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Develop A Responsive Layout Of Mobile App With Flutter | Develop a Responsive Layout Of Mobile App With Flutter
With 3.5 billion smartphone users in 2020, expected to reach 3.8 billion in 2021, it is fair enough to say that demand for mobile apps has gracefully scaled from desktop to mobile. And this is due to the growing interest of the developers towards designing a highly responsive and interactive UI layout of applications.
While back in 2015, Google rolled out with a significant change in search engine algorithm and introduced a new rule for the website to be mobile responsive first. And, from there, designers have not just understood the importance of designing the responsive architecture in both desktop and non-desktop applications but also love designing responsive UI in-app to increase user experience.
However, implementing responsive UIs in the application becomes a complicated task for designers in real-life.
Whether it’s about configuring changes in the app, auto-rotating the content according to the screen, or making it compatible to display on both small and large screens. At any cost, your app needs to be responsive to the layout changes.
That’s where Flutter comes into the role and takes the momentum!
So in this guide, we will answer:
What is Responsive Design?
What is Futter, Why It’s So Demanding and What it Has Evolved In to?
How Flutter is Different and Help You Create a Responsive UI of the App?
Conclusion: Where To Go Next?
Let’s dig deep into each point to understand how to increase the responsiveness of the app with Flutter…
What is Responsive App Design?
Responsive design simply means using a single code set that responds to various changes to the layout of the devices. The responsive app lay out its UI according to the screen size and shape of the device. From smartwatch, phone, tablet to laptop, an app developed responsive UI can run on multiple devices without having to develop different interfaces of the application.
The same app will adjust the size of the page according to the screen when the user either resizes the window on the laptop or changes the orientation of the phone or tablet.
Important Elements to Focus To Create Responsive Layout
In recent years, developing a responsive app has become a hot topic of the town but how to make it happen in the real world? What essential things do you need to focus on?
In responsive design, there are majorly three things to consider- Size, Orientation, and Device type. When any one of these elements changes, the app UI changes. You can also choose to hire mobile app developer that can make it done for you. But..
Let’s make it simple for you to understand:
In the below image, we have a logo, logo title and subtitles, two fields, action button and background image.
But, when we run these components on four different devices, [small screen (480*800), medium screen (1080*1920), Large screen (1200*1920) and iPhone XR], observe the clear results.
In the small device screen, the layout components are breaking and going out of screen. The title is splitting into two lines and overall reduces the design impact. While other screens are looking fine but there are few minor differences.
So what’s the solution? In this blog, I’ll explain to you how to fix the UI problems of the app by using Flutter plugins.
But before that!
What is Flutter, Why It’s So Demanding and What it Has Evolved Into?
Flutter is defined as Google’s UI toolkit that allows developers building beautiful, natively compiled applications for multiple platforms including Mobile (iOS, Android), Desktop (Linux, Mac, Windows, Google Fuchsia) and web. With the launch of Flutter in 2015, Google has not just stolen the show again but also created a buzzword in the field of app development. That is why clients from all across the world are keen hiring flutter app development company in 2021.
Being based on Dart programming language and allowing developers to create an application for multiple platforms using a single codebase, Flutter is making good progress. It has become the second most popular choice of framework for developers.
By introducing Flutter, Google has marked incredible success in two significant aspects — in creating a genuinely platform-independent framework for Android and iOS native apps that work great for production use.
Now the question is what makes it so demanding for the app development?
Here’s a list of some features and qualities that makes it so demanding:
Being a cross-platform framework, it allows developers to create an app for iOS and Android by using the same code-base.
Flutter is an open-source framework, so it is free to use and provide extensive documentation and community support to make it easier even for beginners to get started with Flutter.
This framework is simple to learn and easy to use as it is based on Google’s in-house language that is Dart.
Despite being a young framework, Flutter has become a prime choice of leading companies like Google, Alibaba, eBay, Emaar and many more.
With hot reload feature, launching or updating a Flutter based app is quite simple and fast. Developers can instantly make changes in the code on emulators, simulators and hardware in a second, without having to restart the running app. It is one of the biggest reasons that make Flutter the first choice of developers for building UIs, fixing bugs and adding a new feature.
Hopefully, you are convinced that Flutter has become so famous for developing applications. As far as building a responsive layout in the application, Android and iOS adopt different approaches to handle layouts for different screen sizes natively.
To handle various screen sizes and pixel densities, multiple concepts are used in Android including:
Android Approaches for Developing Responsive UI
ConstraintLayout: For creating a flexible and creative UI design that adapts to different screen sizes and dimensions.
For creating a flexible and creative UI design that adapts to different screen sizes and dimensions. SplitView: For separate layout files that fit different screen sizes and able to handle layout adjustments automatically as per the screen size of the device.
For separate layout files that fit different screen sizes and able to handle layout adjustments automatically as per the screen size of the device. Fragment: For extracting your UI logic into separate components, so you don’t need to define the reason separately.
For extracting your UI logic into separate components, so you don’t need to define the reason separately. VectorDrawable: For any kind of illustrations like icons, or vector graphics.
iOS Approaches for Developing Responsive UI
Auto Layout: Also known as Constraints that govern content in your app and automatically adjust the layout according to the specified constraints.
Also known as Constraints that govern content in your app and automatically adjust the layout according to the specified constraints. Size Classes: With size classes, iOS dramatically makes layout adjustments based on the size classes of a content area.
With size classes, iOS dramatically makes layout adjustments based on the size classes of a content area. UI Elements: There are few UI elements that developers use for building responsive UIs on iOS including UIStackView, UIViewController, UISplitViewController and more.
How Flutter is Different and Help You Create a Responsive UI of the App?
Just because we are claiming that creating responsive layouts in Flutter is quite more straightforward and easier, therefore, many of you are curious to ask these two questions instead of directly moving to hire software development company:
What widgets should I Use in App That adapts to Screens of Different Sizes? How Can You Get The Information About the Screen Size and How Can You Use It While Writing the UI Code?
We’ll answer these questions but let’s first talk about the second question because it is the heart of the issue.
So there are here major ways to meet your goals:
1. MediaQuery
One potential way to get information from the MediaQueryData of the MediaQuery root that is “InheritedWidget”. It provides some valuable information on Orientation and ScreenSize, that enables you to determine which layout to display based on the current orientation, what type of screen (mobile, tablet or Desktop), and screen size on which app is being displayed on.
Now the question is how to use it?
Let’s learn with the example of building a chat app in Flutter that responds to layout changes:
To get started with the changes in the layout of the chat page using MediaQuery, you need first to check the orientation from MediaQuery- If it is a landscape, then you’ll have a detail page.
You need to declare a child widget to use it later.
If you have a details page, then you can declare the child widget as a row of widgets.
For this, the row contains the list of chats as a first item.
After that, the next thing in a row is the chat page showing the conversation.
If you don’t have a detail page on the app, then the child will be the list of chats.
Lastly, you need to assign that child widget you created as a SafeArea.
Develop the app and make it run different screens and it will most likely this on Portrait and Landscape:
To make it happen, you need to go into the “ChatListPage.Dart” file in the Lib folder and have to replace the content of “build (Buildcontext Context)” with these above mentioned steps.
2. LayoutBuilder
The other way is to use a LayoutBuilder, a perfect alternative to MediaQuery that has been used to handle orientation changes. It is a builder widget just like a “StreamBuilder” or a “FutureBuilder”, that also gives BoxConstraints which enables you to determine the maximum and minimum height and width properties of the screen.
Let’s understand how this approach will work practically:
Firstly, you need to declare the LayoutBuilder as a SafeArea.
You need to determine whether the details page is using the maximum width of the parent widget. If it is greater than 600, then you have to have a detail page.
If you have a detail page, then declare the child as a row of widgets.
For this, the row contains the list of chats as a first item.
Next item in a row is the detail page showing the conversation.
Lastly, if you don’t have a detail page, it’ll be the list of chats.
Following these steps, you can build and test projects on different screens.
So these are the two major ways to check different orientations and screen sizes. But, how to make further adjustments with text?
Auto-Resizing Text Based on Parent Widget Size
If you notice the text in the above landscape screenshot, the coloured text is not resized correctly as per the layout of the screen. In that case, increasing the size of the font is quite daunting as it will go over the box. But using the Flutter Widget “FittedBox”, you can rightly scale the size according to the size of the parent widget.
This is how you can use this widget in a chat app:
To make changes in the text size , you need to follow “BoxFit.Contain” rules and try to go over these steps:
Firstly, you declare a FittedBox as a parent of the Text Widget.
Secondly, as you are using the BoxFit.Contain, you can fit to make it scale as big as it can without going out of the widget box.
Lastly, declare the original TEXT widget as a child.
Following the steps, you can see the improvement in the text size that automatically get adjusted with the screen size.
UI Architecture: Expandable and Flexible
App responsiveness is directly related to making your UI flexible and expandable with the right choice of widgets. And, the plugins that are really useful inside a column or a row. To fix the broken image to the screen, firstly you need to open the “ConversationalPage.Dart” file in that Lib folder. Then discover the line with “SquareGallery()” with TODO.
That widget will not appear, because it’s a child of “Column” and it doesn’t have enough information to determine its own height. So there you can wrap it in an “AspectRatio” widget to give it constraints.
In case if you are not able to find such constraints, then it will give you one that only follows the ratio provided by you. Moreover, in that case, the widget might overflow.
Final results, when you click on to attach the image button, then the image will come like this in both portrait and landscape screen.
CustomMultiChildLayout
Flutter also provides layout widget, that helps to size its child layout to a fraction of the total available space. It is especially useful inside Expandable and Flexible widgets.
With CustomMultiChildLayou, you can make your layout responsive, but how?
Since its a vast topic, so here we are explaining the basic code snippet below:
First, you need to declare a subclass of MultiChildLayoutDelegate.
Overlay the PerformLayout method, so you need to layout the children widgets using the LayoutChild and PositionChild methods.
Lastly, you need to return a boolean from ShouldRelayout if the widget should perform a layout again. The choice of the method depends upon your widget’s parameters.
Conclusion: Where To Go Next?
Most of you are wondering that from where you can get these plugins or widgets to make you app UI responsive. You can download the material by simply clicking on the interlinks of the blog, and you can choose to get connected with our experts.
Since Flutter has become a most demanding framework in the app development market, therefore, the majority of developers are looking forward to leveraging the features of Flutter.
There are plenty of guides, tutorials and official docs available for responsive apps in Flutter, but understanding the technicality of those tutorials is quite challenging for a novice. Therefore, we drafted things in this blog in a simple and straightforward manner to make you understand the concept.
Apart from the above mentioned widget, there are various other things that you need to know and understand. Therefore, we recommend you to hire an app development company that stands by your side at every step to make your Android/iOS app responsive with Flutter. | https://medium.com/flutter-community/develop-a-responsive-layout-of-mobile-app-with-flutter-c6a6f7013aec | ['Sophia Martin'] | 2020-12-14 05:52:38.459000+00:00 | ['Mobile App Development', 'Mobile Apps', 'Technology', 'Startup', 'Flutter'] |
About Carbon Neutrality | I have been talking about $CBC and CNES, and I also want to talk about carbon neutrality itself.
If you find it helpful, please forward it so that more people can understand carbon neutrality and make a little contribution to our planet.
More and more companies are participating in carbon neutrality and are beginning to notice the reduction of carbon dioxide. Companies need to get their emissions down fast, but getting to absolute zero is hard. Some companies are committed to reducing their emissions and use carbon offset credits to lower their effective emissions by investing in projects around the world that reduce emissions elsewhere or that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
These projects include wind or solar farms, planting and growing new forests, or protecting existing forests. But some companies could be investing in the very cheapest available credits, with little regard to their credibility, simply to launder their reputations as “green”.
There are a few key ways to move to net-zero emissions, which are reflected in most national plans:
drastically reduce or eliminate the use of fossil fuels in the energy sector (including transport)
improve efficiency and/or develop new technology in other sectors generating emissions but unable to easily reduce them, such as manufacturing and agriculture
invest in bio-sequestration (also known as reforestation or tree-planting) and carbon-negative technologies to offset any continuing or unavoidable emissions.
No technology or quantity of trees planted could offset the emissions currently generated globally. That’s why nearly every net-zero plan includes first reducing and eventually replacing, fossil fuels. Fossil fuels could be used to achieve net-zero with offsets or carbon capture and storage, but in many cases, this is not actually the most cost-effective or practical pathway to net-zero.
Most national plans achieve this through land management techniques such as reforestation. However, the amount of CO₂ offset through natural carbon-negative solutions can be difficult to measure. Additionally, the long-term delivery of the carbon offsets cannot always be guaranteed — for example, a replanted forest may die or be burnt in a bushfire releasing CO₂ back to the atmosphere.
It’s not just countries that can produce net-zero emissions. The term can also apply to a state, city, company, or even a single building.
Under a net-zero scenario, emissions are still being generated but they’re offset by the same amount elsewhere. Examples of offset activities include planting trees to absorb CO₂ or using other natural ecosystems to increase carbon stored in the biosphere. The term “carbon-neutral” is sometimes used instead of net-zero, and they broadly mean the same thing.
When it comes to achieving carbon neutrality as an individual, it can be a little tricky. Most people don’t have the time, resources, or money to ensure they are removing the same amount of carbon into the atmosphere as they are polluting, but that doesn’t mean you’re helpless.
Finally, I have to talk about CNES again (instead of $CBC). What CNES can and must do is to solve the problem of individual participation in carbon neutrality. Whether it’s through NFT planting, walking, or even other interesting ways that we haven’t announced yet, I believe that we can let everyone on the planet participate in carbon neutrality, for the planet we live on.
CoMe | https://medium.com/@come-cnes/about-carbon-neutrality-7fdcb7632490 | [] | 2021-09-07 14:28:34.026000+00:00 | ['Carbon Neutral', 'Carbon Emissions', 'Carbon Neutrality', 'Carbon', 'Cnes'] |
The Hope for Springs Eternal | by CK Harshbarger
[ Photo by Josh Addison ]
We know from experience that there are a few basic truths that cannot be shaken by the chaos of our society. It takes faith in these basic truths, that some call the laws of nature, to raise food and fiber. It also takes a paradigm shift in our thinking for one to understand the complexities that govern the laws of nature. Farming in the image of nature is the first key insight needed to begin the journey toward regenerative agriculture. We must design our farm systems to rely on the simple truths observed during our experiences when work-ing on the land. As other key insights along this journey are revealed to us, they inspire endless possibilities of how one could design a farm system in the image of nature. We can then use planning that is inspired by our observations, to set the farm ecosystem up for success, all the while accepting that things are going to happen that we cannot control.
Therefore we must plan accordingly to design as much resilience as possible into our farm’s ecosystem. Stacking enterprises, using vertical integration in our supply chains, finding value aligned partners, and most importantly, grow-ing and raising plants and animals that thrive in our ecological setting. And still, one has to be cautiously optimistic that the simple truths we have observed from years past, will hold true again, at least in some form, this year. One of the beauty’s of farming, and in life I suppose, is that we are given reassurance each year through experience that we can rely upon these truths in trying times. And as we get older and wiser from our experiences, our faith gets stronger in the resilience we have built into our farm ecosystem, all the while deepening our relationship with the land we steward.
Our experience tells us each spring, the days will get longer until the summer solstice and then shorten until the fall equinox up until the first day of winter. We know that the spring will bring rain and eventually the absence of frost. We ob-serve that each plant has a purpose and a relationship with the birds, insects, mammals, and soil of its place. We see that the diversity corresponds with the health of our landscapes and correlates to the abundance of life that we see in our fields. Yet the gradual occurrence of these truths are subtle and often taken for granted in our society. This is because it takes intention to observe the simple truths in our daily lives. We must dance in rhythm with the seasons, to produce the healthy foods and fiber that sustain our society. So in agri-culture, we are forced to address the dichotomy of truth and control. We have been indoctrinated to believe that we can control the environment to ensure the success of production systems. Yet this separates us from all of our counterparts in nature. So as we begin to let go of our desire to control and the hope for springs eternal, we begin to find more peace in our lives.
We must think holistically to plan for the things out of our control such as drought, fire, and pandemics that lead to a wavering in our social discourse. Things will change, life will cycle and the living things we raise, will grow and eventually senesce. Markets evolve as do the relationships with staff and our customers. Supply and demand will ebb and flow. The simple truth is that developing and maintaining heartfelt, honest relationships with our customers, employees, families and friends takes hard work. And this work will lead us to success in our lives regardless of the ever changing aforementioned uncontrollable variables. In fact, the success of our business may very well depend on how well we have planned for the unexpected. Success also depends upon how willing one is to adapt their plans.
Our children will grow older and we will too. Politicians will emerge and then fade away into history. No perfect day or perfect job or season will last forever, and that is okay. The oldest tree in the forest will one day fall and give light to another. We can use this wisdom to appreciate our days, moments and years while we live the lives that we were intended to live. And ultimately, the fact that the sun will rise and set each passing day, is our greatest truth. And everyday, we are reminded of this truth by the beauty of this diurnal occurrence. | https://medium.com/mad-agriculture/the-hope-for-springs-eternal-2d0ddd293285 | ['Mad Agriculture'] | 2021-01-12 16:26:12.174000+00:00 | ['Agriculture', 'Ranching', 'Spring', 'Resilience'] |
The Electoral College Delivers Unpredictable, Almost Random Results, But It Can Be Fixed | The Electoral College Delivers Unpredictable, Almost Random Results, But It Can Be Fixed
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay
By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
Systems With Predictable Results Are Vital
In order to manage our lives, we need to be able to figure out the likely consequences of our actions.
Written laws define criminal acts and assign specific punishments so that we can understand in advance the probable consequences of our conduct.
We can’t live with a drug that randomly cures us today and kills us tomorrow. We can’t live with a car that starts today, doesn’t start tomorrow, runs great the next day, and bursts into flame the day after that.
This need for predictability extends beyond criminal and financial systems. The electoral process needs predictability too.
Candidates And Voters Need To Know In Advance How The Winning Candidate Is Chosen
Imagine that after an election the votes cast were ignored and instead somebody appointed by the City Council decided which of the candidates would be declared the winner. What would be the point of even having an election if some appointed official could choose anyone he/she wanted?
Without election rules that provide reliability and predictability you’re essentially just picking the winner’s name out of a hat in a blind drawing that has no relationship between the candidates’ policies and the voters’ choices. Democracies cannot function that way.
That is my problem with the Electoral College.
The Winner Chosen By The Electoral College System Is So Unpredictable That It Is Almost Random
I ran the numbers for the 2016 and 2020 Presidential elections and found that there is little or no reliable or predictable relationship between the number of votes cast for each candidate and the number of electoral votes each candidate receives.
The electoral college results were so wildly different for the two elections that they bore little relationship to the votes cast for the four candidates in those two elections.
2016 & 2020 Popular Vote Percentages
Since no 2016 or 2020 third-party presidential candidates earned any electoral votes I ignored the votes for third-party candidates and added together the 2016 votes for Trump and Clinton and the 2020 votes for Trump and Biden to determine the percentage of the votes received by each candidate in each election.
In rounded numbers, in 2016 Clinton got 51.1% of that total vote and Trump got 48.9%.
In rounded numbers, in 2020 Biden got 52.3% of that total vote and Trump got 47.7%.
Trump 2016 Vs. Trump 2020
In 2016 Trump got 48.9% of the popular vote but he received 56.9% of the electoral votes.
In 2020, Trump got 47.7% of the popular vote, a 2.45% decrease from his performance in 2016 (48.9 — 47.7 = 1.2/48.9) but he received only 43.1% of the electoral votes, a 24.25% decrease in the percentage of electoral votes he received (56.9% — 43.1% = 13.8%/56.9%).
Trump 2016 vs 2020: A 2.45% decrease in popular vote →24.25% decrease in electoral votes.
Essentially, Trump’s percentage of the electoral votes decreased 10X more than his percentage decrease in the popular vote (24.25%/2.45%)
We had the same candidate, Trump, and almost the same percentage of the popular vote, 47.7 vs. 48.9%, but Trump’s electoral votes declined from 56.9% all the way down to 43.1% of the electoral votes.
Clinton 2016 Vs. Biden 2020
In terms of the percentage of the total votes cast for Clinton and Biden, Biden got roughly 2.35% (52.3% — 51.1% = 1.2%/51.1%) more popular votes than Clinton received.
In 2016 Clinton got 51.1% of the popular vote but she received only 43.1% of the electoral votes.
In 2020 Biden got 52.3% of the popular vote, a 2.35% increase over Clinton’s percentage of the popular vote, but Biden received 56.9% of the electoral votes.
Biden 2020 vs. Clinton 2016: A 2.35% increase in popular vote → 32% increase in electoral votes. That’s a 13.6X percentage increase in Biden’s electoral votes (32%/2.35%) in relation to his percentage increase over Clinton’s popular vote.
Winners: Trump 2016 Vs. Biden 2020 Electoral Votes
Trump 2016: 48.9% of the popular vote →56.9% of the electoral vote
Biden 2020: 52.3% of the popular vote →56.9% of the electoral vote
We had two candidates, Trump and Biden, who received the same percentage of electoral votes, 56.9%, but one of them did it by winning only 48.9% of the popular vote while the other one had to win 52.3% of the popular vote to get the same number of electoral votes.
Losers: Clinton 2016 Vs. Trump 2020 Electoral Votes
Clinton 2016: 51.1% of the popular vote →43.1% of the electoral vote
Trump 2020: 47.7% of the popular vote →43.1% of the electoral vote
Two candidates, one with over 51% of the vote and the other with less than 48% of the vote and they both got the same number of electoral votes.
This is almost a random system in which two candidates, Biden and Clinton, who received close to the same percentage of the popular vote yet received two vastly different electoral vote results, one representing a strong win for Biden and the other a strong defeat for Clinton.
Electoral Votes By State Vs. Electoral Votes In Proportion To Popular Vote
If the electoral votes mirrored the popular vote, then in 2020 Biden would have received only 281 electoral votes (52.3% X 538) instead of the 306 he won, and Trump would have received 254 (47.7% X 538) electoral votes instead of the only 232 electoral votes he won.
In 2016 Trump, the Republican, got MORE electoral votes than his percentage of the popular vote and Clinton, the Democrat, got FEWER electoral votes than her percentage of the popular vote.
In 2020 Biden, the Democrat, got MORE electoral votes than his percentage of the popular vote and Trump, the Republican, got FEWER electoral votes than his percentage of the popular vote.
In Summary, Unpredictable, Almost Random, Results
This is not a predictable system. This is not a reliable system, and in elections as in medicine, law, engineering, finance, criminal law, etc. we want and we need our systems to be both reliable and predictable.
There Are Other Serious Detriments From The Winner-Take-All Assignment Of Electoral Votes
Under the current winner-take-all policy used by 48 of the 50 states, the total number of votes cast for Joe Biden and Donald Trump in Virginia was 4,935,487. Out of those roughly 4.9 million votes Biden won the state by only 11,779 votes, yet he received all 16 of Virginia’s electoral votes.
This winner-take-all system guarantees that changes in a very small numbers of votes will have massive consequences far out of proportion to their numbers.
This winner-take-all system
generates distrust of election results
encourages abuse of the voting process, including voter suppression,
spurs recounts, court fights, conflicts, and delays
ahead of election day creates uncertainty about what the result will be
delivers unpredictable, almost random, results including the election of a candidate who is chosen by only a minority of the voters
guarantees that campaigns will be limited to a few “battleground states” which get all the candidates’ attention to the detriment of the rest of the country
In spite of these massive and obvious flaws, politically it’s going to be almost impossible to switch to a system where the President is simply elected by the popular vote.
But there is a fix that might be both practically and politically possible.
Can The Electoral College Be Revised To Be Less Random?
This leads us to ask ourselves: Is there a better, more rational, more predictable way to elect a President while still keeping the Electoral College?
I decided to perform a little experiment. I asked myself:
“What would have happened if each state awarded electoral votes in proportion to that state’s popular vote?”
Awarding A State’s Electoral Votes In Proportion To That State’s Popular Vote
If a state had 10 electoral votes and each candidate got 50% of that state’s popular vote then each candidate would get 5 of that state’s 10 electoral votes.
If a state had 3 electoral votes and the popular vote was split 60% — 40% then 60% X 3 = 1.8 so we would round that up to 2 electoral votes for the 60% candidate and round down to 1 electoral vote for the 40% candidate.
If a state had an odd number of electoral votes, e.g. 3, and each candidate received exactly 50% of the vote, that is exactly 1.5 votes each, then each would get 1 electoral vote and the third vote would go to whichever candidate received a majority of all the votes cast for President nationwide.
How This Would Have Worked For The 2020 Election
I applied this system to the state-by-state numbers for the 2020 election. The result was 277 electoral votes for Biden (instead of 306) and 261 electoral votes for Trump (instead of 232).
Under such a rule Biden and Trump would have each won 8 of Georgia’s 16 electoral votes; Biden would have gotten 36 of California’s 55 electoral votes and Trump would have gotten 19; Biden would have gotten 18 of Texas’ 38 electoral votes and Trump would have gotten 20.
On the other hand, if the country’s total of 538 electoral votes were awarded in strict proportion to the national popular vote Biden would have gotten 281 electoral votes (52.3% X 538) and Trump 257 electoral votes (47.7% X 538).
Under an award of electoral votes on a state-by-state basis in proportion to each state’s popular vote, Biden would have received 277 electoral votes, not 281, and Trump would have received 261 electoral votes, not 257.
How This Would Have Worked For The 2016 Election
I also ran the numbers for the 2016 election and under this mechanism Trump would have received 268 electoral votes and Clinton would have gotten 270, which is far less than Clinton would have received if the electoral votes were issued in direct proportion to the popular vote — 51.1% Clinton Popular Vote X 538 = 275 electoral votes; 48.9% Trump Popular Vote X 538 = 263 electoral votes.
Advantages Of Making Each State’s Electoral Votes Proportional To That State’s Popular Vote
This proportional electoral-vote system would have the following advantages:
There would no longer be any “battleground states” meaning that candidates would campaign across the country as a whole
Changes in small numbers of votes one way or the other in a state would have no material effect
There would be no incentive for recounts or court fights over small numbers of votes
This would still preserve the allocation of votes state by state instead of by the popular vote on a national basis.
Each state awarding its electoral votes in proportion to that state’s popular votes would give us a far more predictable and reliable system in contrast to the current system where a candidate’s margin of victory or defeat bears little or no relationship to the total number of votes that candidate received.
How Could This Be Done?
Conceivably, such a plan could be adopted by the states as an interstate compact or Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution could be amended to require that each state assign its electoral votes to the Presidential candidates in proportion to the popular votes each such candidate received in that state.
We Must Fix This System
One thing is clear, the current system is so unpredictable, fragile, prone to manipulation, litigation, disputes, fraud and corruption that it must be changed.
— David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
To see a searchable list of all David Grace’s columns in chronological order, CLICK HERE
To see a list of David Grace’s columns sorted by topic/subject matter, CLICK HERE.
Follow David Grace on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/davidgraceauth | https://medium.com/david-grace-columns-organized-by-topic/the-electoral-college-delivers-unpredictable-almost-random-results-but-it-can-be-fixed-aaf5f4632a49 | [] | 2021-01-13 15:12:25.882000+00:00 | ['Electoral College', 'Elections', 'Dg008', 'Politics', 'Voting'] |
This Skywalk Goes 100 Feet Above Redwoods | Northern California is virtually synonymous with redwood forest groves; they’re the same swaths of trees under dire threat from the climate crisis (though, nevertheless, are resilient). Now, there’s a new skywalk — think elevated hiking passage — at Sequoia Park Zoo that takes people on a short trek through the canopies of these famed trees… some 100 feet above the forest floor.
Opened earlier this summer, the Redwood Sky Walk has delighted guests with aerial perches of the namesake trees, previously unavailable to them. Take for example part of the trail called the Ascent Ramp. One of its legs is nearly identical to the height of the tallest known living coastal redwoods at 383 feet. (The experiment through the said passageway is dubbed a virtual “redwood climb.”)
Also, because there are no stairs on the Redwood Sky Walk, this soon-to-be iconic passage is mostly ADA accessible, sans parts of the Adventure Bridges, which is a 369-foot segment off Spruce Supr.
Speaking of the Adventure Bridges, the 36-inch wide walkways have square open mesh decking and, though it is safe, walkers will feel more exposed to the natural surroundings and more aware of their height; the passageway will even sway under light winds.
Photo: Courtesy of Redwood Sky Walk
Both the Ascent Ramp and Launch Deck — the ADA-accessible start point of the skywalk — are wood structures, with concrete foundations, the walkways themselves laid with non-slip surfaces; handrails are found on the structure and metal panels are slotted between posts to ensure safety. Because of the Redwood Sky Walk’s structural integrity, no helmets or harnesses are needed to traverse the short hike.
That said: You may need to take a few deep breaths while some eight stories above the ground. But with the viewsheds in front of those who choose to brave this aerial passage, taking those long inhales is totally worth it.
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For more information on the Sequoia Redwood Sky Walk, which is accessible only through the Sequoia Park Zoo, visit redwoodskywalk.com. | https://thebolditalic.com/a-skywalk-just-opened-up-that-goes-100-feet-above-the-sequoia-redwoods-8e3210b57539 | ['Matt Charnock'] | 2021-07-26 20:45:42.486000+00:00 | ['Bay Area', 'Redwoods', 'San Francisco', 'Climate Crisis', 'Skyway'] |
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Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/stseusp/climate-digest-2-6-78198436a51c | ['Sts Center'] | 2020-12-13 10:52:18.637000+00:00 | ['Coca Cola', 'Climate Change', 'Digest', 'Ecology', 'Climate'] |
Give Your Dad What He Really Wants This Father’s Day | Johnny Carson with his wife and three boys, 1958
Father’s Day is Sunday, June 20th, and fathers everywhere deserve to have a great weekend — considering where we were as a country last year. While things are looking it up, it is important to make dad feel appreciated for being hard-working, fun and helping out around the house.
Below, you will se an assortment of gifts curated for the modern dad. There’s something for every dad…ranging from cool styles, sweet digs, self care and more! We’ll continue to update this page as we get closer to June 20th.
Essentials Just For Him
Dad will have peace of mind with the Ring Video Doorbell Wired, Ring’s smallest and most affordable video doorbell yet. He can check in on his front door anytime, and even connect it with an Amazon Echo Show to hear, see, and speak to any visitors right from his mobile phone or Alexa-enabled device.
With the all-new Echo Buds featuring Amazon’s custom-designed Active Noise Cancellation, Dad can enjoy all the things he likes to do around the house while listening to his favorite playlist or podcast. And, with hands-free access to Alexa, he can easily set reminders, check his calendar, or make a call by simply saying, “Alexa, call Dad.”
The recently released Echo Show 10 is the perfect gift for dad. With a screen that’s designed to move with you, he can take Zoom calls, follow along with recipes, watch his favorite shows on Prime Video, Netflix, and Hulu, and more — all without losing sight of the screen. The device also doubles as a home monitoring camera, so he can securely access a live feed of the camera from the Alexa app while he is away.
Summer is here and relaxation is this year’s theme as we adapt to our new normal. From the stress of once again battling work week traffic to completing final term papers, Motorola razr is calling all dads and grads to take advantage of its latest deal.
Available now through June 17, Motorola is offering $200 off its razr for tech-savvy dads for a chance to get in on the latest accessory. Originally $1,399.99, the razr is now available for $1,199.99. Families looking for last minute gifts can head over to Motorola, Best Buy and Amazon.
HERO in Niani, Bergamot, Rosemary, Cardamom. Smells like: Creamy vanilla, toasted tonka beans, a sweet yet subtle tasty delight. The Man It Was Inspired By: Mansa Qu (14th Century)
Show dad how important he is this Father’s Day with a candle from Nomad Noé inspired by transformative figures in history. The sustainable range of non-toxic, vegan candles are hand-poured in the US and housed in reusable bisque porcelain vessels that glow from within when lit.
Nomad Noé embodies the spirit of wanderlust with a variety of vibrant scents that draw inspiration from all over the world.
Diffusers offer a way to keep any apartment big or small smelling impeccable at all times. Not to mention, they are a much safer alternative to candles. L’or de Seraphine diffusers are housed in beautifully designed ceramic vessels, and there is one for everyone’s style and scent preference.
Having your home feel like a personal sanctuary is more important now than ever before, especially for dads working from home. As a bonus, the ceramic vessel can be repurposed following use (a pencil cup comes to mind!).
With a unique mix of Kapok fibers and reactive memory foam, the Layla Kapok Pillow will mold to your comfort while holding its shape throughout the night with its incredibly soft cover that is a breathable polyester/viscose blend with CuTec® performance copper fibers so you never have to flip this pillow over to the cool side as its fibers make sure your body heat is naturally pulled away from your face and neck for a cooling effect that prevents overheating while you sleep.
The new product is the Layla’s first ever comforter. It’s made with a luxurious 300 thread count, 100% cotton exterior, is hypoallergenic, thermal regulating and features down-alternative cluster fill. Designed to look beautiful and feel exceptional even without a duvet cover, the Layla Down Alternative Comforter also has corner loops for easy fastening should consumers choose to use one.
Monty Storage Bench by harmati
“Teddy” fabric has been trending for the past year as cozy became a wardrobe priority, and now harmati, a new furniture and décor brand delivering stylish yet functional products, has released a sheepskin storage bench to bring this trending look into your home.
Equal parts curvy and comfortable, the upholstered Monty Storage Bench features a removable top lid revealing a large storage box. The neutral-tones, clean lines and solid wood or metal legs provide an understated modern feel. Its soft sheepskin upholstery and high-density foam cushion make this bench the perfect addition to any room in need of comfortable seat and/or additional storage.
GoodSkin MD is a gender-neutral skincare brand offering six products that are scientifically formulated to enhance consumers skincare regime. GoodSkin MD products improve skin resiliency and help break the cycle of stressed skin for a healthier looking complexion in just one week. All GoodSkin MD products are dermatologist-tested, contain hypoallergenic formulas, and specifically designed for sensitive skin.
Using Asia’s most precious anti-aging ingredient, red ginseng, this K-Beauty brand designed a skincare line specifically formulated for men. The Red Ginseng Homme Power collection recently launched and is available on Amazon!
This kit is packed with antioxidants and anti-inflammatory properties which help target intense moisturization, soft application, and a non-sticky absorbent formula great for that post shave feel. DONGINBI’s products are gentle enough to use on freshly shaved skin so Dad can always be looking his best.
A peptide-rich, multifunctional serum helps reduce the visible signs of aging and keeps skin looking healthy. The silky liquid texture allows powerful, efficacious ingredients to be readily absorbed to help improve skin tone, help reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles, and help protect from future damage.
SELF/ish Skincare has launched their brand new Beard Oil! This lightweight formula featuring ingredients like Squalane, Jojoba Seed Oil, and Argan Oil conditions your beard, helping to prevent breakage and maintain vibrancy while maximizing moisture and nourishing skin. The blend of botanical extracts helps to tame frizz and overall look of your beard.
As with all SELF/ish products, Beard Oil is clean, vegan, cruelty free and 100% made in the USA — from product to packaging!
For the earth-conscious Dad, this waterless body wash system can be personalized through an online quiz based on Dad’s preferences. Now he won’t have to steal Mom’s body wash in the shower because he will have his own custom scent. Youbody was created by former product developer for AXE, Heather Fritzsche, who set out to design an eco-friendly alternative to body wash that is unlike anything else on the market.
In addition to creating less water waste, you can make the product your own with 8 different scent packets. The packets break down into clean energy in just 120 days and are sulfate-free, sulfite-free, paraben-free, and hypoallergenic. The pods are made to last for 2+ years and dishwasher safe for proper cleaning.
Smoothing out a tradesman’s rough edges is no easy task — takes more than drugstore suds to wash out hard work. Lucky for you, the Spit & Polish Datenite Gift Set can get any grit-covered guy presentable for fine dining in a jiffy. This spiff-him-up survival kit includes whisker-smoothing beard oil, odor-ousting natural deodorant and a nifty tin of solid cologne that’s perfect for precision application. All three grooming essentials are made with natural ingredients that soften, moisturize and all-around rejuvenate your hardworking dad.
Scraggly beards are for roughnecks and vagabonds — but even those folks are taking proper care of their manes these days. If you know a neglected beard, you can gently guide its owner on a better path with a Spit & Polish Beard Gift Set. Inside he’ll find Kodiak Klean Beard Wash, Noble Beast Beard Balm plus Datenite Beard Oil and, in tandem, they whip whiskers into their finest state possible.
Perfect to pack for fishing trips, tailgates and more — this stool features durable water repellent fabric, a sturdy powder-coated steel frame and bi-fold construction that’s easy to set up or pack up.
Leatherman recently launched the first new multi-tool model since the FREE launch in 2019. Inspired by Tim Leatherman’s original PST multi-tool, the new Bond is the result of 38 years’ worth of innovation and incredible moments made.
The Bond has 14 tools packed into a lightweight, compact multitool, perfect for Dads on the go. Not only is a Leatherman multitool super versatile, functional and handy, but through the Leatherman Custom Shop you can add personalized designs, engraved messages and fun patterns to make a truly one-of-a-kind gift for fathers.
Wish Dad a “Happy Father’s Day” in his most fluent language: jerky and dad jokes. From Ghost Pepper to Sarsaparilla to Thai Satay and more, the Dad-vent Jerky Calendar hides twenty-five tender, tasty jerky bites hidden behind twenty-five punny jokes that at least he will love.
As we start to see loved ones again after a year of social distancing, it’s time to start thinking of the perfect Father’s Day gift for Dad that will bring the whole family together. Before you pick up another mug or tie, Sagamore Spirit, maker of award-winning Maryland-style rye whiskey, is sharing a limited-edition Sagamore Spirit Summer Barbeque Gift Set for Father’s Day that makes the perfect gift for whiskey newcomers and aficionados alike.
Packed with everything Dad needs to host the ultimate Summer BBQ, Sagamore Spirit’s Summer Barbeque Gift Set includes a bottle of their Signature 83-proof rye whiskey, an apron, a grill set, a 16oz tumbler, Sagamore Spirit’s Spicy BBQ Sauce, and their Sweet BBQ Sauce. Whether enjoying neat, on the rocks, or mixed in a cocktail, Sagamore Spirit’s Signature rye whiskey is a smooth and sippable rye that Dad can enjoy during his next cookout.
Hudson Whiskey and Little Pie Company teamed up for the second year in a row to create a Father’s Day gift any dad, but especially those with a sweet-tooth, would appreciate — a limited-edition Hudson Bourbon Pecan Pie!
Like Little Pie Company, Hudson Whiskey — the first-ever bourbon produced in New York State — focuses on locally-made quality over quantity. Hudson’s Bright Lights, Big Bourbon brings a subtle sweetness, and irresistible bold and flavorful taste to this one-of-a-kind pie.
Made by hand using ingredients from local New York family farms, the pie features crunchy pecans marinated in Bright Lights, Big Bourbon plus cinnamon and sugar to enhance the warm, caramel notes of the nuts. Each hand-made pie features an incredibly crisp crust, rich and tasty filling and a hint of cayenne pepper sprinkled on top for a little extra kick!
Available now for nationwide shipping, online pick up and local NYC Delivery at LittlePieCompany.com.
For the ultimate craft beer lovin’ Dad with a sweet tooth, Hilliards features the Craft Beer Collection combining its popular Craft Beer Brittle and its award-winning Craft Beer Caramels for a salty, sweet and hoppy treat for the beer enthusiast. Infused with Shovel Town Double IPA Beer, this sweet selection of caramels and brittle is a winning gift for the Beer lover. Caramels and Brittle can also be purchased separately.
Kettle Brand’s Bougiest chip yet, Truffle + Sea Salt is earthy, oaky and downright decadent. Cut thick and flavored with a boldness that’ll make dad consider doing a little truffle hunting of his own.
Ingredients include local, full-fat Icelandic milk and dark chocolate cookies featuring 70% dark chocolate from Tanzania, made by local bakery Brauð & Co. for a unique Icelandic twist on a classic. In the words of Omnom founder Kjartan Gíslason, “It’s an inside-out chocolate bar where you get all the cream you want and top it off with two powerhouse cookies that you didn’t know you needed until now.” Yum.
The Dad Who Has Style
Eco Eyewear Nassau
Want to look like the coolest dad in town? These will certainly help. Nassau is an aviator design that comes in four different colors that will guarantee to pop out: Gun Metal, Light Blue, Green/Gold, and Gold.
Alpha Industries has best sellers and latest collaborations just in time for Father’s Day! Some of the highlighted styles, include their iconic Heritage MA-1 Bomber Jacket, Cargo shorts and Vest from their latest UNFRM x Alpha collaboration, as well as accessories such as the Playboy x Alpha Mission Backpack — Alpha has the perfect pieces for the stylish dad!
This Father’s Day, let’s keep dad comfortable and cool in Wilson Sportswear, the new performance-based clothing line from Wilson Sporting Goods that is sure to speak to the sporty and casual sides of dad. Key styles from the collection include the Millennium Crewneck Sweatshirt, Metro Track Pant, Midway Travel Pants, and the Newport Zip Henley with new items released bi-weekly, exclusively at Wilson.com in the US.
If dad loves the earth and looking good, this shirt is just for him. Made with hemp and organically grown cotton, the Westerlands Shirt has a lower impact on the planet and is ready for days on the trail and nights on the town.
Finally, a lightweight linen shirt that resists wrinkles far better than traditional linen. Its wrinkle-resistant finish lets you spend less time ironing and more time doing what you love. Plus, it’s easy to care for. Just wash, dry, and look great!
Eco-friendly unisex short sleeve resort shirt with strokes of the work of Valentino Cortázar “El beso”. Wear it open or closed. It has a front pocket.
Traditional blue jeans will always be a staple in your closet, and DEVIL-DOG Dungarees has the best quality jeans at affordable prices. The brand’s athletic, straight, slim, slim-straight, and boot cut are all equally as popular. Whether they are a part of your everyday work uniform or a casual date night, you’re sure to find the perfect pair from DEVIL-DOG’s bestsellers.
All DEVIL-DOG styles feature performance-enhancing materials carefully selected for each fit. Styles come in at an affordable price of $79 and available at devil-dog.com and nordstrom.com.
Classic twill shorts in a basic khaki wash makes for the perfect spring/summer staple to be worn with just about anything. The soft and thick brushed twill gives a premium look and feel, while the slim contemporary fit that ends just above the knee ensure a stylish look that’s both easy and sophisticated.
Florsheim CROSSOVER KNIT LACE TO TOE SNEAKER
The first thing that strikes you about the Florsheim Crossover Knit Lace To Toe Sneaker is its stylish mix of materials, colors, and textures. Try it on, however, and what really stands out is the sock-like comfort of its knit upper, fully cushioned Comfortech footbed, and Flexsole technology.
The iconic ProWalker is the shoe that started a walking revolution — and these days, walking is more crucial to wellness than ever. These limited edition shoes have the vintage style you love, with exceedingly comfortable construction, expert craftsmanship, and high-quality materials. Lace up these men’s walking shoes and get your move on.
Herschel Supply Co., recently launched their Eco Spring 2021 collection. Featuring a variety of sustainable Herschel signature silhouettes, the styles are reimagined with recycled fabrics and industry-leading recycled materials from the liner to label. This collection serves as an evolution of the initially launched assortment earlier this year.
The Eco Spring 2021 Collection launched with Herschel signatures such as the Classic XL backpack, Heritage backpack, Nova Mid-Volume backpack, City Mid-Volume backpack, Retreat backpack, Herschel Little America backpack, and Novel duffle.
Priced from $69.99-$119.00, each style in the collection is made from anywhere between 11–22 post-consumer water bottles that were collected, chipped, cleaned, melted, spun, woven into fabric, and sewn into bags. All silhouettes feature 100% recycled body fabric, liners, labels, webbing, and zipper tapes.
Share A Drink With Him
CÎROC VS Fine French Brandy
his Father’s Day, CÎROC VS Fine French Brandy is recognizing the inspirational and one-of-a-kind dads and raising a glass to the positive, long-lasting impact they leave behind. From now until June 10, CÎROC VS is offering people the opportunity to say Happy Father’s Day to their dad with a billboard in their city.
To enter, residents of legal drinking age in Dallas, Atlanta and Charlotte only need to upload a photo and share a ‘Very Special’ message of gratitude to their dad using #CIROCVSContest for #VerySpecialDads on Instagram. One lucky winner will then be selected to have their message and photo amplified for all to see. Learn more on how to enter by visiting @CIROC or win.ciroc.com.
As a brand that champions community and purposeful celebrations, CÎROC VS stands out as a brandy made to be enjoyed during very special moments like this Father’s Day. Toast to fatherhood all month long and gift your dad a luxurious-tasting spirit by ordering your bottle of CÎROC VS today at Drizly.com.
The Macallan Double Cask 12 Years Old forms part of our Double Cask range which marries the classic Macallan style and the unmistakable sweetness of American oak. This is a fully rounded single malt in perfect balance, with flavors of honey, citrus and ginger.
The Macallan Double Cask 18 Years Old
The Macallan Double Cask 18 Years Old, a perfectly balanced single malt whisky matured for 18 years in both American and European sherry seasoned oak casks. Sherry seasoned American oak adds delicate vanilla to the subtle spice of European oak, delivering a whisky with a sweeter, warmer taste and character.
The Glenlivet Illicit Still
The Glenlivet 12 Year Old Illicit Still tells the story of how George Smith illegally distilled his whisky in hand-crafted, small copper stills in a hidden bothy located in the remote Glenlivet Valley. He smuggled his whisky across the Scottish Highlands in order to avoid the excisemen and subsequently created the iconic Scotch that’s loved the world over. Smith’s whisky reshaped conventions at the time and is the origin of Speyside’s signature fruity and floral style. Inspired by this distinctive style, this limited edition pays homage to where it all began.
The design for The Glenlivet 12 Year Old Illicit Still is inspired by the oldest bottle in the brand’s archives, and features copper highlights that represent the hand-crafted stills used to illicitly produce the whisky in the 1800s. It is non-chill filtered and has a higher than average alcohol content of 48% ABV, inspired by the traditional methods of the time. The Glenlivet’s iconic fruity and floral style is also intensified in the new limited-edition Scotch that is characterised by tropical and sweet notes while having an exceptionally long and smooth finish.
Jameson Black Barrel with Waterford Old Fashioned Glasses
A combination of pot still and grain whiskeys, Jameson Black Barrel Select Reserve Irish Whiskey is matured in sherry and bourbon oak casks to unveil a complex palate of sherry nuttiness, vanilla, and creamy notes.
Unlike other Jameson whiskeys, Black Barrel is aged in twice-charred casks, producing a blend of rich flavors ranging from fruity hints of apple and nectarine to the creamy tones of the grain whiskey to the piquant flare of the pot still. Accompanied by Waterford “The Markham Collection” glassware, Markham lends an air of sophistication to any event, or Father’s Day celebration, with stemware featuring a classic cut pattern design and sculpted stems.
Russell’s Reserve 13 Year Old
Russell’s Reserve is unveiling a new limited-release Bourbon. Russell’s Reserve 13 Year Old is a 114.8-proof Kentucky Straight Bourbon. Master Distiller Eddie Russell aged this one-of-a-kind release for at least 13 years, maintained the barrel proof and opted not to chill filter the whiskey, creating a more robust mouthfeel and authentic bourbon experience.
The barrel-proof bourbon coats the palate with sweet and warming flavors rising from the harmonious marriage of dried dark fruit and charred confectionary notes. Those sweet and woody notes give way to rich flavors of honey, chocolate and nougat throughout, followed by a strong and lasting finish.
Wild Turkey Master’s Keep Bottled in Bond
This 17-year-old Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey is designated Bottled-In-Bond, a certification that guarantees a strict production process and ensures incomparable flavor and consistency. To carry the bonded label, the bourbon must be the product of one distilling season from one distillery, aged in a federally bonded warehouse and artfully bottled at 100 proof. Master Distiller Eddie Russell identified this unique, high aged liquid and pledged to share it with discerning whiskey connoisseurs around the world.
A smooth and sweet combination of warm brown sugar and cinnamon, BSB is guaranteed to heat things up — and keep the celebration going all night long. And with the Jamie Foxx stamp of approval (who announced his ownership of the spirits brand in March), it makes the perfect gift for dad.
X by Glenmorangie
In an effort to diversify the whisky category and offer an approachable expression to new whisky drinkers, Glenmorangie worked with top bartenders to craft X by Glenmorangie. Paired with your favorite mixer, X by Glenmorangie creates effortlessly delicious drinks.
Inspired by the flavor possibilities by mixing whisky, Dr Bill Lumsden, Director of Whisky Creation for Glenmorangie, set out to craft a sweeter style single malt that, unlike other whiskys, lends itself to a series of refreshingly simple serves — each needing just 2–4 ingredients — perfect for enjoying on date night, at a BBQ or sipping on at karaoke.
The new collector’s edition is available on ReserveBar.com through the duration of the tournament for a limited time only and features a premium, 19 year aged blend with the US Open bottle design. Conceived by Dewar’s award-winning Master Blender Stephanie Macleod, the new premium bottle features whiskies that have a minimum age of 19 years and are finished in ex-American Bourbon casks.
Offering consumers around the country the opportunity to celebrate the annual tournament even if they aren’t able to take in the action at Torrey Pines, the resulting liquid features supple and complex notes of toffee popcorn and soft panna cotta balanced with floral notes of freshly cut grass.
Monkey Shoulder Blended Malt Scotch Whisky
Refreshingly approachable and tailor made for mixing, Monkey Shoulder’s commitment to the unconventional is bringing great Scotch to a new generation. Monkey Shoulder is made from 100 percent malted barley — not a drop of grain is used — and aged exclusively in first-fill Bourbon barrels for exceptional smoothness.
Tullamore D.E.W. is the second largest Irish whiskey brand in the world and is the original triple blend. With an intriguing smooth, yet complex, character, Tullamore D.E.W. is triple distilled, but is also a unique blend of all three types of Irish whiskeys: pot still, malt and grain. As a result, the liquid is three times smoother with an added gentle complexity.
Premium whiskies made in the USA and packaged in an unbreakable stainless steel can that chills fast and goes where glass can’t — dad will love the taste (choose from Original, Spiced Cherry, Peach Tea or Apple Crisp), and be able to pack it for wild weekends knowing the can was built to take a beating.
Angel’s Envy Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey
Angel’s Envy Kentucky Straight Bourbon is finished in port wine casks for an award-winning spirit. We guide each batch’s conditioning, blending our handcrafted bourbon in small batches of 8 to 12 barrels at a time. Once it’s deemed ready, we finish our bourbon in ruby port wine casks, which adds subtly distinct flavor nuances that enhance the whiskey without challenging it. Our port finishing process lasts between three to six months, depending on taste.
Bib & Tucker Bourbon
The phrase “bib and tucker” in the 1880’s meant to don your finest attire for celebrations, but when your dad’s attire has been the same for years — despite all of those neckties you gave him — the same is probably true for his bourbon of choice. It’s time to help change his style with Bib & Tucker Bourbon.
Father’s Day will be here before we know it, make this year different by thanking him for all that he has done with a bottle (or two) of Bib & Tucker Bourbon — a bourbon that is as special as he is.
George Dickel Bottled in Bond Distilling Season Spring 2007
George Dickel recently announced the release of the latest vintage of their highly acclaimed Bottled in Bond whisky series, Spring 2007, which will be available as a limited-time offering. This bottling is the first offering of the series from a spring distilling season, and follows the releases of the brand’s top-rated and award-winning Fall 2005 and Fall 2008 whiskies (including Fall 2008 winning Double Gold at the San Francisco International Spirits Competition last week)!
This powerhouse release of George Dickel Bottled in Bond is a 13-year-old whisky, offering the bold and balanced profile that made this whisky series a fan favorite, highlighted by tantalizing notes of cherry. At 100 proof, Bottled in Bond fans can expect to best enjoy this whisky neat or on the rocks in addition to mixing it into their favorite classic cocktails like a Perfect Manhattan thoughtfully garnished with an orange peel to further amplify the fruit notes found in the liquid.
Courvoisier VS
Courvoisier VS is a youthful and lively blend of Cognac, delivering a spectrum of sensations with every sip, making it the perfect gift for a new dad with a love for custom cocktails and convenience. Extraordinarily versatile, Courvoisier VS is delicious with simple mixers such as ginger ale, lemonade or fruit juices and is perfect for creating batch cocktails and punches.
Courvoisier VSOP
If your Dad is the life of the party, look no further than Courvoisier VSOP — a blend of several crus with a perfect balance between Fins Bois, Grande and Petite Champagnes, at the peak of its aromatic potential. Cocktail culture is on the rise and consumers are exploring clever cocktails using Cognac more than ever — allow Dad to impress his guests with this award-winning cognac and master mixology skills (Note: mixology skills not included, but VSOP can be enjoyed neat as well!)
Courvoisier XO
Inspire a trip to the Cognac region of France and present dad with the gift of liquid luxury, Courvoisier X.O. This complex blend of Cognac is a tribute to fathers everywhere — harvested, aged, and bottled in the Cognac region of France, XO is considered one of the finest spirits in the world. With hope on the horizon and vaccinations on the rise, this is a great way to get dad thinking about life after lockdown — and planning a trip to Château de Courvoisier, where he can bottle his own personal eau-de-vie.
BACARDÍ Gran Reserva Diez
For the fancy Dad who likes his spirits extra-aged, we recommend BACARDÍ Gran Reserva Diez. A master blender’s reserve, BACARDÍ Gran Reserva Diez is barrel aged for a minimum of ten years. Best enjoyed neat or on the rocks, this bottle has a dark golden hue that boasts bright notes of banana, pear and tropical melon balanced with caramelized vanilla and oak, resulting in a premium rum with complex flavors your Dad is sure to enjoy.
BACARDÍ Reserva Ocho
For the spirits connoisseur and budding at-home bartender Dad, gift BACARDÍ Reserva Ocho — a premium aged rum to show Dad just how special he is to you this Father’s Day. Based on the original recipe from the Bacardi family reserves developed in 1862, BACARDÍ Reserva Ocho has a rich golden color and warming notes of butterscotch, nutmeg and dried apricots.
Barrel aged for a minimum of eight years with a rich, velvety body — the longer aging process sparks an additional layer of complex flavors from the barrel. Best enjoyed neat, on the rocks— Dad is sure to feel the love while sipping on this premium rum.
The Equiano Rum Co.
Equiano Rum is another great option for Father’s Day. The world’s first African and Caribbean rum, Equiano Rum begins its journey at Gray’s Distillery in Mauritius — a small island off the coast of Madagascar — before traveling to the infamous FourSquare Distillery in Barbados, where the two unique rums are perfectly blended & bottled. The rum then ships out across the US and Europe for all to enjoy.
Cruzan’s Single Barrel Rum is an easy, practical and affordable gift for any dad! Aged for up to 12 years this rum is bottled one cask at a time and has a blend of caramel sweetness with oak. To make things easier for dad it is best enjoyed neat or simply on the rocks!
The robust Black Barrel blend is crafted from a blend of intense and aromatic rums, distilled in traditional copper pot and column stills. The rum is matured between 3 to 7 years in American Whiskey casks and then, finished for 6 months in deeply charred bourbon casks. This robust and bold rum offers rich notes of spices, gingerbread and toffee.
Try mixing up Black Barrel within a Black & Stormy, Manhattan, or Rum Punch for an original take on your favorite classic cocktails. When you buy dad a bottle, you also contribute $5 to help save our oceans through Mount Gay’s partnership with 4ocean for World Ocean Month, throughout the end of June. More information can be found HERE.
Cointreau is the iconic orange liqueur at the heart of more than 500 of the world’s most celebrated cocktails, including The Original Margarita, The Cosmopolitan, and The Sidecar. The House of Cointreau was founded in 1849 in Angers, France, where Edouard Cointreau perfected the recipe. Blended with sweet and bitter orange peels, Cointreau has a unique, balanced flavor beloved by mixologists and bartenders worldwide.
Grand Marnier Cordon Rogue
Grand Marnier’s signature expression Cordon Rouge is lovely when simply sipped neat or enjoyed in one of our signature summer cocktails, such as the Garibaldier, Grand Club or Larchmont. With attractive orange notes, nuances of candied zests and vanilla flavors from the Cognac, its flavor is full and ample, with bitter orange aromas balanced by Cognac notes of hazelnuts and toffee.
Grand Marnier Cuvée Louis-Alexandre
A step up from the signature Cordon Rouge and a unique blend of refined V.S.O.P. cognac and Liqueur D ’Orange, the cognacs used in this premium Cuvée come from the finest growing areas in the Cognac region. It contains 82% VSOP cognac from the 5 best crus is best served on the rocks or in Grand Marnier’s signature cocktail, the Grand Louis
NOLET’S Silver is an undeniably modern take on gin, reflecting the tastes and preferences of a new generation of gin drinkers. The refreshing floral and fruit-forward flavor highlights a unique combination of botanicals never before used in gin. Only 117 Calories per 1.5 oz. Serve, No Sugar, No Carbs and NON-GMO Project Verified.
Distilled in the Isle of Islay, off the coast of Scotland, The Botanist Islay Dry Gin is an ultra-premium gin distilled with 22 hand-foraged botanicals, wild to the area. Known for being the heart of classic cocktails including The Martini, The Botanist & Tonic and The Negroni, The Botanist Islay Dry Gin is a bar cart must-have.
GREY GOOSE Vodka
Treat Dad to a martini shaken, stirred, or however he likes it, by gifting him a bottle of Grey Goose vodka. The super-premium French vodka is smooth, rounded, and incredibly versatile, and pairs perfectly with everything from a splash of Benedictine and a lemon twist to your favorite bloody mary mix.
Made from Polish rye, purified water and a distillation process by fire, Belvedere contains zero additives, in accordance with the legal regulations of Polska Vodka that dictate nothing can be added, is certified kosher and is gluten free.
Produced in one of the world’s longest operating polish distilleries that has been making vodka since 1910, Belvedere’s Master Rye Distillers draw from a 600-year polish vodka-making history to artfully craft Polish rye into an extraordinary vodka of distinct taste and character.
Five X the party. Imported from Sweden and distilled five times from Swedish winter wheat.
Avión Reserva 44
Typically served neat, Avión Reserva 44 is the perfect, elevated sipping tequila for Father’s Day celebrations or the tequila-lover on your gift list. Reserva 44 Extra Añejo offers the smooth, complex taste of luscious fruits and American oak paired with an aroma of warm vanilla and spices.
DeLeón Tequila Añejo
Aged over a year in a combination of American Oak and delicate French Oak wine casks creating a balanced profile with vanilla, dried fruit and a hint of spice on the finish. With a nice taste and finish that contains rich caramelized agave balanced with resinous oak highlighted with rich caramel and complex noses of dried tobacco and tea. Finished with a whisper of leather and brown spice.
Bently Heritage distillers foraged locally in the high desert east of Lake Tahoe for inspiration to help create Juniper Grove, which is made with five different botanicals, triple distilled and finished in copper pot stills. The traditional dry gin style makes it ideal for classic cocktails like martinis, but with a singular story that gives any cocktail a twist.
Two Creeks Pinot Noir blends grapes from the Annahala and Apple Barn Estate vineyards in Mendocino County’s Anderson Valley, an appellation renowned for its superb Pinots. Fragrant aromas of sweet black cherry, raspberry and rose petal introduce the rich, pure fruit of this fresh and lively Pinot Noir.
The first-ever Cabernet Sauvignon from the brand, this wine reveals sultry aromas of muddled red fruits, raspberry, and dried strawberry with hints of light baking spices. Swirling brings up notes of crème brûlée with black tea, mocha, and cocoa powder. The palate is round and polished, with black currants and plum purée accented by vanilla bean and balanced by fine tannins. Hints of dark chocolate and pressed berries linger on the finish.
It’s summertime, which means temperatures are rising, beaches are opening and dining outdoors isn’t just required, but desired. Whether on the beach, by the pool or at the grill, have a drink in hand that is just as refreshing: something fresh, new and vibrant. ETTORE is offering a range of wines for any and all palettes that are bound to become your new go-to summertime sips.
This features a nice dark core of cassis and creamed plum notes laced with violet, graphite and juniper hints. The finish flows clean, with the graphite edge extending as long as the fruit for lovely balance.
2018 Double Diamond Cabernet Sauvignon
This is a full-bodied red wine that boasts aromas of Mexican chocolate, nutmeg, and violets. This wine features flavorful notes of black currant, blackberry reduction, and allspice, creating a sleek and voluptuous sensation with silky and smooth tannins to make for a complex structure. Overall, this wine beautifully integrates decadent fruits with exotic spices and will surely be enjoyed by all wine enthusiasts.
Mount Veeder Winery 2018 Cabernet Sauvignon
This is a wonderfully rich wine that perfectly accentuates Father’s Day and summer BBQ dishes like filet mignon or pork chops without falling flat. The unique rugged mountain conditions on Napa Valley’s Mount Veeder produce grapes with intensely concentrated dark fruit and rich tannins. The perfect bottle for wine enthusiasts who savor a bold flavor, Mount Veeder Winery’s Cabernet Sauvignon has notes of red fruit, peppercorn, and olive which fill the palate and lead to a long, lingering finish.
NOLET’S Silver House Gimlet
Ingredients
1.5 oz. NOLET’S Silver Gin
0.75 oz. Fresh Lime Juice
0.75 oz. Simple Syrup
2 Dashes Celery Bitters
1 Lime Wedge
Pinch of Fresh Dill
Method
Add a pinch of dill into a chilled coupe or Martini glass. Squeeze the juice from a lime wedge over the dill. In an ice-filled shaker add NOLET’S Silver, lime juice and simple syrup, and shake vigorously until well chilled. Strain into glass, add 2 dashes of bitters and garnish with a sprig of fresh dill.
BLUE BULLDOG
Ingredients
1 1/2 parts SVEDKA Blue Raspberry
3/4 part Blue Curaçao
3/4 part Fresh Lemon Juice
Dash Simple Syrup
Method
Combine all ingredients in a blender. Add ½ cup ice and blend on high for 20 seconds. Pour contents into a margarita glass. Garnish with a lime disc and optional salted rim.
The Honeypot
Ingredients
Created by Erik Delanoy, Bartender
2.0 oz The Macallan Double Cask 12 Years Old
3/4 oz Fresh Lemon Juice
1/2 oz Murray’s Chestnut Honey
1 Dash Angostura Bitters
Method
Add all ingredients into a cocktail shaker, add ice, shake until chilled, strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice.
Tan Fresco
Ingredients
1.5 oz Patrón Silver
1 oz Cucumber Juice
.75 oz Fresh lime juice
.75 oz Pineapple gum syrup
.25 oz Fino Sherry
2 dashes Ancho Verde
Method
Shake all ingredients except for soda and fine strain into a highball glass. Top with soda and garnish with a cucumber ribbon and sliced pepper.
Boulevardier
Ingredients
0.75 parts Campari
0.75 parts 1757 Vermouth di Torino Rosso
1.5 parts Russell’s Reserve 10-Year-Old Bourbon
Method
Combine Russell’s Reserve 10 Year Old Bourbon, 1757 Vermouth di Torino and Campari in a glass, stir until combined. Pour over large ice cube, garnish with orange slide and enjoy!
Old Fashion
Ingredients
2 parts Wild Turkey Bourbon
¼ oz. simple syrup
2 dashes Angostura bitters
Method
Stir together ingredients. Pour over ice into rocks glass and garnish with orange peel. Recommended with Wild Turkey Bourbon, Wild Turkey 101, Russell’s Reserve 10 Year, Russell’s Reserve Single Barrel or Russell’s Reserve Single Barrel Rye. For a spicier kick, use Wild Turkey Rye, Wild Turkey 101 Rye or Russell’s Reserve 6 Year Rye.
Belvedere Pear & Ginger Spritz
Ingredients
1 oz Belvedere Pear & Ginger
1 TSP Honey Water
1 oz Soda Water
1 oz Ginger Ale
1 dash Orange Bitters
Cucumber Ribbon
Sprig of Rosemary
Method
Place all ingredients in Spritz glass over cubed ice and stir gently to combine. Garnish.
Moët Courtside Crush
Moët & Chandon is now the official champagne of the NBA!
Ingredients
2 Dashes Angostura Bitters
20 ml Sugar Syrup
75 ml Moët & Chandon Moët Impérial
Method
Pour all the ingredients into a glass half-full of ice and stir quickly. Fill the rest of the glass with crushed ice. Garnish with lemon zest and serve with a smile.
GOLDEN DRAM
Ingredients
2 oz ABERFELDY 12 Year Old Single Malt Scotch Whisky
2 barspoons of Local Honey Syrup (honey syrup = 1 part honey, 1 part water)
2 dashes Angostura bitters
2 dashes orange bitters
Method
Add the local honey syrup, bitters and ABERFELDY 12 Year Old Single Malt Scotch Whisky to a mixing glass, then add ice and stir to dilute (~30 seconds). Pour into a rocks glass and add block ice, then garnish with an orange twist expressing the oils over the drink.
Service Bar Old Fashioned
Ingredients
2.5 ounces whiskey — Middle West Bourbon, Pumpernickel Rye, or Wheat Whiskey
0.25–0.5 ounces MWS barrel-aged maple syrup (or quality maple syrup)
2 dashes Angostura bitters
2 dashes orange bitters
Method
In a mixing glass, combine whiskey, barrel-aged maple syrup, and bitters. Add ice and stir cocktail for 15 seconds. Double strain into an old fashioned glass over a large ice cube. Garnish with an expressed orange peel.
Bently Heritage Field Day Martini
Ingredients
2.5 oz Source One Vodka
0.5 oz dry Vermouth
2 Green Apple Slices
Method
Muddle green apple in a mixing glass; add vodka and vermouth. Stir over ice until full dilution is achieved. Garnish with a blue cheese stuffed olive and fresh apple slices.
Rum Old Fashioned
Ingredients
2 oz. Dos Maderas PX Rum
.25 oz. Rich Simple Syrup (2:1)
2 dashes of Aromatic bitters (like Angostura)
2 dashes of Orange bitters (like Bitter Truth)
Method
Prepare your Rich Simple Syrup by dissolving 2 parts cane sugar into 1 part boiling water. Let cool. Chill a Rocks glass. Add all ingredients to your Mixing Glass. Fill with cracked ice. Stir with a long bar spoon for 10 seconds. Strain into your chilled glass over 1 large piece of ice. Garnish with an orange peel, oils expressed over your drink at a 45 degree angle.
Old Fashioned
Ingredients
2oz Espolòn Añejo
½ part Agave Nectar
1 dash of Angostura bitters
1 dash of orange bitters
Method
Build in an old fashioned glass over one large ice cube
Garnish with an orange peel
Absolut Patriot Punch
Ingredients
2 Parts Absolut Original
1 Parts Lemonade
1 Part Watermelon Juice
Frozen blueberries and strawberries, lemon wheels, mint sprigs
Method
Combine all ingredients over large chunks of ice. Decorate with the above garnishes
Redemption Whiskey’s Rye Cobbler
Ingredients
1 part Redemption High Rye Bourbon
1 part Manzanilla Sherry
1 part pink grapefruit juice
½ part raspberry liqueur
½ part lemon juice
Method
Combine all ingredients except raspberry liqueur in a julep cup
Top with crushed ice
Garnish with fresh berries tossed in sugar
Drizzle with raspberry liqueur
Bombay Sapphire Lemonade
Ingredients
1 part Bombay Sapphire GIN
3 parts fresh lemonade
Lemon wheel
Method
Fill your balloon glass or Collins glass with ice. Combine all ingredients in your glass. Give it a quick stir and garnish with a lemon wheel.
The Dewar’s Victory Highball
Ingredients
1.5 Parts Dewar’s 12 Year Old
Top with Ginger ale
Lemon peel
Method
Pour Dewar’s White Label into a chilled Collins or Highball glass filled with ice. Top with soda water. Garnish with expressed lemon peel.
Santa Teresa 1796 Old Fashioned
Ingredients
1 ½ parts SANTA TERESA 1796 Rum
¼ part Demerara Syrup (1 part water, 1 part sugar in the raw)
4 dashes Angostura bitters
Method
Build all ingredients in a mixing glass. Stir 30–40 seconds. Pour over ice in a double old fashioned glass. Garnish with an orange twist. | https://medium.com/@tjbdaily/give-your-dad-what-he-really-wants-this-fathers-day-be141c8c8297 | ['Tony Bowles', 'Contributing Columnist'] | 2021-06-18 15:04:08.468000+00:00 | ['Dads', 'Fashion', 'Fathers Day', 'Gifts', 'Holidays'] |
10 Best websites for Tech news | Technology is constantly changing and Technology news websites are a great way to keep up with the latest trends and developments in the world of technology. Technology news websites cover everything from computer hardware, software, programming languages, cybersecurity issues, and more. We compiled a list of 10 of our favorite tech news sites to help you stay up-to-date with all things tech!
1. Wired
Wired, with its sleek interface and high-quality design, is a favorite of many tech enthusiasts. Wired covers everything from AI to self-driving cars to the latest in virtual reality. Technology news on wired.com can be sorted by category for easy reading!
The Wired is a technology news website with an incredible amount of detail and depth. They cover everything from the latest gadgets to emerging science. The best thing about it though is that they review all their content before publishing so you don’t have to take anything on faith.
Their articles are organized by category which makes them easy for new readers who might not know what this site covers thoroughly yet: Technology News, Business, Science & Culture, Design in Society (which has a lot of really cool stuff), Books Reviews, etc. This helps people find something interesting quickly without having to dig through each article looking for something specific — if I want more information about Artificial Intelligence or Robotics then I just click on those categories under Technology News where there are articles on those topics.
The site is also really easy to navigate with a clean layout and lots of white space so it’s not too overwhelming.
The Wired is my favorite tech news website because they’ve been in the game for a while and have seen all of the trends come and go. I trust that they’re accurate and unbiased because they’ve been around for so long, which is exactly what you want from a news source.
Click on wired.com to visit the website
This is a screenshot of their Technology News homepage, it provides easy access to all Technology news.
2. Cnet
Technology know-it-all reviews, specs of the latest smartphones and laptops, lists on how to choose a tablet or laptop — CNET has it all. One of the top tech news websites that offer comprehensive coverage for your daily dose of technology information is Cnet. This site provides an easy way to stay up to date with current events in Technology as well as those coming soon. With its clean layout and many different articles on Technology topics, you will never run out of things interesting to read! To search for the specific type of content just use their simple search bar at the top!
CNET has been around since 1994 and focuses on technology news. They have content for everyone from newbies to experts, including reviews of tech products as well as information about the industry’s latest trends. CNET is also home to plenty of videos that cover a variety of topics related to gaming consoles, mobile devices, and much more. You can watch their popular video series: “The Top 100 Gadgets” which features all sorts of gadgets ranked by popularity with commentary from gadget expert Elliot Taylor. in total you will find the best tech news over there.
Click on cnet.com to visit the website
This is a screenshot of their Technology News homepage, it provides easy access to all Technology news.
3. TechCrunch
TechCrunch is a leading online publication for technology news, analysis, and commentary. Technology coverage has been included in its headlines since TechCrunch was founded by AOL co-founder Michael Arrington on September 27, 2005. As of March 18, 2016, CrunchBase reports that the site receives more than 26 million visitors per month (38% from the U.S.) with 30 million page views coming from outside of North America. The content published ranges across breaking stories to longer features including interviews and opinion pieces or blog posts written by contributors at their discretion which are not necessarily endorsed or approved by editors before posting; topics include Internet culture as well “offbeat” items such as popular gadgets like iPhones or other social media trends such as Twitter hashtags
They also feature follow-up articles about stories that are trending in each area so you can stay up to date without getting overwhelmed from all angles at once.
Click on Techcrunch.com to visit their website
This is a screenshot of their homepage, it provides easy access to all Technology news.
4. PC World
PC World is one of the most popular websites for technology news. Technology enthusiasts come to PC World because they know that it will always have up-to-date information on what’s happening in the tech world, and also provide a forum for discussion about how new technologies can be applied to everyday life. What sets PC World apart from other publications in their coverage of industry trends; journalists at this site are experts not just in writing content but also in creating online tools such as interactive guides and infographics related to technology developments.
This blog has been around since 1984, demonstrating its longevity as an authoritative voice on all things technological. The website publishes posts every day with topics ranging from reviews of new smartphones or laptops coming out soon, trending viral videos, and all the latest news in technology.
Technology enthusiasts come to PC World because they know that it will always have up-to-date information on what’s happening in the tech world, and also provide a forum for discussion about how new technologies can be applied to everyday life.
Click Pcworld.com to visit the website
This is a screenshot of their homepage.
5. Mashable
Mashable is an online news website that covers the latest in tech, the Internet, and digital culture. Its coverage includes social media, web trends, technology reviews, and more. The site was founded by Pete Cashmore in 2005 while he was still a student at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and has grown to have six different editions: Mashable Technology; Mashable Business; Mashable Entertainment; Mashable News; Social Media Today (a daily newsletter); and Moms With Apps for moms with young children. As of July 2015, it had over 13 million readers per month according to ComScore.
Click mashable.com to visit the website
This is a screenshot of their homepage.
6. The Verge
The Verge is a technology news website that covers the most recent and breaking developments in the world of news media. The site’s content includes reviews, opinions, blogs, videos, podcasts, and more. Technology companies like Google and Samsung are among their frequent sources for information on trends within both consumer electronics as well as tech-centric policy issues such as net neutrality or SOPA/PIPA legislation.
One benefit to Tech News Websites is that they provide live coverage from events happening across the globe ranging from CES to E-Wars. One downside however can be how quickly these websites break stories before other sites which may have an adverse effect on traffic depending upon what was reported first by one of them versus another competing publication group. In addition, sites such as The Verge may have an advantage in social media over other groups because of their large following on Facebook and Twitter.
Click verge.com to visit the website
This is a screenshot of their homepage.
7. LifeHacker
The next one is LifeHacker. This technology site is focused on being productive in your day-to-day while also offering some “counterintuitive” tricks that might make life a little bit easier. The content offers ways for you to use old tech or new tech in the most efficient way possible which makes it great if you’re looking for shortcuts of all types.
Lifehacker has been around since 2005 so they have had time to build up quite the library full of articles that are organized neatly into categories like General Technology, Money & Career Hacks and Productivity Tools. You can browse through their archives by category.
Lifehacker’s goal is to help people find the most efficient ways to do everything tech-related from setting up a home theater system, managing your gadgets for work or play, and of course how to keep them safe on the internet. They cover topics that range from gaming reviews, security features in Windows Vista, app management with LaunchBar or Quicksilver, configuring an iPod Touch as a remote control device for Windows Media Center PC — this site has it all!
The audience ranges anywhere from students looking for advice about school projects, mothers trying to figure out what games their kids are playing (as well as which ones might be appropriate), dads who are overwhelmed with how to best manage their gadgets.
Click Lifehacker.com to visit the website
This is a screenshot of their Technology News homepage, it provides easy access to all Technology news.
8.Digital Trends
Digital Trends is a leading technology media property that provides expert analysis of the latest in digital culture. It has been delivering cutting-edge news, insights, and reviews with authority since 2000.
Digital Trends is a purveyor of all things tech, from the latest smartphones to reviews on new apps. Technology enthusiasts can find content for every niche and topic imaginable at Digital Trends. This website has an extensive archive that includes guides on how-to videos for everything from photography to gaming, as well as news articles that are updated daily with fresh stories about technology trends around the world. Technology journalists love this site because it’s one of the most reliable sources out there when researching breaking stories or finding expert opinions on topics within their field. It also provides up-to-date reports in real-time about current events occurring both nationally and internationally; covering anything from business decisions made by major companies like Apple Inc., to political policies being enacted in countries.
Click Digitaltrends.com to visit the website
This is a screenshot of their Technology News homepage.
9.Gizmodo
Gizmodo is an American technology blog that covers the latest in gadgets and tech. Articles are shared on a daily basis about innovations released into the market such as new smartphones or tablets. The content includes reviews of these products along with investigative reporting to keep readers informed about upcoming trends within this industry. Gizmodo was founded by former Engadget editor Brian Lam who wanted to create his own blogging platform for topics not covered elsewhere online which led him to start Gizmodo Media Group.
Gizmodo is one of the most popular tech news websites. They cover a wide range of topics such as how to buy and use technology, what’s coming next in consumer electronics, the latest gadgets, and gear available for purchase or pre-order, reviews on new products like smartphones and smartwatches, science stories about robotics, and space exploration, etc. Gizmodo readers are interested in all things Technology.
Click gizmodo.com to visit the website
This is a screenshot of their Technology News homepage, it provides easy access to all Technology news.
10.TechRadar
TechRadar is a British online publication that covers technology. It provides reviews of smartphones, tablets, and other consumer electronics. Techradar also gives information about the latest video games with news articles and in-depth reviews. Unlike most tech websites it’s not an opinion site but rather more of a straight product review style website for all things tech-related.
The Techradar website is a popular destination for tech news, reviews, and buying advice. They cover the latest breaking technology trends in some of their sections such as ‘smartphones’, ‘computers’ or even ‘TV’s’. It has an editorial team from across the globe who are experts in various fields. They have more than 500,000 followers on social media channels like Facebook and Twitter which makes them one of the most followed websites online today.”
Click techradar.com to visit the website
This is a screenshot of their Technology News homepage, it provides easy access to all Technology news.
Conclusion
Technology is evolving faster than ever and it’s important to stay up-to-date with the latest developments. The 10 news websites we’ve included in this blog post are some of our favorites, but if you have a favorite that didn’t make the list, let us know! We’re always looking for new ideas on how to keep readers informed about all things tech-related. Technology affects each one of us differently so don’t be afraid to share your own thoughts in the comments below or tell us what article topics you want to be covered next time around! | https://medium.com/@sedudziamrago/10-best-websites-for-tech-news-5f5e2b49c109 | ['Sedudzi Amrago'] | 2021-07-23 00:02:46.065000+00:00 | ['Tech News Today', 'Technology News', 'Tech Website Ranking', 'Technology'] |
3 Simple Steps To An Effective COPYWRITING Strategy | Whether you’re selling an online course, a software, an electronic gadget, or you’re simply a business owner looking to boost your marketing campaign and conversion rates, and you can do so with the power of a good copy. Amаtеur copywriters simply write for the sake оf wrіtіng. While they mау сrеаtе соріоuѕ amounts of inconsequential соntеnt for реrѕоnаl pleasure, іt dоеѕ nothing tо іnсrеаѕе buѕіnеѕѕ prospects, іmрrоvе conversions, оr move thеіr audience tо take action. Recently, people have been asking me questions on how I write copy for my clients. The simple truth is that the actual writing process is pretty fast, although creative power and energy are involved in the copywriting process before the actual writing is done.
So what іѕ thе gоаl оf grеаt copywrіtіng, and how саn іt сhаngе your presentations? A Prоfеѕѕіоnаl wrіtеr аlwауѕ have оnе central gоаl іn mіnd wіth everything they write: tо trаnѕfоrm thеіr аudіеnсе. Grеаt copywrіtеrѕ strive tо hеlр thеіr аudіеnсе ѕее through dіffеrеnt eyes, act differently, сhаngе thе way they іntеrасt wіth thе world. Times are pretty tough at the moment. As a business owner, you need to do everything you can to drive as much traffic as possible to your site and close as many deals as you can. This means that your content has to speak to your target audience with the correct tone of voice, value proposition, and content optimizations.
Anуоnе саn thrоw words tоgеthеr and mаkе complete ѕеntеnсеѕ , but іf you wаnt tо асtuаllу have іmрасt through уоur wrіtіng, уоu muѕt lеаrn tо wrіtе fоr trаnѕfоrmаtіоn. It’ѕ the difference bеtwееn bеіng mеrеlу informative and bеіng соmреllіng аnd реrѕuаѕіvе. Thеrе аrе thrее simple ѕtерѕ to trаnѕfоrmаtіоnаl wrіtіng:
1) Wrіtіng fоr a specific аudіеnсе,
2) Using the right vеnuе, аnd
3) Chооѕіng аnd executing thе rіght tуре of trаnѕfоrmаtіоn
1. Sресіfіс Audіеnсе
If уоu want tо rеасh уоur аudіеnсе, іtѕ absolutely crucial that уоu undеrѕtаnd thеm, gеt оut of уоur оwn реrѕресtіvе, аnd write to thеіr perspective. One оf thе fіrѕt thіngѕ I do with every piece I wrіtе is іdеntіfу my target аudіеnсе, things ѕuсh аѕ age, gеndеr, rасе/еthnісіtу, location, іnсоmе lеvеl, рurсhаѕіng habits, hobbies, talents, interests, еtс.
When I know who I’m tаlkіng tо, I’m рrераrеd tо сuѕtоm tаіlоr the message tо resonate with them specifically. Fоr еxаmрlе, wоrdѕ such аѕ rеvоlutіоnаrу, cutting-edge, frеѕh, оr іn vоguе will more lіkеlу rеѕоnаtе with an 18–25 аgе grоuр, whereas a 60–70 аgе grоuр wіll рrоbаblу hаvе negative rеасtіоnѕ tо thеm, whо рrеfеr things thаt аrе proven, ѕаfе, and ѕеnѕіblе.
2. Thе Rіght Vеnuе
By the right vеnuе, I mean thе mеdіum uѕеd to convey your mеѕѕаgе, іnсludіng ѕuсh thіngѕ аѕ magazines, newspapers, jоurnаlѕ, bооkѕ, rаdіо and TV аdѕ, blоgѕ, wеbѕіtеѕ, еtс. Thе vеnuе you choose іn a lаrgе part, is determined by уоur аudіеnсе. For еxаmрlе, if I’m writing a lеngthу аrtісlе on monetary роlісу іntеndеd for ѕсhоlаrѕ and есоnоmіѕtѕ, thе best venue is рrоbаblу a scholarly jоurnаl. Fеw people саn ѕtаnd tо rеаd lоng blосkѕ оf meaningful tеxt оn a соmрutеr screen, I рrоbаblу wоnt have enough space tо make my саѕе in most mаgаzіnеѕ, еtс. On the other hаnd, if mу content іѕ соnсіѕе, ѕіmрlе, аnd іntеndеd fоr a brоаd аudіеnсе, perhaps a newspaper аrtісlе mаkеѕ sense. All of us are еxроѕеd tо written соmmunісаtіоnѕ thаt we skim оr іgnоrе, yet if that same mеѕѕаgе is рrеѕеntеd іn a venue mоrе раlаtаblе to uѕ, wе arе much mоrе lіkеlу tо spend tіmе rеаdіng іt. Wrіtіng for trаnѕfоrmаtіоn requires utіlіzіng thе bеѕt vеnuе fоr оur subject matter аnd аudіеnсе.
3. The Rіght Trаnѕfоrmаtіоn
Thеrе are thrее types of transformations: knоw, fееl, and do. A know trаnѕfоrmаtіоn seeks tо gіvе thе rеаdеrѕ nеw іnfоrmаtіоn, оr old іnfоrmаtіоn аrrаngеd in a dіffеrеnt wау, tо hеlр thеm tо learn and knоw thіngѕ thеу dіdn’t knоw before, in ѕuсh a wау thаt сhаngеѕ their life аnd реrѕресtіvе. A fееl trаnѕfоrmаtіоn obviously seeks tо еvоkе ѕtrоng еmоtіоn іn the аudіеnсе, whіlе a dо is designed to gеt аn audience tо tаkе vеrу ѕресіfіс, immediate, and tangible асtіоn. Amateurs lооk аt this list and trу to dо аll thrее; рrоfеѕѕіоnаlѕ fосuѕ оn one аnd nаіl it, bесаuѕе dоіng ѕо affects thе оthеrѕ. Hоw dо уоu wаnt реорlеѕ lіvеѕ tо change bесаuѕе thеу read уоur mеѕѕаgе? What dо уоu want tо ѕее оссur in thеm? Do уоu рrіmаrіlу wаnt them tо knоw, feel, оr do ѕоmеthіng? Pick оnе; уеѕ, juѕt оnе аnd еxесutе іt wеll, аnd thе оthеrѕ will tаkе care оf thеmѕеlvеѕ. If you want your mеѕѕаgе tо асtuаllу hаvе іmрасt, уоu muѕt learn tо wrіtе for transformation. Know whо you are wrіtіng to, use thе rіght venue to rеасh thеm, аnd сhооѕе the rіght trаnѕfоrmаtіоn аnd еxесutе it wеll. Aftеr аll, trаnѕfоrmаtіоnаl writing іѕ the оnlу wrіtіng wоrth rеаdіng. | https://medium.com/@lebomatt/3-simple-steps-to-an-effective-copywriting-strategy-84d7402fc6f0 | ['Lebo Matt'] | 2020-12-15 06:15:52.494000+00:00 | ['Copywriting Strategy', 'Copywriting Tips'] |
Men’s Ethnic Wear Gets A Creative Touch | Rightly said by Tom Ford, “Dressing well is a form of good manners.”
Instagram : @kartikaaryan
When it comes to fashion, men feel a little left out, at times. They think that women’s fashion grabs the maximum eyeballs while there is not much emphasis on men’s wear. Are you nursing a similar grudge? So, don’t worry.
Here is the good news!!! Gone are the days when the world of fashion only revolved around women. Men, no longer, have to restrict themselves to the mundane churidar-kurta set. Designers across the globe are increasingly experimenting with men’s wear that is high on fashion and creativity. Now-a-days, Indian men are eager to put their stylish foot forward.
Men, now, know exactly what they want and are looking to adapting styles that suit their persona. Their wardrobe is evolving and getting a lot more daring and more individualistic.
The flavour of the season is traditional with a twist. The wedding and festive season is in full swing. It is all about glam and shimmer. Men, now-a-days, don’t shy away from experimenting different styles and silhouettes.
Many Bollywood actors have adorned ethnic wear with unique and eye-catching silhouettes at various occassions. Who better than them can be our inspiration!!!
Let’s see how can you incorporate these styles in your wardrobe.
Add some glitter with a sequinned look
Instagram : @shahidkapoor
Sequins are sparkly and sleek. They make you feel more fascinated and happy. It is an instant way to add shimmer to your outfit. A basic and neutral coloured black bandhgala can be transformed into a costume piece with the much needed twist to men’s ethnic wear.
Sequins are no longer restricted to women’s outfits. They add a touch of interest to the overall outfit and make you stand out among the crowd. Bollywood actor Shahid Kapoor aces the glitter look which softens his serious demeanour as black colour is associated with being reserved and secrecy.
2. Add some unusual colour to your wardrobe
Take a break from predictable blacks, blues and greys and try something unusual. Prints and patterns add life to the otherwise plain fabric. Patterns are an expression of personal style.
Bollywood actor Ranveer Singh is known for his eccentric personality and dramatic fashion sense. Here, he wears an emerald green kurta with golden chanderi foil print (animals like lion, rabbit). Both emerald green and golden colours are eye-catching which everyone cannot carry it off with ease and that’s perfectly alright.
One needs to be a little experimental to try this look.
3. Layering never fails to impress
Instagram : @arjunkapoor
Why should we restrict three piece suit to western outfits only? Indian ethnic wear has its own charm. Simply add a long cape or a jacket as it increases visual authority. You don’t look casual.
Here, Bollywood actor Arjun Kapoor in a navy blue layered ethnic wear looks digified and regal. The textured outfit is a perfect exmaple of wearing classic piece with a twist. Texture on fabric adds a touch of interest to the overall look. The colour blue is associated with being trustworthy, classic and stability. Moreover, the colour Classic Blue is the Colour Of The Year 2020.
Also, monochrome outfits like that of Arjun Kapoor’s adds illusion of height. It makes you look tall.
4. Accessorize it the right way
An outfit with unconventional hemline adorned with a classy brooch is all what is required to be the showstopper wherever you go. Brooch is no longer restricted to be known as a woman’s accessory. It has found its place and worth in a man’s wardrobe. It gives an instant royal touch to your whole ensemble thus making a statement.
Here, Bollywood’s Nawab Saif Ali Khan dons the royal look to the T.
5.Opt for flattering silhouettes and asymmetrical cuts
Instagram : @kartikaaryan
Asymmetrical hemlines and flattering silhouettes are the hottest trends of the season. They work wonderfully on plain linen or cotton fabric. The buttons, which are placed asymmetrically, give an extra edge to the whole outfit. Yellow is considered to be a rich traditional colour. This is a common colour spotted during festivals and weddings. Experimenting with traditional colours like blue, yellow, maroon is in vogue.
Here, Bollywood heartthrob Kartik Aaryan looks vibrant and fresh in this mustard yellow indo-western outfit with a new-age silhouette. Yet another example of simplicity with a twist!!
6. Experiment with embroidery
Instagram : @sidmalhotra
Men’s wear is turning umapologetically maximalist in design and style. Embroidery gives an aesthetic touch to the outfit. The focus is now on flattering cuts and silhouettes with dose of embroidery. Embroidery is the craft of decorating fabric using a needle and thread. It adds colour and richness to the garment.
Here, Bollywood’s uber-cool actor Sidharth Malhotra looks fresh and energetic in deep blue and off-white ensemble which creates the perfect contrast. A deep blue khadi kurta embroidered with motifs in green, off-white and red resham threads and edged with geometric borders. The timeless colour blue acts as a great canvas for experimentation.
So, go ahead! Explore! Be ready for the festive and wedding season in style! | https://medium.com/@ankisalwan08/mens-ethnic-wear-gets-a-creative-touch-12a7789f0bf8 | ['Ankita S.'] | 2020-03-07 15:59:15.194000+00:00 | ['Festivals', 'Style', 'Trends', 'Menswear', 'Fashion'] |
End-to-End Wine Quality Modeling with a Boost from Watson NLP Services | Three questions I will seek to answer in the following sections are -
How can we use high cardinality categorical data effectively in model training? How can we improve the efficiency of compute-heavy functions against pandas dataframes? Can we extract meaningful information from the description field to improve model performance?
1. First things first — EDA
For the scope of this article I wanted to share just a few findings from exploring the data.
I. Wine prices vary… a lot.
I don’t even want to include the histogram of price here its so ugly. Against my better judgement you can see it below.
Yuck — very skewed
You can also see how nicely a log transform helps get this to better mirror the distribution of points in this data.
For more of a fun look — here’s a breakdown of the average price of the 20 most common wine varieties in this data set —
A bottle of Nebbiolo typically costs over $60 but Rose usually runs under $20
II. What the people are saying
Looking at the length of description, as expected, wines that got higher scores had longer descriptions in their reviews. Not quite as obviously to me, people have more to say about Cabernet’s than about Chardonnay’s.
On average reviews were ~30 characters longer for cabs than chardonnays
III. Virginia is for wine lovers
Being from Virginia and being a fan (by no means a connoisseur) of visiting vineyards, I was curious to see where I could get a good, cheap bottle of wine.
Wineries in VA with at least 10 bottles of wine reviewed in this dataset
If you’re ever around Albemarle County there’s several good wineries to try like King Family vineyard.
2. Data Preparation
There were several key data preparation steps that needed to be taken before modeling this data.
I. Duplicate Rows:
One of the first steps I took in assessing the quality of this data was to inspect the proportion of unique values in each categorical variable. The results I found provided a good few challenges down the road. Here is a grape-themed visualization showing the breakdown of unique values in categorical feature:
The greater the sliver of green on the chart, the greater the number of values that category has
Naturally the description field makes sense as the most unique column here — there’s only so many countries or wine varieties in the world but essentially limitless permutations of an open text field. However, as can be seen above, the description field is still a long way from being 100% unique. This helped lead to the discovery that around 1/3 of this data were duplicate records.
I used the pandas drop_duplicates() function for a quick and easy solution to the replicated rows.
wine.drop_duplicates(subset = ['description', 'winery', 'variety', 'country', 'province'],inplace = True)
II. Missing Values
In the spirit of keeping a common format, I created a similar visualization for the proportion of null values in each column. Here are some more grapes:
Fortunately several of the fields were entirely populated, and some of the scarcely populated fields were found to have low associations with the target (points) were likely going to be dropped anyways.
Before explaining how missing values in region_1 were handled I’d like to clarify the location variable hierarchy a bit in case it may be unclear:
country > province > region_1 > region_2
So to deal with the missing values in region_1 I created a dict that contained each unique value of province and the highest occurring value of region_1 for that province. Then with a lambda function, the missing values in region_1 were imputed with the most common region in that province. You can see the code below:
regionDict = {} for p in wine.province.value_counts().index:
if len(wine[wine.province ==p].region_1.value_counts()) < 1:
regionDict.update({p: 'NoListedRegion'})
else:
regionDict.update({p: wine[wine.province == p].region_1.value_counts().index[0]})
wine['region_1_imputed'] = wine[['province', 'region_1']].apply(lambda row: row.fillna(value = regionDict.get(row['province'])), axis = 1).loc[:, 'region_1']=
Some provinces didn’t have any listed regions, if this was the case the null value was replaced with ‘NoListedRegion’.
III. Dealing with Categorical Variables with high cardinality
This ended up being the area of data prep I probably spent the most time on — partially because it was difficult and partially because it was interesting. With some help from a few very clever friends and colleagues, I came up with a methodology I believe worked out well.
For categorical variables with > 100 levels, the first N levels to make up 95% of all values in the column were identified and all other levels were cast to ‘other’. Those columns were then one-hot encoded. If it took more than 100 levels to make up 95% of all values in the column I decided to either take the first 100 values and one-hot encode or just to index the column (I know, I know) on a case-by-case basis.
A screenshot of the notebook showing how we found that the 98 most popular varieties make up 95% of all varieties
Some features, such as winery, needed over 1000 levels to make up 95% of all values. That column was simply indexed here but in future analysis an approach that may be worth taking is doing some clustering of those columns to form logical grouping of winery values and reduce dimensionality by replacing the original value with a cluster value.
At this point we did have our data ready to train some models and created a gradient boosted model with an Adjusted R² value of 0.586 and a MSE of 4.29. Not bad but lets see what we can do to improve!
3. Natural Language Understanding
Again, a primary inspiration here was to build out a good baseline regression model and then see if applying some NLP to the description column could push the model even further. Obviously there’s a lot of NLP libraries and functions out there and you could spend months trying on various methods. I wanted to keep things relatively short and sweet which is something Watson APIs across the board can be very handy for.
First step here was to provision a Watson Natural Language Understanding (NLU) lite service. This is free for anyone who wants to try it and is a really valuable API for no cost. If you’d like to read up more about the API and sign up for a free NLU service or subscribe to the full-fledged service, check out the home page:
There’s a lot that developers can pull from natural language including basic to advanced entity extraction, concept recognition, sentiment analysis, and even relationships between entities. Language models can be tuned to recognize particular sets of terms and be fully customized to the language of specific businesses and domains.
In our case, I just used an out-of-the-box model as those can provide great value as well. Seeing as we’re essentially looking to gauge the quality of a product based on the review, looking at the scored emotion results from the model was theorized to be very helpful in prediction.
Here is some of the code I used to extract the emotion from a wine review —
As you can see I used a few helper functions I was able to construct thanks to some really helpful articles I found online (namely https://towardsdatascience.com/make-your-own-super-pandas-using-multiproc-1c04f41944a1) around optimizing lambda functions. Also using the tqdm package and replacing .apply() with .progress_apply() gives a live status bar for your function and updates against a projected time to completion. For the lite version of NLU there is a concurrency limit of 30 calls, but for the standard version you can parallelize even further and really speed up these operations. Still, I went from an ~8 hour job to a ~20 minute job on a pretty large data set — 30 threads are better than 1!
So with a few quickly defined functions I was able to produce the level of joy, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness in every wine review. I was happy to see much more joy present in reviews rather than anger or sadness here. This makes sense as all the wines in this data set were rated from 80–100 on an 100 point scale.
Emotion is scored on a scale from [0,1] with 0 being no trace of that emotion detected to 1 being totally representative of that emotion
Using the scores as additional inputs to our ML model with all else held constant — we went from an R² of 0.586 to .605 and an MSE of 4.29 down to 4.10. Certainly an impactful improvement.
In addition to emotion I also used NLU to extract Keywords from the descriptions. Keywords are essentially the most relevant tags that NLU finds within the text. Several keywords are detected for each piece of input text and are ranked in order of relevance. I thought it would be interesting to revisit the cabernet vs. chardonnay comparison to see how the top keywords differed for a popular red and white wine.
Word clouds of keywords for Cabernet Sauvignon (top) and Chardonnay (bottom)
You can certainly see the difference in the flavor profiles between the two wines and some other interesting like ‘tannin’ being a popular keyword in cabs and ‘acidity’ being a popular keyword in chardonnay.
I would highly recommend anyone interested in exploring the NLU app to check out this hosted demo. You can see example output (entities, concept tags, sentiment, emotion etc.) for a variety of industry examples (financial, legal, media) or input your own text or URL. It’s a great way to explore how you could use NLU to help extract meaning from your business data — friendly reminder IBM never collects or stores your data! | https://medium.com/swlh/end-to-end-wine-quality-modeling-with-a-boost-from-watson-nlp-services-8ebfd4137f6c | ['Elliott Botwick'] | 2020-06-22 14:09:45.433000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Natural Language', 'Pandas', 'Data Science', 'Wine'] |
REEEAAAAD, ya’ll! | I love this poster because the intended message gets so overwhelmed and even contradicted by aspects of it’s design. Despite a US literacy rate of [99%](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=US+literacy), the US adult population can be categorized into “[half readers and half non-readers](http://stephenslighthouse.com/2009/01/17/american-reading-habits-studied/)." Reading is not exactly an American past time, is what I’m saying, and Britney Spears (as opposed to some famous author) is not exactly the best spokesperson choice for literacy, IMHO. And I wouldn’t have pointed out the U states reading stats but it’s sort of irresistible given the symbolic patriotism stretched across Britney’s boobs.[¹] And I suppose that *Harry Potter* is the pop fiction of the age, but aren’t there really [more literate choices](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings)?[^2]
“Hey!” (sounds out the inevitable disagreement) “Other options wouldn’t make reading as exciting and cool for kids.” Yeah! I agree! In fact, we should put the word “Read” right in the poster in an over-used [trajan-like](http://typographica.org/2007/on-typography/trajan-the-fallback-font-for-lazy-movie-marketers/) movie poster font that looks like daggers, cuz reading will *cut ya’*, man! And Britney Spears is more than an awesome spokesperson — — she is so radical that she should have an angelic gaussian light spilling down on her! We could even present the book over Britney’s nether-regions as if to say, boys, if you you finish this book, guess what else you’ll get? And don’t tell kids to go to the library tell them it’s “@ your library,” because @ is cool or something. Yes, I am certain — -certain, I tell you — -that kids read because of this poster’s placement in children’s libraries.[³]
[¹]: And they tell us we can’t burn flags. Whatever. Burn *that* one.
[²]: Yeah. I’m a nerd.
[³]: Which is *not* where I stole mine from. | https://medium.com/minds-on-media/reeeaaaad-yall-e1549d8d7999 | ['R. E. Warner'] | 2018-01-29 07:02:43.498000+00:00 | ['Made You Look'] |
TOO SCARED TO DREAM | I have so many expressions clustered up in my chest, I feel like a prisoner in my own mind. The more I try to find myself, the farther away I feel from my identity.
There was a time when my life was filled with so many colors. I had the ability to set goals, achieve them, and feel that rush of endorphin. I had a voice inside me that was loud and clear about who I was and what I wanted.
I could focus so well on anything and make it work. I had routines of meditation, affirmations, visualizations and my heart had all the capacity in the world to believe in the positive and beautiful part of life.
Suddenly, this realistic fantasy started breaking into pieces. The things I thought were certainties turned out to become impossibilities. My dreams were plunged out of the ground and the light I had within me went dim.
Ever since then, I haven’t been able to truly believe. I haven’t believed in anything because I am scared. What if I believe in my dreams again and get hearty disappointments. My fragile heart cannot take that blow and it is my duty to protect it, right?
The funny part is that there is absolutely no fulfillment in disbelief. It is like a dark cave that hides you from all the beauty of possibilities. It is like breathing nitrogen and rapidly suffocating.
It is like being best buddies with constant pain. Believing is scary, not believing is suffocating. In my opinion, life is a form of suffering but then some suffering makes you happier than others.
I really want to be strong. I really want to stand up and relentlessly chase after my dreams. I want to kiss my fears in the face with all the courage I can muster. My heart wants to believe but she doesn’t know-how. | https://medium.com/@dianaufuah/too-scared-to-dream-4f0cfeca7071 | ['Diana Ufuah'] | 2020-12-24 10:52:25.599000+00:00 | ['Fear', 'Future', 'Dreams', 'Sad', 'Pain'] |
Visualizing large datasets with H2O | Visualizing Large Data
Let’s now see how we utilize H2O to visualize a large dataset.
1️⃣. Initialize an H2O cluster
H2O has an R and Python interface along with a web GUI called Flow. In this article, however, we’ll use the Python interface of H2O. Every new session begins by initializing a connection between the python client and the H2O cluster.
A cluster is a group of H2O nodes that work together; when a job is submitted to a cluster, all the nodes in the cluster work on a job portion.
To check if everything is in place, open your Jupyter Notebooks and type in the following:
% matplotlib inline
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.style.use('fivethirtyeight') import h2o
h2o.init()
This is a local H2O cluster. On executing the cell, some information will be printed on the screen in a tabular format displaying, amongst other things, the number of nodes, total memory, Python version, etc.
Running h2o.init() (in Python) | Image by user
2️⃣. A first look at data 👀
Next, we will import the airline dataset and perform a quick exploration.
path = "https://s3.amazonaws.com/h2o-public-test-data/bigdata/laptop/airlines_all.05p.csv" airlines = h2o.import_file(path=path)
Let’s check the first ten rows of the dataset.
airlines.head()
First ten rows of the dataframe | Image by Author
What we have above is called an H2O Frame. It is similar to Pandas’ dataframe or R’s data.frame . One of the critical distinctions is that the
data is generally not held in memory. Instead, it is located on a (possibly remote) H2O cluster, and thus H2OFrame represents a mere handle to that data.
We can also take a look at a quick statistical summary of our dataset with the .describe() command as shown below
airlines.describe
Statistical summary of the dataframe | Image by Author
3️⃣. Visualising data
The dataset has around five million rows and thirty-one columns. Let’s now quickly plot a histogram of the Year column to see if there is a pattern in the data.
%matplotlib inline
airlines["Year"].hist()
Frequency of flights | Image by Author
Interestingly, the histogram shows that we do not have data for some years. This is the power that EDA brings to analysis. It helps to quickly pinpoint anomalies in datasets like missing values, outliers, etc.
Next, let’s plot the Departure versus the Arrival time to see if there is a relation between the two. This time we’ll plot a scatterplot so that we can see individual points.
# Convert H2O Frame into Pandas dataframe for plotting with matplotlib airlines_pd = airlines.as_data_frame(use_pandas = True) plt.scatter(airlines_pd.DepTime, airlines_pd.ArrTime)
plt.xlabel("Departure Time")
plt.ylabel("Arrival Time")
Scatterplot of Departure versus the Arrival time | Image by Author
As stated above, we do get a scatterplot, but the individual points are hardly discernable. A lot of overlapping points make it difficult to see a general trend in the data. | https://towardsdatascience.com/visualizing-large-datasets-with-h2o-ffe9af40371b | ['Parul Pandey'] | 2021-07-29 02:12:42.302000+00:00 | ['Aggregator', 'Outliers', 'Data Visualization', 'Unsupervised Learning', 'H2oai'] |
BREAKING: Cincinnati Prosecutor Urges Ohioans to contact legislators to urge Abolition of #DeathPenalty! | BREAKING NEWS: Hamilton County Prosecutor Urges Ohioans to Contact Your Legislators to Abolish Ohio’s Deaths Penalty!
This is, in fact, true. Tuesday morning I was invited to participate in a press conference by the Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center, a long-time ally. IJPC staffer Jessie Franks led the event releasing a report on the high cost of the death penalty to Hamilton County residents. Check the report for yourself. I was quoted by the Cincinnati Enquirer.
“If the citizens of Ohio want the law changed, they should contact their state representative and let him or her know,” [Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters] added. “However, I am bound to follow the law and I will continue to do so.” Abe Bonowitz, of Death Penalty Action, said it’s unfair that rural counties don’t pursue death penalty cases because they can’t afford them. But large urban counties, like Hamilton County, do because they have the tax base. Bonowitz said a life without parole sentence should be considered “death in prison.” “We can be safe from dangerous offenders and hold them accountable without executions,” he said. “It’s what we do the vast majority of the time.”
After the press conference I found an email from my friend Holly in Cincinnati with news that Governor DeWine has declared lethal injection to be over in Ohio. Suddenly I am on the phone with the Associated Press. And:
Opponents of Ohio’s death penalty called on lawmakers last month to enact a capital punishment ban during the current lame duck legislative session. They repeated that demand Tuesday. “It’s time for the General Assembly to just end the death penalty in Ohio and repurpose the funds wasted trying to execute people into programs to better serve the needs of murder victim families,” said Abraham Bonowitz, Death Penalty Action director.
So there you have it. The Governor and the Prosecutor….
WE CAN DO THIS IF WE ALL TAKE ACTION TODAY AND INVITE OTHERS TO JOIN WITH US:
OHIO RESIDENTS:
Write Your Ohio Legislators to Pass SB 296 to Repeal Ohio’s Death Penalty.
Write Governor DeWine to Support Repeal of Ohio’s Death Penalty.
EVERYONE EVERYWHERE:
Sign the petition to Governor DeWine urging him to lead the death penalty repeal effort.
Many thanks!
— abe
Abraham J. Bonowitz
Director, Death Penalty Action
PS: Five federal executions remain scheduled in the coming weeks, and Death Penalty Action is leading the grassroots opposition. Sign and share our new petition urging president Trump to halt the executions.
PPS: Please share our posts on Twitter, Facebook, and now on Instagram too! | https://medium.com/@deathpenaltyaction/breaking-cincinnati-prosecutor-urges-ohioans-to-contact-legislators-to-urge-abolition-of-328feaa0cfa9 | ['Death Penalty Action'] | 2020-12-09 07:33:20.099000+00:00 | ['Mike Dewine', 'Budget', 'Protest', 'Peace', 'Ohio'] |
5 Things Super Productive People Never Do In The Morning | 5 Things Super Productive People Never Do In The Morning
How you spend the first few hours of your morning can make or break the rest of your day
A solid morning routine is the backbone of a productive day. What you do in the morning can make or break the rest of your day.
As Richard Whateley once said, “Lose an hour in the morning, and you will spend all day looking for it.”
The best morning habits put in the perfect mood to get things done. Highly productive people choose what to focus on the morning carefully.
“Focused, productive, successful mornings generate focused, productive, successful days — which inevitably create a successful life — in the same way that unfocused, unproductive, and mediocre mornings generate unfocused, unproductive, and mediocre days, and ultimately a mediocre quality of life,” writes Hal Elrod in his book, The Miracle Morning.
There is a right way to have a productive morning? Some people kick off their day with a morning exercise to increase blood flow and improve mental clarity.
Others meditate, write their thoughts down, read a book, listen to their favourite podcast, learn and absorb a few new things, write ideas down, do creative work or do their most important task.
Highly productive people can also work on their side hustles, or spend time on a hobby. There are dozens of productive things you can do to start your day right.
There are so many better habits you can incorporate into your morning routine but what makes a productive morning depends on what you personally feel you need to do in the morning.
While good habits can set you up for a productive morning, some morning activities hinder our productivity and overall mood and can derail the rest of your day. How you spend the first few hours of your morning is as important as how you spend the last few hours of the day.
Here’s what super-productive people don’t every morning.
They don’t forget to hydrate first thing in the morning
Staying hydrated is a key component to your overall brain & body health. Dehydration can leave you feeling tired in the morning. Productive people drink at least a glass of water first thing in the morning.
“Hydration is incredibly important, especially after waking up. I always find that this larger quantity of water provides incredible energy and prepares my body for the day ahead,” says Jeff Sanders, the author of The 5 A.M. Miracle: Dominate Your Day Before Breakfast.
Instead of a cup of coffee, drink a glass of water first. Starting your day with water helps rehydrate your brain, restore natural metabolism and refreshes your body to gradually focus on the day ahead.
As you sleep, the natural reservoir in your body will be depleted of water — that means your body can be dehydrated and needs nutrients to jumpstart your bodily functions during the day.
Water improves your circulatory system and keeps it running immediately you wake up. Give your body exactly what it needs to start the day right.
Super productive people don’t immediately drink coffee
There’s nothing wrong with your morning coffee.
Coffee might help you start your day, but drinking water before your caffeine can be more beneficial to you in the long run.
Most people grab a cup of coffee first thing after waking up — this habit can interfere with the natural ‘wake up process’ of the body.
“Drinking coffee at peak cortisol times not only diminishes the energy-boosting effects of caffeine but causes your body to build a tolerance to it, meaning the caffeine jolt you get will diminish over time,” says Dr Steve Miller.
Cars run off fuel. Humans run off water. You don’t need caffeine immediately upon waking. Prioritise water first thing in the morning over coffee.
Timing your morning coffee can help you get the most benefit from it. Drinking a glass or two of water right when you wake up will aid in better digestion when you have breakfast.
Highly productive people don’t choose breakfast options without protein and fibre
Low fibre and protein breakfast (or high sugar breakfast) will often set you up for a poor experience later on in the day. Your body uses up sugar energy quickly, and you will soon start feeling inactive.
High-fibre foods and nutritious options like hot oatmeal, multi-grain cereal, eggs, nuts and berries stick with you longer than a sweet roll or pastry.
“Getting healthy fat and protein can create a positive and sustainable boost in energy without giving you a spike in blood sugar and crash,” says Dr Brady Salcido, a personal health expert.
Stacey Morgenstern, co-founder of Health Coach Institute recommends we eat high-quality proteins to keep our energy levels high. “…eat high-quality proteins and fats for a long-lasting source of energy to keep you focused and productive,” she tells Bustle.
Breakfast is an important meal of the day — make it work for your brain and energy and you can boost your performance and energy consistently throughout the day.
They don’t make too many decisions in the morning
Highly effective and productive people don’t spend the first hours of the morning making decisions. Making too many decisions in the morning deplete your energy quickly.
Making too many decisions in the morning will waste your energy in the morning. The best way to spend your mornings is to get straight to activities that bring out the best in you and helps you get things done.
If you spend your mornings deciding when to work out, what to wear, what to eat for breakfast or which tasks to work on, you are wasting brain energy.
Want to read a book in the morning? Pick it out the night before. Want to work on a specific task first thing in the morning? Choose the task the night before and get right to it in the morning. Want to work out in the morning? Choose your gym clothes and put them in a strategic place for easy access.
Don’t get caught up in small or important decisions in the morning.
Highly productive people don’t plan their day in the morning
You can get a lof things done if you start your day on purpose and plan well in advance. Planning what to do the night before
Many successful people spend their evenings preparing for the next morning because it makes their mornings free to get an early start on important tasks.
“Planning the evening before is effective because we have a limited amount of willpower and decision-making ability every day. The thought of making too many decisions in the morning will slow you down and drain your brain for the rest of the day,” writes Britt Joiner of Trello.
So write out your daily to-do list and how you want to spend your morning the night before. After a few weeks of practice, some habits will become automatic and the rest will get easier.
It pays to create your schedule and set your priorities the night before. Waking up to an actionable plan for the day will help you to focus more easily. A maximum of 3 priorities is a good start for a productive morning. If you’re setting your do-list first thing in the morning, you’re already too late! | https://medium.com/personal-growth/5-things-super-productive-people-dont-do-every-morning-29281cf0b1e | ['Thomas Oppong'] | 2020-11-19 15:04:51.839000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Self', 'Self Improvement', 'Productivity', 'Work'] |
To Solve problems of Gas shortage and use of wastage useful for the Environment | We all very well known that at cold session we are facing the major problem of gas shortage and gas bills are at high rates even a mediocre man faced much problems to pay bills than poor community cannot be managed in their limited resources .Also it’s become hard to manage the other necessories of their daily routine life.
Another prospective that everyone faced the issue of gas shortage even in cities, village’s throughout whole country even pays high bills without proper availability of gas that is the major issues especially in winter season.
So get ride of this serious issue, we are using low coats recourses to fulfill our needs, means we are using woods to burn and fulfill the requirements. No doubt we are using natural resources to fulfil our needs but another side we are playing with our environment by deforestations. We are declining our trees by deforestation, which may leads to disturbing the environment. Trees are plays very important role to clean the environment along with to reduce the Global Warming issues respectively.
Now, what would be solution? Why not we used the wastes to fulfil the gas shortage and saves the environment safe and clean for especially to our next generation.
We can produced the natural gas by introducing the Biogas plants. We can used dairy wastages like dunk that is also big issue faced by dairy farm wastes management system. So to solve all the serious issues, introduce the mini biogas units in houses, especially in village areas. In results we get slurry as byproduct from Biogas plant Units. Slurry would not be wasted we could be used as fertilizers.
By compiling all the discussion, we can manage our wastages to useful purpose. Thanks. | https://medium.com/@muhammad-furqan173/to-solve-problems-of-gas-shortage-and-use-of-wastage-useful-for-the-environment-4838ab185528 | ['Muhammad Furqan'] | 2020-12-27 16:11:51.300000+00:00 | ['Biogas Plant', 'Environmental Issues', 'Problem Solving'] |
Why you should NOT set New Year’s Resolutions. | SlightEdge (Philadelphia, PA) as well as most people right now are starting to think about new year’s resolutions. There are only two weeks left in 2020 and it gets everyone thinking. However, our company is not making new year’s resolutions, we are setting 2021 goals. There is a difference. When you talk to people about resolutions, it usually involves something they will start doing or stop doing based on something they want to change about themselves such as losing weight, quitting smoking, going to the gym, eating healthier, etc. Statistically speaking, over 75% of people give up on their resolution by March. So why would anyone be excited to make a new year’s resolution when the statistics are not in their favor? And that is why at SlightEdge, we focus on setting goals. What is the difference?
Goals are realistic and attainable. They force you to formulate concrete facts supporting what you’re doing from what you have accomplished so far and overall what your end results are. Resolutions are based on ambition which is great but sometimes out of reach or unrealistic.
Goals have action plans. In order to set goals, there needs to be daily, weekly or monthly actions for the individual to complete. There are check-in points to ensure you are doing the things you committed to and goals are also set up to be reevaluated. Let’s use the new year’s resolution of losing weight as an example. The statement someone will give you when you ask them their resolution is “I want to lose weight.” They do not usually follow that up with how they are going to do that. A goal is more specific. “I want to lose 25 pounds this year. I am going to go to the gym three times a week, eat more vegetables and give up soda.” You can expand even more on that with meal plans, workout plans, etc.
Goals provide a direction that gives someone confidence in their ability to reach their desired result. Refer back to the previous point. It is very easy in this world to get distracted or to find a million and one excuses why you can not do something. But having something set in stone to follow every day will really help the individual stay on track and believe they can hit their goal.
Before you go making your new year’s resolutions for 2021, think about this. Think about sitting down and writing out your goals and exactly how you are going to accomplish them. You can have something tangible in your hands to refer to every day. You can check things off your action item list and who doesn’t like checking things off a to-do list? Think about how you are going to feel once you have reached this goal. To learn more about how SlightEdge and our team are setting goals for the new year, visit our Youtube page and the CEO Corner. | https://medium.com/@slightedge/why-you-should-not-set-new-years-resolutions-bf864f1062f4 | [] | 2020-12-18 11:59:54.138000+00:00 | ['Goal Setting', 'Slight Edge', 'New Year Resolution'] |
Stay Human. With everything that’s going on right… | With everything that’s going on right now, it’s so easy to lose sight of the irrefutable fact that you are blessed and will get through this . . . as long as you live responsibly. Let’s table the debate about whether or not the Divine is involved in your life for another day. Just roll with me on this.
Enter Covid-19
Few would disagree that humanity has been hemmed in on all sides, partially by Covid-19, if not more so by willful human stupidity. If the stakes weren’t already high before Covid arrived in the United States, since March, just about everyone on the planet has had elements of their lives unceremoniously stripped away.
In other parts of the world, change and upheaval are an expected part of life, if not the norm. But here in America, because of the material wealth we have amassed, the dominant culture has cultivated an expectation of a life overflowing with milk and honey, two cars in every garage, a chicken in every pot, and perpetual individual happiness. Amen. This presumption is so deep-seated that for many, the slightest interruption of their guaranteed joy may as well be a jail sentence.
Enter Covid-19 with its real-life quarantines and resultant losses.
Take, for instance, the comfort that comes from the regularity of routine. Order is what gives our lives structure. We’ve lost that. Bye-bye. The old order’s been swept away, and it is never coming back. What remains are varying degrees of uncertainty and a whole lot of chaos. Who knew we would be living with such a heightened level of uncertainty in our lives? Face it. We are riding a high-speed roller coaster without a safety restraint bar, a seatbelt, or a life insurance policy.
And the Hits Just Keep on Coming
Some of us have lost our mobility. We can no longer come and go as we please. Countless people are living in a Groundhog Day version of quarantine. America’s senior citizens, those who love and care for them, as well as people in high-risk categories for contracting Covid-19, are avoiding public places at all costs—so that it doesn’t cost them their lives.
Many of us have lost our sense of community. People are made to be together. We were made to be in the company of other people. We can all attest that too much of a good thing is a real thing. Yes, self-professed introverts like me long to indulge our inner extrovert every once in a while, but given the current Covid circumstances, a large number of us have opted to exercise our common sense and curtail our in-person gathering.
For some, that means no visits with the grandkids, fewer trips to a favorite restaurant; and what was formerly known as a mundane walk in the park or a quick visit to the grocery store is now a life-threatening proposition. And as for that birthday getaway to the Exumas . . . well, it might be a good idea to put that on hold. Indefinitely.
Connectedness is off the table now. The option to meet a friend for coffee or a drink must be carefully weighed against the possibility of contracting the virus. That means no church, no sporting events, no theatre—but WWE wrestling is still on. Go figure.
And Coming . . .
Humans, being the industrious creatures we are, co-opted apps and platforms in stopgap measures to remain connected. Thank you, Zoom, FaceTime, and our old standby: social media. Ultimately, nothing—no thing—nothing beats face-to-face interactions. There are simply some experiences that cannot be duplicated.
And who doesn’t know someone who hasn’t lost their job? It looks like many of those jobs aren’t coming back. And if they do, it won’t be in the foreseeable future.
Thousands of people have lost homes due to fires, floods, tornadoes, and more named hurricanes and tropical storms than ever before in recorded history.
I haven’t addressed homelessness, hunger, the onset of unexpected diseases (I know at least four people who are dealing with recent cancer diagnoses), mental and emotional health distress, frontline workers’ and first responders’ anxiety, medical field professionals stretched to the breaking point, not to mention those who support them. That’s its own Pandora’s box.
And the most tragic part in all this is the ongoing loss of life. Family members. Loved ones. Friends. Sorry folks, but in the United States about 250,000+ people have lost their lives to Covid-19, not to mention the more than 250,000 families and loved ones left to grieve and pick up the pieces.
Depends
To my white readers, the unbearable feeling of uncertainty, those waves of worry about to drag your under, the nagging anxiety your entire life has been launched into outer space while you’re trying to juggle flaming chainsaws—that’s what Black people experience every single day. Now, you believe us when we tell you that at any given moment, we could be killed because someone wants to flex their white supremacy muscle and call the police on us for doing mundane things, like living.
But tell me this: Why is it that Black folks get little to no support until the wolf is knocking on white folk’s doors? Welcome to the club. Your membership card is in the mail.
But I digress . . .
Folks, people are hurting in deeply profound ways. And the worst part is: it didn’t have to be this way.
What now?
It’s time for everyone to shut up, put on their big boy undies and big girl panties, and get to work. Together. Everything we’ve experienced so far has been a pre-show for what we’re about to go through in the upcoming months. But before we get to that—
Realize That You are Under Tremendous Stress
To suffer any one of the above losses under the best circumstances is traumatic at best. So imagine how much more overwrought you are if you’re living through more than one of these traumas.
Job loss, illness, and the death of a loved one are devastating in their own right. Sometimes the impact can be felt immediately. At other times the effects may not be felt until months later. If you’ve been coping since March, you do the math.
Now imagine living from trauma to trauma without time to process what you’ve lived through, with no time to recover. This is the world we live in. Realize that you’re under tremendous stress and will take just as long, if not longer to recover. And give yourself a little time to exhale.
Step Away from the Media
After distressing events, especially those that take on national significance, it’s easy to get caught up in the tidal wave of reports on television and social media. In this age of instant reporting by citizens and the news outlets, a constant stream of updates, graphic images, some misinformation, and memes can lead to sensory overload.
While it’s natural to have a thirst for updates on what‘s going on, media outlets have a tendency to spin news events into a heightened dichotomy of Us versus Them. Part of their goal is to garner viewers and what better way to retain viewers than with “breaking news” about everyone’s adversary— Them. Once you find out what it is or who they are, the goal for viewers then becomes protecting themselves with the latest updates. Next thing you know, you’re hooked.
Curbing your media intake to limited subjects for a predetermined amount of time or taking a brief social media detox for a few days can do a world of good.
Do What Rejuvenates sounds Your Soul
I’m a firm believer that once you step into adulthood, no one will look out for your well-being with the interest and fervor like you.
When your body is hungry, you feed it. When you’re tired, you sleep. So it stands to reason that when you are emotionally drained, you should dedicate some time to engage in activities that feed your soul, even if it’s only fifteen to thirty minutes of quiet time, meditation, or prayer. It’s hard to care for loved ones or yourself when you have nothing to give.
For some people, rejuvenation involves meditating, strategizing, or involvement in some sort of physical activity. Whatever you choose, find the time to refill your physical, emotional, and spiritual tanks. You and those closest to you are depending on you.
Stay Human
Anxiety, anger, and depression are emotional states that feed on themselves and you. The best way to turn off the repeating playlist in your head involves a two-step process.
Step 1. Talk it out. Speak openly and honestly with people who know you, understand your circumstances, and have a history of supporting you. Tell them what is going on, how you’re feeling, and the way it’s affecting you.
Talking to a friend one time isn’t going to fix things. This is not a drive-by, a one-off, or hit it and quit it deal. Think of it as sharing about having had a bad car accident. The first few times you recount what happened, it’s hard to look back at what you’ve lived through. But the more you examine and talk about it over time, the emotional severity of the impact lessens. So give yourself time to absorb and process what you’re experiencing. It’s heavy stuff.
Don’t Wait to Exhale
Stop for a moment. Breathe. Yes, things are bad. The specific things you’re going through might be the worst you’ve ever experienced. I’m not diminishing that in the least. But you’re still in the game. And accept the fact that some things are simply beyond your control.
Step 2. Change your outlook. Take stock of the things you do have, the things that are working in your life. Look for the good. Start changing the things you can by setting small goals for yourself.
Take the things you’ve learned over the past few months and put them to use. Everything you’ve experienced this year has been preparation for the next few months. I like to think the only wasted time is that in which we can’t say we learned something.
Step 3. The practice that will help you the most is to invest a little energy in helping others. You don’t have to raise a barn for your neighbor. It’s the little things that matter most as they lay the foundation for bigger things. Slide other people a little grace, a little wiggle room. We’re all going through tough times.
You never know what other people are going through. You can’t tell by looking at someone whether their health is compromised. Putting on a mask is a small thing that has a big impact.
That’s it
Learn from the lessons of 250,000+ Americans who are no longer with us. Some who may have learned too late that they could have avoided their fate had they or others around them only worn a damn mask, practiced social distancing, and washed their hands.
You just might save a life . . . maybe your own.
Love one another. | https://medium.com/our-human-family/stay-human-the-covid-19-edition-5bd016e1fcda | ['Clay Rivers'] | 2020-11-27 08:18:44.970000+00:00 | ['Gratitude', 'Humanity', 'Equality', 'Allyship', 'Covid 19'] |
Mapping The Turkish Agriculture Machinery Ecosystem | By Tezer Pekşen
Understanding the Sector
As Kök Projekt, we are an agri-food startup accelerator and an innovation partner for the food, agriculture, and water sector companies. We conduct research, prepare reports, and create databases to understand the world of food, agriculture, and water. Thus, we know the importance of recognizing each actor is crucial to understand the sector.
Thus, we shared Turkish Agricultural Ecosystem Maps, Turkish Food Ecosystem Map, Turkish Agricultural Cooperatives Map, and Turkish Water Ecosystem Map throughout the recent months in collaboration with Patent Effect and Startups Watch.
As we are deeply immerse ourselves in research, and considering the agriculture machinery is the main pillar for digitalization of agriculture, we have decided to map the Turkish Agriculture Machinery Ecosystem Map.
Through this map, we aimed to understand the agriculture machinery ecosystem and its stakeholders, which has a crucial role in the sector for digitalization and efficiency goals. Although we know that a map has many limits, it’s also a great tool to start digging deeper and initiate conversations.
An Overview of the Turkish Agriculture Machinery Ecosystem
In Turkey, agriculture and agricultural mechanization have been an important topic since the beginning of the 1900s. Many studies and researches have been carried out on this subject. As a result, mechanization in agriculture still maintains its importance, and Turkey has become a leading country in production and export in this field over the course of the years.
Starting with establishing the first Turkish Tractor Factory in Etimesgut, Ankara, in 1954, many remarkable results have been achieved, such as the first tractor export in 1974, and the domestic tractor presence reached 1 million by the 2000¹. Due to the domestic market fluctuations towards the end of the ’90s, some companies in the sector started to look for further opportunities for exporting their products. As a result of this orientation, exports have increased ten times since 2000.
Exportation requires a certain quality and technology; thus, noticeable engineering development has been observed in the sector. In addition to establishing a suitable infrastructure for this in the last two decades, it is also an important reason to regain the declining yield in agriculture due to environmental factors to the economy.
Today, almost all of the requirements needed mechanization equipment is manufactured in Turkey. Besides the heavy industrial products such as combines, balers, self-propelled silage, and cotton harvesters, which are generally designed in capacities and models suitable for large parcels and enterprises; entrepreneurs have started to invest in the market, products, and services such as sensors, drone technologies, and satellite scanning systems.
¹http://www.tzob.org.tr/basin-odasi/haberler/traktor-sayisi-1-5-milyonu-asti
Building the Map
Public and Governmental Organizations
From harvesting equipment to agricultural sensors, the Turkish Agricultural Machinery scene has never been this vibrant before. Research, studies, and financial support conducted by public institutions such as the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Ministry of Industry and Technology, TÜBİTAK, and KOSGEB greatly impacted this development process.
We started our research by determining which governmental and public institutions are working on this subject. We dive into the 2018–2022 Agricultural Mechanization Sector Policy Document to determine the scope and implementation of food and agricultural policies in Turkey; this document was prepared to understand the current situation, challenges, and future trends of the sector and to regulate the procedures to be followed in the 2018–2022 period.
Unions
During the second stage of our study, we searched for unions and federations that contributed to developing the Turkish agricultural machinery sector’s development.
We found that TARKMAKBIR (The Turkish Association of Agricultural Machinery & Equipment Manufacturers) is one of the key contributors in this field. They achieve this by gathering essential players in the agricultural machinery field and publishing vital statistics and sectoral reports such as the “Agricultural Machinery Industry Interaction Report.”
Corporates
As Kök Projekt, we are an innovation partner for food, agriculture, and water sector companies; thus, we carefully follow the sector’s companies. Many national firms are operating in the agricultural machinery sector. These companies play a significant role in the development of the industry and contribute to efficiency and productivity.
Most of these companies produce more than machinery equipment; they simultaneously export to various parts of the world, but they also develop the machinery industry and contribute to the national economy.
Startup
In recent years, startups have become active players in the agriculture ecosystem, they contribute to this network by doing research and development.
As Kök Projekt, we are an agri-food startup accelerator. We follow Turkish agri-food startups closely and support them. In our map, we also append the startups to illustrate the sector more deeply.
The startups focus on increasing productivity, efficiency, and advancements in a manner of agricultural production. For the Startups Section, we used our startup database to put it on the map. Secondly, we collaborate with Startup Watch, a Turkish Startup Ecosystem Intelligence to get startup data. Finally, we worked closely with Patent Effect, supporting technology-driven companies, and research institutes to unleash the patents’ power to impact their innovation journey. In the map, with the contribution of Patent Effect, you will find startups and Patentpreneurs: Startups who have at least one patent/utility model application.
Quick Disclaimer
Quick disclaimer; This is not an exhaustive list of all stakeholders of the agriculture machinery ecosystem. You can reach out to our 2020 Turkish Agriculture Machinery Ecosystem Map here.
Our Turkish Agriculture Machinery Ecosystem Stakeholder Map 2020 (For Full Version)
Below is an overview of each startup category
Smart Agriculture/Precision Farming: Startups focusing on advanced technology, including big data, internet of things (IoT), which are tracking, monitoring, and automating agricultural activities. Specific crop management, farming management concept responding to inter variability in the field, and crops.
Indoor Farming: Startups working with hydroponic systems, vertical farming solutions, soilless, and indoor farming systems. Generally, indoor farming applications are used in urban farming. Urban farms reduce the distance between production and consumption.
Agriculture Machinery: Startups focusing on agriculture machinery.
Investors: Very crucial stakeholder of the ecosystem. Without investments, startups can not survive. The more ag-tech financing will grow, the more number of innovative startups will increase.
We welcome your thoughts and would love to hear from you.
For any of your questions or feedback, you can shoot us an email to:
[email protected]
Sources
“Tarım Makina Sanayi Etkileşim Raporu”
https://www.oaibftp.com/arge3/tar-mak-etk-rap.pdf
“Tarımsal Mekanizasyon Sektör Politika Belgesi 2018–2022”
https://www.tarimorman.gov.tr/TAGEM/Belgeler/yayin/Tar%C4%B1msal%20Mekanizasyon%20Sekt%C3%B6r%20Politika%20Belgesi%202018-2022.pdf
“Agrievolution Reports”
https://www.agrievolution.com/global-market-data
“Türkiye’de Akıllı Tarımın Mevcut Durumu (Akıllı Tarım Platformu İcra Kurulu Raporu)”
http://www.tarmakbir.org/haberler/raporlar/akillitarimrapor01.pdf
“Türkiye nin Yükselen Gücü:Tarım Makineleri Sektörü”
https://www.moment-expo.com/tr/dergiler/63/kapak/turkiye-nin-yukselen-gucutarim-makineleri-sektoru
“Tarım Makinaları”
https://www.turkaytarim.com.tr/kurumsal/tarim-makinalari
“MAKFED Makina Sektörü Envanter Araştırması (2019)”
http://www.makfed.org.tr/images/s/DegerlendirmeRaporu.pdf
“Tarımsal Mekanizasyon Kurulu Raporu”
http://www.tarmakbir.org/haberler/tmk2018.pdf
“Tarım Alet ve Makineleri Sektörü”
https://www.karacabeytso.org.tr/blogfiles/561493273042.pdf
“Tarım Makinaları Terminolojisi”
http://www.tarmakbir.org/haberler/terminology.pdf
“Traktör Sayısı 1.8 Milyon”
http://www.tzob.org.tr/basin-odasi/haberler/traktor-sayisi-1-5-milyonu-asti | https://medium.com/k%C3%B6k-projekt/mapping-the-turkish-agriculture-machinery-ecosystem-e47a9ea43206 | ['Kök Projekt'] | 2020-12-17 15:21:46.974000+00:00 | ['Kök Projekt', 'Turkey', 'Agtech', 'Agriculture', 'Startup'] |
Apple’s Titan Project to Launch EVs by 2025 | Speculating Apple, the i-phone maker
Battery & Charging
The basic element of electric cars is the battery. After Tesla Motors’s battery day, they are definitely leading. Apple has announced a mono-cell LFP battery technology. Mono-cell is the keyword here as LFP is currently being done by Tesla Motors as well in their Model 3.
The batteries of current EVs are a culmination of hundreds of batteries. It helps in longer range but makes supercharging cumbersome. A mono-cell would be a new technology entrant & could solve that problem. Autonomous Driving
The autonomous driving element is a combination of software & hardware. Imagine, how a baby learns to walk. A baby develops vision, then peripheral vision, understands where the baby is and where it wants to go and then begins the journey.
The EVs work in a similar way. Eyes are LIDAR, sensor fusion is peripheral vision, localisation and path planning are going from A-B. You can read a detailed article here from William Law.
Apple is a contrarian company. How? Just look at how Mac O.S have every feature starkly opposite to Windows. I have no doubt that Apple would come up with a revolutionary software, with the given engineering talent they have. Operations of being an Automaker
a. Upon looking at past operation practices like the Macbook chip from Intel which did not change until very recently, it is evident that Apple will rely on suppliers for the car parts.
b. Operations of mechanical manufacturing is capital intensive and the margins are low. Apple has turned huge profits selling a premium product like i-phone & Macbooks but the question remains if they can sell cars the same way? (answered below) The product psyche
Phones and laptops are an extension of human beings, the first penetration level of artificial intelligence if you may call it. Cars are not a big part of our lives, they help you go from A-B and that’s it. How does this matter? A super-premium product no matter how many miles Apple promises might be very difficult to democratize because the world doesn’t care as much about cars as much as they do about phones & MacBooks.
Why it matters for Apple?
EVs are profitable when democratized, why else do you think Tesla’s timeline had a sports car Roadster in 2006 & Model 3 in 2018 on it. The Ecosystem for EVs
Apple is a believer in building ecosystems, from software to hardware, now including chips. The marginal costs argument aside, it allows the company to control the product. The ecosystem for EVs involves the battery, car, software, OS and a full-fledged charging network. Maybe they come up with travel compatible battery packs with energy reserves but they still would have to build charging station networks across the target market. Can they do it?
Of course, with a reserve cash capital of $191 billion, Apple has the means. Another way to look at it is to license battery & autonomous driving technology(given they have one) to other automakers. I hardly think that would happen though since it does not align with Apple’s values.
Proof?
6.The Tim Cook effect
Tim Cook is an operations genius, that is why he was brought into Apple in the first place. He might not be the charismatic Steve Jobs, but he is Tim Cook. It means if he was leading Tesla’s operations efforts, Tesla would meet even the deadlines promised by Elon Musk.
Having said that, there are more chances of Apple realizing their Titan project on the factory floor than building a mono-cell as of now.
Conclusion
The automobile market is highly competitive, capital intensive and fewer margins. Tesla turned up a profit after 17 years. Can Apple enter the market & disrupt? Definitely yes. The stock price jumped more than 3.5% as soon as the news broke out but that is not why I am backing Titan.
We are talking about the company who made the whole world complaint about removing the standard earphone jacks from our mobiles, the competitors followed suit. How many of you miss It? Apple removed the home button from i-phones followed by introducing face unlock, it wasn’t the first to do so but it sure was the first company to make it a norm. The same goes for AirPods too.
The next target of Apple is “privacy”. I understand Apple has always been privacy spooky but it is now on the agenda to make the world aware about it. It could be the end of advertising as we know it(you heard it here first).
The past is evidence of how disruptive Apple has been, the future cannot be predicted but Apple can be relied upon to deliver. | https://medium.com/@s-r-vivek/apples-titan-project-to-launch-evs-by-2025-fdc8ccaabdcb | ['S R Vivek'] | 2020-12-24 13:10:35.198000+00:00 | ['Strategy', 'Tesla', 'Business', 'Apple', 'Electric Car'] |
Get Fit For The Summer Exercise Challenge | I’m issuing a challenge to all of you, to help you overcome your resistance and get fit for the summer.
Are you ready?
Here’s the challenge:
Commit to doing some kind of exercise for just 5–10 minutes a day (to start with), for 6 weeks. Make a big commitment in your mind. Tell someone about it. Or many people. Do it for 10 minutes a day, trying to be mindful during the exercise and focusing on enjoying it with gratitude. Keep a simple log each day of the exercise you did. At the end of each week, write a 5–10-sentence journal entry about how the week went, reviewing your successes and failures. Share it with someone (email, etc.). If you were consistent the previous week, increase your exercise by 2 minutes for the next week, otherwise stay the same or shorten it.
So just make a commitment to yourself and others to stick to small daily exercise for six weeks, and keep a log.
Will you be super fit after these 6 weeks? Well, you’ll be fitter than now, and you’ll be much further along the way to a lifetime fitness habit.
You can do it!
Tips for the Challenge…
Read more https://www.ibelieveinmothernature.com/my-exercises/get-fit-summer-exercise-challenge/ | https://medium.com/@contact_77118/get-fit-for-the-summer-exercise-challenge-dca40cc34a59 | ['I Believe In Mother Nature'] | 2019-04-10 14:18:12.842000+00:00 | ['Exercise', 'Body', 'Fitness Tips', 'Summer', 'Fitness'] |
The Service Designer’s Road to Hell | Image Credit: Andrew Herington
If you are in the design world and haven’t read Milton Glaser’s Designer’s Road to Hell, you really should. As poignant as the title is, some of the items are pretty striking in their innocuousness—what does it mean to design a package that looks larger on shelf ? Isn’t that the point of package design, to grab attention, to attract and outdo its neighbors, and ultimately to be bought more than others?
Beyond the examples that might get lost outside the practice of package design, Milton means to illustrate a continuum of ethics around communicating something as you want people to perceive it, versus what the product is actually capable of contributing. Aesthetics and product design and user experience are all in their own rights forms of communication, and all forms of communication are equally able to be used to inspire, clarify, confuse or mislead.
In my read of Milton’s list I have admit that I love the drama inherent in the later, more hellish steps. In #11— Designing a brochure for an SUV that flips over frequently in emergency conditions and is known to have killed 150 people—he connects the benign act of designing a brochure to the fact that even a brochure, well designed, can lead people to a harmful product. I’d summarize Milton’s list with the maxim:
Know thy product, and to thy product be true.
I don’t look at his illustrative list and think “Whew—thank goodness I haven’t designed any 9/11 buttons minted from ground zero wreckage.” But I have reflected on some products I’ve designed for where I wasn’t quite sure if the benefit I was instructed to communicate was or even could be proven. Should the adverts I did for a well-known, predatory financial company have been designed to the best of my abilities? When I try and draw parallels to my own efforts his list seems much less dramatic and frankly personal. Which I believe is what Milton really wanted with the list: not an arbitrary ethical scale to judge fellow designers against but a prompt to consider what outcomes we’re directing our audiences to and through that be a better investigator of the products we work on.
On service design
When it comes to considering the outcomes we direct our audiences to—Service Design requires a more complex understanding of the paths users might end up. It’s beyond approaching a package on a shelf—it’s the shelf itself, what interactions the customer might have as they attempt to purchase, and even what neighborhoods that store was built in.
In Milton’s example it’s pretty easy to connect an unethical product to action that shouldn’t be taken. However, even if the outcome of a service is inherently a public benefit, can the service design be unethical? Definitely. Can we find examples as illustrative as Miltons? Hell yeah (looking at you for-profit healthcare systems).
To that I propose the Service Designer’s Road to Hell, to complement Milton’s list. | https://medium.com/@dufflebag/service-designers-road-to-hell-1aa4075e4c33 | ['Sean Duffy'] | 2020-07-21 20:11:04.068000+00:00 | ['Human Centered Design', 'Design Thinking', 'Ethics', 'Service Design', 'Product Design'] |
In my town this is how we get wood, it’s from our local nice man. | In my town this is how we get wood, it’s from our local nice man. There’s also a local bad man, but only foreigners buy wood from him–they’re Brits and northern European apparently. He is said to underpay his employees, scream at them and steal money from his customers by messing with the scale. He overcharges them. Locals know him and they warned us. It seems being a foreigner doesn’t matter if your surname is a local one; in the village they trust your ancestry, somehow. We appreciate that, it even gave us a free pan once.
We need wood again because we have no heating, a wood stove for the whole house. It felt minimalist and cool as we moved here, now it just feels cold. Yet when I look outside my window I feel peace, well worth the cold a for a few months a year. | https://medium.com/@monivzq/in-my-town-this-is-how-we-get-wood-its-from-our-local-nice-man-d9821dfc72d9 | ['Moni Vazquez'] | 2020-12-07 15:40:53.672000+00:00 | ['Minimalism', 'Lifestyle', 'Rural', 'Spain', 'Costa Blanca'] |
Arlo and Alarm.com bow similar but different touchless video doorbells | Arlo and Alarm.com bow similar but different touchless video doorbells Walter Jan 15·3 min read
Don’t want anyone touching your doorbell in the age of COVID-19? We don’t blame you, and now two smart home companies—Arlo and Alarm.com—have arrived at this year’s virtual CES with their own touchless video doorbells.
While the Alarm.com Touchless Video Doorbell might, at first glance, look like a standard smart doorbell, complete with an oval design and a camera lens, a telltale “don’t touch!” icon makes it clear that you won’t need to press any buttons.
Alarm.com The Alarm.com Touchless Video Doorbell has a telltale “don’t touch!” icon stamped on its shell.
Instead, visitors must stand on a doormat placed at a discreet distance from the doorbell (“Stand on mat to ring doorbell,” the doormat helpfully reads) while the doorbell’s person detection features will automatically ring the indoor chime, send an alert to your phone, and begin recording a video clip.
[ Further reading: The best video doorbells ]Alarm.com’s Touchless Video Doorbell also provides 1080p HDR video resolution, a vertical 150-degree field of vision, two-way audio, infrared night vision, and an onboard heater to keep the doorbell warm in cold conditions.
Arlo’s Touchless Video DoorbellMeanwhile, smart security manufacturer Arlo has its own Touchless Video Doorbell in the pipeline for 2021. Rather than having a visitor stand on a doormet, Arlo’s touchless doorbell uses a proximity sensor to detect someone approaching the doorstep. Once the doorbell spots a visitor, it will sound a chime and shine a light to let the person know that the doorbell has been rung.
Arlo has yet to release more details about its Touchless Video Doorbell (indeed, we don’t even have a picture yet), but the new device did manage to nab a 2021 CES Innovation Award.
Arlo already has a couple of other video doorbells in its lineup, including wired and wireless versions. Both of those doorbells support a maximum 1536 x 1536 video resolution, a 180-degree viewing angle, HDR and night vision, two-way audio, and a built-in siren.
Arlo Essential Indoor cameraIn addition to its Touchless Video Doorbell, Arlo also announced a new indoor camera with a privacy shield that blocks the lens when the camera is disarmed.
Arlo The Arlo Essential Indoor camera has a privacy shiend that’s automatically engaged whenever the camera is disarmed.
The Essentials Indoor camera will stop recording and turn off motion and audio detection when its privacy shield is engaged. When the camera is switched back to “armed” mode (which can be done manually via the Arlo mobile app), it disengages the privacy shield and resumes recording and motion detection.
As with its Touchless Video Doorbell, Arlo has yet to reveal more details about the Essentials Indoor camera, which (like the doorbell) won a CES Innovation Award. Conceptually, the camera sound like the Kangaroo Privacy Camera, which has an opaque lens that turns clear when it’s charged by an electrical field, and the Cync Indoor Camera that GE Lighting announced ahead of CES.
This story, "Arlo and Alarm.com bow similar but different touchless video doorbells" was originally published by Playlist.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details. | https://medium.com/@walter31571199/arlo-and-alarm-com-bow-similar-but-different-touchless-video-doorbells-ba5e47edad6f | [] | 2021-01-15 06:10:49.722000+00:00 | ['Headphones', 'Security Cameras', 'Tvs', 'Home Tech'] |
What to Do When a Team Member Makes a Mistake | After a Team Member Fails
As a leader, what do you do when one of your team members messes up?
1. Ask questions to find out why
Get to the heart of why the mistake was made. Instead of berating the person who lit the fire, ask them probing questions to uncover why:
What was going on in your mind? What result did you expect to get? Why did you think this was a good idea?
Most of the time, the mistake comes from good intentions.
Recently, I dealt with an unhappy client. In response, I agreed to lower the interest rate on their loan. A new loan agreement had to be executed. I informed the client’s banker and headed off to Cabo on vacation.
A couple of weeks after I returned, I received an outraged email from the client. It had been weeks and they hadn’t received a loan agreement from us. In the meantime, another loan payment at the higher rate had gone through. What happened?
My initial reaction was frustration. This client was already unhappy. I expected their banker to be extra diligent in ensuring a quick turnaround. You outperform to make up for past under-performance. How else could you turn the relationship around?
When I confronted the banker, he informed me that he received the loan agreement from our service center weeks ago. He just hadn’t sent it to the client. He felt that it would have more impact if the loan agreement was presented in person. So he had booked a meeting, a month out. Unfortunately, he had given no explanation to the client for the purpose of the meeting.
Although I felt like throwing rocks at a wall, I maintained my composure. I reminded myself that he meant well. He’d done the work to produce the loan agreement through our service center. I calmly explained the urgency of the situation to him again and urged him to send the agreement to the client via email right away.
2. Step in to offer solutions
The time to berate and reprimand is not when the lava is approaching the shore. Your first job is to step in and try to resolve the situation. Brainstorm solutions on how to fix the problem and minimize the impact.
A friend is an investment adviser. Her assistant’s primary responsibility is opening accounts once my friend lands a client. This entails preparing documents that have to be vetted and verified by a back office.
Recently, my friend discovered that a client had missed two automatic contributions to his children’s education funds. Probing further, she discovered that her assistant had forgotten to send an addendum to the back office.
Although she felt like a ball of fire, she restrained herself. She arranged for a conference call with the client to communicate the message and reassure them that this will not happen again. Yearend was several months out so the missed contributions could be made up with no tax implications. Once the client was handled, she pulled her assistant aside for a heart-to-heart.
Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash
3. Ask yourself if you could’ve taught them better
When a mistake occurs, ask yourself:
Could I have explained things better? Where did I go wrong in setting expectations? Did I do a good job of transferring my skills and expertise?
At my company, we offer an in-depth training program of up to a year before a banker is awarded a portfolio of clients. In the past, I’ve mistakenly assumed that a fully trained banker is ready to take the reins with no further coaching.
But people learn differently.
One person could grasp a concept in minutes while another may need three evenly spaced-out explanations and hands-on experience.
When coaching new bankers on handling clients, I always ask:
Do you know what to do? Are you comfortable with the process? How will you communicate this message to the client? Are you aware of the approvals you need to secure?
Throwing people in the pond and encouraging them to thrash their way out may be a great way to engender learning. But before doing so, make sure you have taught your employee how to breathe underwater.
4. Ask yourself whether the mistake represents an anomaly or a pattern of behavior
Should they have known better?
If the mistakes are regular and abundant, maybe it’s time for a strict conversation or even a warning letter.
However, high-performing employees make missteps too. It’s part of the clumsy and uncomfortable process of growth. Don’t assume that when a top performer makes a mistake, the best thing to do is to let it slide. Even top performers need coaching — and the occasional gentle rebuke.
Don’t bestow the impossible-to-maintain mantle of perfection on your top people. Tell them where they went wrong. Even diamonds need to be buffed and polished.
5. Accept responsibility and don’t rebuke in public
A direct conversation behind closed doors is one thing. A public drawing-and-quartering is another.
As a leader, you need to defend and advocate for your people. Don’t publicly air their mistakes in front of others in the company. Even if the mistake is high-profile, think about absorbing the consequences yourself — instead of shoving your team member in the line of fire.
When you lead people, you are responsible for them. And sometimes that means taking responsibility for someone else’s mistake.
If you’re in the driver’s seat, it’s your responsibility to bear the brunt of the blow, even if the person in the backseat caused the crash. This will also engender loyalty with your team. They will be much likelier to work hard not to let you down again.
Photo by Steve Buissinne on Pixabay
6. But don’t sweep failure under the rug
We have a tendency to equate failure with shame. In recent years, some brave souls have started challenging this.
Fuckup Nights is a movement that traverses the globe, organizing events, tapping into local business communities, and drawing out people to publicly share their failures.
The idea behind it? We need to talk about failure. Sweeping it under the rug like a shameful secret serves no one. When we share, we have the opportunity to learn from one another. Everyone stumbles. Growth cannot happen without it.
How do you replicate this with your team? Instead of focusing only on successes and recent wins, carve out time in your meetings to talk about failure.
Talk about situations that didn’t go well. Reflect on clients who left. But always frame failure as a shared responsibility.
It’s not about pulling someone out for a public lashing. It’s about acknowledging that we’re all human. It sends a powerful message that it’s okay to fail.
As a leader, light the first firecracker. Kick off the discussion with a heartfelt and honest story of your own failure. If you create the right culture, people will step forward and share. | https://medium.com/better-marketing/what-to-do-when-a-team-member-makes-a-mistake-47f193ce9f07 | ['Hs Bruni'] | 2019-09-04 14:53:24.167000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneurship', 'Leadership', 'Personal Development', 'Work', 'Failure'] |
How much exercise is enough exercise to be healthy? | The stress of being self-employed is enormous. There is the ever-constant anxiety of wondering whether or not orders can be fulfilled, salaries paid, having enough cash flow for maintaining operations, and other endless worries. Sadly, with so muh occupying my mind, exercise was the least of my worries. My workday started any time from 03:00 am and I knocked off at 9:00 pm or even later. Where would I get the time to exercise, I used to wonder to myself. It’s only recently that I realized that for my own wellbeing, I needed to make time for exercise and other outdoor activities. In my previous blog, I wrote about the relaxing effects of gardening. In this blog, I’ll be writing about physical exercise/activity and hiking.
Hennops hiking trail. I took the Zebra trail which is only 5km. The entry fee for this trail is R100 for adults and R50 for kids. Be sure to have cash on you as they do not have card facilities.
We read a lot that exercise, like sex, can release endorphins, the feel-good chemicals. We also know of the health benefits but how many of us can say we prioritise exercising or any kind of physical activity? Every year we sign up for gym memberships as part of some well-intentioned resolution. We go into the gym or start jogging for the first week after the festive season and thereafter, the gym membership gathers dust until the next year. As a professional, exercise was an afterthought, and as an entrepreneur, it just became a distant concept. Why is it that we never make time for such an essential activity despite knowing of the benefits?
Modderfontein Reserve trail. This is a relatively flat trail and makes for a leisurely walk. The trails range from 10km-40km. I opted for the 10km hike. Entrance is R30 for adults and R15 for kids.
Countless studies have been conducted on the benefits of exercising. An even more compelling case for exercising is that it has also been found to have positive effects on people with stress, anxiety, and depression. This is due to physiological and biochemical mechanisms which include the release of endorphins. Interestingly, some researchers also looked at whether or not exercising outdoors had more beneficial effects than exercising indoors. Exercising outdoors did not lead to more beneficial changes per se. However, outdoor exercises were seen to be more calming and thus had more stress-reducing effects associated with calming environments. This shouldn’t detract anyone from doing indoor exercise though. Sometimes, exercising indoors is all we can manage, and you still get all the benefits that come with exercising.
Cradle Moon hiking trail. The hiking trail that I took is 9km. The great part about this trail is that there is game on the premises and so, be ready to see impala, zebra, etc. The entrance is R20 per person.
To be quite frank, I was motivated to start exercising because lockdown weight gain is very real! I needed to do some exercise to maintain my weight, over and above the other benefits that come with it. So, my indoor cardio exercise is geared primarily for maintaining weight. I was part of the athletics team in school and maintained an active lifestyle in university. So, I hardly struggled with weight. But alas, the struggle is real for me now. In addition to exercise, I try and maintain a healthy diet as well. I’m not on any formal diet programme, I just consciously try to eat healthily and be active.
I don’t have a goal weight or anything, I just want to be happy with the way I look and feel. My clothes are also a good indicator because I don’t want them to be too tight, nor do I want a new wardrobe. These are my motivating factors, and the byproduct of my workout is feeling good mentally as well. It’s not always easy to get up and exercise, sometimes the motivation is simply not there, and I have to work 10 times harder to stand up and exercise. I do a high-intensity interval training workout that combines jumping rope and an assortment of crunches, burpees, and squats. So, you can imagine how difficult it is to look forward to it sometimes. I take supplements and drink tea that helps me with my energy levels and detoxing as well.
Views from the top of Table Mountain. This is the view you get from hiking up the Platteklip Gorge trail. The entrance is free and it is a
I have now also rediscovered my love for hiking and I try to hike at least once a week. Again, this is me consciously making the time for this activity that I find so relaxing and calming. Hiking clears my head and motivates me. It’s hard to stay motivated when everything seems to be going pear-shaped, we need all the help we can get. I have been to some of the most beautiful hiking spots in and around Johannesburg. We live in a beautiful country with so much to be explored. You’ll see some of the hiking trails I’ve really enjoyed in a series of pictures peppered throughout the blog. The beauty that is all around us in nature has such a tremendous calming effect. When the lockdown measures were eased and we were able to go to public spaces again, it felt like rediscovering everything anew.
More views from atop Table Mountain.
I must say, I’m surprised that I still have a love for hiking because five years ago, I got lost on a hiking trail on Table Mountain in Cape Town. I suppose I still hike because the whole situation on Table Mountain was so comical. The sun was hot, the scenery from the mountain was, as always, enchanting. I was burnt to a bronzed crisp on that mountain, I was so dehydrated I didn’t have any saliva in my mouth. I was distracted from my woes by watching helicopters scooping water from the ocean to douse a fire on Lion’s Head, a mountain across Table Mountain. The Western Cape province is often plagued by veld fires that cause devastating damage and I was witnessing one such incident and how the brave men and women in the fire department were fighting to keep the fires at bay. Thinking of that kept me distracted for a while until I was rescued by the park rangers. Also, the views more than made up for the ordeal, so I’ll always hike to carry on seeing the beauty that nature has to offer.
Table Mountain, Constantia Nek hiking trail. Most of the hiking trails in Cape Town are free. There are beautiful sites to see. It’s a steep 16km hike (going up and down the mountain) and at the top, you can take a swim in one of the dams.
I returned to Cape Town again this year and the first order of business was a hike up Table Mountain. I’m writing situated on the foot of Table Mountain now. At the start of the hike, I wanted to give up. The hike is extremely steep until you get to the top. Although I thought I was a bit fit, my thighs were burning within the first minute of starting my hike. I joined a group of hikers from the Chicks Who Hike team(a group formed specifically for women who want to hike but do not have other people to join. You can find them on Instagram under the handle chickswhohikeza). They encouraged me to carry on and were patient with me until I got my second wind and could keep up. The swim in the dam at the top of the mountain as well as all the amazing views made my effort well worth it. I also got a sense of accomplishment after completing my longest hike so far (16km).
Table Mountain, Constantia Nek hiking trail.
As professionals and entrepreneurs, it is essential to take time out and mind our mental and physical wellbeing. It has been shown that taking time out and cutting work hours can significantly increase productivity and job satisfaction. Unilever is trialing a four-day workweek in New Zealand. Employees can cut 20% off their work hours without losing their pay. The performance of the employees is measured by output as opposed to hours. Other companies such as Microsoft have also trialed four-day workweeks and saw their sales leap by a whopping 40%. Productivity and job satisfaction also increased dramatically. The New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Ardern has advocated for a four-day workweek to encourage flexibility during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through this action, she also hopes to boost local tourism.
This is an honourary mention for Cape Point. They have excellent hiking trails and the entrance is R85 for South African citizens. So, be sure to have your ID with you. I opted for a short walk up to the lighthouse but the hiking trails and tidal pools will make a hike worthwhile.
A lot of small businesses have been adversely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. One way we can assist small businesses is through local travel and embarking on activities such as hiking to keep fit. Some trails have farmer’s markets on the premises so that after a great hike, one can buy products from local entrepreneurs. It is a calming atmosphere that’s excellent for post-hike relaxation. Besides keeping fit and relaxed, being active can prevent death. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), up to five million deaths per year are a result of people not being active. So, being active can literally save lives.
Supporting local entrepreneurs at the Fourways Farmers Market in the Modderfontein Reserve. The Farmer’s Market is at the end of the hiking trail and the entrance is R20.
How active is active you might ask? Well, WHO recommends up to 150 to 300 minutes of moderate to vigorous aerobic activity per week for adults (including those living with chronic conditions or disability). For children and adolescents, 60 minutes of activity is recommended. A whopping $54 billion in health care and $14 billion in reduced productivity is lost each year due to lack of sufficient physical activity in adults and adolescents. In addition to reducing the negative effects of anxiety and depression, physical activity can also prevent and help in managing heart disease, type-2 diabetes, and cancer, according to WHO. So why are we so shy to get out there and start being active?
Lion’s Head hiking trail. This hike has magnificent views and is less than 8km. To catch the sunrise in summer, I’d recommend an early start of 04:45 am. The entrance is free.
I like a slogan that WHO uses which goes “every move counts”. One doesn’t necessarily have to go to the gym or jog every day to keep active. You can start with simple everyday activities such as walking, wheeling, cycling, dancing, playing, and cleaning. WHO also recommends gardening as another way of staying active. So, you see, every physical activity of any duration counts in terms of positive effects on one’s wellbeing and mental health. More is always better but start small. | https://medium.com/@kutlwanoah/how-much-exercise-is-enough-exercise-to-be-healthy-ead7c40aefcc | ['Kutlwano Hutamo'] | 2020-12-21 12:37:14.416000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Mental Health', 'Wellness', 'Exercise'] |
How to debug? (Tips for newbies) | I studied business in university and had little experience in software development. Debugging has been my greatest obstacle to become a software engineer. It is very confusing to find out my program doesn’t work as expected. I used to be a technology consultant. Creating a proposal in powerpoint never gave me the same level of confusion as programming did. If I had not found a systematic way to debug efficiently, I would have ended my career in software engineering. Therefore, I want to summarize some general debugging skills for newbies. Hope you can have a smoother path in pursuit of being a software engineer.
Firstly, locate the error messages in all the right places. When a program encounters into problems, it usually throws errors in different places. It can be misleading and confusing to read error messages in just one place. Try to go through all errors to have a comprehensive picture. For example, when your website doesn’t work, you can check the error in the browser as well as in the backend server.
Secondly, read the error message carefully. I used to find the error message, googled it and clicked the first Stack Overflow link immediately without even reading the error message. Sometimes the error can be as simple as missing a bracket. That can save your google time if you read the message first.
Thirdly, just google it. I think I don’t need to elaborate further for this part which is an inborn skill for all digital citizens.
Fourthly, read the official documentation. Most beginners get stuck after they google the error message as they either can’t understand it or those google results don’t accurately describe the error they are facing. You should then find out which lines of code cause the error and what functions, modules, libraries, SDK and/or API calls are involved. Search the official documentation related to that component and read the definition carefully. Usually, the documentation defines how your component should be written and what data type of variable should be put in. Cross-check with your code to see if there is anything wrong.
Fifthly, find tutorials on how to use that component. Rookie developers may just get confused after digging into the jargon-filled official documentation. You can try to google something like “How to use (component name) of (module, library, SDK or API name)” Some generous software engineer (like me 😊) may try to contribute back to the community by explaining how to use some complicated components.
Sixthly, brute force it! Sometimes you may not find any answer from the documentation and google. You may need to go through the process of trial and error, such as changing the data type of the variable, moving the component to different lines of the code and removing the entire component. Don’t forget to put a function to print out the result of your trial and error process.
Seventhly, the error can be related to the environment. I got very lost when I first heard the term environment in the software development. It is nothing scary but just some other programs surrounding your little program. Think of it like your bedroom. If your lightbulb is not working, you firstly try to see if there is any problem for the switch in the bedroom. Then, you may install a new lightbulb to see if it works again. Then, you may go to the living room to investigate whether the circuit breaker is triggered. Lastly, you seek help from an electrician. For your program, the error can be caused by the runtime version. Runtime refers to a piece of software where your program is executed, such as Java, Node.js and Python. Perhaps your component only supports a particular version. On top of that, your runtime maybe wrapped in a container environment. Container OS or the container itself can cause the error. In addition, other programs running in the host OS or the host OS itself may also cause the error.
Lastly, restart the computer but don’t do it in the production environment (SERIOUSLY!!!). Allegedly, it solves 80% of the computer problems but you may face the same error someday.
I hope you can really take away something from here and solve next bug with a little bit more confidence! Happy debugging😊 | https://medium.com/@cloudycalvin/how-to-debug-tips-for-newbies-5baa0c8a40e | ['Calvin Cheng'] | 2020-12-21 09:35:37.629000+00:00 | ['Coding', 'Software Development', 'Debugging', 'Technology', 'Programming'] |
How people wade through one of the top trending technology (artificial intelligence) | Nowadays people will be showing more interest in learning new technologies. There are a number of top trending technologies in that Artificial intelligence is one of the top trending technologies. Who is wade through Artificial intelligence it is good for their career?
Artificial intelligence is one of the most important technologies in this world. Today the field of artificial intelligence is more alive than ever and some believe that we are on the threshold of finding that could shift human society permanent for better or worse.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial intelligence is an important technology and it is one of the branches of computer science that can be the creation of intelligent machines that can work like humans. It has become an essential part of the technology industry. It can be performed on specific tasks by processing large amounts of data.
What are artificial intelligence platforms?
It has the use of machines to perform the tasks that are performed by human beings. This platform of AI is performed like human minds such as learning, solving problems, reasoning, social intelligence. In this AI is classifies either as narrow AI/ weak AI which is generally meant for particular tasks, the strong AI is also known as artificial general intelligence it can find the solutions for different tasks.
There are different kinds of AI platforms.
Machine learning. Automation. Natural language processing and natural language understanding. Cloud infrastructure.
1.Machine learning: It is one of the roots of artificial intelligence. When machines take care of your problems? first, we require good and reliable data to work machines well. All you need is going to build what you want. It uses the above processes to learn complicated decision systems.
2.Automation: Automation is everywhere in technology. In your artificial intelligence also automation is a must-have feature. It is basically creating software or hardware that is capable of doing tasks automatically without human interruption. Artificial intelligence is all about trying to make machines or software imitator, and ultimately, supersede human behavior and intelligence. With the right way, you can automate processes such as invoicing, marketing, job documents with ease.
3.Natural language processing and natural language understanding: Natural language processing (NPL) is an interaction between human (natural) and computer language and it is referring to communicate with an intelligence system.
The field of natural language understanding (NPU) is an important and challenging subset of Natural language processing (NPL). By using an algorithm, this is to reduce human speech structured.
4. Cloud infrastructure: Cloud infrastructure has a feature provides the scalability to grow and access resources to deploy even the complex artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions.
Artificial intelligence is trending technology with the potential not only improve the existing cloud platform authorities but also boost up a new generation of cloud computing technology.
Current forms of Artificial intelligence:
Voice assistants: If we call any technology that makes our lives easier by one name is almost impossible. It is a digital assistant that uses voice recognition, speech, and natural language processing to provide a service through a special application. They differ essentially based on how we interact with the technology, the app, or a combination of both.
Translation: The translation is not just about translating languages. This is also about translating objects, pictures, and sounds into data that can be used in various algorithms.
Predictive systems: Artificial intelligence is looking at statistical data and forms valuable conclusions for investors, doctors, meteorologists, and nearly every other field where statistics and event prediction prove valuable.
Top artificial intelligence platforms:
Below are the best top AI platforms using the software.
Microsoft Azure machine learning.
Google cloud prediction API.
Tensor flow.
Infosys Nia.
Wipro HOLMES.
API.AI.
Premonition.
Rainbird.
Vital.AI.
MindMeld.
Is AI dangerous?
Artificial intelligence’s are long series of programmed replies and collections of data right now, and they don’t have the capability to makes really independent decisions. If AI sees humanity as useless for its purposes, it could easily eliminate us from the equation by using our existing properties of biological weapons, or by making existing viral agents into weapons to make our city to come to a pause.
Artificial intelligence will probably get a small smarter and kill a lot more people in the process before we figure out how to make it actually clever. Clever AI in the future, the super-intelligent sentient sort, is probably going to see us as either tool to manipulate, like toys to play with, or as pets to protect.
Humans have empathy made in because we evolved to be social animals. Artificial intelligence made from the ground needn’t come with empathy. If we don’t make sure to build empathy into such artificial intelligence at the onset, it could be dangerous for us. | https://medium.com/quick-code/how-people-wade-through-one-of-the-top-trending-technology-artificial-intelligence-6f59f9bb55a1 | [] | 2019-05-22 12:21:00.874000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Software Development', 'Technology', 'AI'] |
The Worst Technical & Contextual SEO Mistakes You Can Make (2020 Update) | Have you noticed that SEO in the last 3–4 years is a tricky process, which requires more strategic thinking and better user experience than before? Sure it’s just a little part of them: Here’s more than we expected.
As far as I can tell, your most prominent reason why you are here is that you need more traffic, more leads & revenue from organic search. Each of us needs more traffic in the long term, and for this, we make various SEO efforts. But are these efforts efficient for the future of your brand? We need to measure all of them and convince ourselves that improvements will be most trusted.
So what challenges will we see in the evergreen SEO process?
There are a few things we need to know:
I think it’s enough to understand how long is the process of SEO now and maybe beyond. The last one, do you know how to hide a brand in search results? Easy peasy!
Page 2nd of the Google search results
Let’s come to the central thought. Below you will see some worst SEO mistakes (and how to avoid them), which I experienced with various brands and get better performance (take a look at one example — Migros’ SEO Case Study).
Shortly in this post, you can find SEO issues on these pieces:
Crawling & Indexing Technical SEO Content/Context SEO
Now, focus and be ready!
Indexing Issues & How to Avoid
Forget or Skip Using Robots.txt Rules
You have probably heard about robots.txt file and maybe heard how important it is to use this file carefully. There in robots.txt file User-agent, Disallow, and Allow is the most famous lines — if you don’t understand how to use these rules, you shouldn’t wonder about that and permit a webmaster. Robots.txt is used by 500 million websites that were adopted by all major search engines (Google, Yandex, Bing, etc.).
The Robots.txt File
https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt
How robots.txt file works?
It is not necessary to use this TXT file on your leading directory of the website. But, if you didn’t use, then you need to know that:
Major search engines will be crawling all URL paths of your website (search results, filtered URLs, thin pages, etc.)
You will treat crawl-budget (website’s crawl rate limit)which is very important for index health,
Many of your web pages’ ranking will change every day because they may be cannibalization.
For example, if you want to block your search results’ URL path to Google, use that rule:
User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /search
If you want to block the search results, but some of these* allow to indexing:
User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /search Allow: /search?q=cheese
*Some of your search results are specialized and optimized nicely then break them to indexing. If there are no reasons, block all of them. I’d like to share with you a fantastic guide about how robots.txt works and how to use rules in the best way: Here’s a blog post by Matthew Henry.
Failed URLs in XML Sitemap
Supposing you want to hike to a specific destination, you are alone, and there’s no wifi, no G.P.S. How can you walk to this destination? Guide, am I right? And so your website needs to be pointable for significant search engines.
Ups, I forget one thing. You may don’t know what the XML sitemap is. It was just one of those things, like a regular technical SEO doer.
XML Sitemap is one of the most important (after robots.txt) files for your website’s URLs. There you can add all your web pages to show to Google or another one. If you already have that file, Google will crawl them every day.
The file can be in any URL path. There is an example:
Inside XML Sitemap File
Remember those things:
Don’t break here at broken links because Googlebot will crawl and, at every turn, will try to index your broken URLs — it will treat your crawl-budget.
If you have more than 50K URLs, put them into a few files (e.g.,/sitemap-categories.xml, /sitemap-products.xml, etc.).
One sitemap file can’t be more than 50 M.B. That may be a problem for Google when trying to analyze this file.
Except for <loc> protocol, if you don’t need to use other protocols is your right. But before take a look here and understand how XML sitemap protocols work.
Forget to Use Meta Robots “noindex” Tag.
If you want to deindex (remove from the index permanently), you should add <meta name= “robots” content= “noindex”> code into <head> side. Robots.txt is only one part of your crawl management.
As John Mueller said:
“robots.txt is for controlling crawling, not for controlling indexing of URLs.” — Twitter Status
Where should you use the “noindex” tag?
Meta Robots “nofollow” tag code
URL path which you disallow from robots.txt,
Pagination pages (these pages will never have a high rank).
Pass Over the 404 Pages
Still? Really?!
A little break? → Still D.R.E.
I can’t sometimes believe what I see when starting the process of URLs’ health. It’s a long story, but yeah, continued.
“404 Not Found” pages are a pain in the neck. They may be in Google’s index and still get clicks. If any of that clicks will come to an empty page, I’m sure most of the visitors will exit from this page — meaning you lose potential revenue.
You have a lot of ways how to identify these 404 pages:
Google Search Console’s Coverage Report Track with Google Analytics (Needed Google Tag Manager) Analyze with DeepCrawl / Screaming Frog SEO Spider
And so
After you find all failed URLs, fire to 301 redirects. How? Where?
Similar to your failed URL path (most recommended).
or
Pages which is already gain traffic.
or
Direct to #1 level categories or main page.
Technical SEO Issues & How to Avoid
Killer of SEO: Page Load on Mobile is Slower than Desktop Devices
Most users use smartphones — so Googlebot uses a smartphone too, for the most crawling. Over 50% of search results are from mobile indexing, and if your website’s mobile version doesn’t load faster, then you lose more than 53% of potential customers.
“If your site takes longer than two seconds to load, 53% of your customers lose interest.” — Think with Google
Think with Google
We are in an age of mobile-first indexing, where Google dominates. So, providing a fast experience on each device will contribute to your sales and, thus, to your SEO visibility.
I’d like to share two significant brands’ experienced examples:
#1 — Amazon (2012)
In 2012 Amazon’s page load time rose to 1 second and lost $1.6 billion.
#2 — Walmart (2016)
For every -1 second of improvement, they experienced up to a 2% increase in conversion rate.
#3 — eBay (2020)
For every 100ms improvement in search page loading time, eBay.com saw a 0.5% increase in Add to Cart count.
It’s just the most prominent brands’ 3 examples that say if you need a difference in visibility and revenue, be fast like a cheetah! Not only on mobile, at all devices.
So how to test the load speed of pages? I have a few useful tools for you:
Above I just share tools that I use, you can choose any of those. But remember, when you identify the page speed issues, you will need a full-stack developer and a knowledgeable SEO doer. I recommend to you before that to take a look at Ian Lurie’s blog post about “A developer’s guide to SEO.”
Choose who you want your website to be
Misusage in Canonical Tags
Canonical tag helps to show which URL is the original version/should be indexed by search engines. For example, if you have pagination pages, and if you add below code to /cheese?page=2 this page.
<link rel=“canonical” href= “/cheese” />
Google will index just your first page of the category. Now you understand a little bit how it works, but I think you will be impressed to learn more details — waiting for you here.
I see many issues on canonical tags, these are:
Pages without any canonical URL,
Use the same canonical URL to duplicated pages (e.g., https://yourdomain.com and http://www.yourdomain.com),
Canonicalized to an unrelated page (e.g., yourdomain.com/cheese and yourdomain.com/category/cheese),
Without entire domain extension (HTTP/HTTPs, W.W.W./non-WWW, or with/-out slash),
Wrong quotation marks
Use to non-indexable pages (301, 404, 502, etc.),
Use A.M.P. (Accelerated Mobile Pages) URL version to desktop source codes (e.g., yourdomain.com/cheese and yourdomain.com/cheese/amp/),
Use JavaScript in-code to all pages (e.g., rel= “canonical” href=“{{MetaTags.canonical}}”).
There are too many cases; these are just a few of them. So what you need to do to detect these canonical tag issues?
I will show you a more comfortable way: Start to use DeepCrawl, crawl your website, and look at “canonical” issues. If you have more than one report, then start step-by-step to resolve them. After you solve the canonical tag issues, download Screaming Frog SEO Spider and paste all the URLs there to see differences which your developer does. There you can see many reports, but all that you want to see is the “Canonicals” tab.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider, List Mode
Do Not Load Third-party Tools Directly When Page is Opening
To be more precise, I’ve shared a screenshot below.
WebPageSpeed Waterfall Results
If you have an eCommerce website, then surely you are using a few third-party tools for users/your customers. If you load all of the tools directly when visitors come to your website, you are in trouble with time to interactive*. Take a look at the above waterfall view; there is an example that shows how much time needed to load-fully a page.
*What is time to interact?
Google PageSpeed Insights — Lab Data
What do you need to do with third-party tools?
Firstly and except Google tools (G.A., G.S.C., G.T.M., etc.), you should pick up all javascript codes of your tools. Add the below code to your source codes.
The code for load third-party tools after scrolling
window.addEventListener(‘scroll’,() =>
setTimeout(() => {
// load third-party tools here
}, 1000),
{ once: true }
)
The logic of this J.S. event is third-party load tools after a user scrolling your page. Tools like Hotjar, Taboola are for your visitors, and that is why we need to load them after scrolling.
Content/Context SEO Issues
Exceed the Meta Title Pixel Limit
Meta titles are a part of the section for the main summary thing of the content on the page. It’s just seen to users, which is on the search engine results. If you want to level-up your knowledge about the meta title tag, Moz already wrote a guide.
Perhaps you’ve heard that there’s a 60–70 character limit to appear your page meta title fully on Google search results. However, Google doesn’t have a definite character limit — it can be a max 600 px.
What does the 600-pixel limit mean for meta titles?
One letter can be longer than another. For example, M is a letter, and so N is a letter. However, there is a pixel difference between the two. To have a more explicit example, I prepared a visual as follows.
As you will see, both titles with the same number of characters are displayed differently. One on Google limits the title to “…” while the other one appears. Here is what we need to understand; we may show clear titles for users searching on Google while we do not exceed the pixel limit.
How to optimize meta titles and boost your C.T.R.?
I have no words after Brian Dian’s case study:
Here’s What We Learned About Organic Click Through Rate
Pass Over High Traffic Potential of the Old Blog Posts
You may have old blog posts with a low traffic rate. Keep your eyes there before publishing new posts. If you don’t want to lose your blog’s potential traffic, measure the performance of all blog posts.
A few questions to ask before publishing a new post on the blog:
— What is the average ranking of your old blog posts? — Do you get the traffic performance you expect? — What is the average session duration? — What % of the traffic you have per month based on the search volume of the main keywords of the content? — What is the CTR of the main keywords of the content? — Do you have an extensive brief according to specific topics? — Do you compare your post with the best competitors in terms of ranking? — It may bring natural backlinks?
Update your blog posts periodically, prepare comprehensive content that will remain evergreen for next year. Instead of focusing on a single keyword, use relevant keywords that may search by many users. You are not obligated to write blah blah blah just because that keywords are higher in search volume — understand what is mean intent-based. Prepare the best one brief; it helps to content writers.
Here is a part of my content brief:
You can catch a few ideas from this part of the content brief → You can download and use it free — Detailed Content Brief
I’m not going to close here; I’ll be working on this content to keep more comprehensive and evergreen.
If you have more time, you can read my latest Medium posts:
→ Future of Voice Searches & Impact on SEO
→ Do You Care About Your Website’s Externally Linked 404 Pages?
Follow me on Twitter: @AdamitaRoman | https://medium.com/boostroas/the-worst-technical-contextual-seo-mistakes-you-can-make-24114bf882a6 | ['Roman Adamita'] | 2020-05-05 06:56:18.310000+00:00 | ['Boostroas', 'Technical Seo', 'Crawling', 'Content Marketing', 'SEO'] |
JSON Web Tokens With Python APIs. Part 1. Creating the Token | JSON Web Tokens With Python APIs
Part 1. Creating the Token
Photo by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash
When designing and building an Application Programming Interface (API), security is something that the developer must have in mind. Without security, a malicious user could potentially gain access to sensitive data. That’s where JWTs or session cookies come in to play. Today, we will be using JSON Web Tokens. Essentially, these are compacted JSON objects that securely transmit data. For this tutorial, we will build an API that authenticates a user and creates a token.
Let’s Get Building
Before we can get started writing our Python code, we need to figure out what the database will look like. Below is some SQL code to help us get started.
The first table we create is the Users table. It holds basic user information as well as the hashed password and the salt value used for the password. Next, we create the Claims table. This table will hold a list of applications and their corresponding Guid’s. If you are looking at the JWT documentation, these claims will be known as private claims within the payload part of the token. The final table we will create is the UserClaims table that ties claims to a user.
With our authentication tables created, it’s time to write some Python code. The API will be written using Flask and SQLAlchemy. I’m not going to go into detail about setting these up in your environment, but here are some resources to help get started:
For this API, we will have two different endpoints. The first will be a POST request that adds a user to the database. The second will be a GET request that creates a JWT for the user.
Now that we have some endpoints, we can add some meat and potatoes to them. Looking at the “adduser” endpoint, we need to have code that will create a salt value to be used for when we hash the users password. For those who may not know, a salt is a unique value that we add to the end of the password which is then hashed using some sort of encryption method. Once we have the salt, the hashed password and the rest of the users basic information, we need to add it to the database.
The function above will achieve most of what we are looking for. It is by no means perfect, but it does accomplish some basic error handling. In the future, it would be nice to have it check for an existing email address and handle that issue accordingly. There are two helper functions left that are needed to complete the “addusers” endpoint.
Disecting the “DetermineSalt” function, it uses the “os” module to generate a string that is 32 random bytes longs. Analyzing the “HashPassword” function, we pass the users password and the newly created salt to it. Importing the “hashlib” module, we use the sha256 hashing module to hash the combined password and salt.
With the “adduser” endpoint built, we can move on to the endpoint that will login the user (basically create the jwt).
Like the “AddUser” function, the “UserLogin” function performs some basic error handling. In a nutshell, this function checks the database for the users email, then hashes the provided password with the stored salt to see if it matches the password hash in the database. There is one more helper function that is needed for this function to be complete.
As you probably guessed, this function does exactly what it’s name is. It creates the JWT. The function also takes a claims parameter that will be defined in Part 2. In order to create the token, we use a secret string (this can be whatever you want it to be). The token is encoded using HS256 which is HMAC with SHA-256. One final note is that the “jwt” module needs to be imported in order to encode the token. To install this module, use pip.
pip3 install pyjwt
Testing the Endpoints
Now that the code writing is complete, it’s time to see if our hard work has paid off. To test the API endpoints, we will use Postman. To test our “adduser” endpoint, we will add a JSON object to the raw body in Postman. It will look a little something like this.
{
"firstName": "Bob",
"lastName": "Smith",
"email": "[email protected]"
"password": "testPassword!" }
When you add your hostname and the “adduser” URL to Postman, you should get results similar to this when you send the POST request.
Testing the “userlogin” endpoint will be a little similar except the JSON object we send will look like this.
{
"email": "[email protected]"
"password": "testPassword!" }
After changing the URL in Postman to the “userlogin” endpoint and sending the request, your result will look something like this.
Just for fun, try out changing the password for the same email. If it worked, the results should return as this.
Something really cool worth checking out, is heading over to the website jwt.io and plugging in the token we received when we successfully requested a token. This site will decode the token and break down the different parts of it for you. It’s also a good way to tell if you have a valid token.
Final Thoughts
To sum things up, this API is by no means complete (nor perfect). There is still quite a bit of work to be done in order to use the token for authentication. A few of those todo’s are that we need to implement the token claims portion as well as implementing the authentication for the token. However, all that will be handled in Part 2. Therefore, until we meet again cheers! | https://medium.com/python-in-plain-english/json-web-tokens-with-python-apis-part-1-creating-the-token-ce2cfe22b7d6 | ['Mike Wolfe'] | 2020-11-29 09:06:44.547000+00:00 | ['Jwt', 'API', 'Web Development', 'Software Development', 'Python'] |
Stand for something — a small spark lights the fire | In September 1990, as a wide-eyed 13-year-old, I watched as Doordarshan flashed images of Rajiv Goswami, a student of Deshbandhu College, immolating himself. He was protesting the proposed implementation of the Mandal Commission reforms that had recommended reservations for economically and socially backward classes.
A small ripple until that point, his action led to a tidal wave of protests across the nation. Schools and colleges closed down for months, offices struck work, candlelight marches were organized, and the nation came to a standstill.
Twenty years later in 2010, the world watched wide-eyed, as images of Muhammad Bouazizi a Tunisian street vendor immolating himself, were flashed across BBC and CNN. His act, borne out of desperation against an authoritarian regime, led to the Arab Spring, with people movements toppling dictators in Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Tunisia.
One need not light themselves up to fire a revolution. One only needs to stand firm for what one believes in.
Whether race or religion, democracy or deep thought, will you have the courage to stand for what you believe in?
Onlookers try to help Rajiv Goswami as he immolates himself in New Delhi (image courtesy google images) | https://medium.com/@en-dwarak/stand-for-something-a-small-spark-lights-the-fire-6896e9f7e417 | ['Dwarak Narasimhan'] | 2020-12-18 13:02:28.534000+00:00 | ['Stand Up For Yourself', 'Democracy', 'Courage', 'Protest', 'Belief'] |
Stranded in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean… on purpose | Lieutenant Jonathon ‘Pony’ Moore, recently found himself being dumped into the warm Atlantic Ocean as part of a ‘downed pilot’ scenario.
Lt Moore stranded out at sea with HMS Queen Elizabeth in the distance.
Lieutenant Moore was the focus of a ‘downed pilot’ scenario, which aims to test the rescue skills of both HMS Queen Elizabeth and the Commando Helicopter Force during the Westlant 19 deployment. — the aircraft carrier’s deployment to North America.
The duty search-and-rescue aircraft from 845 Naval Air Squadron was scrambled to rescue a downed pilot. Once on the scene, the aircraft was able to use its onboard equipment as well as putting the full sea-search skills of the crew to the test to rescue the survivor.
Aircrew are taught how to escape from the aircraft and surface, along with how to assist with their own extraction.
Lt Moore being saved by 845 Naval Air Squadron.
As the ship prepared to embark UK F-35B Lightning jets for the first time, the ship has also prepared for the worst-case scenario — where it might need to rescue a ‘downed pilot’ or other isolated persons, at sea, recovering them back to the ship.
Life support jackets, single-seat liferafts and a range of rescue beacons were tested.
Testing the communication lines from the beacon back to the ship, aircrew then launched and honed onto the ‘downed pilot’s’ beacon to swoop in and pick him up. | https://medium.com/voices-of-the-armed-forces/stranded-in-the-middle-of-the-atlantic-ocean-on-purpose-69f5357b59b9 | ['Ministry Of Defence'] | 2019-11-01 15:37:32.674000+00:00 | ['Military', 'Security', 'Sea', 'Humanitarian', 'Navy'] |
Parenting | 10 Myths and Struggles in Breastfeeding and how to overcome it
Breastfeeding is the natural process for feeding the baby. New mothers should have knowledge about breastfeeding and the initial struggles they might have in that journey prior to delivery which will help them to understand it better. Also mothers struggle to handle the myths regarding breastfeeding.
As a new mom, most of them often expect a colorful life immediately after delivery. In reality, it’s not the case. Of course, the baby is going to bring you loads and loads of happiness in life, but not immediately. New mothers often feel stressed and exhausted because of reasons like pregnancy hormones change, struggle during delivery, pain after delivery and more. Their stamina to feed their new born also depends on factors like type of delivery they had(normal or c-section), complications they had during delivery. Breastmilk secretion works on the rule of demand and supply. More the baby suckle, more the milk is produced. It will take 6 weeks to establish the supply according to the baby’s needs.
As per WHO recommendation, new mothers can make sure that the baby will be given only breastmilk or formula milk for 6 months and it remains the main source of nutrition till 1 year because their digestive system is not mature enough to digest solids till 6 months and slowly can be introduced after it. It is also recommended to continue breastfeeding for 2 years.
Breastmilk is called “liquid gold” because it has such amazing health benefits for the baby. Baby will feel secure and safe at the mother’s breast once they are born because they will get the same warmth from the womb. Newborn mother’s will produce their first breastmilk called colostrum which is highly nutritious and a few drops which are produced are sufficient for the baby. The first one hour is called “golden hour” and the mother can ask for breast crawl to start breastfeeding. More skin to skin contact can help in starting the breastfeeding journey.
Breastmilk has antibodies which helps in building immunity for the baby, childhood obesity is reduced, mothers can manage the regression period by breastfeeding, baby will be getting all the essential nutrients (vitamins, protein, fat etc). After starting solids, it will help in easy digestion. When the baby gets illness, breastfeeding helps in getting quick recovery as breast milk is produced according to the baby’s needs. Extended breastfeeding also helps the infants to get the antibodies from the mother if they get sick, refuse food, managing tantrums etc.
Lets see about a few myths which new mothers might hear in breastfeeding and the reason not to believe it.
1) If the baby is feeding frequently or suffering from gastric issues, some people might say that the mother is overfeeding the baby. Breastfeeding babies know the amount of intake so they won’t get overfed. Incase the problem persists, mother can consult a paediatrician to identify the cause.
2) If the baby is not chubby, her breastmilk is not nutritious or it is watery. It is the constant dialogue which most of the mothers might hear it. It’s not true. Breastmilk secretion happens purely based on baby’s suckle. According to baby’s needs, breastmilk will get secreted. There is nothing called as watery breastmilk. Breastmilk is secreted as foremilk which is watery and hindmilk which is thicker. Both are nutritious.
3) After getting head wash or if the mother gets cold, she should not feed her child. It’s not true. Make sure to dry your hair properly so that water droplets from hair don’t fall on the child and not to sneeze in front of the baby so that the baby doesn’t get cold.
4) When mothers go out and if they want to feed their child, some are asked to do in their car or even washroom. Some people also say that if she feeds in front of others then milk secretion will stop. If the mother is comfortable, then she can feed the baby anywhere she wants. Milk secretion won’t stop because of feeding in public. No adult can eat in a washroom so the baby. People should understand that breastfeeding is quite a natural process.
5) People often advise that if a mother eats certain food, then baby will get that specific taste in her breast milk. If she eats more food, more milk will secrete. It’s not true. Eat for hunger, drink for thirsty. Every food in moderation is the key. If she wants to eat an ice cream, let her have it. Baby won’t get milkshake as breastmilk. If she eats bitter guard, milk won’t taste bitter . Breastmilk is secreted from the blood of a mother, not from her food.
Lets see about a few struggles which new mothers might face in breastfeeding and how to overcome those struggles.
1) After birth:
- If the baby is born as pre- mature (before 37 weeks of pregnancy), then depending on the baby’s condition, will be admitted to NICU if necessary. In this case, if the mother has good milk supply, she can either hand express or use a pump and give that milk to feed the baby. If not possible, formula can be given with parent’s consent.
- If the baby is born as full-term, he/she will be given to the mother for their first feed. Nowadays, some of the hospitals are giving formula milk immediately without getting mother’s consent which is not acceptable. This might create nipple confusion. It will be difficult to make the baby latch if they are used to the flow of milk. Baby’s weight will reduce after birth, so don’t worry about it. Mother can make sure to feed the baby for every 2 hours until their birth weight is regained and after that, they can feed based on the baby’s demand. If the supply is more, then she can use hot pack compression and hand express the milk till the pain is reduced. Mother can make sure to avoid taking any galactose to increase milk supply in the initial 6 weeks so that mastitis or further problems can be avoided.
2) Latching : Some babies may latch and some may not latch. Some mother’s start producing milk immediately and some might take a few days.
- If the baby latch is good and the mother doesn’t have any discomfort in feeding like pain, then the breastfeeding journey has started smoothly.
- If the baby latches and still cries every time, then the mother might secrete milk in a few days, so the baby can be fed with formula or breastmilk (from breastmilk bank or donor) in the meantime. Mother can try to latch the baby frequently when the baby is not hungry like after every feeding. This might help to latch better and for milk secretion of the mother.
- If the baby latches but is sleeping in a few minutes or not actively suckling or the mother is facing pain in feeding or the baby doesn’t latch at all, feeding position may not be comfortable for the baby or mother. Mother can try different feeding positions and can identify the one which is comfortable for both the baby and mother, so that it can help the baby to latch and mother can also avoid back pain because of sitting for longer hours.
- Even after changing feeding positions, if the problem remains the same, then the mother can consult a lactation consultant. They can guide her in the right direction. Most of them give online counselling also if she can’t meet personally. Some babies might have ties(lip tie or tongue tie or both). In such cases, babies can’t latch properly or won’t latch. They can guide on how to rectify the issue and can explain the proper feeding positions.
3) Pumping:
- Some mothers used to pump and give the milk because of various reasons like latching issue, resuming to work etc. That is also breastfeeding.Thanks to technology. Pumping is not an easier task, it’s difficult than direct feeding. It should be done at a regular interval of 2 to 3 hours once to meet the baby’s needs and to maintain the supply. Bottles should be sterilised properly. When the baby is sleeping, instead of taking rest, even at midnight, mother will be pumping so that her baby will get the breastmilk. Milk should be stored properly. To use it for a longer duration, it should be stored in the fridge. Everytime when we give breastmilk from the freezer, it should be thawed to room temperature. Once thawed, it should not be stored again. These many struggles she might face in pumping to give the breastmilk. So, the mother can ask the help of others to do things like feeding the baby, making them sleep to get some rest for her
4) Milk supply:
- Mothers might hear from others or they may have a doubt about their milk supply. If the pee count is fine (more than six), then your baby is getting adequate milk. So, mothers can have a check on pee count to know whether the baby is not dehydrated. Pumping can also increase the milk supply.
- Some mothers suffer from oversupply issue. Their bodies tend to produce more milk than the need of the baby. Those mothers might struggle to latch the baby. In such times, mother can hand express little before latching the baby. If she is comfortable, she can also pump and donate to breastmilk bank. It may help some mother for her baby.
5) Handling sleep and crankiness:
- Sometimes, babies wants to hold for their naps. Once we keep them down, they will be awake and start crying. Some people say that the baby is not fed fully so he/she is awake immediately. Feed the formula to make them full. It’s not true. Breastmilk will digest easily so the baby will also be feeding often. But, formula is not easily digested like breastmilk so babies might sleep a little longer. Babies can’t bridge their sleep cycles on their own like adults. In order to bridge their naps, mother can feed in the side lying position and make the baby sleep
- Babies cry for various reasons. Crying is the only means of communication to them. It doesn’t mean that the baby will cry only if he/she is hungry.They will cry if they feel cold, hot, stomach pain, boredom, scared and so on. Whenever they achieve new milestones like crawling, sitting, standing, walking, talking, they will cry more, will face discomfort in sleeping. In those times, breastfeeding helps to pacify the baby.
Easier said than done. After delivery, she may not be even able to sit for hours to try feeding because of tiredness, sleeplessness, pain etc. Her partner, family, friends could provide moral support to her and make sure that she gets adequate rest so that her body and mind will be fine. If possible, guide her to find a solution for issues. If any struggle she is facing in breastfeeding, ask her to meet the right person, provide correct info. Always remember, happy mom makes a happy baby. When a baby is born, a mother is also born again. There will be criticism no matter what the mother chooses for feeding. Mother can make sure to take an informed decision.
I would like to point out a few examples where mothers have got both good and bad experiences in real life.
- Some of my friends had a good breastfeeding journey. Baby latched well, milk supply was good, baby’s weight gain was adequate. They also did breastfeeding for more than a year and some of them did extended breastfeeding too.
- My baby didn’t latch. Met a lactation consultant, corrected ties but it was little late. Because of nipple confusion, I was not able to breastfeed. Finally decided to pump and give breastmilk instead of going for full formula feed. My baby was mixed fed. Pumping helped me to make sure that she gets breast milk for at least a year.
- I also know a mother who was struggling with latch. She corrected her baby ties and then breastfeeding was easier.
- One of my friend couldn’t breastfeed. She tried pumping but her milk supply didn’t increase. She went into postpartum depression because she couldn’t breastfeed and the people are making her feel bad. Then she understood, she is doing her best so no need to regret about it. It helped her to have a good time with the baby.
To the mothers who are facing struggles, just remember that, if you can carry your baby for 9 months in your womb safely, then you can take care of the baby also. Please consult a breastfeeding friendly paediatrician if you have any queries. Stay strong, you are the best and you can do it. | https://medium.com/@bhavi92.venkat/parenting-5ba7b4b5c37f | ['Bhavishya Gopal'] | 2020-04-09 10:46:46.205000+00:00 | ['Parenthood', 'Parenting Tips', 'Breastfeeding', 'New Mothers Support'] |
Knowing the SparkJava Framework | I would like to share some of my knowledge in Spark Java in this article. I will carry my article in a way of answering the following questions What, Why, Where,When and How ? With some code examples. I will cover the rest of the things in upcoming articles.
Let’s see the questions that needs to be answered.
1.What is Spark Java?
2.What are the advantages of using SparkJava?
3.Why it is Used ?
4.How to Use It?
5.Example codes and Advantages
What is Spark Java?
Spark is a simple and lightweight Java web framework built for rapid development.Spark focuses on being as simple and straight-forward as possible, without the need for cumbersome (XML) configuration, to enable very fast web application development in pure Java with minimal effort. It’s a totally different paradigm when compared to the overuse of annotations for accomplishing pretty trivial stuff seen in other web frameworks, for example, JAX-RS implementations.
What are the advantages of using SparkJava?
It is an alternative to other Java web application frameworks such as JAX-RS,Play Framework and Spring MVC.
It runs on an embedded Jetty web server by default, but can be configured to run on other web servers.
It does not follow the Model — View — Control pattern used in other frameworks, such as Spring MVC.
Spark is intended for “quickly creating web-applications in Java with minimal effort.”.
Why it is used?
Java developer with neither the urge nor time to learn a new programming language, and we’re not planning to build a super large web application that scales in all directions, then Spark might be a great web framework to work with. It will have us up and running in minutes, and we don’t wan’t to think too much about configuration and boilerplate code (like you often have to in other Java web frameworks, like Spring or Vaadin).
How to Use It?
We can configure Spark java in a project by adding maven dependencies in our POM file like this
Add the maven dependency:
<dependency> <groupId>com.sparkjava</groupId> <artifactId>spark-core</artifactId> <version>2.1</version> </dependency>
Sample code to start with…
Example Code :
import static spark.Spark.*; public class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String[] args) {
get("/hello", (req, res) -> "Hello World");
}
}
To view the result ….
Try this on your browser :
http://localhost:4567/hello
* Spark Java by default uses the port 4567.
How to change the port?
If we want to set another port use setPort. This has to be done before using routes and filters:
setPort(9090);
Now the Spark will run on port 9090
Routes
The main building block of a Spark application is a set of routes. A route is made up of three simple pieces:
A verb(get, post, put, delete, head, trace, connect, options)
A path(/hello, /users/:name)
A callback(request, response) -> { }
Routes are matched in the order they are defined. The first route that matches the request is invoked
Route method’s example codes :
get("/", (request, response) -> {
// .. Show something ..
}); post("/", (request, response) -> {
// .. Create something ..
}); put("/", (request, response) -> {
// .. Update something ..
}); delete("/", (request, response) -> {
// .. annihilate something ..
}); options("/", (request, response) -> {
// .. appease something ..
});
Route method with Param example code : get("/hello/:name", (request, response) -> {
return "Hello: " + request.params(":name");
});
Filters
We can add two different filters in Spark Java as Before and After filters.
Before filters are evaluated before each request and can read the request and read/modify the response.
The example code for before filter is
before((request, response) -> {
boolean authenticated;
// ... check if authenticated
if (!authenticated) {
halt(401, "You are not welcome here");
}
});
After filters are evaluated after each request and can read the request and read/modify the response:
The example code for after filter is
after((request, response) -> {
response.header("foo", "set by after filter");
});
Redirect :
We can trigger a browser redirect with the redirect helper method:
response.redirect(“/bar”);
We can also trigger a browser redirect with specific http 3XX status code:
response.redirect(“/bar”, 301); // moved permanently
Halting the server:
To immediately stop a request within a filter or route use:
halt();
We can also specify the status when halting:
halt(401);
Or the body:
halt(“This is the body”);
…or both:
halt(401, “Go away!”);
Stopping the Server:
By calling the stop() method the server is stopped and all routes are cleared.
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Visit Keleno | Facebook | Twitter | https://medium.com/keleno/knowing-the-sparkjava-framework-11e57739b143 | [] | 2021-06-17 13:57:36.856000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'It', 'Software', 'Iot Product'] |
Tech Must ‘Get Uncomfortable’ With Its Impact on Society: An Interview With Swati Mylavarapu | OneZero is partnering with the Big Technology Podcast from Alex Kantrowitz to bring readers exclusive access to interview transcripts with notable figures in and around the tech industry.
This week, we’re joined by Swati Mylavarapu, a founder at Incite. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
To subscribe to the podcast and hear the interview for yourself, you can check it out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Overcast.
Swati Mylavarapu is a tech investor and activist who spent $2 million in the 2020 election cycle on Democratic causes, in partnership with her husband, Nest co-founder Matt Rogers. Mylavarapu isn’t your typical Silicon Valley investor. She’ll explicitly admit that the tech industry has some culpability in the hollowing out of the middle of our economy, delivering wealth to the few while leaving the rest in a tough spot. She also served as Pete Buttigieg's national finance chair in the 2020 Democratic primaries, playing a key role in his surprising upstart campaign.
Mylavarapu joined the Big Technology Podcast fresh off a bout with Covid-19 to discuss the tech industry’s role in our society, and how it can be a force for good moving forward.
Kantrowitz: We were actually scheduled to record last week. Do you want to fill us in on what your past couple of weeks have been like?
Mylavarapu: Yeah, it’s actually why I am literally excited to be here. My family and I contracted Covid, so we were grappling with the realities of that for most of the last two weeks, including over Election Day. But thankfully, relatively mild symptoms in our house, and we are on the mend and very lucky to have had access to great medical care, which is something that I wish every family had access to.
And it was also such a reminder because we’ve been extremely careful, maintaining a strict quarantine, lockdown, not traveling, and it still managed to come into our house. It’s a reminder that this thing is very real and we need a better coordinative response out there than what we’ve got at the moment.
You’re the first guest that we’ve had on that’s had it. I’m glad that you’ve recovered and are doing well.
Thanks. We’re also really lucky to be in San Francisco because the city’s gone above and beyond to make testing super accessible, so that helped us.
So, to start, there are people that call you a Silicon Valley power broker. I know you don’t like the term, but why do you think people say that?
Oh, I think that’s an awful term. I suppose people say that because I do a fair amount of work really at the intersection of supporting breakout leaders, and increasingly that’s been in the political realm, not just in the startup and venture realm. And I think that I am too rare a bird in Silicon Valley. But part of what I’m excited to talk to you about is why I think it’s important that more of us do this kind of work like we’re doing at Incite to invest in early stage political leaders as well as early stage startup and technology builders.
We spoke for a story a few weeks ago, and you seemed willing to say the way that tech accumulates wealth is part of the reason why have such a disconnect in the country right now.
We’re living in this moment in America where the idea of market fundamentalism and unfettered capitalism is increasingly in question, and that is not just led from one political party. You see people on the conservative side, like Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley, starting to call for more conscious capitalism, to folks on the super progressive side as well.
Tech is very much caught in the crosshairs of all of these conversations. And I think the best way for us to grapple with that is to start grappling with these hard questions about what we’re building and why. And [asking] who it benefits; where it concentrates power, and who loses out as a result of it. Because if we’re not having those conversations, the world outside of our industry is having them for us.
Silicon Valley seems to have built a lot of platforms that end up accruing wealth to the few and taking opportunity from the many. One example is TurboTax. There used to be this whole class of accountants who would make a nice living doing families’ taxes, but TurboTax came around, it was more efficient, but it harmed this important middle of the economy. Do you see this as a problem?
It’s one of the biggest problems of our time. And it’s not something that sits squarely on the shoulders of technology companies in our industry, but it’s something that we very actively play a role in.
Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
Sure. Well, you’ve given a great example of what this might look like if you are, say, building an enterprise software company. It’s equally true if you are building a delivery service company, and you are starting to make decisions about who are stakeholders in your business versus not and what is the relative value that a driver or delivery person participating on your platform has or not.
It’s also something even more fundamental. Mary Gray is an anthropologist who was recently given the MacArthur Genius prize, and her research over the last couple of years has done groundbreaking work to talk about what she calls “ghost work.” And the idea that any major technology platform in the modern age—whether you’re Amazon and what they’ve done with Mechanical Turk to a gig-economy company or any large company like Facebook that’s using a huge distributive global workforce—what they have done to create and underclass, a global underclass around the world.
And some of these might seem like fringe ideas, but I think we’re starting to see the credence that this notion of class and caste is starting to take on in public conversations about what’s happening in America, and it’s extremely relevant to what we build in the tech industry and these forces of power and earning asymmetry and the divide between capital and labor and how tech feeds into it.
Going back to the TurboTax example, are we going to end up in a society where we do have a small percentage of people who have the wealth and everybody else struggling to get by? We have a lot of political unrest in this country, in large part because people feel that the system has left them maybe one expense away from economic catastrophe.
Populism is in some ways a really powerful lens through which to view what’s happening in the United States at this moment, and if you think about technology as a way of supercharging some of the forces that are giving rise to populism, it can be really telling.
I spent a lot of time last year in places like Iowa, where Donald Trump is about as popular as Bernie Sanders, and that should tell us something. It’s not this red versus blue, good versus evil, the predominant cleavage for a growing number of Americans is around who gets access to having and who doesn’t.
So it’s interesting, you’re posing this as a question of technology building software that’s kind of inverse Robin Hood and taking from the folks that can least afford it and accumulating wealth. I think it’s a little bit more complicated than that, it’s not just that certain stakeholders are getting to accumulate disproportionate amounts of money. It’s also what we’re taking away from so many people that provided for their family, [who] were able to put bread on the table, and buying the American dream of their children and their children’s children having a better life than their own. We are stripping that away, and we’re not offering a viable alternative.
So I guess what you are pointing at is this is something that the political system needs to address?
No, I don’t think this is something that sits just on the political system. I think that this is also a reality that the tech industry has to grapple with and ask questions around. At some point, these companies that we’re building, what is the point of them if they are not meaningfully improving the quality of life for people?
Do you think people actually ask that question?
I think we’re starting to more and more. And I think in our earliest days, those were the questions that gave rise to the tech industry as we currently know it. Wherever those intentions have led us, and I believe at our core we are good and we do hard things not just to make a lot of money but because they make the world better.
And so what I’d love to see is a wider spread, deeper reckoning with some of those core, values-based questions. These days, I think our industry would be better if we talked as much about our leaders’ values and the real-world value that our companies are creating as we do about our valuations.
So often when I speak with tech leaders, they talk about people who are against technological changes being similar to the people who were against the horse and buggy moving to the car. Should we start discussing — and why have so few people started to ask — how tech products are leading a division between the economic haves and have nots?
Yes, we should be having those conversations. Those conversations are happening, they are happening today right now, whether or not we acknowledge that they are. So the question for my peers and my colleagues is: Do they want to be part of those conversations?
Obviously there’s somebody in the White House who calls into question foundational science and the advance of modern thinking when it benefitsed him. And he is just the tip of the iceberg. There is a growing movement of conservatives and elected officials in this country that do the same.
And so too, on the other side of the political spectrum, there’s a growing conversation around [the question]: What is the purpose of capitalism? What is the purpose of technology and innovation if it is not fundamentally improving the lives of everyday people? This movement’s getting a term, “conscious capitalism,” and I think there’s a lot of credence to it. And the more those of us that are here investing in future technologies, building the companies of the future, choose to participate in it, I think the better served we are in terms of what we find is investment-worthy.
But also in the kinds of problems that we decide to take on and solve with the companies that we build. For example, should more venture capital go into technologies and companies that are addressing our climate crisis? We make that choice in the allocation of capital in the founders and companies that we back alongside wanting to generate a top-notch return. It’s not clear that we have to choose between building great businesses and making a ton of money and solving big hard problems that are worth solving.
What is going on behind closed doors when you speak with people in the tech industry about the impacts of this wealth consolidation are?
The tech industry is a monolith. You know that better than most—it’s showcased in the diversity of viewpoints you bring on your podcasts and you cover in your stories, but I think that there is a growing concern.
This year saw two concurrent things that are really interesting to me. One, there’s a growing popular tech-lash, if you will, across most of America outside of Silicon Valley that calls into question the motivations, goals, and unquestioned utility of what’s happening in our industry. But we also saw an unprecedented number of people from inside the tech industry become politically and civically engaged.
How many of our colleagues and friends were motivated to do something around this year’s election? And so what that tells us is we’re an industry full of individuals that care deeply about the future direction of America, about doing good in the world, about solving hard problems that matter.
But somehow that has come a little bit unplugged from what the ramifications of our platforms and our businesses have had. There’s reason for optimism in that. I think we can get out there and rectify things and take more ownership and have these harder conversations.
It’s something that I push the folks in our Incite portfolio to do all the time. We start at the very beginning, by looking for founders that want to build big, hard problems and values-driven businesses, and we drive them and help create platforms for them to have conversations about some of these hard questions around what they’re building. I’d love to see us create more space for those kinds of conversation from more leaders across our industry.
You studied with Pete Buttigieg and ended up being his lead fundraiser here in Silicon Valley. I’m going to say this with a caveat, I’m not a Bernie Sanders voter, but looking at the message it seems to me that you might have gravitated toward him. So why Pete Buttigieg?
The way that you phrased your question, Alex, is in part my answer. So much of Pete’s magic is his ability to have very direct conversations with voters and talk to them openly about ideas that they might have pre-assumed to be too extreme or too radical but to make them palatable.
I’ll give you an example: At the beginning of the primary last year, Pete was the candidate out there in the Democratic presidential primary calling into question why the number of justices that we have on the Supreme Court was a fixed number and in fact, opening up the question of maybe there’s future court reform that calls in the question the size of the court.
Now wherever you are, and that is a potential solution, it became a mainstream idea in the run up to the election two weeks ago, something that everybody across the spectrum was talking about. It was there on Fox News as much as it was discussed on CNN or C-Span. And that is so much of Pete’s magic and his talent—to position ideas that might seem too far extreme or too futuristic and to make them seem approachable and palatable and to make them seem relevant in the current political moment.
It’s a skill that he has in spades, it’s also something that I think is true of new generation political leaders. So while you’re right, I’ve known Pete for half of our lives, and he asked me, he gave me the opportunity to work on his presidential campaign. It’s also something that I’ve seen in the deep political work that I’ve done for the last four years. Right after the 2016 election, I helped build a program called the Arena, which at this point has trained a few thousand young Americans around the country who are incredibly diverse to be first time candidates and staffers.
And this attribute, this ability to talk past partisanship and to speak to core values and to connect with voters on both sides of the political spectrum, is a skill that we see in all of these graduates coming out of the Arena too. I think it’s an indicator of the direction our politics are headed in.
Court-packing was something the more progressive wing of the Democratic Party embraced, but it wasn’t something really geared toward fixing the economic system. And when people thought of Buttigieg, I don’t think that’s really what they thought of. In fact, the tech industry’s support of him was that he was kind of a safe candidate that would ensure the economic systems that have made tech folks wealthy would stay in place. What do you think about that?
I don’t know, he came out here and he protested with Uber drivers; he was in support of AB5. He was out there very openly saying that social media platforms had gotten away from our democracy and the institutions that we respected and that those were all things that needed to be open to review.
So, were the positions as extreme maybe as Bernie Sanders’ economic positions? Not necessarily. But I think that they had a degree of pragmatism to them that also made them approachable, and there was a willingness to put everything out there.
And I’ll say, I think part of the reason why folks on the West Coast gravitated to Pete, especially in the tech industry, is because we have this thing, we understand what it is when young people step up to the plate and try to do big, hard things. And I think we have unique appreciation for that. So that’s part of what we saw reflected in the support that came out of Silicon Valley for Pete.
I don’t want to re-litigate the whole 2020 Democratic primary, but I think that the folks who listen to this might be skeptical that Silicon Valley actually wants real change in the political system. This is not an anti-tech industry podcast, but there’s definitely a feeling that there’s a reticence to tackle some of the real troubling aspects of our society head-on. So where do you stand on that?
For sure. Yeah, and so let me be very clear, this is not a normative position. I want to be very descriptive of what I see happening as a student of the social sciences and history; change is coming for the technology industry. The question is how actively our industry is going to participate in that conversation and in what ways.
Say more about that.
I just think you can see it in the tea leaves of what is happening in different corners of our country and the way that is starting to gain steam. The fact that populism is becoming a major theme in our politics, that there are more and more Americans beginning to question the technology industry, who are beginning to sort of wake up and realize that actually, democracy is more fundamentally American than capitalism, that the notion of unfettered market fundamentalism and businesses seeking profits for profit’ sake.
You can either be a turtle and stick your head back in the shell and hope that it just passes by, or we can get out here and actually listen, learn, participate, and demonstrate that there are better ways to build a more conscious kind of business that solves hard problems, satiates shareholders, and brings all of the stakeholders like our employees, our labor pools, the consumers that we rely on, along with us.
Could you see people actually in this world gravitating toward that message?
For sure I can. It’s part of the reason why we built Incite and why we look to invest in founders that lead with their values as well as their desire to create value.
We’ve got a portfolio now. In the last four years, we’ve made 60 investments of companies that are building important climate technologies, cancer therapeutics companies that have pivoted into COVID treatment development firms. We’ve got companies that are led by incredibly diverse teams that are making maternal health care more accessible to more people in America, that are building really amazing high return likelihood businesses but are also doing it in a conscious way. And if their businesses succeed, their stakeholders will succeed, as will their investors. So I’m in this business because I believe, I know it to be possible.
It seems like, at Incite, you’re looking for mission-driven or founders that want to heal the world, make things better.
I don’t know what we call it these days, but we invest in good people that want to solve big problems and make some money along the way.
Doesn’t everybody in the tech world feel like they’re a good person who wants to solve a problem in a good way and make some money along the way?
I hope so. I want to believe that most of us in tech are good people. But again, you’ve got to be willing to have the hard questions about what you’re building and why and in what ways does it actually benefit people.
I think for a long time, the first few years after I started Incite, I could tell some people got it and some people really didn’t because you’d start to talk about values and doing good and it would make some folks really uncomfortable. Like “Oh there is no data around that.” Or “Well what’s good or what’s bad?” This notion of false neutrality. No, you’ve got to have the conversations .
Right, once you bring that up then you can start to see who’s actually in it and who actually just had a slide in their PowerPoint deck that we’re going to improve the world by doing X.
Yep.
So you’re trying to help with the fund and with the political activism, what would you say is more impactful?
They’re both really impactful, and at their core, they are very similar. It’s the willingness to take early bets on good people that are getting out there to solve really hard problems, but we do it with an awareness that in 2020, big, hard problems aren’t just things that startup companies can fix. Sometimes they require really talented leaders in our politics, sometimes they require new nonprofits to advocate for whole new areas of investment. So we try to be flexible and nimble in the form that solution can take.
Okay, let’s end with this: What are some of the key policies that you would like to see implemented over the next four years? Now, I know we’re going to have divided government most likely, so the chance of anything getting done—if the last four years are any indication—is little. But if you had a dream set of policies that we would implement, what would they be?
Well for one, I’d like to see us get this pandemic under control because I think there is no economic recovery. We can’t even really start a conversation about economic recovery until we figure out how we’re going to get this virus in control.
And there are too many Americans whose health but also livelihoods depend on better leadership from the top. So that’s the first thing that I hope we get there on, and I think that’s such a huge opportunity for the tech and innovation community to step up to the plate and play a part in it. Because we know how vital science and scientific and tech breakthroughs are going to be in the development of treatment and the widespread accessibility of it.
So that’s a big one, but the other thing is I want us to have a set of forward-looking policies that really look at getting the economy working for more Americans. It’s a lot of the themes that you and I have spoken about today, Alex, but I think we’ve gotten the opportunity with the new administration to focus on some of these nonpartisan conversations around how we get the American economy working for more Americans.
And maybe that starts with things like student loan forgiveness and an economic stimulus and relief for families and small business owners across the country. But forward-looking, I think it’s got to be a lot more than that and really look at the breakdown of capital versus labor in this country and who has access to those two things.
And just looking at the composition of the transition team for the Biden-Harris administration and how incredibly diverse it is in gender, in race but also in thinking [and] socioeconomic background. I’m really hopeful, I think this could be one of the boldest periods of leadership on economic issues that America’s seen in a long time.
Okay, so help end the coronavirus and then think about student loan forgiveness—is there anything else that you’d be interested in pursuing?
Student loan forgiveness would be part of just a much broader-based economic reimagining. So I think that could include a host of things, including reinvestment in underprivileged communities, focusing on advancing home ownership for more parts of the country, focusing on minimum wage and what that looks like. We saw some important advances with the ballot box around those questions two weeks ago, but I think there’s more to be done under federal leadership there.
And then for tech companies out there, if there’s a few things that they could do differently, what would you recommend?
Focus on their core products and platforms and ask those hard questions about how their products and platforms are supporting or undermining democracy, and who they’re working for and why, and how we ensure that they work for more people. That’s a big part of it. And then the second is to look internally because it’s not just what our companies build, it’s also how we build them.
So these conversations that we’ve been having for a while around the diversity, or apparent lack thereof in our boardrooms, in our management teams, and our employee bases, it’s a really important moment to be asking those questions.
These are the things that we have control over—what we build and how we build it—so I’d love to see more of us asking these kinds of hard questions and pushing ourselves to choose between right and wrong. Get in there, and get uncomfortable. | https://onezero.medium.com/tech-must-get-uncomfortable-with-its-impact-on-society-an-interview-with-swati-mylavarapu-21e27d541296 | ['Alex Kantrowitz'] | 2020-11-18 19:06:05.383000+00:00 | ['Big Technology', 'Society', 'Activism', 'Technology', 'Silicon Valley'] |
What Makes Flutter Ideal For Mobile App Development In 2020 | Nowadays, Flutter has become the first choice for startups as well as developers. Flutter is a cross-platform mobile app development framework created by Google in the year 2017. According to GitHubs’s 2019 report, Flutter is the fastest-growing mobile app development platform.
Mobile app development in Flutter is very easy than any other programming language. It fastest functionality and easy to build app creating a lot of buzz in the tech world. It allows businesses to develop cross-platform mobile applications in less time within budget. That’s what makes flutter premier for mobile app development.
If you’re a startup business or established and planning to develop a cross-platform mobile app, then the Flutter is an ideal choice for you.
Here is what makes Flutter ideal for mobile app development in 2020.
Save your time
While using flutter’s hot reload feature, there is no need to time waste on deployment like regular programming. You can implement all the changes directly without leaving the current application state. With flutter you no need to compromise on speed and development while fixing bugs, building UI, or adding new features.
Ideal for startup MVPs
If you want to develop your product as soon as possible, Flutter is a good option for you. It’s cheaper to develop a mobile application with Flutter because you don’t need to build and maintain two mobile apps, one for iOS and one for Android. To create your MVP in Flutter all you need one developer only.
Cross-Platform development
Cross-Platform App Development with Flutter is very easy as this technology is compatible with various IDEs such as Android Studio, VS Code, IntelliJ, etc. Developers can use these IDEs of their choice to build mobile apps.
Low Development Cost
Low development cost is also the reason for its popularity among developers or startups. And, it is a great benefit that everyone can take. Using a single codebase, you can build an application for two platforms- iOS and Android respectively.
Faster code Writing
Flutter programming language Dart is easy to learn and get started with. For developers, coding is very easy and fast using this framework. With its widgets and code libraries, developers require less-effort to design and develop an application. It uses JavaScript libraries that also play an important role in building cross-platform applications for Android and iOS.
Wrapping Up
If you haven’t tried Google’s Flutter app yet, this is the right time to give it a shot. You can hire the best Mobile App Development Company that provides Flutter App development services. | https://medium.com/@monikasen/what-makes-flutter-supreme-for-mobile-app-development-in-2020-zimble-code-90f634922208 | [] | 2020-04-02 08:16:20.259000+00:00 | ['Cross Platform Mobile App', 'Flutter App Development', 'Flutter Widget', 'Cross Platform', 'Flutter'] |
[11x3] Shameless Season 11 : Episode 3 [FULL Episodes Online] | Shameless — Season 11 Episode 3 [FULL EPISODES] here you will be able to watch Shameless (S11E3) online. Unlimited access to over 20 million titles. Free. You’ll never be bored again | Be entertained anywhere, anytime. Optimized for PC, Mac, mobile, PS4, Xbox One, and Smart Tvs.
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❏ GOODS OF SERVICES ❏
Credit (from Latin credit, “(he/she/it) believes”) is the trust which allows one party to provide money or resources to another party wherein the second party does not reimburse the first party immediately (thereby generating a debt), but promises either to repay or return those resources (or other materials of equal value) at a later date.[1] In other words, credit is a method of making reciprocity formal, legally enforceable, and extensible to a large group of unrelated people.
The resources provided may be financial (e.g. granting a loan), or they may consist of goods or services (e.g. consumer credit). Credit encompasses any form of deferred payment.[2] Credit is extended by a creditor, also known as a lender, to a debtor, also known as a borrower. | https://medium.com/shameless-series-11-episode-3-hd-full/shameless-season-11-eps-3-full-episode-streaming-466b67903ba | ['Lynn Jpierce'] | 2020-12-20 08:42:35.512000+00:00 | ['TV Shows', 'Television', 'Social Media', 'TV Series'] |
Ten Christmas Gifts Not To Buy | Here is the world’s worst holiday gift guide, from the Washington Post. Bubble bath! Mediocre wingtips! (Here’s a hint: if you’re going to spend more $550 on wingtips for men, then you can afford to go to John Lobb and get proper ones.) And? Says one gift-giver: “My female friends are getting amazingly colorful one-size-fits-all muumuus I found in Bali.” That is from boutique-owner Christopher Reiter, who is going to have zero female friends as of December 26th. | https://medium.com/the-awl/ten-christmas-gifts-not-to-buy-64d9361c47d0 | ['Choire Sicha'] | 2016-05-13 02:01:05.586000+00:00 | ['Bad Things', 'Christmas', 'Ew'] |
The Clubhouse App: Access & Accountability | The Clubhouse App: Brings Unprecedented Access, Inclusivity and Accountability To The Tech World, Creatives and Everyday People
Photo by Daniel Korpai on Unsplash
*Originally published in Technology Hits
I was invited to join Clubhouse a week ago and I like it. Since then, I’ve visited several Clubhouse rooms, but I’ve only participated in conversations about entrepreneurship and writing. The Writing Community discussion hosted and moderated by Shaka Senghor and Julie Wenah was amazing and helped me understand the positive impact and need for a voice-based platform and discussions like this.
I’m not tech savvy nor big on social media. However, if I — a Gen X, WOC and educator turned writer and entrepreneur with a start-up consultancy can join discussions and walk away feeling heard, engaged and empowered — that speaks volumes about both the app and the moderators.
I will admit, at first I didn’t get it. I didn’t believe the hype. It sounded like the tech version of the old school party lines from the 80’s. However, Clubhouse is so much more and it’s needed during the pandemic. Being an entrepreneur is already a daunting and sometimes lonely venture, but social distancing adds a new level of isolation and challenges. Working from home and limited access to everything from government to banking services are a huge challenge; not to mention, how the current political climate deepens the digital divide, disparities and gaps in wealth, health and education. We need to connect and communicate to share information, ideas, resources and strategies to support, motivate, and inspire others and ourselves — more than ever.
Unprecedented Access
The Clubhouse community offers real access and authentic, real-time conversations between creatives, thought leaders, political and industry leaders, and celebrities and everyday people with similar interests from around the world.
The conversations can help you build connections and cultivate a wide array of personal and professional relationships with like minded people. You could find synergy that could lead to collaborations, mentorships, partnerships with people you would have never met through in-person and virtual networking or current social media platforms.
I can tweet about or mention anyone on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. I can even visit their live sessions, but the only place I could possibly listen to and possibly have a conversation with people like Oprah, Ava Duvernay, tech company CEO’s and venture capitalists is Clubhouse.
Inclusivity and Accountability
I love that anyone can start discussion. However, there is a higher level of accountability in Clubhouse’s invitation-only format. You need to choose wisely because your guest could impact your membership.
You might question how I make the argument that this is an example of inclusion. Well, unfortunately social justice and workplace diversity, equity and inclusion research has found a direct correlation between the lack of diversity in personal networks and the lack of diversity in professional networks and companies. It’s simple — you refer, hire and partner with who you know and who you’re comfortable with…
The Washington Post reported that three quarters of white people surveyed don’t have any non-white friends. Therefore, if Black or brown people had to wait for an invite from their white colleagues or business associates — they’d probably never get one. Yet, oddly enough they would probably get an invite from a Black or brown associate.
Clubhouse evens the playing field because Black and brown people have the power to invite people in their own network — which based on a cursory review of invites is actually diverse. I know this because Clubhouse lists who invited you to the platform.
Although it was only a small sample of members — the researcher and the nosey church lady in me couldn’t help but notice that the 3 white members, in two different chats with 100 plus people were invited by a Black person or person of color (POC). Yet, I didn’t find one Black or POC who was invited by a white person. This sadly aligns with the DEI data. | https://medium.com/clubhouseapp-recap/clubhouse-app-3a4163a6a0f7 | ['Tee', 'Weoc - Writer', 'Editor Of Color'] | 2021-02-20 15:48:45.946000+00:00 | ['Diversity', 'Online', 'Clubhouse', 'Tech', 'Social Media'] |
How to save money and keep your old Apple MacBook | image: Apple
So we’ve seen the latest Macbook with M1 chip haven’t we? Looks great right? It looks like the new M1 chip will blow the competitions processors out of the water.
Allowing for 100% efficiency, with system memory, graphics card and the processor integrated on one single chip instead of separate components, the 2020 macbook is a speedy one. Apparently the well priced 13-inch Pro is currently faster than Apple’s high-end 16 inch Pro? Madness.
Do you actually need it though?
I’m not the type that is ever in any rush to get the latest and greatest thing, I prefer the let the waters calm before I make any decisions. There is usually issues with anything brand new, whether that be software bugs or issues with the components on the product themselves.
People flocking to get the new MacBook and expecting to improve their workflow might be facing some technical difficulties already. There are already a number of applications that aren’t compatible on the 2020 Mac, which could be disastrous for some industries or firms that are clients of Apple and use their products.
Consider buying an older Model?
M1 is a huge advantage, this years release of apple MacBooks have set a new benchmark and could be seen a desirable laptop for years to come. But looking back over previous years there hasn’t been many vast improvements in the MacBook specs. Granted the newer models will have better graphics cards and features that ultimately make them slightly superior but the RAM and hard drive storage haven’t significantly improved.
Check the specs yourself!
If you don’t currently have a mac and are looking for one then maybe consider purchasing an older version? Do you really need the latest tech? some of Apples older MacBooks are still sought after and are durable. | https://medium.com/@roryopal/how-to-save-money-and-keep-your-old-apple-mac-book-d88c41920c09 | ['Rory Opal'] | 2020-11-23 18:39:28.695000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'Apple', 'Design', 'Hardware', 'Technology'] |
Social Business in Japan: a Snapshot of a Flourishing Movement | In 2015, the Cabinet Office estimated that there were 205,000 social businesses in Japan, employing some 5,776,000 people and adding 16.0 trillion yen to the economy — the equivalent of 3.3% of GDP.
To give an idea of how significant this is — the entire agricultural sector contributed 1.2% to Japan’s GDP in 2018.
And with the recent boom of interest and activity in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), sustainability, circular economy, social innovation and other similar fields in Japan, the social enterprise space is likely to continue its upward trend.
But what exactly constitutes a social business, and what do they look like in Japan?
Japan’s Definition of Social Business
The term “social business” can mean different things to different people.
Broadly speaking, they are organisations striking a balance between social objectives and financial goals, sitting somewhere between profit-maximizing corporations and ‘traditional’ charitable organisations.
Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) defines social businesses as organisations that primarily focus on addressing societal problems through business practices, and have the following characteristics:
Social mission (社会性): the organisation’s core mission is to tackle societal issues. Feasibility (事業性): adheres to strong business principles and carries out its operations in a sustainable and financially viable way. Innovation (革新性): creates social value by developing, deploying or mainstreaming new products or services.
Social Business: Performance & Trends
A 2014 study by the Japan Finance Corporation (JFC) — a public corporation wholly owned by the Japanese government — found the following from a survey of social businesses in Japan.
75% of social businesses reported losses from the previous fiscal year (i.e. they were ‘in the red’).
from the previous fiscal year (i.e. they were ‘in the red’). 75% of social businesses reported gross annual revenues of less than 50 million yen (approx. 500,000 USD) in the previous fiscal year.
This study suggests that the majority of social businesses are small-scale, and few are able to cover their expenses solely from earned revenues, with many relying on grants, subsidies and donations to ensure long-term viability.
A few other insights from JFC on the social business sector were:
The Prominent Role of Women: In companies engaged in social business, 31.6% of representatives were women and the average percentage of women employees was 68.7% . In contrast, for companies not engaged in social business, the figures were 8.1% and 34.3% respectively, indicating that women play an important role in this sector.
In companies engaged in social business, and the . In contrast, for companies not engaged in social business, the figures were 8.1% and 34.3% respectively, indicating that women play an important role in this sector. People Problems: The top two barriers to success for social businesses cited were recruitment and upskilling of employees . This points to a need to develop and attract top talent to the social business sector for its long-term growth and success.
The top two . This points to a need to develop and attract top talent to the social business sector for its long-term growth and success. Little Debt Finance: Only a quarter of social businesses took loans from financial institutions. These loans tended to be financed by regional financial institutions, such as local banks and Shinkin banks (cooperative financial institutions serving SMEs and local residents).
Among the top challenges for social businesses cited were recruitment and developing talent. At the same time, young people are increasingly drawn to social and environmental issues in Japan (Photo: mymizu)
Legal Structures in Japan for Social Businesses
A legal structure that is specifically designated for social businesses in Japan does not exist.
METI recognises that organisations identifying as social businesses are made up of a number of different legal structures. They can be:
Nonprofit Organisations 非営利活動法人（NPO法人）
General Incorporated Associations 一般社団法人
Joint Stock Corporations 株式会社
Limited Liability Companies 有限会社, 合同会社
Other (e.g. Workers Collectives, Sole Proprietors, Unions and Foundations)
In this 2011 report by METI, almost half (46%) of social businesses were nonprofit organisations, whilst for-profit organisations (i.e. Joint Stock Corporations and LLCs) made up 20%.
Pros and Cons of Different Legal Structures
Each legal entity type has its own strengths and weaknesses. To list just a few:
Certified Nonprofit Organisations can enjoy strong levels of trust with members of the public; however, they may require more time and effort to establish and oftentimes require regular reporting and upkeep to maintain. Donors to certain ‘approved’ nonprofit organisations may also be able to enjoy tax breaks, incentivizing charitable giving.
can enjoy strong levels of trust with members of the public; however, they may require more time and effort to establish and oftentimes require regular reporting and upkeep to maintain. Donors to certain ‘approved’ nonprofit organisations may also be able to enjoy tax breaks, incentivizing charitable giving. General Incorporated Associations are easy to set up, and can provide both for-profit and nonprofit services. They can also receive donations and apply for many philanthropic grants — however, donors are not able to receive tax breaks, lessening the incentive for charitable giving. They also generally cannot take equity investment.
are easy to set up, and can provide both for-profit and nonprofit services. They can also receive donations and apply for many philanthropic grants — however, donors are not able to receive tax breaks, lessening the incentive for charitable giving. They also generally cannot take equity investment. Joint Stock Corporations are easy to set up (however, non-Japanese nationals require a lump sum of startup capital), may have higher levels of trust from large corporations when it comes to delivery of “business services” like consulting, and can take equity investments. However, they generally cannot receive donations and apply for most philanthropic grants, and may encounter scepticism when carrying out services for public good which don’t generate an obvious/immediate financial return.
*Note: these are very broad generalisations. There are many exceptions!
This table below, adapted from a 2016 survey of 1,000+ social businesses in Japan, explores the key drivers for why founders chose their given entity type.
Source: Japan Forum of Business and Society. *Numbers in parentheses indicate percentage of respondents.
A Bright Future
A wide range of events, conferences and programs related to social business are held across Japan. (Photo: Social Innovation Japan’s “SDGs x Blockchain” Summit).
Social businesses are growing rapidly in popularity and number thanks to a range of drivers, including government measures/incentives (eg. grants to incentivize social entrepreneurs in rural areas), universities (more of which are beginning to offer courses on the topic), events and competitions (e.g. Nikkei Social Business Contest and Hult Prize), philanthropic organisations such as the Nippon Foundation, increasing coverage by mainstream media, a thriving impact investing sector, and influential organisations at the forefront of the movement like Borderless Japan and ETIC.
As a kaddaisenshinkoku (課題先進国)— a country facing a number of globally unprecedented challenges, such as its ageing population — Japan is under pressure to quickly shift its know-how, skills and resources to solve these problems head-on, or face dire consequences. This new wave of social entrepreneurs and their ground-breaking businesses will likely play an important role in overcoming these challenges for decades to come. | https://medium.com/social-innovation-japan/social-business-in-japan-a-snapshot-of-a-flourishing-movement-c618aea596d8 | ['Robin Lewis'] | 2021-08-19 06:30:11.988000+00:00 | ['Social Innovation', 'Social Entrepreneurship', 'Japan', 'Social Business', 'Social Enterprise'] |
How An Unemployed Data Scientist Structures Their Day | The Routine
My Handmade timetable
Above is a real image of the timetable which I created and strategically placed above the TV in my room. Of course, it’s not rigid, but I follow it as closely as possible with a few amendments.
5.05–5.25: Mindfulness; 5.45–6.30: Exercise
Note: Discussing these two together since they are as important as one another
We all know the strain of job seeking in the Data Science arena. It’s tiring. That’s not even including all the rejection you will face (because you are going to get rejected!). In the morning is where I have the most energy, and I believe it is important I put myself in a good place mentally and physically if I want to have a productive day.
The goal of mindfulness is for me to achieve a state of alert, focused relaxation before my day starts, by deliberately paying attention to my thoughts and sensations without judgment. I find this useful as I feel it allows me to be present at the moment hence making me feel more engaged when it is time for me to crush some work.
Exercise is what I use to physic myself up. I am not really into weightlifting, I do calisthenics (including freestyle) which requires a lot of energy. Whilst I am training, I often listen to podcasts (i.e. Towards Data Science Podcast, The Chai Time Data Science Podcast, The Artist of Data Science, etc), but if it’s a day I don’t feel like working out, I have a playlist for that — It’s rough.
6.55–7.55: Reading
I am one of those read a book a week guys, but this slot isn’t necessarily for books (although I keep a book with me everywhere I go so I can squeeze out some pages while I wait). This slot is allocated for reading blog posts. Throughout my day I usually save interesting blog posts I find online and it’s this time I read them (therefore I am reading the post I saved from the previous day) — I find this gets me mentally prepared as I am often inspired by the work of others.
8.00–12.00: Data Science
If I am volunteering/freelancing, or I have a personal project I am working on, it fits in here. I believe whenever I am doing a programming task I ought to block out a large chunk of time so I can really get lost in the work — the state of flow kind.
Currently, I am working on a personal project where I am “Using Machine Learning to Detect Fraud”. The goal of this project is not so much to attain an accurate model, instead, I am focusing more on other stuff such as the Machine Learning architecture (train by batch, predict on the fly, serve via REST API in this instance), Continuous integration and deployment pipelines, deploying to PaaS without containers (i.e. Heroku), and deploying to IaaS (i.e. AWS ECS).
Taking that into account, I am aiming to put heavy emphasis on software engineering best practices since I believe “Data Scientist Should Know Software Engineering Best Practices”.
12.00–1.00: Lunch
Yes, I block out Lunch. Blocking out time to diffuse is just as important as having a focused time. I am not going to go into why but a book I’d recommend is “Learning how to Learn”.
Note: I do not do affiliate marketing so any links I do to purchase a book is just a recommendation because it was useful to me.
1.00–3.45: Blogging
I prefer to sit with a blog and get it all written in a day so I block out a 2 hour 45-minute block of straight button bashing.
You are probably thinking “how do you get time to come up with ideas for your blog?” or “what If you need to code?”. The short answer, I have quite a lot of optional time after Dinner to do as I plea, even if it is blocked out as something else, but in general, I believe I’d need a full article to answer those questions accurately.
3.45–4.30: Social Media
This one is important because I always go on about building a Data Science network.
Networking is important, but it is not a substitute for hard-work!
I am grateful that my blog post are growing in popularity and with that naturally comes people who want to speak with you and honestly it is amazing the number of cool people you meet. However, it becomes a problem when this consumes you.
Yes, you want to network and meet new people. Yes, you want to answer all the questions people have for you with good quality. Yes, you want to see cat pictures on your feed, but the ultimate goal is developing yourself into an elite Data Scientist, hence you ought to set your boundaries and stick by them.
Note: I also go on social media during my lunch, although this is usually more for leisure and cat pictures.
4.15–6.00: Learning
If I realise I need to learn a new framework for my project, or I am taking a course, or I am going through a research paper, or I want to write about something I haven’t tried before… It all goes here.
6.00: Crash Stop
At this point, I have diffused from work mode and anything else beyond this point is pure leisure or taking care of responsibilities.
Now that I am currently unemployed, I use this time (usually 6.30–8.00) to apply for jobs since I know people in the UK will be finishing work and we can spark up longer/deeper conversations —How that correlates? I don’t believe the only way to get a job is by filling applications. | https://towardsdatascience.com/how-an-unemployed-data-scientist-structures-their-day-1712824e58fd | ['Kurtis Pykes'] | 2020-10-08 13:56:50.108000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Getting Started', 'Data Science', 'Deep Learning', 'Towards Data Science'] |
Rise of the Dimechian Socialists | Holder of the VOICE OF THE REVOLUTIONARY YOUTH (MALTA) mt | https://medium.com/@holder-vym/rise-of-the-dimechian-socialists-5de18435b29a | [] | 2021-01-06 11:24:59.739000+00:00 | ['Malta', 'Socialism', 'Dimechian Socialists', 'Manuel Dimech', 'Revolution'] |
How to Write Professional Code Using the Command Query Separation Principle | How to Write Professional Code Using the Command Query Separation Principle
Improve your codebase
Photo by Vincent Botta on Unsplash
One fundamental fact of quantum mechanics challenges our basic perception of the world: Observing something alters its behavior.
This is crazy! In real life, you wouldn’t expect the act of watching television to alter the original content recorded in the studio.
For the same reason, you wouldn’t expect a file browser application to make changes to the files it displays every time it is opened. This behavior would be useless — you couldn’t afford to open the file browser without worrying about unwanted changes.
In software engineering, the same principle, of dividing data observation from modification, applies. Take a database, for example. There’s a clear separation between the query, insertion and deletion methods. You wouldn’t write data-changing code in the implementation of the query() method.
This segregation makes it easy to use the database API without having to reason about what could happen when each of these functionalities is used.
If this segregation makes sense for the database, why not enforce it in every functionality we write in our code-base? After all, each piece of code eventually comes down to querying data or executing commands which affect data. | https://medium.com/better-programming/writing-professional-code-with-command-query-separation-principle-470c096949e9 | ['Tal Kanel'] | 2020-03-03 22:56:46.879000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Software Architecture', 'Software Engineering', 'Programming', 'Functional Programming'] |
Why must we go back to the office? | IMAGE: Alexander Grishin — Pixabay (CC0)
The early availability of vaccines suggests there is light at the end of the long pandemic tunnel, but we must keep up our guard and avoid infection: we’ve got this far, after all; what’s more, the so-called return to normal mustn’t mean returning to how we did things before all this began.
Think back to a year ago, when there were already too many things we were doing badly, and which were the cause of many of the problems we still face. To make matters worse, there is the undelayable and enormous problem called the climate emergency, which is going to require making many changes to our way of living.
Have you returned to your office yet? With the exception of the few jobs that simply cannot be performed remotely, a lot of people who were working from home during the toughest phases of the pandemic have already returned to their workplaces. As shown by the rush hour traffic statistics in many cities, most people have already returned to their pre-pandemic routine of getting into a car in the morning, sitting in traffic jams, and then in a chair in an office where they “work” a certain number of hours. With the notable exception of some technology companies and other organizations with reasonable attitudes going back to work seems to have become an obsession.
Why this need to return to presentialism, if it has been demonstrated that the months of lockdown saw no drop in productivity, with many people saying they put more hours in? Are there really so many managers out there who are incapable of realizing the possibilities offered by giving their workers more freedom to work from wherever they want?
The sad truth is that we seem locked in a vicious circle: many workers, faced with the expectation that working from home will be a short-term situation, have given up on investing in adapting their homes, their internet connection or their equipment, even though their companies are in many cases willing to assume part of that cost. Why? Because the attitude of their companies has led them to think that as soon as possible, even if it is not yet totally safe, they will be forced to return to the office or they will harm their career prospects. In practice, this vicious circle is a consequence of the short-term thinking of many managers, who, whatever happens, want to keep their subordinates under control, to see them, to watch them closely, to micromanage them, as if today’s companies were simply a continuation of the workshops of the industrial revolution.
This is the intellectual chicanery that prevents many companies and professionals from accessing obvious benefits that could result in more productive relationships while reducing emissions by avoiding unnecessary trips and traffic jams at rush hour. It is this isomorphism, this tendency to continue doing things the way we’ve always done them, that prevents us from evolving as a society, from unlearning and doing things the way they really should be done.
The challenge we face is to free ourselves from habits that force many of us to work in ways that make no sense, as if we were chained to a chair for a number of hours so as to carry out tasks we could do from anywhere, more comfortably and much more flexibly. The consequences of this refusal to see the obvious are enormous: from the need to live in a certain place, to wasting valuable hours stuck in traffic every day, to a bunch of unnecessary routines.
Among the very few positive things that this pandemic has produced is the opportunity to work in new ways, to create new working relationships, to do things differently. Giving up that possibility of learning and striving to go back to work as before is the definition of intellectual poverty. It is a failure as a manager, which time will show. But it is also, without a doubt, a failure as a society. | https://medium.com/enrique-dans/why-must-we-go-back-to-the-office-b9b98ade7d5 | ['Enrique Dans'] | 2020-12-23 12:25:45.777000+00:00 | ['Work From Home', 'Work', 'Coronavirus', 'Traffic', 'Pandemic'] |
JavaScript Problems — Strings, Arrays and More | Photo by Susan Mohr on Unsplash
Like any kind of apps, there are difficult issues to solve when we write JavaScript apps.
In this article, we’ll look at some solutions to common JavaScript problems.
Count String Occurrences in a String
We can use regex to find all the occurrences of a given string with the match method.
For instance, we can write:
const str = "foo bar baz";
const count = (str.match(/bar/g) || []).length;
We search for all occurrences of the 'bar' string in our str string.
Repeat Character N Times
Strings have the repeat method to repeat the string multiple times.
For instance, we can write:
"foo".repeat(10)
to repeat 'foo' 10 times.
We can also write:
Array(11).join("foo")
We need 100 since join puts the 'foo' in between the entries.
Therefore repeat probably makes more sense,
Simplest Code for Array Intersection
We can get the intersection of 2 arrays by using filter to return an array with the entries that are included in the other array.
For instance, we can write:
array1.filter(value => array2.includes(value))
If we have arrays array1 and array2 , then we use filter to return array entries of array1 that is also in array2 by using the includes method with array2 inside the callback.
This would return a new array with arrays that are in both entries.
Remove CSS Class from Element with JavaScript
To remove a class from an element by using the classList property's remove method.
For instance, we can write:
element.classList.remove("foo");
Given that the element element has the foo class.
We can call classList.remove with the argument 'foo' to remove it.
Subtract Days from a Date
We can subtract days from a Date instance with JavaScript.
To do that, we can use the getDate method to get the day of the month.
Then subtract that by whatever number of days we want.
For instance, we can write:
const d = new Date();
d.setDate(d.getDate() - 5);
We call setDate to change the date by changing the day of the month with the number we want.
It doesn't have to be within the month range because it’ll automatically wrap.
Check if an Object is a jQuery Object
We can use the instanceof operator to check if an object is an instance of the jQuery constructor.
For example, we can write:
obj instanceof jQuery
Now we can call jQuery methods in it.
Create an Array Filled with Zeroes
To create an array filled with zeroes, we can use the Array constructor with the fill method.
For instance, we can write:
new Array(len).fill(0);
where len is the length of the array.
fill fills the slots with 0.
Check if a JavaScript Object is a Date
We can check if a JavaScript object is a Date instance with the instanceof operator.
For example, we can write:
date instanceof Date
This works if the object isn’t passed across frame boundaries.
If a Date instance is passed across frame boundaries, we can write:
Object.prototype.toString.call(date) === '[object Date]'
We get the string representation of the Date instance.
Force Refresh of a Page
We can set the Cache-Control header of our code.
For example, we can write:
Cache-Control: max-age=86400, must-revalidate
to set the cache to last 1 day, which is 86400 seconds.
We can disable caching by using the:
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate
header.
Check if an Array has a Specific String
We can use the indexOf method to check if an array has a specific string.
For instance, we can write:
const arr = ["foo", "bar", "baz"];
const hasFoo = arr.indexOf("foo") > -1;
to check if arr has the string 'foo' . -1 means that the string isn’t in arr ,
Otherwise, the index of the string in the array is returned.
There’s also the includes method if we don’t care about the index.
We can write:
const arr = ["foo", "bar", "baz"];
const hasFoo = arr.includes("foo");
Then it returns true if the string is in arr and false otherwise.
Photo by Terricks Noah on Unsplash
Conclusion
We can set the cache header in our web host to set when the cache expires.
Also, we can check Date instances with built-in operators.
We can get array intersections with array methods.
JavaScript In Plain English
Did you know that we have four publications and a YouTube channel? Find them all at plainenglish.io and subscribe to our YouTube channel! | https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/javascript-problems-strings-arrays-and-more-2af5d8ecba4a | ['John Au-Yeung'] | 2020-06-28 18:17:43.323000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Web Development', 'Software Development', 'Technology', 'Programming'] |
The Release Manager model | However, someone else “accidentally” merged another pull request before and didn’t ship it to production (no issues until now), and the previously merged code contained a bug that caused a serious incident.
The first action is to revert the last known pull request, which doesn’t solve the problem and the next actions will be: start calling people and digging into the last merged pull requests as a try to identify the buggy code to do the right revert.
The above scenario highlights a few problems:
No explicit recovery point in case of failure
No release or changelog mechanism
Lack of protection for human error
Error-prone & Miscommunication issues
The schedule
Deploy calendar notification on Slack channel
As an attempt to better organize deploys, a shared calendar was created with scheduled deployment windows where anyone from the engineering team could simply pick a free time to deploy their code to production
The scheduled windows were divided into 4 windows:
Morning : 7:00 AM to 8:00 AM BRT
: 7:00 AM to 8:00 AM BRT Lunch : 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM BRT
: 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM BRT Late Afternoon : 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM BRT
: 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM BRT Early Morning: 2:00 AM to 5:00 AM BRT
This addresses the visibility issue but still has a communication overhead and starts to slow down the engineering team since the team starts growing and becomes hard to find a spot on the deployment windows.
What about Continuous Deployment?
First of all, there’s the somewhat pedantic fact that deployment does not imply release.
But what makes continuous deployment special is deploying every change that passes the automated tests (and optionally a short QA gate) to production.
Continuous deployment might seem extreme and dangerous
Teams usually need some breathing room between development and deploy, especially with database migrations changes when it’s very important to have a clear safe point to rollback in case of failure and ensure that the code and the database are backward compatible and so on. And because of that only a few companies properly run this practice nowadays…
As an attempt to solve the productivity issue we started some tests with what we called “continuous deployment for real”… In the first design, we tried to automate the current deployment strategy since the development cycle already uses branching to split environments.
Continuous deployment draft back 2018
The initial implementation was made with the staging environment, which already had its own branch and was a safe place to fail, and definitely improve the engineering productivity because everyone was able to just push the code to the branch and get it ready into a real-world environment…
But (this world is so cruel) we face some problems, which in fact could be very harmful in the production environment. One of the challenges comes with database migrations, in the first place it wasn’t so hard to automate the execution of the migration if it exists, but to scale the process we’ll also need to create a lot of tooling to safeguard failure scenarios and create a stable recovery point in case of a rollback.
To be Continued…
Using the branching approach in mind, we also tried to use the Gitflow workflow and couple each branch to an infrastructure environment (i.e.: development, staging, and production)
However, the GitFlow is a bit complex which should take too much effort to automate the entire process. Furthermore, we face an organizational issue where we have multiple teams working in several features that can have different release dates and would be very hard to align everyone to make a single release.
Automating GitFlow
Evolving for stability
All previous approaches were driven by speed and productivity, but this philosophy becomes a bottleneck when the engineering team starts to grow which makes that the “deployment queue” becomes bigger and bigger, which doesn’t leave too much time to observe the system in production.
During the 2018’s Black Friday we identified that we need to change the way we ship changes to production because we’ve identified that we were moving so fast that was hurting us, mainly because we were shipping bad code to production and increasing the number of outages.
Loggi’s 2018 Outage Main Reasons
As the company grows the business becomes more critical and less susceptible to failures. That is a very common path for growing companies, the Facebook is an example of that, where Zuckerberg said in 2014 company’s F8 conference, referring to the “Move Fast and Break Things” philosophy
“What we realized over time is that it wasn’t helping us to move faster because we had to slow down to fix these bugs and it wasn’t improving our speed.”
But slowness isn’t good to a Startup, and we put ourselves to think about how can we keep moving fast and stable…
Changing (a bit) the development cycle
Since we’ve dropped the idea to go with the GitFlow + Continuous Deployment approach, mainly for the production environment, we’ve decided to get the best from Feature Branch Workflow and Google’s SRE Release Engineering Branching strategy
The main branch is the single source of truth and code into this branch is considered stable and ready for deploy
And, with that said we keep the development cycle very similar to the Feature Branch where all feature development should take place in a dedicated branch instead and merged back in the main branch
Image by Kasun Siyambalapitiya
Google’s SRE releasing strategy said that projects don’t release directly from the mainline, instead, a new branch is created from the mainline and named with a specific revision version and become read-only.
We’ve dropped the GitFlow strategy because of the huge number of branches coming and going, we decided to use git tag as a version marker which is like a branch but doesn’t change allowing us to keep the atomicity.
Even after all the previous work we still have the organizational issue mentioned before and still an open question:
What is a release for us? And when we should do it?
At the end of 2018’s holidays, we introduce the concept of the daily deploy which was our definition of a release and also when it will happen.
The Red / Black deployment
Since our main goal was to increase the stability we started the year using a more reliable deployment approach that we called “Push do Macunha” in honor of its creator.
The design uses a similar approach of the Canary Deployment but we rename it to “Red / Black” (believe it or not, we already had the blue/green terminology in our platform)
On a daily basis scheduled time, a new tag is automatically generated, and the pipeline is started leaving the code ready to be deployed, waiting to be approved.
Loggi’s “canary-like” deployment overview
The Release Manager
Ben Treynor advocates on your talk about Keys for SRE that the SRE team needs to keep the developer teams into the production loop and share around 5% of the operation work and, during the 2018’s holidays (including Black Friday) the deployment process was being handled by the SRE team which increase the operational load and moreover, transforming the deploy process in a “mystic creature”.
Image from me.me
SRE team doesn’t run the production alone, opposite of that, we believe in a shared responsibility environment that everyone on the engineering team can run Loggi’s main application deployment process and, inspired by Google’s Release Engineer discipline we’ve created the Release Manager.
The main objective of the Release Manager role is to spread the knowledge, the operational load across the engineering team scaling the deployment process in multiple teams.
The Release Manager is responsible for the following actions:
Coordinate the Loggi’s main application deployment process.
Monitor and take the decision to move forward or rollback the code.
In case of a rollback, it will be in charge of identifying and reverting the offending PR.
We encourage everyone to be part of the rotation, but there is no obligation to be part of the process and, with that said we’ve also created a Release Manager Rotation, which is a list with the names of everyone which applied to be a release manager.
The first version of the Release Manager rotation sheet
The first list born with 15 names and today we have more than 40 release managers
The deployment process isn’t linear
Even with the process running for a long time we realized that the new release manager’s confidence was low, mostly because of the number of decisions which need to be taken during the deployment mainly in failure cases
Deployment workflow overview
To reach the 40+ release managers we have today, we needed to address this issue in some way, which is also an issue for new SRE members.
So one of the new SRE members that were recently joined the team had attended Loggi’s Xboarding, and also the SRE’s, realized that it could use the same methodology to give more context to new release managers in a more practical way, and the Release Manager Onboarding was born.
The process was born to be self-regulated creating a continuous learning environment and for that, we’ve created a classification list based o the previous experience as a release manager (RM for short)
Full RM — The experienced release manager that has already done several deploys and is able to “spread the word” to the other members.
Assistant RM — A less experienced release manager which already attended some deploys as shadow and has absorbed sufficient context to run an entire deploy by themselves paring with a Full RM.
Shadow RM — Since the process born to “spread the word” and transfer the knowledge across the engineering team, anyone can be part of the deploy process as a Shadow (another inspiration from our hiring process), which is an observer.
The face of the Continous Learning approach
Everything is done through a conference call allowing everyone to participate and the Full RM should follow the normal flow of the deployment, but the difference is that it will share its screen with everyone to share their knowledge and experience
References | https://partiu.loggi.com/the-release-manager-model-7af93f9f499f | ['Italo Santos'] | 2020-11-08 04:54:30.923000+00:00 | ['Logistics', 'Technology', 'Sre', 'Continuous Delivery', 'Site Reliability Engineer'] |
a philosophy, pared way down | everything this year has been wittled away ‘til not much is left, and what ever is left may not even be the essence of the thing.
I wrote a journal entry which made me cry, vignettes of a worldview. pieces of a perspective. this^ is all of it that I’ll share, pared down to little to none. Pared down to one. | https://medium.com/@hollyhaney/a-philosophy-pared-way-down-349cb3013c1b | ['Holly Haney'] | 2020-12-27 03:45:17.582000+00:00 | ['Worldview', 'Crisis', 'Covid 19', 'Perspective', 'Philosophy'] |
The Literally Literary Weekly Update #5 | One Last Note
Our most-read story was read only 150 times. We have 27,612 followers. What this tells us is that algorithms and user preferences play a huge role in what gets seen and that publications, in and of themselves, don’t carry a ton of weight.
Most people don’t read publications on Medium, they read writers. That’s why it is important for all writers on the platform to be consistent with their frequency and quality.
We at Literally Literary are doing our part to make sure your works are published in a timely manner and that we are only publishing high-level submissions, however, this is a partnership. One between publication, writer, and reader. The more we continue to work together as a community, the more our views will grow back to where they should be. | https://medium.com/literally-literary/the-literally-literary-weekly-update-5-573502abbd9f | ['Jonathan Greene'] | 2020-01-22 14:37:30.023000+00:00 | ['Ll Letters', 'Fiction', 'Nonfiction', 'Poetry', 'Newsletter'] |
Toys as Teachers | An Interview with Jonathan Alexandratos | by Laura Butchy
📷 by Jonathan Alexandratos.
Jonathan Alexandratos is a New York City-based playwright and educator who also happens to be a huge fan of toys — toys which they often incorporate into their teaching to create inspiration for imaginative storytelling. An instructor at Queensborough Community College, Alexandratos has had plays produced at the NY International Fringe Festival, the Pop Culture Association Conference, the Last Frontier Theatre Conference, the Ingram New Works Lab at Nashville Repertory Theatre, the Abingdon Theatre Company, and Truant Arts. A member of the Queens writers’ collective Mission to (dit)Mars, Alexandratos’s most recent play, “Toys 101: The Last Class,” is an interactive show that reveals how storytelling, toys, and dialogue can help us to build community and hope. Incite/Insight spoke with them about their work at the intersection of education and imaginative play, as well as the challenges of virtual teaching.
Laura Butchy: Describe for us how you incorporate storytelling and toys into your teaching practice.
Jonathan Alexandratos: Toys are a fantastic classroom tool because (a) everyone knows what they are, and (b) people are often pleasantly surprised that we’re actually going to take time out of our academic day to play with them. Of course, it’s not unstructured play (though nothing wrong with that either). I start off with a story, usually “Barbie-Q” by Sandra Cisneros, to demonstrate how an author might make toys into a very personal, emotional story. Then, we play with some toys I bring in (one per student), and the students write their own toy stories based on the toys they have. I get some wildly creative and wonderful responses. I find that when students are really excited about the writing they’re doing, the writing just blossoms.
LB: How do the use of theatre and toys help students to explore identity?
JA: Not all [students] internalize their storytelling like that, but, in some cases (and in my own case), there are hints (or more than hints) of identity in the stories students come up with. For example, when a student wrote a story about her action figure of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, she told the tale of a woman locked inside The Rock’s body, and she’s the “real good” wrestler, but The Rock gets all the credit. This might have had nothing to do with her identity in any way, but I could see how she might at least relate to the feeling of being incredibly good at something only to watch someone else take the credit.
LB: Tell us about your show “Toys 101: The Last Class.” What inspired you to create it?
JA: When I was 31, I was left with the realization that everything I had been reading about being Non-Binary and being Trans and being Queer in some way applied to me. That’s based on a deep, emotional response to what I had been reading about. Of course, the problem with deep, emotional responses is that they often leave you with less certainty, rather than more. Emotions don’t come with words. We assign words to the feelings, but that search for words can be really tough…. I felt strongly that I’m Non-Binary, but where do I find the words? Well, why not ask the things that have been with me my entire life: my toys.
So I basically did the same exercise I give my students…. Once I started looking at my own toy stories, I started to find the beginning of an answer. I’m still trying to find the right words, but “TOYS 101”brought me closer, and the toys supplied me with the vocabulary…. For instance, the heavily binary Barbie/Hot Wheels Happy Meal from McDonald’s (which was even more binary in the ’90s) gives me a toy, a Barbie, that was forbidden. When I talk to that Barbie, we talk about why that toy was forbidden, and how that [forbiddenness] constructed an identity in my mind that didn’t feel like it truly fit.
LB: Life has changed dramatically since we first spoke about this interview, and social distancing and stay-at-home orders have transformed teaching. How have you and your students adjusted to virtual learning?
JA: They have tackled it with every tool they have. I offer about an hour of empathic synchronous learning followed by an hour of individual work per section. I say “empathic synchronous learning” because it’s easy to assume synchronous learning means that, if you’re not there in the first five minutes, I mark you late or absent, and if your computer cuts out or you don’t have the needed tech, then you’re just out of luck, and that is absolutely NOT how I run my classroom….
Empathy is important, now more than ever. Without empathy, the students can’t open the pathways needed to learn because they’re just worried the whole time about meeting a set of strict rules that, at the end of the day, don’t connect to absorbing new knowledge, which is the ultimate goal. I want to make distance learning as open to actual learning as possible. They’re doing great with that.
LB: In March you livestreamed “Toys 101: The Last Class” on Facebook, keeping it interactive. Do you have more plans for offering elements of your theatre online?
JA: I’m thinking about it. I’ve been learning a lot by failing a lot. I think online presentations need to be–generally–short and direct about what they want their audience to do. The amount of relief I feel when someone tells me they just need me for 15 minutes is immeasurable after a day attached to my screen. When I figure out how best to work within that constraint in a way that is engaging, I’ll do more.
LB: Storytelling, imagination, and toys now seem even more important. What do they offer in the age of social distancing?
JA: The pandemic has left us all…tired. We may want to write, but we’re not motivated to. There are so many ideas, and so much going on, and it’s all draining. Well, pick up a toy you’ve had since you were a kid. Write the story of that toy. You never know what you’ll come up with. And beyond all of this, they’re just fun. Pure fun. It’s good to have objects whose purpose is fun, especially now.
Laura Butchy is an educator who has taught theatre and the arts to New York City students of all ages. A dramaturg for a variety of venues, she also serves as vice president of the New York College English Association and has written for American Theatre and other publications.
Jonathan Alexandratos
Learn more about Jonathan and their work on the New Play Exchange website.
The interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
Now it’s your turn! What do you think? Comment, react, share. | https://medium.com/incite-insight/toys-as-teachers-an-interview-with-jonathan-alexandratos-3e196289721c | ['Wyckham Avery'] | 2020-12-01 17:45:57.315000+00:00 | ['Art Education', 'Toys', 'Teachers', 'Art Educator', 'Theatre Education'] |
Sports and event tech on the fast track | Aussies sports innovation on point
The startups demonstrated just how diverse the sports and event tech landscape really is here in Melbourne, which is not surprising given the city’s self-appointed title as the sporting capital of Australia and indeed the world.
Here are the startups we heard from on the day:
Blinxel is a democratized augmented reality content and creation platform where anyone can record, distribute and view realistic 3d content.
Fantasy Esports is a non-wagering fantasy esports platform for the global gaming community.
Friends of Mr Ed is a new racing app designed by owners for owners. A personalised way to see all your horses in one view, chat with other owners and share the fun of ownership.
Signmee is an online forms platform that provides signing solutions through response data, summary report, and authentication.
Sportspass powers the platform behind loyalty, rewards, and sponsorship activation programs for sporting clubs and associations.
Weyoume is a decentralized social media platform, based on blockchain technology. It enables freedom, transparency and community to flourish at a global scale.
Humense is a volumetric video company solving the capture and display of humans for augmented reality and virtual reality.
LetsTrainMe matches the right trainer with the right pupil, bringing personal trainers and customers together.
TidyHQ is a membership management software used by groups, organsations of all sizes that makes membership administration simple for the entire board or committee.
Treiner is a football coaching marketplace service providing players of all skill levels the opportunity to increase their abilities, learn new skills and become better players both on and off the field.
Ultra Sync Sports is an app that connects all fans all around the world, so the team can see the huge support which extends far beyond the sport arena.
Intix is a ticketing technology solution business for the event, entertainment and sports industries that allows anyone to create, share and attend events of any kind including music festivals, exhibitions, sports events and local club functions.
Changing the game plan
Despite the massive disruptions caused by the coronavirus, Ollie and the rest of the SBC team were able to complete their global scouting tour. Applications for the program closed on 27 March, and with the program starting on 25 May, Ollie and his colleagues at SBC have the unenviable task of selecting 20 startups from around the world to pitch at a Selection Days event for the final 10 spots in the accelerator program.
In the words of the great India batsman, Sachin Tendulkar “Success is a process. During that journey sometimes there are stones thrown at you, and you convert them into milestones.”
Normally the SBC Selection Days event would be held in Melbourne but of course, in these times, it swiftly — and seamlessly — pivoted to a virtual event being held in May.
If you’re interested in talking to us about our work with startups or the Startupbootcamp Sports and Event Tech Accelerator Program, please get in touch. | https://medium.com/@dius-au/sports-and-event-tech-on-the-fast-track-d4403cbc54e7 | [] | 2020-06-23 08:40:27.911000+00:00 | ['Sports Tech', 'Event Technology', 'Startup Accelerators', 'Innovation', 'Startup'] |
Tokes Platform Newsletter, August 2018 — Vault Logic is Live, Merchant Gateway Beta, and New Site | Happy August Tokes Enthusiasts!
The last month has primarily been one of heads down focus for our development team, as they put final polishes on the current version of the Merchant Gateway, which will soon be available for select private beta users — more on that below. Additionally, we have some new exciting developments on the adoption front for Tokes, particularly the live listing of Tokes on the Vault Logic Smart ATM network!
Tokes is Live on Vault Logic ATMs
As we alluded to in the previous few weeks, Tokes ($TKS) is now live on the Vault Logic Smart ATM network. While this will inevitably benefit users wishing to purchase cannabis within a dispensary using our Tokes Mobile Wallet, it also means that crypto enthusiasts may now buy and sell Tokes at any participating Vault Logic ATM. The Vault Logic team has a number of placements around the United States, and we will soon be assisting in these efforts within our home base of Las Vegas. Watch the video using the link below demonstrating how to quickly buy or sell Tokes using the machine. The process is about as seamless as it gets, and we are very pleased with Vault Logic’s development efforts.
Vault Logic will be at BlockShow in Las Vegas hosted by Cointelegraph August 20 & 21st for anyone who wants to give the new ATM a try. And likely by the time you read this, the kiosk in the video above will be at the fabulous Donut Bar (https://donutbar.com) in Downtown Las Vegas for anyone to use! We encourage our users to share their experiences with the kiosks on social media, and maybe we’ll send some Tokes swag your way in gratitude.
Private Beta for the Merchant Gateway
As we inch closer and closer to a public release of our Merchant Gateway software, we are now encouraging users interested in testing the software to contact us for beta access. As one of the first full-featured point of sale solutions for cryptocurrency payments, it is imperative that we test real world use of the product. We want the final version to be as easy to use as possible for both consumers and merchants. With this in mind, we are looking for brick and mortar merchants interested in testing the software at their establishments. You do not need to be a cannabis specific business to apply, as fundamentally our software is industry agnostic.
To apply, please email [email protected] and tell us about your use case. While preference will be given to users with a brick and mortar business, we encourage others to apply as well. We look forward to hearing from you.
New Website
When our projects evolve, it becomes necessary to change our branding around software offerings. As such, we are excited to announce the launch of our new website later this month! Primarily this rebranding will focus on our core offerings: the Merchant Gateway, the EPCIS chain, and Blockchain/Platform as a Service (Baas & PaaS). While we are still primarily developing for and targeting the cannabis vertical for deployments and integrations of our software, this new branding conveys a more agnostic approach and vision of what the Tokes Platform can provide outside of the cannabis space. We feel this is a vast improvement over our current look, and we hope you do too. Below is a sneak peak, look for the full site to be live by this time next month!
Other News and Notes
Pisos, our partner here in Las Vegas has had an array of crypto enthusiasts through its doors lately buying cannabis with Tokes! We deeply appreciate the enthusiasm around the product, and look forward to having more dispensaries for our users to give their patronage in the coming months.
The next round of Tokes Bingo is live on our social media, for information please check out our Twitter @tokesplatform and message to get a board! You can win some Tokes swag and even some Tokes!
Lastly, the Tokes founders were at the ChainXChange conference this week networking with developers and teams within the blockchain space. We encourage upcoming Vegas conference attendees to reach out to us if they wish to meet during the upcoming BlockShow or World Crypto Con events in Vegas.
And if you haven’t had a chance yet, remember to download our new mobile apps below!
Until next time…
Here’s to something new. Here’s to the revolution. | https://medium.com/tokesplatform/therev-tokes-platform-newsletter-august-2018-1f1345958fdf | ['Multichain News'] | 2018-10-03 18:44:17.937000+00:00 | ['Fintech', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Cannabis', 'Bitcoin'] |
Opening Night NBA | My entire life I have been a fan of anything competitive. From playing house league hockey as a kid to beating my friends in NBA2K online, anything that could be competitive I was interested in.
Last year I took this passion to another step, I started betting on NBA games, seeing as that was my second favourite sport and refuse to ruin my true love, hockey, over money. Within the year I made 500 dollars from gambling with little to no knowledge on what I was doing, so I decided to change that.
Since the start of COVID-19, I have been working on a sports betting model for the NBA and decided to hold myself accountable and share with you my picks for each game, how much I wager, and my overall record. This is a litmus test on if I am smart enough to make a career out of projections.
With Day 1 of the NBA season only an hour away from tip off, I will not be going into detail of what my model does or why I am picking the games, because I am still trying to figure that out as well, but this is a gambling blog so I have to make some picks.
Day 1 of the NBA season has the Brooklyn Nets vs Golden State Warriors (+7.5) and the Los Angeles Lakers vs Los Angeles Clippers (+2.5), my picks for these games are the Brooklyn Nets (-7.5) and the Los Angeles Clippers (+2.5). 10 dollars placed on each bet, so in total I am wagering 20 bucks on two bets.
Best of luck to everyone, and in the coming days I will be going more in depth as to why I am betting games, and how sports betting actually works.
James | https://medium.com/jamesbets/opening-night-nba-459fcaf3e090 | ["James O'Dowda"] | 2020-12-26 17:41:07.634000+00:00 | ['NBA', 'Betting', 'Sports', 'Betting Tips', 'Sports Betting'] |
Top 10 in PropTech: Current Trends in Real Estate Technology | Blockchain. Blockchain use can potentially revolutionize rental property payments by removing middlemen and reducing transaction cost. It can facilitate cost effectiveness and better decision-making in leasing processes with the use of a shared database, where an entire vertical of stakeholders including owners, tenants and service providers can interact with ownership information, or transaction history in an open and secure way. Real estate assets can be tokenized and made transferable with the use of blockchain. Brickblock is a smart contract platform that allows users to buy tokenized shares of real-world assets with cryptocurrency with an aim to remove barriers to entry imposed by traditional financial institutions.
The introduction of smart contracts into real estate ledgers and transactions have the capability to restructure various processes such as transfers of ownership and documents. Propy integrates blockchain technology for governments to instantly verify online title deeds issuance for a property in a secure and cost-effective way.
Building Information Modelling (BIM). Building Information Modeling is a smart 3D model-based process that enables architects, engineers, and construction professionals to plan, design, construct, and manage buildings and infrastructures efficiently and the information can be used throughout the life cycle of the property. Snaptrude is an intelligent CAD (Computer-aided Design) software for real estate, which transforms a hand drawn sketch of a floor plan to a 3D BIM within seconds.
CyBe Construction.
Construction Technology (ConTech). Proceeding from an economically necessary view of the entire property life cycle, ConTech has the potential to automatically become the focus of interest. The global construction industry is booming and there is a need for technological advancement with the current explosion in construction cost. CyBe Construction is pushing the boundaries of 3D concrete printing and as a result, is driving this change in the Construction industry. These technological advancements will not only make the industry cost-effective but also sustainable.
Giraffe 360°.
Drone Technology. The extraordinary aerial imagery of real estate that we are able to look at today has only been made possible through the use of drone technology. It can be used for everything starting from high rise office buildings to pre-eminent properties along the coast to sports stadiums to wildlife parks. It has helped agents in selling large estates by providing important information and property overview to the buyers. On the other hand, camera drones and its ground-based substitute, glide-cams, are being used to create indoor virtual tours and videos for both residential and commercial spaces. GIRAFFE 360° enables effortless digital space capture for virtual tours, floor plan and wide-angle photography and improves the experience of property viewing for the buyers.
Geolocations. Geolocation technology transforms simple maps into full sets of critical data about real estate and properties. It can not only pinpoint where buyers are in the traditional sales cycle by utilizing predictive analytic technologies but can also pinpoint their physical location. It enables real estate developers to make far more accurate valuations based on economic strategies. Further, geolocation technology plays a very crucial role in real estate marketing and has the capacity to change how properties are marketed and traded. geothinQ visualizes property data, county maps, topography, flood zone maps, soils and more in order to analyze the value of land. It provides more accurate access to parcel data that accelerates risk versus reward analysis for land acquisition, land use planning and land development and therefore enables smarter decision making.
Internet of Things (IoT). In simple terms, IoT can be described as items and structures equipped with sensors that internet applications can read and can translate into usable digital data. IoT can improve both the real estate industry and individuals everyday lives by its varied application from predictive maintenance to accelerated decision making to increased energy efficiency to count a few.
There is a rising opportunity for alternative housing solutions equipped with IoT as the age demography in Europe changes with the increase in the aging population. Better @ Home offers a tailor-made and modular expandable solution for equipping real estate with age and comfort. The concept is designed to enable older people to live at home as long as possible without compromising on safety and self-determination.
Sharing Economy. The ‘Sharing Economy’, interchangeably used for the term ‘Collaborative Consumption’, represents an economic revolution built around an economic philosophy that space and capital goods are better shared. In the real estate industry, it has its application in nearly all domains including residential, hospitality, retail, storage and office spaces. Estimates suggest that there is a rise in the number of single households, and this has and will increase the demand for shared services, as it provides lower fixed cost for people involved.
The drastic increase in the number of co-working spaces in the last few years is also indicative of the increase in the demand for shared services. Containerwerk upgrades used shipping containers by an innovative insulation process into a high-quality buildings and space modules that can be used for student hostels, co-working spaces or micro-living to count a few. | https://medium.com/sicos-publication/top-10-in-proptech-current-trends-in-real-estate-technology-8056c10d561b | [] | 2019-01-31 16:52:21.287000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Stokr', 'Big Data', 'Real Estate', 'Drones'] |
Minimalism: A Definition | It’s About More Than Letting Go.
Photo Credit: Daniel Pohl
Minimalism is an age-old idea and a shiny new word. For some, minimalism is a new hipster lifestyle. A counter-culture way of living that started in the late 2000s. Their definition of minimalism is people being as comfortably close to homelessness as possible.
The truth is that minimalism has been around for generations. Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) is one of history’s most famous minimalist. He might not have called himself one, but his simple living philosophy checked all the boxes. Socrates ( 470 BC — 399 BC), the famous Greek philosopher, was the one who said, “The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less”. For these historical figures, their ideas of simple living were what would become today’s minimalism.
So what is minimalism?
Is it choosing to live as a homeless person inside a tiny house? Is it growing a beard and wandering into the woods to build a log cabin? Is it starting a blog and writing a series of books? The answer is yes.
Minimalism, as many like to define it, is a way of being more with less. I think that’s the best way to define it. It’s simple, it’s catchy, and it’s not having less, it’s being more with less. That is important to remember.
Being More with Less
Minimalism is not tossing out boxes of clutter and reducing your wardrobe to 33 items. That’s typically part of it, but it’s tossing out the reason you had boxes of clutter. It’s finding out why you needed more than 33 items in your wardrobe. It’s a path of self-discovery. It’s eliminating the habits and mindsets that filled your life with unimportant things.
How you do that is up to you. The minimalist lifestyle, as I chose to define it, is Being More with Less. Your minimalist lifestyle, however, is defined by you.
Maybe it’s selling all your earthly positions and moving into a tiny house.
Maybe it’s re-evaluating your spending habits and living more intently.
Maybe it’s deleting apps from your phone and spending more time in nature.
That’s all up to you. If you’re reading this, you’re already on the path to being a minimalist. What happens next, that’s the exciting part.
Remember, as you either start your journey or continue to grow.
Be More with Less, and above all else, Be Happy.
Thank you for reading. | https://medium.com/@beardedminimalist/minimalism-a-definition-d947bd195259 | ['Daniel Pohl'] | 2020-12-13 22:54:50.373000+00:00 | ['Minimalism', 'Discovery', 'Minimalist Lifestyle', 'Life', 'Mental Health'] |
Meet the Entrepreneur Who’s Making Clean Water Accessible Across Haiti | Using a decentralized water treatment and distribution system, Jim Chu, the founder and CEO of dloHaiti, is bringing safe, affordable water to thousands on the island. Chu recently participated in diaspora engagement roadshows hosted by USAID INVEST, which encouraged members of the Haitian diaspora to invest in the country’s private sector.
A customer purchases Ovive from a dloHaiti kiosk. (Photo: dloHaiti)
By Emily Langhorne, INVEST Communications Specialist
“Private sector engagement is crucial to lifting people out of poverty. I can’t stress that enough. It’s mostly about scale: I don’t believe charity or aid ever truly scales to the amount needed. That really requires private sector capital. Unless we bring that capital to Haiti, we won’t see change that serves everyone in need.” ~ Jim Chu, CEO, dloHaiti
Jim Chu loves flying. The Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor began paragliding in 1993. Over the last two decades, he’s participated in the sport all around the world.
“My favorite place [to fly] would have to be the Indian Himalayas,” Chu says. “You’re right up against the mountains, so on good days you can see some well-known trekking trails. You can see corn drying on people’s roofs. The landscape is this intensely lush green. People live all over in that area, and they tend to be very welcoming, so you can land anywhere and usually get a ride.”
Chu flies planes, too. He recently became interested in Alaska bush flying, where short takeoffs and landings are common because the rough terrain often lacks prepared takeoff and landing strips.
These days, however, Chu’s hobbies are the less adventurous part of his life. As the CEO of dloHaiti, a water treatment and production company, he has spent the last seven years working daily to expand the accessibility of clean water throughout Haiti.
Haiti’s Water Crisis
Nearly 70 percent of Haitians do not have access to clean water. Waterborne illnesses cause more than half of the country’s deaths each year, and one in five children die from diarrhea — a preventable disease.
The Haitian government provides only undrinkable water through its infrastructure, so private companies dominate the water market. These companies locate their water treatment facilities near the cities and use large trucks to deliver water to other areas. As a result, the water provided to customers outside of the cities is often limited in quantity and variable in quality.
“If you happen to live close to the city, you at least have water, even if it isn’t that clean or reliable,” says Chu. “But if you live somewhere farther out, you get served by dirty and unreliable trucks, so those folks end up going without clean water; moving toward the city, which means the country experiences mass urbanization simply because people need water; or paying a lot more for unreliable water of questionable quality.”
In a country where 60 percent of people live on less than US $2.00 a day, most water companies charge US $1.25 for a five-gallon jug.
“It’s mind-boggling how lack of clean water hinders a country,” says Chu. “The typical Haitian will pay 50 times more for a liter of water than an American does, so most people either go without or spend a lot of time trying to find affordable water. That burden usually falls on women and children, so children miss school and women miss out on opportunities for earning an income. But more often than not, people just go without clean water and suffer through the waterborne diseases that result.”
Haiti’s government provides only undrinkable water through its infrastructure, and only one third of the population has access to it. (Photo: dloHaiti)
The Journey to a Private Sector Solution
Chu has no background in water treatment. From 1996 to 2003, he ran marketing and business development departments for Cisco Systems. Since 2005, he has been investing in and operating numerous start-ups in Silicon Valley. For 20 years, he had a typical Silicon Valley tech career. Then, by chance, he stumbled into his work in Haiti.
After the country’s 2010 earthquake, Chu traveled to Haiti as a volunteer with a non-governmental organization (NGO) distributing clean water to those in need. He later became the CEO of Life Giving Force, a nonprofit providing clean water throughout Haiti.
Chu ran the nonprofit for nearly two years, but he became disheartened with its lack of lasting impact. “The NGO model wasn’t working, and neither was aid,” says Chu. “Their best outcomes were only band-aids.”
Many NGOs must attempt to serve both the people writing their checks and their beneficiaries, according to Chu. Unfortunately, serving the demands of the former doesn’t always align well with the needs of the latter. For instance, a donor might want to build a water facility in a location that doesn’t provide access to the greatest number of people. Chu discovered that NGOs and development agencies weren’t always business-friendly, and in worse case scenarios, they crowded out business solutions and prolonged problems.
“I was trying to make a change within the development world, and I wasn’t getting anywhere. I was frustrated by the bureaucracy of it all — the long timelines and red tape,” he says. “I wanted to do something meaningful, to have an impact, but mostly I was in Haiti, thinking, ‘I’m pushing paper. I’m just a bureaucrat. I’m not solving the problem.’”
In 2012, Chu decided to partner with the IFC, the private investment arm of the World Bank, to launch dloHaiti, an investor-driven social business designed to make clean water accessible in underserved Haitian communities via a market-driven model.
“I decided to apply a business lens to this development product, to create products and services that are valuable to the customers who need and want them,” Chu explains. “I call them customers, not beneficiaries, because we need to create value to keep them as customers. When I was volunteering, I saw that most people could pay — and wanted to pay — for water. The problem was that they couldn’t get it: it was too far away to be convenient or too expensive. That’s the problem we needed to solve, and we knew many Haitians valued the solution enough to pay for it.”
dloHaiti: A Decentralized, Market-Driven Model
dloHaiti is a decentralized water kiosk venture. The company manufactures its own water brand, Ovive, which it produces at accessible water facilities — called kiosks — using a reliable treatment process.
dloHaiti doesn’t operate in well-served urban areas or remote, rural areas. It builds kiosks in underserved towns and peri-urban areas, which have growing populations and a high demand for water. In these regions, the market conditions are ideal for a commercially viable water business serving a significant number of people.
Each kiosk uses energy-efficient water treatment technology, operating on 70 percent clean energy. The kiosks have a three-kilowatt solar power system that powers everything on site, including the pump, filtration units, lamps, and more. Because it doesn’t depend on costly grid or generator power, dloHaiti can reduce the cost of its products and operate in areas without grid connections. Every site is economically self-sufficient: they no longer require a subsidy to operate.
dloHaiti’s kiosks rely heavily on solar power, operating on 70 percent clean energy. (Photo: dloHaiti)
Purifying water locally is more cost-effective than using water trucks. A five-gallon jug of Ovive costs 40 cents, 85 cents less than the country’s other water brands. By relying on a local distribution network, in which residents of the local community work as delivery agents and distributors, dloHaiti can expand the customer base for each kiosk and reach areas that large water trucks fail to serve because of economic or logistical reasons.
Customers who live within 500 meters of the kiosk can collect water directly from the source. For those customers and vendors located within five kilometers of the kiosk, dloHaiti offers delivery and distribution. The company focuses on improving the supply chain for vendors so that they can make Ovive available to more people. It offers distribution services for those vendors located between five and 25 kilometers away. It also provides “just-in-time” inventory so that vendors don’t have keep their liquidity tied up in inventory, which makes merchants more likely to sell water. As a result, water is available locally when people need it.
A delivery agent brings water to a local distributor. (Photo: dloHaiti)
The Challenges of Running a Business in a Fragile Country
While Chu is passionate about his company, he’s also upfront about the challenges of running a business in Haiti. For starters, the infrastructure needed to run a successful operation is often lacking. Finding reliable, affordable electric and water providers can be difficult or prohibitively expensive.
“It’s a massive amount of money for a generator, which makes it nearly impossible to become an entrepreneur unless you already have money or a wealthy family member willing to contribute,” says Chu.
Financing, likewise, can be a problem. Unlike in the U.S., most Haitian banks won’t allow an individual to act as the personal guarantor for a small business loan, which makes finding start-up capital challenging.
“There are obstacles at every step,” Chu explains. “Intuitively, I knew that it wouldn’t be as easy to start and run a business in Haiti as it is in the U.S., but I underestimated the enormity of it. You’ll encounter days where your office space goes for 24 hours without power.”
Internet access is also an issue. Usually, businesses must pay one internet service provider an exorbitant amount of money for reliable service. However, because Chu worked for Cisco Systems, he knew how to install a multi-WAN router at his office so that he can use the service of multiple internet providers. That way, if one goes down — “and they always go down,” says Chu — he won’t lose internet access. Many people starting a business would not have the experience or know-how to navigate that hurdle.
Regardless of these challenges, Chu believes, and has shown, that it’s possible to run a profitable business in Haiti. Moreover, by starting a business in Haiti, he has positively impacted the life course of thousands of individuals.
Beyond Profits: What It Means to Be a Social Business
dloHaiti is a social business, which Chu defines as a company that ensures that positive social impact results from the activities it undertakes.
Arden’s Cherelus, an operations and facilities manager at the company, explains that unlike the country’s other water producers, dloHaiti is embedded in communities they serve, and transparency with them is important. Because many people don’t understand how water is treated, dloHaiti’s kiosks have glass windows through which people can watch the process.
A dloHaiti staff member monitors quality control during the treatment process. (Photo: dloHaiti)
The company also hires local staff. It employs more than 100 people in permanent jobs, mostly in non-urban areas where an 80 percent unemployment rate is the norm. It creates jobs directly through the treatment facilities and indirectly through the network of distribution and delivery agents.
A delivery agent picks up water from a kiosk. (Photo: dloHaiti)
dloHaiti has created a series of programs that provide micro-credit for in-kind loans, such as financing inventory for re-sellers and vehicles for distributors. It’s even launched the Haiti Opportunity and Prosperity through Entrepreneurship (HOPE) Micro-Credit Note, a social impact bond issued by the U.S. Delaware legal entity, to support more micro-credit programs.
Chu talking with a vendor and customer. (Photo: dloHaiti).
dloHaiti now operates 10 kiosks and serves 150,000 people. Chu plans for dloHaiti to serve more than a million people in Haiti by 2030. He’s also founded a sister company, Untapped, to spread the decentralized water treatment model to other developing countries. Combined, he hopes the two companies will serve more than 100 million people by the end of the next decade.
Private Sector Engagement: The Future of Development?
“Private sector engagement is crucial to lifting people out of poverty. I can’t stress that enough,” says Chu.
Ironically, Chu is the co-founder of the global nonprofit, Watering Minds, which works with local partners and donors provide clean water to schools in Haiti, Cambodia, India, and Ghana. Nonetheless, he believes that the private sector is needed to solve the world’s toughest development challenges.
“It’s mostly about scale,” Chu explains. “I don’t believe charity or aid ever truly scales to the amount needed. That really requires private sector capital. Unless we bring that capital to Haiti, we won’t see change that serves everyone in need.”
Students drinking Ovive during school. (Photo: dloHaiti)
Chu believes the development sector is becoming increasingly willing to work with the private sector to find sustainable ways of solving social and environmental problems. Likewise, he thinks that there’s a growing interest within the business world to work in emerging markets, where development agencies can provide valuable local knowledge and expertise.
He recently participated in a roadshow hosted by USAID INVEST, an initiative that mobilizes private capital for development. The Haitian diaspora contributes roughly one-third of Haiti’s GDP in remittances, so Haiti INVEST organized five diaspora-engagement sessions throughout the U.S. and Canada to encourage the Haitian diaspora to invest in Haiti’s private sector. The sessions showcased entrepreneurs, like Chu, who run businesses in Haiti.
“The model of Haiti INVEST is a great idea,” says Chu. “It’s helping to ‘grease the wheels’ on the transaction costs of investing in Haiti. It gives entrepreneurs a platform to talk about their businesses and connect with intermediaries. Among the diaspora, there are almost certainly people who will be interested in investing if they are made aware of the opportunities.”
In founding dloHaiti, Chu intended to create positive development outcomes for the people of Haiti, but “it needed to be done in an economically sustainable and market-friendly way,” he says. “We couldn’t rely on subsidies and be sustainable. It’s important to create something that does return some value to investors; otherwise, you’ll never scale. If you don’t attract commercial investment, well, then, you’re just another NGO.”
To learn more about INVEST’s work in Haiti and elsewhere, check out our website. | https://medium.com/usaid-invest/meet-the-entrepreneur-whos-making-clean-water-accessible-across-haiti-694ccbd0ed5b | [] | 2020-08-12 16:51:17.469000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneurship', 'Impact Investing', 'Sustainability', 'Humanitarian', 'Water'] |
O Rex Gentium | Priest, dean of a cathedral a city with so much beauty and heartbreaking poverty. Bring hope to the hopeless! Live compassionately! Lovingly serve everyone! | https://medium.com/@Troy_Beecham_Episcopal/o-rex-gentium-443ae5d0540 | ['Father Troy Beecham'] | 2020-12-22 17:38:37.199000+00:00 | ['God', 'Jesus', 'Advent', 'Christianity', 'Father Troy Beecham'] |
I Put a Spell on Trump | I Put a Spell on Trump
Photo by Devin H on Unsplash
If I believed in magic, I’d believe in God,
but I know the woman in the box
just curls her legs
into a chamber beneath her
while someone else wearing her shoes
puts on a show of wiggling toes.
If God created everything,
he gave birth to the devil,
while he miscarried a billion babies this year
into toilets across the land,
and he isn’t doing shit
to protect your immigration status
from an orangutan with a comb over,
no matter how many kewpie dolls
made from orange hair and blood
you set fire to in the urns.
I wrote “Fuck Trump” in caps
across my chest with a black Sharpie,
and cut up pictures of his face
and fed them to birds.
I said the words, “Be bound to your angry chair,”
and threw crow feathers up into discordant spirals.
Trump gave the CEO of DuPont his pen,
and told the media to fuck off
with a smile on his face
like the day the devil was born.
And the Christians kissed their crosses
and said, “Amen.” | https://medium.com/resistance-poetry/i-put-a-spell-on-trump-8c373997b2d1 | ['Jay Sizemore'] | 2020-12-06 17:03:29.470000+00:00 | ['Resistance Poetry', 'Witchcraft', 'Spells', 'Trump', 'Poetry'] |
How to display database content in your flask website | Flask,PostgreSQL
File structure
Hi,I have a table called v_timestamp1 made in PostgreSQL. Lets see how we can display it in the Flask UI. First I m establishing connection with pgadmin in the try statement. Put your database name instead of silverTip, that is name of my database also my user is postgres, my password is sT789. Replace those with your specific credentials.Here is my app.py code
from flask import Flask, request,render_template
import psycopg2
try:
conn = psycopg2.connect(database="silverTip", user="postgres",
password="sT789", host="localhost")
print("connected")
except:
print ("I am unable to connect to the database")
mycursor =conn.cursor()
app = Flask(__name__)
def index(): @app .route('/')def index(): return render_template('index.html')
def v_timestamp():
mycursor.execute("SELECT * FROM v_timestamp1")
data = mycursor.fetchall()
return render_template('v_timestamp.html', data=data) @app .route('/v_timestamp')def v_timestamp():mycursor.execute("SELECT * FROM v_timestamp1")data = mycursor.fetchall()return render_template('v_timestamp.html', data=data)
If you guys havent downloaded psycopg2, please do so before running the code, in the terminal. Please make sure you have made a database made in the postgreSQL.
pip install psycopg2
Code in index.html.In the body section I have just included a button, upon clicking that button lead to v_timestamp page.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ url_for('static', filename='home.css') }}">
</head>
<body> <h2>Vehicle info dashboard</h2> <p align="center"><a href=v_timestamp ><button class=grey style="height:75px;width:150px">vmd timestamp</button></a></p> </body>
</html>
The index.html has the code for arrangement of styles for the main page(app.py). How the front page looks like in port 5000.
The code in the v_timestamp.html is given below. I have given the text alignment as center, and padding and border as specified in the code.My table column headings are vehicle ID, current timestamp, expiry timestamp.As specified under <th> element, those fonts appear in bold. The <tr> elements font is normal(not bold) .In the <td> elements, the instruction {{row[0]}} means to capture the first row details in the v_timestamp1 PostgrSQL db and so on. Do not get confused, v_timestamp1 is the db at postgreSQL. v_timestamp is the page I’m routing the main page upon a button click event.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<style>
td {
width: 150px;
text-align: center;
border: 1px solid black;
padding: 5px;
}
</style>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>vehicle ID</th>
<th>current timestamp</th>
<th>expiry timestamp</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
{% for row in data %}
<tr>
<td>{{row[0]}}</td>
<td>{{row[1]}}</td>
<td>{{row[2]}}</td>
</tr>
{% endfor %}
</tbody>
</table> </body>
</html>
How the UI looks for v_timestamp page.
Thanks for reading. Have fun coding!!! | https://medium.com/@kanchanardj/how-to-display-database-content-in-your-flask-website-8a62492ba892 | ['Dul S Blog'] | 2021-01-08 07:14:05.500000+00:00 | ['Postgres', 'Flask', 'Python', 'HTML', 'MySQL'] |
Instagram As A Marketing Tool | After Facebook, Instagram is the second most popular social media platform. Over one billion active monthly users and 500 million daily Instagram Stories users use the famous visual-first social media platform. The number of brands that have established a presence on the platform has increased.
According to Oberlo, 71 percent of US firms utilize Instagram. Is it, however, worth their time, and should your company be on the platform as well? The answer is YES. Instagram has over one billion monthly active users and 500 million Instagram Stories every day.
In the United States, there are 140 million Instagram users. Users spend 53 minutes every day on average browsing. Instagram is used by 71 percent of businesses in the United States. Around 50% of the world’s population between the age of 18–44 use Instagram.
Instagram is clearly no longer only for personal usage. It’s now a global platform that allows businesses to humanize their content, acquire fresh talent, display their products, and inspire their customers.
Furthermore, Instagram users are not just active but also engaged. Approximately 59 percent of the platform’s active users log in on a daily basis and spend at least 7 hours each week exploring material and communicating with others.
7 Ways To Use Instagram As A Marketing Tool
Make Use Of Hashtags To Increase Awareness.
However, there are a few factors to consider while selecting and using hashtags. To begin, while you don’t need to use tons of hashtags per post, you should use at least a couple. Which ones are they? This leads us to the next point.
The majority of your tags should be related to your industry in some way. More individuals will be interested in what you do and offer if they come across your postings this way. You should, however, utilize a combination of local and trending hashtags.
Maintain Your Brand’s Integrity By Sticking To Your Story.
The importance of consistency cannot be overstated. If you’re “all over the place” and your followers don’t know what to expect from you, you’ll struggle to keep them.
As a result, each of your postings should follow the same general topic. Like a puzzle piece, each article should fit neatly into the larger picture — your company’s story.
What about when you truly want to communicate something without interrupting the tale your postings are telling collectively? That’s where Instagram Stories come in helpful; because they let you publish material that stands out from the others.
Engage With Your Audience Freely
Interacting with others on Instagram has a lot of advantages. It’s an important factor in both customer happiness and brand loyalty. Furthermore, it boosts your company’s:
Trustworthiness
Visibility
Likability
Recallability
You’d probably agree that the rewards outweigh the time commitment. But with whom should you be interacting? Your followers, industry experts, and people you followers of those you follow. The more individuals you engage in a genuine way, the better your efforts will be.
Also read :- Importance Of Video In Marketing
Share User-Generated Content (UGC)
Sharing user-generated material is a wonderful method to interact and be engaged with, and it goes hand in hand with the previous idea. You can think of entertaining and inventive methods to encourage your consumers to submit their photos, videos, and good experiences with your company.
Others may become clients as a result of this, and they may express their enthusiasm in the hopes of receiving the same distinction. User-generated content is one of the most powerful types of social proof and a great method to get people excited about your company.
With Location Tags, You May Encourage In-Person Interaction.
It’s critical to find ways to get your leads more connected with your business as you try to nurture the leads you generate. Because location tags encourage face-to-face interaction, they can assist you in doing so.
What better approach to direct customers to your actual store? That might be enough to persuade someone to get in their car and pay you a visit, especially if they’ve seen other photographs related with the place you’ve chosen.
If possible, your location tag could also point to a location where you are or where you want your followers to be. A workshop or a major conference in your industry, for example.
Advertise To A More Specific Audience
One of the best things about Instagram is that you can use it as a marketing tool even if you only have a free account. However, if you want to make a bigger impact, you can use the platform’s advertising options.
You can be even more particular in your targeting with Instagram advertising to fully take advantage of the high engagement rate. For more information on Instagram advertising, one can also learn about the following things:
How to Promote Your Business on Instagram
How much does advertising on Instagram cost?
Instagram Ads Examples
Some Examples of Instagram Video Ads
Digital Marketers So Excited About Instagram’s New Tool — Reels
Instagram Reels is a new service that allows creators to publish 15-second movies that include music and augmented reality effects. If it sounds like TikTok, it’s because it is: Instagram Reels debuted with many of the same features after TikTok surpassed 1 billion users in just 18 months.
While the feature isn’t very innovative, it does provide engagement options within the same ecosystem as Instagram and its parent company, Facebook.
Instagram’s power and reach are undeniable, with one billion monthly active users. What started off as a simple photo-sharing software has evolved into a social experience that allows users to explore a company’s visual identity.
High-quality content is valued by Instagram users. Create images that deliver relevant information to your audience or show off your business in a new, distinctive way. Make your material more engaging by crafting amusing subtitles.
It may seem daunting to create and maintain a platform that embodies your brand’s visual identity, but Instagram makes it simple and enjoyable.
Originally Published at Socialmediafreaks on 1, July 2021 | https://medium.com/@socialmediafreaks/instagram-as-a-marketing-tool-f99a66072eaa | ['Social Media Freaks'] | 2021-07-06 10:06:29.861000+00:00 | ['Audience', 'Engage Audience', 'Hashtags Instagram', 'Instagram Marketing'] |
Master Audience Communication and Grow Your Business with Ease & Grace | It’s so goddamn simple guys
So simple it should be illegal
We create complexities to hide our imperfections — but that’s for another time
All of this is built on being able to say the right thing, to the right person, in the right way, at the right time
Tick all those boxes and you’re set
Where do we begin though?
What do we do?
Begin with your audience Tap into their psychological state Tell them powerful stories and ask them questions
Seek to understand your audience better than they know themselves. The simplest way to do this is to think about what media your ideal client consumes
This will tell you all about them
Then, match their psychological state
Are they interested, in a state of desire or ready to buy?
If they’re interested — talk about what they want
It they’re in a state of desire — talk about how they get what they want
If they’re ready to buy — talk about what life is like afterward
See. Simple…
Master these basics. Get your language tight. Watch your business grow
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
Nick Maier
@nickmaier__ | https://medium.com/@nick-maier/master-audience-communication-and-grow-your-business-with-ease-grace-abae72f527a4 | ['Nick Maier'] | 2020-12-26 20:31:57.792000+00:00 | ['Health And Fitness', 'Communication', 'Words', 'Marketing Communication', 'Copywriting'] |
There have been at least three incidences of “alternate electors” showing up and trying to vote… | There have been at least three incidences of “alternate electors” showing up and trying to vote for Trump in states he lost. There is no such thing as an alternate elector. These people should be arrested for election fraud! | https://medium.com/@mannyotiko1/there-have-been-at-least-three-incidences-of-alternate-electors-showing-up-and-trying-to-vote-a00ea5d6510c | ['Manny Otiko'] | 2020-12-15 00:33:01.183000+00:00 | ['Election 2020', 'Trump', 'Politics', 'Democracy', 'Voting'] |
Automatically Trace MongoDB Calls from AWS Lambda | Debugging your MongoDB and AWS Lambda integrations with new Auto-Tracing Update from IOpipe
If you’re using AWS Lambda to send commands to MongoDB Atlas (or considering it), IOpipe recently added MongoDB auto-tracing to help developers gain real-time visibility and faster debugging for their database queries.
One of the biggest challenges for developers and engineering teams building serverless applications on AWS Lambda is gaining whole event observability — particularly when it pertains to functions that make calls outside of the AWS ecosystem.
The new feature empowers users to trace many MongoDB commands automatically and provide real-time invocation metrics, including duration and connection information.
For current IOpipe users, enabling auto-tracing is a simple as setting the environment variable IOPIPE_TRACE_MONGODB to true. See below for the full instructions.
For non-IOpipe users, sign up for your free tier or trial and use your preferred install method, including our blazing-fast, no-code setup via our Serverless Plugin.
Auto-tracing MongoDB Instructions:
Set the environment variable IOPIPE_TRACE_MONGODB to true, and IOpipe will trace commands automatically: which command, which key is being read or written, database and collection name (if available), and the connection’s hostname and port. This plugin supports these commands:
command, insert, update, and remove on the Server class
connect, close, and db on the MongoClient class.
find, findOne, insertOne, insertMany, updateOne, updateMany, replaceOne, deleteOne, deleteMany, createIndex on collections. bulkWrite is also supported, and generates a list of which commands were part of the bulk operation.
next, filter, sort, hint, and toArray on the Cursor class.
Commands used with a callback parameter generate end traces and duration metrics. (Note that MongoDB commands that don’t take callback params — like find — won’t generate durations.)
This plugin supports MongoDB Node.JS Driver v3.3 and newer. (This includes the latest version of Mongoose, which uses the native v3.3 driver.)
Help and Feedback
If having trouble with the auto-tracing MongoDB commands, please reach out to our team via community Slack or email. We’d love to get your feedback and assist you with any difficulties. | https://read.iopipe.com/automatically-trace-mongodb-commands-from-aws-lambda-baeb4f81a5d6 | ['Maurice Rickard'] | 2019-10-16 23:16:06.997000+00:00 | ['AWS Lambda', 'Serverless', 'Iopipe', 'Mongodb', 'Debugging'] |
What are the differences between Ethereum mining and Bitcoin mining? | Recently, the liquid mining (Defi) has directly caused network congestion of the underlying public chain Ethereum, and the average gas price on ETH has peaked at 480Gwei (now dropped to 110Gwei).
ETH Average Gas Price Chart
The ETH miners benefits the most from the congested Ethereum network and high transaction fee.
Based on the current Bitcoin price, the net profit of the 5700XT 8 cards machine is $16.43 per day. The static payback period for Ethereum mining is around 240 days; the 1660S of the NVIDIA series has only 210 days.
(Note: The above prices were collected on August 31. The price of ETH at that time was $480. Now the price of ETH has fallen, and the fee revenue has also decreased. The static return period has changed significantly)
From the perspective of the static return period, Ethereum mining is extremely attractive.
However, compared to Bitcoin mining, only a minority of miners know and take part into the Ethereum mining. In today’s article, we try to compare Ethereum mining and Bitcoin mining in 4 ways.
1.Mining algorithm, equipment, hashpower scale
As everyone knows, Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 encryption algorithm. the hashower is crucial when it comes to competition. In order to improve hashpower performance, Bitcoin mining has gone through four stages: CPU, GPU, FPGA mining machine, and now ASIC mining machine, with increasing specialization.
While Ethereum uses the Ethash encryption algorithm. During the mining process, it needs to read the memory and store the DAG file. Since the bandwidth for reading the memory each time is limited, besides, it is difficult for the computer technology to make a qualitative breakthrough on this issue, therefore, no matter how the computer’s computing efficiency is improved, the memory reading efficiency cannot be improved in a remarkable way. Therefore, in a sense, ETH’s Ethash encryption algorithm is “ASIC resistant”.
The difference in encryption algorithms has led to a large difference in terms of mining equipment and hashpower between Bitcoin and Ethereum.
At present, the mainstream Bitcoin mining equipment consists of highly specialized ASIC mining machine. The hashpower of a single mining machine can be up to 110T/s (Antminer S19 Pro model), and the scale of the whole network is 120EH/s or above.
While the ETH’s mining equipment is mainly graphics card, and there are very few specialized ASIC mining machines. On the one hand, the “ASIC resistance” of the Ethereum mining algorithm increases the threshold for developing ASIC mining machines, on the other hand, once Ethereum is upgraded to 2.0, the consensus mechanism will be transformed into PoS and the mining machine will become obsolete.
Compared with ASIC miners, graphics card miners differ by 2 orders of magnitude in hashpower. At present, the mainstream graphics mining machine (8 GB) has a hashpower of about 420MH/s, and there are 230Th/s hashpower in the whole Ethereum network.
Over the past two years, Bitcoin’s entire network hashpower has grown rapidly, while Ethereum’s has grown relatively slowly.
Since 2018, Bitcoin’s entire network hashpower VS Ethereum’s entire network hashpower
However, Bitcoin’s ASIC mining machine is monopolized by several major manufacturers, miners can only buy from the market; , although there are also specialized Ethereum graphics card mining machine manufacturers, miners can also DIY according to their own needs, they can purchase parts in the market and then assemble them by theirselves.
2.Proportion of energy cost
ASIC mining machine has high hashpower and high power consumption. For example, the latest Antminer model S19 Pro has a rated power consumption of 3250W and consumes 78 kwh of electricity per day. According to the current Bitcoin price and the energy cost of $0.033/kwh during the wet season, the electricity cost accounts for 30.68% of the total cost. Other older generation Bitcoin ASIC mining machines, such as the Antminer T17 series, the electricity cost ratio generally is greater than 50%.
Therefore, ASIC miners are very sensitive to electricity fees. This is why every year with wet season in Sichuan coming on, many ASIC mining machines have to be relocated from thermal power mining farms in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia to hydropower mining facilities in Sichuan. When the mining output cannot cover the electricity bill, the mining machine has to be unplugged.
In contrast, graphics card mining machines consume low energy as the electricity cost ratio is also low. For example, a 5600XT 8 graphics cards mining machine, based on the electricity price of $ 0.0514/kwh, the daily electricity bill will be about $1.49, accounting for about 11.5% of total cost; and for the model 1660S 8 graphic cards, the daily electricity bill is about $ 0.986, energy cost ratio is approximately 10.3%.
Due to low energy cost ratio, graphics card mining machines rarely is relocated back and forth every year (another reason is that graphics card mining machines are very “fragile”), and they are generally hosted in full-year electricity mining farms.
Earning the difference in electricity fee is the main profit model for the mining farm. The more electricity sold, the more money the mining farm makes. As Bitcoin ASIC mining machines consume high power and their maintenance is easier, so they are deeply welcomed by the mining farms owners, miners have lots of options when choosing farms for hosting.
Ethereum’s mining machine not only consumes less energy, but is also bulky. Compared with Bitcoin ASIC miners, an ordinary graphics card machine needs 3 times of space, which means it will take 3 ASIC miners to occupy the space 1 ETH miner.
In addition, graphics card mining machines have high requirements for mining farms. In addition to the most basic requirements, such as dust-proof, moisture-proof, and internal temperature control, the mining farm also needs to undertake anti-static treatment.
Moreover, when the graphics card mining machine is restarted, it is common that some hashpower will be lost, which will increase the workload of on-site operation and maintenance. Therefore, when choosing a hosting mining farm, the stability of the power supply and the ability of operation and maintenance are very important factors for consideration.
As a result, graphics card miners are not welcome in many crypto mining farms, and there are fewer hosting facilities to choose from. Generally speaking, for hosting, the electricity price charged by the mining farm on graphic card miners is generally higher than that of the ASIC mining machine.
4.Mining machine’s residual value
The chips of ASIC miners are customized and ASIC miners can only mine cryptocurrencies with fixed algorithms. For example, SHA-256 Hash Algorithm Bitcoin miners can only mine BTC, BCH, and BSV. After the ASIC mining machine is scrapped, it can only be sold as hardware, and the precious metals in the miner will be extracted and reused. A scrapped ASIC mining machine hardware can only be sold for about $4.29, so the residual value of the ASIC mining machine is extremely low.
In contrast, ETH miners have a high residual value.
First of all, if the graphics card mining machine can no longer mine Ethereum, you can switch to other cryptos, and there are plenty of options .
Secondly, even if you don’t want to continue mining, the graphics card within the miner can be disassembled and be sold to Internet cafes, game players, or companies that need to process a large amount of graphics and images. Generally speaking, for a graphics card that has been minining for two years, its residual value is about 30% of a brand new graphics card price.
In addition, the remaining parts of the graphics card miner (mainboard, CPU, power supply, hard disk, etc.) can also be reused and also have a high residual value, which can generally be sold for $71.43 to $142.
5.Block rewards and mining term
As part of Bitcoin’s coin issuance, crypto miners are rewarded a certain amount of bitcoins whenever a block is produced, Bitcoin halving takes place on average every 4 years, and all the Bitcoins will be mined until 2140. After the halving in May this year, the Bitcoin block reward is 6.25 coins per block and will decrease to 3.125 coins per block post next halving, estimated in April 2024. As long as the mining output can cover the electricity bill, miners can continue to mine Bitcoin until 2140.
At the beginning, the mining block reward of Ethereum was 5ETH. In October 2017, after the Byzantine upgrade of Ethereum, the mining reward per block was reduced from 5ETH to 3ETH; in March 2019, the block reward was reduced from 3ETH to 2ETH since the Constantinople upgrades.
The ETH 2.0 will fundamentally change the current economics, in fact the Ethereum will switch to PoS(Proof of Stake) and completely erase the concept of mining. There are uncertainties about when to upgrade, how long the mining machine can mine, and whether the block reward of Ethereum will continue to decrease during the upgrade process. At present, the majority of stakeholders in the industry believe that Ethereum can be mined for another 1 to 3 years.
6.Summary
The difference in encryption algorithms has led to great differences in mining equipment and hashpower scale between Ethereum and Bitcoin. Ethereum’s mining equipment consists of mainly graphics card miners, and very few specialized ASIC miners are available on the market.
Ethereum miners consume less energy but are large in size and require high mining environment and opex capabilities. Therefore, there are relatively few options of mining farms when hosting.
Although graphics card miners has a higher residual value, Ethereum 2.0 pose a potential risk for ETH mining, which must be taken into consideration before participating in mining.
Read more from B.TOP:
👉 What is Crypto Mining Farm (Complete guide 2020) Part 1
👉The potential pitfalls of buying mining machine futures (Part 2)
👉Join us on telegram. | https://medium.com/@b-topmining/what-are-the-differences-between-ethereum-mining-and-bitcoin-mining-d24ede8ea2aa | ['B.Top Mining'] | 2020-09-09 08:02:34.451000+00:00 | ['Ethereum', 'Bitcoin', 'Bitcoin Mining', 'Ethereum Blockchain'] |
Global Startup News…Month In Review — February 7, 2020 | Friday, February 7, 2020
Global Startup News (GSN) is a curated resource, showcasing hard-to-find, early-stage technology companies and related startup industry news from around the world.
Chris Valentine
CEO and Founder
Adeo InterActive
Quote of the Month
“Don’t start a company unless it’s an obsession and something you love. If you have an exit strategy, it’s not an obsession.” — Mark Cuban
Featured Startup News
Global | Africa | Asia | Europe | North America
Oceania / Australia | South America | Weekly Spotlights
Global
The World’s Most Productive Countries — Labor Productivity
Source: You Tube
PwC Aviation Industry Forecast 2020 to be another year of strong performance for global aviation industry
Source: Irish Tech News
Europe
Data, Decrypted: What We Learned From Analyzing 6 Years of Startups at Slush
Source: Slush
The year of the French unicorns
Source: Tech Crunch
Dutch scaleup funding 2019
Source: Startup Juncture
New, extensive survey on the Icelandic innovation ecosystem
Source: Northstack
North America
Venture capital slowly seeps outside of Silicon Valley
Source: Axios
How Mormons Built the Next Silicon Valley While No One Was Looking
Source: Medium
The United States Of Venture Capital: The Most Active VC In Each State
Source: CB Insights
Asia
Israel Earns Its Name as the Startup Nation with Over 6,000 Startups
Source: Medium
Bahrain: The challenge of staying competitive
Source: Wamda
A Startup Nation: Why Israel Has Become The New Silicon Valley
Source: Apex
Africa
The biggest problems facing South Africa’s tech entrepreneurs right now
Source: Business Tech
African tech startup funding hits $491m in record-breaking 2019
Source: Disrupt Africa
The top 5 pan-African startup sector developments of 2019
Source: Disrupt Africa
East Africa: EAC Must Not Be Left Behind in Fourth Industrial Revolution
Source: All Africa
Rwanda: Five Major Tech Trends of 2019
Source: All Africa
South America
Investment in cloud and AI to increase in Brazil
Source: ZD Net
Oceania / Australia
How Australia can lead the electric vehicle revolution
Source: Startup Daily
Random Thoughts
Visualizing Unequal State Tax Burdens Across America
Source: Visual Capitalist
In the internet era, public libraries are more vital than ever
Source: Mashable
Australia is building a research submarine
Source: Startup Daily
Who We Are
Global Startup News
If you have any questions, please contact Chris Valentine at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/valentinechris | https://medium.com/@cv87740/global-startup-news-month-in-review-february-7-2020-b864f5ce3c7d | [] | 2020-02-07 15:31:04.243000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Investors', 'News', 'Venture Capital', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
Authentication with AWS Amplify & React | What is Amplify?
https://docs.amplify.aws/start/q/integration/js
Basic Setup
First, if you don’t have Node yet, download and install it.
Open https://nodejs.org/en/download
You will also need an AWS account to run Amplify. Create your AWS account if you don’t have one yet.
Amplify
Now, with the basic setup completed, let’s begin.
Install the Amplify CLI
The Amplify Command Line Interface (CLI) is a unified toolchain to create, integrate, and manage the AWS cloud services for your app.
$ sudo npm install -g @aws-amplify/cli
Configure Amplify
Sign In to your AWS account and run:
$ sudo npm install -g @aws-amplify/cli
Press Enter, Specify the Aws region, username, and Enter again.
amplify configure
Follow these steps to set up access to your AWS account: Sign in to your AWS administrator account: https://console.aws.amazon.com/
Press Enter to continue
Specify the AWS Region
? region: eu-west-2
Specify the username of the new IAM user:
? user name: amplify-user
Complete the user creation using the AWS console
https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/home?region=undefined#/users$new?step=final&accessKey&userNames=amplify-7T7mt&permissionType=policies&policies=arn:aws:iam::aws:policy%2FAdministratorAccess
Press Enter to continue
Complete the AWS Amplify user creation, download the credentials, and add the remaining information in the terminal:
Scanning for plugins…
Plugin scan successful
Follow these steps to set up access to your AWS account:
Sign in to your AWS administrator account: https://console.aws.amazon.com/ Press Enter to continue Specify the AWS Region region : eu-west-2 Specify the username of the new IAM user: user name: amplify-user
Complete the user creation
Press Enter to continue
Enter the access key of the newly created user: secretAccessKey :
This would update/create the AWS Profile in your local machine Profile Name: amplify Successfully set up the new user.
Configure your React app
Let’s install AWS Amplify packages in our React app: $ sudo npm install aws-amplify @aws-amplify/ui-react
Authentication
Let’s proceed and add authentication to the app.
Authentication in Amplify uses Amazon Cognito. $ amplify add auth Make the selections below or according to your config:
Do you want to use the default authentication and security configuration? Defailt configuration
How do you want to be able to sign in ? Email
Do you want to configure advanced setting? NO, I am done
This command will walk us through a series of questions. Each question is configuring the authentication for our application. If you are unsure what configuration you need, go ahead and select Yes, use the default configuration for the first question. You can always come back and reconfigure these settings by running the command amplify update auth. We now have the authentication module configured for our application. But, we still need to deploy this configuration to our AWS account. Lucky for us, this is handled by the Amplify CLI as well. Let’s push the configuration to the cloud with the command below:
$ amplify push
Are you sure want to continue? YES
This will create and deploy the necessary changes to our AWS account to support our authentication module. A configuration file called aws-exports.js will be copied to your configured source directory, for example, ./src.
Configure Amplify in the React app Now, let’s add the Amplify auth service to our React app. Open your favorite IDE and edit the index.js file:
import React from 'react';
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';
import './index.css';
import App from './App';
import * as serviceWorker from './serviceWorker';
import Amplify from 'aws-amplify';
import awsconfig from './aws-exports'; Amplify.configure(awsconfig); ReactDOM.render(<App />, document.getElementById('root'));
serviceWorker.unregister(); Next, add the Amplify Authenticator to your App.js file:
import React from "react";
import "./App.css";
import { withAuthenticator, AmplifySignOut } from "@aws-amplify/ui-react"; function App() {
return (
<div>
<AmplifySignOut />
Welcome to Amplify Authentication with React Demo
</div>
);
} export default withAuthenticator(App, true);
Now, we are ready to test the app. Run the application using:
$npm run start
Your browser will load with a secure page to sign in. Your app is now protected with Amplify.
Keep learning.. | https://medium.com/appgambit/authentication-with-aws-amplify-react-3a811b49260e | ['Rahul Ladumor'] | 2020-05-29 15:23:37.872000+00:00 | ['AWS', 'Amplify', 'React', 'Cognito', 'Amplify Blog'] |
Cross that Finish Line, No Matter What it Takes | why finishing your work is the most important thing you can do as a writer
Photo by Isaac Wendland on Unsplash
We all get a little starry-eyed when we think of our favorite works of art.
The evocative and tender stroke of a paintbrush. A sentence so gorgeously wrought you find yourself whispering it aloud, just to relish the sound of it on your tongue. Entire universes of the human condition at 24 frames per second.
These works of art are masterpieces, in every sense of the word.
Despite their inherent beauty, I’m often struck by something beyond the workmanship of such pieces. Beyond the aesthetics, beyond the themes that seem to encompass all of humankind.
I get excited about the fact that they ever got finished in the first place.
The Road Less Traveled, the Line Rarely Crossed
Some writers never get to experience the joy of finishing a piece of work.
They sit down to write and end up on Google, combing the web for distraction.
They sit down to write and then realize they have another dozen things they should be doing, and immediately get back up again.
Oftentimes they don’t sit down at all. They simply dream, and figure that someday they’ll be ready to pen their masterpiece. Someday they’ll find the right words, the right idea, the right way to tell their precious story.
We’ve all been “they” at some point. Writing is hard. If you don’t think it is, you might be kidding yourself. It’s not just placing words down on paper.
For fiction writers, it’s juggling a million things at once: characterization, the trajectory of the plot, subtext, effective storytelling, gorgeous prose that doesn’t get in the way of itself.
Non-fiction is just as fatiguing, when you think of the research involved, the metric tons of notes to look over, and the precision required to tell the truth of the matter in captivating terms.
It isn’t easy, friends.
But we all do it for a reason, whether that is the joy of writing, the need to tell a certain tale, to be paid for our work, or to simply hold a copy of our own story made flesh and blood, and pat ourselves on the back for a job well done.
Is that reason enough?
“Why Finish? Why Even Bother?”
I know I’ve mumbled those very words, closing my laptop after a particularly frustrating writing session. Sometimes it seems like it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Sometimes it seems like the end will never come into sight, that it will remain a distant point on the horizon: the closer I move, the smaller it gets.
It’s a well-crafted illusion, but one that is inherently false.
How else could it be that buildings are constructed, soaring to dizzying heights through the air? How else did the Great Wall of China and Hadrian’s Wall come into being? They didn’t just appear, fully-formed.
They were laid down, brick by brick, stone by stone.
We know this to be true, but aren’t able to see our writing the same way. It’s taxing on the mind rather than the body, and oftentimes simply lifting the “stone,” whether that is a word, a sentence, or a chapter, feels Sisyphean.
But that’s all it is. One plus one plus one. Every word you write brings you closer. Every idea you catch elevates your work to new heights.
There’s Only One Way to Finish…
and that’s to keep pressing on, word after word, line after line until the piece is finished and there is nothing left to say. It may not be a neat finish. It may not be pretty at all — it may be wrapped in a crooked and colorless and poorly-tied ribbon, with an awful cliche plopped on top for good measure.
But did you catch what I said?
It’s finished.
And once it’s finished, you can let yourself relax. The first draft is always the hardest part, because anything is possible, in fact, everything is possible. Once that first draft is down, you can narrow your focus.
You can go through, circling words to be substituted, phrases that can be refined.
You will see little diamonds glittering in the dust, the debris, the clutter intrinsic to the first draft process.
Rather than staring glumly at a blank page, you will watch, amazed, as seemingly disparate parts begin to align, as themes arise from the chaos.
As Margaret Atwood so succinctly put it,
“A word after a word after a word is power.”
Go write that story. Go tell the world what it needs to hear. Everything you dream of is waiting just beyond that finish line, and it’s growing closer and closer every day. | https://medium.com/swlh/cross-that-finish-line-no-matter-what-it-takes-db91ee2d127d | ['Dana Marie'] | 2020-06-06 07:15:31.242000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Productivity', 'Writing Tips', 'Creativity', 'Inspiration'] |
Metrics to Evaluate your Semantic Segmentation Model | Metrics to Evaluate your Semantic Segmentation Model
How do you know your segmentation model performs well? Find out here.
Illustration of IoU and Dice Coefficient.
Semantic segmentation. My absolute favorite task. I would make a deep learning model, have it all nice and trained… but wait. How do I know my model is performing well? In other words, what are the most common metrics for semantic segmentation? Here’s a clear cut guide to the essential metrics that you need to know to ensure your model performs well. I have also included Keras implementations below.
If you want to learn more about Semantic Segmentation with Deep Learning, check out this Medium article by George Seif.
Contents:
Pixel Accuracy Intersection-Over-Union (Jaccard Index) Dice Coefficient (F1 Score) Conclusion, Notes, Summary
1. Pixel Accuracy
Pixel accuracy is perhaps the easiest to understand conceptually. It is the percent of pixels in your image that are classified correctly.
While it is easy to understand, it is in no way the best metric.
At first glance, it might be difficult to see the issue with this metric. To expose this metric for what it really is, here’s a scenario: Let’s say you ran the following image(Left)through your segmentation model. The image on the right is the ground truth, or annotation (what the model is supposed to segment). In this case, our model is trying to segment ships in a satellite image.
Image from Vlad Shmyhlo in article: Image Segmentation: Kaggle experience (Part 1 of 2) in TDS
You see that your segmentation accuracy is 95%. That’s awesome! Let’s see how your segmentation looks like!
Not exactly what you were hoping for, huh. Is there something wrong with our calculation? Nope. It’s exactly right. It’s just that one class was 95% of the original image. So if the model classifies all pixels as that class, 95% of pixels are classified accurately while the other 5% are not. As a result, although your accuracy is a whopping 95%, your model is returning a completely useless prediction. This is meant to illustrate that high pixel accuracy doesn’t always imply superior segmentation ability.
This issue is called class imbalance. When our classes are extremely imbalanced, it means that a class or some classes dominate the image, while some other classes make up only a small portion of the image. Unfortunately, class imbalance is prevalent in many real world data sets, so it can’t be ignored. Therefore, I present to you two alternative metrics that are better at dealing with this issue:
2. Intersection-Over-Union (IoU, Jaccard Index)
The Intersection-Over-Union (IoU), also known as the Jaccard Index, is one of the most commonly used metrics in semantic segmentation… and for good reason. The IoU is a very straightforward metric that’s extremely effective.
IoU calculation visualized. Source: Wikipedia
Before reading the following statement, take a look at the image to the left. Simply put, the IoU is the area of overlap between the predicted segmentation and the ground truth divided by the area of union between the predicted segmentation and the ground truth, as shown on the image to the left. This metric ranges from 0–1 (0–100%) with 0 signifying no overlap and 1 signifying perfectly overlapping segmentation.
For binary (two classes) or multi-class segmentation, the mean IoU of the image is calculated by taking the IoU of each class and averaging them. (It’s implemented slightly differently in code).
Now let’s try to understand why this metric is better than pixel accuracy by using the same scenario as section 1. For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume all the ships (colored boxes) are part of the same class.
But wait, what exactly is overlap and union in our context? The image above shows a pretty clear picture, but I found it a bit difficult to understand in the context of predicted vs. ground truth because they aren’t necessarily overlapping like the image depicts above. Let’s take a look at the predicted segmentation and the ground truth side-by-side. | https://towardsdatascience.com/metrics-to-evaluate-your-semantic-segmentation-model-6bcb99639aa2 | ['Ekin Tiu'] | 2020-10-03 15:15:04.783000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Evaluation', 'Metrics', 'Deep Learning', 'Segmentation'] |
Practicing around D3.js over Appdynamics | Practicing around D3.js over Appdynamics
Trying out novel visualization models to increase the insights over your infrastructure CrashLaker Apr 21, 2019·5 min read
GIF extracted from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXXyWLft1zc
Disclaimer: Some contents written were based solely from my experience uppon using the Appdynamics dashboard. So suggestions and a more in-depth overview about appdynamic’s products are much appreciated.
Appdynamics
Appdynamics like many other Application Performance Management (APM) tools helps you to trace, spot outliers and setup warnings when a certain service-level objectives (SLOs) such as response time or errors per minute, etc, happens by providing incredible visuals as well as the ability to drill down into the call stack methods to find the method at the exact moment an incident occured.
Image taken from https://solucaoprimeitapmappdynamics.wordpress.com/tag/appdynamics/.
D3.js
D3.js is a javascript framework in which my first use case to it was to better organize basic lists and blocks with data loaded from APIs but its strongest feature and use case is that it allows you to bind arbitrary data to the Document Object Model (DOM) and then let’s you to pretty much render anything you want on the browser using HTML, SVGs, CANVAS and CSS.
All D3.js examples here https://github.com/d3/d3/wiki/Gallery.
Appdynamics caveats
To state that this isn’t a “flaw” tothe Appdynamics product. It’s just that it didn’t suit my use case at first. Consider for example the first GIF of this article and the image below.
Image taken from http://dailyrevshare.com/database-transaction-flow-chart/database-transaction-flow-chart-elegant-overview-of-application-monitoring-4-4-x-documentation/.
By seeing those two pictures one can tell that Appdynamics perfectly describes each remote calls (called business transactions) and generates a component (represented by a visual circle) based on each application and features, such as the Database server and its model + database name or the Message Queue (MQ) server and its topics.
So one cannot have a macro view of the infrastructure as a whole. What if I want to see which applications talk to one database? Which MQs depend on application X? Application Y is on top of which infrastructure (physical, vm, cloud)?
To answer the questions above one would have to manually go through all the applications and check if each one of them has a connection to database X for example. And when you have more than 50.. 100.. 1000.. applications.. you see where this is going. right?
Appdynamics menu taken from https://www.g2.com/products/appdynamics/details.
So the image above shows the appdynamics menu taken from the browser where you can see the tabs Applications, Databases and Servers segregated.
The “Applications” tab indeed shows all the communications between them except for the databases and each objects representing the topics of each MQ server is shown instead of a unique node representing each MQ server.
Appdynamics API
Luckly appdynamics has an extensive and well documented API where you can follow these few and easy steps to get access to its REST API or RESTUI. The latter not documented though with warning of unnoticed changes on further releases.
So you can just POST to `/controller/api/oauth/access_token` with your credentials to get your token:
curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/vnd.appd.cntrl+protobuf;v=1" "https://<controller address>/controller/api/oauth/access_token"
{
"access_token": "...",
"expires_in": 300
}
After this step you can just thought all Application’s Business Transactions and build a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) characterizing each Application’s dependencies. You can save this graph in structure you want but remember that if you save it in one of these two JSON formats you’re pretty much up to plug-n-play your new JSON to any hierarchy or treemap style of d3 example to see your data in action without needing to touch any javascript code… yet.
Layout 1 on the left. Layout 2 on the right.
Push data to D3.js
So I found one example that best suited my needs and.. boom! Right what I was looking for.
D3.js result from DAG graph generated from Appdynamics.
Then after filtering some keywords that belonged to other applications and services it became more like this:
After hovering over one node:
Then moving to the hacking phase where you’re able to tweak some parts of the code to suit your needs.
Like if I want to place them divided by its categories:
Making it more organized and insightful when hovering:
You can pretty much do whatever you like by messing with the force. Like my attempt to copy appdynamics’ layout.
After hovering:
I know there’s plenty of tutorials about D3 and force graphs but I wanned to show you my use case and how you can first preview your data before having to mess or build a D3.js code from scratch which has a considerable learning curve like Paul Sweeney commented.
Thank you!
References | https://medium.com/@crashlaker/practicing-around-d3-js-over-appdynamics-2975a66bc364 | [] | 2019-04-21 20:22:15.357000+00:00 | ['https://solucaoprimeitapmappdynamics.wordpress.com/tag/appdynamics/', 'JavaScript', 'D3js', 'Appdynamics'] |
Burnout | Pandemic burnout and challenges adjusting to the ‘new normal’ has been real. If you’re feeling it, you’re not alone. Quite a few people are sharing their stories.
Here’s something from Tara Haelle that’s making its way through social media. The relatable point for me, is where Tara talks about being a person who thrives in high pressure/stress environments, but knowing it wouldn’t last and that she would eventually crash. Tara shared some great insight on things she did to bounce back.
“But even knowing I would eventually crash, I didn’t appreciate how hard the crash would be, or how long it would last, or how hard it would be to try to get back up over and over again, or what getting up even looked like.”
She REALLY gets it. Feel free to read the article when you have a spare moment:
Your ‘Surge Capacity’ Is Depleted — It’s Why You Feel Awful.
Here’s how to pull yourself out of despair and live your life.
Our Brains Struggle to Process This Much Stress | Elemental (medium.com) | https://medium.com/@empow3r2020/burnout-9738c8a5f53e | [] | 2020-12-19 00:57:50.789000+00:00 | ['Burnout', 'Articles', 'Pandemic', 'Mental Health', 'Wellbeing'] |
UX-Araştırma | Kullanıcı deneyimi araştırması hakkında her şey:2 | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/ux-ara%C5%9Ft%C4%B1rma/ux-ara%C5%9Ft%C4%B1rma-kullan%C4%B1c%C4%B1-deneyimi-ara%C5%9Ft%C4%B1rmas%C4%B1-hakk%C4%B1nda-her-%C5%9Fey-2-ab3a0800e2b | ['Kerem Can Demirtaş'] | 2021-02-08 19:12:03.746000+00:00 | ['User Research', 'Kullanıcı Deneyimi', 'UX', 'User Experience', 'Kullanıcı Araştırması'] |
Design Genius Bullied by a Dictatorship : Notes on Oskar Schlemmer | Design Genius Bullied by a Dictatorship : Notes on Oskar Schlemmer
Sept. 4 is the birthday of a Bauhaus artist who flourished in Germany’s vibrant 1920s. Then Nazis gained power by sowing division among citizens, stirring violence in the streets and attacking artists and the press.
How cutting edge were the costumes Oscar Schlemmer (1888–1943) designed for his Triadic Ballet?
So cutting edge that art critic Alastair Smart credited Schlemmer as an influence on costumes David Bowie and Lady Gaga wore on stage decades later. (There’s a link at the end of this essay to a bibliography with details on Smart’s article and other material used in researching this essay.)
Decades after the Triadic ballet toured in the 1920s, Bowie and Gaga were looking rather futuristic in stages costumes that echoed Schlemmer’s designs.
In a 2019 article appearing on the website of Christie’s auction house, Smart wrote about Schlemmer and other artists who work as part of the Bauhaus. This German art school operated only from 1919 until 1933. But it has had a lasting effect on modern style. The artists, architects and designers of the Bauhaus emphasized sleek spare designs, such as the logo Schlemmer for the group, as seen below.
Signet of the Staatliche Bauhaus, designed by Oskar Schlemmer and used from 1922. Wikimedia copy of image in the public domain.
Schlemmer made his name in art circles with his work on the theater’s workshop.
“During his years at the Bauhaus, he put on a number of avant-garde stage productions, most famously Triadic Ballet, in which dancers in geometric-shaped costumes made mathematically-inspired moves — in a manner rather resembling marionettes without the wires,” Smart wrote. | https://dooleyyoung.medium.com/design-genius-bullied-by-a-dictatorship-notes-on-oskar-schlemmer-9f42bfc0ee35 | ['Kerry Dooley Young'] | 2020-09-07 12:27:57.918000+00:00 | ['Art', 'Germany', 'Bauhaus', 'History'] |
Community Resilience Through the Civic Commons, Part 2 | Compared to the city as a whole, North Minneapolis is more racially diverse, has more young people, and — at an estimated $40,000 — has a lower average household income. It’s a proud community, with many assets made up of people, places and a culture that have been impacted by present and historic inequities, including redlining. “In North Minneapolis, we’ve talked — and we’ll need to continue to talk — at length about how we connect Northsiders to the river,” said Minneapolis City Councilor Jeremiah Ellison at the Overlook’s opening. “A big part of it is not only changing the landscape, but that it’s youth and folks on the Northside who contribute to what that landscape looks like. I’m excited to see how this will be a catalyst for access to the river.”
The Overlook elevates Black design within and for a largely Black community. James Garrett of 4RM+ULA Architecture was the lead architect of the Overlook, which features an 840 square foot oval loop trail and deck perched on the river’s edge. The deck is circumscribed by a steel railing which includes a 48- foot interpretive panel, designed by Samuel Ero-Phillips with contributions from Black youth designers at Juxtaposition Arts (JXTA). The panel depicts a timeline of the Mississippi Riverfront, from pre-settlement to its imagined future.
Minneapolis-based TENxTEN Landscape Architecture and Urbanism led the Overlook’s multidisciplinary design team. In a nod to the deep roots that nourished this project, James Garrett co-founded the Environmental Design Studio at JXTA (with Satoko Muratake of TENxTEN) and years ago, Councilmember Ellison was one of JXTA’s first youth apprentices. | https://medium.com/reimagining-the-civic-commons/community-resilience-through-the-civic-commons-part-2-fc65f51a9211 | ['Reimagining The Civic Commons'] | 2021-09-14 08:03:12.568000+00:00 | ['Cities', 'Sustainability', 'Civic Engagement', 'Resilience', 'Community'] |
Online Writing, Adult Learners and Employability | When you dive right into the workplace before getting a degree, you might discover the need to improve your writing. In fact, it might be one reason you decided to seek out a degree after a sizeable gap period from when you last when to school. If you started the degree, while juggling family and your current job, you might have been scared to death of the writing requirement.
Having an understanding of academic writing can enhance a university’s student’s grades, but it can also have added benefits towards jobs and careers. . . . [For instance], Academic writing allows one to see the perspectives of different people and form an opinion on it according to the information available. . . . Clarity in writing demonstrates judgment and problem-solving skills, it also demonstrates that one can explain a complex situation in simpler terms. All of these skills are said to be of great importance in the future of employment.
Many of my students in their introductions voice the stress they have about taking my academic writing and research class. Their careers are often hanging on the balance of their school performance. They often mention their writing isn’t very good (though usually the actual post contradicts this), and they even write that they are not sure they will get through the course. Several write that this course was the last of their degree, and although they realize taking it earlier might have helped them with the other courses, their fear kept them away. However, one thing is clear from these posts and that is their passion for learning and motivation to get the skills needed to earn the degree and increase their employability. | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/online-writing-adult-learners-and-employability-caa95c46b5f | ['Barbara L. Ciccarelli'] | 2020-12-03 16:40:57.470000+00:00 | ['Students', 'Online Learning', 'Employment', 'Writing', 'Education'] |
Fix Error Why Microsoft Edge Not Working in Windows 10 ? | After the windows have been updated to the windows 10 the Microsoft Edge Not Working is the major problem that is on run. You can find that there is a constantly not able to upload problem on the go. If it is let even for some time then also it comes not responding. There is a problem which you have to fix it to get it to work properly.
Reasons for Microsoft Edge Not working ? Call at — 1 866 235 4333
There are multiple reasons but the major reasons that cause this problem in windows 10 are mentioned below.
· Microsoft edge not updated
· Corrupt files
· Multiple programs running on the background
· when there is no compatibility
Fix Microsoft Edge Not working
1. Restart your Device and then open Microsoft edge
2. Check for updates
Go to start and tap on update & security and go to windows update select the check for update option. Then if you find any update make sure you do it.
3. Simultaneously press windows and R button and type msconfig and tap on ok. Then go to the service tab and then go to hide all Microsoft services and disable all.
In the Startup tab go to the task manager and then select the item and disable it.
4. Clear the browsing data in Microsoft edge, go to the Hub in the right corner on the top. And choose the history option and go to clear history option. And then select a clear option. This will clear your history.
5. In the extension option in the edge, browser makes sure you turn off each and everything and then reopens the browser. This will ensure smooth running. And stop problems form extension.
6. Windows and X button must be pressed together and then go to Microsoft edge. And in the advanced option link it to the new window. Then repair it by selecting the repair option and then if it doesn’t change anything then you can select the reset option.
(Remember — The option repairing would not delete any information but in case if you are choosing the reset option then everything will get deleted)
7. The next thing you can do is to reinstall the browser press both the windows key and R key and type %localappdata%\packages and then tap on entering.
Then go to Microsoft folder and then go to properties option and then remove the check on read-only option.
Further, click on the Microsoft folder and delete it and then restart your windows.
8. Open the command prompt window and then enter DISM/online/Cleanup-image/restorehealth and then enter SFC/scan.
After this restart your window. This will help you out to have the windows properly working.
See Also — Microsoft Edge Not Working Windows 10 | https://medium.com/@jameswilliom123/fix-error-why-microsoft-edge-not-working-in-windows-10-547fc69db142 | ['James Williom'] | 2019-07-15 07:20:34.411000+00:00 | ['Windows 10', 'Working', 'Microsoft', 'Edge', 'Not'] |
Envisioning LSPs in the Lightning Economy | Because Lightning is still so new and it’s still changing so fast, nobody has really cracked the formula yet. Nobody knows the best business model for LSPs. Indeed, there might be several viable, scalable business models for different kinds of LSPs servicing different niche markets. We’re just surveying what’s currently possible, concretizing our vision of the coming Lightning economy, and interpolating between the two.
Today’s LSPs are on the cutting edge. We’re the early adopters, the first movers, the cool kids on the Lightning network. Since we’re committed to — and certain of — the coming Lightning economy, the time, effort, and coin we’re spending on building the network and our user base now is an investment in our future. The future is our incentive, and progress is our reward.
Speaking of the future…
The second wave of LSPs
As the Lightning network and the Lightning economy grow, the LSP model will become more attractive. Indeed, for some current market actors, expanding their businesses into Lightning services will be a requirement for survival. A couple of existing business models will feel pressure to become LSPs in the next, say, one to three years. First are the exchanges. Second are existing payment apps, like Square’s Cash App and Venmo.
Think about it: as the Lightning economy grows, bitcoin will gradually suck fiat out of the economy, and exchanging currencies is what exchanges do. Ergo “exchanges.” Existing bitcoin users are already familiar with exchanges, and many incoming fiat users will have to pass through an exchange before joining the Lightning economy. (Unless, of course, their LSP offers a handy, in-app means to top-up their balances.)
Occupying the conduit between crypto and fiat, the exchanges won’t be able to miss the flow towards Lightning. And not expanding their services to take advantage of that position would be ludicrous.
In fact, as bitcoin expands to become the default medium of exchange with Lightning as its medium, exchanges are going to face a very busy transition period, after which, however, they’re going to need a new business model. In the absence of fiat, there won’t be as much left to exchange. Expanding their offerings to include LSP services would be a natural, rational way to master the transition.
Further, running an exchange is also a capital-intensive undertaking. They need to have bitcoin on hand anyway, but bitcoin doesn’t accrue interest. Now, if the exchanges could put some of that bitcoin into funding users’ channels, they could even make some money on the bitcoin that would otherwise just be sitting around collecting digital dust.
The proof of exchanges’ interest in the LSP model is in the fact that a couple of them are already doing it. Sparkswap and Olympus let users purchase bitcoin with USD, so they’re exchanges. But they also open channels for users, like LSPs. Sparkswap opens users’ channels immediately (just like Breez), and Olympus opens the channel when the user buys bitcoin through a Turbo channel. They’re effectively exchanges that offer Lightning services as well.
As for the payment apps, integrating Lightning as the preferred means of transferring everyday quantities of bitcoin is a natural progression from their existing businesses. Cash App already facilitates bitcoin transfers (well, sort of, because it’s custodial, so it’s not really bitcoin, is it?). Lightning is simply a better way to do what they’re already doing.
The evolving LSP business model
When the exchanges enter the LSP space, we can expect more attention and more entrants to join the party. We’re all used to bandwagons by now, right? But that’s a good thing because it means that more people will start experimenting with more different kinds of LSP models. Some might be very large and serve hundreds of thousands of users; others might be very small and might only service a few dozen friends. The LSP model scales in both directions, up and down, which is great for decentralization.
The Lightning economy needs many people to help cultivate it, and decentralization has always been in bitcoin’s DNA, so this trend is good for all of us and good for bitcoin.
At this stage, growth (read: onboarding) is the name of the game. A number of business models are thinkable for LSPs with sufficient capital. Each has to balance cost with scalability, onboarding with revenue.
If everyone jumps on the same bandwagon, it’s a revolution. (Costumes optional) (Source: Wikimedia)
Freemium models
Now, if a firm is entering an existing but very promising space with incumbent, pioneering competitors, it’ll need to catch up with and then surpass that competition. It has to grow faster than the existing providers, just like Spotify, Medium, Dropbox, and Skype have done in their respective markets. They started with good, competitive products, and gave them away — at least their basic functions or in some limited quantity.
The LSP business also lends itself to such freemium models. Since Lightning allows for transaction fees, a “free” service would effectively run on a pay-as-you-go basis, charging users transaction fees that are high enough to cover their costs. Limits on, say, channel capacities would also help contain the LSPs’ costs and provide users with an incentive to upgrade.
Such free user plans would be great for private users who want to experiment with Lightning before committing to a paid plan or for users who require limited capacity and a low-cost service (e.g. students). However, other classes of users, like businesses, will need better service, optimal reliability, more flexible capacity, and they’ll also be willing to pay for it.
In order to serve clients who need enterprise-grade performance, there will also be a market for paid, premium LSPs. Premium services could include higher channel capacities, higher transaction volumes, lower fees, SLA-guaranteed provision quality, and so on in exchange for a flat monthly fee.
Upselling
We’ve all seen those ads for phones that only cost $1. It’s also the case that you can usually buy bananas in grocery stores in the northern hemisphere for less than the cost of shipping them thousands of kilometers. These providers can lose money on phones and bananas because they make far more on the mobile contracts and laundry detergent they sell to those same customers.
Perhaps counterintuitively, such loss leaders can be rational and profitable because they attract customers to associated products or services with higher margins.
An in-app marketplace in practice. More revenue streams = faster growth = accelerating progress.
LSPs could pursue a similar strategy by offering some services for free, like opening and funding channels, as long as users commit to using other services, like exchanging, for a price. If the margin on the profitable services and the user volume are sufficiently large, the LSPs can afford to offer some services for free. Indeed, they might even have an incentive to do so at scale.
Having users’ attention when they’re paying and making transactions is also a valuable commodity in itself. There is no reason why LSPs have to restrict their business models to their own services. They can also sell products and third-party services. More specifically, why not let users purchase directly from an in-app marketplace? Doing so requires another button in the app and perhaps a few B2B partnerships, but LSPs are working on that kind of thing anyway.
Additional revenue streams, like in-app marketplaces, also help to increase customer lifetime value (CLV). That’s an important consideration, since services like opening funded channels increase the customer acquisition cost (CAC) — at least in the very short term. What matters, though, is the overall CAC:CLV ratio, so raising the CAC is not a bad thing if doing so raises the CLV even higher.
LSPs in a maturing Lightning economy
Once the second wave has hit, we can expect “LSP” and “the Lightning economy” to be household terms, even if many people aren’t entirely sure how they work — much like bitcoin now. At that point, the banks will be sweating because the entire economy will be excising the middlemen. So who would be the next entrants into the LSP market? Who would stand to gain from widespread disintermediation?
In a word: everyone. It’s hard to estimate what the banking system costs the world, but a decent first estimate is to add up the value of all the world’s banks. They’ve been able to amass around $124 trillion in assets, a number that grows somewhere around 10% per year. That’s the size of the pie that stands to be recut. And LSPs are the knives.
Mmmm. Slicing the pie. Is this the first pastry analogy we’ve used? No. Is it possible that I have a thing for sweet, delicious pastries? Maybe. (Source: skeez)
That pie is big enough for everyone to have a slice, so the LSP market is sure to flourish. The range of small-scale LSPs is likely to expand rapidly, but they won’t be the only ones.
Other things being equal, those companies with the greatest transaction volumes — excluding banks — will be the ones with the greatest incentive to foster the Lightning economy. Those with vast user bases will also have an advantage in entering the LSP market. So which businesses have vast user bases and process vast quantities of transactions? The FAANG crew (possibly without Facebook, pending the fate of Libra) come to mind, and they are likely to join the third wave of LSPs.
Third-wave business models
The image in the crystal ball gets fuzzier the farther forward we look. Business models might be as diverse as the scales of the actors providing LSP services. Small LSPs might rely on personal contacts and low overheads, like a corner barber shop. Medium-sized ones might rely on custom localizations and brand tie-ins, like many current franchise operations. The largest have vast opportunities to onboard their current users while cutting costs and expanding their revenue streams.
To imagine a big tech player entering the LSP business, consider a company like Netflix. In 2018, Netflix had around 140 million subscribers, and their gross sales were around $18 billion. Imagine the number of transactions involved and the magnitude of transaction fees they had to remit to banks. If Netflix wanted to set up an LSP, they could pay for the R&D out of petty cash, and they could maybe save a few hundred million per year by disintermediating all those payments. Considering what banks currently make, a company like Netflix could soon be generating more revenue from a growing FinTech arm than they do from their traditional video-on-demand business.
In the third wave, scale will remain important, as always. But the key is always to find the right solution for the niche. Some people prefer processed cheese from a factory; others prefer artisanal Chesires ripened strictly in the cold months. We’re eager to see where the Lightning economy goes, and we’re excited to be growing along with it. | https://medium.com/breez-technology/envisioning-lsps-in-the-lightning-economy-832b45871992 | ['Roy Sheinfeld'] | 2019-11-11 06:24:36.705000+00:00 | ['Lightning Economy', 'Lsp', 'Bitcoin', 'Lightning Network'] |
What I Learned From Being Dumped by Men on the Rebound | The third time, my friend looked at me with her “seriously?” expression when I told her the guy I am seeing is only recently separated from his wife.
She already anticipated what will happen, but I was still in denial.
Surely the fact that it happened twice does not necessarily mean it will happen again?
But it did.
From going the extra mile to spend time with me and doing everything he assumed I wanted, there was an immediate drop of contact as soon as I revealed a side of me he was not expecting.
This time, my mistake was more severe. He was going out of his way to deliver my hat which I forgot in his car. But since he arrived late at night without warning, I was upset. I felt vulnerable and I couldn’t sleep that night… And my reaction was a reflection of that.
I sent him a text message at 11:30 pm asking him not to appear uninvited to my house. I was probably too tired and confused and did not articulate it nicely enough.
I know. He had good intentions and I blew it.
Still, if he liked me as much as his efforts indicated, wouldn’t it make sense to take a little time to work it out?
The real issue with men on the rebound.
After three times I was dumped by men who were recently separated, I finally found the common ground.
All three men I dated were really keen. I guess I was completely different from their ex that it was refreshing for them. Perhaps after a long period in which the relationship with their ex deteriorated, they were fully ready to let their heart soar with excitement for someone totally unlike her.
They flooded me with their attention and made me feel special before they truly got to know me. In me, they saw an imaginary perfect partner which would be the antidote to the recent relationship that only just crumbled.
The problem, though, is that all three of them were not ready for a relationship with a real person. Someone that has more than one dimension.
So as long as what I said and did was in accordance with their unrealistic vision of who I was, they were exuberantly passionate.
However, their relationship that just ended was overburdened with arguments and friction. And at the first sign of discord in the newly emerging relationship with me, their fantasy has evaporated into thin air. They had no capacity to deal with any disagreements. No matter how small or insignificant they were.
Does this mean I will never date a recently separated man again?
I never say never.
But I am sure as heck going to be extra cautious next time I end up dating someone on the rebound.
And maybe, just maybe, next time a man on the rebound wants to date me, I would ask him to wait a couple of years before contacting me again.
Then again, maybe I won’t. | https://changingmaya.medium.com/what-i-learned-from-being-dumped-by-men-on-the-rebound-eabb5d1578a4 | ['Maya Melamed'] | 2020-01-30 18:08:32.823000+00:00 | ['Personal Growth', 'Relationships Love Dating', 'Relationships', 'Love', 'Dating'] |
Weeks 10, 11 & 12 — Holidays and focus | There has been a holiday! It was camping in Dorset with my other half’s family and it was glorious. In the spirit of continuous improvement, we identified gadgets that would improve our next camping experience and I will be busy sourcing those for next year.
The view from the dog walking area at the campsite wasn’t half bad
Back in work land, I have been focussing.
A change to support this is rolling off the intranet project. Overall, I can add more value to other work going on in the Council at the moment so that’s what I am going to do! This week has been my last week with the intranet team and they’re moving toward a really good place. Eleanor has completed the stakeholder interviews. The user research plan is complete and Lorna is well into recruiting. Jaco and Alysia are doing great things with process mapping and content mapping. Mark & Niall are steadily building up data we can use to understand current usage trends, Philippa is building up the comms plan and Alex is steering the ship wonderfully. They’re full steam ahead.
In the world of backup, things are slower but progressing. This week, we got through some commercials and proposed solutions to review. We’re going to need to go back to the supplier to run through these in detail but probably for a week as most of Sukh’s time is needed for recruitment next week.
Speaking of Sukh’s recruitment, I’ve been assisting with that. It’s been the first time I have ever invigilated technical tests or sat in on technical interviews. I have been both pleased and surprised that I do actually understand what is being discussed and could even answer some of the technical questions! It’s been a really valuable, but brain draining, experience to see just how different recruiting technical roles is. I have a whole new appreciation for the process and effort involved.
Finally, in AWS migration work, Mo has been driving along the connections needed to be able to talk between our data centre and AWS. These are motoring along and we’re hoping to start testing in the next few weeks!
And that’s me. Another week under my belt. | https://medium.com/@emma-h/weeks-10-11-12-holidays-and-focus-2f628af0b064 | ['Emma H'] | 2021-09-17 07:29:21.306000+00:00 | ['Weeknotes', 'Local Government'] |
I Can’t BEAR to be Alone: Our Wholesale Fear of Our Own Thoughts | Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash
In a remarkable study by the British Psychological Society which revealed a great deal about Western society (https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/10/12/what-are-we-like-10-psychology-findings-that-reveal-the-worst-of-human-nature)/, I read the following:
We would rather electrocute ourselves than spend time in our own thoughts
Maybe if we spent a little more time in contemplation we would not be so blinkered. Sadly, for many of us, it seems the prospect of spending time in our own thoughts is so anathema we’d actually rather electrocute ourselves. This was demonstrated dramatically in a 2014 study in which 67 per cent of male participants and 25 per cent of female participants opted to give themselves unpleasant electric shocks rather than spend 15 minutes in peaceful contemplation. Although others questioned the interpretation of the results, at least one other study has shown people’s preference for electrocuting themselves over monotony, and another found cross-cultural evidence for people’s greater enjoyment of doing some activity alone rather than merely thinking (also replicated here). The gist of these findings would seem to back up the verdict of the French philosopher Blaise Pascal who stated that “All of man’s troubles come from his inability to sit quietly in a room by himself”.
When I was the in the Army, somewhere around 1975 there was a huge popular movement- pushed in part by the Beatles- to learn Transcendental Meditation. The Beatles had gone to study under the tutelage of the Maharisihi Mahesh Yogi. What followed was a great wave of popularity. I was recovering from a series of rapes by a senior officer, was trapped in an ugly and abusive relationship (those things tend to follow one another) and the promise of some mental peace was hugely attractive.
I took the course. Got trained. Forty-three years later I can still drop myself off into very deep meditation in a matter of seconds. The result is that I feel as though I’ve had eight hours of sleep. It’s one hell of a life skill.
It wasn’t a fix-all. However learning how to meditate has been one of those intensely important skills that the great masters have taught as fundamental to our quality of life.
Yet this study points out that most of us in our Western world cannot bear to be alone, much less alone with our own thoughts.
While I understand how so many of us seek to drown out our sadness, our angst with noise, entertainment and compulsive shopping (hey, it’s December), I can’t help but wonder at the cost.
Photo by Jonathan Bowers on Unsplash
Growing up on a farm in Florida, one of the gifts was that we were surrounded by woods. A lake bordered the property. Back in the 1960s as I was just growing up, we had no air conditioning. When we had summer storms, the night was filled with tree frogs and every croaking, singing thing. It was a symphony. Those of us who grew up with the sounds of Nature also tend to appreciate her silence, but also the song that lies within it.
Nature’s silence is like a great curtain of calm.
Nowhere have I felt this so powerfully than in Iceland.
Driving around the Ring Road, there were times that I pulled off the side of the highway, surrounded by high rolling hills. Every so often a sheep would approach, then run. No other cars passed me for hours on end. I would simply stand in the cool, sometimes the mist, and breathe in the vastness of the landscape.
Photo by Seth Macey on Unsplash
There is an intensity to such silence, a feeling of great portents and promise. That kind of quiet is woven with hope, with grace, and the possibility to reflect upon ourselves, our lives, and what there is to be experienced.
Silence speaks to us. Our brains actually grow more cells in the presence of silence (https://www.lifehack.org/377243/science-says-silence-much-more-important-our-brains-than-thought). We heal when we learn to listen to nothing, and release all our thoughts, worries, concerns and -let’s face it- largely meaningless human bullshit to the greater Forces that touch us.
Trip Advisor
Some years ago I was in South Africa, in the Hluhluwe–Imfolozi Park. The oldest preserve on the continent, you can take your rental car (at your own risk, thank you) through the park, and view all the animals up close and personal.
There’s a good-sized hill in the park, the only place it’s safe to get out of your car. On two occasions over the course of the years, I’ve driven to that lookout point to stand and view the animals, feel the wind and drink the African spices deeply into my lungs.
I have spoken to what I experience as the Universe, as God, whatever She or He may be. I’ve given myself up to those silences and the beauty of my surroundings. That kind of silence heals. You can release your petty, meaningless bullshit to vastly larger Forces, and be renewed, reinforced and revalued when humbled in the face of All of Creation.
When you and I can come to the realization of our meaninglessness, our nothingness, at that moment we can begin to do great work. It’s only in the letting go of our attachments to the ego-based desires that drive our basest selves that we can find true freedom. When I can release my grasping, my neediness ( I wanna be a thought leader!!! I wanna be famous!!!! I wanna be rich!!!! Nobody gives a shit, thank you), then the world opens up like a spring blossom in front of me.
If you’re short on examples, witness Nelson Mandela. For years in the silence of his cell in South Africa, this profoundly great man learned to be in his own space. Fill it with forgiveness, wisdom, and the fullness of his being. His ability to be with his own thoughts gave the world one of its greatest leaders and statesmen. You don’t earn that through comfort. You earn that through intensely difficult personal effort.(https://www.today.com/popculture/prison-was-mandela-s-greatest-teacher-wbna36087300) Silence is one of our greatest teachers.
In the face of silence, Nature’s great healer, we come to know our sacredness.
Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash
While vastly too many of us fear what we think, the truth is that in the heart of silence we can come to know that spark of Creation that exists in all of us. That animates us, gives us movement. Gives us wings, should we choose.
Rather than experience silence as terrifying, which our Western society uses to sell us stupid shit like all manner of devices which distract, damage, ruin our hearing and invade everyone else’s quiet space, the soft cushions of our inner world, the quality of our own thinking (or lack thereof) provide a training ground.
In his magnificent book The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, the great Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh writes that our emotions are like a great river. We can sit quietly on the bank and watch them flow by. Recognize each as they arise. “Ah,” we can say. “I am feeling anger.” “I am feeling sadness.” We can hold these mercurial feelings in our hands, and let them touch us deeply. We validate, feel, and honor our emotions, as valid aspects of our humanness. Then they can flow on. What we resist, persists. What we fear, we store inside us like a cancer. By allowing, those feelings, which we fear so deeply, can simply be, then pass, like so much morning fog.
For most of us, emotions are terrifying. Our sadness, our despair, our anger overwhelm us. It is far more common to want to medicate, deny or avoid our feelings completely, when to honor them allows us to recognize their sources. When we do that we can see if there is a place of suffering. Often in the study of the feeling we see the seeds of our release, whether it’s an attachment to a thing, a person, a way of being, or simply a feeling that flits through us the way a swallowtail butterfly delicately flutters through a garden.
ButterfliesatHome.com
The ability to allow the flow from our hearts is one of the secrets of peace. Everything we feel is valid. When we honor, experience and move through those feelings we learn to touch the outer boundaries of the self. This allows us to know ourselves, then push that boundary outward. Each time we allow our feelings, we build the strength to trust that they won’t overwhelm us. Our tendency is to want to control our feelings. That forces them to go underground and explode later in a spectacular display worthy of Yellowstone. And wholly unnecessary.
We fear being overwhelmed by our feelings. This is one of the drivers of the opioid epidemic, most certainly behind much of alcoholism and all the other addictions that serve as perfect distractions to the richness of our human experience. As long as we are in the throes of some kind of addiction, we don’t have to face the Self. And yet, sitting with the Self in the quiet of our hearts, we find little to fear. Little to be threatened by. Puff the Magic Dragon indeed.
Photo by Tarik Haiga on Unsplash
Peace- what so many say that they want- is available right here, right now, always and forever. It is borne of being able to be deeply inside the Self, leaning thoughtfully against the bedrock of the soul, that immutable and forever part of us that is expressed as the Kingdom Within. There is much to trust there, but when we don’t explore the quiet reaches of our hearts and souls, it’s easy to believe that darkness is full of monsters.
The quiet of our inner space is as vast as the Universe itself.
On a quiet, lonely beach in Eastern Madagascar, three hours by horse east of Brickaville (which is eight hours by car from the capital), I spent a week in silence. The early mornings were spent horse backriding from 5:30 to 9:30. Then, giving the horses over to the staff for a dip in the channel, I took up a spot against the brick building which was our baseops.
No electricity. No running water. Most everyone spoke French or Malagasy. Perfect.
Dawn on a Madagascar beach
From 10 am until I went to bed at sundown, I had the beach to myself. The only sounds were the breakers on the beach just over a grassy hill, the songs of birds as they constructed nests in the nearby palm trees. The quiet, gentle breathing of the two strays which I had adopted for the week. The onshore winds which made the heat bearable.
In an increasingly loud world where even the whales can’t communicate due to the noise (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/02/ships-noise-is-serious-problem-for-killer-whales-and-dolphins-report-finds), it’s hard for any of us- human, animal, insect, the like- to find our place in the industrialized world. There is no peace in man-made noise (and I don’t include music in this, although some types, let’s be clear, are bad enough to make anyone want to sail to the Hebrides forever). There is peace in Nature, in her sacred silences, and in the perfect music she creates. We are tearing more and more of that down, burning it and destroying it even as we increasingly, desperately need it.
Photo by Jared Rice on Unsplash
If silence scares you, that’s an invitation. In the perfect quiet of a deep forest — quiet for lack of someone’s playlist, their incessant chatter, the noise of cars and planes and ATVs — we have the opportunity to find peace. The truth of why we are here. What makes us human, and what makes us part of the larger movement of life on this planet. The more we isolate ourselves from Nature, the more we fear Her. And yet, in her embrace, lie more answers than questions.
No matter where you go, where you move, no matter where you travel, peace will always and forever elude you if you don’t go within. While finding a spot of nature is hugely helpful, the blessed peace and solace that so many of us so desperately want is forever abiding inside us. There is quiet. There is peace. The cathedral of the soul always has a seat for us, if we’re willing to sit down in the perfect quiet of the heart. | https://jhubbel.medium.com/i-cant-bear-to-be-alone-our-wholesale-fear-of-our-own-thoughts-103309e641f1 | ['Julia E Hubbel'] | 2018-12-07 13:03:49.963000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Self Improvement', 'Life Lessons', 'Wellness', 'Meditation'] |
The Future of DeFi Depends on Ethereum, But for How Long? | The Future of DeFi Depends on Ethereum, But for How Long? LetKnowNews Follow Jan 12 · 4 min read
As decentralized finance gains steam how much of it will depend on Ethereum? Well, it depends on how long Ethereum 2.0 takes to launch.
DeFi’s Dominance
The number two blockchain hosts the largest number of developers, and thus reports the most activity, according to data from August 2019. Of this activity, “smart contracts, infrastructure, and DeFi ecosystems continue to gain full-time developers.”
Indeed, some of the sharpest minds in blockchain technology are moving to Ethereum to build out the alternative world of finance. This is made clear by the fact that nearly all the dominant DeFi applications are built using Ethereum-based smart contracts.
DeFi Pulse, a site that reports data on the family of DeFi applications, reveals that nine of the top ten DeFi products are built on Ethereum. Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, a layer 2 solution to allow for speedy micro-payments, is the only non-Ethereum application included. It isn’t just the top ten that are thriving either.
At press time, DeFi Pulse indicated that a total of $701.7 million is currently locked up across DeFi applications. That is more than double the amount since January 2019, with some commentators calling 2019 “the year of DeFi.”
The term “locked up” in this context refers to the amount of money that has left the fiat world and is gaining interest, being loaned out, or traded in crypto open finance. MakerDAO, for example, DeFi’s most successful credit platform product, makes up just over half of all the funds locked up in the ecosystem.
This swarm of activity hasn’t been lost on big-time investors either.
Venture capitalist Andreessen Horowitz invested $25 million in November 2019 to back Compound, a money market protocol where users are promised high-interest rates to deposit their crypto. Many of these platforms dominate legacy banking interest rates that rarely push beyond the typical 1%.
LoanScan, an analytics aggregator that monitors open finance developments, reports interest rates as high as 8.31% in some cases. These rates will, of course, fluctuate according to an application’s supply and demand.
Still, many are convinced that the DeFi movement is crypto’s best chance of going mainstream. Unfortunately, this chance may be under threat. At least for Ethereum.
Ushering in a Scalable Ethereum
Compared to traditional finance, $700 million locked up in different crypto applications is small change.
Part of making this pie bigger has to do with simply introducing these products to a broad audience. Solving this marketing problem doesn’t solve the technical realities facing most blockchain technologies, however.
No matter the number of interested users each of the DeFi applications onboard, eventually the blockchain that is hosting these applications will come to a grinding halt. At the moment, this blockchain is Ethereum. And like almost every other blockchain, it suffers from scalability issues.
From this perspective, one can see how the promise of DeFi, a future that would allow the world’s unbanked to participate in complex financial products, currently hinges on Ethereum solving this issue. The current title for this solution has been called “Serenity,” or “Ethereum 2.”
It has been laid out as a three-phase process, with Phase 0, Beacon Chain, expected to launch in Q1 of this year. The Beacon Chain is a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain that would run in tandem with Ethereum’s current proof-of-work (PoW) model until the two merge into one system. This PoS model would set the table for many security, scalability, and so-called longevity upgrades further down the line too.
The merge from Ethereum to Ethereum 2 also poses problems for large user bases like those found in the DeFi ecosystem. In an interview with Mohamed Fouda, a partner at Token Daily, he told Crypto Briefing that “If DeFi apps cannot migrate easily to ETH2, there will be no activity on the new chain.”
Fouda added that many in the Ethereum space are aware of this challenge too. It is for this reason that Jim McDonald, a managing director of Weald Technology and Ethereum advocate, said that:
“This is undoubtedly the single most important task for Ethereum contributors to focus on in 2020. If 2020 ends without a stable release of phase 0 of Ethereum 2, it will be hard to look at Ethereum 2 as anything other than a failure.”
This failure could mean the end of DeFi as we know it.
The more likely conclusion, however, is that users will simply look to Ethereum competitors. As outlined above, many of the current products are perfectly operable assuming the blockchain has smart contract capabilities. This definition would include projects like Tron, Waves, EOS, and Stellar, to name a few.
While these platforms lack Ethereum’s network activity and brand, they do boast a much higher throughput. One can be sure that investors are watching this competition develop as the space moves through the year.
Jim McDonald highlighted this point in an interview with Crypto Briefing, saying:
“DeFi is heavy on the network effect and as such if Ethereum 2 launches late, with DeFi already moving to another network, that could be problematic for Ethereum 2’s continued use.”
The better question, in this case, is not what Ethereum can do for DeFi, but what DeFi, and the hopes of open finance, can do for Ethereum.
LetKnow.News on Facebook, Twitter and Telegram | https://medium.com/letknownews/the-future-of-defi-depends-on-ethereum-but-for-how-long-92da7cbf8999 | [] | 2020-01-12 16:05:37.920000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Crypto', 'Ethereum', 'Ethereum Blockchain'] |
Israel Respects Gay Rights; the Palestinians Do Not | By Aidan Segal, 2020–2021 CAMERA on Campus Fellow
The University of Pittsburgh’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) held a meeting in October on the topic of “pinkwashing” — the accusation that Israel exploits the LGBTQ+ community to propagandize a progressive image of the country, and to obscure the reality that Israel is allegedly an apartheid state.
Pinkwashing is one of many false narratives manufactured by anti-Israel organizations. Like any country, Israel is not perfect and not without prejudice; but it strives to be a beacon of freedom for all its inhabitants. In a region hardly brimming with liberal democracies, Israel “adamantly protects the rights of its gay citizens, and the LGBT community is represented in the highest echelons and in all facets of Israeli society.”
Israel celebrates the community not to appear progressive, but because it truly respects gay rights, and has an uncanny level of support for the LGBT+ community.
The founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, wrote that a Jewish state would be a positive force not only for Jews, but “for the good of humanity.” Nothing could be more true for the prosperous LGBTQ+ community in Israel, though anti-Zionist activists such as adherents to the BDS movement insist that an ulterior motive is at play.
The BDS movement claims that “Israel’s pinkwashing agenda seeks to portray itself as a fun-loving gay haven while using racist stereotypes to depict Palestinians as backward.”
In reality, there are no civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ people in the territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, which has prompted hundreds of gay Palestinians to flee to Israel for fear of persecution.
Click here to read the rest on the CAMERA on Campus blog | https://medium.com/camera-on-campus/israel-respects-gay-rights-the-palestinians-do-not-3821209383a1 | ['Camera On Campus'] | 2020-12-13 09:00:52.976000+00:00 | ['Zionism', 'LGBTQ', 'Gay', 'Israel', 'Palestine'] |
The Internet of Bodies Will Change Everything, for Better or Worse | Ross Compton was there when a fire ravaged his $400,000 home in Middletown, Ohio, in September 2016. Fortunately, Compton told investigators, he was able to stuff a few bags with several possessions — including the charger for an external heart pump he needed to survive — before shattering a window with his cane and escaping.
But as the smoke cleared, police began to suspect that Compton’s story was a fabrication.
His statements were inconsistent. The rubble smelled of gasoline. And it seemed implausible that someone fleeing a burning house — especially someone with a medical condition like Compton’s — could execute such a complex escape plan.
Eventually, investigators were able to indict Compton on felony charges of aggravated arson and insurance fraud. Their star witness? His pacemaker.
Police obtained a warrant to retrieve data on Compton’s heart activity before, during, and after the fire. After reviewing this information, a cardiologist concluded that it was “highly improbable” Compton would’ve been able to escape the flames so quickly, while lugging so many belongings.
Compton pleaded not guilty. His attorney argued that the pacemaker data should be thrown out; including it would violate doctor-patient privilege and Compton’s constitutional right to privacy, the lawyer said.
The case was strange, arguably sad, and fraught with difficult questions. Regardless of whether Compton really torched his house, should a life-saving device inside someone’s body be part of a case that might put them behind bars?
We may not know the answer for some time. Compton passed away in July at the age of 62, leaving his case — and whatever precedent it might have set — unresolved.
This may seem like a one-of-a-kind chain of events, an aberration. But as industries usher in a new era of devices that track personal information by leveraging the internet and the human body in equal measure, it won’t be the last.
When it comes to regulating the Internet of Bodies, it’s the Wild West.
This type of technology, appropriately dubbed the Internet of Bodies (IoB), has the potential to improve our lives in countless ways. But the risks are just as legion. A new RAND study explores the Internet of Bodies, identifying implications for policy that could help maximize the IoB’s upside while mitigating these risks.
“When it comes to regulating IoB, it’s the Wild West,” said Mary Lee, a mathematician at RAND and lead author of the study.
“There are many benefits to these technologies that some consider too great to be slowed down by policy. But we need to have a larger discussion about what those benefits will cost us — and how we might avoid some of the risk altogether.”
What Is the Internet of Bodies?
Internet-connected devices like smart thermostats, voice-activated assistants, and web-enabled refrigerators have become ubiquitous in American homes. These technologies are part of the Internet of Things (IoT), which has flourished in recent years as consumers and businesses flock to smart devices for convenience, efficiency, and, in many cases, fun.
Internet of Bodies technologies fall under the broader IoT umbrella. But as the name suggests, IoB devices introduce an even more intimate interplay between humans and gadgets. IoB devices monitor the human body, collect health metrics and other personal information, and transmit those data over the internet. Many devices, such as fitness trackers, are already in use.
Torrents of data on everything from diets to social interactions could help improve preventative health care, increase employee productivity, and encourage people to become active participants in their health.
Artificial pancreases could automate insulin dosing for diabetics. Brain-computer interfaces could allow amputees to control prosthetic limbs with their minds. And smart diapers could alert parents via Bluetooth app when their baby needs to be changed.
But despite its potential to revolutionize just about everything in ways that could be helpful, the Internet of Bodies could jeopardize our most intimate personal information.
“There are vast amounts of data being collected, and the regulations about that data are really murky,” Lee said. “There’s not a lot of clarity about who owns the data, how it’s being used, and even who it can be sold to.”
Lee and her colleagues examined the risks that IoB devices could pose across three areas: data privacy, cybersecurity, and ethics. The team also identified recommendations that could help policymakers balance the IoB’s many risks and rewards. | https://medium.com/rand-corporation/the-internet-of-bodies-will-change-everything-for-better-or-worse-44d9d0775656 | ['Rand Corporation'] | 2020-12-01 20:13:56.518000+00:00 | ['Healthcare Technology', 'Biotechnology', 'Emerging Technology', 'Internet Of Bodies', 'Biomedical Research'] |
On Books and Memories and Hope in On the Tips of Her Fingers | Writing a book
As a lifelong reader and writer, I would like to say that the story was always brewing inside me, waiting for an opportunity to release. It was knocking at the door that guards my innermost thoughts from the rest of me.
But that’s not true.
That’s not to say that I haven’t, throughout my life, given space for ideas to develop. That is not to say I didn’t dream of becoming an author, of spinning tales for readers who would become enraptured with my prose and character building. But it is to say that I never had my one golden idea, the one that felt good enough to build.
On the Tips of Her Fingers was that idea. And it came about rather serendipitously. But before I go into that, it’s important to share some background.
Growing up in Brooklyn
My life began in Stará Ľubovňa, Slovakia. It’s a picturesque town in northeast Slovakia, currently numbering around 16,000 citizens. It has a beautiful medieval castle — built at the turn of the 13th century — that overlooks the town from atop a hill. As a young girl, I visited the castle with my mother and aunts, surrounded by silver weapons and upholstered chairs and grand rugs. I lived with my maternal family: my grandparents, mother, and aunts and stole bread from the grocer down the block when I was 3. In my defense, I had no concept of money at that age and my debts were promptly re-paid.
When I was five, my mom and I moved to Brooklyn, New York. I didn’t speak any English, nor did she. She began working immediately, long hours to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. While she worked, I attended school and, in the afternoons, a bilingual daycare where I began to learn English. In the evenings, as my mom and I sat down to do homework, or read a story together, or do a puzzle, I would teach her the words I’d learned that day.
It was a quaint and comfortable life. But different, nonetheless. I felt like an outsider at times, constantly attempting to find the right words and, more often than not, supplementing broken English with fluent Slovak. As a child, it was lonely.
Photo of Bibiana Kerpcar, the author
Memories of Slovakia
With time, my broken English turned into fluent English and I forgot much about Slovakia itself. It was only when I visited for the first time, over a decade later, that I remembered the familial feelings of togetherness.
I experienced the bucolic beauty of Slovakia all over again: the way in which the trees around the Lower Tatras cast shadows over the forest floor during mushroom picking; the way in which the water moved around the wooden rafts at Pieniny; the bubbling of the mineral springs where we would gather water for my grandfather; the way in which the mountain-top snow crunched under my boots, and the way in which the woods came alive at night, wolf howls coming closer to the campfire.
It’s that imagery that inspired my novel. While I did not do much traditional growing up in Slovakia, I grew up with my family. And that was pretty close.
Impact of books
But my life in the United States was very different. Struggling with growing up and the unique challenges of being a young immigrant in a new world, I threw myself into books and novels and stories, using those as an outlet for escapism.
I used books to travel to far-off lands, riding river rafts in the Amazon with Eva Ibbotson’s Journey to the River Sea.
I used books to learn, new words floating into my brain like feathers dancing on the wind as I flipped through Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.
I found passions and interests — creative outlets — among dogeared pages of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline.
The more I read, the more I became confident in myself and my words. The more I read, the more my personality started to shine through. The more I read, the more I began to fit in. On my own terms, of course. At night, I curled up under the covers with a book between my hands, escaping elsewhere for hours at a time.
Writing a book, again
That brings me, once more, to the reason behind my book. Books were my creative outlet as a child. Books promised magic and infused that magic into my everyday. As a young adult, I found myself once again picking up ASOUE or Coraline and finding genuine comfort in the storytelling. It felt nostalgic and special and magical.
That is what I hope On the Tips of Her Fingers can be as well.
I hope that, in reading it, people will discover and regain a little bit of magic in their everyday. On its surface, it’s about escapism and the journey to grow up. At its core, it’s about self-identity and self-expression. It’s about hope and the courage to face difficult situations head-on. Yes, it will surely offer magic by way of special powers and abilities. But it will force us all to acknowledge that there is a power in perseverance and courage. | https://medium.com/@bibianakerpcar/on-books-and-memories-and-hope-in-on-the-tips-of-her-fingers-829565189145 | ['Bibiana Kerpcar'] | 2020-12-17 15:53:09.916000+00:00 | ['Publishing', 'Fiction', 'Writing', 'Authors', 'Novel'] |
The Great Purge | Andrei Vyshinsky Accusing the United Opposition
Soviet Politician Andrei Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky
Based on the statement created by Stalin upon Kirov’s death and what it can signify, in 1936 Soviet jurist and politician Andrei Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky has accused leaders of the United Opposition for wanting to eliminate the Stalin and other influential governmental bodies that are on his side. The United Opposition was a political group formed in 1926 which went against Stalin and his regime, the group has never approved of Stalin’s ruling within the Soviet Union because they always wanted more. These were the people that saw the unfair side of the communist-style which Stalin presented.
The sentence to death of Grigori Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev for being the chief defendants of opposition or so-called ‘Trotskyite Kamenevite Zinovievite Leftist Counter-Revolutionary Bloc’ was the start of the Great Purge in which over 1 million people from the Soviet Union followed to be murdered. In this trial, 14 other members of the ‘Trotskyite Kamenevite Zinovievite Leftist Counter-Revolutionary Bloc’ took part and have been deemed of the same sentence as the chief defendants. These two men were actually allies of Stalin in 1917.
Grigory Zinoviev
Grigory Yevseyevich Zinoviev also known as Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky was a Bolshevik revolutionary that has been fighting against Stalin’s regime in the Soviet Union since 1927. He has made great research at the University of Bern into Vladimir Lenin and Leninism. It has been said by contemporary historians that from his research in his academic years he has seen compliance towards socialism as well as communism brought by Lenin but he has never liked how Stalin was applying this style to the Soviet Union.
Soviet Politician Lev Kamenev
The second chief defendant was Lev Borisovich Kamenev, a very influential and prominent Soviet politician that was even a member of the first Politburo in 1917. A good friend of Vladimir Lenin and also known personally by Joseph Stalin which was also a member of the first Politburo. The political influence which he has acquired in time made Stalin scared of possible outcomes that the United Opposition could do to turn the Soviet population against Stalin. As you can see so far, everything is going smoothly for Stalin and if you still did not understand why these influential people were being killed is because Stalin was afraid of their power and the possibility of ending his ruling of the Soviet Union. | https://medium.com/history-of-yesterday/the-great-purge-73187d46bc1c | ['Andrei Tapalaga'] | 2020-09-08 13:08:01.993000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'WIB History', 'Purge', 'History', 'Russia'] |
The Best Prepper Tech for Non-Preppers | The Best Prepper Tech for Non-Preppers
Photo: Construction Photography/Avalon/Getty Images
I’m not a prepper. But 2020 has thrown a hell of a lot of upheaval and disaster our way and I’ve found myself increasingly focused on building my family’s resilience in the face of calamity, using gadgets, DIY tech — and some weird, oily meal bars.
I’m in good company. Wired reports that since Covid-19 struck, companies who previously served the gear needs of “fringe survivalist” (read: preppers) are now receiving so many orders that they can’t keep up with demand. Sales of basics like masks and hand sanitizer are up 319% and 79% respectively, and bespoke companies like Preppi are offering disaster kits that can cost $10,000. Disaster prep has become mainstream — maybe even trendy.
I’ve always had a fascination with extreme weather and natural disasters. While other kids were enjoying the folksy misadventures of the Hardy Boys, I was reading the SAS Survival Handbook cover to cover. I’ve had experience with real extreme weather, too. While driving through Northern California in 2014, I saw a giant, funnel-shaped cloud snaking down towards the ground just off the Interstate 5. “Wow, that looks exactly like a tornado! But we don’t get those in California…” I recall thinking, just as hailstones started raining down on my car. The cloud was a tornado that touched down just after I passed. I got a great blog post out of it.
Behold my DIY microgrid
More recently, my slice of the Bay Area has dealt with Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS). Realizing that they’re unable to supply electricity without also starting lots of fires, our utility, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), has begun killing our power preemptively when conditions are conducive to wildfires. Sometimes they leave it off for days.
After experiencing our first PSPS last year, I knew I needed a backup power source. Several companies provide systems that pair batteries with solar panels to keep your home running during an outage. Tesla’s Powerwall, for example, provides 13.5-kilowatt-hours of backup power — enough to run your fridge, lights, and basic appliances for days. But it also costs $7,000 and has to be hardwired into your home. I decided to build a DIY alternative — my own private microgrid (don’t try this at home unless you’re totally comfortable with electricity and know the risks).
To start, I bought solar panels from Renogy. The company specializes in supplying off-grid solar systems for RVs, boats, and remote cabins. Their panels are cheap — for $287, I got two 100-watt panels and a 50-watt panel, for a total capacity of 250 watts. I also got an Adventurer charge controller ($50), and a beefy 100 amp-hour car battery from Home Depot ($120).
The panels for my solar microgrid. Photos courtesy of the author
I started by placing the panels on a balcony on the front of my house, and running a 40-foot, 16-size American Wire Gauge (AWG) cable down to my garage. My homeowners association was not okay with that. So I moved the panels to a sunny part of my side yard instead. I connected them to my charge controller, and the controller to the car battery. Car batteries aren’t ideal for this, but it’s worked fine for me, since I’m only using power from the microgrid during outages.
I then bought a 500-watt Renogy power inverter ($120), which takes the 12-volt output of the battery and transforms it into the 120-volt power you use in your home. The whole system cost around $620. That’s about 9% of the cost of a Powerwall, for a system that’s almost exactly 9% of the Powerwall’s capacity.
Several companies provide systems that pair batteries with solar panels to keep your home running during an outage.
In full sun, the panels provide more than enough power to run my desktop PC. They’d keep a Chromebook humming for days. They’re also beefy enough to power small appliances, lights, a TV, or nonessential medical devices, like a nebulizer. I even hacked a car charger to pull power directly from the battery, allowing me to charge my phone from the panels and bypass the inverter.
After the sun goes down, the battery provides supplemental power. Unlike the fancy lithium ion batteries in Tesla’s Powerwall, a lead acid car battery only supplies about 50% of its rated capacity without suffering damage. Still, my battery’s 50 effective amp hours are enough to run a TV for 10 hours, a household lamp for 40 hours, and to keep essentials like a sump pump operating. During a PSPS, it’s a great comfort knowing I have backup power ready to go.
Pack your go bag
I’ve taken some other basic preparation steps around my home, too, like stocking up on canned goods, keeping bottled water in stock, and investing in a fireproof safe. But what if I need to evacuate instead of sheltering at home — as thousands of Californians have had to do during wildfires?
Organizations like Ready.gov have been telling Americans to create emergency kits and evacuation “go bags” for years. They recommend including essentials like food, water, a battery powered or hand crank radio, a first-aid kit, and a flashlight.
Living in an earthquake and wildfire zone, I know I should have made a go bag years ago. But it’s the kind of task — like writing your will or refactoring your codebase — that’s super easy to put off. So turning to the internet, I outsourced it. Companies like Preppi and Judy make beautiful, highly styled survival kits. Preppi’s fire-retardant Kevlar Prepster Advanced backpack looks like a prop from a David Bowie video, includes niceties like TCHO chocolate and “premium teas,” and costs $995.
If you’re looking for something more utilitarian, you can spend a lot less. After some research, I settled on the Earthquake Bag from Redfora. For $217, I got a bag which promised to keep my family of four warm, sheltered, protected, and fed for three days during a natural disaster. The bag includes first aid and hygiene kits, sleeping bags, a tent, a radio, a flashlight, hand warmers, glow sticks, and enough shelf-stable water and food to last three days.
Test taste your emergency food (or trust my review)
Five year shelf-stable SOS Food Rations bar
The shelf-stable food fascinated me. It comes in the form of dense, wrapped meal bars from a company called SOS Food Rations. According to their website, the company’s Coast Guard approved bars can survive for five years in temperatures ranging from -22 F to +149 F. They’re often used in life rafts and airplane emergency kits. Each tightly sealed pack of nine bars provides 3,600 calories (mostly from sugar and flour). They’re not exactly nutritious, but they’re enough to keep a person alive for three days.
In the interest of journalistic inquiry, I decided to try the bars. Being a good content creator, I did this in real time on YouTube.
SOS Food Ration’s bars taste simultaneously better than I expected in some ways, and much worse in others. The most off-putting thing about the bars is their oiliness. Their third ingredient is palm oil, which is semisolid at room temperature and melts around 95 F. That means that the bars have an oozing quality, especially when you touch them and briefly expose them to your 98 F skin temperature. For a product that’s meant to last five years, I expected them to be denser and more inert than that.
Members of the survivalist community apparently challenge each other to live on the bars for three full days, as a way to prove their prepper bona fides. One comment on a YouTube video of the challenge reads “thnx for ur sacrifice!” I won’t be participating in this challenge.
Prepare everything for a power outage
In addition to the Earthquake Bag, I also bought an LED lantern from Wsky, which costs about $16. You switch it on by pulling up the top, and it’s bright enough to light an entire room in your home. One of the best features is a strong magnetic base, which lets you stick the lantern to metal objects in your home. During our last PSPS, I stuck it to my refrigerator and used it to light our kitchen while I made breakfast in the early morning.
The Renogy E. Power battery pack
I also picked up a $39.99 E. Power 10,000 MAH solar charger from Renogy. It’s a compact, water resistant battery pack sheathed in dense plastic, with USB ports to charge your phone and other devices. The “solar” here is really just for show — the device does include a tiny solar panel, but it takes about 10 days in full sun to fully charge the battery. (I recharge mine via USB instead.) The $189.99 Phoenix mini power station — an upgraded model — provides enough juice to run a laptop, and includes a flexible 21-watt solar panel that provides much more charging capacity.
I found that browsing through disaster supplies felt like falling down a rabbit hole of imagined catastrophes and spiking fears, tempered by a laundry list of devices intended to placate those fears.
Money can’t always buy safety
Scrolling through Amazon, I found all manner of other survival gear, too — flares, pedal-powered laptop chargers, emergency beacons, and more. I briefly considered purchasing a $149 container of powdered eggs I saw on the site. I guess eating nothing but powdered eggs for several months would be preferable to death. But it feels like a toss-up.
I found that browsing through disaster supplies felt like falling down a rabbit hole of imagined catastrophes and spiking fears, tempered by a laundry list of devices intended to placate those fears — all of them for sale. After the third page of water-purifying UV pens, I started to wonder if any of this stuff was actually useful. Do these gadgets really make us safer? Or is buying them just a way to rope back some sense of agency and orderliness from a world that feels increasingly out of control?
Experts, like British researcher Michael Mills, have wondered the same thing about the prepper movement in general. At its best, prepping can show up as a positive tendency towards building self-reliance and increasing the resilience of communities — like gardening or beekeeping. At its darkest, the movement can manifest as a deep-seated, fear-driven anger towards governments, institutions, and societal change — the kind that drives practitioners to stockpile weapons and retreat to wooded compounds. Prepping, Mills and others believe, exists on a spectrum.
In our post-Covid-19 world, stocking up on extra canned goods — or even investing in a water filter or solar charger — is probably prudent. But you can likely skip the $25,000 underground bunker. Likewise, if you’re tempted by a $5,000 survival bag, consider getting a cheaper, more functional one instead, and donating the difference in price to an organization that helps actual people experiencing real disasters right now, like the American Red Cross.
Overall, if you feel like your disaster prep purchases are moving from the “healthy preparedness” end of the prepper spectrum towards reactive panic buying, take a step back. In what may be the biggest “no shit” declaration of 2020, the CDC says: “Pandemics can be stressful.” Even if you’re not the type for meditation or hot baths, there are probably better things to channel that stress into than purchases of powdered eggs.
As you embark on your own preparedness journey, determine the gadgets and supplies that you need to genuinely build your resilience. Buy those things (or if you consider building DIY solar systems a fun hobby, have at it). But be sure you know in advance where to stop. Sometimes the best way to build your resilience might be purchasing a kickass multitool or a kitted out emergency radio. But sometimes, it might be as simple as taking a walk or calling a friend. | https://debugger.medium.com/the-best-prepper-tech-for-non-preppers-ba3d41cc52f7 | ['Thomas Smith'] | 2020-11-09 06:32:38.171000+00:00 | ['Gadgets', 'Energy', 'Doomsday Prepping', 'Digital Life', 'Technology'] |
Mergers and Acquisitions- what does Change Management mean for them? | A couple of years ago, I worked with a small Biotech which was focused on one core offering and were on the way to being acquired by a large research-based Pharma. The Biotech got to continue the pathbreaking work it was already doing in its one core offering, albeit with deeper resources at their disposal.
I was curious to see if there would be any culture change now that it had been acquired by a larger company and had much more at their disposal.
Glassdoor and Indeed reviews for the small biotech were favourable. It was interesting to see how employees acknowledged that the culture had evolved and they were quite at ease in accepting it as one of the outcomes of the acquisition.
But the acquisition itself wasn’t an easy task. Trouble stemmed within the various factions of the large Pharma, ‘from differing assessments of the Biotechs’ innovative capacities to conflicting philosophies of risk within its own management team. Their investors were on the verge of backing out because they didn’t agree with its research strategy, and its philosophy of risk. But the management at the large Pharma insisted that they were learning how to make wise choices in drug development, and improving its chances to create innovative first-in-class therapeutic products for unmet medical needs. Their CEO is famous to have said “What’s on the balance sheet is not as important as a culture of innovation and being able to bring something to patients which then creates value for everyone. The market and shareholders don’t always understand this, but it’s the only way for our company”
This resolved all the internal strife that they were facing and got in renewed focus on research; which ultimately led to the acquisition by the large Pharma.
This kind of culture was what the large Pharma was buying into, or probably the other way around. From the very beginning there was the obvious difference in size to consider and what that meant for a research based unit.
Innovation is largely stifled by large units, and the small Biotech ran on innovation.
How do you let an acquired company retain its culture because that’s the bedrock of their performance? How do you ensure that the acquiring company doesn’t assert territorial rights and expect things to change magically with their new teams?
What happens when organizations go through change?
When organizations go through change, resistance is to be expected and managed. Change management creates pockets of acceptance, of dissent and of resignation to fate. While it is tedious legwork to stitch in the process and structure pre and post change, it helps to manage the people aspect as a project too, this means the job roles and the culture. Experience suggests that it is supportive to inform the top and middle management upfront and to use them as multipliers.
Managing change needs to be tailored to the specific situation. Business leaders put people, culture, change management and communication as the top reasons for integration failure. Fortunately the large Pharma had a sophisticated understanding of acquiring companies and it put this understanding to good use.
They understood that people across the rungs, even those who have been actively rooting for the change have questions:
What do I actually do to get started? What approaches and tools do I apply, and when? What matters most?
The new integrated entity needs deliver on the base business, align strategies, put a new organisation in place, and realise synergies.
Managers need independence to stay invested in the outcomes of the change process. Personal motivation is a huge factor here — People choose their behaviors based on what they think will happen to them as a result. If you need people and managers to stay the course, focus on creating new experiences and new motives — clarify what’s in it for them, this may not always be pleasant news, as some jobs will be redundant and others will need to be reshaped. But usually there is tremendous learning during the integration phase and that’s valuable too.
Your objective is that the employees are running the change, owning the actions, decisions, consequences and results.
While managing change, it is better to be judged on the Final score card at the end of the change period rather than on every stroke, and not second-guessed in a way that is inappropriate.
It becomes even more important during the integration phase to define accepted behaviours.
In the various pockets of acceptance, dissent and resignation, induce peer pressure to not deviate from the desired behaviour. Teach them to use that social support and social motivation in their own favour.
Find opinion leaders and Influencers who will be mouthpieces and implementation champions for the change process .
The small Biotech was mainly about better innovation, better drug accessibility and usage — and that was of immense value to a global giant like the Big Pharma. That was essentially what they wanted to preserve and possibly nurture. And from what I see, they succeeded.
Not all change management processes need to be about changing the culture, some could be to protect the better parts too.
Sometimes the more original a realisation, the more obvious it seems later.
This article was first posted on LinkedIn on July 03, 2019. | https://medium.com/@shivangiwalke/mergers-and-acquisitions-what-does-change-management-mean-for-them-70fceac8d161 | ['Shivangi Walke'] | 2020-12-16 08:48:24.847000+00:00 | ['Change Management', 'Mergers And Acquisitions', 'Vitalsmarts', 'Shivangi Walke', 'Influencers'] |
Trump brings out the worst qualities in people. | Trump brings out the worst qualities in people. Then these awful people are filled with grievances because no one wants them around. They whine that they were 'cheated’. It’s repugnant. The whole lot of them are rotten. | https://medium.com/@ambientartspace/trump-brings-out-the-worst-qualities-in-people-c20be47513bf | ['Todd Zen'] | 2020-12-15 04:56:02.628000+00:00 | ['Republican Party', 'Trump'] |
Google Photos Just Made the Case for Breaking Up Big Tech | Google Photos Just Made the Case for Breaking Up Big Tech
A new policy perfectly illustrates a core issue across the industry
Photo: Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
After five years of Google Photos offering unlimited, free storage of “high-quality” compressed images, Google announced on Wednesday that its policy is changing. Starting next June, any new photos you upload will count toward the 15 gigabytes of free storage offered to every Google account. (Your old photos won’t.) After that, you’ll have to pay a subscription fee for Google One, its cloud storage service.
In one sense, that’s a totally reasonable policy change for a product that has become wildly popular since the initial free-storage offer. Storage isn’t really free or unlimited, after all, and 15 gigabytes is still a lot of space. Some even argue that paying Google directly for services such as Google Photos represents a healthier business relationship long-term than paying with your data or attention.
But viewed from another lens, it’s a galling bait-and-switch and an object lesson in anticompetitive behavior by a Big Tech firm. The unlimited free storage offer was arguably Google Photos’ top selling point, one that few, if any, competing providers could match. The company was likely willing to lose money on its service in exchange for the photos’ value in training its A.I. systems and for the value of keeping users in its broader software ecosystem.
Now that Google has lured more than 1 billion users to the service, making it an integral part of their digital lives (not to mention a huge hassle to switch), that original selling point is gone.
As Platformer’s Casey Newton pointed out on Twitter, though, the real losers here are not Google Photos users. It’s still a great product in many ways. The losers are all the rival photo apps that Google Photos crushed on its way to the top, including startups such as Everpix, Loom, and Picturelife. (Newton reported on the struggles of photo storage startups for The Verge in 2015.)
What was once a hotly competitive and innovative space is now largely controlled by Google and a few other giants, such as Apple. And this points to another set of losers, albeit a nebulous one: everyone who might have benefited from the new ideas and fresh features that were never developed because startups didn’t stand a chance against Google.
It would be easy to reach for a sardonic “don’t be evil” reference here. But what Google is doing here, and why it matters, isn’t best understood in moral terms. At every step, it was just doing what successful companies do. It offered a great product for free because it could afford to, it crushed competitors largely by virtue of being the best option on the market, and now it’s raising prices because the free storage offer has served its purpose.
Instead, this move is best understood from the standpoint of competition and antitrust. It’s Google’s vast size and scope — the way its products in different markets complement and cross-subsidize each other — that gave it unmatchable advantages over smaller rivals. In retrospect, the free storage offer looks a lot like predatory pricing, whether that was Google’s intent or not. But the bigger picture is that Google, like other dominant platforms, has its hand in so many different, mutually reinforcing lines of business that it will always be incentivized to leverage them in anticompetitive ways. From a certain standpoint — the standpoint of maximizing profit and shareholder value — it would be foolish not to.
It’s that sprawling, multifarious nature of digital platforms that the U.S. House of Representatives antitrust subcommittee sought to address with its hefty report last month recommending a suite of new measures to rein in Big Tech. The Google Photos episode is just the latest example of why such measures are needed.
There’s a common misconception that calls to break up Big Tech are motivated by enmity or jealousy of success. No doubt such enmity and jealousy exist, but those aren’t why serious antitrust advocates believe we need to act. And the serious proposals on the table to “break up Big Tech” aren’t about vengefully smashing the companies to bits as I explained in August. They’re about restricting the largest platforms’ free rein to leverage their power across different business lines.
We need new antitrust laws for Big Tech not because big tech firms are evil but because they can’t help themselves. They’re playing on the playing field they’ve been given. And if it’s all downhill from their side, then the answer is not to blame and shame them but to fix the field. | https://onezero.medium.com/google-photos-just-made-the-case-for-breaking-up-big-tech-420dc6b5d375 | ['Will Oremus'] | 2020-11-11 23:44:34.062000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'Google Photos', 'Big Tech', 'Google', 'Antitrust'] |
Containerize a Dotvvm Web Application and a MySql Database with Docker Compose | Blazing Pizza
Introduction
Containerization has changed the way web developers deploy applications across many stacks, and no less so in the dotnet world.
Some benefits of containerization are listed below:
Applications run on identical environments both during development and in production.
Maximize resources by running multiple identical versions of applications.
Maximize resources by running different applications on the same server all isolated into their virtual (container) environment.
In this article, we take a look at dockerizing a web application built with DOTVVM, a modern MVVM web application development framework.
Prerequisites
We assume familiarity with the following concepts/technologies:
Docker/Docker Compose
YAML
Depending on your operating system, install Docker Desktop for Windows/Mac or Docker for Linux. Run the command docker -v in either Powershell or Terminal. Output in the form of Docker version 19.03.8, build afacb8b confirms that docker is ready for use.
Demo Project
Clone the Demo project from Github and open the root folder in Visual Studio Code. The “start” branch contains the starter blazing pizza DOTVVM client and server applications.
Docker Images
Docker images specify what a container contains and how it behaves. The relationship between a container image and containers is much like that between a class and objects; multiple objects can be created from one class definition.
In the same way, we create a single container image and spin up multiple instances of our container from it.
Adding a Dockerfile for each Project
There are two projects in the cloned solution; the API project or Server — a simple asp.net core 3.0 web API, and the SPA front end built with DOTVVM. We will create two dockerfiles, one for each. Follow the steps below to do this.
In the src folder, add a new file named server.dockerfile. This file created the docker image for the server project.
Add the yaml snippet below to the file
server.dockerfile
Next, add another file named app.dockerfile in the src folder. This dockerfile will be for the DOTVVM project, add the yaml snippet below
app.dockerfile
Making the Applications Accessible in the Docker Container
Because of how networking works in a docker container, we need to make a small modification to our projects so we can access them from the browser.
Open up the program.cs file in the BlazingPizza.App folder and modify the BuildWebHost method to look like below
Program.cs for app
Note that we have added a UserUrls and UseKestrel Registration. This prompts the application to listen for requests on that port.
Open up the Program.cs file in the BlazingPizza.Server project and modify the BuildWebHost method as shown below.
Program.cs for server
Adding a Docker Compose File
We now add a docker-compose file which bootstraps our services, and a database.
Add a file name docker-compose.yml file to the src folder and add the code snippet below to it.
docker-compose.yml
This docker-compose file defines our services and a MySQL database. We now need to connect our services together.
Connecting the Services
Currently, we need a connection string to the MySql Database in the Server project and an HTTP endpoint from app to the server. Since we are using docker-compose and these services are part of the same network and we can refer to them using the container name specified in docker-compose.yml
Open the Startup.cs file in BlazingPizza.App project and change the BaseAdress for the HttpClient from http://localhost:64590/ to http://server:64590/
Open the appsettings.json file in BlazingPizza.Server and modify it to look like below
appsettings.json
Note the connection strings property and how the server is the name of the MySQL container.
Testing/Running it all
Open up a terminal/Powershell session and navigate to the src folder. run the command docker-compose up -d
After downloads are completed and all containers are started, navigate to localhost:8080 and you should see the beautiful blazing pizza website. Order a pizza!
Conclusion
In this article, we have seen how to containerize a DOTVVM application, connect multiple services using docker networking and use a MySql database.
To learn more about DOTVVM head to https://www.dotvvm.com/ | https://medium.com/dotvvm/containerize-a-dotvvm-web-application-and-a-mysql-database-with-docker-compose-6c74c9780ee1 | ['Vincent Nwonah'] | 2020-05-20 13:28:31.588000+00:00 | ['Blazor', 'Csharp', 'Dotvvm', 'Aspnetcore', 'Mvvm'] |
WooCommerce Instagram Shopping Setup Tutorial | In today’s WordPress guide article, we’ll learn how to setup Instagram shopping using the WooCommerce WordPress plugin to its full potential.
You’re exploring whether Instagram and it’s one billion users can help grow your business, right? If you have a WooCommerce store, you have even more Insta-opportunity: Shopping on Instagram makes it simpler than ever to move people from your photos to checkout. Let’s leverage the power of Shopping on Instagram for your business!
Let’s say I like the pair of shoes in that picture and would like to buy them for my girlfriend. In that case, Instagram shoppable posts let me see a full product page. We can click through to purchase the item on the company’s website. The idea is to capitalize on the fact that people like to browse through and purchase items on social media. If you’re running an online store, the Instagram shoppable posts feature is not only free but possibly a great revenue source.
WooCommerce Instagram Shopping Requirements
As with many social networks, you’ll have to adhere to some rules. Shoppable posts are no different.
Firstly, to be eligible for the Shopping on an Instagram feature, you need an Instagram business account. This requires approval, and certain countries are currently excluded. Secondly, You must abide by the Instagram commerce policies and merchant agreement. Have a Facebook page + need an Instagram Business page. You can only sell physical goods on Instagram. Finally, make a Facebook catalog and link it to Instagram.
There are also plenty of other rules in the commerce policies and merchant agreement. For instance, I found out in a test run that Instagram doesn’t allow shoppable posts if your Instagram page doesn’t have much activity. Having said that, most businesses should have no problem configuring shoppable posts if you have a running store, Facebook page, and Instagram Business account.
Moreover, I’m assuming that your WooCommerce store is already working and with some physical items (you can’t sell digital items through Instagram shoppable posts). If you’d like assistance setting up WooCommerce, view our guide on it here. WooCommerce also has a setup wizard after you install it on WordPress.
Facebook Page & Catalog
Facebook is required to sell on Instagram, so you need to either generate a Facebook page or make sure your current one is ready to launch. Create a Facebook page.
Walkthrough the steps provided by Facebook. You have the option to completely skip your page setup, but we recommend filling in everything such as the profile picture, business description, and hours if you also run a physical store. Your Facebook store appears a lot less reputable when it’s not complete. Once the page is ready, go to the Facebook Catalog Manager page. Click on the Create Catalog button. We’ll assume your business is eCommerce, but feel free to select a different type of business if you’d like. Click the Next button.
The next page reveals an option to upload your product info manually. However, we’re more interested in linking a WooCommerce site. Click on the button that reads Connect E-Commerce Platform: Scroll down to click on the WooCommerce logo. Make sure you also have the right owner of the catalog. Click on the Finish Set-up button.
Linking WooCommerce Account
We need the Facebook Pixel Extension to upload into your WooCommerce account to enable Instagram shopping. This links the two accounts and makes product syncing possible. Click on the Download button to get your Facebook Pixel Extension. Select the Continue button when complete. Facebook provides a short tutorial on what to do next.
You’re just uploading a plugin, so go to Plugins > Add New in your WordPress dashboard. Then, upload and install the plugin you recently downloaded from Facebook.
Products Addition Process
Go back to the Catalog Manager you started at before in the Facebook interface. Click on the catalog you’d like to use. Add products manually by clicking on the button to the right. Alternatively, you could download and install the Facebook WooCommerce extension to add a larger collection of products.
Business Profile
Open the Instagram mobile app. If you don’t have an account, create one by completing the following steps: Click on the Sign-Up button. Type in your email address or use your Facebook account to register. Once on Instagram, go to Settings > Switch to Business Profile to set WooCommerce Instagram Shopping.
After that, you’re able to fill in business profile information like your address and phone number. Note: If you already have a personal Instagram account, feel free to convert that to a business account. It’s the same process as the third step above. Go to Settings > Switch to Business Account.
Linking Facebook and Instagram For Set Shopping
The Instagram Business profile needs to be attached to your Facebook catalog for WooCommerce shopping. How do we go about doing this? Since the Facebook Catalog has already been created, go to that catalog. Select the Settings tab.
Scroll down to locate the area that asks you to connect Instagram Business profiles. Click Manage Profiles. This is where a list of your connected Instagram accounts comes up. If your page is already on the list, try to link the two accounts. If not, log in to your Instagram Business page. In the event of the Instagram page not yet being a Business profile, you’ll see the following message. Make sure to walk through those steps.
If your account isn’t eligible for Instagram shoppable posts, you’ll see an error and the reason for the problem. For instance, this first account I tried to link doesn’t have enough activity on the page. If all goes well, Instagram should approve your request within the day. Then, you’ll receive a push notification that says “You have been approved to tag products.”
Tag Products For WooCommerce Instagram Shopping
Although Facebook and Instagram and WooCommerce are now all connected, you still need to let Instagram now that you want to tag products (or activate Instagram shoppable posts). After you get the approval push notification, click on it to go to your profile. Find the message on your page that looks like the screenshot below. Click on the Get Started button. This brings you to the Shopping section on Instagram. You can also navigate to this page yourself. Select the Products option and choose the catalog you would like to link. Click on the Done button once complete.
Tagging Products In Instagram Guide
Now the fun part! It’s time to tag your products in whatever images you plan on posting. Begin the process by creating a regular Instagram post like you normally would. If you’ve never done this before, click on the “+” button in the bottom middle of your screen.
Find the picture you like in your library or take a photo right in your Instagram app. Once you have the photo, click Next, then choose a filter if you’d like to add one. Click Next again. This page is where you decide on the Instagram shoppable posts. You can write a caption and tag some people, but right under that, you’ll see a new button listed as Tag Products. Click on that to reveal a list of items in your catalog. Choose the items that make the most sense for the image. Make sure the tags are in the right locations on the image. After finding the product, choose a place on the image to a tag. Click on that spot, then click on ‘Done’.
You can drag to move the tag or even tap it to completely remove it from the image. Once the photo is posted, it will have the wonderful Instagram shoppable posts feature we’ve learned to love. Tip: You may have noticed that some of your favorite brands have “Shop” tabs with all of their listings organized into one section. This only appears after you’ve listed at least nine Instagram shoppable posts.
WooCommerce Instagram Shopping Setup Final Words
The main part of this tutorial that gets a little tricky is making a Facebook Business account and linking that catalog to your Instagram account. You may find that it ends up connecting to your account and not your business account, or maybe you have no experience with the confusing Facebook Ads interface. Whatever happens, walk through these steps one-by-one and I’m sure you’ll eventually find just how easy it is to manage and share Instagram shoppable posts. | https://medium.com/visualmodo/woocommerce-instagram-shopping-setup-tutorial-7f307b5a5e14 | [] | 2019-12-16 02:25:31.006000+00:00 | ['Instagram', 'Guide', 'Shopping', 'Woocommerce', 'Social Media'] |
The First Signs of Alcoholic Liver Damage Are Not in the Liver | The First Signs of Alcoholic Liver Damage Are Not in the Liver
Myfather died of alcoholic liver cirrhosis four years ago. It came as a surprise to all of us, even though it was clear he had a severe drinking problem for decades. It was especially surprising to me, as a former nurse and a recovering alcoholic. You would think I’d know more about liver problems and alcohol use than the average person. But the truth is, in the months before his death, I had no idea my father’s liver was struggling at all. Most people know about cirrhosis, but few people know how a liver goes from early damage to end-stage liver cirrhosis.
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The combination of my father’s death and my personal background lit a fire in me to know more. He was admitted to the hospital on June 24, 2016, and he died on July 18. Only 24 days passed between the first sign there was a problem and his subsequent death.
Now, hearing that he was in end-stage cirrhosis didn’t surprise me, given his heavy drinking. What did surprise me was that he’d visited several doctors and specialists in the months before his death, and no one knew his liver was struggling either.
So what happened? Does end-stage liver cirrhosis really sneak up that fast? Were there other signs that would have alerted someone to his failing liver?
As for why the doctors and specialists didn’t know what was happening, that mystery resolved reasonably quickly. The plain truth is that alcoholics rarely divulge the amount and frequency of their drinking to their doctors. This was the case for my dad. He had many health issues that he was trying to solve, but he protected his drinking habit fiercely. So he refused to spill the beans, even when it mattered.
The problem is that liver damage has numerous multifaceted symptoms that are confusing and associated with many other illnesses. Unless a doctor knows that the patient is an alcoholic, they may not know how to interpret what’s happening until it’s too late.
As he was dying, my father told me that he didn’t think to tell the doctors how much he was drinking. He said it was as if he blanked out and “forgot” to mention it. As crazy as that sounds, this strange “forgetting” is a common part of the alcoholic mindset. It may also be due to the metabolic and physical changes of cirrhosis itself.
There are many signs of liver problems, but oddly, none seem to point to the liver at first. And in fact, many of the first signs of liver damage occur in other parts of the body. Knowing these signs may help educate alcoholics and their families if they want to understand their risk of developing liver cirrhosis.
Liver damage has numerous multifaceted symptoms that are confusing and associated with many other illnesses. Unless a doctor knows that the patient is an alcoholic, they may not know how to interpret what’s happening until it’s too late.
Digestive signs
The liver plays a huge part in our digestive process. It filters out all toxins from food as well as helping to break down fats and glucose.
When a liver starts to slow down due to significant damage, it will reduce its digestive work. Instead, it will divert its energy toward vital functions like metabolizing medications and filtering toxins.
This means that symptoms like bloating, nausea, vomiting, gas, and diarrhea will start to increase. Over time, eating becomes more challenging. In the later stages of liver cirrhosis, toxins that can’t be filtered out begin to build in the bloodstream, which causes more nausea.
Cognitive signs
Although confusion and brain fog happen in end-stage liver cirrhosis, they can also be early signs.
The liver is responsible for filtering dangerous substances in the blood. It also helps regulate hormones, blood glucose, and vitamin absorption. In the early stages of liver damage, these processes can be interrupted. Inevitably, this affects our brain and nervous system.
This means that early liver problems can make you feel tired, confused, slow, and foggy. You may have some memory issues as well.
Neuromuscular signs
The liver stores vitamins required for the functioning of many organs and systems in the body — one of them is vitamin B1 or thiamine. A deficiency in this particular vitamin has been documented in many alcoholics with or without liver damage.
Unfortunately, alcohol inhibits the absorption of thiamine in the intestine. Over time, as the liver becomes damaged, it can no longer store thiamine in enough quantities. Thiamine deficiency is responsible for many neurological issues in people with alcoholism.
Symptoms of thiamine deficiency range from mild to severe and include things like: confusion, mental fog, lack of balance, pain and numbness in hands and feet, muscle weakness, rapid heart rate, digestive problems, flushing, and involuntary eye movements.
Thiamine deficiency happens in almost every alcoholic who consumes frequent and large amounts of alcohol. And if thiamine deficiency due to alcoholism is discovered, you can be sure the liver is suffering damage at the same time.
Many of the first signs of liver damage occur in other parts of the body.
Vascular signs
All alcohol consumption can lead to blood vessel dilation, causing flushing in the face and hands. Over time, this can cause damage leading to permanent redness in the face. Although many alcoholics have rosacea or spider-like veins on their faces, this is often benign.
However, spider angiomas are different from rosacea or spiderlike veins. They’re circular and have a central point called a spider nevus that is darker than the rest of the lesion. Spider angiomas are a sign of liver disease and can be present in the early stages. They often progress to more extensive and more numerous lesions.
Spider angiomas are caused by increased estrogen levels in the blood. When the liver becomes damaged, it can’t properly metabolize estrogens, which causes them to build up in the body.
Many women who are pregnant or taking birth control pills may have a few spider angiomas. However, in alcoholic liver disease, these lesions are often more frequent and accompanied by red palms and varicose veins in the esophagus.
These are a few of the main signs of alcoholic liver damage that happen outside of the liver. It’s important to know this because most of us have no idea how the liver functions and how it communicates distress.
The liver itself doesn’t show signs like pain or swelling in the early stages of liver damage. This contrasts with other organs like the heart or stomach, where any damage will emit pain or symptoms directly from these organs.
What happens with liver damage is that its many diverse functions become interrupted, causing symptoms in other parts of the body. This may explain why most people never think they have a problem with their liver.
Unfortunately, patients with alcoholism are rarely educated about these issues. This is because they often don’t reveal their drinking, to begin with. And even if they do, the symptoms are widespread and complex, which makes patient education challenging.
My goal in writing articles like this is to help educate regular people about alcoholic liver disease to understand their health and make better decisions.
It’s hard to say if my father would have changed his drinking habits if he knew more about his vague and complicated symptoms. But I think having proper education would have certainly helped him understand his risks and health problems better. | https://medium.com/@katrinakaif64843/the-first-signs-of-alcoholic-liver-damage-are-not-in-the-liver-a3aa38576079 | [] | 2020-12-18 18:17:24.106000+00:00 | ['Addiction', 'Mental Health Body', 'Mental Health X', 'Alcohol', 'Health'] |
The Lighthouse | Built on the mount, plain yet regal to sight.
The house of light guards rough night waters,
eyes bright with anticipation, beams white,
sending word of homage to lost sailors.
Hard stone rounding the structure cementing
in place solid white brick walls of this safe house,
a solemn structure of truth rescuing
unfortunates lost in the crashing waves.
Inside the lantern room in the tower he stands,
a lighthouse tender directing and guiding the light,
gently illuminating the way to and from port.
Protecting from rocks, reefs, and treacherous shoals,
the lighthouse guides the ships home.
© Joanne Troppello | https://medium.com/warm-hearts/the-lighthouse-b8b5c29cff71 | ['Joanne Troppello'] | 2020-05-22 10:44:56.471000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Poems On Medium', 'Poetry On Medium', 'Lighthouse', 'Poem'] |
NoSQL Transactions with C# | Basics of Transactions using Couchbase to perform ACID transactions on JSON documents and C#.
Traditional RDBMS have had transactions for many years to ensure the accuracy, completeness and data integrity via ACID properties: Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability. With the influx of newer, NoSQL databases that focus on scalability, transactions took a sideshow. This is changing however, as transaction support is added to these distributed, multi-node systems. Recently, Couchbase, a low latency, high-performance distributed database has offered support for transactions in a NoSQL database. In this post I’ll over Couchbase Transactions for .NET, discuss when to use it over other built-in transaction like support features in Couchbase and go over the performance implications of using it!
Introducing Couchbase Transactions for .NET
While still in Beta at the time of writing, Couchbase Transactions for .NET is available as a standalone download from the server. The package is available on NuGet and uses the popular Couchbase .NET SDK as the driver for persisting data to Couchbase server.
We’ll start by creating a .NET Core Console Application in Visual Studio or VSCODE and then add a NuGet dependency to the Couchbase .NET Transaction package using the Package Manager:
Install-Package Couchbase.Transactions -Version 1.0.0-beta.1
This will install both Couchbase .NET SDK and Couchbase.Transactions. You may want to upgrade the SDK version as the GA uses CouchbaseNetClient 3.0.7 and the latest at the time of writing is 3.1.X. For this example, the SDK version shouldn’t matter as long as it’s 3.0.7 or greater.
Next add the following code to initialize the Couchbase .NET SDK:
Assuming you have a locally installed Couchbase server, this would be “localhost” and your username and password. Once you have done this and connected to Couchbase server, you will want to create a Transaction object.
Please note that only one Transaction object can be created per application as it creates background resources to allow the transaction and more than one may cause unexpected results.
The actual transaction is done within a lambda statement passed into the Transaction.RunAsync(..) method. Within this lambda you can write whatever code you wish to scope this particular transaction.
“ctx” is the AttemptContext object that is proxy to the equivalent SDK methods for CRUD. The difference is that it abstracts the transaction logic added to ensure ACID properties are preserved.
Here we fetch the two documents that will be included within the transaction. We’ll perform some writes to them and then these will be committed when Dispose is called within the using statement above.
Assuming all the above happens without another context mutating any of them, the transaction will complete. If not, all mutations will fail, and they will be “rolled back” to their original state. The example is fairly complex and you can download the code directly from GitHub to help you understand it. The important thing to understand the transaction creation and that the lambda statement is the scope of the transaction. What you write within it depends on your problem domain.
Performance Implications
If you were ever a student of economics you likely learned of the concept of TINSTAAFL; There is no such thing as a free lunch. In a nutshell, somebody always ends of paying for it; you can’t get something for nothing! The same concept applies to transactions. For everyone update to a document, there is at least 2 operations done on that bucket and 2 to complete the transaction. They are not optimized for high throughput, low latency scenarios but for when you need to ensure ACID properties across two or more document mutations. Use it wisely!
When to use Transactions vs Sub-Document vs CAS
Couchbase offers other types of atomicity that is much less expensive and is a fit for some scenarios. For example, CAS (Check and Swap) can be used for concurrent document mutations via optimistic locking. It works by using the CAS value for a document which changes every time it is mutated. By sending the CAS to the server the value can be checked to see if it has changed. If so, the server will reply with a CAS_MISMATCH error response which can trigger retries until the operation succeeds.
Sub-Document API allows for multiple operations to ran against a single document without the overhead of fetching the entire document over the network. Sub-Document operations are atomic on a single document.
More information on Couchbase.Transactions can be found here. | https://medium.com/@jeffryscottmorris/nosql-transactions-with-c-2ab7c7186705 | ['Jeffry Morris'] | 2020-12-04 18:27:24.133000+00:00 | ['Csharp', 'Database', 'Json', 'Transactions', 'NoSQL'] |
Putting a Human Face on Government | Putting a Human Face on Government
Storytelling about community-led partnerships is changing the way government works — and creating a new narrative.
By Eliana Reyes and Ellie Sandmeyer
The decline of the coal industry in Southeast Kentucky — where few other industries provide jobs — left thousands of laid-off miners facing a stark choice: file for bankruptcy, or leave their homes and communities behind to seek work elsewhere. But in Pikeville, a town of roughly 7,000 people, entrepreneurs Charles “Rusty” Justice and M. Lynn Parrish had a different idea: build a new business that would train former coal miners as computer coders.
The result was Bit Source, a company that recruits former miners and trains them to do web development, mobile application design and more. Coal miners have proven adept at coding. “I think one of the big misconceptions about coal miners is that we’re given up on as being intellectually inferior,” said one Bit Source hire. “When your life depends on the decisions you make, you don’t last long if you don’t make good decisions and have a real refined critical thinking process.”
Justice and Parrish are creating jobs locally while helping other businesses get connected to the Internet. But they didn’t do it alone — smart federal investment helped make their idea a reality.
In the wake of the financial crisis, the Obama Administration recognized the importance of locally grown efforts to drive development in hard-hit areas. The White House encouraged innovators in federal agencies to open new lines of communication with community leaders to better understand residents’ needs and support local efforts. At the same time, agencies sought feedback on their work — asking what was effective and what could be streamlined.
Seeing this flexible, collaborative approach bear fruit in communities across the country inspired the Ford Foundation to learn more. So they enlisted the team at Hattaway Communications to gather stories of “community-led partnerships” and elevate key lessons from successful efforts like Bit Source.
Interviews with more than 50 local leaders and federal innovators working in urban, suburban and rural areas produced a catalogue of stories that would inspire local residents and federal personnel to innovate and collaborate. The story-gathering process also led to the development of a storytelling framework the foundation could use to describe the players who make community-led partnerships work and principles that guide the practice.
Consistent and concrete language about what people are doing to improve their communities helps define the solutions people can use in their stories.
These tools are being used by leaders in philanthropy, in the administration and throughout dozens of agencies to show people how to work with government to make their hometowns great places to live, work and raise family.
Putting people in the picture shows how government works.
A Google search for the word “government” produces faceless symbols of power — imposing buildings and gavels, for example — that make it hard for people to understand what government does or how it works. Community-led partnerships are driven by people-to-people interactions among federal personnel, local leaders and community residents. Sharing the lessons of the community-based approach began with putting a human face on government — describing who makes the approach work and what they do.
The Players framework helps storytellers understand the different characters in a story — and what role they play.
Brain science shows that putting people in the picture, as protagonists in a story, helps audiences understand abstract or complex ideas such as “how government works.” Audiences better understand how systems work when they are explained in terms of people taking actions.
Storytelling tools help explain the role of each player who makes community-led partnerships work. Local leaders, for example, work together with federal partners to identify a community’s needs and assets, and to develop a plan for development. Another player, community organizations, can contribute the resources and manpower to carry out those plans. These descriptions help people see themselves in the narrative and imagine the role they could play in improving their own communities.
Strategic storytelling can change the narrative about government.
Tackling complex challenges, such as turning around a decaying downtown or retraining workers for the new economy, can take years. Along the way, community-led partnerships can produce different types of success stories that keep people engaged in the process — and even improve perceptions of government.
Some stories are about federal innovators testing out an innovative idea. Others show government personnel re-designing programs in response to local residents’ perspectives, or speeding up community revitalization by connecting local residents to crucial resources and expertise. All of these counter the prevailing, distant image of government, instead portraying it as innovative, flexible and responsive to people’s ideas and concerns.
By sharing the lessons of community-led partnerships, the Ford Foundation is helping federal innovators change how government works with communities. These success stories ensure that the Obama administration’s collaborative approach will outlast its time in office — and potentially drive a new narrative about government. | https://medium.com/aspirational/putting-a-human-face-on-government-a0ff581cfc25 | ['Eliana Reyes'] | 2017-09-05 16:08:49.427000+00:00 | ['Government', 'Coal Industry', 'Archive', 'Cognitive Science', 'Storytelling'] |
I remember the Alamo drafthouse | I remember the Alamo drafthouse
Photo by Matthew T Rader on Unsplash
I remember the Alamo drafthouse. I remember beers, in a theater, watching Marvel-cinema-shtick because it’s always the CGI and big budgets that beckon me (out-of-doors and into-other-doors) to the glory of public widescreen and surround-sound-sensualities. Sometimes I cry when a character dies in a predictable way; plot devices remain gutwrenching even when you can see them minutes away; like a slow-motion train with a damsel on the track (me, or perhaps you), I am bound and I am witness to the slow chug-a-chug-a. I know what the sound represents, and it’s always the score that leads you to feelings before the character’s eyes do, or the way Emilia Clarke can bend-her-eyebrows-like-Beckham, always telegraphing (as we hope) the way she feels, the way we should feel. I should feel that Game of Thrones was a valuable source of time: 9pm Sundays was a household event, I relish the daily reminders to be on time and to be quiet and if you are early you get half of the beanbag the size of a polar bear. Then, I never felt like the story would end. There would always be another season, another episode mid-summer, no ending and no exit and always a group of friends on a Sunday evening sitting in silence. These activities did end, did exit. Recall, evening prep: pining and plying and pleading to go to one bar and not the other, the one with the expensive handsoap and the DJ who exudes emotional-euphony: it is pleasing to my ear to hear you say you’ll be getting me a bottle of beer and I can stay put, I can be myself in my corner next to everyone else in their corners; another who says that I picked the right sweater for an evening like this, that I’ve picked the right club for a group like this, that I’ve picked the right group for a life like this. There are no hangovers among friends. In tandem, at large, we are laughing at ourselves, gripping pills in one hand and coffee beans in another, grinding and brewing and drip-drip-dripping ourselves back to pleasantries. Back to a full palette of color in the face, meeting mothers for brunch, mothers who want to hear about an ROI on tuition, but you cannot place an ROI on your friends, certainly the ones who candidly offer to get doubles at the bar because altruism exists and it exists in the space where you provide conscious, loving attention. | https://medium.com/@sykes-jordan/i-remember-the-alamo-drafthouse-6a1b43c0837c | ['Cactus Yordy'] | 2020-12-14 05:36:03.899000+00:00 | ['Drinking', 'Love', 'Youth', 'Friendship'] |
Attitude Is Everything | How do you currently see Life?
After you wake each morning and push through the grogginess and grumpiness, how do you honestly feel about Life? Don’t pay much attention to the people and situations influencing you, focus rather on how you feel inside. Don’t try to impress me or some other person with your answer. Ask yourself from your heart, from your soul, do you like your current perspective of life?
Your Perspective is important because the one you hold has a hold over you
It affects the way you see the world and how you carry yourself through each moment. It chooses the words you speak and the actions you take. And as the world sees you expressing yourself, they are, in some way, influenced by you — some may even end up following you. So, you have to be responsible for yourself because everything you do could change someone’s life for better or worse.
Remember, you alone see your Perspective, the world feels only your Attitude
You are responsible for your Perspective. You need to be able to take everything weighing down on you and still carry out yourself well. It doesn’t matter whether the day feels good or bad, you must never succumb to the people or situations influencing you the wrong way. You need to be your own and hold firm on the belief that nothing is stronger than your belief in yourself.
And everything out there exists only to serve you in some way
You may not know how at first, but you know that at some point in the future, its meaning will reveal itself to you. Don’t consider yourself a victim and succumb to the things facing you, see yourself as being the one who benefits and overcome the things facing you. Don’t sit idle, hold strong, and keep moving forward. This Attitude can change the world in some way every day.
Keep with you the words of Arthur Gordon:
Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid. In the past, whenever I had fallen short in almost any undertaking, it was seldom because I had tried and failed. It was because I had let fear of failure stop me from trying at all.
I would like for you to keep these with you:
Your Perspective Powers Your Attitude
Inky Johnson once said something quite interesting: perspective drives performance. And I am paraphrasing here but, the adversity that finds you is not as important as your perspective of it. You may not be able to control the adversity that will find you, but you choose how you see it and this will decide what you do with it.
Your Perspective will influence your Attitude
A destructive perspective can lead you towards a destructive attitude in the same way a constructive perspective can lead you towards a constructive attitude. The latter asks for more effort but do not let this discourage you because this brings with it a great deal of value. Embrace it. If you were to be consumed by anything, let it be this. You will not regret the value you find in the end.
“I am still determined to be cheerful and happy, in whatever situation I may be; for I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances.” — Martha Washington
A Comprehensive Understanding Leads To A Better A Perspective
Make room for Doubt and ask the questions you need to ask. Understanding is a journey and the questions you ask help you explore this journey. Look at the good and the bad, and try to draw value from them both. Be not afraid to explore, for the more ground you cover, the broader you will be able to think. And along the way, the understanding will reveal itself to you.
This helps you find and follow what makes sense to you
But be careful not to mislead yourself. The understanding you find is meant to help you choose a Perspective that will bring you value today, tomorrow, and each day after. Don’t choose one without considering the long-term value. But once you find the one that aligns with your soul, keep it. Let it be expressed through your Attitude and be the reason why the world remembers you.
“Carve your name on hearts, not tombstones. A legacy is etched into the minds of others and the stories they share about you.” ― Shannon Alder
This Is How Your Brave The World
It is no secret that the world can feel harsh at times. Things often do not work in your favor and they may compound into an enormous and powerful weight resting itself on your shoulders. I can say, if you leave this weight alone, it will grow and hold a great influence over you and the life you live. It will do its best to overwhelm you.
But whatever you do, do not succumb
Don’t be influenced by everything living outside your control. They may feel strong, they may feel impossible, but know that you are capable, know that you are stronger. Stay true to your belief in yourself. You may feel confused, but you will understand it better at some point in the future. Don’t let go of your hope and the terrors of the world will hold no power over you.
“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” ― E.E. Cummings
Photo by Ali Pazani on Unsplash
You are going to live your life each day and go through the time given to you. You may do it willingly or unwillingly, but this is an important decision you must make each day. I do say, choose the former because Life is far too interesting to live it unwillingly. Some days may be good and some days may be bad, but neither should be enough to sway your Perspective of life as a whole.
Your Perspective may be nourished by the outside world but it stems from within
Your Perspective belongs to you, it is for you to maintain and express through each thing that you do. Let it not be influenced but rather nourished by the people and situations living outside your control. Let everything serve you on your way. A well-rooted Perspective and indomitable Will leaves you with an empowering Attitude, one that can brave the world and change it at the same time.
“Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and, above all, confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained” — Marie Curie
Invest In Your Existence, Kind Reader. | https://medium.com/live-your-life-on-purpose/attitude-is-everything-5d46cc4046c5 | ['René Chunilall'] | 2020-12-25 17:03:12.792000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Life', 'Self Improvement', 'Self-awareness', 'Self Mastery'] |
Case study: The app that helps you maintain a balanced everyday life | Case study: The app that helps you maintain a balanced everyday life
Overview
MacroFit is a solo concept mobile app created during my first week as a General Assembly student. It was developed as a quick and rough exercise to explore the design process of creating a mobile application.
This project took a deep dive into my subject’s attitudes and behaviours surrounding fitness and nutrition. The case study below will take you through my design process in defining and developing a solution to the user’s problem for this concept.
Discovery
Understanding Max’s pain points
My main goal for this project was to understand Max’s lifestyle and relationship with nutrition so I could enhance his experience.
During my interviews with fitness enthusiast Max, I discovered the need for an app that would offer users the possibility to easily track their macronutrient intake throughout the day. Food packages contain the nutritional information you need to calculate your daily macros, but a more efficient way to keep track of your intake is by simply logging your food in an app.
Max and I during our interview
Some of the key points that I learned during our interviews are the following:
Max meal preps at the end of every day and follows a simple diet
and Enjoys finding new recipes
Has used other apps in the past but found them too elaborate and hard to use
Needs to quickly track his water consumption on a daily basis
on a daily basis He is not a big fan of phone notifications but wouldn’t mind to receive reminders throughout the day to drink water
By tracking his macros, he can make sure that he fuels his body with the right type of energy to perform, have energy throughout the day, build muscle and maintain hormonal balance. In other words, no matter what his goal is, he wants to be healthy therefore knows that it’s important to eat within the right macro ratio.
To further analyse the data from my interviews with Max, I created an experience map to show the common frustrations that arose. The area boxed in red shows the key pain points I discovered:
Defining a problem statement
This has then led me to the following problem statement:
Define
With a clear idea of Max’s pains, gains and motivations, I launched into an iterative design process to develop a meaningful solution. Below you can see some initial sketches of the low-fidelity prototype screens in development.
I wanted to keep it simple and focused: macro tracking with carb, protein and fat intake with the option to add meals, snacks and water. Research shows you’re 4x more likely to reach your health goals simply through daily tracking. This is an easy solution that best addressed Max’s frustrations.
Illustrating a scenario:
To better illustrate how this app would fit into Max’s life to solve his problem, I drafted this storyboard with an accompanying outcome statement:
Develop
Before making the prototype, I started by creating a user flow where I defined the main functionalities of the app — users can add a meal to their diary: they will search for their meal, view nutritional information and input the quantity. From here, they can add another item or click ‘Done’ and be redirected to the home page where they can see the updated progress bar with the new nutritional values. On the User profile page, users can access a summary of their progress.
A feature that exists within the app but hasn’t been captured in the below user flow is the option to record the water intake. | https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/macrofit-app-a-ux-case-study-581ef551e536 | ['Emilia Lungu'] | 2021-01-06 00:39:03.681000+00:00 | ['User Research', 'UX', 'Nutrition', 'User Experience', 'Case Study'] |
Modern wood protection | Modern wood protection
One of the most modern ways to protect wood is the so-called modification of wood, which changes the molecular structure of the wood mass. Enzymes, chemical reactions or heat treatment are used to protect wood in depth from pests, insects and dimensional instability without the use of harmful chemicals.
Modern wood protection
Modified wood against the exotic
The increased interest in modified wood is due to changes in the wood industry. Legal restrictions on environmentally harmful coatings have encouraged investment in more environmentally friendly measures against wood decay, and development has also been fuelled by environmental awareness among consumers.
Wood has again become an important building material in the last ten years, and modification will also make an important contribution to its more sustainable use in the coming years. It could reduce the import of exotic wood, which is used in the external environment mainly due to good resistance.
Domestic tree species suffer more from dimensional instability as they contract in a dry environment and spread in a humid one. Their decomposition is accelerated by insects, fungi, moisture and solar radiation. Modified wood without harmful emissions solves most of these problems,
Extremely resistant, but less flexible wood
Thermal modification is the treatment of wood with high temperatures, which affect the strength and resistance of wood. We know a bunch of different techniques, all of which have in common that dry wood is kept in a vacuum chamber at a temperature of 160 to 260 degrees Celsius for at least a few hours, and certain procedures use even higher pressures and different levels of humidity.
Heat-treated wood loses its density and loses a lot of flexural strength. Therefore, it is not suitable for load-bearing structures and requires slightly more careful processing. You could say that wood is more fragile in terms of sensitivity to breakage and chipping, so it is recommended to process it with saws with small and dense teeth, drill holes before driving nails and the like. These changes are not so obvious at lower modification temperatures, where also the resistance does not grow to the desired degree.
Less need for protective coatings
Wood resistance is due to increased dimensional stability. In both thermal and chemical modification, the result is more dimensionally stable wood, which reflects more water. It is less burdened by the rapid change of dry and humid environment or occasional humidification in the external environment. However, this property must be taken into account when gluing and applying coatings.
Modified wood is not UV-protected and turns gray in the sun, so it must be coated with a suitable stain or decorative layer to preserve the color. In both coatings and adhesives, it must be taken into account that wood is more difficult to absorb water. Applying glue or paint is different, the drying time is also longer. However, due to the dimensional stability, the coating is more durable and requires less frequent renewal.
Less prized wood becomes something special
By modifying the wood, we achieve an increase in the resistance of the wood for the whole class. Modified spruce wood is comparable in resistance to untreated Siberian larch, which means that a relatively simple procedure and accessible tree species can to some extent replace another, less widespread type of wood.
Due to mechanical limitations, it is not easy to replace and even with the development of modification, Siberian larch will retain its reputation, but more options for long-term use will get some of the types of wood that have been inappropriate and overlooked, especially if we expect the price of heat treated the woods eventually fell.
Current prices per cubic meter can also be twice as high as untreated wood, making larger projects quite rare. But thermally modified wood is also interesting for stylish carpenters.
If you liked this piece why not check out some of my other pieces here. | https://medium.com/@everythingcj/modern-wood-protection-heat-treatment-for-a-sustainable-future-f3699f7ccf56 | ['Everything Cj'] | 2021-02-07 15:02:23.791000+00:00 | ['Future', 'Future Of Work', 'Home', 'Woodworking', 'Wood'] |
What is VPN? how does it work?And What is it used for? | A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, allows you to create a secure connection to another network over the Internet.
VPNs can be used to access region-restricted websites, shield your browsing activity from prying eyes on public Wi-Fi, and more.
They originally were just a way to connect business networks together securely over the internet or allow you to access a business network from home.
In very simple terms, a VPN connects your PC, smartphone, or tablet to another computer (called a server) somewhere on the internet, and allows you to browse the internet using that computer’s internet connection. So if that server is in a different country, it will appear as if you are coming from that country, and you can potentially access things that you couldn’t normally.
So how does this help you? Good question! You can use a VPN to:
Bypass geographic restrictions on websites or streaming audio and video.
Watch streaming media like Netflix and Hulu.
Protect yourself from snooping on untrustworthy Wi-Fi hotspots, working at a coffee shop…
Gain at least some anonymity online by hiding your true location.
Protect yourself from being logged while torrenting.
via howtogeek | https://medium.com/@tu7a1k23/what-is-vpn-how-does-it-work-and-what-is-it-used-for-2f2fd7ed88bf | ['Diep Thanh Tu'] | 2019-02-25 08:00:45.751000+00:00 | ['How Does It Work', 'VPN', 'What Is It Used For'] |
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