border to make it a disincentive to come to begin with. ‘Be real tough. We’re really strong,’” he said with disgust.
“Coyotes didn’t bring them over. Their parents were with them. They got separated from their parents,” Biden said with emphasis. “And it makes us a laughing stock and violates every notion of who we are as a nation.”
(By the way, if these children were brought to the border by illegal means, did the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) arrest them? What did the U.S. government do if they thought there was human trafficking? Let the criminals go? The president throws out “coyotes” to distract from his policy and to play on anti-Mexican, anti-Latino biases and stereotypes.)
Later, as Trump tried to bait him about who built the cages his administration used to throw children into, Biden got even more emphatic.
“Let’s talk about what we’re talking about. What happened? Parents were ripped… Their kids were ripped from their arms and separated, and now they cannot find over 500 of the sets of those parents, and those kids are alone. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to go. It’s criminal. It’s criminal,” he said with sincere emotion.
I get emotional rewatching that moment because it encapsulates what’s at stake in this election and the vast differences between the two candidates and their parties.
The choice is between a president who has no plan to reunite children, 60 of whom were under 5 years of age when his administration separated them from their families.
Or vote for a former vice president who has pledged to immediately institute a task force to reunite these 545 children with their parents.
Just to put a bow on how stark the differences are, Trump said during the debate, “They are so well taken care of. They’re in facilities that were so clean.” His definition of “so well taken care of” is destroying families.
Trump wanted extremist policies at the border. With malice aforethought, the administration spawned the diabolical “zero tolerance” policy. Department of Justice officials, starting with then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, pushed to enact the Trump’s most sadistic measures.
Sessions insisted, “We need to take away children,” and Rosenstein chastised prosecutors who declined two cases because the migrant families’ children included infants and toddlers. “Per the A.G.’s policy, we should NOT be categorically declining immigration prosecutions of adults in family units because of the age of a child,” Rosenstein said.
Lest anyone forgets, as the Trump administration implemented its inhumane policies, Holocaust survivors wrote of their experiences of being separated from their families by the Nazis. That was the comparison.
Meanwhile, former President Barack Obama was labeled the “deporter-in-chief” by immigrant rights groups for the administration’s mass removals of immigrants who crossed the border without authorization and for prioritizing deportations of immigrants with criminal records. When asked about it at the debate, Biden did something Trump has never done. He admitted the administration was wrong.
“[W]e made a mistake made. It took too long to get it right,” he said. He promised to send a bill to Congress within his first 100 days that would provide a pathway to citizenship for 11 million hard-working immigrants, most of whom are here on expired visas.
Read the debate transcript. Biden makes many other moving and substantial points about immigrants, which you can tell by the resolve in his voice and his manner come from a passionate belief in human dignity. It’s clear Biden is fighting for the country’s promise embodied in Emma Lazarus’ poem, The New Colossus, which is mounted on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
Biden’s concern for families and children was also on display when he talked about guaranteeing affordable health care for all, raising the minimum wage and addressing in substantive ways institutional racism.
There are 545 children forcibly separated by the U.S. government from their families. Trump created a policy based on the worst of U.S. government actions — from the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II to the forced removal of Native children from their families to attend Indian residential schools to the generations of enslaved Black children ripped from their mothers’ arms and sold. Biden promises to address these great wrongs and inequities.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” as the famous quote goes.
I started writing this with my many leftwing friends in mind. When talking about Biden, they use terms like “nose holding” or “lesser of two evils.” I disagree greatly. Joe Biden is not evil. I have no qualms about voting FOR him and not just AGAINST Trump. There are 545 children without their families, and if you care one iota about them, you can proudly vote for a man who cares about them and will work to reunite them with their families. That’s 545 reasons to vote for Biden and Kamala Harris. | https://medium.com/engendered/545-reasons-to-vote-for-biden-harris-2c90daadab69 | ['Teresa Albano'] | 2020-11-02 20:15:54.156000+00:00 | ['Joe Biden', 'Immigration', 'Politics', 'Election 2020', 'Society'] |
064 | 在OKEX交易所躺著賺 | in In Fitness And In Health | https://medium.com/%E6%AF%8F%E5%91%A850%E5%9C%A8%E5%B8%81%E5%9C%88/064-%E5%9C%A8okex%E4%BA%A4%E6%98%93%E6%89%80%E8%BA%BA%E8%91%97%E8%B3%BA-d040ae9c4bb9 | [] | 2020-05-23 08:45:03.466000+00:00 | ['被動收入', '比特幣', 'Okex', 'Okex交易所', '區塊鏈'] |
Re:Designing Cisco | Design has taken a new position in the business world. In 2015, designer Jon Kolko published an article in the Harvard Business Review proclaiming that “Design Thinking” had come of age. The same year, Dr. Gjoko Muratovski of Tongji University in China, published an academic paper on the “new role of design in business and society,” writing:
“Design has never been more valued as an economic force, nor has it been as culturally influential as it is now. All types of organizations, including once-conservative management consultancies, financial organizations, and banks, have begun to adopt “design thinking” as their guiding principle and are building their internal design competencies.”
The HBR article in particular caught the attention of the enterprise products team at Cisco. The engineers and product developers on the team were working on what would become DNA Center, a network management and command center at the heart of the company’s new Digital Network Architecture that would launch two years later in 2017. Seeing the potential in human-centric design, a few members of the group literally went back to school — Stanford’s d.school in fact, the leading institution for Design Thinking.
It was the beginning of what one of those engineers describes as a major paradigm shift within Cisco.
What Is Design Thinking?
Design Thinking is essentially a framework for creating clarity and alignment among teams using interactive exercises that engage participants across disciplines. The framework has been around for decades, and large enterprises like IBM, GE, Bloomberg, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte, Accenture, Fidelity, Capital One, and others have seen dramatic success implementing it in their business products and processes. It seems to have spread like wildfire within the corporate world in the last five years.
“The word ‘design’ can refer to how something looks — like a concert poster or the shoes on your feet. Design can also describe the way you interact with things — how you drive a car or use the smartphone in your pocket.”
And there are very good reasons for its rise in popularity, especially in technology. The world is becoming much more complex, technically speaking, and Design Thinking was created specifically to find solutions for complex problems.
In networking, complexity is one of the top challenges to successful growth. Network engineers, operators, and architects are grappling with complex multicloud environments, tough security challenges, a flood of IoT devices, and a laundry list of evermore complex business requirements. The larger the organization, the larger the network, the more complex the topology, and the more difficult it is to manage.
While it was specifically created to solve complex problems, Design Thinking is not a silver bullet. And it’s not a guarantee to find the exact solution needed. But when applied correctly using the right stakeholders, “human-centric design” — as it’s also referred to — can produce some powerful and highly creative results.
As Cisco’s published book on Design Thinking begins, “At its core, design is about solving problems.”
Old Technique, New Approach
Designers within Cisco have taken to using design as a guide in making some of the most substantial changes to networking in decades. And the difference is showing.
One of those designers is Michael Kopcsak, senior director of user experience design and research. Kopcsak joined Cisco in 2016 at a pivotal time during the late stages of creating DNA Center, the capstone product of intent-based networking.
At the time, the engineers working on DNA Center had a lodestar goal of making networking simpler. A few clicks should accomplish what would normally take hours through a command line. DNA Center would be the central dashboard with workflows that control a customer’s entire network.
One of the early challenges Kopcsak set out to solve was a lack of cohesiveness between those workflows. To be successful, DNA Center needed a cohesive experience, so as an engineer works with it, she can smoothly transition from one workflow to the next.
“The first step was to develop a cohesive design system, which aligned everything from page width to button typography to color palette,” Kopcsak said in an interview. “That got us on a trajectory of bringing things together cohesively.”
The issue was the initial designs of these workflows were all designed by different groups. So while they were headed in the right direction, they came together in a fragmented state: “They looked different. They felt different. They had different terminology. They had different styles. They had different interaction models. There was basically just no way the tools could come together … There was no common design language,” he said.
Applying a human-centric approach to the design would help create that common design language. From the outset, the team’s early work on UI—buttons, typography, color palettes, page width—was accomplished through traditional product design.
Kopcsak said the team then went on to host Design Thinking exercises both internally and externally with Cisco engineers, TMEs, PMs, SEs and Cisco customers to ensure DNA Center would solve the right customer challenges.
Back to School
Tim Szigeti, a Cisco principal engineer on the DNA Center team, was one of those engineers who attended these sessions. He was also one of the engineers elected to go through Stanford’s d.school program.
As he puts it, this move to a human-centric design is a tidal shift for a company like Cisco. It’s almost hard to overstate what practical differences it will bring in the coming years. “[Going to] Stanford’s d.school was a paradigm shift for us,” Szigeti said. “We as engineers automatically think, ‘Well, we’ve got the best technology; our job is done.’ But [Design Thinking] recognizes that it’s about more than just technology. We have to give equal weight to the user experience. It’s this intersection of technology meeting both business needs and user requirements.”
Applying equal weight behind technology innovation and customer experience was not the typical approach Cisco took in creating its products in the past, according to Szigeti. “Knowing the human user, what they’re pain points are and what their needs are, is not something we gave a lot of thought in the past,” he said. The products coming out of Cisco were made by brilliant engineers simply trying to make the most capable technology possible, which often left the design and interface to those products as an afterthought.
Application Response Time or ART, Szigeti said, is powerful technology that lacked a UI, and confused even the most technical customers. To decipher the metrics that ART generated, customers would have to understand detailed protocol operations, as illustrated in the diagram above. Conversely, DNA Center ingests these metrics from network devices, analyzes them, and presents them in an easy-to-understand format, such as the Application Health Score (shown below).
“Products within Cisco sometimes looked like they came from different companies,” Szigeti said. “Even a predecessor to DNA Center, APIC-EM, had applications within the same platform that looked like they came from a completely different product.”
Cohesiveness is only one desired characteristic that came out of customer advisory sessions. During both Kopcsak’s and Szigeti’s work to identify pain points with customers, it became clear that even basic functions in running a network were potential points of frustration.
Kopcsak realized the very definitions of success had to change. Instead of rapidly developing a product and selling it as a solution for a problem the customer may not even understand, the process had to instead start with establishing empathy and trust.
UI Actually Does Matter
“There’s direct correlation between the fit and finish of a product and there’s the perceived value and the sense of trust in a product,” Kopscak said. “We put a lot of rigor into the UI, because the UI actually does matter. It represents the brand. It represents the hard work of everyone who worked on the product.”
The customer research involved was exhaustive. According to Szigeti, his team conducted more than 60 customer interviews, a majority of which prevented customers from knowing who was asking the questions. “We even talked to our Cisco IT team and went through 12,000 tickets to find out where IT spends time and resources.”
The idea, he said, was to begin designing with the end goal in mind. “We’re not going to do things the way we’ve always done them. We’re going to use this human-centric design initiative and philosophy.”
An example Szigeti used to exemplify the iterative Design Thinking process was his work creating application health scores for DNA Center. Applications experiencing poor performance receive a red badge with a low “health score” number. Behind that single score, what the customer doesn’t see, would be a whole host of performance metrics and indicators feeding it.
An example of the application health score in the DNA Center dashboard. A clean design, with clear indicators of where problems in a customer’s network might lie.
Szigeti said it was imperative to keep the layout clean and have a way for network operators to understand what’s not performing well with a single glance. The end goal was easy to picture, but hard to create.
“So the end goal was showing the customer that there was an application that received a poor health score. How did it receive a poor health score? We’ll work it out later,” he said. “If these particular tools don’t yet exist on our platforms, we’re going to add them to our roadmap, so that we can build the outcome we want from the top down.”
Not Just a Technology Solution
Since Design Thinking is built around empathy for customers, it’s often applied to business processes or even situations where there is no actual product to improve, like a customer support experience or a renewal process.
Jason Cyr, director of user experience for cloud security, has seen Design Thinking applied to a number of non-product scenarios. The potential impact of applying human centric design, he said, is what’s keeping him at Cisco.
“For me, one of the most exciting things that’s kept me at Cisco is this opportunity to influence the company with design thinking,” Cyr said. “I’ve been part of this core team that has been developing the design thinking program at Cisco.”
That core team has its own publication here on Medium. It’s also the group responsible for the publication dedicated to Design Thinking at Cisco quoted earlier. | https://medium.com/cisco-shifted/re-designing-cisco-95ee8963ad96 | ['Owen Lystrup'] | 2018-09-13 17:46:58.141000+00:00 | ['Networking', 'Design Thinking', 'Design', 'Cisco', 'UX'] |
A Fascinating Look at Old Sausalito | By Dewey Livingston
Map made in 1849 of Old Town Sausalito. Anne T. Kent California Room.
As we pull out interesting maps in the collection of the Anne T. Kent California Room for a closer look, a map of great interest is the oldest original map on file: a survey of a boundary line in Sausalito dated 1849. This beautiful example of the mapmaker’s art, drawn with ink and watercolor on paper, depicts old Saucelito — as it was spelled then — and other compelling details documenting the period before California became a state. This was the time when Navy and whaling ships came to Sausalito to obtain fresh water, and the Mexican-era rancho was still under the ownership of grantee William Antonio Richardson.
The map is entitled, “Map of part of Northern Boundary of Saucelito Tract Conveyed by Richardson & Family to Charles T. Botts. April 16th 1849.” The surveyor or author of the map is not named. The map is small, measuring 15 by 17 inches. It depicts the waterfront of what today is referred to as Old Town, the cove south of downtown Sausalito (the neighborhood is best known in local history as the home of Sally Stanford’s Valhalla restaurant, and known by mariners as Hurricane Gulch). A section of the hillside upon which a property boundary lies shows slope and trees, as well as other details to be discussed below. The map can be seen in detail at this link.
Buildings and docks at old Saucelito (Sausalito) in 1849. Anne T. Kent California Room.
At the time the map was made, there was a small settlement in the cove; six or seven buildings are seen, with a dock and a pier. According to early accounts and to Jack Tracy’s 1983 history of Sausalito, these buildings included a pioneer sawmill erected under contract with the Navy in late 1848 or early 1849, which produced lumber out of logs barged down from the site of Mill Valley. (Contrary to popular old myths, there was no marketable timber, other than cordwood, on the hills of Rancho Sausalito, only in the gulches and canyons in what is now Mill Valley, Muir Woods and a few other sites.) U. S. Navy Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones — who was well acquainted with Sausalito for its water supply — had requested the sawmill to supply boards for his Pacific fleet and other Navy uses. Certainly, one or more of the buildings (probably more like shanties) housed the mill crew, including its superintendent, Lt. James McCormick, and another reportedly accommodated a storehouse.
It is possible that one of the buildings is the former cabin of John Reed, who coveted the Sausalito site but instead was later granted Rancho Corte Madera del Presidio to the north. This graphical layout of the early townsite is enticing, as the histories written so far indicate that there were fewer buildings here at this specific time than those depicted on the map. After the map was made, some buildings at the site were taken apart during a lumber shortage and shipped up the Sacramento River.
The old port of Saucelito in 1868. The scene had not changed much since the survey map was made in 1849. Jack Mason Museum of West Marin History.
William Richardson sold about 160 acres of the ranch to Charles Tyler Botts on the day this map was made: April 16, 1849. The price was high: $35,000 in gold, probably reflecting the value of the water from springs near the northern boundary, and the potential plans for a large Navy facility (Mare Island got it, instead). Botts, who earlier that year had been elected chairman of the commission to create a provisional government for the Territory of California and, after purchasing this land, participated in the Constitutional Convention, sold lots to a handful of people, including Commander Jones, Lt. McCormick, and Sausalito pioneer Capt. Leonard Story. A Navy surveyor laid out streets and soon, McCormick built a hotel called the Fountain House, and another rose called the Saucelito House. For the most part, it was a Navy town, with so many men of those ranks buying in.
Botts, for his part, never lived on his land. He became a prominent attorney and judge in Oakland and San Francisco, and died in 1884.
Eventually, Sausalito developed on a larger scale north of the historic cove, with its ferry landings, railroad depot and maintenance yards, and the majority of homebuilding and commercial construction taking place on the waterfront and in the hills in the vicinity of Caledonia Street.
The most historically significant details on the 1849 map are the spring sites. From these springs, and probably others nearby, came the water that brought the earliest commerce to Marin County, as a watering depot for whalers, military ships, and civilians on the coast during the Spanish and Mexican periods. Two springs are seen just below the right-hand part of the boundary line.
The trails and springs seen in a detail of the 1849 map. Anne T. Kent California Room.
Today we travel Bridgeway through Sausalito, which hugs the waterfront (it was originally called Water Street). Note that on this map, there is no road along the shoreline; it was too rocky and precipitous. The route north from the cove was a series of trails; the map shows an “Old Trail” farther up the hill, and the currently used “Trail” closer to the cliff edge. Of course, there was not much overland travel to the north; any visitor would have been on a boat and if they wanted to reach the inner areas of Richardson’s Bay or the south county, they would have continued sailing to a more convenient and close landing. In 1849 there were no towns in Marin County except for San Rafael, which could barely be called a town at that time.
In another interesting detail, the “Inclined Tree” higher on the hill is thought to still exist. The “Rocky Eminence” might also survive the passage of time, up by Waldo Grade.
The “Inclined Tree” depicted on the map is believed to be this one that survives on the hill above Old Town. Photograph by Richard Torney.
This 172-year-old map is a treasure in the collection of the California Room, thanks to Marin surveyor William Schroeder, who had the foresight and generosity to have his survey archive become part of Marin County’s public collection. We can enjoy this glimpse into primitive Marin, and future scholars can use this map to uncover further details about the founding of our world-famous town, Sausalito. | https://medium.com/anne-t-kent-california-room-community-newsletter/a-fascinating-look-at-old-sausalito-5afcffceb0c9 | ['Anne T. Kent California Room'] | 2021-01-26 21:44:57.666000+00:00 | ['Local History', 'Marin County', 'Maps', 'Maritime History', 'Sausalito'] |
MOIA Hackathon 2020 — our learnings & insights | by Yannick Block
Participating in a hackathon this year wasn’t like any other. In 2019, we gathered for a town hall meeting on site, pitched our ideas and formed small groups. We then spread out in a co-working place in a fun little corner of Sternschanze and started to hack. We met later for lunch together, and had some celebratory drinks in the evening.
Now, enter 2020.
Happy remote hacking!
In the beginning of November, the Hackathon was announced during our Company Breakfast (a monthly all-hands, usually with breakfast together, but now remotely, of course) and we were asked to pitch our ideas within the next two weeks via a shared wiki.
The Project pitches: MOIA Karaoke
One of the ideas was to have a karaoke party inside the MOIA.
“Do you like Karaoke but are afraid to sing in front of large crowds? Let’s provide a more private space for this, like in Asia with smaller Karaoke boxes. The lyrics will be displayed on the In-Vehicle-Screen and the vehicle speakers should be sufficient for the instrumental music.”
Required skills:
Vehicle hardware interfaces (screen and infotainment system)
UX (In-Vehicle-Screen and mobile app / mobile web page)
Backend service (to queue songs)
Mobile frontend app / web page
We then had another remote session where all the ideas were presented to explain them in more detail, allow for questions, and check if they sparked any interest from colleagues. Every idea had one “champion” who came up with the idea and would be responsible for its organisation (setting up a Slack channel, a Google Meet room, checking requirements, etc). The list of submitted ideas already sparked excitement for what was to happen during the two hackathon days. Here are some examples:
A macOS dictionary as a glossary for MOIA-vocabulary
Booking MOIA rides without installing the app (via iOS App Clips & Android Instant Apps)
MOIA iOS Widget
Share your MOIA ride with friends (live location)
A MOIA mod for the game “Cities Skyline”
Virtual MOIA stops in AR
An in-vehicle quiz for entertainment during your MOIA ride
Predictable in-app feedback using machine learning
The above mentioned “caraoke”
A MOIA mod for the game “Cities Skyline”
One Monday in December it was finally time and all the fully-formed teams could start.
Caraoke Team
The “caraoke” group gathered for a quick brainstorming session on the requirements with the following results:
Use the YouTube API to search for karaoke songs
A mobile friendly web-app for customers to search for and queue songs
A splash page for the in-vehicle-screen showing a QR code linking to the queueing interface
A web page to play karaoke videos on the in-vehicle-screen once queued
A backend service to accept song requests
A small computer to host the server (decided on a Raspberry Pi 3)
TypeScript, Next.js, Apollo Server and GraphQL Subscriptions as the tech stack.
How to advance your hackathon — Trophy system
To make the hackathon even more fun, there was a trophy system with achievements that could be unlocked by all teams. Here are some examples:
Long Island Iced Tea
Each member of your Hackathon Team is from a different team
Each member of your Hackathon Team is from a different team I am a Coder
Your project has a commit from someone who never commited to git before
Your project has a commit from someone who never commited to git before L337 c0mm!73r
There is a commit at 13:37 CET
There is a commit at 13:37 CET Driving home for christmas
Your design sneaks in some snowflakes
In the afternoon of Day 2 everyone met again on a video call and presented their results. The results were really good! It was truly inspiring to see the creativity flourish and how much great projects were created in such a short period of time even if most of us participated remotely this year.
Our main learning: our creative and smart colleagues can’t be stopped, not even by a pandemic! | https://medium.com/@moiadev/moia-hackathon-2020-our-learnings-insights-e4c86785cbcf | ['Moia Engineering'] | 2020-12-18 14:19:27.036000+00:00 | ['Mobility', 'Hackathons'] |
Ignazio Cassis: science and diplomacy key to inclusive development | by Kasmira Jefford. Published 19 December 2020 on GS News.
Switzerland’s foreign minister Ignazio Cassis at an event to mark the 75th anniversary of the UN Charter, at the United Nations in Geneva, 26 June, 2020. (Keystone/Salvatore Di Nolfi)
Last year, the Swiss government launched an initiative aimed at bolstering Switzerland as a future hub for global governance and multilateralism. Breakthroughs in science and technology were identified as a field likely to play a major role in the future of diplomacy between countries — as seen this year with the race to mobilise the world’s best scientific institutions to create a vaccine for Covid-19.
The result was a new foundation, the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA), that would identify the latest scientific advances likely to shape society over the next 25 years and then come up with ways to apply those findings to modern-day challenges.
Read: Geneva Science and Diplomacy foundation reveals its next steps
Ignazio Cassis, the head of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, has been one of the lead instigators of the initiative. He answered Geneva Solutions’ questions about science, diplomacy, and global governance issues shaping international Geneva.
You have been one of the driving forces behind GESDA and in positioning Geneva as a future hub for science multilateralism. It is an ambitious vision: do you think it is one that can be achieved?
Today’s world is undergoing profound change, partly due to technological development. This is not new. The world and ourselves as human beings have constantly evolved throughout history. This time, however, the changes are happening at an unprecedented speed. The role of GESDA is to anticipate these changes, to recognise the challenges they pose and the opportunities they present, so that the international community can act effectively in the interests of the world’s population. This is not a matter of predicting the future, but of preparing our society for it in the best possible way. As a well-established hub, Geneva favours a coordinated response to global challenges and allows advanced technologies to be put at the service of an inclusive development that enables the social and economic potential of all sections of the population to be realised.
CERN is an example of science as a diplomatic endeavour — is Switzerland aiming to create second CERN?
CERN and GESDA are proof that science knows no boundaries. CERN is an institution that bases its strength on the common language of scientists around the world. Switzerland is proud to host CERN and supports it in disseminating its “Science for Peace” model, as it does, for example, with the Sesame Project in the Middle East or with SEEIIST in the Balkans. GESDA shares the values of scientific diplomacy with CERN. However, the tasks of the two institutions are different; GESDA is not CERN. Instead, the two complement each other in their work for a strong and inclusive society.
One element of GESDA is the creation of a new Geneva-Zurich Center for Science Diplomacy, how do you see science diplomacy as an effective tool for foreign relations — especially in the context of Covid-19?
Covid-19 has shown how important global answers to global questions are. Many of the challenges of our time — including not only the worldwide pandemic, but also the climate as well as the migration crisis or the food security of the world population — can no longer be solved within rigid national borders. The link between science and diplomacy is becoming increasingly important if we want to put advanced technologies at the service of integrative development. The Centre for Science Diplomacy is one of the institutions that is working on strengthening this alliance. Science can serve negotiation with innovative instruments, which is particularly important in today’s world where international exchanges are increasingly complex and technical.
Switzerland has just launched its digital foreign policy strategy. What is your vision for this and where do you see the best chances for Switzerland or international Geneva to influence policy in this field?
Switzerland is a country of innovation. World-leading technology companies are based here. With its technical universities and research institutes, Switzerland is at the forefront of research into digitalisation. At the same time, Switzerland enjoys a high degree of trust and a good reputation internationally, based on its neutrality and good offices. It is a country, which can build bridges and facilitate mutual understanding. These qualities make Switzerland, and International Geneva in particular, the ideal hub for promoting the establishment of shared rules and enabling technological development in the interests of all.
Do you think international Geneva as a centre of multilateralism can survive in the context of current challenges? (UN institutions under existential and financial pressure, Covid-19 and the rise in remote working, cancelled conferences, high living expenses, competition from other cities?)
The world needs shared solutions, today more than ever. The pandemic has highlighted the absolute necessity of international cooperation. In an area of 10 square kilometres, Geneva brings together the knowledge, expertise and experience of a large number of international entities, public as well as private.. They challenge each other, put ideas to the test and work together on new ventures to help shape a resilient society capable of dealing with the unexpected. The special ecosystem of International Geneva increases the efficiency of international cooperation and development and therefore indirectly reduces its costs.
What do you see as the best path for reform of the multilateral system and how can Switzerland help shape that?
Switzerland is convinced that international organisations need clear mandates, in order to efficiently reach their goals and act in an effective way. They need to be well managed and serve the purposes of member states. Several organisations are currently carrying out reforms in this direction, which Switzerland supports.
The World Trade Organization (WTO) is a key institution here in Geneva, yet it is under enormous pressure to reform. Can it survive — and can “international Geneva” survive without a functioning WTO? What was Switzerland’s position on the US veto on the appointment of Ngozi Okonjo Iweala as director-general and what was does a Biden administration mean for the WTO?
The WTO is of great significance for International Geneva. Likewise, the WTO’s trading system is a very important pillar for Switzerland’s economy, which is strongly oriented towards foreign trade. In the difficult circumstances of a global health crisis, the rule-based multilateral trading system of the WTO must be maintained as the central authority of international trade policy and, where necessary, strengthened by reforms. The appointment of a new director-general by consensus is therefore important. Constructive cooperation between all WTO members, including the US, is essential to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow.
And same question for the WHO: how do you see the US role on the global health stage changing under a Biden administration, which has pledged to recommit to the organisation?
The US has always played a central role in creating and developing the multilateral system. The announcement by President-elect Joe Biden and the US commitment to participate in the international debate on the future role of the WHO are strong signals in favour of multilateralism.
What are Switzerland’s new ambitions and goals in terms of its relationship with the UN?
Switzerland’s policy in the UN is consistent and has always been based on fundamental values such as the rule of law and the humanitarian tradition, which are deeply rooted in Switzerland’s DNA. A more secure, stable and prosperous world is in the interest of us all.
As for our goals in the relationship with the UN, Switzerland expects the same high quality standards that it offers, based on stable, fruitful, predictable and focused exchanges.
Switzerland’s candidacy for a seat on the UN Security Council is moving ahead, nine years after starting the process. Why is it important now for Switzerland to hold this seat? Is it compatible with Swiss neutrality?
Switzerland’s political functioning is based on the union of different cultures, languages and opinions. This quality of bridge building is already one of Switzerland’s great strengths on the international stage. Our neutrality, in this sense, is an advantage. The seat on the UN Security Council enables Switzerland to make greater use of its many years of experience as an accepted and globally respected bridge builder — for more peace and security in our world. Therefore we have chosen the following slogan: A Plus 4 Peace. | https://medium.com/geneva-solutions/ignazio-cassis-science-and-diplomacy-key-to-inclusive-development-f13fed6b8d5c | ['Gs News'] | 2020-12-22 10:02:32.065000+00:00 | ['Diplomacy', 'International Relations', 'Science', 'International Geneva', 'Switzerland'] |
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