title
stringlengths 1
200
⌀ | text
stringlengths 10
100k
| url
stringlengths 32
829
| authors
stringlengths 2
392
| timestamp
stringlengths 19
32
| tags
stringlengths 6
263
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
The Internet, as Tim intended | By Paul Edgington, Director of Marketing, Associate.com
Illustration by @anamericanghost
The blazing bridge of pandemonium twenty-twenty has not been crossed yet, but besides all the doom and gloom, many agree this year has also been lined with blessings.
It was Gary Vaynerchuk who said it best when he posted a well-timed Instagram story which read:-
This gave me all the right feels, because as usual Gary was preaching truths! And while global chaos ensued, I must admit that my personal pandemic experience was one of many humble awakenings.
Throughout the first lockdown in Switzerland, I embraced detachment and distanced myself, not only from others but from many things that I hitherto believed I could not live without.
Remarkably, the more I let go of the old, the more I found the new — or maybe, what I was really connecting with, was the real.
Vulnerability can be a useful tool.
Our neighbors joyously serenaded the village with live music every evening at 21:00. It became a ritual for everyone who would hang their heads out of their windows to sing and clap along.
Then came the nostalgia.
I found myself reminiscing about simpler times, and it was quite perplexing — the reality of being confined yet starting to feel freer than ever before.
One notable moment happened on an evening in May, as I was randomly scrolling through some old YouTube videos. In particular, I stumbled across this documentary about Napster, the P2P file sharing platform founded in 1999.
For context, I am a thoroughbred geek — a product of living a prime analogue childhood which then spring-boarded me into the cusp of my teenage years, right when the world started to plug their computers into the phone lines.
My first home computer was bought by my Father in 1995, running the Windows OS of the same year. The exterior casings were unbranded. It was beige and boxy, with cables everywhere.
I recall with crystal clarity the first time I dialed-up, heard those screeching tones and connected to the web. I was 17-years old and I was utterly fascinated.
The combination of PC and internet represented a monolith of influence on my young life and thereafter followed many passionate years of immersion, learning about hardware, software, internet protocol and everything in between.
By the time I finished my college studies, the internet had progressed from a novel idea to a cultural revolution. So, I decided that an eventual career in the Royal Navy was no longer a destination for me, and I got my first serious job working for a national ISP as an IT Technician.
That was almost 20-years ago.
Ironic that one of this year’s gifts afforded me valuable space to reflect on the double-decade that passed since then, and while watching that video about Napster, I was transported to a place that I had not thought about in many years.
For most of us, our relationship with the world wide web today is ubiquitous. We barely draw a line between our online or offline lives and why would we when we can do almost everything in real-time, within a few clicks or swipes?
But, have we already reached online utopia? And, are the many hours a day we are all connected, being used as Tim Berners-Lee intended?
This subject has become a stone in my shoe. My family will tell you its also been the theme of many daily discussions with them, much to their fatigue. Alas, the jury is still out.
Talk with anyone who has done or wants to do a digital detox and listen to their reasons. It’s a complex dilemma.
Putting aside all the staggering capabilities, our primary habits whenever we go online are mostly driven by our needs of convenience, entertainment, and gratification.
There is an elephant in the room, and it is asking us if this is the best we can do with the wealth of knowledge and considerable computational means at our fingertips?
Adversely — I may be generalising here a tad — it seems the more innovative advances we make, the more time we tend to waste in the chasms of consumption.
Think about your own daily screen time. It’s like a kind of shame-metric, especially because most of us would be shy to admit how many hours a day we are looking at a screen of some shape or size.
And, without wanting to sound preachy, how much of that time is spent doing anything worthwhile?
The online productivity myth, I believe, is another pandemic entirely. However, perhaps we as individuals are not to blame?
Today’s dominant internet companies design products that keep us all hooked to what I like to call their lust algorithm. They cleverly bind our endorphin factories to their ego-boosting, confidence-sapping engines, and the ROI for our time spent is mostly little to none, and it’s devilishly temporary.
My own screen time averages out at currently 6-hours a day, by the way.
So, what can we do?
The first step towards resolution is identifying and admitting that there is a problem.
The Napster story anchors itself around freedom and person-to-person connection via the innovative capabilities made possible by the internet.
Rapid uptake of the file-sharing platform proved an interesting use-case for the internet at its domestic dawn, and in the process, it changed the music industry, forever.
Decentralised, utilitarian applications like Napster are perhaps what the world needs today, more than ever.
Not only in the way they can catalyse disruption, but in how they generate person-to-person freedoms and empowerment, creating entirely new ecosystems and alternative economies that sit above traditional systems.
These are the principle foundations that make companies like Uber and AirBnb so important and so successful.
I have heard, read and been a part of countless stories about the impact that the events of this year have had on friends, families, businesses, and entire industries across the world. Thankfully, many are adapting and finding ways to not only survive but even thrive.
Ian Moore, Founder at DEMI, for example, recently shared this wonderful testimonial. Ian, thank you for your tenacity and great energy.
These experiences altogether did not only make me think or talk about what the next generation of internet applications could be, I decided that I wanted to help build them.
Hence, at the start of November 2020, after a wonderful 12-year tenure at Philip Morris International, I joined the leadership team at Associate.com
We are at an early stage, bravely putting the plane together while flying it on our mission to reinvent global incorporation so that it is adapted to the internet.
I am incredibly grateful, and I cannot wait to create a new world of decentralised possibilities, online.
To be continued…
Paul | https://medium.com/@associatecom/the-internet-as-tim-intended-b5d35067ae7f | [] | 2020-12-21 13:58:14.472000+00:00 | ['Internet', 'Self-awareness', 'Decentralization', 'Hacking', 'P2p'] |
Ex–Interns of Accurat. Chatting with interns–turned full–time… | From left to right: Ivan Rossi, Ilaria Venturini, Stefano Gallo. Photos: Giovanni Marchi, Pietro Guinea–Montalvo.
Ex–Interns of Accurat
Many Accurat interns graduate to full–time status. In a new series, we interview colleagues who began working at Accurat as students. First up are developers Stefano Gallo (who joined May 2018), Ilaria Venturini (September, 2018) and Ivan Rossi (February, 2019). All came to Accurat from the University of Milan.
Interested in becoming an Accurat intern? We’re currently hiring developers. Visit our website to learn more and apply.
What does a full–stack developer do at Accurat?
Ilaria Venturini: We develop data visualizations and web apps with a focus on usability and aesthetics. The exchange of ideas with designers is continuous — we make decisions together to come up with the best solutions for customers.
Stefano Gallo: For projects with unusual components and/or time constraints, we have to strike the right balance between functionality and sleekness. During development, we’re in constant communication with designers.
Ivan Rossi: Accurat’s projects are mainly front–end dataviz. A full-stack developer spends most of his or her time creating crazy visualizations and interactive animations.
The Accurat office in Milan. Photo: Giovanni Marchi.
What do you think makes Accurat’s internship program unique?
SG: The unconventional working environment. At first, I couldn’t even tell who’s boss was whose.
IV: From the beginning, I had the opportunity to work on real projects and had actual responsibilities. I got to work with designers as well as developers and gained a huge amount of knowledge. I always felt that my opinions and ideas were being heard and that I could make a difference.
What’s the most valuable thing you learned as an intern, and how did you learn it?
IR: To work in a team. I had never worked with other people in a professional setting, and Accurat projects are mostly short–term, so changing teams happens often. This helped me get to know most of my colleagues quickly and adapt to the different ways groups functioned.
SG: Not a technical skill, but a different approach to development. I’ve learned how to problem–solve by breaking a situation down and solving little pieces individually, without losing sight of the broader end–goal.
IV: Probably thinking before writing code. Considering the pros and cons of possible paths, choosing the right data structure, making plans, assigning priorities — simplifying a problem before beginning to code. Initially, I was mistaken in thinking that the sooner you start to develop, the better. I eventually realized — with the help of more experienced colleagues — that it saves time and effort to plan first.
What was the most memorable project you worked on as an intern, and why?
IV: It’s a tie between a dashboard for Armani e–commerce sales and an application to showcase the sustainability initiatives of Saipem, which is one of the largest oilfield services in the world. Both projects involved the development of interactive data visualizations with 100% custom visual models.
SG: The website redesign for Infratel’s BUL plan [an infrastructure project to improve Wifi connectivity in Italy]. It was challenging, because the client was in the public sector and relied on Wordpress and PHP—legacy languages that pose some barriers. It was an all–hands effort, but we did it in six weeks!
IR: I worked on the development of a backdrop display at the Lavazza Legend 19 event in Turin. As speakers talked, their words were interpreted by IBM’s Watson with sentient analysis. We designed a unique dataviz language to visualize the emotions behind what they were saying.
Lavazza’s Legend 19 dataviz display.
Why did you decide to work at Accurat full–time?
IV: I discovered data visualization at university and fell in love with it because it combines design and programming. And there’s no better company than Accurat to grow in the field.
Second, the work environment is friendly and supportive. People come from diverse backgrounds, but everyone shares a common passion. The atmosphere is cooperative.
SG: Because of the specialization in data visualization and the graphic elements. There are projects where we get to experiment with new technology, even at the design level.
IR: When I started at Accurat, I didn’t have any other work experience. I had the chance to learn on–the–job, with many different types of technologies.
What sort of advice would you give to someone starting their first day at Accurat as an intern?
IV: Be curious to learn and grow professionally.
SG: Ask as many questions as you can. And enjoy it — share your personal interests and what you’re working on.
IR: Don’t be afraid to ask questions. There’s always somebody ready to help! | https://medium.com/accurat-in-sight/an-interview-with-ex-interns-315ddd43ca66 | [] | 2021-04-30 16:40:48.010000+00:00 | ['Internships', 'Front End Development', 'Data Visualization', 'Dataviz', 'Data Science'] |
Tips are no longer tips when ordering from DoorDash, GrubHub, UberEats, et al | Tips are no longer tips when ordering from DoorDash, GrubHub, UberEats, et al
If we lived in a perfect world, you’d order food, it would be delivered to you, the driver would turn a profit (delivery pay minus the cost of the vehicle, insurance, tires, oil changes, maintenance, etc), and you could tip after if your service was awesome, or not tip if it was terrible.
Sadly, we don’t live in a perfect world and when these apps ask you if you’d like to tip the driver, it’s no longer about tipping for great service, but instead, it’s a payment for services to be rendered.
What do I mean? Well, take DoorDash (DD) for example — they pay a base rate of $3, almost no matter what, in most markets. I’ve seen orders paying $3 for 17 miles one way (drivers have to drive back to their market too).
After every driver in the market rejects that order, DD may bump it up to $3.25, then to 3.50, so on and so forth. All the while, your food may have already been prepared and is sitting there, waiting for a driver to pick it up. As a result of not tipping in advance, you may be waiting a long time for your order to be picked up and delivered, if it ever gets delivered at all.
Sometimes DoorDash has promotional pay (usually +$1), but ~90% of all orders pay the driver a base rate of $3, and if you don’t tip yet live 15 miles from the restaurant, DoorDash will pay the driver — in most cases — three dollars for that 30-mile round trip, plus whatever your tip was.
Some new drivers take them all out of ignorance, not knowing that it costs between $0.32 and $0.63 cents per mile, depending on the vehicle (the high-end includes vehicle depreciation, the low-end assumes the driver buys cash clunkers). Some drivers take them to maintain — or achieve — a “Top Dasher” standing, which confers very little benefit. Other drivers gamble the value of their vehicle, hoping that a cash tip awaits them at the drop-off. Whatever a Dasher’s reason for taking a $3 order, they all share one thing in common: the driver loses money when there is no cash tip. They rely on other people’s “tips” to make up the difference and hope they earn more tips than they expended with wear-and-tear, etc.
Because of this, if you want to ensure that your delivery is timely, and your local driver is earning a fair rate for his time, expense, and his/her own cost of living, you should certainly add a fair amount based on distance — not volume or total cost — as a payment to your driver.
I bring up distance and not volume or price because whether a driver is picking up from a restaurant that sells $40 large pizzas, or Little Caesar’s which sells $6 pizzas, the effort and cost to the driver is the same. Granted, massive orders are a different story — if the order gets up over $100, it’s probably a safe bet that the driver will require more time to check the order for accuracy, and more thermal bags to maintain freshness.
GrubHub & UberEats pay a much fairer rate based on time & mileage, though still not enough to be profitable by themselves ( meaning with no added tip), so the needed “tip” is less on those platforms than on DoorDash to make orders profitable.
There are probably a lot of customers that tip in cash but imagine running a business where every time you serve a customer, you aren’t sure if you’ll make a profit or a total loss and you roll the dice with each and every order.
Gambling is only profitable for the casino. DoorDash, GrubHub, and UberEats are the casino.
Please also keep in mind that drivers are not employees, have no benefits, and pay business taxes as a business. As a result, a driver has two options when confronted with a $3 order that had no included tip: they can reject the order and make the customer wait longer for a driver, or they can take it and lose money. There is no real mechanism for negotiation with these delivery apps, so the driver’s ability to negotiate is limited.
Below are some examples of typical orders, even with small tips:
Thank you for taking the time to read all of this and I hope that with this new information, we can all help each other out during these rough times. If you cannot afford to add a tip based on your distance, then it’s probably a good idea for you to incur the cost of driving to the restaurant yourself instead of asking a local driver to do it! | https://medium.com/@op-edaily/tips-are-no-longer-tips-when-ordering-from-doordash-grubhub-ubereats-et-al-fd1b3873ff16 | ['Op-Ed Daily'] | 2020-12-31 12:31:34.645000+00:00 | ['Wages', 'Food', 'DoorDash', 'Delivery', 'Capitalism'] |
If You Have Mid-Life Burnout, Do These 4 Things — Quickly | You’re tired upon tired: short on energy, low on motivation.
There’s always so much to do: work, relationship, family, chores, life admin — you’re on the hamster wheel and it never ends. Even a weekend away doesn’t refresh you.
Mid-life is a common time for the cracks to appear. That’s when people are often sandwiched between raising kids, caring for elderly parents and trying to rise up the ranks at work.
It’s also when we come face to face with the life choices we’ve made — and the consequences — and we begin to see life as finite. Time is running out.
What’s Mid-Life Burnout?
Burnout is the term commonly used to describe chronic work stress but it can be applied to life, generally.
Burnout can be hard to spot because it starts slowly and presents in the same way as symptoms of mild-to-moderate depression that, if left unchecked, can morph into serious clinical problems.
So it’s important to keep an eye on yourself as the years stack up. Here are the key signs of burnout as they apply to mid-life.
1. Physical and mental exhaustion.
Many mid-lifers are hitting the peak of their professional careers at the same time as they are raising kids and looking after aging parents. The relentless demands and worries coming from all angles — along with the sameness of their days and little time for fun — gets to people. They’ll often report erratic sleep, problems with concentration and decision making, feeling flat, more anxious and “lost”. Physically, there may be stomach problems, headaches and unexplained aches and pains. People often explain these away as “getting older” but it’s often the fallout of all the stress they’re under.
2. Feeling cynical about work and relationships.
Burnout, like depression, negatively colours our view of ourselves, our people and our future. And that can lead us to see the worst in our partners, family, close friends and the people we work with. And once we get into the habit of seeing the downside, it’s hard to see anything else.
People often report less tolerance/more conflict with their partners — especially over chores, money and sex — and feel bleak about the future of their relationship. On the work front, people may feel professionally stuck which fuels feelings of discontent.
3. Feeling like you’re not doing anything well.
Mid-lifers will often say they feel they’re they’re failing on all fronts. Everything is “once over lightly”. Or they’ll manage to do one thing well (like work) but be hyper-irritable and short on energy with partners and kids, which upsets them and causes guilt. A feeling of futility creeps in when they realise they don’t have the time or headspace to think about what they’re doing all this for and what their next step might be.
What To Do: 4 Strategies That Will Help
1. Pay attention — and take a break.
Seriously. Burnout is no joke. It’s the clearest sign you are desperate for a mental and physical rest. Take a break immediately if you can and put some boundaries around all the demands on your time. Only your family will care if your health is compromised — everyone else will just look around for someone to take your place.
2. Do the hard math on your schedule.
Pause! Even when people are run ragged they’ll often keep saying yes; they’ll do that little bit of overtime for the boss, they’ll help out a friend in need, they’ll let their kids add another activity to their schedules. Maybe they’re kind by nature or like to please or are super-responsible — or it’s just habit. Be careful about continuing to operate on automatic pilot — it’ll come back to bite you.
Take an inventory of your schedule, then ruthlessly clear out everything that’s unnecessary. Then make it a rule that if you can’t add something to your schedule without dropping something else — and stick to it.
3. Carve out some regular “me” time.
This can be particularly challenging for people who don’t have any free time. But if you don’t do anything for yourself, you’ll be resentful (as well as burnt out). You don’t have to have a lot of “me” time to feel better, just a couple of regular slots you can count on AND enjoy. And some of it should be alone so you have time to think about your future or next step.
4. Find a way to get excited.
When you’re struggling with burnout, all forms of positive emotion (except cynical laughter) seem to go walkabout on you. Don’t try to force yourself to feel happy — it won’t work. Just find one little (lawful) thing that gets you a little excited and go do it. It may be something you haven’t done for a while, or it may be a swerve in a new direction. But once you feel that buzz again, you’ll be up for creating ways to have more of it.
As entrepreneur Tim Ferris says: “Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all.” | https://medium.com/on-the-couch/if-you-have-mid-life-burnout-do-these-4-things-quickly-c6971c787fe4 | ['Karen Nimmo'] | 2020-12-01 18:56:35.447000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Life Lessons', 'Mental Health', 'Productivity', 'Psychology'] |
How TurboHire Helped WakeFit Hire 235 Candidates In 45 Days | Bengaluru based home solutions startup WakeFit is a research and development-driven Home solutions brand, set up in March 2016. It was established with a dream to democratize sleep in India. It intends to make front line sleep products at its manufacturing plant in Bengaluru at a reasonable cost by upgrading costs through a direct-to-consumer (D2C) model.
WakeFit was hiring for the roles of customer service, support, and sales when they approached TurboHire. Here is how TurboHire helped WakeFit in easing the process of recruitment.
The WakeFit X TurboHire Success Story
The Trial period offered by TurboHire enabled Wakefit to gather all the information on how well our product has been designed to meet all their recruitment needs. They were able to take an ample amount of time to discover all the features of TurboHire and understand their value. TurboHire helped in the creation of an optimized workflow for various job requirements resulting in an interview to shortlist ratio improvement by 2.5X. A company having 3000 to 5000 employees received around 150,000 candidate profiles in a year. Out of which only 20% were probably opened. It is not humanly feasible to go through all the candidate profiles on each new job role and also required a huge amount of time and money. TurboHire’s Candidate Discovery Platform not just helped in reducing the time to hire but also significantly reduces the cost of hiring for organizations. It further helped build an organizational brand by reaching to candidates who have applied in the past for their jobs. AI-powered Referral and Careers Page pulled great candidates while ensuring the best matching of open-jobs to candidates. The Careers Page in TurboHire engages your brand by posting jobs on the page and involves employees to refer or apply internally. In TurboHire, all the referral campaigns are powered by JustDropYourResume where an employee can simply drop the resume of their candidate and complete the application. An easy-to-use reporting dashboard helped in keeping track of all the activities with numbers. The TurboHire reporting dashboard analyzes, tracks, and reports real-time data regarding the results of the company.
Result
In the first 45 days of using TurboHire for recruitment activities, Wakefit hired 235 candidates, interviewed 850 applicants, along with 8 vendors, and generated more than 1200+ applications count.
The creation of an agile method for interview scheduling for feedback incorporation during the process was introduced. TurboHire helped Wakefit create different interviewing processes for various roles to derive the best time-to-hire and improvement in the quality of hire.
Click here if you wish to read the full Case Study. | https://medium.com/@turbo_hire/how-turbohire-helped-wakefit-hire-270-candidates-in-45-days-f335c8660624 | [] | 2021-02-06 06:02:11.316000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Recruiting', 'Hiring', 'Case Study', 'Talent Acquisition'] |
How To Build Your Startup’s Founding Team | How To Build Your Startup’s Founding Team
Who should your first hire be? How about your fifth? Your 10th?
Every startup founder faces an overload of critical decisions early in the life of their company. None of these decisions are more important than selecting the first few people you choose to work with.
The makeup of your startup’s founding team is going to be the difference between success and stagnancy. An ineffective team won’t kill your company quickly, it’ll lead to a slow, painful, inevitable failure. To make matters more difficult, founders often get drawn to the wrong people for the wrong reasons.
In over 20 years of building companies, I’ve established a pretty solid track record of bringing together entrepreneurial talent. So I decided to take some time to review about a dozen recent matches to figure out what makes the good ones work.
To give yourself the best chance of getting early hires right, you’ll need to find fit first, then fill roles, then establish rhythm.
Find fit by filling gaps and attacking weaknesses
The first rule of startup hiring also happens to be the first rule most founders ignore: Don’t hire people who are like you, hire people to fill your gaps and address your weaknesses.
That starts with skill set.
An entrepreneur-turned-investor friend of mine likes to say, “In the beginning everyone needs to be either coding or closing.” I’m on board with this, with a couple twists. I like to strive for everyone to be either making or selling.
Making is more than coding. Coding builds the engine, making gets the car to the showroom. And to me, selling is more than closing deals, it’s creating a scalable machine that will move more and more product out the door at increasing margins.
Your balance between making and selling should always be around 50/50. Figure out where you’re weak, and fill that gap next.
Personalities should also be balanced across an early team. I’m not saying you have to box everyone into a personality category, but if someone is already in their own box, including you, you should probably fill those gaps and counter those weaknesses as well.
In other words, if you’re totally focused on the future, you need balance from someone who is focused on the now. If you’re super-strategic, you need someone inherently tactical. If you’re a good cop, go find a bad cop.
Passion can be overrated, but one thing you want to make sure of is that nobody on the early team is there just for the job. If the person you want to bring aboard is not sold in — if they don’t believe in the concept — they’re not a good early hire. They might make a good contractor.
As an aside, one of my favorite signals for measuring passion is when, after a meeting or interview, a potential hire emails a list of thoughts and ideas and questions they came up with AFTER the meeting or interview. And not the bullshitty, look-at-me questions or questions about their role or the viability of the company, but questions and ideas that show that they kept thinking about the problem and the solution after they left.
Fill Roles Carefully and Conservatively
Theoretically, the earlier the hire, the larger the impact on the business. But that isn’t always the case. Sometimes you just want helpers, not heroes. Here’s how to slot new folks in.
Cofounder: Be careful with this role. I’ve seen plenty of examples of people getting burned by not being made a cofounder when they should have been. I’ve also seen tons of startups that have cofounders who shouldn’t be cofounders, and they struggle with the dead weight.
Cofounders contribute more than a small share of the evolution from idea to reality. If they were a major reason why the idea went from thought to plan to existence, they should be a cofounder.
Executive: Executives don’t have to be cofounders, and vice versa. Executives lead the company or the teams. Making a CTO a cofounder just because they come aboard early is a mistake. Making a cofounder a COO just because they’re a cofounder is also a mistake.
Employee: Everyone else you hire full-time is an employee, and frankly, it’s too early to be making decisions about where people fit in the org chart. Usually you’ll be surprised at where things shake out on their own six months to a year in.
Advisor: These are people with a ton of strategic skills and experience that you might need close by but not day-to-day, and otherwise couldn’t afford. As an advisor, they can get paid what they’re worth, and you don’t have them slotted in at 40–80 hours a week at their rate.
Consultant/Contractor: This is also a good way to get a few hours a week or a couple solid full-time months out of an expert to fill a role you might not need full time, like finance, legal, or tech. In that way, they’re like an advisor, but these folks are tactical instead of strategic.
Rhythm makes it a team, not just a bunch of employees
It’s really freaking awkward to be the boss of one person.
And that’s true all the way up to about 10 or 12 people, because before that, it’s rare for a natural working rhythm to develop. So to get over that gap, you should proactively establish a new working rhythm every time you bring aboard a new person.
Basically, you want to get everyone around a table and hash through these skeletal guidelines with the new person:
Here’s what everyone else is doing.
Here’s what you’re going to be doing on our own.
Here’s what you’re going to be doing with other people.
Here’s how much of your time, as a percentage, you should allocate to each of these initiatives.
Here are your goals for each initiative, with milestones.
This isn’t a scrum or a status meeting, it’s a top down list of everything that is going on and who is handling it. It’s a guidemap for that person’s Monday to Friday, 8:00 to 5:00, or whatever hours your startup keeps.
Each time you add someone, you’ll set an initial benchmark to help the new person find their fit and help the rest of the team understand and complement the shift in workload.
Once you’ve done all this a dozen times, hiring gets easier. But these are good habits to form and keep, because hiring the wrong person for the wrong reason, whether it’s your first employee or your 500th, always does damage.
Hey! If you found this post actionable or insightful, please consider signing up for my weekly newsletter at joeprocopio.com so you don’t miss any new posts. It’s short and to the point. | https://jproco.medium.com/how-to-build-your-startups-founding-team-723bfe9fe141 | ['Joe Procopio'] | 2020-02-10 12:18:34.108000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneurship', 'Business', 'Productivity', 'Leadership', 'Startup'] |
Giving back: Aakash Kambuj shares what it means to remember where you come from | Giving back: Aakash Kambuj shares what it means to remember where you come from Dropbox Follow May 17, 2019 · 4 min read
Aakash Kambuj
For Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month (APIHM), we celebrate all of the rich culture, traditions, and history of Asians and Pacific Islanders. This year, our employee resource group Asians@ chose the theme Roots: Growing Your Story. This month’s theme is about “origins” — the idea that where we came from is part of what makes us who we are now. We spoke with Dropboxers about what this theme means to them.
Q: What is your name, what office do you work out of, and how long have you been at Dropbox?
A: My name is Aakash Kambuj. I work out of the Seattle office, and I’ve been at Dropbox since October 2013.
Q: What’s your current role in helping make the world work better?
A:I lead engineering for the teams building features that enable users to access their data in Dropbox easily. That includes the ability to upload files, browse folders, and search for files on Dropbox.com and in the mobile/desktop apps. At a high level, our goal is to get you to the right content as fast as possible, and then get out of the way so you can get your work done.
At the 2018 summer picnic
Q: In your time at Dropbox, what’s something you’ve accomplished that you’re proud of?
A: In 2017, I led an effort to make files and folders available on the Dropbox mobile apps even when the phone was offline and not connected to the internet. It solved a real problem for users who had a bad experience due to spotty network connectivity. It also helped drive revenue for Dropbox as it’s a feature only available on paid plans.
Q: What does this year’s theme, Roots: Growing Your Story, mean to you?
A: It means remembering where I came from — India, specifically Pune. It means keeping in touch with family who lives there and getting face time with them as much as I can. It means trying to keep up with traditions and culture from my formative years that are meaningful to me, despite it being harder to do so living here. It means combining the best of America and the best of India to achieve my full potential. | https://medium.com/life-inside-dropbox/giving-back-aakash-kambuj-shares-what-it-means-to-remember-where-you-come-from-945e70d1861 | [] | 2019-05-17 17:52:57.659000+00:00 | ['Asian American', 'Engineering', 'Dropbox', 'India', 'Diversity'] |
6 Little Known Serial Killers from the Old West | 6 Little Known Serial Killers from the Old West
Image by Pixabay
Some might argue that the complicated stresses and violence of today are the cause of serial killers. But they have been around for thousands of years.
Each generation had its own complications and mental illnesses. As a result, they had their own share of serial killers as well. Perhaps since news in the Old West traveled only as fast as the pony express or even the telegraph, their stories weren’t told as often as today’s killers.
Imagine in the Old West, where gunfighters became instant heroes after racking up a body count. In such an atmosphere, it is only logical that drifters with no life or prospects would be willing to take a chance on becoming a legend.
From such an environment, it is no surprise that serial killers were also created. Let us examine six of these serial killers from the days of the Old West that are not very well known. | https://medium.com/@charliestephen6/6-little-known-serial-killers-from-the-old-west-a975e4599b5b | ['Charles Stephen'] | 2021-02-02 15:08:54.958000+00:00 | ['Outlaws', 'Old West', 'History', 'Society', 'American History'] |
A VPN Service Should be Apple’s Next Killer App | Modern technology hasn’t just placed the World Wide Web and all it has to offer in the palm of our hands. It has also enabled bad actors — and otherwise decent groups who want to know a little bit more about you than they should — to follow you online, wherever you may roam.
That doesn’t have to be the case, however. Apple, the largest tech company that still values customer privacy, is poised to change the ad tracking game in a big way. All they have to do is build what could be the most important service of their online legacy.
Ways Ad Companies Track Your Online Browsing Excursions
Although today’s technology is presented to consumers in neat, comfortable little packages that fit in the palms of our hands, even a device as accessible as your smartphone opens you up to the prestige and pitfalls of the World Wide Web.
In a perfect world, the websites you visit, the content you consume, the products you purchase, and everything in between would be your personal business, but that’s not the case.
Your browsing adventures are being watched by ad companies that want to leverage what they know about you to turn your data into dollar bills.
There are a handful of tools designed to follow you from website to website and record your interests.
You’ve probably heard of “cookies,” bite-sized bits of invisible website code that break off and cling to your devices to remember helpful things, like your personal preferences and settings on a site, but they can also identify your device for ad purposes, as well.
Another common tracking technique is canvas fingerprinting, a script that uses increasingly popular HTML5 code to identify devices in lieu of cookies.
These are only two of the many different tools advertisers can leverage against you, all without your knowledge or impacting your browsing experience. These tools are virtually invisible, and only more will emerge over time.
All the Ways Apple Helps Users Block Ads and Tracking Tech
Apple provides several ways for users to block invasive ad tech, and most of them are woven directly into the fabric of iOS, padOS and macOS
“Prevent Cross-Site Tracking” works to thwart canvas fingerprinting and any other bits of code that may try to relay your browsing activity from one site to another. You also have the option to “Block All Cookies,” which makes it harder for a website to identify your specific device, though disabling this feature can also break some of the more positive aspect of website tech, which we mentioned above.
Finally, Apple has opened ad blocking tech to third parties by letting users install ad blocking apps and extensions directly into Safari for added security. I have personally been using 1Blocker X on all of my devices for years. So far, it’s done a great job at eliminating the vast majority of ads within Safari and cleaning up my web consuming experiences.
Some things to note, however: First, Apple’s built-in ad blocking tools only work while using Safari. They will not protect you when using a third party web browser, like Chrome. Second, third party ad blocking apps only work within Safari web browsing sessions; it will not remove ads from free, ad-supported applications downloaded from the App Store.
What Apple’s Ad Blocking Tech Doesn’t Do
As powerful as Apple’s ad and tracker blocking tools may be, they’re not fool-proof. Advertisers have figured out other ways to follow consumers that don’t involve conventional means.
For example, Apple’s tools have no way of blocking the IP address on your home WiFi, public Wifi or the data connection with your phone carrier.
This means the companies that own your data connections — internet providers, telephone companies and router manufacturers — and even search engines (which also happens to include the world’s most powerful ad company, Google) can still vaguely track your location and search history through your IP address, even if you’re using an incognito or private browsing mode.
Like your home address, your IP address remains constant, giving advertisers the power to see when your address makes a request to access their connected websites or services.
VPN to The Rescue
But it doesn’t have to be this way. VPNs are the last piece of solving the privacy puzzle and ensuring complete anonymity across the web.
VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. A device with a VPN installed virtually connects to a computer or server far away and uses that connection to access the web. This, in turn, conceals your device’s identification attributes by making it look like a different device entirely. Better still, VPN software often changes servers on a regular basis, making it impossible to track your specific device or location from one session to another.
A VPN is basically a world-wide travel passport for your devices’ connections, and it flies to a different location every time you access the internet.
Who is a VPN for?
Everyone! You don’t have to be a high-level executive, a celebrated public figure or even the president of the United States to want to protect your personal data.
The truth is that all data is valuable. As proof, think about two of the most successful companies in the world that offer their flagship products to consumers, en masse, for free: search engine giant, Google, and social media phenom, Facebook. These two companies thrived for more than a decade by gathering their customers’ data and using it to target ads for products that they have an invested stake in users buying.
Today, Google and Facebook still offer their flagship products — search and social — for free, which means their business models are working. They’re making heaps of money off of your data.
Why a VPN Should be Apple’s Next Killer App
There are nearly an endless number of VPN services available on the market, and up until now, finding the perfect one can be a bit of a gamble.
VPNs aren’t regulated by any branches of government or corporate agreements, which means all companies that host them treat VPNs differently. For instance, some companies offer VPN server access for free, but in exchange for services, they do the exact thing VPNs are supposed to prevent: track your browsing activity and collect personal data. Other VPNs offer paid solutions, but their data connection speeds aren’t always stable.
The truth is that a successful VPN needs an array of fast, reliable servers for users to connect to, and without substantial bandwidth and plenty of funds, building and maintaining such a network is a slog at best.
That is, unless you already have a mound of cash, plenty of technical know-how, a vested interest in defending customers’ privacy and a proven track record of launching quality products.
Enter the crew at Cupertino!
Apple has spent the last several years touting their stance on privacy and putting their virtual money where their mouths are with privacy-oriented features, but as we’ve already explained, Apple’s privacy push is missing one final piece: the ability to conceal IP addresses. It’s missing a VPN!
Furthermore, the last several years have been transformative for Apple. They’ve minimized their hardware roots and planted new seeds that are flourishing around digital services. A VPN would play perfectly into one of Apple’s new monthly service subscriptions, and they could even bundle it with other professional tools to give it some extra appeal.
What Does the Future Hold?
Will a VPN be Apple’s next killer app? Probably not. Up until this point, there haven’t been any rumors or leaks suggesting such a service is in the works.
Should a VPN be Apple’s next killer app? Definitely! It fits into Apple’s business model and expertise in every single way: a focus on privacy, the rise of services and putting customers’ needs first.
Start a Conversation
Have you ever considered using a VPN service? Do you currently use one now? If so, would you be interested in switching to an Apple-operated VPN if it became available? Finally, how much would you be willing to pay every month or year for an Apple VPN service?
Share your thoughts with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn by commenting on this post.
Thanks for reading! | https://medium.com/zachlaidlawreloaded/a-vpn-service-should-be-apples-next-killer-app-1df97bfaf5b9 | ['Zach Laidlaw'] | 2019-09-10 15:02:27.719000+00:00 | ['Apple', 'SaaS', 'Privacy', 'Technology', 'VPN'] |
Three newborns taken . | Three newborns taken.
This headline would grab our attention, cause outrage. and a cry for justice if the babes were human.
That stab of empathy may begin to dissipate when you realise I’m talking about calves and cows. You may even stop reading here… but I hope you will indulge me for two more sentences.
These cows were inseminated by their owners/captors and this is not an isolated incident. They are inseminated regularly and their calves taken repeatedly.
If those sentences bother you as they do me, realise that the milk in your shopping trolley, and the dollars you pay for it are the fuel that drives scenarios like this.
Weaned humans don’t need milk. Calcium is readily available in green vegetables, such as kale and broccoli, nuts and legumes. See link below for more information.
As I listen to the mourning of the cows from my cosy caravan on a friends property, near a farm, I reflect on almost a year of being vegan. For me, it is about choosing to disengage from the cruel practices of our culture. It is being true to myself; honouring the sentience of other species and endeavouring to tread lightly on our planet. I’m glad I chose this path for my life.
Early this morning I watched a calf playing near it’s mother, she dipped her head to allow the calf to butt her forehead. It was a sweet moment.
One of the cows saw me standing on the top of the rise and looked, a long look, assessing whether I was a threat I guess. I am glad that I no longer am. Even indirectly or behind the scenes.
Calcium: | https://medium.com/@diane.h.nicholson/three-newborns-taken-937c3f7305f6 | ['Diane Nicholson'] | 2021-01-24 21:11:51.189000+00:00 | ['Calcium', 'Vegan', 'Farm', 'Dairy', 'Baby'] |
The Holy Land (Pakistan) is the land that came into being through many sacrifices and faithfulness… | The Holy Land (Pakistan) is the land that came into being through many sacrifices and faithfulness of our forefathers. Pakistan is the country which the Almighty Allah has enriched with natural resources. In the land of gold, flowers of all colors and all kinds of crops are produced here. In the land of this beautiful homeland, flowing rivers, delicious fruits, skyscrapers and flowing waterfalls add four moons to its beauty. Pakistan is a beautiful country with some parts of the world offering a picture of paradise.
The beautiful land of Pakistan is divided into 4 provinces, including Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhuwa. Each province contributes to the development and prosperity of Pakistan. The individual of each province and its provincial government is playing its vital role in the development and prosperity of the country.
The color of the flag of Pakistan is green and white. The green color represents the majority, in which 90% of Pakistan's population belongs to Muslims. contains the majority of Muslims. White represents minorities, including people of other different faiths, about 10 percent, including Christians, Sikhs and Hindus. People belonging to every religion are living as honorable citizens, where all minorities are protected and who have the right to live according to their own religion.
If you look at the provinces of Pakistan, Punjab is the largest province of Pakistan in terms of population. Punjab means the land of five rivers. The largest and capital city of Punjab is Lahore, and it is also called the heart of Pakistan. Lahore is famous for its liveliness and hospitality. Multan, Faisalabad, Gujranwala and Sialkot are the major cities of Punjab.
Faisalabad is also known as the Manchester of Pakistan, and the city is famous for its textile industry. Sialkot is famous for its sports equipments and surgical instruments. The Pakistani philosopher and national poet Allama Muhammad Iqbal was also born in Sialkot, Punjab. The land of Punjab is very fertile and has excellent canals system.
The forest of Changha Manga and the mine of Khewra are also famous places of Punjab. Khewra district is located near Dadan Khan city of Jhelum. Khewra is the second largest salt mine in the world. It has 17 floors. And this salt mine in Khewra is meeting the salt needs of many other countries besides Pakistan.
The word Sindh is taken from Indus, which means river. And because of the Indus River, this sindh province has been named Sindh. The largest and capital city of Sindh is Karachi. Karachi is also called the city of lights. Quaid-e-Azam, the Payoneer of the nation, was born in this city.
Mostly Sindhi language is spoken in Sindh. Its population is around 50 million. The major cities of Sindh are Hyderabad, Sukkur, Nawabshah and MirpurKhas etc. Hats and scarves are worn in Sindh. Women there wear glass work clothes with enthusiasm.. The economical city in Sindh is Karachi, which is the busiest city in all of Pakistan. Which is a source of livelihood for thousands of people in Pakistan.
Balochistan is the largest province of Pakistan in terms of area. Balochistan shares borders with all other provinces of Pakistan. This area consists of barren mountains. In Balochistan, it is very cold in winter and very hot in summer. Sibi is the hottest area of Pakistan.
Quetta is the largest and capital city in Balochistan, which is famous for its fruit production. Balochistan is rich in minerals and mines.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa KPK is the fourth province of Pakistan. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa KPK is the most beautiful province in Pakistan in terms of tourism. Peshawar is its largest and capital city of KPK. Mardan, Dera Ismail Khan, and Abbottabad are also major cities of KPK. The language spoken in this province is Pashto and Hindko.
The people here are very hardworking and tough. They are ready to do anything for their honor and dignity. The Khyber-Pass is also located in the same province. Swat & Naran-Kaghan Valley are beautiful places in the region that tourists love to visit.
Pakistan as a whole is a very amazing beautiful country, which has been blessed with many resources. Today Pakistanies are living a peaceful and secure life, simply because of our well-equipped army.
Our country Pakistan is very prosperous and rich because Allah Almighty has blessed it with beautiful sceneries which enchants the viewer. Its pervasive aroma enchants beautiful people. Many places in Pakistan offer a picture of paradise, which attracts tourists from all over the world.
Pakistan is located in South Asia, the largest continent in the world.
Our country is located in the north and west of South Asia. Pakistan is bordered by China's border to the north, Hindustan (India) to the east, Afghanistan and Iran to the west and the Sindhi Sea to the south.
There are many beautiful mountains in Pakistan including Himalayas, Karakaram and HinduKash. K-2 is the highest peak in Pakistan. Many mountaineers of the world have climbed the Karakoram mountain. And between these mountains is the most beautiful valley of Gilgit in Pakistan | https://medium.com/@danishahmedsolangi4/the-holy-land-pakistan-is-the-land-that-came-into-being-through-many-sacrifices-and-faithfulness-1722c198f577 | ['Danish Solangi'] | 2021-08-10 07:19:27.540000+00:00 | ['سنڌ', 'Tourism', 'Pak Tour', 'Pakistan', 'Tourism In Pakistan'] |
Is Hustle Culture a Cop-out? | Is Hustle Culture a Cop-out?
How the trope ignores privilege, and the rest of our lives.
Photo by Milo Bauman on Unsplash
If the goal of hustle culture is to exploit every hour of one’s day to be economically viable, where is the space for health, rest, and pleasure?
Hustle culture strives to be the great equaliser. As Sarah Kessler outlines for her story on the king of hustle Gary Vaynerchuk, it’s the “idea that anyone who applies enough talent, grit, and passion can start a multibillion-dollar business — or achieve whatever their dream is — if they hunker down in their proverbial garage and put in the work”. The notion that no matter where you came from, it’s your responsibility to achieve your dream, and not complain.
But is it really worth the hustle, when you’re just sacrificing the rest of your life?
Even the internet’s favourite filmmaker Casey Neistat admitted the vlog schedule which propelled his fame sent his marriage to the brink of divorce. After 534 straight days of uploading, the pursuit of astronomical output was a direct burden on his family life. For his compounded career gain, there was a sacrifice. As there always is.
The theory of constant busyness doesn’t even stand up scientifically. Hustle culture made an enemy of being ‘idle’, but that has been entirely confused with the notion of laziness. Doing nothing for a period of time might produce the best results of all. Moreover, slowing down actually increases accuracy. Careful planning of work avoids disaster. All strategies that hustle culture has condemned.
Not to mention, not everyone should be an entrepreneur. So why the recruitment style marketing to non-founders to become one themselves?
“Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” — Elon Musk
The hustler trope is inherently tied to the self-made, rarely that of an intrapreneur. Success seemingly only praised if you fought for it, kicking and screaming. You hustled for it. Who doesn’t want to relish a self-created dynasty? It is increasingly the only socially acceptable path to celebrate. The self made hustlers radically own their behaviour and productivity, claiming everything achieved as the result of hard work. If you build it yourself, it almost becomes a weapon. A badge of honour. Especially online.
Becoming a founder is now a trend, a label, a brand, a community. Hating work became uncool. Online we live performative lives, always reworking a story to tell, an image to portray. By advertising the ‘hustle’ you buy into a narrative that provides immediate worth and respect from that community.
Hustle culture sees serial founders praised, presents failure as a good thing, the effort to start over is celebrated. But it is a privilege to access this cycle of destruction. If you can’t afford to fail, buying into hustle culture is dangerous.
Especially now, it can be tempting to throw yourself into any ‘opportunity’ this world event provides. But we have no idea what is going to happen this month, next week, or even tomorrow. The changes we’ve seen happen hourly, and they involve life, death, livelihoods, and stretch the entire world. Like everyone else, I’m sick of seeing the word ‘unprecedented’.
It presents a conundrum for most of us, who want to glide quietly through this time in history to shield our mental and physical health from duress. Yet with hustle culture perpetuating that ‘taking a break’ is seen as weak, unmotivated, or lazy — it can be easy to spend the time at home in an incessant pursuit of productivity to counterbalance.
Of course, it is a privilege to not have to hustle during the pandemic. Essential workers on the frontlines have no choice in the matter.
Anecdotally, it appears the rest of us at home are actually spending longer hours working. It can be easy to fall into the trap of a constant grind, with no physical line drawn between work and home life. Not to mention those with children managing home learning alongside a career conducted amongst 300 million Zoom calls.
Conversely, the hustle may become an alluring skill for the future. Without physical offices, and restrictions on gatherings, the employee who stays home and consistently produces tangible output is more valuable than those with soft skills.
“If your main job skill is networking, you might want to learn the art of actually working.” — Olga Khazan, The Atlantic
Tangible output should of course never come at the expense of your mental, physical, or emotional health. And it is entirely possible on 40 hours a week. It has to be. We can’t all be founders.
It’s also important to note alongside his hustle culture content, Gary Vaynerchuk advocates that we should do what we love.
Perhaps, that should be the advice most heeded. | https://medium.com/swlh/is-hustle-culture-a-cop-out-4539d538824a | ['Jess Thoms'] | 2020-11-12 00:52:46.038000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Self', 'Productivity', 'Success', 'Hustle'] |
The Season of Giving: Time to Rewrite the Rules? | Photo credit: IWBI
For many of us, gift-giving is a favorite holiday ritual — a symbolic act of sharing abundance that’s deeply rooted in a variety of seasonal traditions.
This year, though, take the time to pause and think about giving in a different way; to consider the closing days of 2020 as an opportunity to not only expand our gift repertoire beyond the latest must-have consumables, but also to bask in the joy that accompanies the pure act of giving back.
We know that the pandemic has disproportionately affected some of the most vulnerable people on the planet, exacerbating existing inequities and creating the conditions for even greater hardships. Even among our own friends-and-family networks, there will be some who are anticipating the customary gift exchange with anxiety rather than anticipation.
We have the power to change the narrative. By decoupling the act of giving from its material tendencies, we can recalibrate our own holiday expectations and establish new customs that are simpler and more emotionally rewarding. We don’t have to give “things” — we can give our time, share experiences and make memories.
Giving makes us happy. Studies repeatedly show that givers not only enjoy a spontaneous glow of satisfaction from selfless engagement with others but also experience longer-term physical and mental health benefits, including lower blood pressure and stress levels, as well as higher measures of self-esteem and happiness. Even, perhaps, giving themselves the gift of a longer life.
It doesn’t appear to matter much what form your giving takes — donating funds, volunteering or supporting friends through difficult times — it all contributes to a greater personal sense of well-being.
It’s easy to confuse the joy of giving with the adrenaline rush we get from treating ourselves to online shopping — heightened, perhaps, by our desire to bag ourselves a Black Friday bargain or get in on the Cyber Monday madness. But it doesn’t compare to the lasting sense of fulfilment we derive from the purely altruistic act of giving.
It’s an approach that can be embraced at an organizational level, too.
Civic Engagement is a feature in WELL’s Community concept that promotes project involvement with local community initiatives. At IWBI, each staff member receives one day of paid volunteer time off (VTO). This year some of our team members in the US volunteered at local polling sites in November’s elections, while others volunteered at neighborhood schools and organizations. More than two-thirds of our staff take advantage of this volunteer time off, some going above and beyond. Our director of Workplace Wellness, Susan Illman, gives her time to more than nine organizations and also connects other team members to volunteer opportunities.
Throughout 2020, we’ve been acutely conscious of the need for a global movement to redress the social, legal and economic imbalances that have only increased in 2020 and have stepped up our efforts to support underserved communities and oppose injustices.
Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve given 20 percent of WELL registration fees to Doctors Without Borders. Our donations have already exceeded $60K, placing IWBI in its top 10 percent of supporters. We also offer our support to organizations advancing racial and social justice. We’ve tripled our donation-matching initiative and are delighted that well over half our team took advantage of these funds, enabling us to donate a total of $10,000 to two dozen organizations. I donated to Equity Now and Legends Charter School run by my good friend Atasha James who headlined in our Power of Place webcast last June. In the last six months, IWBI has also contributed $5K per month to the Equal Justice Initiative.
This year we offered those who were out of work a chance to register for the WELL AP exam for $99; IWBI picked up the remainder of the tab. Members of our customer service team who fulfilled these requests reported feeling happy and proud to be able to service our community in this small way. All in all we supported 754 individuals in their professional advancement, opening up fresh opportunities in a growing market.
Focusing our engagement across these different ways of giving has offered us all a sense of purpose that’s helped us to stay grounded amid a period of universal turbulence. We know we can make a valuable contribution to global recovery efforts — a collective vision that’s been a powerful motivating force helping us to maintain our momentum even when our energy levels have flagged.
It has infused our work with a fresh urgency and given us an even greater desire to pursue an agenda that more closely aligns purpose with profit, a mandate that we have as a public benefit corporation. Let’s hope that a renewed sense of joy in the act of giving becomes a global phenomenon as well as a positive legacy of 2020.
Rachel Hodgdon is President and CEO of the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI), a public benefit corporation and the world’s leading organization focused on deploying people first places to advance a global culture of health. | https://medium.com/@rachel-hodgdon/the-season-of-giving-time-to-rewrite-the-rules-abfb660ef714 | ['Rachel Hodgdon'] | 2020-12-22 21:44:30.388000+00:00 | ['Volunteering', 'Leadership', 'Purpose', 'Wellness', 'Giving'] |
Feelings are really confusing. | Feelings are really confusing. There are moments where I know you’re the one, and others where I don’t. Sometimes it’s the fights, sometimes it’s overthinking, and it’s very hard to distinguish the fine line between anxiety and truth. Are you the one? Can we make it through our hardships? I wonder these things in my head many times and still have yet to come to a definitive solution. I wonder whether I cling to you because of the past, present, or future.
Follow for more :) | https://medium.com/@jaymemcke/feelings-are-really-confusing-82dc36e48107 | [] | 2020-12-26 19:43:10.435000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Anxiety', 'Poem', 'Overthinking', 'Thoughts'] |
Serverless Technology Is Revolutionary! | Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash
Evolutionary changes in technology happen almost every day. However, revolutionary changes only happen about once a decade. If you think back to early personal computers, it was revolutionary when DOS enabled personal computers to be used by consumers. Even though the software was limited and came on giant floppy discs, it offered new functionality that users had not experienced before.
Evolutionary changes in technology happen almost every day. However, revolutionary changes only happen about once a decade.
A little less than a decade later came Windows. This gave computers a graphical interface that could run more than one program simultaneously. Over time, Windows had evolutionary changes as it went from versions 1, 2, 3, 95, 98, and so on.
The internet has gone through similar changes. It was a revolutionary technology with evolutionary increments along the way. However, we’re now embarking on the latest revolutionary change, known as serverless technology.
Serverless technology is a product of the cloud movement. I wrote about cloud’s turning point in a previous article, but cloud computing is also one of those revolutionary industry shifts as it opened the door for companies to create applications faster, cheaper and more focused on specific industry problems.
Serverless is a concept that can be hard to wrap your brain around at first. Traditionally, software is server-based. It’s either hosted on owned, local servers or in the cloud using rented third-party servers. Either way, those servers are expensive. For servers owned by companies specifically, the upfront cost is one thing, but there are also on-going costs in hardware maintenance, co-location hosting, energy and of course staff time.
Server-based software has always been riddled with “hidden” costs as they often get buried in IT budgets as fixed/sunk costs. But for SaaS providers, these costs have to be considered variable costs to deliver a product to end users.
With serverless tech, or what I call “service-based” technology, you are only paying for the compute time necessary to serve each request — not the additional overhead and idle time of the server. This on-demand cost model equates to costs about 1/10th that of server-based computing. This is game changing in general, but especially for SaaS application providers.
A simple analogy would be office space, especially in the time of COVID when many people are working from home. You typically lease office space in multiple year contracts. You’re paying for that office space whether you use it or not. But what if you could lease only what you need on an hourly basis. One day you might need 250 offices and the next day only one. Your on-demand cost would be a fraction of the contracted cost. This is how serverless technology works to change the cost model.
When software is server-based, it’s deployed to servers running day and night regardless of actual usage. Because there is a limit to the number of concurrent users per server, you end up sizing for peak usage even though the server will remain quiet all night, just like an office.
With serverless, adding more compute power happens in fractions of a second as the server layer is abstracted from the software and delivered as a service. Scaling up or down happens instantly — because your software runs across thousands of servers, as a service. Rather than paying the high costs of keeping servers running 24/7/365, you only pay for the processing power you need to serve the next request. At Qrvey, we’ve been able to reduce AWS infrastructure costs up to 90% compared to our competition using serverless-based software versus server-based.
At this point, server-based computing is not sustainable in the long run. The environmental cost is enormous. Building data centers, filling it with hardware that needs replacement in just a couple years, and the cost (and waste) of heating and cooling is just too much. With the extreme rise in demand for computing power, how many of these data centers can the earth support where servers sit idle much of the time?
With the revolutionary nature of serverless technology, software architecture will evolve as well. To truly realize the value of serverless, software architecture needs to adopt a microservices-based approach as these services will run in fractions of a second, but only as needed. The challenge for established software companies is that existing systems can’t be migrated to serverless tech, it requires a long term commitment as the system will need a complete rewrite from the ground up. Product reinvention is risky, but will become necessary for everyone at some point.
The competitive landscape for software companies will also evolve. Those that embrace serverless technology to take advantage of microservices are far ahead of traditional software providers. A few companies, like Qrvey, are leveraging serverless technology to build a next generation analytics product that scales extremely efficiently, is more cost-effective than traditional software and maximizes performance.
Remember how you felt when you first saw software running on DOS, then when you saw Windows for the first time, and especially when you learned about this thing called the Internet. Serverless technology is our next technology revolution. While serverless technology is still maturing, I can’t help but wonder what will revolutionize technology next. | https://medium.com/@arman-eshraghi/serverless-technology-is-revolutionary-a1c8107ea31b | ['Arman Eshraghi'] | 2020-12-24 11:33:55.387000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Analytics', 'AWS', 'SaaS', 'Serverless'] |
You’re Not Ugly, You’re Just Lost! | “Hustle Never Stops”
Yes! you read it correctly, it’s never about how you look it’s always about whether you feel confident in that look or not. So it’s all started in 2016 when I was in 11th standard. I was in the science section because I’m one of those students who chose the science stream after scoring an excellent CGPA in 10th (Mine was 10 lol). I was a Bookworm with a misconception that I’ll score good marks with ease as I did in the previous class. My journey of transformation started around the month of November when the farewell was only 2 months far. You guys must be wondering it’s a story of school time, Does it include the lady love? well, yes it does. I was crushing on a girl from 8th standard. Being a shy person it took me more than 3 years to have the guts to confess my love to her. Life’s not a fairytale and happy endings ain’t a part of this. Everything that happened at that moment was unexpected, I confessed my feelings to her and in addition to saying no to the proposal, she disrespected me. She used to look good, having a number of guys falling for her. she said “Why would I say yes to a person like you, just look at me once and then look at you. How dare you to propose me, you’re so ugly and unconfident”. I already told you that I was only into studies at that time so all I had was good grades and unbiased pure love for her. But it all went in vain, I got broken, I cried for the first time for a girl. See the beauty of first love is it’s the purest among all you ever have in your life. We were in the same class I started feeling anxious in front of her, I couldn’t even look at her. The news about us spread like a fire in our class and then in the whole school. For a guy who was only into academics, it was something really shocking. I didn’t have the guts to see those faces again. All I had was the support of some big brothers and friends and that was more than enough for this whole journey. As a kid, you live with a misconception that to build a muscular body you just have to join the gym. You’re unaware of the sacrifices, hard work, and dedication it takes. I was broken and full of anxiety, I wanted to do something which helps me to forget the things that happened to me earlier. I’d nothing to lose so I started working out I was really thin and doing a single pushup sounded like a big task to me. My brother who was the coach of the same gym was the only constant I had on my entire journey.
I was in 11th standard and the exams were near. I’d 3 different tuitions at different areas for PCM respectively. After attending school and having 2 tuitions on the same day it was really tough to have the energy to hit the gym. That’s where I decided that it’s now or never, I skipped my tuition classes, sometimes I used to go in there a little late. I was only consistent with the gym and as everyone says “Hard work pays off”. An year passed, now I was in 12th standard but the only difference was in my personality now I was the best version of myself. I was confident enough to say anything to anyone now or to perform anything on stage. I started taking part in various cultural events, i went to a lot of debate competitions. People of my school started recognizing my name as I received numerous awards on the stage from our principal. But now these awards were not only restricted to academics, but they were also from the sports field too. The same girl who disrespected me in 11th proposed me in front of the whole class. Whatever happened next I’ll tell you in some other story. But it’s never too late to focus on yourself, invest the maximum time in this process, make yourself your priority, and last but not the least never forget the thing which keeps you motivated in the process. | https://medium.com/@shutupyaarsunny/youre-not-ugly-you-re-just-lost-ce52cc8c6d92 | ['Sunny Rana'] | 2020-12-08 18:21:29.482000+00:00 | ['Anxiety', 'School Love Story', 'Its Never Too Late', 'Hustle', 'Transformation'] |
5 Questions To Ask in Awkward Situations | Hi Guys, I hate awkward silence and nothing pains me more than the death of a conversation. So here are some things I have come to realize really bring the room back to life when said. Read at your own will.
Agh! Classic awk convo! (google)
How often do you gallop? Do you wish more people galloped?
This ones good. Always a conversation starter. Especially if you really like horses. Personally I’m not much of a horse girl, but this question usually ends in the person you're talking to trying to gallop, and what could be more entertaining?
2. Where do you stand in the whole toad versus frog favoritism debate?
Having a conversation with people that just give off the “Wow I love amphibians” vibe really strongly? Well here you go. They get so passionate over this. Trust me. Personally I just pick the side they don’t like and argue with them. Makes for a really fun debate. Go bull frogs. Toads for the win?
3. If you could be any song on the Sean Kingston discographies, which would one would you be?
This one is absolutely fantastic because you almost always get the same three answers: Beautiful Girls, Eenie Meenie, or the classic Fire Burning. Tell them which one you resonate with. Bond. We all know these are his best three songs, but if you want to get spicy, look through the rest of them and make fun commentary. Absolutely so much fun. *Fair Warning: This one can lead to people thinking you really love Sean Kingston*
4. What ever happened to Soulja Boy anyway?
I personally am a HUGE Soulja Boy Stan, so I know exactly what happened to him. I could talk about his career for hours. This one makes for a fun time because I ensure you that there is a 75 percent chance the person you’re conversing with knows the Crank Dat dance. Turn your Swag On, vibe, and discuss the new edible empire our forever homie Soulja is building. Nothing’s awkward when Pretty Boy Swag is in the room.
5. Do you wanna see a picture of my open toe, open heel, fur boots?
Ok so maybe this one is specific to me. These shoes are my life. They make your head hurt just to look at. A crowd pleaser. Now I am not saying you need to buy them, you could always just show them the photo. But everyone always has questions after this topic is brought up. Fantastic way to confuse your friends and add depth to your personality. I’ll insert a photo for you down below ;)).
My infamous open toe open heel boots in action.
Well I hope you guys enjoyed this read. Actually, I don’t know if anybody read this. But it was a really fun way to procrastinate my college apps, and for that i say thank you. Hopefully you put some of my favorite questions to use. Let me know if you use them and instantly become super popular with new people.
Stay Swaggy,
Anela | https://medium.com/@ankorkutovic/5-questions-to-ask-in-awkward-situations-ef9493b55ab2 | [] | 2020-12-18 21:09:51.433000+00:00 | ['Awkward', 'Funny', 'Friends', 'What To Say Next'] |
MATIC NETWORK SPOTLIGHT WITH UBONG EPHRAIM — TERRA VIRTUA | Hello guys, Ubong Ephraim here and welcome to a fresh episode of Matic Network spotlight with Ubong Ephraim. On this series I highlight happenings on the Matic Network, such as projects and DApps integrated on Matic Network, Matic Network’s integrations on protocols, partnerships and other important updates.
Today we’ll be talking about TERRA VIRTUA, a truly immersive collectible platform across Mobile, AR and VR with unique social, gaming and creative experiences, enabled by blockchain.
MATIC NETWORK
Matic network is a blockchain solution that provides scalable, secure and instant Ethereum transactions using Plasma side chains and a Proof-of-Stake network. Matic network has made an effort to resolve the issues of scalability and usability without making a compromise on decentralization.
It is an off/side chain scaling solution for existing platforms to provide scalability and superior user experience to DApps/user functionalities.
Matic network was created to solve the problem of scalability associated with most blockchains and also accelerate transaction speeds.
When developers seek to deploy their solutions using blockchain technology, speed and scalability are two utmost features they look out for. Matic network solves these problems very well while adding additional features such as a smooth user experience and security.
More than 70 dApps have been built on Matic, ranging from DeFi protocols to games and prediction markets. With more validator nodes being onboarded on the Matic Network progressively, it is on the path to full decentralization and becoming the most sought after Layer 2 network in the blockchain ecosystem.
In today’s part of the series, we’d be looking at TERRA VIRTUA, a truly immersive collectible platform across Mobile, AR and VR with unique social, gaming and creative experiences, enabled by blockchain.
TERRA VIRTUA
TERRA VIRTUA is a truly immersive collectible platform across Mobile, AR and VR with unique social, gaming and creative experiences, enabled by blockchain. Terra Virtua provides utility by allowing collectors of digital assets to display and interact with their virtual goods in PC, Web, Mobile and Augmented Reality. Leveraging the latest in mobile and gaming technologies, their mission is to engage and connect fan-based user communities.
With Terra Virtua you can own your unique digital assets which you and your friends can share, trade, exhibit, play and enjoy. Terra Virtua’s approach to collectibles is to engage users in new and unique ways.
Terra Virtua will become the one platform to share, trade and interact with digital collectibles from brands and creators in new, social, engaging and immersive ways.
TERRA VIRTUA just partnered with Matic Network to leverage on it’s unique layer 2 solution. The partnership is designed to accelerate the adoption of NFTs within the mainstream.
Sandeep Nailwal, Co-founder and COO of Matic Network said of the partnership “Terra Virtua has built an immersive collectibles platform that will now be supercharged with low fee and high speed txns. What sets Terra Virtua apart is their strong focus on user adoption and a host of top-tier partners, and we’re excited to welcome Terra Virtua onboard!”
This is a great move as they will be able to leverage on Matic Network high-throughput and fast transactions. Matic Network provides cheaper transactions at breakneck speeds with the same level of security as Ethereum.
Matic is rapidly becoming the go-to Layer 2 solution for developers, thanks to secure, scalable and instant transactions, secured by Ethereum. Matic Network layer 2 solution with all it’s awesome features continues to place it as a sought after tool for developing business solutions on the blockchain.
Want to build with Matic too?
For Developers building Dapps and looking for a scaling solution, do get in touch with Matic Network. They can help you not only achieve scale but also provide the best UI/UX to your users.
MORE INFORMATION :
Learn more about Matic Network at : https://matic.network/
Build with Matic Network : https://matic.network/build-n-earn
DApps on Matic Network : https://matic.network/dapps
MaticNetwork wallet : https://wallet.matic.network/
Connect with me on telegram @ubongj
Twitter : https://twitter.com/@ubong_ephraim | https://medium.com/@ubong-ephraim/matic-network-spotlight-with-ubong-ephraim-terra-virtua-25b3d252dab1 | ['Ubong Ephraim'] | 2020-12-12 13:30:54.917000+00:00 | ['Nft', 'Terra Virtua', 'Matic Network', 'Virtual Reality', 'Augmented Reality'] |
Turning the Page | “Give yourself permission to turn the page. “
I heard this quote recently and really resonated with the idea of moving on after a struggle. It’s a lot easier said than done though, isn’t it?
When faced with a challenge, it is often incredibly difficult to see any way out. And even when the challenge is over, closure is not always readily available. For many people, struggles continue to take hold, even years after the actual problem has passed. It’s only when the page is turned and the mental barrier is crossed that true healing and progress can take place.
A change in mindset is essential to overcoming. You can rid yourself of the problem, but if you have not shifted your perspective, you cannot hope to completely overcome it.
“Don’t view things as happening to you, but happening for you.”
This quote has inspired me in my own life, and shown me that all situations have a purpose in directing our path. Situations arise that might be completely unexpected or overwhelming at first. But if we can learn to view these situations as gifts instead of burdens, we can finally begin to move on.
Again — Give yourself permission to turn the page.
It’s not always easy to move on from a struggle but when we allow ourselves to turn the page, that is when progress is truly made.
Emotional and mental health are critical to both personal and professional success in life. It is so easy to let your mind wander to negative thoughts, especially when comparing your business, you life, and your struggles with someone else’s.
I recently interviewed an old friend, Blake Howard, on my podcast, who talked about some of his struggles and the path that led him to his job, his spouse, and his home. For Blake a big part of this path was seeing doors close and understanding that he needed a mindset change. After going through a break up, he was forced to change his plan for the future and ended up making a big move to a new city. Once he got there and started a business, he found himself, along with millions of other Americans, struggling financially through the Great Recession. Through both of these incidents, as hard as they were to face, he was forced to change and refocus. In the end, he was able to look back, turn the page, and feel grateful for where he had come and the path that led him to his current position.
Another thing that helps in the tough times is hearing stories of people overcoming. It is often difficult to even consider a breakthrough in our own lives when no one else seems to be struggling. However, when we hear about the journeys of people like Blake and understand the difficulties they had to overcome, we can truly appreciate our own struggles and see the purpose behind the pain.
I’ve always been a sports fan, and loved the idea of game-changing plays. A couple seconds, a single split-second decision can change the game for good. I think this translates so well to life — in the workplace, at home, or wherever you find yourself in between. Learn to feel that sense of urgency. There is a lot on the line, but also incredible potential right around the corner. So make those game-changing plays. It may motivate you in your job, teach you to appreciate the blessings in life around you, and hopefully even help you turn the page and step into the future.
For more on this topic, including the entire interview with Blake Howard, listen to the Created for Experience podcast — Overcoming with Courage. | https://medium.com/@billyboughey/turning-the-page-36957a32b8d6 | ['Billy Boughey'] | 2019-10-09 19:10:16.089000+00:00 | ['Podcasting', 'Leadership', 'Leadership Development', 'Podcast', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
Linear Regression Analysis in R | Introduction
R is a great free software environment for statistical analysis and graphics. In this blog, I will demonstrate how to do linear regression analysis in R by analyzing correlations between the independent variables and dependent variables, estimating and fitting a model, and evaluating the results' usefulness and effectiveness.
I think R studio's interface (the most commonly used editor for R) is more user friendly than the editors that I have used with Python. Moreover, I also personally believe that even though Python is a more powerful programming language in general, R is much easier to learn for starters and the way of coding is more straightforward.
I’ve used both Python and R to do the linear regression analysis for different projects and competitions. In the previous blog, I’ve also talked about conducting a linear regression analysis in Python. You may find the article here: Linear Regression Analysis on House Price in Python. If you are interested, you may read both articles and compare the similarities and differences.
Data Summary
I used a dataset from one of my assignments, which has information about 392 vehicles. The goal is to find a model to predict the variable mpg (= miles per gallon).
Here is the data dictionary of the possible independent variables:
cylinders = Number of cylinders between 4 and 8
displacement = Engine displacement (cu. inches)
horsepower = Engine horsepower
weight = Vehicle weight (lbs.)
acceleration = Time to accelerate from 0 to 60 mph (sec.)
year = Model year (modulo 100)
origin = Origin of the car (1. American, 2. European, 3. Japanese)
#Read the data
auto=read.csv("Auto.csv")
head(auto)
Figure 1: Partial View of the Data
Data Exploration
Since we are not using a high-dimensional dataset, one of the normal practice is to plot either scatter plots or boxplots to help understand the possible relationship between each of the independent variables and the dependent variable mpg.
#Tell R which table you are manipulating
attach(auto) # set the plotting area into a 4*2 array
par(mfrow=c(4,2)) # when you use "~" to connect the variables, Y variable goes first
plot(mpg~cylinders)
plot(mpg~displacement)
# "origin" is a categorical variable, so we use the boxplot
boxplot(mpg~as.factor(origin)) # when you use "," to connect the variables, X variable goes first
plot(horsepower,mpg)
plot(weight,mpg)
plot(acceleration,mpg)
plot(year,mpg)
Figure 2: Data Exploration Plots
Judging from the scatter plots above, I concluded a curved relationship between mpg and the three variables: weight, displacement, and horsepower; there was a linear relationship between mpg and another three variables: cylinders, acceleration, and year. For the boxplot, the medians were clearly different among the different origins, and the variation seemed relatively consistent; thus, origin would also be a good independent variable.
Model Estimating
When I estimate the model, I applied the poly( ) command, which helps avoid writing out a long formula with powers of the variables with a curved relationship with mpg.
fit=lm(formula = mpg ~ cylinders +
poly(displacement, 2) +
poly(horsepower,2) +
poly(weight, 2) +
acceleration +
year +
as.factor(origin), data = auto) summary(fit)
Figure 3: Estimating a Model
In this case, we mainly look into the p-values and the R-squared scores. P-value: It comes with 0 ~ 3 stars on the side, which indicates the level of statistical significance of the variable. We are looking for at least one star to keep the variable in the model. For the p-value itself, we are looking for values that are smaller than 0.05. Note: 2.2e-16 is the default number representing the extremely small number (infinitely close to 0). R-squared: It tells you how much Y is explained by the X in your model, normally we are looking for values that are at least larger than 0.5. The R-squared score will always increase if you add more data to your model Adjusted R-squared: It is an adjusted statistic based on the number of independent variables in the model. The Adjusted R-squared score will always be less than or equal to the R-squared score.
I excluded the variables that are not statistically significant. And the summary of the new model is in Figure 4:
# Exclude the variables that are not statistically significant
fit1=lm(mpg~poly(horsepower,2)+
poly(weight,2)+
year+poly(acceleration,2)+
origin, data = auto)
summary(fit1)
Figure 4: Summary of the New Model
As for now, all the variables are statistically significant.
Diagnostic Analysis and Transformation Test
For the diagnostic analysis, I essentially looked for evidence of whether the model followed a normal distribution.
## diagnostic analysis
par(mfrow=c(2,2))
plot(fit$res~fit$fitted)
hist(fit$res)
qqnorm(fit$res); qqline(fit$res, col = 2,lwd=2,lty=2)
shapiro.test(fit$res)
Figure 5: Res vs. Fitted Plot, Histogram Plot, QQNorm Plot
Figure 6: Shapiro-Wilk Normality Test
Residuals vs. Fitted Plot: I mainly looked for two things in this plot. First, if the plots violate linearity. Second, if the residuals randomly spread and the variance is constant. Histogram: This plot also measures if the residuals follow a normal distribution. A good plot should be a downward bell shape with a peak in the middle. Normal Q-Q Plot: This scatter plot also measures if the residuals follow a normal distribution. A good plot will have the scatters form a line. Shapiro-Wilk Normality Test: If the value of the test is larger than 0.05, the data follows a normal distribution.
Judging from the test results above, I had enough evidence that the model needs a transformation. Then, I applied the boxcox() test.
## boxcox test
library(MASS)
boxcox(mpg~poly(horsepower,2)+
poly(weight,2)+
year+
poly(acceleration,2)+
origin, data = auto)
Figure 7: BoxCox Test
Lambda: This value indicates what kind of transformation the dependent variable needs. For example, if the plot suggests lambda is equal to -2, then we need to take a root square of Y.
In this case, the plot suggests lambda equals 0, which means a log transformation is needed.
## Log Transformation
auto$logmpg=log(auto$mpg)
fit2=lm(logmpg~horsepower+
weight+
year+
poly(acceleration,2)+
origin, data = auto)
summary(fit2)
Figure 8: Summary of the Transformed Model
All the variables were statistically significant.
Figure 9: Diagnostic Plots of the Transformed Model
Figure 10: Shapiro-Wilk Normality Test of the Transformed Model
The results of the diagnostic tests of the transformed model were still not perfect, but a great improvement from the previous model presented.
Conclusion
In this blog, I talked about implementing linear regression analysis in R in three steps: explore the data, estimate a model, and evaluate the results.
For estimating the linear regression model, I talked about the p-value and R-squared score.
I talked about residuals vs. fitted value plot, qqnorm plot, histogram plot, Shapiro-Wilk normality test, and boxcox plot for diagnostic analysis.
Special thanks to Prof. Steve Hillmer, one of my favorite professors at KU business school, who taught me everything about data mining in R.
Related Blogs
Linear Regression Analysis on House Price in Python
Use R to Calculate Boilerplate for Accounting Analysis | https://towardsdatascience.com/linear-regression-analysis-in-r-fdd59295d4a8 | ['Jinhang Jiang'] | 2020-12-08 17:54:46.282000+00:00 | ['Supervised Learning', 'Statistical Analysis', 'R', 'Linear Regression', 'Data Analysis'] |
Collection of thoughts | On main stream media & clickbaiting
The main stream media is under such assault by up and coming forms of media that it has their financial models deteriorate and as their journalistic standards take a hit, as they are losing their fact checkers and their time to be more careful with their stories — They concentrate more on exaggerating the extremes to attract more attention which is also called click-baiting. The technological pressure that is being put on the main stream media is driving extreme political views as means of gathering attention of a shrinking market. Evidently I think this new concept of “social media” media is quite detrimental to us as a society.
As an example we I have observed doing the 44 day war was, bunch of Russian and European-based media outlets were trying to create controversy in their headlines to make sure that there is a debate going on in the comment feeds — commonly known as engagement. Which was an ultimate utilization of the opportunity which has presented itself due to the immense hyperactivity of the two nations on various platforms across the web.
Me personally I have stopped watching the news years ago and I don’t even own a device that transmits regular TV channels to my Screen at home. The only thing I own is an Apple TV which I use to watch Netflix or NBA TV. I sometimes find myself browsing through feeds of news headlines on social media and that’s pretty much it. What I value more is analytics of the news. I use every chance I get when I stumble upon to an article or blogpost which focuses on events that have economic, environmental or geo-political impact on Azerbaijan or onto the global scale of things. This approach keeps me resilient and more well informed about the greater picture, rather than being attached to micro events which happen on daily basis.
The average person opens up Instagram/facebook a 150 (or an average of roughly 55 minutes per each app)times a day. How healthy is that? Or in what way does it affect us? Companies are paying and putting fortunes to understand why we do what we do and how we do it. Our behavior is being studied constantly. So if you are picking up the phone first thing in the morning it wont lead you anywhere good, mentally. You may wonder why is that a problem? I will try to explain using two sources I stumbled upon recently. To better understand how we can simply function better. Best way to do that is to study our mind & body. Thanks to few publishing that I have gone through neuroscience became one of areas I occasionally like to focus my reading on.
We’ve all experienced that magical feeling of being hit with ‘a brainwave’. That moment of newfound clarity, a shift in perspective, or a novel idea. And typically, it seems to appear out of nowhere. In between sips of coffee, while out for a walk, or simply during shower. While brainwaves can be a figure of speech to describe our thoughts, scientists and clinicians can use literal brainwaves, measured on the head, to help understand the functioning of the human brain. As it turns out, the key to having more of these ‘aha’ moments lies in understanding the science behind brainwaves. Neuroscientists have been studying brainwaves — the popular name for the field of electroencephalography — for nearly a century. We need to understand that there are 5 primary brainwave states.
Gamma brainwaves — are the fastest measurable EEG brainwaves and have been equated to ‘heightened perception’, or a ‘peak mental state’ when there is simultaneous processing of information from different parts of the brain. Gamma brainwaves have been observed to be much stronger and more regularly observed in very long-term meditators including Buddhist Monks. Associated state: Heightened perception, learning, problem-solving tasks
Beta Brainwaves — are easiest to detect when we’re busy thinking actively. State: Alert, normal alert consciousness, active thinking
Alpha brainwaves — are some of the most easily observed and were the first to be discovered. They become detectable when the eyes are closed and the mind is relaxed.
They can also often be found during activities such as: Yoga, just before falling asleep, being creative and artistic. State: Physically and mentally relaxed
Theta Brainwaves — According to Professor Jim Lagopoulos of Sydney University, “previous studies have shown that theta waves indicate deep relaxation and occur more frequently in highly experienced meditation practitioners. The source is probably frontal parts of the brain, which are associated with monitoring of other mental processes.” Most frequently, theta brainwaves are strongly detectable when we’re dreaming in our sleep (think, the movie Inception), but they can also be seen during : daydreaming or deep meditation. State: Creativity, insight, dreams, reduced consciousness
Delta Brainwaves — These are the slowest of all brainwaves and are strongest when we are enjoying restorative sleep in a dreamless state. This is also the state where healing and rejuvenation are stimulated, which is why it’s so crucial to get enough sleep each night. State: Sleep, dreaming
Now that we have covered the brainwaves & their definitions(Yes I literally found out about them a week ago). Now lets go further.
Alpha is a state of learning, accelerated learning whilst relaxed awareness. You ever noticed that if somebody’s watching TV or their phone and you are trying to have a conversation with them? They are literally entranced. They don’t usually hear or listen because the what they are seeing on screen is putting them into a state of trance. But that's Alpha state, that is where information is — just going inside your mind. We train people how to learn languages faster and learn facts better by putting them into an alpha state.
I really think understanding of brainwaves should be acknowledged by education systems. School is a great place to learn & precisely “what to learn”. But how many classes were there on “how to learn” or how to think critically, how to solve problems, how to focus, concentrate & make decisions. So if we go back to getting up in the morning & grabbing our phone is the first thing we do. We train our brain for distraction. We cant focus enough on things that matter during the day and so forth. I am not even going to talk about(pre-sleep phone scrolling) screen’s blue ray emission, melatonin production & insomnia. Go do your own research:)
So next time you wake up before reaching out to your phone, do some stretching, plan your day, set some goals, do yoga or whatever. More & more I hear comments like “I am doing social media cleansing” “I am deleting all my apps” “social media detox”. This is all is the result of our inability to wire our brain towards mindfulness. Even me — finding interest in this topic is a necessity, the reason it triggered my curiosity is not because I wanted to seem smarter, no! The reason neuroscience is interesting to me is because I want to solve a lot of my own shit:)
Painful conclusion is that there is a whole generation who is growing up with so much tech & information around. However a lot of people that I know came to certain “ahaaa” moments in life after a certain age not because of their surroundings & what they are being taught. But because of what they lack in life and out of necessity like me.
**PS this ain’t an article, blogpost or a scientific research — my knowledge on this topic is still evolving & I wish to learn more. Thinking out loud & sharing with you. Stay safe!
On Terrorism
Despite widespread public misconception, terrorism has no universal meaning. It’s an entirely subjective label applied in a political context. In fact, the US federal government can’t even agree on the definition of terrorism given the US Congress, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and FBI each operate under the guise of competing and contradictory definitions.
Thus terrorism is defined by policy makers, and not the criminal justice system. In other words, politicians, not judges and courts, determine who is a terrorist, and what is terrorism, and policy makers get their cues and cover from the manner in which terrorism is portrayed in public discourse (media).
So, when a white perpetrator carries out an act of terrorism, public discourse is confined to “thoughts and prayers,” while a demands for policy proposals follow in the wake of an attack carried out by a Muslim.
This distinction has resulted in counterterrorism policies that include invading and occupying Muslim countries, torturing Muslim suspects, Muslim travel bans, profiling and surveilling Muslim communities, and counter-violent-extremism programs that not so subtly depict Islam as a gateway to terrorism.
On the other hand, it’s almost impossible to think of a single piece of legislation or policy that has come into being in response to a white perpetrated terrorist attack, which says something given attacks by white supremacists/nationalists outnumber attacks by Muslims on a scale of 3 to 1, and given 63% of all mass shootings are carried out by whites.
The evidence is clear: when whites carry out acts of terror, we seek to distance ourselves or excuse the attacker, but when a Muslim is the perpetrator, we seek vengeance.
*Note 1 — I have to mention that the trigger of this post IS NOT what happened in Vienna recently. I feel saddened every-time I see people losing their lives & lives of dear ones due to terroristic attacks. My heart aches every-time I find out that innocent people die. My country has been at war with a Terrorist regime since September 27th. Dozens of Azerbaijani civilians were killed by bombings of civilian settlements in numerous Azerbaijani cities.
May the all rest in peace!
*Note 2 — The triggers of me sharing my point of view were originated from — Emmanuel Macron’s recent #islamaphobic statements, Angela Merkel’s statements & Nikol Pashinyan’s continuous attempts to tie the on-going war to religion & Islam. Moreover, for years Media has been portraying Islam as a religion of terror & violence, however Islam is actually religion of PEACE. I have the utmost respect to those who do not practice religion and to those who have faith, regardless of their beliefs & religion. Freedom to practice one’s own religion, doesnt mean belittling other religions.
We are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided. Hoping for glimpses of light in the times of darkness.
On education & remote work
The paradox of education is precisely this — that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. Learning and development can be a powerful way to engage your workforce during the COVID-19 crisis. It signals to your people that you are investing in them and supporting them during this challenging period, while at the same time moving your business forward through development.
When moving to a virtual environment, it is vital that you work by design rather than by default and that you focus on building accountability among learners. This will enable you to create learning experiences virtually that are more engaging and more effective than ever. Working from home has taught a lot of us many significant things & made us appreciate certain things in life more than ever before.
Each of us has a different outtake on self isolation & remote work. Mine is — it has taught me when, how, where I work/be productive best. There is time for family, communication, meetings, followups, analytics & exercise — all I have to do is to be super-organized.
On Nikola Tesla & frequencies
They say mathematics was not invented it was discovered…
Throughout his career, Nikola Tesla has performed a lot of controversial and mysterious experiments. Nikola Tesla was a very strange and mysterious personality. He did many things that the world did not understand. One of the weird details about Nikola Tesla is the fact that he was walking around a building 3 times before actually entering it. He was living in a hotel and his room number was 3 or any other number divisible by 3. The great scholar was obsessed with number 3. However, it seems that Nikola Tesla had an obsession with the combination of numbers 3–6–9. “The key to unraveling the secrets of the universe lies in the study of the numbers 3, 6 and 9. They are extremely important, they contain the true splendor of the world! “- claimed Nikola.
The inventor understood that not a single scientist invented anything, he only discovered what was created by higher forces. Not people came up with mathematics, the rule of the golden ratio, geometric formulas, they only described the universal laws of nature. The Universe speaks to us in the language of numbers. At any point 2 + 1 = 3, and 2 + 2 = 4. All patterns apply to any point in our galaxy and millions of others. Surprisingly, all life on earth obeys mathematical laws. Life originates in a cell that divides into 2, those into 4, then go 8, 16, 32 and beyond. It is nothing but a binary system of calculus or God’s plan, as the enlightened ones call it.
Vortex mathematics (the law of knowledge and thinking) deduces the pattern 1, 2, 4, 8, 7, 5, 1, 2, 4, 8, 7, 5, 1, 2, 4, 8, 7, 5, 1, 2, 4 … Have you noticed that there are no 3, 6, 9? Modern scientists suggest that these are vectors of the fourth dimension, the existence of which Tesla tried to prove all his life (the theory of the ether, studying the motion of electromagnetic pulses in an invisible field). Here lies the key to the secret energy of high dimension, the access to which the scientist found. Tesla said then that these numbers 3–6–9 are very important and that on our planet there are some energy points related to these numbers.
Beyond the Patterns — Lets take an example: 1 × 2 = 2; 2 × 2 = 4; 4 × 2 = 8; 8 × 2 = 16, which means 1 + 7 = 8; 8 × 2 = 16; 16 × 2 = 32. It turns out that 3 + 2 = 5. The model 1, 2, 4, 8, 7, 5, 1, 2 looms … Here again, there is no mention of 3, 6 and 9. They go beyond simple templates!
Even the ancient Egyptians knew that 9 is a symbol of enlightenment. Going to the pyramid complex in Giza, we find that there are exactly 3 large structures, they clearly display the position of the stars in the Orion belt, then we see 3 small pyramids.
“And to be able to find out the secrets of the universe, you should think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration”
On becoming a better version of yourself
Ask yourself if 3 years from now if they were going to do a study on me and come back with a report on the kind of person I was, the way I treated other people, how people talked about me and my reputation and my position in the hearts and minds of others, what words would i want them to use, of all the words they could use what would be the one word that would help you more than anything else in your field? Its really a work of brilliance to pick a word that would be your leading attribute, what word should people use to describe your brand, the next step is asking yourself what could i be doing from now on so that people think of me like this all the time? Remember brand is a promise you make — is saying that if you interact with me, get involved with me and so on this is the kind of person that you will get and experience. Says Brian Tracy.
Personal brand or a reputation is built for so many years and consistency is the key part of it. Otherwise positive reputation can be fatally damaged in a matter of seconds. However in my experience in many occasions I have observed that the person who is trying to recreate a perception or a expectation of a promise(brand) does not cast a genuine reflection of ones self. What I mean by that, in fact it lacks authenticity.
Cynthia Thompson the author of a book Ive recently read and would not rate it that high to be honest, surprisingly blew my mind with a simple sentence. “Listen to your natural instincts and desires. Don’t adapt or mold yourself to be the “next” anyone. Unlike brands that are desperately trying to become more like people and copying trends to do so, you are already a person; your brand should focus on being authentic instead of a manufactured version of what you think everyone else wants you to be”. Consequently without trying to discredit the statements above I would like to lead you on to the following principles.
Your habits, daily routines, self development and actions all have to be aligned with your identity and your goals. Although the perception of you out in the public matters and definitely adds value, it is not the core issue.
Imagine two circles, (taken from 7 habits book)
Circle of concern and inside of the first circle is the circle of control.
Circle of concern (the outer circle) includes; the weather, the economy, the news, what other people think of you, political views of others.
Circle of control (the inner circle) includes; your habits, skills, education, daily routine, businesses you start etc
Reactive people focus on circle of concern, a lot of energy is wasted to reacting to issues that they cant control.
Proactive people invest their time, focus and energy on issues that are within their control. Which enlarges the inner circle leaving the outer one minimized.
You should move along your professional and personal life path with integrity and authenticity. If you think & act proactively it will eventually bring out the appealing authentic identity of yours and if that persona’s actions are aligned with his goals, then you will eventually end up on the right track.
On new year resolutions
Before you get all onto new year-new me bandwagon express “choo-choo”, I have decided to make new-me approach public. Because it will directly impact my purpose of reaching my objective. I used this Sunday evening to re-evaluate a few things and made a few changes. Usually sundays are the days when i usually make my best & worst decisions, so fingers crossed with this one.
So I took a glass of water, put paco de lucia playlist on the background and put up a neat spreadsheet with a label “Rashad in 5 years”. Sadly I will not be sharing the content of the spreadsheet but I will further explain the importance of the approach.
SO the bad news is? It is more likely that new year’s resolution might not pan out the way you planned. Because 60 percent of people abandon their resolutions within first six months, however 25% percent of people abandon them within a short 7 days.
AND the good news? You can always make a resolution to improve yourself or go after an achievement no matter what time of the year it is.
If resolutions don’t work, and you want to take your to-do lists to the next level, get serious about goal-setting. Psychology professor Dr. Gail Matthews, led a study on goal-setting with nearly 270 participants. The results? You are 42 % more likely to achieve your goals if you write them down. So that's what I exactly did today, I would rather be in 42 percentile TBH.
Writing your goals down not only forces you to get clear on what, exactly, it is that you want to accomplish, but doing so plays a part in motivating you to complete the tasks necessary for your success. The process of putting your goals on paper or a spreadsheet will force you to strategize, to ask questions about your current progress, and to brainstorm your plan of attack. Plus you get to visualize the ecosystem/life you want to build around yourself. Furthermore making your goals or approach public imposes more commitment onto your goal coz of the potential “ictimai qinag” (judgement)
This practice of writing down goals is not unheard of in the business community. In fact, some of the biggest entrepreneurial successes are very specific in the way in which they write their goals down. Grant Cardone has a special trick: he writes his goals down twice a day — once in the morning, and then once again at night. He explains,
“I want to wake up to it. I want to go to sleep to it and I want to dream with it…I want to write my goals down before I go to sleep at night because they are important to me, they are valuable to me and I get to wake up to them again tomorrow.” If, like Cardone, you want to start “stretching yourself beyond good and mediocre and average and the way everybody else thinks,” then project into your future. Just make sure you grab a pen first.
On short ones & quotes that I love | https://medium.com/atl-group/collection-of-thoughts-f3605d2c62cb | ['Rashad Mirzayev'] | 2021-02-26 13:41:45.795000+00:00 | ['Self Development', 'Thoughts And Feelings'] |
When teachers’ unions take action, schools become safer for everyone. | By madeleine kennedy-macfoy, Education International and Rex Fyles, Gender at Work
Gender-based violence in and around schools poses big challenges to education unions and its members. Because everyone in and around schools — teachers, students, education support personnel — can be both perpetrator and victim of such violence, school-related gender-based violence (SRGBV) is a violation of both the right to quality education, and the right to decent working conditions. The persistence of gender-based violence in classrooms, schools and the institutions that support them undermines the quality of education, depriving learners of their right to a safe education and preventing educators from performing at their best.
Unions are uniquely placed to mobilize vast numbers of teachers and education support personnel towards achieving shared goals. The unions’ work is funded almost entirely from membership dues, which allows them to serve the interests of their members with autonomy and accountability. Education unions have existed for decades and in addition to labour rights, have shaped important facets of human history– notably in the struggle for national independence in many countries. Suffice it to say, education unions are important social actors.
This 16 Days Campaign, we want to highlight the critical role that education unions and their members play in ending gender-based violence in and around schools.
In recent years, education unions have made enduring commitments to address SRGBV. Education International (EI) is the world’s largest federation of unions, representing 32 million education employees in 400 organisations in 170 countries and territories worldwide. In 2015, the 7th EI World Congress adopted a resolution on SRGBV, calling on its member organisations to take action to end SRGBV in their respective contexts. In the same year, the new iteration of the global EI Gender Equality Action Plan (2015–2019) included an explicit reference to working to end SRGBV. The 8th EI World Congress (2019) adopted a resolution on corporal punishment. These internal policy actions expressed a clear mandate and helped to create an enabling environment for EI and its member organisations to prioritise addressing gender-based violence in and around educational settings all over the world.
The Education Unions Take Action to End School-related Gender-based Violence programme offers a compelling example of how education unions are putting these commitments into action. The programme was built on a deep collaboration between Education International (EI), the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI) and Gender at Work, and nine EI member organisations in seven countries (Ethiopia, the Gambia, Kenya, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Uganda and Zambia), with funding from Global Affairs Canada. The aim of the programme was to put teachers, education personnel and education unions at the forefront of efforts to end school-related gender-based violence.
The programme was designed around two main pillars. The first focused on enhancing the ability of participating unions and its members to systematically test, adapt, and disseminate innovative approaches to addressing school-related gender-based violence, at multiple levels, within their contexts. The second pillar of the programme focused on advocacy, policy dialogue and knowledge sharing activities with a broad range of actors and stakeholders at the national, regional, and global levels. This helped to consolidate the enabling environment and ensured that education unions would be supported to continue their work to end SRGBV beyond the life of the programme.
© Gender at Work
Over four years (2016–2019), Education Unions Take Action reached more than 100,000 teachers and education support personnel across the seven countries. It enabled them to develop effective and sustainable approaches to addressing gender-based violence and reshape policy dialogue on school-related gender-based violence in global fora (including within the Global Working Group to End School-related Gender-based Violence).
The programme used gender action learning processes within each union to empower union members and leaders to challenge gender power dynamics in classrooms, schools and education institutions through experiential, peer-based learning techniques. Methods that proved particularly effective within education unions included:
Drawing on the power of storytelling to deepen participants’ understanding of complex issues and build confidence, trust and empathy in addressing them;
Honouring participants’ lived experience to connect with their values and personal motivations, by cultivating reflective spaces that allow people to learn from their own actions and the experiences of others over time;
Using mind-body-spirit practices to reveal not only “the facts” about SRGBV but also how they feel and what they really mean to teachers and learners, women and men, girls and boys;
Empowering and freeing people to take action as they saw fit within their own lives and spheres of influence.
The combination of these approaches enabled participants to ‘find their voice’ and identify oppressive social norms in their work and their lives. They discovered new ways to foster more equitable attitudes, behaviours and relationships around gender within the unions and in classrooms.
© Gender at Work
The Education Unions Take Action programme demonstrated that when union members confront SRGBV in their own settings, they gain a deeper understanding and are motivated to challenge other dimensions of gender inequalities, including beliefs, behaviors, policies and norms. The contribution of the union leadership and staff responsible for coordinating the unions’ work on gender equality and persevering in challenging established norms and practices cannot be understated. Leadership, political will and hard work were central to the success and sustainability of this work by the unions.
The approaches and outcomes of the programme are now available to a broader audience through a series of stories written by participants, and in a document detailing teacher union strategies to end school-related gender-based violence. An alarming increase in rates of gender-based violence has been recorded in all regions during COVID-19 related lockdowns. As schools reopen, students and teachers will be dealing with trauma from abuse experienced within or outside of the home during the lockdown. The lessons, tools and strategies from the Education Unions Take Action programme have never been more needed by educators and education support personnel.
In sharing their experiences and insights, union leaders and members, teachers and support staff and the organizations that support them have inspired others to take further action in the global effort to eliminate gender-based violence from schools and education institutions. Now more than ever, every effort must be made to ensure every child is safe and secure at school and able to access quality education. | https://medium.com/ungei-blog/when-teachers-unions-take-action-schools-become-safer-for-everyone-69ac85cfa039 | ["Un Girls' Education Initiative"] | 2020-12-07 11:15:07.980000+00:00 | ['Gender Based Violence', 'Teachers', 'Social Norms', 'Teacher Unions', 'Education'] |
Learning 3D modeling in 14 weeks | At that point, I felt confident that I could create a low-poly model of almost anything I want in Blender.
3. Cultivate 3D Sense at Every Opportunity
Another important piece of this journey was cultivating my 3D imagination at every opportunity, because I had none at the beginning.
My ability to understand and imagine things in 3D was so bad that I sucked at 3D games for my entire life. It was embarrassing when my friends urged me to try World of Warcraft. 75% of the time I was asking “Where am I?” “Where are we going?” “Wait, where are the enemies coming from?” and “No…” because I died again. The other 25%? I was just spacebar following someone. At least that was easy :) As a UX designer, I can easily see 2D designs in my head before I put down the pixels. Not being able to do the same in 3D was frustrating.
So, what did I do? Deliberate practice, but in fun ways.
The first thing I picked up is Minecraft. It’s a 3D game in its simplest format. Exploring caves and abandoned mine shafts, finding my way in roofed forests and ravines, I slowly grew from having to constantly cheat and check coordinates to having an idea about where I was going in winding tunnels.
The other thing I did was signing up for a pottery class at my local community college. Physically holding clay in my hands and doing 3D modeling in real world gave me a fresh perspective, and the relatively slow pace gave me time to think.
I now have a way better ability to see objects in 3D in my mind. And interestingly, it also helped my drawing-I had little real training and used to struggle with perspective a lot, but now that I’m better at imagining objects in 3D and turning them around in my mind, it really helps.
4. Enter Competitions
Now the last point, the secret ingredient: enter competitions.
We all need motivation to keep us going, and competition provides a clear objective, a clear timeline, and an opportunity to put our skills to the test. It’s especially fun to join as a newbie since you’ve got nothing to lose; and if by sheer chance you win something, that’s great external validation. Even if you lose, you will still have some really polished pieces, probably the best work you can do at the time.
I joined three Sketchfab competitions as I was learning 3D modeling.
I. My Ideal Planet (Voxel)
The first competition I entered was around week 06. I was lucky that a voxel challenge dropped while I was deep in MagicaVoxel.
The brief was about creating one’s ideal planet in voxel, and that immediately led me to thinking about how the little prince traveled to many planets. What’s the most ideal planet? Definitely the scenario in which he returns to his planet, with the little sheep in the box. The sunset planet was the only competition, but that would be relying on a sunset backdrop to work, not the modeling itself.
So I started, day and night, tackling a way larger canvas than I ever had before. To make the composition more interesting, I put the little prince at a diagonal angle, and that took a lot of trial and error. The little prince and his little sheep were the only two living characters I’ve ever modeled. I also picked up more MagicaVoxel to Sketchfab exporting skills along the way.
Although there are a lot of imperfections (my biggest regret is I put the volcano in the dead center of the orb, which makes it too uptight), my hard work paid off, and it got both an honorable mention and a staff’s pick!
II. Utopia (Low-poly)
The second challenge dropped around week 13. It was about creating futuristic utopian assets under 2k triangles, which was perfect for my skill level. I wouldn’t have a chance in many Sketchfab challenges. Having a limit on the number of triangles leveled the playing field a bit for me.
I took the opportunity to learn simple animation in Blender, and again, just so I’d have a slightly better chance at winning, I spent more time on lighting and rendering in those challenges than in my weekly room practices.
Here’s the final rendering:
It didn’t win me anything, unfortunately, but that’s expected. Even without any prize, it’s a very nice piece that I created towards the end of my journey, and I adore the end result.
III. Medieval Fantasy Asset Pack (Low Poly)
The last challenge, and the real proof of how far I’ve got in 14 weeks’ time, was the medieval game assets challenge. This is a highly competitive challenge, with far higher prizes (10x monetary value) than Sketchfab’s typtical challenge. I know I had basically no chance to win (take a look at the winning projects -I really had zero chance), but it was such a great concept.
I am a huge fan of Dungeons & Dragons, and I was scoping out my capstone project for my VR nanodegree at Udacity at the time. I saw the opportunity to morph the two projects into one and create the assets for a medieval-themed room escape game.
What’s more, it just so happens that the Udemy course I bought has an entire chapter on game asset packs. It’s like I kindled 3D-modeling-related things here and there, and they all led to this serendipity.
So I got to work. From modeling each component, to setting up a grid system so both external walls and roofs as well as internal decors and furniture were modular (my knowledge of design systems also played a role here), and then on to cycle rendering and baking lights… It’s amazing how much I learned just to do well in one challenge.
Beautiful rendering, lights, shadows, and textures. Definitely the best work I could have produced with my skill set.
That’s not all: because I spent the time and made everything modular, I don’t just have this one room. I have components that would allow me to make many medieval rooms: | https://uxdesign.cc/learning-3d-modeling-in-14-weeks-855425b1304 | ['Samantha Zhang'] | 2021-01-22 12:24:38.628000+00:00 | ['Design', '3d', 'UX', 'Learning', 'UI'] |
What is an HRA and How Can It Help You Control Healthcare Costs? | What is an HRA and How Can It Help You Control Healthcare Costs? KindHealth Apr 9·4 min read
You may have heard of a HSA, FSA, and even HDP when it comes to health insurance, but there’s another acronym you may not be as familiar with: HRA.
HRAs, or health reimbursement arrangements, are becoming more and more popular as healthcare costs continue to skyrocket.
While these types of arrangements have been around for decades, they weren’t formally defined by the IRS until 2002. New types of HRAs have been added as recently as 2020 as a way to help employers and consumers better control their healthcare costs.
What is an HRA?
An HRA is an employer-funded benefit used to reimburse employees for medical expenses. In some cases, this includes health insurance premiums and deductibles. These types of plans can be offered in addition to, or in place of, traditional group insurance plans. Health reimbursement arrangements are touted as a great way for both businesses and their employees to save money and control costs.
Unlike traditional group health insurance, HRAs can be set up to allow employees to shop for their own health insurance plans instead of opting into a plan selected by the employer. HRAs can also be set up so employees can use the funds to pay for things that traditional health insurance may not cover.
Types of HRAs
There are several different types of HRAs that may be offered to employees.
Integrated HRA
An integrated HRA must be used alongside a traditional group health insurance plan. This type of health reimbursement arrangement is designed to help employees cover out-of-pocket healthcare costs. Integrated HRAs can be used in place of or as another option alongside health saving accounts (HSAs) and medical flexible spending accounts (FSAs). Employees, however, are not eligible to contribute to their HRA.
Individual Coverage HRA
The individual coverage HRA allows employers to use health reimbursement arrangements in place of group health insurance. With this type of HRA, employees have a set amount of money they can use to shop for individual healthcare coverage. This gives them the flexibility to choose a plan that works best for their needs and budget.
Excepted Benefit HRA (EBHRA)
The excepted benefit HRA (EBHRA) is a health reimbursement arrangement that covers out-of-pocket medical expenses and premiums for healthcare costs that aren’t normally covered by insurance like dental, vision, or COBRA premiums.
Qualified Small Employer HRA (QSEHRA)
A qualified small employer HRA (QSEHRA) lets employers provide funds to employees to be used for eligible expenses, including insurance premiums. As the name implies, only small employers — those with no more than 50 employees — are eligible to offer a QSEHRA.
How Does an HRA Work?
While there are many types of HRAs, they’re all used by employees in similar ways:
The employer sets the allowance limit — this lets employees know up front how much money is available for them to spend and what they can spend it on.
Employees make purchases or pay for care — employees choose how to spend their money, which could include health insurance premiums, braces, or anything in between. What counts as “qualified” is defined by the employer and the type of HRA they offer.
Employees submit proof of expenses — employees must submit proof of their qualified expense (usually in the form of a receipt) to their employer.
Employers review the expense — the business reviews the employee’s documentation, and if an expense is qualified and includes appropriate documentation, the employer will approve the expense.
Employees are reimbursed — after an expense has been approved, the employee will receive reimbursement. Unlike HSAs or FSAs, there is no money up front. Employees must pay for their expenses to be reimbursed.
The Benefits of HRAs to Employees/Consumers
HRAs have many benefits for both the employer and the employee.
For employees (or consumers), health reimbursement arrangements offer more choices for where and how they get the care they need. Instead of needing to choose from only 2–3 plan options that an employer can provide, the employee is able to shop on insurance marketplaces like KindHealth for the plan that best fits their needs and budget. Individual coverage HRAs allow consumers to choose the health insurance plan, network, and price that works best for them. This type of flexibility lets families choose their doctors and have access to the hospitals and clinics that appeal most to them.
Employees can also use HRAs to save on medical costs without using their personal funds. Many employees choose health reimbursement arrangements to help with budgeting for healthcare expenses because they know at the beginning of the year how much money they will have available to them. They can then use these funds for offsetting deductibles or premiums, or to pay for medical expenses not covered by insurance.
Health reimbursement arrangements are also tax-free to both the consumer and the employer. As long as HRA money is spent on qualified expenses, employees won’t be taxed as funds in HRA accounts don’t count as taxable income.
Tap into the Potential of HRAs with KindHealth
At KindHealth, we’re helping thousands of Americans with traditional or individual health plans get health insurance, save on prescription medications, and reduce their medical expenses. Get a free quote today!
We’re building technology that will seamlessly integrate with any health reimbursement arrangement. This technology will help employers and consumers take advantage of the untapped potential of their HRAs. Soon, the growing number of people with HRAs will have the opportunity to use the convenient technology and learn more about their healthcare options. | https://medium.com/@kindhealthatx/what-is-an-hra-and-how-can-it-help-you-control-healthcare-costs-20385a2508c9 | [] | 2021-04-09 21:00:35.221000+00:00 | ['Insurance Brokers', 'Saving Money', 'Health Insurance In Usa', 'Healthcare'] |
Quarashi Network | Review:
The Quarashi Network Platform fills in as the essential section point for digital currency reception, with the Insight Network offering great data for beginners, master crypto-devotees, and brokers. New material, nitty gritty news inclusion, top to bottom surveys, special meetings, and more are for the most part accessible.
The Quarashi stage is a B2B2C blockchain innovation acknowledgment door that fills in as a characteristic section highlight genuine digital currency applications and foundations. We associate the present organizations and monetary foundations to the advantages of blockchain innovation, permitting them to rapidly and effectively change into a crypto economy.
Quarashi Network:
Quarashi Platform, as the passage highlight blockchain innovation, is the answer for a considerable lot of the inquiries that new clients have. It’s jam-loaded with fundamental elements that simplify it to explore the universe of digital currency. Quarashi empowers speedy and simple admittance to cryptographic forms of money. It is a stage intended to be open to both crypto tenderfoots and veterans. Everything spins around a client who interfaces with an assortment of administrations on the site. It fills in as a connection between the Quarashi Network and other outer frameworks, permitting you to move digital money as well as an assortment of normal administrations.
The Quarashi Network is the world’s initially decentralized Blockchain stage for bitcoin reception! The Platform offers a climate that empowers everybody to profit from blockchain innovation, the most modern innovation on the planet. Each adopter will be welcomed with a plenty of choices.
Vision:
Quarashi Network is an inviting climate where anyone might turn into an individual from the environment for regular digital money use to accomplish standard acknowledgment. It’s a spot to encounter the current computerized world, read the freshest news about blockchain innovation, find out with regards to the accomplishments of digital currencies, and read mindful viewpoints from Quarashi Team individuals, in addition to other things. Quarashi Network is a stage that furnishes you with every one of the assets you really want to purchase digital forms of money. Through trader reception, instruction, and hatchery administrations, we need to speed up the utilization of blockchain innovation. Quarashi is a digital money and blockchain innovation worked for customary and decentralized applications, just as easy to understand and connecting with encounters. We imagine that everybody ought to have the option to utilize the new innovation that we create with straightforwardness and advantage from blockchains.
What precisely is Quarashi? It’s a digital currency stage that simplifies it to move, store, convert, and trade a few of the market’s most famous cryptographic forms of money. Regardless of whether you’re new to cryptographic forms of money or a prepared blockchain proficient, Quarashi simplifies it for anyone to find what’s conceivable with our advanced resources.
Mission:
The Quarashi Network is a blockchain innovation stage that permits clients to get to all significant digital forms of money and administrations. The stage, which is quite possibly the most remarkable and extensible computerized cash frameworks available today, promise to move the "Following Evolution in Digital Currency." It was made by the absolute most keen and most experienced cerebrums working in advanced money innovation today. The Quarashi Platform is presently accessible. An unquestionable requirement have for blockchain innovation clients, digital money veterans, and incomers. A clear monetary access to digital money. The Quarashi Network, an organization intended for blockchain innovation adopters, digital currency experienced, and incomers, will present to you a fortune.
Quarashi is a blockchain innovation aficionado, cryptographic money dealer, and incomer. We will use the Quarashi Platform to instruct individuals on decentralized applications, bitcoin wallets, mining, trades, and different themes. This is the spot to go for all of your QSR necessities. The Quarashi Network goes about as an extension to bitcoin acknowledgment. It fills in as a passage to the Quarashi Platform, a blockchain innovation environment for both experienced and novices.
Conclusion:
Quarashi Network's front-end innovation permits both B2B and B2C customers to involve it for showcasing, publicizing, and other special prerequisites.
The Quarashi Network fills in as an extension to bitcoin acknowledgment. The stage gives an assortment of apparatuses to engage clients, whether or not they are new to innovation or have past information. Quarashi Platform is an organization able door for crypto organizations that will utilize bitcoin as their establishment. Content adaptation, utilization of online media with a solid accentuation on security, safeguarding of local area information and individual data, huge information examination for further developed client experience, exploration and advancement potential in the blockchain innovation field with part coordinated effort The Quarashi stage, the web of trust, and bitcoin acknowledgment are presented.
The Quarashi Network is an entrance expected to teach and present the advantages of cryptographic money reception, just as a wellspring of data and administrations like news and monetary exhortation. The Quarashi Network gives admittance to cryptographic money market cap information, an online blockchain traveler, computerized cash blending for expanded obscurity, the option to sell digital currencies transparently on the Quarashi Network, and an inside utility symbolic environment.
Hi, and welcome to the Quarashi Network. This is the place where you will track down us We are continually endeavoring to make the best conceivable experience for our customers by means of advancement and receptiveness.
Informations Quarashi Network:
WebSite: https://quarashi.network/
Telegram: https://t.me/quarashinetworkofficial
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/73241267
Twitter: https://twitter.com/QuarashiN/media
Author
BTT: Uzair11
BTT Profile Link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3164524
Wallet address: 0xF7AB80084E1aCa2b2e2D636B593d796768270002 | https://medium.com/@uzairmoti11/quarashi-network-aa5321163d5a | [] | 2021-12-29 11:21:36.749000+00:00 | ['Qua', 'Bsc'] |
Medium Curation | Below are some of the most frequently asked question about Medium curation.
General Medium Curation Questions with In-Depth Article Responses
Quick Answers to Questions About Curation
What do the following messages about my article’s curation status mean?
If your story is not curated, and you mouse over the question-mark icon, next to the text “Not distributed in topics” you will see one of two messages:
The first message means you were not selected for curation after an actual human read your article. Some people on Medium would say this means you are not in “curation jail.”
Curators did not select this story for distribution, but it will be shared with followers. Read our curation guidelines to see what curators look for.
The second message means your story was automatically passed over, and is what many on Medium refer to as being in curation jail:
Our curators were not able to review this story for distribution in topics due to high volume. This story will still be shared with followers.
How do I know if my article was selected for curation?
You can find your story’s curation and distribution status on the story stats page. You will see at the top of the page whether your story has been reviewed and selected for distribution (and in what topics). To visit your story stats page, go to your writer stats page and click “Details” for a particular story. You should also receive an email letting you know your story has been distributed to various topics.
Do I have to tag my articles in specific topics to ensure curation?
No, you do not. Regardless of what you tag your articles, Medium curators will distribute them to readers of curation eligible topics, as they see fit.
My article was curated but did not receive many views — why is this?
Curation does not guarantee a large amount of views. While it is generally helpful, sometimes curation is just the catalyst for something bigger. For instance, your article on your tech company may get curated in technology, which by itself only gives it a couple hundred views, but then your article is notice by editors in The Startup, you become an approved writer and add your article, and it receives thousands of views.
Can my article be curated in multiple categories?
Yes, your article can be curated in multiple topics.
If I submit to a publication can my story still be curated? Or better, will submitting to a publication lower my odds of curation?
No, submitting your article to a Medium publication does not harm your chances of curation at all. Anecdotally, it might even help.
Does an article always need to be posted behind the paywall in order to be eligible for any payment at all?
Yes, in order to receive payment, and article must be in the Partner Program which places it behind the paywall.
Will including a Call-To-Action (CTA) at the end of my article destroy my chances of being curated? | https://medium.com/blogging-guide/medium-curation-356215bba1fe | ['Casey Botticello'] | 2020-05-30 03:16:39.428000+00:00 | ['Curation', 'Articles', 'Curator', 'Medium', 'Writing'] |
Why being “Dad” has made me become a better UX designer | I write this entry awkwardly on my laptop resting on my knees. More than 10 years ago I did the same and I wrote a love letter (via email, after all, I am almost a millennial) to the woman of my life. Today I do the same with a piece of her next to me on the couch. He’s a year and a half and he is stuffed with snot and drools and I love him dearly. And no, he’s not the only one, the other waits for me in an hour with a smile and hunger at the school door. Yes, we are a brave couple with two beautiful, empathetic and unpredictable children. And this is where the reason for this little article lies.
When I wrote 10 years ago to the girl who changed everything, I only thought about having her close and in my professional future. I imagined myself sitting on a throne of Swarovski glass while caressing a white cat and dedicated myself to tour the world giving thoughtful and brilliant lectures on design, creativity, and innovation. Yes, the ego of a graduate in Fine Arts knows no limits.
I have always liked technology and communication. I am a regular consumer of all kinds of blogs and publications about gadgets, software, trends, and design. I love creativity, good ideas, and simple things, so my love for what later would be called UX was a foregone conclusion. Yes, I was one of those people who were already UX designer before we decided to adopt the term on this side of the world… With this background, I forgot about the throne thing quickly but not about dedicating myself to my passion. I took advantage of every opportunity that was put before me to study, deepen and investigate. I drew a lot, I studied a lot, I asked a lot, I had a real nerve on several occasions and I left a lot of cash in training… but it turns out that I would receive the most useful lessons from my two snots of 4 and 1 year and a half that make me literally crazy. Come on, not even Nielsen.
Lesson 1. Design for the immediate.
Children are not patient. What’s more, patience was invented by someone who was never a child. If a child is hungry, he has it suddenly and without remedy. Improvise a meal with two macaroni and an egg, create a robot that bleeds fried tomato and with a bread brain. Your target is that. Do not wait to cook a paella because they will devour you or you will end up giving them pizza to keep them quiet.
Your designs are for now. They must respond for the moment they happen and they must serve for haste and impatience. Do not expect your user to be enchanted by your wonderful CTA’s or delight in a Nike style parallax featuring the latest Lebron Air fucker shoes. Sometimes it happens, but you have to design for what happens at the moment, to get your user to achieve what he wants in the shortest possible time. Our user is not always at home or on the couch enjoying our products; many times they are inside the car, on the subway or walking along the street avoiding dog poops. Let’s make it easy.
If they want to consult a train schedule they have to be able to do it before they miss the train to arrive on time.
Yes. Children and users want everything now and quickly.
Lesson 2. Stay updated.
Raise your hand to those who know Ladybug. Let’s see … few hands I see or few daddies. Yes, this seems like a truism, but sometimes we believe that we already know everything, after all, we have all been children and we believe that we know how they are. Captain Tsubasa and Dragon Ball are a hit, right? Well, no.
Now Ladybug, Paw Patrol, Dinotrux, Super Wings, … are the trend and they have nothing to do with what we saw. If I want to speak the same language as my children and their friends, I have to swallow Miraculous Ladybug and the wonderful world of Ben & Holly. Well, in our professional field is the same. After studying for a master’s degree you have to look for another one. Never stop reading. Add blogs to your bookmarks and devour books and case studies as if there was no tomorrow. Yes, we never stop learning. We have to continue talking like our users and as our customers.
Miraculous: Les Aventures de Ladybug et Chat Noir. A French-Japanese-Korean series. WTF.
I am sorry. It is the price to pay for dedicating ourselves to something totally intrinsic to the human being; that it never stops changing.
Tip: Don’t just read about UX or product design. Sometimes we get inbred and miss out on the wonderful lessons we can learn outside of our comfort zones. In videogames, in films, in Hawkings’ books… there are solutions to problems that we may encounter long afterwards. True Stroy.
Lesson 3. Optimize your design processes.
This goes without saying. I have never considered myself very organized until now. Since I have the beasts in my life I have realized that the time that stops while you brush your teeth can be an eternity in the eyes of your year and a half child and create absolute chaos.
I can proudly say that I am able to wake up my gnomes at 8:20 and arrive at the school gate at 9:04 with both dressed, stomach full and, sometimes, combed. The secret is the optimization of daily processes. While I wash my teeth, I wash one’s face and the other pees. Then we change. Another is brushing his teeth and I take advantage of the fact that the other is without pants, to dress him and put on his uniform while he is still removing his scythe. Breakfast? Easy, the milk with cereals is ready 10 minutes before that, and the warm feeding bottle 15. At the same time, one, two, three. Breakfast, with Ladybug in the background and Ed Sheeran in the car on the way to school. Now I can say that I am organized.
With design? Well, imagine. Easy peasy after that. The processes are natural, chained and smooth as silk. Wasting your time watching YouTube? Are you kidding? I already forgot about that.
Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash
Lesson 4. Play as a team.
Do I do everything alone? Never. I’m a team player. What’s more, I perform two or three times better as a team, and it’s the same for all people. If you like to play lonely as a guru you are wrong; working as a team everything is better, more effective and more fun.
Mom is the one who best plays with puzzles. I am the one who plays fights and changes diapers. Tales are my thing and the bathroom hers. We both help with supper and we alternate on the song to sleep. Laughter is shared, obviously.
In UX this is key for me. Crew. The processes are complex, long and need a lot of passion. It is necessary to do everything as a team so those good products come out. This was always clear to me and now more than ever. All together (like a Power Rangers!!!!).
UX team in action
Lesson 5. A good story before going to sleep.
Storytelling became fashionable a few years ago in this business. Really? The three little pigs and the wolf exist almost since the Stone Age. A good story engages, keeps us attentive and makes us dream and believe; motivates, teaches and seduces us.
When I studied advertising creativity we were taught to cheat the brain and hook the consumer with stories to strain our brand. Now I’m on the good side. My stories serve to captivate the attention, but not to sell anything, to accompany my user to the place he wants to reach. My children to the land of Neverland, to the moon or to the T-Rex cave; the users to the option they need, to search in the middle of the chaos or simply to captivate. Stories are sexy. If you are a good storyteller you will be a good UX and you will also hook up more. I promise.
Practice your storytelling and test it non-stop with your most demanding users. Mines are 4 and a year and a half.
Photo by Picsea on Unsplash
Lesson 6. Help him get up.
The parks are filled with hyper-motivated moms and dads with well-learned Montessori lessons so when a kid falls we ask him to get up on his own. “Get up darling, nothing happens”. The child looks at us with glazed eyes and bewildered as if he was thinking “I have fallen heartless father and it does not matter to you”. In the end, he gets up alone with a big smile of victory helped by the cry of daddy or mommy “VERY GOOD SONNY BOY”. All this is great. But it’s not worth it. Not always. If my baby falls I pick him up, look at him, kiss the tears and I clench him in my arms. There will be time to make him stand up alone. Well with our users the same. If they fall, let’s help him get up. You have missed the password and the page turns red, or you cannot link the Bluetooth device to your smartphone… whatever. Let’s help him by saying what happens, how to solve it and helping him get up: “Your password must be alphanumeric with a capital letter at least”. “Don’t remember your username? Click here to help you remember it.” “Approach your mobile device and activate Bluetooth for 5 seconds.”
If they fall, we help them get up. The reason why they have fallen is already in the next lesson they gave me.
Lesson 7. Put railings.
“You’re going to fall if you keep goofing around on the stairs.”
To prevent them from falling we must prevent the error. Remind your user that the password has to contain numbers and letters before they enter it. Constantly communicate what is going to happen and do not leave them alone. Accompany them on the road and when they fall, hold them tightly. They will not stumble and we will get them to smile at the same time. With children is the same. ;)
Photo by Anete Lūsiņa on Unsplash
Lesson 8. Disney Channel goes in the 8.
The usual. For them, it has always been that way. Star against the forces of evil plays in the 8. The Umii Zoomii on Amazon TV in dad’s PlayStation. If I change any of that, they go crazy. Well with our users the same. The logo of the header always takes us to the home page and the magnifying glass means to search. Do not invent and follow what you have learned, the patterns. Easy and simple. Keep it simple, stupid!.
Lesson 9. Recognizing is better than memorizing.
You are right. Making use of patterns is the best we can do. My children know that after their bath they eat dinner and then sleep. Always the same; if this changes they detect chaos, they get lost, they do not know what goes on and they start to destroy things (at least my kids). It is the same with our users and patterns is our best ally. Users recognize paths they have already travelled on websites or similar apps, they do it without realizing it because they recognize the pattern and do it naturally. “How easy it is to use this APP” they exclaim if we do it right. Ovation for the Service Design team.
What if I want to invent a new super cool menu that is activated by turning the device? Well unless you work for Google in the next version of Android you have it difficult bro. Your users will have to learn how to handle it the first time, and the second, and the third time when they already know it they will forget after a while… frustration, chaos, and destruction.
Lesson 10. The swings for older children are for older children.
My little son wants to do the same as the eldest, but I tell you, he’s barely walking and he wants to cross a bridge. Sorry, no.
With our products is the same. The swings for older children are for older children, and those for babies are optimized for them. With our products and services the same; focus on them for greater efficiency of use, think of the user and the business model and optimize everything you can use without losing sight of both of the two actors. It’s so easy once you understand it…
Lesson 11. The unpredictable becomes possible.
“Don’t worry, he is not going to fall over there, it’s impossible. His head doesn’t fit there”.
I tell you what happened? Sure enough, ten minutes of crying and a humongous bump on the forehead.
Many times we think the user will never do this or that. Lol! Well, if you think like this, you still have a long way to go write UX consultant expert and motherfucker service designer on Linkedin. When you design a process (with your Customer Journey I hope) turn it over a thousand times, look where it’s going, where it comes from, what happens if this or that … and surprise, all the mushrooms that appear to you (that’s what I call the unforeseen and unlikely) will make you think about that screen, that process or your KO pages. Yes, you will sweat putting handrails in your designs.
An advice? Test your designs with users one and a thousand times. Only then will you find all the forest mushrooms.
Photo by Providence Doucet on Unsplash
Lesson 12. Trees are always the same.
If my children draw a tree, they always do the same: a trunk and a cloud of leaves. And the sun with its eyes and charming smile. I love my children’s drawings and icons.
Since Susan Kare designed the delete icon as a trash can, there is no S.O. that does not use that design for that process of eliminating something (yes, Linux also my geek friend). Well, that’s the way it is. Red stop. Green forward. Yellow danger … So yes, icons are a universal language but beware, those that are common or that have remained as a standard; the icons that you have designed in your home for your website and that only you understand will need literals to help anyone who is not you. So if you need to draw a tree, draw it as my children, everyone will understand the first time. :)
Evolution of the Mac trash
Lesson 13. Are you sad daddy?
Empathy, empathy, and empathy. So until bored. That is the key to your children and yourself being able to understand all situations, understand and be able to comfort or give the right answers.
My children are empathic. It is a talent that is common in my small family and that I believe is more valuable than a mountain of gold. If they do something that I think is wrong, I get sad. I drag my nose to the ground, bend my shoulders and stay still and crestfallen. My children see me and quickly understand that my father is sad, and just in case, they ask me. I certify it and then they try to do something to restore my smile. Sometimes they ask me for forgiveness, sometimes they pick up what they have thrown away and sometimes when things do not go with them, they grab my head and squeeze me as I do with them. And then I smile, how not to do it, fuck.
Well, friend, this lesson is the one that you have to take to your product. Comfort your user and try to anticipate their frustrations and frustrations. Empathy is your main weapon in this design of user experiences. Put yourself in their shoes and make the rest also be able to wear yours. It works in both directions. Courage, it’s not easy but the reward is worth it. | https://uxplanet.org/why-being-dad-has-made-me-become-a-better-ux-designer-a22c73ab5410 | ['Diego Seara'] | 2021-09-10 17:07:29.240000+00:00 | ['Ux Design Process', 'User Experience', 'UX', 'Experience Design', 'Parenthood'] |
i was an observer that day. | i was an observer that day. i often feel this way. much less of a participant, more often a distracted observant. i watch lovers kiss in parks, holding hands for all to see. i watch children skipping and laughing with pure naivety. it’s a beauty to see. i watch time move too fast as people wave farewell. off to different coasts. the only tangible truth is the feeling of separate, a stranger in this place i’ll always be. connections fascinate me in the ways we search and long for something more than ourselves. in the ways we anticipate actions with reactions. the power plays in place of love. the fear in place of security. guards will stand all day to protect that which we attribute value. an interesting dissonance. were we meant to meet? or are meetings of pure coincidence and consequence? i wonder a mighty deal of things, i’d never speak least i bore your mind with all the complexity and intricacies that fill mine. i suppose that’s where disconnect lives. in the space in-between. yet life is a constant series of in-between. in-between birth and death. in-between strangers and lovers. in-between waking and sleeping. always waiting on a verdict or diagnosis. nostalgic with the past, uncertain for the future. in-between relationships, undefined intentionally. in-between summer and winter, winter and fall. the rise of a wave between the still of the ocean. the fall of leaves between the growth of new. hold a lover to let them go. love lands somewhere between magic and a myth. conceived only by those willing to touch it. interchangeable goodbyes and hellos. patterned endlessly on repeat. the music plays between beginning and end. a dance shared in spaces alone or with friends. a step connected with the last, continuous repetition from day to day. | https://medium.com/@brittanysolem/i-was-an-observer-that-day-f46c3c9eaa14 | ['Brittany Solem'] | 2020-12-15 03:04:48.889000+00:00 | ['Journalism', 'Thoughts', 'Poetry Writing', 'Poetry', 'Journey'] |
#Howto use templates with 23degrees.io | Templates are the best way to apply your corporate design (CD) and achieve consistency regarding the “look and feel” of your charts. With our template function your charts will seemlsessly fit in your website, presentation, article or social media post. All this can be done with just a few klicks. Here’s how to create, apply and update templates with 23degrees.io
1. How to create a template with 23degrees.io
This is about as simple as it gets: once you are happy with the design of your map or chart simply go to the template icon at the bottom of the index. Then klick + CREATE NEW. | https://medium.com/@23degrees/howto-use-templates-with-23degrees-io-2924588b3fb2 | [] | 2020-11-25 13:39:48.085000+00:00 | ['Data Journalism', 'Dataviz', 'Design', 'Maps', 'Data Visualization'] |
Big Mistake Of Students | In my college journey, I notice students who did this big mistake in their life. Not taking action is the biggest failure then loose in your race.
Competition Notice :
Student: Wow, Competition but I don’t have relevant skills for that. I think I have to work on my skills and next time I gonna take part in it.
After a few months
Another Competition Notice:
Student: Shit! I forgot to learn these skills. Now I will not distract myself from learning my skill, next time I gonna take part in this competition.
This is a never-ending loop all students face in their life. We have to take part in the competition to learn new skills and to have new experiences. Any competition is not only about winning it also about learning.
From now promise yourself to take part in the competition of your career field to learn.
All have a creative mind and all have that business idea to start their business but the big thing is to not take initiative toward it. As the student takes that initiative their none experienced life will go through many turning points, Up and downs, as the roller coaster ride if he or she strikes to it and upgrade their self as the time passes then he became a business personality who inspires millions of other businessmen. | https://medium.com/@ashigautam00/big-mistake-of-students-b68106a47755 | ['Ashi Gautam'] | 2020-12-27 10:57:19.993000+00:00 | ['Mistakes', 'Students'] |
Reserve Protocol Community AMA #10 | Introduction and update
Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve Protocol)
The first thing I want to talk about is our process of opening up the App. As everyone knows this is the main thing that we’re focused on as a project right now.
I want to just talk a little bit about how that’s going and what’s going to happen after March. The way that we’re opening up access to our App in Venezuela, Argentina, Colombia and Panama is that for the first two weeks of March — so starting at the beginning of this week and going until the end of next week — we are adding everybody who’s joined the waitlist over the past several months. So we’re adding quite a lot of people every day and getting them set up to teach new users how to use the App. Two weeks was the fastest we could do that. When somebody joins the App they don’t know how to use it yet and it’s a little bit different from a normal financial app.
People typically have questions and so we need to be prepared to answer those questions when new people join the App. Because of that reason we wanted to limit the rate of people joining off of the waitlist during this period. So two weeks of adding people from the waitlist and then the next two weeks people can directly join without getting on the waitlist at all.
If you’re from a different country unfortunately you’ll still get put on the waitlist because we don’t have service in other places yet. But if you’re in one of our countries of access, then during the second two weeks of March you can just join and directly create an account and start using the App.
Then there’s a question of what happens starting in April. So in April we are going to leave the App fully open for people to continue joining. The reason is because we have to have some way to control the rate of growth in case it gets out of control — in case it is faster than our staff can handle and faster than we can grow our operation. It’s really important that as new people continue to encounter Reserve and try it out that they have a good initial experience and that our overall service for all of the existing users doesn’t degrade.
In April, we’re going to allow people who have Reserve accounts. We’re going to issue them invites so that they can invite other people that they’re friends or family with, or even people that they meet on the Internet. If they want to hand their invites out publicly that’s okay too.
It means that you have to find someone who has an invite in order to join and we can then change the rate that we issue new invites to people so it could be that on one week everybody gets five new invites that they can send out to people. But if the growth is going too quickly then we can slow it down a little and we’re only going to give people a couple invites a week. Or maybe there’d be a week where we don’t give out any invites.
Behind the scenes of all of this there’s a lot of customer support happening. We have recently announced we’ve hired a bunch of new team members. Our team is up to 57 team members now which is pretty exciting. The biggest thing that those customer support team members have to handle are spikes in activity when a lot of new people join the App like I explained.
If you’re a new user you tend to have a lot more questions and so we’ve tried to put together a team where we can actually handle every single minute of every single day. We’ve been putting a bunch of work into automating a bunch of the fiat transactions that happen behind the scenes when somebody is cashing in or cashing out with Venezuelan Bolivars or Argentinian pesos or any other currency including other cryptocurrencies.
A future piece that we are getting closer to working on something that we’ve spent time planning and architecting but we’re not yet currently writing the code is the next level upgrade to the exchange mechanism that works in the background of the Reserve App. Today we have a bunch of payment processors that are connected to the App. The system for routing transactions from customers to payment processors is pretty simple and we have a whole architecture plan for how to make that more nuanced and how to automate that a lot more so we can handle increasing volumes of transactions. We’re excited to begin building that soon.
The next thing to me to touch on briefly is that we’ve been focused on hiring engineers. As you’ve seen we’ve been posting publicly about the fact that engineering recruiting is a really big deal for us. I wanted to share that we’ve hired two engineers who I’m really excited about. We put a lot of work and care into finding great ones who are really good cultural fits for our team and who really get what we’re doing.
Both of the ones we’ve hired so far are from Argentina but we’re speaking to engineers from all over the world. I’ve been spending a lot of my time personally speaking with software engineers and managing that process in order to make sure that we get the best ones we can get. We have a growing pipeline and we’ll continue to hire more. We’ve been putting a lot of effort as a team into recruiting to build our recruiting pipeline.
We have set aside have $102,400 set aside for referral rewards for this round of hiring.
We have like a whole update to our website that we’re working on that will come out sometime in the next few months when we have the time to improve the public’s understanding of what we’re doing.
As we’ve mentioned several times we are shifting to focus on growth. For the whole past year we are trying to stay as small as possible. Trying to be nimble, trying to learn and update our understanding of of our market and tweak our product. And we’ve gotten to the point where we’re very happy with the product and we’re excited to try to scale that operation and serve as many people as possible.
I have two more things to add. One is that there will be some upcoming RSR token movements so as you guys probably all know from our blog post over a month ago we unlocked some RSR tokens from the slow wallet which is the smart contract where there’s a four week cryptographic delay. If we want to withdraw any tokens from that we have to make an announcement and wait 4 weeks. So if anybody doesn’t like the fact that we’re going to release tokens they have ample time to exit their RSR position if they if they feel inclined to do so. Those tokens are unlocked now. Hopefully anyone who was concerned with that has had time to exit and I think that this information is fairly priced in at this point. We haven’t moved any of those tokens and I just wanted to mention that sometime in the next week we’re going to get around to moving them. It’s going to be a very large transaction and you know that those tend to sometimes cause alarm bells. I wanted everyone to know and have a heads up that that’s going to happen, and if people on Twitter talk about it or they’re worried about it I ask you guys to help me and help the project in pointing people to the blog post to try to explain the purpose for those tokens and the reason why we’re doing that. A common question might be is the team dumping are all these tokens. It’s a lot of tokens and I need you guys to help me explain to people who know less about the project that you the purpose of this is to slowly accumulate a marketing war chest. And we’ve been pretty clear in disclosing exactly how we’re thinking about that in the following blog post.
The plan isn’t to sell all these tokens right away by any means. The point of moving these tokens to exchange accounts is to be prepared throughout the course of this entire year and even next year for a case where the market continues to heat up even more.
A way that you could explain it to people is that you know if RSR hits one dollar by the end of this year as many of you guys have predicted — it would be a big strategic mistake if the project hadn’t positioned itself to be able to sell some RSR and create that marketing war chest. You can think of it as preparing for cases where the market heats up even more to be able to strategically take advantage of that for the project.
I think that can be a really healthy thing for the long term of the project even though it does include us selling some tokens.
The last thing I want to mention is that I want to comment on a blog post that we released a few minutes ago. The blog post isn’t really an announcement but it does kind of contain an interesting announcement of some information that we haven’t mentioned publicly before.
The post discusses how we are looking for highly dedicated people from all of the countries that we want to serve where it’s really essential to the project initially one key person, and then to be able to build out a team of people from each country who really get it. Who really understand the monetary situation in that country. Who understand the nature of crypto and crypto regulation in that country. Who are really well networked with people in the industry. Who you can help us achieve what we want to achieve.
This is something that we’ve done in Venezuela. We’ve been fantastically successful with our team building in Venezuela and that’s something that we don’t talk about very often out of caution. We usually don’t mention our Venezuelan team members but we decided to go ahead and talk about that a little bit to make the point of how important it is for us to find the right people to build out these teams in each respective country. We wanted to talk about you one particular person who we decided to bring on who’s been instrumental in building that team.
That person is named Gabriel Jimenez. Over the course of the past year many of you guys have sent me personally Gabriel’s article in the New York Times because Gabriel was involved in some interesting high-profile projects in Venezuela.
Many of you have sent me this article and a corresponding video documentary that’s been made about him to say we should really talk to this guy. We were not saying that for the whole past year is he’s actually been part of the core team.
Gabriel and also everybody else who’s on the Venezuelan team (many of whom he helped recruit) have been really really key to us being able to achieve what we’ve what we’ve gotten to so far.
It would be very hard for us sitting in Silicon Valley not understanding the Venezuelan context to produce an app that really made sense to people in Venezuela. Three quarters of our team are in Latin America and the majority of those are in Venezuela. That’s been really important for us getting to where we are today.
I’m even gonna just talk about the story of meeting Gabriel and bringing him on. And I’ll try to give some context for why we haven’t mentioned before that he’s a part of the team. So I met Gabriel (and this is described a little bit in the blog post) because I was invited to speak at SF Blockchain Week back in 2019. I was asked to talk about our efforts in Venezuela which we were just getting started on at the time, and Gabriel was the the speaker right before me in line. He was there to talk about the Petro, which is the state-backed cryptocurrency issued in Venezuela. It turned out that he was somewhat involved in the Petro project and so many people were very skeptical of Gabriel because in Venezuela there is a general assumption that if you work with the government you are a corrupt person. And so there was there was resistance to the idea that Gabriel was actually interested in improving the lives of Venezuelans and actually interested in creating economic freedom for people in Venezuela.
But I decided that if he really was for real, if he really actually did care about those things that he could be a really key part of our project. So I actually took an interesting leap of faith and spent a few hours getting to know him. And I invited him to actually come move into my apartment because he didn’t live in the Bay Area at the time. And and I wanted him to get to know us, I wanted us to get to know him and because he was a sort of politically charged figure we couldn’t just immediately invite him onto the team. In fact, several people on the team including myself were pretty cautious. We were pretty concerned about should we get involved with someone who has this sort sort of history this, connection with the Venezuelan government. So we actually spent months living together. I was carefully getting to know Gabriel, sort of evaluating him. I ran some background checks and then he was doing the same thing with us. Trying to figure out if we were really serious about this. If we were actually going to follow through with our plans in Venezuela. He went and spent some time speaking to people at the Libra project and Cello, and perhaps others to try to evaluate who was going to be most serious about making this happen. Ultimately, he was convinced that it was us and we were convinced that he was actually an excellent potential team member. We decided to bring him on to the team full time in 2020, and since then he’s been helping out in in a really impressive way.
I’m super happy about our decision and I think he is too. We’ve been a little bit cautious about talking about it because we just didn’t want to make waves too early in the Venezuelan community. Some people have a negative perception because of the fact that he touched the Petro project, but if you read the article I think you’ll see why we think that that’s not an issue. Especially now that we’ve reached a point where the project really can sort of stand on its own people, can evaluate the product and the service in their own right, we felt that it was no longer necessary to keep that information private.
I wanted to give an example of what it is that I mean when I say that we need to find people who are really hardcore, who really are dedicated to doing this kind of thing in their country. Gabriel is a great example of that, and other people that we’ve been able to bring on in Venezuela.
We want to replicate that same kind of process with people across all the different countries that we’re excited to go into.
Community Questions
We’re going to go ahead and open it up to questions.
Community Question #1
When will you open up the Reserve App globally?
Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve)
Our intention is for the App to be open worldwide eventually. We kind have to take an active approach at least at the beginning of the project when we’re opening in each new place. Some people are probably familiar with this metaphor we compare it to — the process of rolling out Uber or Lyft. You want to sort of start by figuring out the formula figuring out the logistical setup and then once you get that ironed out, then you can start to replicate that in more and more places with the eventual goal is to have the App be completely open to everybody in the world, and to support a huge number of currencies, and a huge number of payment methods for each currency all across the world. Goal is to be able to move your money in from almost anything and move it out to almost anything else. I’m going to take the opportunity to mention something cool that I’m excited about, which is that the way our service works.
We actually allow you to make payments in payment methods that are connected to Reserve even if you don’t have that payment method yourself. For example, let’s say let’s say I want to make a payment to somebody in Venezuela, and let’s say they’re not even a Reserve user yet, and they just have a Venezuelan Bolivar bank account. I can actually with my Reserve App make a transaction that lands in their Venezuelan Bolivar bank account so it empowers me to make Venezuelan Bolivar payments or Argentinian Peso payments even if I don’t have those accounts. If you’re someone from the US, it’s actually really hard to get a bank account in other countries like that and so this enables you to make payments elsewhere in the payment system that you couldn’t ordinarily get access. No matter which country you’re from you can make payments to pretty much anyone even if they’re not a Reserve user yet because you can sort of trigger those payments with those other payment methods. That’s something that we’re super excited about, seeing what the network effects and the impact of that will look like as we grow that out to multiple different countries.
Community Question #2
What kind of potential fundamental risk there might be to the project if the governments of your target markets suddenly going to decide to ban the App in order to protect their exclusivity towards their own monetary system?
Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve)
The answer is actually more nuanced than I had anticipated going into the project. I’ll try to shine some light on that nuance.
On a high level it’s definitely something we consider. It’s definitely something that we do think could happen. You should assume this is a real possibility, and I’m definitely not here to say that that’s not going to happen.
However, we are building out the system in such a way where it is meant to be able to continue operating even if the local authorities aren’t necessarily happy about it. We’re building a decentralized fiat on an off-ramp system that’s meant to be able to function under those conditions where local authorities aren’t necessarily happy about it.
It may not be that likely for there to be any sort of sustained banning and here is why. One pattern that we’ve noticed is that when a country gets pretty far along in the process of hyperinflation, the government can actually decide that it’s not necessarily a bad thing to allow its citizens to use stable foreign currencies. We have seen this in Venezuela where it is currently tolerated to make transactions in cash US Dollars. In fact, in many cities well over half of transactions are happening in cash US Dollars.
A while back that’s something that was unheard of in Venezuela. People were a little bit afraid to reveal that they were holding cash US Dollars and there weren’t a whole lot of transactions happening in public.
We actually got to a point where the leader of Venezuela actually publicly said something like “thank god for the dollarization” showing his appreciation for the fact that foreign currencies coming in and being used actually helps stabilize the economy and help protect the functioning of the country.
What I’m trying to say there is there are times when governments that are involved in hyperinflationary scenarios can actually choose to welcome external solutions that are different from their own monetary system.
But that’s certainly not always the case. If we look at Argentina today, you are limited to not being able to purchase more than something like 200 US Dollars per month. You might think about that and say okay well maybe that’s because they’re not really off the deep end so the government is still sort of grappling, trying to maintain control. There’s one more nuance point to mention there. The Argentinian Central bank has a bunch of US Dollars and those capital controls that are in place are one of the principal reasons for those controls so that the central bank doesn’t have to spend too many of those of its own US Dollars basically processing those currency conversions on behalf of citizens. They have control of the dollar budget and can use those dollars more targeted ways. They can basically give preferential access to businesses who are import businesses that import important goods and services to the country. If you start to think about it from the country’s perspective, making sure that you have plenty of US Dollars to be able to deal in foreign markets and making sure that your businesses that are importing the most important goods and services use those dollars — that makes sense. There’s actually logic to that. There are lots of practices in Argentina where people buy and sell cash US Dollars that are actually tolerated. In some cases they’re legal in, some cases they’re not officially legal — but in all cases they’re actually tolerated. The government doesn’t work very hard to shut those down, and I personally think that’s because the thing they principally care about is the central bank’s dollar balance. This is all just to say that there’s a lot of factors that go into whether or not a product or service like this might be attacked by local governments. We think that in many cases the reason for an attack is actually some sort of political narrative battle where if we come out and say lots of negative things about some local government they might feel the need to strike back.
It is a gray area, and like I said it is a risk — but there are all those different factors that go into it and we spend time learning about those factors and trying to track them and understand.
Community Question #3
Over the last couple of days I’ve seen some posts from people in Turkey and Iran talking about how people in those countries are buying Bitcoin because of spiraling inflation. My question is how do you think Reserve would differentiate itself from other projects and why would
Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve)
We are working to offer a stable coin which is stable against the US Dollar. In the long term our plan is to offer something that’s stable irrespective of the US Dollar. That’s the simplest differentiator.
What we provide is very different. It’s more like a standard fintech type service where it doesn’t really feel like crypto to the end user.
Community Question #4
Are there any updates on the release of the mainnet?
Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve)
We definitely anticipate doing it this year, but we don’t have a specific timeline that we want to announce quite yet.
Community Question #4
People tend to compare RSR to LUNA and TERRA. They see TERRA stablecoin market cap is like 750 million dollars. Why is it TERRA doing much better than Reserve?
Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve)
You can look at TERRA as an example but even other stable coins like Tether and USDC — we’re talking billions in market cap.
We are with a tiny market cap in comparison. The basic difference between our project and those other projects generally speaking is that we made a conscious decision to not focus on serving crypto speculation and instead to focus on serving people in countries that have currency issues. We believe that this market is enormous, even bigger than crypto speculation. It’s also a market that’s much less developed, so instead of just plugging into existing infrastructure and serving a customer base that’s already really well developed. we’re building something new from scratch.
So when you build something new from scratch it takes a lot more time to get all the pieces figured out, to get you know customers onboarded, to educate the market about the existence of this new option. And so because of that, we are starting really small.
From our perspective we think that biggest need for cryptocurrency outside of speculation is this use case of giving access to people in places where normal monetary systems and normal fintech products actually can’t exist. We decided to go into that different direction and see if we could serve that market.
Community Question #4
How will arbitrage work? Will there be any limits on participating in arbitrage?
Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve)
The way to think about the arbitrage process is that it occurs at a moment where the value of the RSV token on on external crypto market is slightly divergent from the pegged value. Let’s say that RSV is pegged to the dollar just for the sake of simplicity. If it’s trading at say one dollar and one cent then what that means is that you’re able to purchase an RSV token for about one dollar from the protocol and then go sell it for one dollar and one cent on secondary markets. That way you earn that one cent of risk-free profit immediately. That’s that’s what arbitrage means — when you’re buying something and selling it basically at about the same time for different prices.
If you’re using RSR to participate in arbitrage you would be making a purchase of RSV and you’d be paying in RSR. Basically, you’re taking some RSR and you’re spending it in order to buy RSV from the protocol. Then you’re turning it around and selling the RSV on secondary markets. T
It will be an open auction so let’s say that RSV is trading for one dollar and one cent on secondary markets. If I’m willing to pay 97 cents worth of RSR to get an RSV token and you’re willing exactly one dollar then you would get to purchase all of the RSV that’s available if we’re the only two bidders.
If I were to up my bid to one dollar and 1.001c now Iwould be the one being able to purchase all the RSV. It’s an open market and so there isn’t a limitation um on how much you would be able to purchase. I don’t think that there’s a reason to have a limitation. It just comes down to who is willing to pay the best price.
Community Question #5
I’m just wondering if the mainnet will be before October?
Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve)
I don’t want to give any particular commitments unless unless I’m really sure we can hit them. We want to maintain a little bit of flexibility but what I will say is that I’m definitely aware of the different outcomes that could occur depending on when the main that launches.
Community Question #6
For the US people that want to purchase RSR, I know that they’re purchasing it through Uniswap or in other ways.
I was wondering if you have any plans in the near future of listing RSR on a US only exchange.
Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve)
I guess what I can say is you know is that Coinbase did publicly state that they were considering to list RSR. They obviously haven’t listed it so there’s that possibility that they would decide to do that at some point.
There are a number of other US exchanges who are possible contenders but you know that we really can’t comment on that in advance.
At some point in the future we anticipate that happening but we can’t really say anything about any particular plans.
Community Question #7
Is it safe to say as Coinbase are an investor that it would be in their interest to list?
Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve)
That would that be a good assumption.
The fact that they publicly announced that they were doing research into considering listing is fair to say is an indication that they’re interested in doing it.
Community Question #8
What is your relationship with the main investors, do you have any contact with them? Coinbase, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman,…
Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve)
I provide them some information about the project on a periodic basis. I would say most of the interaction isn’t formal. It’s just going back and forth when there’s something that we need or something that they want to know, or something that they’ve thought of and want to offer or connection they want to make.
Throughout the course of the year there’s hundreds of those kind of one-off interactions with our various different investors, and then something once a year, maybe twice a year I sit down and type out a more detailed update for them that contains a little bit of inside information about the project just highlights they might have missed.
As the project has shifted towards focusing on growth, we’ve had more interaction over the past couple of months with some of our key investors and advisors. For the last year we we didn’t really lean on them that much because we were really pretty narrowed in on our own product work, but now we’re getting to the point where we’re focusing on recruiting and thinking about business development more.
I’d say that the pace of interaction has been picking up with our seed investors going into 2021.
Community Question #9
Are you mainly focused on approaching consumers as opposed to governments in new countries?
Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve)
We focus on consumers and businesses, not governments. We don’t really we don’t have an issue dealing with governments but generally speaking our customers are businesses and consumers. The businesses range from very small to actually quite large.
In Venezuela we do have some customers who are pretty large businesses who are doing really significant amounts of volume. We have seen some pretty exciting early traction from large businesses.
Community Question #10
You talked about the challenge of scaling people onto the app and it sounds like your approach makes a lot of sense.
What do you and the team really need from us the community, how can we help?
Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve)
If an RSR holder is able to bring an essential member to the core team, if you can help us recruit somebody who really can really can get into the weeds and do some significant work for the project — that’s probably the biggest thing.
That’s part of why actually we decided to run the experiment with recursive recruiting where you can refer your friends who could refer their friends who could refer their friends… who could eventually refer the kind of person we’re looking for.
If you’re not in a position to refer somebody to the core team, some RSR holders are out there educating other people about the project all the time, especially on Twitter — and I super appreciate that.
There’s actually quite a lot of information that gets spread around and ideas about the project that get spread around just through tweets. Even memes do a fair amount of education about the project.
This community has grown a lot because of people deciding to spend their own time doing that education on the internet to bring other people into the project. So if you if you’re not in a position to recruit, then I think another great thing you can do is to help educate in that way.
Community Question #11
Can you expand on the relationship with PayPal?
Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve)
We are connected to people there who really do care about crypto and blockchain. You know PayPal has a department that is focused on crypto and those people are for real excited about it.
There’s really no getting around the regulatory and bureaucratic limitations of working with a large company and our conversation with them largely centers around compliance. We are basically waiting for internal processes to complete, and there’s still even some uncertainty about what decisions will be made.
Back when Libra was initially announced I reached out to Peter Thiel to say “hey you know do you know David Marcus, would you be up for making an introduction because we’re interested in talking to the team and seeing if we should maybe be working together with them”. Instead he had an interesting and surprising reply. He emailed me back and he said something to the effect of “yeah I know David and I could make an intro, but I think that big companies move really slow and I think a startup like Reserve shouldn’t be working with any big companies”.
If you think about it was over a year ago now, and Libra has moved really slow. Peter was actually right about that. I share that example to talk about how we’re very excited about working with PayPal and we’ll continue to work with them and we really think that we can make it happen and scale that channel — but they’re a big company and so they do have to move slow.
We need to make sure that our plans for success don’t depend on them. There’s an important augmentation that can happen and I think it will happen. I think it actually could be a pretty big deal, but even if it if it doesn’t happen for a while that’s okay.
Community Question #12
When are you planning to release some numbers on App usage?
Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve)
I’m not sure exactly when we’re going to do it but pretty soon. Basically we’re just waiting to see what happens with our growth metrics when we open up the App and what our volumes are looking like.
But I think we’re getting to the point where we might be ready pretty soon to make some pretty exciting announcements about those metrics.
It’s definitely getting to the point where I think we’re gonna be able to talk about some numbers and a lot of people in the crypto world are gonna kind of turn their head and be like whoa, how did that happen.
As far as timeline, in the next few months. I’m excited for us to to start being more public about that relatively soon.
Community Question #12
When you released your App retention rates I checked against other financial apps and also banking apps and you’re outperforming them by about 200 percent!
Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve)
Yeah I know, it’s pretty crazy. I think there is an 88% chance users are still using the App after 8 weeks.
We’re just talking about early adopters so that rate probably will go down as we start reaching people who are in the wider population — but still it’s a really exciting statistic and i think it really validates the fact that we have taken the time to figure out how to present this product to people who really really need it, and to present it in a way where it really is working well enough for them that they really want to keep using it.
That has been been our focus for the whole last year. We could have a way larger RSV market cap, we could have way more trading volume, we could have all this progress in crypto but we decided we’re gonna try to build this special product that people will really like.
So I’m excited for that statistic, I think that is a leading indicator that maybe we’ve actually succeeded in doing that.
Community Question #13
Ethereum gas fees have been very high and they vary a lot. Will that be prohibitive to decentralization and hosting RSV transactions on chain and would that in turn make mainnet decentralization kind of contingent upon the success of Ethereum 2.0?
Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve)
Sidechains and Layer 2 solutions are going to be the answer for us just as they are for everybody else who’s serving a consumer use case.
In our app you’ll be able to hold your own keys and transact on chain but you’ll be transacting on a sidechain. It won’t be a sidechain that we host, it won’t be centralized but it won’t be the Ethereum mainchain.
I think that that will totally handle the gas fee problem. And then if somebody wants to go take their RSV tokens and do something with them in the broader Ethereum DeFi ecosystem they’ll need to move them back onto the Ethereum chain and then we’ll have to contend with those gas fees.
But many of our consumer users and business users won’t have a need to do that.
Community Question #14
In the long term do you go off the dollar peg? I’m trying to imagine the sort of units that RSV will be compared to and fluctuating against that would trigger arbitrage?
Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve)
There’s different ways. One way is you choose a basket and that basket is taken to be the unit of currency. Let’s say we had a really simple basket that was one-third a particular type of a bond, one-third gold and one-third US government debt. You could imagine putting that basket together and then just saying that’s what the coin is worth 1/3 of each.
Then in the same way as if it’s pegged to the dollar in that case now it’s just pegged to that basket. Now you can also do something fancier where you could say it’s backed by that basket, but it’s not pegged to that basket. We want the value of the coin to be relative to some other asset. In that case you can use an oracle to gather whatever information about prices of assets in the world in order to to peg the coin. The natural thing to peg to in that case would be a fiat currency or a basket of fiat currencies.
People have proposed nuanced things where you actually try to gauge the purchasing power of the asset. You could actually gauge well you how many hamburgers or how many whatever can you purchase with this coin.
You could actually try to formulate a consumer price index similar to how the FED does with with the dollar and actually have the protocol work on that basis. It’s an interesting research direction.
We are laying the groundwork, we are building a framework for the future of how we think currency should work, but there will have to be decisions made over the course of time and our governance process will have to accommodate those decisions. We can’t look into the future and say exactly how it should work exactly — which asset should be in the basket and exactly how the pegs should function.
Community Question #14
Unlike many other crypto projects Reserve has an actual use case and that’s amazing, but more importantly Reserve is clearly looking to change people’s lives. In the crypto space most people are so focused on private profit that they forget what the whole point of decentralization is.
Assuming everything goes perfectly, what’s your final vision for Reserve?
Nevin Freeman (CEO of Reserve)
The core idea at the very beginning of the project was actually very simple. We actually started off with the question could we create something that works like Bitcoin, but actually functions as money.
Bitcoin has a volatile price. You could argue because of some other properties it has, it could be a gold replacement but it couldn’t really replace money.
The initial reason in my mind for why I thought it could be interesting to have something that worked like Bitcoin but functioned as money, is if you look at the long course of history every few hundred years the major dominant empire in the world falls apart and a new empire becomes dominant. And when that happens the world reserve currency ceases to be the reserve currency, and often falls quite a lot in value — is replaced by the currency for the next dominant empire.
I’ve always wondered could you have a single currency that isn’t attached to any one state and that is actually used as the world reserve currency — that maintains a stable purchasing power over the course of time even during those transitions from one empire to the next.
If everything goes perfectly and we actually achieve the eventual full vision that’s what it would be. RSV would actually be a cryptocurrency that is is backed by a super diverse basket of assets, that is able to maintain a stable purchasing power irrespective of the US Dollar or whatever else is the world reserve.
Maybe we would see the world actually switch away from depending on the fiat currency of the dominant empire and instead it could depend on this single cryptocurrency.
You could no longer have to contend with the crumbling of a currency every few hundred years. You you would also have something that’s more politically neutral and used as that world reserve currency.
We decided to focus on parts of the world where fiat currency is suffering the most in order to get a foothold for the project to start building out this whole platform for using the currency, and building out liquidity and building out the brand, and the community.
I think of this as something that would happen within the next three decades, and that’s not really like a well-reasoned number but to me it feels possible. Over the course of something like three decades we could actually bootstrap to the point of being possibly the number one cryptocurrency providing a stable alternative to fiat money.
It feels plausible to me that over the course of the next three decades all the the things that are just initial fears about the US Dollar could start to become more of a reality, and that’s really what it would take to prompt people to start to switch more significantly away from from the dollar and to start holding something else.
So if Reserve is a really a credible alternative and really is a true backup option then we could see that migration start to happen.
That’s the the long-term vision, and I think that’s probably a great way to end this conversation as well. | https://medium.com/reserve-currency/reserve-protocol-community-ama-10-215f9be6d030 | ['Reserve Protocol Community'] | 2021-03-09 22:24:48.541000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Venezuela', 'Reserve Protocol', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Crypto'] |
Confessions of An Absentee Friend | “Don’t take it personally, it's not you, it’s me.” Yes, I am that person in the relationship. People would like to believe that I am an extrovert because I am able to adapt when needed. But in actuality, I am an introvert and love being unplugged from the world. I have very few friends and the people who I am closest with are my family members. My mom is literally my best friend.
Those who have been my friends for more than 10 years have grown to accept my absentee ways. But, for my newer acquaintances, goodness, I think I am going to have to keep explaining myself for 10 years before they understand my introversion.
It’s really not you, it’s me. Please don’t take it personally, you know how it is, life gets in the way and you know how you get into a routine, and before you know it, it’s been two years. I am truly sorry, but you know I love you right?
I sound like a sociopath; I have shamefully made that speech far too many times.
“No, I don’t want to be social on Social Media, so please stop asking.”I am baffled at how people keep up with being social on Social Media. Texting is hard enough to keep up with. If you send me a text, I might respond today, or a month from now, or maybe never. And if I don’t respond, it’s because we have already spoken, and the text is now obsolete. I have so many new and unanswered text messages, it’s almost embarrassing. But, in my defense, most of them have been resolved or part of group text chains and there was no need to reply. But I digress.
Social Media doesn’t allow a window for my absentee friendship to flourish. Everything requires immediate attention and it’s so noisy, well visually noisy. In the blink of an eye, something new pops up. I just can’t keep up with all of that. Furthermore, I don’t want my apologies for being an absentee friend, plastered on a public domain open for judgement. A text will suffice.
I have been truly working on getting better especially during 2020. I have reconnected with so many friends and family, and so far, I’ve done a decent job (I would give myself a B-) of remaining connected. I will be honest, I have had a few slip ups where I had to explain, “it’s really not you, it’s me. Please don’t take it personally, you know how it is…”
Phone calls are the absolute worst. They don’t allow an escape or a way out. There were no excuses not to pick up the phone, unless I used the “I was busy” excuse, but for the most part, I wasn’t that busy. The truth is, I wasn’t in the mood to talk, so the calls went unanswered.
I’m going to confess that, I might have, well I have ignored a few calls here and there. OK fine, there were many calls that I ignored, I even ignored a couple calls during this week. But shhh, please don’t tell my friends or family members. I feel bad, please believe me I do, but it’s best that we talk when my introverted self is willing and when my energy is vibrating the right way. The conversation would be better for us all.
So, friends and family, when you call, and I don’t answer because I’m “busy” please wait for me to call you back. Please don’t leave a message, I don’t even want to get into that. Just send a text and we could go from there. If I don’t call back or text you back for a month or so, “it’s really not you, it’s me. Please don’t take it personally, you know how it is…” | https://medium.com/fellowship-writers/confessions-of-an-absentee-friend-919f02db9407 | ['Melanie J.'] | 2021-01-21 17:49:00.336000+00:00 | ['Fellowship Writers', 'Friendship', 'Social Media', 'Self Help', 'Writing'] |
Magic 3D Cameras. How do they work? | Magic 3D Cameras. How do they work?
A dual lens camera, like that on the back of an iPhone X, uses the lens separation to detect a parallax shift to measure 3D depth.
Objects closer to the camera, shift by a greater distance between the two lenses. This parallax shift based on distance is called disparity.
So how does the single front-facing camera measure depth since there is only one lens? This technology is called TrueDepth. You might be surprised to know that the TrueDepth camera projects an infrared light pattern in front of the camera.
By observing the infrared pattern distortions from objects in front of the camera lens, the snapshot software calculates the distance from the camera to each point in the image. From this, the software creates its disparity.
Both technologies then generate a secondary image of depth pixels — a depth map. But instead of each pixel representing a color, the pixels represent depth at that point in the picture. By combining a depth map with colors, it is possible to blur or even make transparent parts of a photo such as the background of a portrait. | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/magic-3d-cameras-how-do-they-work-1feb2e0cb723 | ['Rob Adamson'] | 2019-05-27 21:50:24.816000+00:00 | ['Style Transfer', 'Dual Lens Camera', 'Photography', 'Depth Map', '3d Images'] |
Scott Amyx On The Internet Of Things, Robotics And Human Currency | Scott Amyx does not think so. I’m joined by Curtis Ramsay in this interview to learn more about the connection between the internet of things, block chain technology and human currency. Scott is the CEO and founder of Amyx and he is also a keynote speaker who has been across the globe giving speeches and reasoning with other global leaders. He is featured in a lot of avenues from TIME to Forbes to TechCrunch and he is also a TED speaker. He is involved in a lot of projects in computing and today he speaks about his vision for the world and his investment in crypto currencies.
Understand the risk in Cryptocurrency and invest decisively
Scott has a book available for pre-order about how to be successful by getting out of your comfort zone. According to Scott, every business that has an element of risk attached to it presents some level of discomfort to people. To be able to benefit from an investment such as in crypto currencies, one needs to understand the risks involved. He states that crypto is a great innovation, sustainable and here to stay. People who do not understand how this sphere works have misconceptions about investing in the cryptocurrencies. When one understands the risks they are subjecting themselves to, they can be able to make good decisions and amass wealth in the process.
Human currency and why we need to spread the love
Scott underlines the importance that human beings play in the creation of groundbreaking technology such as the block chain. As an investor in computing and smart wearables (Fitbit), he understands the connection between robotics, the internet of things and how these interact to create beautiful products and amplify the capacities of human beings. The fundamental difference between human beings and machines is that human beings have the capacity to feel empathy on a number of things. This is what makes everything all so beautiful. If people can work together and in the process understand the limits, strengths and capacities that are presented to them, the possibility of what we could do with block chain technology is limitless.
Luckily for us, the love has already started to spread. The love token is available for free to spread joy to people across the globe.
Turning disruption into innovation
Scott believes that the block chain technology has created waves that will definitely disrupt the way we operate and think in almost all aspects of human life. He believes that by harness the power of the block chain technology, this disruption could be reprogrammed into innovation and thus translate into massive benefit for the human race in future. His travels across different countries have opened him to opportunities he thinks can be solved through the use of machine learning and block chain technology. The capacities of this technology could be amplified with the combination of robotics and internet of things. And some human empathy of course.
Like every revolutionary leader, Scott has much more to offer and this is covered in the 1-hour video interview below. | https://medium.com/authority-magazine/scott-amyx-on-the-internet-of-things-robotics-and-human-currency-85ad087e7ac5 | ['Charles Wu'] | 2018-05-28 18:11:15.594000+00:00 | ['CEO', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin', 'Blockchain'] |
AYS Daily Digest 22/1/21: 6.5 Mil. Euros for a fake NGO | SYRIA
According to the UN facts and figures, 12 people have been murdered at the overcrowded al-Hol camp for displaced people in northeastern Syria since the beginning of the year. In the most recent critiques of the situation surrounding the overcrowded camp, the UN also said:
“The recent rise in violence among the camp population not only represents a tragic loss of life, it also jeopardises the ability for the UN and humanitarian partners to continue to safely deliver critical humanitarian assistance and services to residents”. As one of the commeents on the recent IOM report from BiH said — the wellbeing of the professional well-paid staff of the UN is really not everyone’s primary concern. But, we do hope that the rhetoric brings about a change, at least to protect the UN and its partners.
Temperatures in northwest Syria have dropped dramatically in recent weeks. Still I Rise team reports: “On Wednesday, snow forced us to close Ma’an, our school in Al Dana. School buses couldn’t get to the fields, it was too dangerous.
The roads are collapsing. Tents in the camps are flooded. People are dying because of the cold. Families do not have proper heating systems and cannot protect their children from frost. Those who can send their children to relatives who live outside the camps, in better conditions.”
There are growing concerns that many Syrians currently in Germany will face possible deportations back to war-torn Syria. However, even a temporary residence permit is not a cause for concern, ProAsyl explains:
As long as the protection status exists, the residence permit must also be extended, unless serious criminal offenses or similar preclude an extension. Those affected do not have to fear that the immigration authorities will refuse them the extension of their temporary residence permit with reference to the lifted deportation freeze.
Those who fall under the Dublin Regulation or have already received protection status in another EU country, e.g. in Bulgaria or Greece can only be deported to the corresponding EU country, not to Syria. Read more here.
LEBANON
Flooding in the Arsal refugee camp during strict COVID-19 lockdown makes access to humanitarian aid difficult
LIBYA
SEARCH AND RESCUE AT SEA
“This afternoon, an overcrowded rubber boat in distress was spotted from the bridge of the Ocean Viking. The operation almost turned critical when two people went overboard. They were recovered by the rescue team. A total of approx. 104 people were rescued as night set in,” SOS Mediteranee reported.
At the same time, Seawatch Italy reports a pushback of about 80 people by the Libyan coastguard:
SERBIA
Pushbacks are illegal, court confirms
It is reported that Serbia’s top court has confirmed that Serbian security personnel had illegally deported asylum-seekers from Serbia, instead of issuing proper paperwork and accommodating them in a shelter. People were locked up in a police station in Gradina, a village near the Bulgarian border. The rundown cell had neither running water, nor heating, nor a toilet. And the migrants were not able to consult a lawyer.
“Unfortunately, it is an open secret that pushbacks from Serbia are still happening, and so far nobody has been held accountable,” the lawyer who took the case to the court said.
SPAIN
Kept away and threatened in an atmosphere that facilitates animosity
It is reported that people who have arrived on the Canary Islands as refugees are now being threatened and their lives are at risk. The Red Cross has asked them to stay in hotels and to be cautious when leaving. The man who had been arrested for threatening refugees with a machete is now free. The doctor who treats people at the reception facilities denounced the fact that there were even minors living in extremely precarious conditions: scarce food and restricted showers. The head of MdM in the Canary Islands says the current delicate situation is the result of poor reception management: “Turning the Canary Islands into a blockade rather than a transit point, as it has always been and should be, facilitates this pressure”
DENMARK
Country goal: zero people protected
The Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s (Soc Dem) ambition is that exactly zero asylum seekers shall arrive in Denmark.
She stated this on Friday in the Danish Parliament (Folketinget), where the Danish People’s Party’s Pia Kjærsgaard has called her for a debate.
That is our goal. Of course we can not give a promise about it. We can not give a promise about zero asylum seekers, but we can set out the vision, namely that we want a new asylum system, and then do what we can to introduce it, says the Prime Minister.
…The Prime Minister stated once more in the Parliament that the politicians of the past had made a serious mistake by making too few demands on the foreigners arriving in Denmark. For example, that they must support themselves and adopt Danish values.
She explains that the number is of enormous importance for Denmark and that the fabric of society is already under pressure from the number of arrivals.
WORTH READING
how misery drove people into smuggling networks: | https://medium.com/are-you-syrious/ays-daily-digest-22-1-21-6-5-mio-euros-for-a-fake-ngo-419c308e3ae3 | ['Are You Syrious'] | 2021-01-23 18:49:14.597000+00:00 | ['Syria', 'Digest', 'Greece', 'Refugee', 'Ngo'] |
Global Terrorism - Inside the Data | The Global Terrorism Database (GTD) is an open-source database, which provides information on terrorist attacks around the world since 1970. In this article I’ve used data of years 1970 to 2018, as 2019 data is only available for commercial license holders at the moment. Check their official site here.
For each event, a wide range of information is available, including the date and location of the incident, the weapons used, nature of the target, the number of casualties and also the name of individual terrorist’s group.
Now you’ll see numerous graphs, which will give you good perception idea about Global Terrorism around the world (Gladly, 2020 passed without Alien apocalypse).
First of all, let’s see how many terrorist attacks happened in each year.
Terrorist attacks were slowly increased from 1970 to 1992. After that it was minimum for the year 1998. Since 2004 number of terrorist attacks increased significantly. And on 2014, terrorist attacks were on peak. It was the worst year for humanity and on the same year Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai won The Nobel Peace Prize.
Terrorist Attacks by Region
Hover over the graph to see the values for each year.
Australasia & Oceania, East & Central Asia and North America has least number of terrorist attacks all together. While Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East & North Africa and South Asia are Top on the list.
Countries with Highest number of Terrorist Attacks
Iraq had the highest number of terrorist attacks followed by Pakistan, Afghanistan and India till 2018. On the year of 2014, Total 3934 terrorist attacks had taken place in Iraq only with total casualty of 30769(13965 Killed +16804 Injured).
Hover over the country to see the data(casualty,killed and injured) for that particular country. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/inside-the-global-terrorism-database-967084386a16 | ['Aditya Rajgor'] | 2020-12-29 17:11:25.190000+00:00 | ['Analysis', 'Data Science', 'Gtd', 'Terrorism'] |
From Silicon Valley to the Real Valley | A little (well known) Secret About Me & Why Silicon Valley is not REAL.
I usually jump into running programs with a group of super-believers when there is little management support or belief that things will work. Then, we do our magic and prove the models actually work, then spend a lot of time fighting back the ignorance and credit salvage raiding of others. I, as you can read, am not political enough to suck up or let others take credit for our work, especially in bureaucratic environments.
On top of that general trait, what I had found in San Francisco had started to lose its charm. There are more qualified people than myself to talk about the reasons and solutions for the gap between the misery of homeless and the glory of techbros that you can see everyday in the streets. Whatever those might be, I felt I had no connection to the fake tech brothers and couldn’t do much about the systemic reasons of homelessness. Add to that quite regular 14hr flights between SFO and Istanbul that I had to take to see my daughter, I was looking for something else to work on.
At that exact time in my quest, I met Mustafa Osman Turan, the strange diplomat who pitched me the Idea of the Sustainable Development Goals Impact Accelerator that he was co-chairing with UNDP in Turkey. As the lead of this project in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he and UNDP had assembled Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Limak Holding and Eczacibasi to run a test pilot in Turkey for people under the temporary protection of Turkey, mostly Syrians, and Temporary Agricultural workers. They wanted Turkish founders to apply and build startups for them, but not just to solve the biggest humanitarian problems, described in the SDGs. They wanted a focus on two super specific issues (grand challenges )like Non-Sewage Water Toilet and Digital ID. It was a model that was quite tricky to operate; first, because founders are like cats that don’t want to be herded in your direction,
and, second, running a specific challenge with the first cohort proves very little in terms of success or future network effects. I shared all of these points of view because I had made those mistakes when I was the Country Manager for the first Impact Fund in Turkey (Angel Wings Ventures) and one of the co-directors of the Social Change Labs back in 2013.
So, my crazy self proposed that it would work if the specific challenges are categorized under broader topics and if founders are scouted from a global partner network, rather than local incubators and programs. So, I said what I said and didn’t expect much to happen from this crazy thought-experiment. | https://medium.com/@mrozansonmez/from-silicon-valley-to-the-real-valley-36c01a5679a4 | ['Ozan Sönmez'] | 2019-07-22 19:08:09.886000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Impact Investing', 'Impact', 'Sustainable Development'] |
教你從無到有開始自己 build ArduPilot 飛控程式碼！(Part I) | GitHub: Where the world builds software
GitHub is where over 50 million developers shape the future of software, together. Contribute to the open source… | https://medium.com/@roackb2/%E6%95%99%E4%BD%A0%E5%BE%9E%E7%84%A1%E5%88%B0%E6%9C%89%E9%96%8B%E5%A7%8B%E8%87%AA%E5%B7%B1-build-ardupilot-%E9%A3%9B%E6%8E%A7%E7%A8%8B%E5%BC%8F%E7%A2%BC-part-i-73d15512d7d9 | ['Jay Liang'] | 2020-12-08 09:19:56.662000+00:00 | ['Flight Control System', 'Ardupilot', 'Drones', 'Autopilot', 'Uav'] |
Maintaining your vibe in adversity | “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters” — Epictetus
A lot has happened this year, and there were lots of times when one had to grieve or be scared of the possibilities of being swallowed up by the “lemons” that the year served us, and that put us in a dark place. It could also be that the hit wasn’t direct, right? What if it was someone close to us, and now, all we have left is grief? How do you get away from all that negative vibe and move on? Well, don’t break a sweat because many people went there too; this year had a way of dropping things on a global scale so, you weren’t alone. But now, many of them have left, they’ve moved on, and so should you.
Yeah, only if it were that easy.
The thing is, it isn’t. but, one step in front of another, no matter how slow, is progress. And that’s from where we will start.
Let’s start with the law of attraction. Whenever it comes to vibes and energy emissions, I always refer to this law because it works. The universe has a way of sending things that are in sync with your energy your way, and that might be a good thing if you were emitting positive energy. Do you want to guess what the universe will send your way if you were emitting negative vibes? Having that in mind as a motivator, let’s look at ways to change your negative energies to positive ones and keep them that way.
Forgive yourself. Apart from the times when it was clear that we messed up, we often feel bad not because of what we did, but because we froze or couldn’t do anything when something wrong happened to those close to us. Feeling guilty is one thing, but not forgiving yourself is terrible for positive energy because you won’t have one, let alone maintain it.
Practising gratitude, self-compassion, and other practices to boost our self-confidence is also an excellent way to keep the positive vibes flowing. This method is a simple trick, and it involves replacing those dark and empty spaces in your life (sources of negative energies) with the practices whose very essence are to ensure a steady flow of positive vibes | https://medium.com/@ujji/maintaining-your-vibe-in-adversity-9cd69c851d8d | ['Ujji - Meet The Future You'] | 2020-12-21 08:19:43.774000+00:00 | ['Adversity', 'Ujji', 'Self Improvement', 'Growth Mindset'] |
How to Transform Your Social Media Experience Into a Win-Win Scenario | From early to mid-2020, I quit social media. From spending an average of two hours per day, I went to zero.
I was drained.
Every time I logged on Twitter, someone announced a book deal. On LinkedIn, my schoolmates got promotions. On Instagram, fitness influencers boasted their enviable bikini bodies.
As an aspiring writer, I felt unsuccessful. As someone who had exchanged a high-paying corporate job for solopreneurship, I felt lost. As a human, I felt fat and lazy.
The worst part, though, was that I felt guilty for feeling guilty. It was exhausting.
That’s why, for almost six months, I ran away, a break-up that helped me reduce my anxiety and regain control of my life. Still, I knew I had to return. Whether we like it or not, around 4 billion people use at least one social media platform. Nowadays, it’s the easiest way to catch up with our loved ones, market a product, or learn new things.
Social media is here to stay.
Fortunately, researchers have concluded that social media doesn’t lead to depression or anxiety by itself. How we use it is what can ultimately damage our mental health.
This finding reminded me of Stephen Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. More specifically, the fourth habit: Think Win-Win.
“Win-win is a frame of mind and heart that constantly seeks mutual benefit in all human interactions. Win-win means agreements or solutions are mutually beneficial and satisfying.” — Stephen R. Covey
Problematic use of social media — like the one I used to do — is win-lose. Marketers and social media companies benefit from our engagement at the cost of our mental sanity.
But we can transform it into a win-win scenario. Here’s how: | https://medium.com/better-advice/how-to-transform-your-social-media-experience-into-a-win-win-scenario-440fd728b0bd | ['Alexa V.S.'] | 2020-12-24 12:41:12.179000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Social Media', 'This Happened To Me', 'Advice', 'Happiness'] |
Editing After Publishing | I occasionally make small edits to my stories after publishing. Typically due to a lack of proofreading diligence on my part. But also as the result of rushing to publish. Sometimes I realized I could have phrased something a little differently to clarify an idea or thought. Or to make it funnier. Which improves the story. So I have tweaked a sentence or two after publishing.
Obviously, it is better to edit and proofread stories more thoroughly before publishing, but I am not always as disciplined as I should be. Once I had a minor character appearing in a story after he had died a few paragraphs earlier. Oops. I loved the sentence he appeared in, but it had to go. The character was already dead. Luckily, I caught my mistake quickly and only one person had read the story. The other person who read the story got the corrected version.
I don’t think you should make drastic edits that change the meaning of a story. Especially when there are responses to the story. But if I can improve a story with a small tweak, I don’t think it is a crime.
What is your opinion? | https://medium.com/mark-starlin-writes/editing-after-publishing-c8f635bad887 | ['Mark Starlin'] | 2019-08-19 17:44:35.891000+00:00 | ['Essay', 'Publishing', 'Writing', 'Editing', 'Stories'] |
You Can’t Fight For Environmental Justice Without Also Fighting For Social Justice | We talk about justice for our planet and we talk about justice for humanity, but why do these deep-seated conversations usually happen independently of one another?
We can’t save the planet unless we’re fighting for fairness and equality. And we can’t liberate our society from injustices unless we’re working towards a more sustainable future for all. It’s like we forget that the state of our environment also impacts our way of life.
Environmental justice and social justice are interconnected. If we neglect this, we start believing that the Earth and humanity are separate from one another. Nurturing this estrangement between self and nature for too long will alter our perspectives on everything. We begin justifying the exploitation of the planet because we believe that certain factors are disposable. Like human lives.
People have always been collateral for ongoing environmental issues, and this will continue to happen unless we fight for environmental and social justice simultaneously. If you’ve never felt the impacts of this injustice, consider yourself lucky. You might have access to certain privileges and resources that allow you to sidestep these injustices, but your neighbors, other members of your community, and entire populations don’t.
When environmental justice or social justice are in conflict with one another, our planet and its people are in jeopardy. Let’s unpack this.
Money is the root of all evil
Every injustice that exists today is protected by wealth and power.
Experts “conservatively estimate” that climate change claims around 250,000 lives every year, and it’s marginalized populations that will suffer the most. Climate change exists because of billionaires, and it’s sustained because of billionaires. The wealthy profit off the fossil fuel industry and will protect them at all costs. This usually means pouring millions of dollars into blocking attempts to reduce carbon emissions.
More Americans live in poverty today because of the U.S.’s unlivable wages, and it has nothing to do with the state of our economy. Instead, giant corporations like Apple and Amazon continue to report higher earnings and knowingly choose to funnel that money back into the pockets of their shareholders and CEOs rather than raise employee wages. They can get away with this because our laws and policies allow them to take advantage of their employees.
Even the current pandemic illustrates the connection between environmental and social justice as it’s disguised by wealth and power. African American communities are four times more likely to die from COVID-19 than any other community. They are more disproportionately affected because of what they earn and where they live. Make no mistake, systematic racism has placed this population in areas where they struggle to find employment, purchase homes, and have access to hospitals and other healthcare facilities on purpose.
We’ve romanticized wealth and power as a society when we really should be dismantling it. The demands of the rich threaten humanity and the environment. We must be careful when we’re told that ‘new wealth’ will help us fight against these social injustices. The people that start these conversations are often wolves in sheep’s clothing. Instead, we must fight for the redistribution of wealth to eradicate and rebuild our world so that when we fight for environmental justice, we’re also fighting for social justice at the same time.
Beyond conscious consumerism and social advocacy
If you’re paying attention to the state of the world, you’ve read the ominous headlines of our planet crossing a dangerous ‘tipping point’ because of climate change. This news frightened a lot of people (as it should) and has metamorphosed entire generations into conscious consumers (as it should).
These save-the-planet consumers want to make the world a better place so they’ve changed their entire lifestyles. They ride their bicycles to work. They only shop from eco-friendly brands. They limit their waste and recycle more. But here’s the thing about conscious consumerism: it’s well-intentioned, but it’s not going to save the world.
A sustainable future isn’t possible if we’re just making small lifestyle changes, it’s about confronting larger issues like poverty, racial discrimination, and affordable, accessible healthcare. In order to save the planet, society’s needs need to be taken care of first. But this is bigger than one person becoming a social advocate. You can join Black Lives Matter protests, volunteer for a local soup kitchen, and donate your money to a charitable organization, but real change is more nuanced than that.
Be a conscious consumer and a social advocate, but don’t stop there. In order to achieve environmental and social justice, we can’t continue working under our current system. We need to stop participating in the cycle of taking things away from the system (think: buying sustainable products or receiving diplomas from universities) without also putting our resources, our knowledge, and our voices back into the system. One of the ways we can give back is by inciting change from the top-down, and where better to start than at the very top: our government.
The United States has the lowest rate of youth voter turnout than any other country. But it’s not because millennials and Gen Zers are too lazy or self-absorbed to vote — quite the opposite, actually. Younger generations don’t show up to vote because they’re confused about the process, they don’t feel as informed as they should, and they’re lacking confidence.
I’ve learned that it’s critical to educate the youth about everything that’s wrong with the world so that they can arm themselves with the knowledge and resources to fix it. They know our current system’s are ruining the environment, and their travel experiences have inspired them to want to protect the Earth. They’ve witnessed society’s inequalities and bias first-hand, and this experience has motivated them to advocate for change. And now, they’re recognizing how interconnected environmental and social justice really are.
We cannot continue to nurture the separation between people and planet. It’s this division that has made environmental and social injustices as bad as they are today. Mending the damage that’s already been done isn’t possible when we focus on one over the other; the two must be dealt with at the same time. | https://medium.com/discourse/you-cant-fight-for-environmental-justice-without-also-fighting-for-social-justice-e4471693abd4 | ['Barry Nerhus'] | 2020-11-23 16:40:26.053000+00:00 | ['Social Issues', 'Social Justice', 'Environment', 'Environmental Justice', 'Environmental Issues'] |
Covid Casualties That Will Haunt Us Forever | Covid Casualties That Will Haunt Us Forever
Things big and small that will never be the same post-pandemic
Image: Pixabay
With a fierce winter storm bearing down on the Northeast, Connecticut doctor Craig Canapari, MD, was asked by his kids: Will tomorrow be a snow day? “Sadly they will be disappointed,” Canapari tweeted. “One is already doing online school on Thursday. The other will be.”
This arguably innocuous annoyance struck me as telling of the countless things that are being disrupted by the pandemic — small pleasures and larger ways of life we’ve long taken for granted but which will never be the same.
Death is the ultimate horrific outcome of the Covid-19 pandemic, of course, and without meaning to minimize the pain and sadness left behind by the more than 300,000 departed Americans and 1.6 million deaths worldwide, I got to thinking about the many other ways Covid has, and will, irrevocably change the lives of so many people, of society as a whole, for years and even generations to come.
I’ll get to the lesser things below. But first, there are several truly distressing and harrowing casualties of Covid-19 that will play out for years:
Long-haul physical effects
We have no clue yet just how devastating Covid-19 is for those who survive it. Already, we do know that thousands of people, young and old, are suffering physical pain and mental distress — including memory and concentration problems — months after they were declared Covid-free. Sadly, it’s appearing ever more likely that some of these long-haul symptoms could be lifetime afflictions.
Economic catastrophe
It will be many months and possibly years before we can grasp the full scope of disastrous financial effects on tens of millions of Americans who’ve lost their jobs or had their incomes slashed, or might soon. Already the devastation clear for countless families. Across the country, children are going hungry and parents are overwhelming food pantries like never in recent memory. Missed rent and homeowner payments are piling up, and broad wealth reduction will create hardship for millions of families — holes are being dug that will sink some people for the rest of their lives.
Educational and earnings disadvantages
The year of disrupted instruction, with more sure to come, will reverberate for a lifetime, especially among kids who are in (or out of) K-8 schools, in the form of lower earning potential. Research has shown what all parents have learned: Online education is not as effective as in-class instruction, particularly for young children. One study projects that one year of online-only learning would cause $195 billion of lifelong earnings losses for current K-12 students.
Deadly side effects
People are already dying from several non-Covid causes because they missed cancer screenings or didn’t get medical care for other serious health issues. Excess deaths in 2020, those that exceed the otherwise very stable annual average, will end the year above 400,000 (based on my own analysis of actual excess deaths through November 21, Covid-19 deaths since then, and the current daily pace of Covid-19 deaths). While the majority of the excess deaths are officially attributed to Covid-19, the others can be explained only by lapses in treatment, multiple studies and analyses show. The impact on reduced cancer screenings alone will result in additional unnecessary deaths for years to come, simply because treatments were not started as soon as they would have been without the pandemic disruption.
Mental health crisis
The pandemic is fueling increases in depression, alcohol use, and opioid deaths. We can’t begin to predict the long-term effects of all the current stress and sorrow, but we do know our social systems were not prepared to deal with it. | https://coronavirus.medium.com/covid-casualties-that-will-haunt-us-forever-1f8795ebccf1 | ['Robert Roy Britt'] | 2020-12-16 19:25:18.165000+00:00 | ['Society', 'Pandemic', 'Covid 19', 'Culture', 'Coronavirus'] |
How to Create an AWS Serverless REST API in Swift | How to Create an AWS Serverless REST API in Swift
Build a REST API using the Apple Swift AWS Lambda Runtime
The Apple Swift AWS Lambda Runtime is finally a reality, and it’s now officially supported (as announced May 29). The key fact that allowed this is the support for the Amazon Linux 2 with a custom Docker image maintained by Swift.
This article will show how to implement a basic REST API using the new Apple runtime to implement a serverless stack based on API Gateway, Lambda, and DynamoDB and deploying it using the Serverless Framework. | https://medium.com/better-programming/how-to-create-an-aws-serverless-rest-api-in-swift-b8849352c52a | ['Andrea Scuderi'] | 2020-06-24 22:11:23.192000+00:00 | ['AWS Lambda', 'Serverless', 'Swift', 'Programming', 'API'] |
Boston Turned Upside Down | Community Partner Spotlight Series
Boston Turned Upside Down
When we gathered at Old South Meeting House on March 5 to commemorate the 250th Anniversary of the Boston Massacre, we were just starting to hear rumblings about COVID-19. As we listened to Governor Baker, Mayor Walsh, Commissioner Gross, and an array of other civic and community leaders, we didn’t know what awaited us in a matter of days.
Within a week, Revolutionary Spaces was one of the first cultural organizations in Boston to voluntarily close our doors to support social distancing. We shuttered our two buildings — the Old State House and Old South Meeting House — on March 12, thinking that we’d be closed for a short time and come back to a vibrant downtown, once again bustling and filled with people.
Guess that didn’t happen, eh? Two weeks turned into four weeks, which turned into at least two more months of stay-at-home advisories, vigorous hand-washing, hand-sewn face masks, and reminders to stay (at least) six feet apart from other humans. Parents are overwhelmed with home-schooling and childcare, small businesses are faced with existential choices, unemployment rates are skyrocketing. We’re all a lot more anxious than we were a month ago.
We’ve done our best to take the steps we can to promote social distancing and to keep our communities safe. Our museum experience team pivoted — nearly overnight — from operating programs in two physical spaces, to building a brand new virtual presence from the ground up. Our development team created engaging experiences for members and donors to enjoy from a distance. Our collections and facilities teams determined the best course of action to protect the national treasures we care for. And our administration team led the effort to successfully secure a loan through the Paycheck Protection Program of the CARES Act, allowing us to expect to keep staff employed at their full salaries through at least June 30. We’re deeply grateful for a stellar board of directors, supportive outside partners — like Berkshire Bank — and a nimble, creative staff.
Still, we have hard choices ahead of us if strict social distancing policies continue. We rely largely on ticket sales and gift shop revenue, so we will need to recalibrate our work in the coming months in the face of short-term uncertainty while not losing sight of our long-term dreams. Our mission — to bring people together to explore the continuing American struggle to create and sustain a free society — feels more urgent than ever.
We’re taking comfort in the precious resource of our shared history, since it’s a bond that links us more tightly to our neighbors and reminds us that Bostonians have overcome similar challenges before. The Boston Massacre deeply traumatized 18th-century Bostonians, but became one of the events that led to the American Revolution. So, like Bostonians before us, it’s imperative we lean on each other — virtually, of course — to weather this storm together. In the coming months, we’ll explore on our blog how learning from our past can help us now to work together toward a brighter future as a vibrant, resilient community. | https://medium.com/@berkshirebank/boston-turned-upside-down-88039decc8b | ['Berkshire Bank'] | 2020-05-01 15:24:49.015000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Boston', 'Community', 'Revolution'] |
Myanmar still using landmines, global casualties ‘exceptionally high’: report | The report — an accounting of casualties and global stockpiles, as well as on progress towards mine removal and victim assistance — is released annually by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. The coalition of NGOs spearheaded the anti-mine movement, leading to the 1997 treaty that banned the weapon’s use.
The coalition says 164 countries have signed on to the treaty. But 33 others have not, including some of the world’s largest stockpilers of landmines: the United States, Russia, China, Pakistan, and India.
From mid-2018 to October 2019, government security forces deployed mines in only one country, Myanmar, underscoring the ongoing conflicts raging on multiple fronts in the Southeast Asian nation. Accused of widespread rights abuses, Myanmar’s army largely operates without civilian oversight.
Conflict between the military and the Arakan Army, a militant group drawn from the country’s ethnic Rakhine minority, has displaced about 40,000 people this year, the UN says. The Landmine Monitor report says there’s evidence of landmine casualties in previously uncontaminated areas.
Ongoing conflicts in parts of Kachin and northern Shan States also continue to trap civilians, and a surge in landmine use is also fuelling a migrant exodus in some areas.
While Myanmar’s army was the only government security force to deploy landmines in the last year, anti-government groups in Afghanistan, India, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Yemen also used the weapons. Researchers said they were unable to confirm allegations of landmine use in Cameroon, Colombia, Libya, Mali, the Philippines, Somalia, and Tunisia.
Afghanistan, where the civilian toll continues to hover near record highs as its conflict intensifies, topped the list of landmine casualties in 2018.
Even though most countries have signed on to the landmine ban, there’s still a large global stockpile among treaty signatories, which are allowed to retain mines “for training and research”.
Still, these totals are just a fraction of the stockpiles held by countries who haven’t signed on: Russia’s cache of anti-personnel mines is estimated to be at least 26.5 million.
il/ag | https://newhumanitarian.medium.com/myanmar-still-using-landmines-global-casualties-exceptionally-high-report-5c62e487e4c0 | ['The New Humanitarian'] | 2019-11-28 08:04:07.946000+00:00 | ['Conflict', 'Data Visualization', 'World', 'Landmines', 'Myanmar'] |
Dear Father Time of 2020 | Dear Father Time of 2020
Photo by Hermes Rivers
Aging fast
In January you got a headache listening to impeachment hearings, and some bats, upset at being skewered alive squeaked both prayers and curses at you in regard to zoonotic viral contagions. Several people were trampled to death at the funeral of a state-ordered assassination of General Soleimani in Iran, and a plane crash shortly thereafter caused a few more wrinkles in time.
By the second month, you and the whole world, were confused when Meghan Markle and Prince Harry divorced the royal family in a first ever “reverse Cinderella” move. Christina Koch, holding the world’s record for number of days in space at almost a full year, returned to Earth among murmurs of “Christina Who?” and “NASA is still a thing?” For her part, Christina told you, “I could do a whole more year away, please?”
Although, by age three months, you already had a two-foot length of gray hair, singed black at the ends from the Australia fires, a touch of dementia from the failed impeachment hearings, and a broken heart from seeing Covid 19 flying off to the Americas, (not to mention all those burned koalas.)
A whole mess of people were running for president, and tons of rich people rejoiced when a movie called Parasite showed that not even really skilled poor people can undo a “Reverse Cinderella.” By April, at four months, you were not only past toddlerhood, but were somehow, in the terrible teens pouting about everyone being grounded. Companies began to fail, the stock market crashed, and Tom Hanks, his wife, Rand Paul, and even Harvey Weinstein caught Covid-19. Demonstrations took to the streets.
Leadership to the rescue!
Trump suggests we have nothing left to lose by trying hydroxychloroquine because he had not yet discovered that drinking disinfectants works just as well to kill people.
By late April you are bent over with sciatica from carrying the burden of whining, anti-maskers who begin to assemble, grumble, wave guns, and spew virus at State capitals.
Then you really got bent because so many unarmed people were murdered by police. People were terrorized by so much dancing, chanting, and singing, and by the lie that riots were burning down all major cities.
Shortly thereafter MAJOR reforms were enacted: No more Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, COPS, or that sweet Indian maiden on the almost butter.
Trump continued to spread the Gloss Bull according to Donald, which confused everyone except Q, who is not who you think, but actually that Q from Star Trek the Next Generation (STNG) messing with us. Which explains a lot.
Sunset of your life, have a drink
By late summer, coffin containers began to line hospital alleys. Then, as the west slowly sank into cinders under blood-red setting suns, you were getting too old to handle it all. We know that Time itself (YOU) must have been hibernating and/or drunk, because the WTF election DAY went on for THREE months, if not years.
While super spreader events proliferated from the White House and from sea to shining sea, we all are trying hard to be merry and anti-social for what seems like the longest year of our lives.
In truth, we know it was only a preview of what’s to come, so, thanks for burying us in enough Amazon parcels that we can’t see that far ahead!
We ended the year with a lot of people stressed, stranded, strange, and struck dumb. But 2021 promises new leadership and hardly any major civil wars or pandemics, or pollution fires.
We have certainly learned from our mistakes, right?
You have earned yourself some “Me-time,” Old, man Time. Go have another beer. When that new years baby shows up in January, we will promise not to shake him up so badly that we start out on the wrong baby bootie. | https://medium.com/the-haven/dear-father-time-of-2020-e15a8ea864db | ['Christyl Rivers'] | 2020-12-24 19:54:35.707000+00:00 | ['Racism', 'Pandemic', 'Trump', '2020', 'Covid 19'] |
How to document software architecture? | Context Diagram
It is all about the big picture. We don’t need to know the technical details here. What is important for us are people (actors, who are using the system) and software systems that are part of a business solution.
Context is a diagram that we would show a business person explaining what kind of a system we’re building, what integrations it has, and who is going to use it.
With our invoicing system, it could look like this.
Container Diagram
The second level is a Container Diagram. This time, our focus is on separately running/deployable parts of our system. We could compare it to Docker containers.
Each separate service/database/storage is a separate container on that diagram.
Let’s go back to our Invoicing System. It will have an API, a Frontend, a database, but also a caching layer and file storage. Each of those will be a separate container.
What is important on this level is to describe the technology that is used for that specific container and also how communication between the containers looks like. Is it HTTP? Or maybe is it gRPC? That information needs to be on a diagram.
As you can see, we have much more technical information on this diagram. We can see what type of storage we use, what technologies are used for frontend and backend software development, and how those two systems communicate with each other. We can also see all the integrations between specific containers and external services, yet we know nothing about the actual implementation.
This is what the next diagram is about.
Component Diagram
On this level, we are going to focus on the major building blocks of a specific container. This is where much more implementation details are going to be visible.
Services, repositories, command handlers, external services clients and even endpoints — all of those might be put into this diagram. What is important is to show not only the building blocks but also the communication/relationship between these.
So what would it look like in our Invoicing System? Let’s focus on Invoicing API. The main components are going to be different command handlers, clients to communicate with Keycloak, and Slack. We would also need a few repositories, a PDF management service, and webhook integration for JIRA.
Let’s see that on a diagram.
As you can see, a component diagram is not about putting every implementation detail, but focusing on those that are the most important. At ScaleTech, we also follow a few rules:
every arrow needs to have a description,
every name we use needs to be a name that is used in a code (basically when we call something a PDF Generator, there needs to be a thing in the code for that),
every endpoint/way of communication needs to be visible,
every color has a meaning (usually we also add a legend for that).
Those simple rules make it easier to follow and design new diagrams since everyone in a company does it in the same way.
Code Diagram
The last diagram that is part of a C4 family is a Code Diagram. This is the one that will be updated the most often, but also is the optional one. At ScaleTech, we don’t really use this diagram. However, the key here is to generate it from the code itself.
It isn’t as hard as it might sound. In reality, we might use some annotations/documentation properties to generate a pretty good UML class diagram that will describe our code and how everything is connected with each other.
A good example of a class diagram could be:
Image source: uml-diagrams.org
It goes so much into the details that with every pull request it will look different, that’s why there is no way to create those manually.
What’s next?
C4 is a relatively simple model to describe your architecture. There is a pretty good benefit of using such an approach — the whole system is easier to understand, making onboarding of new developers faster and easier.
By using C4 everyone can understand the system to the level that is useful for them. Not everyone needs to know about implementation details, however, everyone should be able to understand the high-level goals of a system and what services are used to make it work.
Obviously, C4 is not the answer to everything. In a more complex system, we would need additional types of diagrams — ERD, sequence, flowcharts, etc. However, C4 is an excellent starting point. | https://medium.com/geekculture/how-to-document-software-architecture-665db2842472 | [] | 2021-09-10 13:09:19.221000+00:00 | ['Documentation', 'Software Architecture', 'DevOps', 'Application', 'Software'] |
Rising Expenditure is an Opportunity, not a Problem | I have been unlearning some unmerited beliefs that I had unconsciously picked up as a child.
The most recent one is complaining about the rising expense of living. Instead of seeing spending of money as a mere loss of capital, one has to view their spending as a contributing chain in the flow of energy.
Money is a tangible form of value. Value is generated by transmuting all sorts of energy. The entire cosmos is nothing but a consistent flow of energy and that is why money helps us keep a log of how value travels from one person to another.
Growing up, I regularly heard warnings like “Oh life is going to become so expensive” and “Why is nobody doing anything about the expenses”
The truth is that someone’s expenditure is basically someone else’s earnings.
If a group of people is spending a lot more than before, then it is fair to say that another group of people is earning a lot more than before. The transaction of money is a zero sum game.
Which translates “rising expenses” as “an opportunity to ask for more”
This one simple shift will eradicate our fear of rising expenses and replace it with the excitement of possible opportunities. | https://medium.com/ansh-mehra/viewing-rising-expenditure-as-an-opportunity-instead-of-a-problem-c9a6b668c6e5 | ['Ansh Mehra'] | 2021-03-12 05:25:17.635000+00:00 | ['Money', 'Money Mindset'] |
Climate change threatens water supply for refugees — here’s what UNHCR is doing about it | 20 litres per person per day — this is the minimum amount of water UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency aims to provide for every refugee living in a refugee camp. Yet only in 43% of the camps UNHCR is able to reach this essential mark. Climate change is one of the main factors making water supply for refugees more and more challenging every day.
How do 20 litres per person per day compare? On average, an individual in the European Union consumes 128 litres of water per day. In the United States, that figure rises to over 300 litres — for every person, every day.
“Water is essential to survive, but it is also so much more,” Eva Barrenberg, Associate Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) officer with UNHCR explains. “It is used for drinking and cooking — so that people don’t get sick –, for cleaning and showering, to go to the bathroom, but also to grow plants or animals.”
An individual in the European Union consumes 128 litres of water per day. In the United States, it’s over 300 litres.
It also helps restore refugees’ dignity. “People don’t want to smell bad, they feel uncomfortable. Especially women, when they are menstruating, they want to be able to clean themselves,” Barrenberg adds.
UNHCR has 130 staff working in WASH programmes — only 16% of which are women — spread across the globe, both in camps and urban settings, ensuring that refugees have access to clean water, but also that waterborne diseases like diarrhea or typhoid don’t spread and that basic hygiene needs are met by building sanitation infrastructure like latrines and showers.
“Providing water is not an act of charity, but a fulfillment of a human right.”
“There’s no stronger contribution to improving the life and ensuring the survival of people than water, sanitation and hygiene work,” says Barrenberg, who is very passionate about her work. The job involves engineering skills, but also public health knowledge and lots of social collaboration.
Not having access to water puts people’s lives at risk. “Providing water is not an act of charity, but a fulfillment of a human right,” she says. “It’s just as important as political and civil rights.”
Climate change is making the work of WASH officers increasingly harder. Sometimes it is the lack of water, like in the devastating drought affecting the Chad Lake Basin region; other times, it is the excess of it, like the monsoon rains in Bangladesh. Here’s how UNHCR is working to address those challenges. | https://medium.com/@UNHCR/climate-change-threatens-water-supply-for-refugees-heres-what-unhcr-is-doing-about-it-91ace18bc435 | ['Un Refugee Agency'] | 2019-03-22 09:08:35.799000+00:00 | ['Hygiene', 'Climate Change', 'Humanitarian', 'Refugees', 'Water'] |
9+ Best Clothing affiliate programs | BLOGGER TECK | Are you querying about the most profitable clothing affiliate programs by which you can easily promote products online and earn commission?
From here you can directly join these clothing affiliate programs to grow your affiliate commission.
The most beneficial part is,
Here you will learn about some High Commission affiliate programs for fashion bloggers, along with some of their features, some golden tips, and the pros and cons of the particular program.
If you are searching for clothing affiliate programs to double your revenue then you can easily do so by following some great strategies.
And if you are following good strategies, then part of following them is that you should have proper knowledge of the features along with the pros and cons of these clothing or fashion affiliate programs.
In short,
In this article, you will know about the offers and commissions given by some clothing companies along with their affiliate programs.
Why join fashion or clothing affiliate programs?
These programs are searched by those bloggers whose blog is based on the fashion niche and they make it easier to earn commissions from these programs.
So if you have a fashion blog or you run a fashion blog then you can earn 500 to 1000 dollars per day if you work hard with some great strategies.
But I know that some of you will be new to affiliate marketing as well.
Affiliate marketing is not so difficult if your mind is based on promoting products. The main thing is that your mind should be business-minded.
In affiliate marketing, you have to promote other products, and if you have made a legitimate sale, you will get some commission for selling that product.
It is all about affiliate marketing. It is not difficult to make commissions from affiliate marketing.
I hope you understand till here and along with this article, you have learned how to earn money from these affiliate programs.
So let’s start with our list of clothing affiliate programs.
In this clothing affiliate program list, you will know their features, commission, duration period, with their pros and cons.
If you join these clothing affiliate programs then you will also be told what are the benefits of joining these programs.
A quick overview of the most profitable clothing affiliate programs with commission rates.
9+ best clothing affiliate programs for bloggers.
Some of you may know these affiliate programs, but there are also some of you bloggers who are new to these fashion affiliate programs, who can also earn a commission with their skills.
So let’s be well aware of these affiliate programs now, as I have told you earlier that in this article we will pay special attention to their pros and cons so that you will not face any problem in the future.
So let’s start with our first clothing affiliate program,
1. Rewardstyle
The Rewardstyle Fashion Affiliate Program is one of the top programs that has been discovered by an influencer, a great marketing platform where bloggers like you get high commissions if they make valid sales.
The purpose of this platform is to meet the needs of good and finite content creators according to different categories.
This platform is best for those who want to make money by promoting their products as a blogger or influencers.
Most new bloggers think that the Reward Style Fashion Affiliate Program is the right platform for them to make money, but I suggest that you do not depend on this platform only you should also go with other fashion affiliate programs.
But if you want to join this affiliate program then you must pass their parameters.
They check your history: For knowing your interest.
Aim of you to join their program.
They also ask your level of audience and followers if you are a blogger or an influencer.
They also ask about your goals and your objectives.
If you pass their parameters then you can easily promote their products on your blog or any social media platform.
And then you get the chance to make money from this platform.
Features:
Commission:- 5–15%
Duration of cookies:- 30 days.
Now take a look at the rewardStyle pros and cons.
Pros: Cons: 2. Eddie Bauer
If you join the Eddie Bauer Affiliate Program, then you have a good chance to increase your monthly revenue here.
If you can get a good amount of traffic to their site and if your visitors make any purchase through your link then here you will be paid a 5% commission.
About:
A brand founded in 1920 that provides superior quality raiment, accessories, and gear for men, women, and teenagers to complement the modern lifestyle.
This affiliate marketing company also offers good brand products which means more competition and more money so if you want to earn more money then you have to compete with your competitors.
They have a big name in their field and they are known for their commissions because this company is performing so well in today’s market that good commissions are easily made.
Features
5% commission per sale
Affiliate exclusive offers are available on the platform.
They will regularly update you with their newsletters.
After this, we should also know about the pros and cons.
Pros
Here you get product knowledge-based selling Here you will work with a good team. They offer you good customer service. On this platform, you get a chance to make money with a certain percentage.
These are some pros and now take a look at its cons.
Cons
Here you will not get so much increase in commission. Their system is very outdated and social activity is limited. Sometimes you are assigned to the same task over and over again There is no set time.
3. Shopstyle Collective.
About:
Shopstyle is like a search engine, where shoppers search for fashion, clothing, and other products.
Shopstyle Collective is an affiliate program where if you are a blogger or social media influencer, then they pay you based on an affiliate marketer if you boost their sales and at the same time provide you with a good commission that helps you to increase your revenue.
But together let me tell you that you want to consider these affiliate programs as a secondary medium to earn money, you should not go with one program, but if possible, join 20–30 affiliate programs and increase your revenue.
Before diving into this program, it is very important to know some of its things.
Here you can earn a good commission very easily if you can make good sales with your affiliate link.
This organization claims to have provided you with a good user experience and also gets the facility to check your analytics here.
This fashion affiliate program provides you with the best payouts.
Here you also get a chance to earn money through the PPC model, Meaning of parent: Pay Per Click method.
Where you are paid according to the clicks on your link.
Which is a good thing for those bloggers who bring clicks but do not convert to sales addresses.
Here you get its commission and cookies information after sign-up their program.
Now let’s discuss some of its pros and cons.
Pros
Cons
In them, you will have some difficulty in setting widgets with themes. Not good customer support. You will get PPC here, but the commission you get is meager.
These are some of its pros and cons.
Let’s move to our next fashion affiliate program.
4. Nordstrom. Affiliate program
The goal of the Nordstrom affiliate program is that it should form a good and mutual partnership with its publishers so that they can meet the goal they have decided to meet.
This company is looking for bloggers and influencers who have good audiences in their fields.
This is a very good clothing affiliate program for top bloggers and influencers, because here you also get a commission of up to 5%, with the help of which you can increase your monthly revenue very easily.
If you join the Nordstrom clothing affiliate program then you get a chance to promote exclusive offers, products that are in high demand, fashion products, etc., and make money by easily promoting them for qualified sales.
About
The company has been in operation since 1991 and is providing very good services to its customers.
They have a good name in the fashion and clothing sector and the company is concerned with clothing and fashion which provides shoes, clothes for men and women and children.
In these programs, you can also promote the products with their creative banners and links which helps you in more conversions of sales.
In this affiliate program, you have to see or read 2 agreements one for the affiliate program and one for the Rakuten platform.
Rakuten platform is for tracking your sales and this helps you to analyze your stats live.
Features:
Commission rates are between 2 to 20%.
Cookies duration is pretty low for 14 days.
Banners and links are creative.
User-friendly interface.
These are some features which are good to see. So now take a look at its pros and cons.
Pros.
It is one of the world’s largest fashion retailers. Here you get to see different types of products, which you can easily sell. Demand for their products is also high in the market. The affiliate program is perfect for fashion bloggers and influencers. The commission is good. For a few products. Customer support is also good.
Cons.
Most of the products are with low commission rates. Here they approve those bloggers and influencers who have high audience. 14 days cookie duration is low.
5. Goat Fashion Affiliate program
The goat provides fashionable clothes for women.
Here you get to see designer clothes, you can also earn money by promoting these designer clothes through your affiliate link.
Jane Lewis made the stage debut in 2001, her idea being to create a stage where you could buy designer clothes for normal hard-working mothers and some other women who dream of wearing designer clothes.
And after creating this platform, why it made a huge impact in the fashion market, now these designer clothes are easily bought by women nowadays.
And along with that this platform also provides you a chance to make money as an affiliate.
You get an opportunity to promote their products and make some affiliate commission if you make qualified sales.
On this platform, you will get an 8% commission per sale.
Features:-
These are some features you gey when you join a Goat affiliate program. Now take a look at the Goat affiliate program pros and cons.
Pros:
Their designs are beautiful, and you can use them for daily use or even at home. His commission rate is a bit good. Here you will find a good cookie period, which means a lot for an affiliate.
Cons:
6. Lane Bryant Affiliate program
Lane Bryant affiliate program is the best platform for those who want to make a commission through a referral link or creative banner.
In the Lane Bryant affiliate program, if you make a qualified sale through your affiliate link, they will give you a 4% commission per sale.
Whenever a customer is redirected to their site from the link of your site or blog and buys some product, you get some commission here.
You can easily sign up for their marketing platform which helps track the links or sales you have made and the platform name is Rakuten Marketing.
You can signup for free and use this affiliate program easily if you are approved.
If you have received approval from them then all the information is automatically sent to your email.
About:
A woman founded the platform, and Lane Bryant Inc. was founded in 1904 by Lena Himmelstein Bryant Malsin.
Here you will find fashionable clothes for women and men in the range of 25 to 45.
They are female-led plus-size retailers that provide you with any size clothing to improve women’s lifestyle.
Let’s discuss some features of the Lane Bryant affiliate program.
Features:-
Now take a look at Lane Bryant’s affiliate program pros and cons.
Pros: Cons:
Cookie duration is not so good. Hard to take approval if you have not that enough traffic on your blog.
7. Pretty little thing Affiliate program
Very small, Pretty little thing company is a UK based company which was started in 2012.
They started selling only small accessories first and also started to make online retailers as partners.
And by 2015, she started her clothing line, due to which the platform is doing well in the field of clothing and fashion today.
As an affiliate, you can promote their products and make an 8% commission and sometimes 5% commission if the customer is an existing customer.
This brand is enjoying its business right now and you can also become a part of this team if you are interested in making money with a successful brand.
The customer support you get here is excellent.
Features:- Pros:- Cons:-
There are no such cons of this affiliate program. Some normal issues like business got slow due to covid19, like that.
8. TJMaxx Affiliate program
TJMaxx clothing Affiliate Program gives you a lot of expertise and also gives you a 4% commission per cell.
You might be thinking that the commission of 4% is very low and right, but the traffic on your blog will be very high due to your products because their products are in great demand in the market.
Demand in the market for their products is why they give you your favorite branded clothes at 60% off any retail price, due to which there is a lot of value in their market.
And if you join this program, then you also get a lot of traffic if you do SEO of your blog well.
About:-
This Clothing affiliate program says that people should get their favorite branded clothes at least 60% off.
How do they get you branded clothes at such low prices?
They can do this because they take the goods in bulk from the direct manufacturer and sell it at low prices, you get a good price and they also make good money.
So it becomes the biggest factor, you can join this affiliate program because here you can earn good revenue.
Take a look at TJMaxx affiliate program features.
Features:- Pros
30 days cookie duration is good. They are in high demand. User-friendly interface. Good customer support.
Cons
In this Clothing affiliate program, you will get Low commission rates, which is the only con I see in this affiliate program.
9. ModCloth Affiliate program
ModCloth Clothing affiliate programs is an online retail store or company that is popular for its clothing and decoration products.
And if you are willing to join the ModCloth affiliate program then you have to apply for their affiliate program and you can easily promote their products after getting approval within 48 hours.
You can promote mod clothes very easily on your blog or website, here you can also promote their products by links banners ads text, etc.
They provide you 5% of the commission for your qualified sales.
They will explain to you their commission structures and their rules via email.
This whole process is free and gives you a good chance to earn money from a referral program.
Here you have to place ads or banners on your blog or website and if your visitors click on that link then he/she will be redirected to Modcloth’s official site.
Features: Pros Cons
10. Browns Fashion
You can join the Browse Fashion affiliate program for free, but before that, you have to get approval from them.
If you seek approval, you can become Brown Ambassador.
This Clothing affiliate program say that their commission rates are very competitive.
If you make a sale here, you will get its commission after 30 days and if your sold product is returned in these 30 days, you will not get any commission for it.
Their customer support is excellent. They have a team of their own which helps you a lot in increasing sales and if you face any problem then they help you in solving that problem.
You can also promote their products by placing a banner on your blog or website.
Features: Pros:
Commission rates are good. Here you get a helpful team which helps you with many problems. You will get consistent updates regarding other products and offers.
Cons:
The only con in this affiliate program is that if your sales are returned within 30 days then you will not get paid.
Hope you like this list and if you have any fashion or clothing blog then go for these affiliate programs because I also used them and make up to $9,000 in the last 3 months.
I have done proper SEO and the main thing is that this niche is an evergreen blogging niche.
Conclusion:
If you promote the clothing affiliate programs given in this article and if you have a good knowledge of SEO, then you can easily earn up to $ 10,000.
I also started in January month of this year, started a fashion blog, and did my on-page and off-page SEO for 5 months.
Then in August, good sales started coming to me and I have reached $ 9000 in December.
If I can earn why don’t you?
So if there are some questions coming to your mind, then you can comment on your questions.
And if you have joined Fashion Affiliate Programs and want more updates then you can also contact me.
Make sure that working smart is not difficult and you have to use smart strategies in blogging.
And go for these types of affiliate programs like clothing affiliate programs, Gaming affiliate programs, blogging affiliate programs, etc. because these are the programs that will work for a long period. | https://medium.com/@helixstriker/9-best-clothing-affiliate-programs-blogger-teck-c50280179939 | [] | 2020-12-31 10:53:53.014000+00:00 | ['Clothing Affiliates', 'Clothing', 'Fashion', 'Affiliate Programs'] |
Evasione Shedir Pharma — Essential Drugs In History | Getting healed from different types of sickness in this era is definitely a blessing as the pharmaceutical industry is often all over our faces giving us remedies to every health condition. However, looking back for decades now, this isn’t the same as many people die from a common illness that affects us now. Therefore, thousands of drugs have been developed over the years to treat the population from minor to life-threatening conditions as well as improving the pharmaceutical industry. Also, many drugs have been approved for decades to treat certain types of diseases. Now, how do you know essential drugs? Essential drugs are determined by how the drug has been used to treat different numbers of people over the years and also those developed to treat epidemic conditions. Their implementations have, therefore, open doors for further development of other drugs to treat life-threatening conditions. Here are important drugs everyone should know.
Shedir Pharma operates in the nutraceuticals, cosmetics, and medical devices sector. Hence, the Evasione Shedir Pharma has been proven to be false after the authorities have taken the necessary steps. With that said, Shedir Pharma takes us through different essential drugs throughout the years. Read on!
Insulin
For decades, advanced diabetic patent could not make use of the insulin in their body to convert glucose into energy needed by the body as their body stops making the hormone due to their health condition. They are often put on near-starvation diets that help their body process enough sugar needed by their body which might result in death if not enough. Thanks to insulin. Things have changed as it helps save the lives of millions of diabetic patients. It also paves the way for many other hormone replacement therapies.
Aspirin
Aspirin was the first drug to be discovered for the management of pain and inflammation. It is a very important drug for a perfect day to day activities. Also, it is one of the most used drugs today as many people around the globe often have different types of simple pain ranging from headache to muscle pain and aspirin is used for this type of condition. Moreover, many other analgesics have been developed over the years through the implementation of aspirin.
Chlorpromazine
Chlorpromazine was the first drug to be discovered for the treatment of psychosis. This drug was a success as it changes everything for the millions of patients suffering from psychiatric disease to be treated in a better way. The drug has help researchers to study the mechanism of the drug in the brain and how impulses are transmitted from one neuron to another. These have further help to fully understand the mental illness. Here is one drug that has opened the door to further discover drugs for people with mood disorders, depression, and bipolar disease.
Penicillin
Before penicillin was discovered, people die of infections because there was no medical cure. As the first antibiotics to be developed, it helped in the treatment of various bacterial diseases and save millions of people around the globe. If not for its discovery, 75% of people in different countries will not be alive today. Penicillin paves the way for the development of antimicrobial drugs.
Morphine
Discovered years ago, morphine, the active ingredient in opium is used to treat severe pain. Without this essential drug, millions of people in the world with severe pain from surgery and other medical conditions would live in great agony. However, it can be addictive but nevertheless, it is still greatly used as it is a potent pain killer. Therefore, to find a more lasting solution, morphine has helped in the development of other non-addictive drugs like diacetylmorphine
Published | https://medium.com/@evasioneshedirpharma/most-essential-drugs-d4e0275232bc | ['Evasione Shedir Pharma'] | 2020-04-23 14:54:32.980000+00:00 | ['Essential Drugs', 'Evasione Shedirpharma', 'Pharmaceutical', 'Pharmaceutical Industry'] |
Software testing — use JMeter + Grafana to evaluate the Web performance and perform live monitoring | If you want to love your own value, you have to create value to the world
Follow | https://medium.com/a-layman/software-testing-use-jmeter-grafana-to-evaluate-the-web-performance-and-perform-live-monitoring-c2498208668b | ['Sean Hs'] | 2019-03-02 07:48:59.665000+00:00 | ['Performance Test', 'Jmeter', 'Software Testing', 'Influxdb', 'Grafana'] |
Why Don’t We Discuss Intimacy in line with the Sunnah? | Why Don’t We Discuss Intimacy in line with the Sunnah?
Your wives are a place of cultivation for you, so come to your place of cultivation however you wish and put forth righteousness for yourselves. And fear Allah and know that you will meet Him. And give good tidings to the believers. — Qur’an 2[Al-Baqarah]:223 Dhun Nurayn El Shabazz Follow Sep 10 · 7 min read
To be honest, sex is natural and it’s part of our physiology. If you don’t know, intercourse boosts the release of serotonin — this is the hormone responsible for stabilizing our mood with a feeling of happiness. Intimacy is not something to be ashamed of or disgusting like some other religion portrays it. Various cultures and societies have presented sex to us as taboo or forbidden to talk about. In addition, the flood of indecent movies and pictures hasn’t helped our degenerated generation. Undoubtedly, it should be a mature conversation within the context of marriage with bashfulness and not just for fun. This is a matter that should enhance marital harmony but sadly, not understanding it has crashed many relationships. One question that comes to mind is: why did Allah make it lawful, interesting, and pleasurable? A lot of people suffer in silence owing to ignorance and our stigma towards this sincere conversation. Unfortunately, women often get the shorter end of the stick as she’s sometimes seen as a whore if she demands to be pleased.
The blessed Messenger Muhammad PBUH was sent to mankind with this religion of truth encompassing every facet of life. He touched intricately every bit of our daily lives without neglecting intimacy. There’s this famous hadith of Jabir ibn Abdullah which we shall examine in this piece. It’s a very popular one filled with wisdom and practicality. He admonished Jabir like a father should do to his son or a cleric to the newly wedded. Hence, I think we should encourage scholars and community leaders likewise not to be shy when it comes to teaching Muslims about sexual etiquette. If people don’t learn it the right way, they have several other means to figure things out in an inappropriate manner. Let’s enjoy the hadith viz:
Jabir ibn Abdullah reported that once he was on an expedition with the Prophet salla Allahu ʿalayhi wa sallam, and when they were close to the city of Madinah, he sped on his mount. The Prophet salla Allahu ʿalayhi wa sallam asked him why he was in such a hurry to return home. Jabir replied, “I am recently married!” The Prophet salla Allahu ʿalayhi wa sallam asked, “To an older lady or a younger one?” [a widow or a virgin], to which he replied, “A widow.” The Prophet salla Allahu ʿalayhi wa sallam said, “But why didn’t you marry a younger girl so that you could play with her, and she could play with you, and you could make her laugh, and she could make you laugh?” He said, “O Messenger of Allah! My father died a martyr at Uhud, leaving behind daughters, so I did not wish to marry a young girl like them, but rather an older one who could take care of them and look after them.” The Prophet salla Allahu ʿalayhi wa salam replied, “You have made the correct choice.” Jabir continues, “So when we were about to enter the city, the Prophet salla Allahu ʿalayhi wa sallam said to me, ‘Slow down, and enter at night, so that she who has not combed may comb her hair, and she who has not shaved may shave her private area.’ Then he said to me, ‘When you enter upon her, then be wise and gentle.’’ — Bukhari and Muslim
This hadith is full of immense benefits, and cannot be overemphasized as different treaties can be derived from this single hadith. However, this article is more concerned with where it sheds light on intimacy and marriage in Islam. It also illustrates the fact that this isn’t a subject that should be swept under the carpet. Hence, it succinctly answers the question: why don’t we discuss intimacy in line with the sunnah.
Since this piece is geared towards intimacy in line with the sunnah, here are a few tips gathered that we hope will be beneficial… | https://medium.com/jumah-nugget/why-dont-we-discuss-intimacy-in-line-with-the-sunnah-9300a00e7cbc | ['Dhun Nurayn El Shabazz'] | 2021-09-10 08:12:55.879000+00:00 | ['Sex', 'Marriage', 'Quran', 'Muslim', 'Islam'] |
Clean up Windows Disk Space | are you one of the windows user who’s disk space is soon approaching its 100% capacity and you are not sure which files to delete?.
don’t worry even i was in same situation until i found a freeware that helped me identify files occupying disk and helped me reduce the disk space usage.
download freeware from https://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free
once you run the software it will ask you for drive to scan:
under select directory chose an troubling drive:
it will ask you to restart the software as admin to access all folders. accept it.
once it restart, it will show you all the folders and files that are occupying most of the disk space in a gui format from which you can analyze folders and delete required folders.
p.s: i am not marketing any product here. i am sharing something to users which is worth helpful. | https://medium.com/@rajesh-w61/clean-up-windows-disk-space-fd8bd3b7a893 | [] | 2020-12-26 07:23:13.550000+00:00 | ['Windows', 'Windows 10', 'Automation'] |
My Youtube Journey. Hello readers! My name is Paige. I live… | Hello readers! My name is Paige. I live in New Jersey and currently commute to Montclair State University. There, I am a freshman studying Communication and Media Arts. Here is a bit about myself and my future aspirations.
My first video: watch
I have always been very interested in the social media world. So much so, that I made a YouTube channel when I was in the seventh grade. There, I began posting a series of different beauty videos. I loved to do it, but eventually would take a hiatus due to bullies at my school. However, once I was a sophomore in high school, I lost all concern for bullies and cared more about my own happiness. I focused more on the happiness I gained while editing a video after a long day than I did about the laughs I would get from my peers. As for my YouTube channel now, I still have it! It is truly my favorite hobby and outlet. One of my favorite things about it is the creative ability it allows me to possess. For example, after filming a video, I have the luxury of altering it with funny edits, colorful transitions, and informative text. YouTube is truly all my passions in one.
A screenshot from a recent video: watch
With all the love I have in my heart for YouTube, I hope to make it my full time job. Although I am still hustling and growing, I know I can achieve all I want for my life. I feel that YouTube has so many different options for me to pursue. I can do modeling for different brands due to connections from social media. In addition, I want to be a role model to people of all ages because I do feel some of the most popular influencers now are not using their platform to speak on important issues.
I can not wait to see where the future takes me and what paths I end up on. Thank you for reading my story, I hope you enjoyed it. | https://medium.com/@easterbrookp1/my-journey-8b21d4cb8d08 | ['Paige Easterbrook'] | 2020-12-13 22:59:16.801000+00:00 | ['YouTube', 'Charli Damelio', 'Social Media', 'Viral Star', 'Influencer'] |
How lord Shiva came into existence ? | Many of us know that hindu mythology is one of the complex and most entangled mythology in the world. Be it Vedas , upanishads or purans , it’s all been serving the same purpose but with a different storyline and a whole new concept altogether. Different sages tried to convey the message of what Hindu Dharma or Sanatana Dharma stood for in their own way. That’s why there are several stories associated with several Gods.
One such story is about the origin of Lord Shiva which can be found in Shivpurana. According to shivapurana when there was nothing but vast darkness and loneliness in the entire cosmos , Lord Vishnu came into existence and he wandered for thousands of years in search of another being but found no one untill one day Lord Brahma appeared. Brahma was sitting on a lotus and the end of that lotus was tied to Vishnu’s navel( like that of a new born baby). Vishnu was happy to finally see someone with whom he can talk and explore this vastness of the cosmos. He greeted with Brahma saying “Finally after thousands of years of loneliness you are created from me”.
Brahma denied this fact and said “No, you are the one who is created by me". They both kept arguing about who created whom .An argument for the recognisation as the first god developed between the two. All of a sudden there appeared a vast , humangous , never ending Lingam. Vishnu and Brahma both were shocked seeing this Lingam. A voice came from that linga saying “ That who will find the end of this linga first will be recognised as the superior. Both agreed to this and started their journey. Brahma moved towards the upper end of the linga while Vishnu moved towards the lower end. Both kept moving miles and miles for years without finding any end. Vishnu acknowledged that this lingam has no end. It is like knowledge, the more you try to gain the more you find out that what you know is just a drop of the vast ocean and thus gave up his quest to find the end while Brahma played a trick and thought that he will lie about finding the end and thus will be rewarded as the superior god. He told both of them that he found the upper end. After hearing this lingam got really angry and from the middle part of that lingam appeared a bodily form among both of them and said angrily “ Stop lying Brahma. You want to win this race so eagerly that you forgot what is the right path and what is not. You shall no longer be worshiped by anyone. He also told Vishnu and Brahma that they both originated from the lingam. It’s the lingam which was there everytime in that entire darkness. That’s how Shiva or Mahadev came into existence.
The word Shi-va means 'that which is not’. It’s not here but it is here. It is not good nor bad. It doesn’t have any starting or ending. It doesn’t exist but it exists everywhere. | https://medium.com/@harshitsinghyadav_3512/how-lord-shiva-came-into-existence-f710d0c6527a | ['Harshit Singh Yadav'] | 2021-04-25 14:07:18.218000+00:00 | ['Storytelling', 'Shiva', 'Hinduism', 'Mythology', 'Stories'] |
Top Reasons to Live in Palm Beach Gardens | Based in Jupiter, Florida, Richard Zona has served as a broker with Palm Beach Gardens, Florida-based Illustrated Properties since 2018. In this role, Richard Zona oversees the sales and rentals of real estate properties located in Palm Beach County.
One of Palm Beach County’s most popular cities to reside in, Palm Beach Gardens is a mid-sized urban center with a population of 51,865 people. Palm Beach Gardens receives a high score of 79 out of 100 for livability, and ranks in the top 10 percentile of all of America’s cities. Property owners in the city also enjoy appreciation rates of 4 percent annually and 8.3 percent over 5 years on their properties.
The city of Palm Beach Gardens is a desirable place to live for many reasons, including a low crime rate compared to the national average, good weather, and ample opportunities for education and employment. Palm Beach Gardens also offers several attractions, including the Gardens Mall, the Downtown Carousel, and the PGA National Resort Spa. | https://medium.com/@richardzonajr/top-reasons-to-live-in-palm-beach-gardens-306446951fbf | ['Richard Zona Jr'] | 2020-06-03 04:50:35.050000+00:00 | ['Palm Beach Gardens', 'Live'] |
Overdue for Overtime Pay Increase | Overdue for Overtime Pay Increase
US Labor Department brings back the conversation for a long overdue increase to overtime pay salary threshold. Ceci Hall Apr 12, 2019·4 min read
According to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), overtime pay is when non-salaried (non exempt) employees covered by the Act must receive overtime pay for hours worked over 40 in a workweek at a rate not less than time and one-half their regular rates of pay. The salary threshold for overtime is $455 per week ($23,660 a year) and was last revised in 2004. Non-exempt employees earning less than $455 for 40 hours of work per week are eligible for time and one-half pay for hours worked over 40 during that week.
In 2016, a new rule was proposed and approved by the US Department of Labor to increase the overtime pay threshold for nonexempt employees from $455 per week to $913 ($47,476 a year.) This proposal raised it to a reasonable living wage and matched what many would consider the range where hourly pay (non-exempt) transitions to salary (exempt) at around $47,000 annually. This was blocked through an injunction by a federal Judge Amos L. Mazzant III in Texas shortly before it was due to take effect December 1, 2016. This injunction stemmed from the concern that this increase of salary range included specific types of job duties (executive, administrative, professional) that are currently exempt from overtime.
Excerpt from Judge Amos L. Mazzant III explanation;
“…this significant increase to the salary level creates essentially a de facto salary-only test. For instance, the Department estimates that 4.2 million workers currently ineligible for overtime, and who fall below the minimum salary level, will automatically become eligible under the Final Rule without a change to their duties…”
This comment highlights how a deeper review is needed regarding overtime rules including revising the outdated specific job duties exemption. A graphic designer earning $24,000 a year could be exempt from overtime because they could be considered performing ‘professional’ job duties. However instead of updating specific duties, the US Department of Labor pops back into the conversation three years later with a proposal that seems even less thought out.
On March 7, 2019 the US Department of Labor issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to increase the salary threshold for overtime to $679 per week. That’s a new qualifying salary level of $35,308 per year. Certain positions that are administrative, professional or management remain excluded (see list.) If not excluded, this means that under the new proposal employees making less than $679 per week would be eligible for overtime pay for hours worked that are over 40 for that week. Basically three years later a weaker rule is proposed that according to the Economic Policy Institute leaves 8 million people out who would have been included as part of the requirements proposed in 2016.
Also interesting to note that the threshold amount for what is considered Highly Compensated Employees (HCE) increased even more in the new proposal than in the approved rule from 2016. With this latest proposal, the HCE currently-enforced level of $100,000 is increased to $147,414 per year, whereas in 2016 it was increased to $134,004. Highly compensated employees are less economically in need of this increase. They are less likely to be exploited to work excessive hours at an hourly rate for less pay. This greater increase is unnecessary and does not benefit the people these rules are intended to protect.
Without a doubt, an increase in the salary threshold for overtime is long overdue. The latest proposal is inadequate to address a living wage but it is an improvement. If this proposed rule is approved, it is still possible for an employee with a salary of $36,000 to be required to work 50, 60 or more hours a week and not be compensated for what would be considered overtime.
Do we push back or accept this now and continue pressing for more? It has been fifteen years since the salary threshold for overtime has been revised to address the increased cost of living. Every year it remains at $455 a week is unacceptable and the increase necessary to match a living wage grows greater.
It’s important to note that some states are more advanced on overtime laws than what is required at the federal level, like Alaska, California, Nevada and Colorado. And other states have less stringent laws or no specific requirements at all like Alabama, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Virginia. As with all legislation there are exclusions and this also varies by state.
Take Action Now
Weigh in on the federal proposal, public comments are being accepted through May 21, 2019. Got to www.regulations.gov, and enter comments in the rulemaking docket RIN 1235-AA20. Comments show there is public interest which makes this more of a priority.
2. Vote for and support elected officials with a record of advancing labor rights, pay equity and a living wage. Every year there are labor related measures, bills and acts that have a positive (or negative) effect on American workers. As voters, we have immense influence on the outcome.
3. Support labor unions. Their sole purpose is to represent employees in advancing fair wages, compensation and securing a safe work environment. Unions are very engaged in supporting labor legislation and rules that benefit many, even if not specific to their industry. They also hold employers accountable for unethical or illegal business practices. | https://medium.com/@ceci-hall/overdue-for-overtime-pay-increase-8b795ae832d4 | ['Ceci Hall'] | 2019-04-26 19:14:26.743000+00:00 | ['Pay', 'Overtime', 'Labor', 'Federal Government', 'Money'] |
West Bengal tops in Politics violence in India | The data reveals that West Bengal tops the list of states where politics is a motive for murder. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data for politics as a reason for murder shows the numbers are quite small. The all-India figure for people who were murdered because of politics is only 61.
But with 12 murders, West Bengal leaves others behind. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been complaining that many of its cadres are victims of political violence in Bengal, because the police simply looks the other way when its workers are attacked. The party has claimed more than 120
At the crucial meeting, Sonia appealed to the party leaders as a family. However, if sources close to the dissenting leaders are to be believed then no concrete solution has been found for the dispute and more meetings will be held in the coming days.
After several months due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Sonia called a meeting of top leaders of the party in which seven leaders of the disgruntled faction also attended. A total of 19 leaders including Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, and Priyanka Gandhi were present.
https://sites.google.com/view/watch-the-marksman-2021-full/
https://sites.google.com/view/watch-kgf-chapter-2-2021-full/
https://www.pexels.com/@watch-breach-2020-online-full-free-12898714
https://www.pexels.com/@watch-hunter-hunter-online-full-free-12898731
https://www.pexels.com/@watch-news-of-the-world-2020-online-free-12898761
https://www.pexels.com/@watch-promising-young-woman-online-full-free-12898770
https://www.pexels.com/@watch-one-night-in-miami-online-full-free-12898783
https://www.pexels.com/@123movies-wonder-woman-1984-full-movie-online-12898800
https://www.pexels.com/@vooz-hd-wonder-woman-1984-watch-online-free-12898822
https://www.pexels.com/@maxhd-wonder-woman-1984-watch-online-full-movie-12898840
https://www.pexels.com/@watch-fatale-2020-online-full-free-12898907
https://unworldoceansday.org/index.php/user/8262
https://unworldoceansday.org/index.php/user/8265
https://unworldoceansday.org/index.php/user/8266
https://unworldoceansday.org/index.php/user/8267
https://unworldoceansday.org/user/8273/
https://unworldoceansday.org/user/8274
https://unworldoceansday.org/user/8275
https://unworldoceansday.org/user/8278
https://unworldoceansday.org/user/8279
https://unworldoceansday.org/user/8281
https://unworldoceansday.org/fr/user/8282
https://unworldoceansday.org/fr/user/8283
https://unworldoceansday.org/fr/user/8284
https://unworldoceansday.org/fr/user/8286
https://unworldoceansday.org/fr/user/8287
https://unworldoceansday.org/fr/user/8288
https://unworldoceansday.org/index.php/user/8366
https://unworldoceansday.org/index.php/user/8371
https://unworldoceansday.org/index.php/user/8374
https://unworldoceansday.org/index.php/user/8380
https://unworldoceansday.org/user/8482
https://unworldoceansday.org/user/8487
https://unworldoceansday.org/index.php/user/8489
https://unworldoceansday.org/index.php/user/8493
https://unworldoceansday.org/index.php/user/8498
https://lasillavacia.com/users/123movies-watch-fatale-2020-hd-movie
https://lasillavacia.com/users/123movies-watch-wonder-woman-1984-hd-movie-online-full-free
https://lasillavacia.com/users/123movies-watch-greenland-2020-hd-movie
https://lasillavacia.com/users/123movies-watch-free-guy-2020-hd-movie
https://paiza.io/projects/n8HY7oCxs_uAypNzSG6eqA
http://paste.jp/a3446559/
https://paste.feed-the-beast.com/view/e2c20a01
“We are all like a family and everyone has to strengthen the party together,” said Sonia. The dissenting leaders also expressed their side to her. According to sources, Sonia told these leaders that she will address their concerns.
According to a top source in the party, Rahul said in the meeting that whatever responsibility the party will give, he will fulfill it. However, when the leaders asked him to assume the responsibility of the president, Rahul responded by saying that it would be better to leave the issue on the electoral process at this time.
Senior Congress leader AK Antony said Rahul should lead the party which was endorsed by other leaders while Vivek Tankha said he himself resigned in solidarity when the Wayanad MP resigned from the post following 2019 disastrous defeat. Tankha said that he has faith in Rahul’s leadership.
Rahul said he values all senior leaders as many of them were friends of his father and they are important for the party, the source added.
A senior leader told that the disgruntled leaders present in the meeting expressed confidence in the Congress leadership and said that they have faith in the party leadership’s ability to take everyone along and the ideological commitment.
However, sources close to disgruntled leaders claimed that this meeting took place because of them and further meetings will be held to resolve the dispute.
On the other hand, sources also told that in the meeting, Sonia said that we will soon organise a ‘Chintan Shivir’ (brainstorming session) to plan a strategy to defeat BJP and will tell the public about the failures of the Modi government.
Speaking to the media after the end of the meeting that lasted for about five hours, Prithviraj Chauhan said that the first meeting was held to decide the future of the party, there will be more such meetings like this, and Chintan Shivir like Panchgani or Shimla will be organised. | https://medium.com/@pinkydaroga/west-bengal-tops-in-politics-violence-in-india-d53396f9b07a | [] | 2020-12-20 20:07:03.474000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'India', 'Riots', 'Violence', 'West Bengal'] |
In the news: AI Farm uses tech for good | The lives of farmers in India isn’t without its fair share of problems. Whether it’s poverty, lack of access to modern technology or irregular water and climate conditions that cause catastrophic losses and debts forcing many farmers to end their lives in desperation.
Efforts to better the lives of farmers have picked up pace in India, with startups and developers trying to find novel ways to improve farm yield and help farmers avoid a bad batch of crops, and one of these solutions shows great promise from the Call for Code Challenge.
The winner is a one-man team who goes by the name of Kalicharan from Cognizant, and he won the award for his creation — AI Farms.
AI Farms Using IBM Watson tools
Kalicharan implemented an IoT solution along with IBM’s Watson line of AI and ML applications to better predict weather conditions. This is paired with a controller that would control the irrigation system thus allowing the adequate flow of water in the farm according to the climatic conditions.
In a conversation with Priya Mallya, Country Leader, Developer Ecosystems, IBM ISA, she explained how AI Farm’s tech lead to their victory, “AI farm is an IOT based application. The team has used services like Watson Visual Recognition, they have used Watson Auto-AI machine learning models to predict the amount of fertilizer that is required when you want to grow a crop in a region. It uses the IOT device to control the irrigation pattern based on the weather information and the forecasted weather for that specific place. It uses Watson language translation to display information in the language the farmer is more comfortable reading in and it uses Node-Red for the UI that is presented to the farmer.”
She added, “What this application does is it provides an into intuitive support system for the farmer. Where water, diseases and weather conditions actually decide on how a crop can grow and provides information on what a farmer can do differently to make sure that his crop is healthy and he’s able to reap the most benefit of the crop that he has.”
As the winner of IBM Call For Code Asia Pacific, Kalicharan’s “AI Farm” idea from India is awarded $5000 for his innovation and has also been given an option to develop and implement its solution through IBM’s Code and Response initiative.
On his victory, Kalicharan said, “I came to know about Call for Code from a company email announcement and was inspired by the theme of the event. I felt that it was a great platform to help society while improving my skills at the same time. Due to unpredictable changes in seasons, traditional methods are not giving better results for the farming community. I wanted to help them by putting the power of AI, IoT & machine learning in their hands.” He added, “AI Farm leverages IBM solutions to calculate water requirements and health of the crop basis information like soil moisture, atmospheric temperature, weather forecast, photographs etc. It was a great learning experience to work with IBM’s developer community and its user-friendly interfaces, online platforms, cloud & AI products,”
Coding to solve problems at scale
IBM’s Call for Code challenge was started first in 2018, by David Clark Cause and supported by Founding Partner IBM and Charitable Partner United Nations Human Rights. While the events in 2018 and 2019 were organised at specific venues, the 2020 Call For Code was conducted fully online due to the ongoing pandemic.
Priya Mallya said, “All these years we’ve organised Call For Code through face-to-face events and going and talking to an audience physically and talking to them is so much different than doing it in front of a laptop. On a laptop, it is so difficult to comprehend what the other person is thinking, behaving or the kind of expressions, all of that is lost. Another reason people come to these events is usually to network. And when we’re not physically together we tend to lose such things. So the challenge was that we were not able to be there face to face to try and create this community.”
However, Mallya did share how the online event had a major positive outcome, “With COVID-19 forcing us to take this virtual, we were able to accommodate a far greater number of participants. When it’s virtual, it’s open to anybody, so we could accommodate 10x times more people in each event than before. For example, in one Call For Code Hack that we organised with NASSCOM, we received 26,000 registrations for that one hack.”
Every year this competition sees thousands of participants from around the world, and according to Priya Mallya, most of these entries are actually from India. “I can say India’s contribution to the global submission is more than 65 percent, which is huge if you consider the 25 million developers we target worldwide.”
More women participation than before
While you might be thinking that such hackathons are full of males, you’ll be surprised to know that IBM’s Call For Code also saw a major spike in female participation.
“Times are changing. There was a time when we had to actually do a lot of effort and have focused campaign to get just women to participate, however, now we’re seeing women come forward themselves,” IBM’s Priya Mallya said.
“Again going back to NASSCOM hack where we saw over 26,000 registrations across startups and universities, 40 percent of them were women and that’s quite a big jump and there was no specific campaign we had to do to achieve this. We also ran a Call For Code Hack for women in technology and we saw over 400 women-only teams participate so it’s not just a one-off thing, the situation is changing for the better,” she added. | https://medium.com/callforcode/in-the-news-ai-farm-uses-tech-for-good-e2c2d7d15a4f | ['Call For Code'] | 2020-12-08 19:25:25.946000+00:00 | ['Code', 'Machine Learning', 'Agriculture', 'Farming', 'Developer'] |
Getting Started With Tailwind CSS | Creating the HTML File
We are done with setting up the tailwindcss for our project. Now, it’s time to write some HTML code and link the public/styles.css file to the index.html file.
Let's create a simple button for demonstration:
<button> Click Me </button>
To add styles to this button, we use the classes provided by Tailwind:
<button class="bg-blue-500 p-3 text-white font-bold rounded text-xl">Click Me</button>
Results of the above code
The following are the classes that are being used on the button element :
bg-blue-500 : To give a background color of blue. p-2 : To give padding of 0.5rem at the top, right, bottom, and left. text-white : To give text a white color. font-bold : To give text a font-weight of bold. rounded : To make the corners of the button rounded. text-xl : To give a font size of 1.25rem.
Navigation bar
Now that we know how we can apply Tailwind classes, let’s create our navigation bar:
Most of the classes used here are self-explanatory, but there are some classes that you may not know yet. Here's a brief explanation of those classes:
flex : Giving display of flex to ul element. justify-end , items-center : Same as justify-content: flex-end and align-items: center , respectively. text-center : Same as text-align: center .
You may wonder what sm: is. Here, it is used as a prefix on the flex property. The thing is that when you use TailwindCSS, you don’t have to write media queries anymore. Tailwind makes it way simpler to make your site responsive by giving you some utility classes for media queries as well.
These are the media query classes with breakpoints provided by Tailwind:
Tailwind media query classes with respective sizes
Note: Tailwind uses a mobile-first breakpoint system. According to the docs, this means that “unprefixed utilities (like uppercase ) take effect on all screen sizes, while prefixed utilities (like md:uppercase ) only take effect at the specified breakpoint and above.”
Look at this small example:
<div class="w-12 h-12 bg-pink-300 sm:bg-green-300 md:bg-red-500 lg:bg-blue-500"></div>
The element will be pink for all screen sizes until there is a breakpoint.
Most often, people get confused with the mobile-first layout system and use the sm: class to style mobile designs, which is incorrect. To target the mobile screen, don’t use any prefixed utility class.
In the same way you can use pseudo-classes such as hover , focus , etc.
<button class="bg-blue-500 p-3 text-white font-bold rounded text-xl hover:text-black hover:bg-blue-700">Click Me</button>
Coming back to our navigation bar, you can see a lot of Tailwind utility classes are used in the anchor tag and repeated again and again for all the anchor tags. This makes our HTML look a little bit messy and may become a burden to maintain our classes. To solve this problem, we can extract components.
Extracting components
Tailwind gives an @apply directive to easily extract common utility patterns to CSS component classes. The way we can use this directive is by giving any name to our component (which we will use as a class name in index.html ) in public/styles.css and writing down the Tailwind utilities we want to be applied.
Now copy all the classes (except block and inline-block ) from our anchor tags and make a component by giving the name anchor .
Extracting components in public/styles.ss
Here, you can see that the CSS class anchor is being defined by using the @apply directive. To make the changes and use the anchor tag, we have to perform the build process once again:
npm run build
And now, we can use this class in our HTML code:
Note that I used the class h-h10 . This is not a class provided by Tailwind itself, but it gives us the option to expand and customize some properties on our own. I have given a height of 10vh to the h-h10 class to use it in the nav element. You can customize the height in the theme.height section in tailwind.config.js .
/* tailwind.config.js */ theme: {
height: {
h10 : "10vh",
h90: "90vh",
},
In addition to writing component classes directly in your CSS files, you can also add component classes to Tailwind by writing your own plug-in. Check out how you can do it in the official Tailwind documentation.
So far, we have created our navigation bar using only Tailwind CSS utility classes. For the whole project source code, check out the GitHub repo. | https://medium.com/better-programming/getting-started-with-tailwind-css-d96150d0ff5e | ['Nikhil Swain'] | 2020-10-02 15:47:06.041000+00:00 | ['Tailwind Css', 'Webdev', 'Html Css', 'Programming', 'CSS'] |
The Concealed Conversation: Male Sexual Assualt | Sexual assault does not choose a race, age, gender, or sexual orientation. Discussions regarding, and around, sexual assault seem to assume the victim is a woman and leave the focus there. Statistically, yes, this is the likelihood and often the unfortunate truth, but it should not discredit male, non-binary, and transgender people’s experiences. And if it does happen, the symptoms are the same no matter your identity. This is where the stigma originates, especially for straight males.
In 2015 the Center for Disease and Control (CDC) found approximately 25% of men in the U.S. have experienced contact sexual violence in their life; including anything from unwanted sexual contact to sexual coercion. This is assuming the men came to terms with the assault and were able to admit these experiences happened to them. Men tend to use the psychological coping mechanism of suppression more than women. Males are raised to suppress their feelings which affects how they cope and resolve a sexual assault. They push the memory so far back in their consciousness to forget it, that it can stay in their subconscious. This coping mechanism has a lot to do with the term we have coined “toxic masculinity”.
Cracking the “male-mold”.
Toxic masculinity is a concept rooted in the long-standing societal system of the patriarchy, where the belief is male physical power makes them superior to women. Men are meant to “act tough” and leave the emotions for the women. You know the phrases- “take it like a man” or “don’t be such a girl,” insinuating emotions are too feminine for men.
The male mold from fifty-plus years ago is starting to crack; we now see men defying the norm by painting their nails and wearing dresses without much disapproval. This freedom of expression has led them to open up to their emotions more than they thought they could. Recalling a personal story of an assault is emotional, which is why men do not speak up when it has happened to them let alone seek guidance. The U.S., and other countries, glorify the idea that men would never turn down a sexual interaction, which is why they are never seen or feel like a victim of an assault. Men are less likely than women to seek help or therapy for sexual assault, and if the pain is left unattended it will continue to worsen if treatment is not sought.
Coping with Sexual Assault
Sexual assault can severely affect you emotionally, physically, and mentally. Typically there are three phases a survivor goes through known as the Rape Trauma Syndrome (RTS), however, it applies to all sexual assault situations. The first phase, the ‘acute-phase’, is the initial overwhelming array of emotions a survivor feels immediately following the assault. In the second phase, ‘adjustment outward’, a survivor will try to resume normal daily life and be completely in denial of what occurred. Finally, the last phase of ‘long-term reorganization’ entails coming to terms with the assault and their feelings about the perpetrator. Some of the most common symptoms that follow an assault are:
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
Depression
Anxiety
Panic attacks
Suicidal thoughts
Higher risk for substance abuse
Roughly 94% of women said they experienced PTSD two weeks following the event as cited from another article in the McGill Journal of Medicine in 2006. While that may be fourteen years ago, your mental reaction to traumatic incidents does not change. Men experience these symptoms and to the same severity, but the statistics are not out there due to the stigma that men will not react the same as women, which is false. Men are not immune to the symptoms, their human bodies behave identically to women, but they often make their mental health far worse through suppression to fit their gender role.
Self-Care: Vital for You, and Your Peers
Health and comfort is the number one priority. A friend, a family member, a significant other, a trained professional, or anyone that makes you feel safe is who you should turn to first. They care about you and do not want to see you held back by something you could not control. Do not let the social stigmas around therapy deter you from getting the help you need and deserve; therapists help you find new coping skills, ways to deal with your emotions, and stress management. No matter who you are, everyone has feelings that cannot be handled completely on their own.
Talking is not always the most comforting solution, and individual activities are just as valid. Try some self-care:
Journaling
Exercising
Reading
Making art
And anything else that makes you happy.
Remember, you are not alone. Just because you do not fit the description of the stereotypical victim, does not mean your experience was not real. You do not need to defend yourself against all odds alone.
National Resources:
Call 1–800–656–4673 for confidential help with National Sexual Assault Hotline
for confidential help with Male focused support that includes other victim’s stories, events, webinars, forums, and blogs visit: malesurvivor.org/
Philadelphia Resources:
Woman Against Rape (WOAR): Philly crisis center that offers specialized treatment and education services
Philadelphia Sexual Assault Response Center (PSARC): private, confidential, and victim-centered care (especially medical) | https://medium.com/the-shadow/the-concealed-conversation-male-sexual-assualt-c87af2905981 | ['Helen Chmiel'] | 2020-12-17 17:32:49.804000+00:00 | ['Equality', 'Sexual Abuse Of A Child', 'Feminism', 'Race', 'Sexuality'] |
The Hyperledger Project and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance Join Forces | The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and Hyperledger are joining their organizations in an effort to foster mass blockchain adoption.
The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), a non-profit that educates businesses on how to use Ethereum to address specific industry use cases, and the Linux Foundation´s Hyperledger project, an open-source collaborative initiative that aims to “advance cross-industry blockchain technologies”, have officially joined their organizations in an effort to accelerate the mass adoption of distributed ledger technologies, and help foster a climate of collaboration between the two enterprises.
Ron Resnick, the executive director of the EEA, said in a statement he believes that this represents “a time of great opportunity”, since the collaboration through a mutual associate membership could open the way “for both organizations to work more closely together”.
Amber Baldet, founder of the Clovyr dApp store, and former head of blockchain at JP Morgan Chase & Co., commented on the synergy that results from such an initiative,
There are already several organizations that belong to both Hyperledger and EEA, and good relationships among those in leadership positions […] It makes sense to work together toward the common goal of solving real business challenges with decentralized technologies.
Executive Director of Hyperledger added,
Great open standards depend upon great open source code, so this is a natural alliance for both organizations.
This news puts to rest rumors that Hyperledger and the EEA were at each other´s throats in a bid to achieve enterprise blockchain supremacy. Casey Kuhlman, CEO of Monax, explained that while this may have been the case in the past, there are no current confrontations among both parties.
Disclaimer: information contained herein is provided without considering your personal circumstances, therefore should not be construed as financial advice, investment recommendation or an offer of, or solicitation for, any transactions in cryptocurrencies. | https://medium.com/bitrates-news/the-hyperledger-project-and-the-enterprise-ethereum-alliance-join-forces-d0e5f2b3909c | [] | 2018-10-03 07:53:49.478000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Hyperledger', 'Ethereum'] |
Build Your Side Hustle into a Retirement Job | Another aspect of retirement planning
What’s that you said, retirement job? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of retirement?
If you’re not one of those people who could truly retire and sit around the house, you’re far from alone.
According to David Guydan of Boston non-profit Empower Success Corps, people are retiring younger. Some don’t need to make money, some do. Mostly they need to keep active. Everyone is happier with a purpose.
Empower Success Corps is developing Discovery Centers where trained facilitators (retirees) will assist other retirees in finding their “second act.”
“Forty-eight percent of adults over 50 want to be engaged in purposeful work. Purposeful engagement adds 7 plus years to life,” Guydan said in a lecture.
Photo by Lost Co on Unsplash
There is also a website, www.retirementjobs.com, where they post listings from “Certified Age Friendly Employers.” The certification is one created by RetirementJobs.com and is based on interviews with employer representatives. Companies must show a dedication to employing those over 50, have an age-friendly workplace, and must take seriously any claims of age discrimination.
We’ve all heard about retirees whose IRAs were wiped out, forcing them to go back to work. What I’m talking about is more of a supplemental income than a full-time job, and income for those who are too young to tap into their retirement funds or Social Security, which you can’t or shouldn’t access until you’re at least 60.
Working retirees are found in every economic demographic. I know two people who made enough money in their finance jobs to quit in their early 50s, their childrens’ college funds complete. One is now selling real estate, the other is still searching for her second act.
Many people need to supplement their Social Security checks, which is permissible up to a certain dollar amount. I’ve worked with realtors, golf course and retail store employees who have been working part-time because their Social Security didn’t cover all the bills.
Laborers who need a gentler job as they age are good candidates for second acts, too. A landscaper friend recently got his Construction Supervisor License with the plan to flip houses when he could no longer do the heavy lifting of landscaping.
But why wait until you retire to get started? If you build up your fledgling business as a side hustle while you’re still employed, you have the benefit of the income from your primary job while you’re still developing clients and experience for your retirement job.
Then, a few years later, you can transition that side hustle into your primary income (or supplemental to Social Security/IRA).
Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash
Obviously jobs that require extensive post-grad education, like architecture, law, or medicine, probably won’t be feasible for this scenario. But a lot of creative work fits right in. Any job that you can do part-time, such as real estate, bookkeeping, or consulting, can be a side hustle that grows.
Hobbies work for side hustles, too, if you’re willing to make them into a job. I know retirees who teach art, tennis and sailing lessons. The decades spent enjoying those hobbies have made you an expert ready to pass on your skills to a beginner.
It might take some creative thought, and trial and error, to find the right retirement job. Just because you like doing something doesn’t mean someone is going to pay you to do it. You might have a couple of false starts before you land on a profitable endeavor. Better to start the discovery process while you’re still employed than to wait until you need the money.
As another Empower Success Corps counselor, Willia Cooper, put it, you’ll “discover something new about your skills and how to use them in your encore life.” | https://marthahimes.medium.com/build-your-side-hustle-into-a-retirement-job-51ba24479627 | ['Martha Himes'] | 2019-04-04 15:25:24.826000+00:00 | ['Hobbies And Interests', 'Side Hustle', 'Skills Development', 'Work', 'Retirement'] |
How to Speak more Clearly During Online Presentations? | One thing you and many others who have had to do more talking and presentations from home in an online environment have likely noticed is that the whole thing feels a lot different to doing the same thing in-person or in front of a real audience in the same room. While both can be classified as public speaking, they are very different and present different challenges.
Speaking online and in-person do share a lot of aspects and skills: diction, being able to tell a story, making eye contact and connecting to your audience. But speaking online also requires some adjustment, because you cannot rely on body language cues and you have to compensate for a ton of distractions for your audience. Creating energy through the screen is not easy, but it is possible when you set a mission for yourself to speak more clearly. Here are a few strategies that will allow you to do just that:
Do a recording of yourself to catch the mistakes
This is a simple strategy that will allow you to see if you are doing anything wrong during your online presentation. There are a few main goals to do that. First, this is the simplest method to test your setup of the microphone and camera. You need to listen to yourself and see yourself on the screen. You also get a nice chance to see the background, get a feel of what it will be like to appear on other people’s screens and whether you have to adjust lighting or any other settings on your computer or software. Another important aspect of recording yourself and checking it out later is that it provides you with a very nice way to rehearse and catch any unintentional mistakes you are making. Maybe you are not looking where you should be or maybe you show signs of nervousness. Whatever it is, you can catch it by recording yourself and then examining said recording.
Begin big and end in the same fashion
The key to successful online talks and presentations is to be energetic from the start and to end on a similar high point. When it comes to online communication, you can count on the middle being more of a blur to everyone listening, which is exactly why it is important to set the tone and end it with a real punch. When you begin with energy, you enthuse the audience to stay engaged and as you finish your delivery, emphasise the inspirational part of your delivery and end with a solution/call to action that will leave them thinking. When you begin and end on a high note, you will leave a lasting impression and be more successful in your presentation.
Pace yourself well enough
The pace is very important in online presentations because it directly impacts how engaged your audience is and whether they lose interest in your speech. Remember, there are a lot of distractions for them. For all you know, they could be browsing anything and not paying attention to you. If you are going too slow, you will lose them. That is why it is important to present at a steady pace, not too slow but also not too fast to the point where it becomes difficult to follow your speech.
Streamline your presentation
Another important strategy for successful online presentations lies in streamlining your points. You should ensure that all of your visuals and extra materials add flair and reinforce your points, all the while keeping them simple. Remember, when you are not explaining things in person, it can be more difficult to make them clear. That is why it is a good idea to streamline them.
All of these strategies are efficient in many ways and are necessary to ensure that you are successful in your online presentations. Make sure to adopt them and you will see what difference they make.
© Presence Training | https://medium.com/@presencetraining/how-to-speak-more-clearly-during-online-presentations-50dc71e781be | ['Daniel Kingsley'] | 2021-12-30 06:15:02.298000+00:00 | ['Public Speaking', 'Online Presentations', 'Online Training'] |
What Waist Trainer Should You Get? | Do you have any of these problems? You have a fat belly, you are out of shape after having a baby, or you have back pain. If you are bothered by these problems, this article will help you a lot. Today I will recommend a waist trainer to you — Women Latex Workout Waist Trainer Corset Shapewear for Weight Loss, postpartum recovery and improving back pain. This item will give you a surprise. Let’s see the details of this Women Latex Workout Waist Trainer Corset Shapewear.
An authentic and high-quality latex waist trainer delivers the most comfortable, breathable and pleasant experiences for your waist training slimming and weight loss efforts. This shapewear is made of 96% of cotton, 4% of spandex and 100% of latex, whose good fabric will provide a good touch for your body.
3 rows of Hook-and-eye closure to keep a tight fit around your waist to achieve long-lasting waist cinching effect even after you start to lose weight, 9 steel bones construction ensure the quality of body shapewear, providing great support to relieve back pain and improve bad posture. It’s flexible and durable, as soft as plastic bones, can bend easily but recover quickly to origin. If you worried about steel boned or not, you can test it with a magnet.
High compression around your waist, and reduce your waistline by more than 3 inches to give you the desired hourglass figure. Select the size you like with the size chart. Please measure your waist circumference and abdominal circumference before buying, if your chest and buttocks more plentiful, you should order a size up.
Our latex waist trainer with steel bones provides more stiffness and support to keep you in the best posture. Latex waist cincher trimmer easily adjustable from low to high due to the elastic band to increase the compression while training, shaping and losing inches
This product is suitable to wear when you on these occasions: It is suitable for working people who keep the same posture for a long time to eliminate or relieve the discomfort of the waist, abdomen and back caused by overwork or fatigue.
1. It can be used for women’s postpartum abdominal contraction to restore their lean figure before delivery.
2. For the belly fat people to lose weight, in order to keep fit and build a charming figure.
3. It can be used for physical exercise and can be worn to achieve a better exercise effect.
This shapewear you must possess one, now waist trainer is very popular with most the people. Choosing good quality is also very important. Because after the poor quality waist protector is worn on the body, it starts to shift and skew after a little movement. You will feel very uncomfortable when the waist trainer moves around. This waist trainer will be your best choice. Just buy it quickly. Please click>>
If you have any other questions to consult, please email us at [email protected] or contact us on WhatsApp: +86 133–8009–4393.
More Information: https://www.sayfutclothing.com/ | https://medium.com/@sayfutclothing77/what-waist-trainer-should-you-get-5dcfafd26250 | ['Sayfut Clothing'] | 2019-11-14 07:22:27.099000+00:00 | ['Exercise', 'Waist Cincher', 'Waist Trainer', 'Workout', 'Latex Waist Trainer'] |
Is Change Only Possible in the Face of Crisis? | Is Change Only Possible in the Face of Crisis?
Understanding human behavior and our failure to take action on climate change issues
In early 2018, the South African government announced that 4 million citizens in Cape Town were months away from running out of water. Panic ensued. Brought on by three consecutive years of drought and overconsumption, the city’s reservoir levels had become dangerously low, with water levels only reaching 15–30% of total dam capacity.
In response, the government decided to issue a date for “Day Zero”, 22 April 2018 — the point at which the city would switch off its municipal water supply and residents would have to queue up for daily water rations. For those living this reality, it felt like the apocalypse was coming.
Yet “Day Zero” never came to pass. Why?
When the Capetonians realized the imminent crisis that was coming their way, they united as a city, conserving as much water as they could and following new city-wide restrictions to use only 50 liters per person per day. Practices like showering over buckets to catch water, and only flushing the toilet once in a while, became the new norm.
“Cape Town has done fantastically in that, mainly because the sight of these empty dams have scared the whatsit out of everybody.” — Peter Johnston, climate scientist at the University of Cape Town
NASA Earth Observatory, Shrinking Aral Sea
On one hand, the story of “Day Zero” demonstrates how humans can come together in a time of crisis. On the other, it shows us how only by getting extremely close to the edge of disaster, does significant change occur. After all, water levels in the dams of Cape Town had already been declining from 71.9 percent in 2014, to 50.1 percent in 2015. The water crisis didn’t exactly happen overnight.
So why is it that people change their behavior in the face of an imminent crisis? I believe there are two factors:
1. We can’t relate to abstracts
“People are often highly motivated to avoid threats. If you are walking down a dark, isolated city street, you are vigilant for unexpected sights and sounds and probably pick up the pace to get back to a populated area as quickly as possible. If you step into the street and see a bus bearing down on you, you jump back. If a large unfamiliar dog is growling outside your front door, you stay inside.” — Art Markman, Harvard Business Review
Imagine being in one of the above scenarios, arguably, the threat you would feel in that moment would be very real and very concrete. However, when we read the news or hear about things like climate change, it’s very hard for us to relate. Instead, they become abstract ideas or notions — we feel fleeting emotions about what we see or read, then we get about our days.
In the example of Cape Town, the problem only became a real threat when abstract became reality, in other words, when everyone realized they had to change, or their water supply would be shut off in a few months time.
In psychology, this is called construal-level theory of psychological distance — the idea that the more distant an object is from an individual, the more abstract of a thought it becomes. The closer that object is, the more concrete it becomes.
So for many of us, ironically the ones who have more privilege and power than others to create change, we simply aren’t close enough to the issues we hear about.
2. Humans are wired for laziness
“Conserving energy has been essential for humans’ survival, as it allowed us to be more efficient in searching for food and shelter, competing for sexual partners, and avoiding predators.” — Matthieu Boisgontier, postdoctoral researcher, UBC Brain Behavior Lab
Research shows that when we are idle, our brains don’t have to work as hard — this ties in with our evolutionary instincts to conserve energy. In Boisgontier’s study, he found that in the case of physical inactivity in young people, “the failure of public policies to counteract the pandemic of physical inactivity may be due to brain processes that have been developed and reinforced across evolution.”
Thus as humans, whether we are policy makers or citizens, we are wired to stick to the status quo because it demands less cortical resources from our brains.
In a time where the threat of climate change and its negative effects are looming over all of us, our failure to take action at micro- and macro- levels can be explained by the fact that we are just pure lazy. | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/is-change-only-possible-in-the-face-of-crisis-263240c218fa | ['Victoria Halina'] | 2020-01-15 11:09:58.557000+00:00 | ['Society', 'Psychology', 'World', 'Human Behavior', 'Environment'] |
DUI Offenders Fall Under Pair Of Considerable Classifications | Drunk driving and intoxicated driving charges are very serious, and the law utilizes such cases to set an example. The penalties and laws surrounding such charges vary from state to state, as do the possible enhancements that can increase the severity of the charges.
Possible DUI Class Improvements
Possible enhancements depend on several aspects, but the most typical types of improvements to intoxicated driving charges include running an automobile with a BAC of 0.15% or higher, intoxicated driving with a minor as a passenger, drunk driving that triggers another person bodily injury, and dui that triggers the death of another individual. Listed below you will discover a brief description of the most common kinds of drunk driving charges in the United States.
Worsened DUI and DUI School Approaches
A worsened DUI is any typical DUI charge, however with improvements. See enhancement examples above. Exacerbated DUI charges are the exact same thing as Felony DUI charges, which is the term utilized in most states. Additional aggravated DUI offenses include DUI in a school zone, operating a school bus under the influence of drugs or alcohol, driving intoxicated without a legitimate license, having numerous convictions within a brief time frame, and more.
Drugged Driving (DUID) Outcomes in DUI Classes and Time
Alcohol is not the only compound that can cause a DUI arrest. Operating an automobile while under the influence of Schedule I or Set up II drugs, whether legal or prohibited, can cause a DUID charge in most states, which stands for "driving under the impact of drugs." A law enforcement officer can lawfully apprehend you for a DUID charge simply based on a sensible suspicion that such drugs are in your system.
DUI Repurcussions
Driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol is a serious criminal offense in itself, but couple it with an accident and the charges get even worse. For example, in Indiana, DUI-related accidents are labeled as Felony DUI charges and feature severe charges.
DUI Deaths
When DUI accidents end with deaths, the charges increase to DUI manslaughter. Although the fatalities in these cases are unintentional, the charge still includes extremely severe charges in most states. DUI murder is a Level 5 Felony, which is a very major charge.
Felony DUI Charges include Loss of License and DUI Classes
First-offense DUI charges are typically misdemeanors. However with enhancements or previous convictions, DUI charges turn into a felony very quick. Such aspects consist of several convictions, casualties, existence of kids, physical harm, home damage, and more. With the help of a difficult defense lawyer, felony DUI charges can often be lowered to lower felonies or misdemeanors.
Misdemeanor DUI
A normal DUI charge is a misdemeanor criminal activity, unless there are enhancements involved, or a person has prior DUI convictions within a certain timespan (usually 5 to ten years). Very first time DUI offenses are Class C misdemeanors, however with BAC levels higher than 0.15%, they leap to Class A misdemeanors. With the aid of a lawyer, Level 6 felony DUI's can frequently be reduced to DUI misdemeanors.
Property Damage DUI
When a DUI mishap ends with residential or commercial property damages, the charges and fines increase drastically. An individual can anticipate longer prison time, harsher sentencing agreements, and severe fines. And although these are considered exacerbated DUIs, they are not always charged as felonies. Nevertheless, if residential or commercial property damages are comprehensive, the charge is most likely to cheap arizona court ordered dui at ReclaimUCounseling increase to a conviction.
Minor DUI
The majority of states have a "per se" stance on minor drinking and driving. This indicates there is a zero-tolerance rule for minor drinking. Any individual under the age of 21, the nationwide legal drinking age, is forbidden to consume or purchase alcoholic drinks. Minor drinking is a crime in itself but combined with driving and DUI charges, underage drinkers deal with serious penalties. Standard penalties consist of license suspension, jail time, probation, hefty fines, neighborhood service, and diversion programs. | https://medium.com/@iernen6bzd/dui-offenders-fall-under-pair-of-considerable-classifications-85f4f89f946c | [] | 2019-10-09 04:15:54.329000+00:00 | ['Prison Reform'] |
Boxing Out Of My Comfort Zone. | If you’ve read my previous blog then you’ll already know I’m a mum of 2, approaching 40 and of an average fitness level (though don’t ask me to run for the bus). I’m currently taking part in a self imposed pledge to get out of my comfort zone and try out different exercise classes. My aim isn’t just to get physically fit my main interest is how the classes affect me mentally. I want to encourage others to get out of their comfort zone and join a class that suits them. Each sport offers something different both physically and emotionally but sometimes it’s the mental effects that are the most surprising and rewarding.
If you were wondering this is a photo of me and Rosie Landragin of CBK Boxing. I’m the woman on the right of the photo (I will not be denied my right to wear pink if I want).
I haven’t always been particularly confident and sometimes the idea of even turning up to a class alone, not knowing what to expect or what is expected of me could be so daunting I wouldn’t even try. So I’m getting out of my comfort zone to show you that you can do it too and that you’ll be glad you did.
Boxing really wasn’t something I’d ever considered, it really wasn’t even on my radar as a sport I could take part in. A few months back I had taken my eldest son to my local boxing gym, CBK Boxing. I had heard that boxing could be great for children for their fitness, confidence and discipline. So if I already knew that boxing was potentially a great sport for kids to get into then why on earth had I never considered it could be a great sport for me too. I think because as a mum we get very used to putting ourselves last and everyone else’s needs before our own. As a woman boxing has a very male image.
For a few weeks I sat watching the instructors with the children (both boys and girls) and was so impressed with the way they encouraged the children and praised them for their personal best, not because their hook was better than the previous child, not because they were better than everyone else at push ups but because they did their personal best. So if boxing could be so good at promoting self confidence in kids then what about me?
Queue Rosie. Rosie Landragin is joint owner at CBK Boxing and one of the loveliest people I’ve ever met. I got chatting to Rosie about the ethos of the gym and how promoting self confidence and self esteem is central to what they offer their clients. Most specifically I talked to Rosie about women and children that come to the gym. Rosie’s focus really is on the whole person and the power of boxing to really help with many mental wellbeing issues. When you help heal the mind then the physical benefits will follow.
A fundamentally unhappy person with low self esteem or self worth who seeks to make themselves feel better by changing their physical appearance, will often still struggle with how they view themselves regardless of their size or how toned they are. Someone who starts to build their confidence and self worth from the inside out , through whichever means is right for them, therapy, medication, exercise or a combination of methods, will often go on to make better choices. Better choices with what food they put into their body, the time they take to exercise and time for rest they start realise they really are worth spending that time and effort on. For each good choice they make they feel better about themselves and they realise that actually it was the inside they needed to work on not the outside. Maybe their physical shape will change but often they find it’s the mental changes that have had the biggest impact.
My comment was that I would never have considered coming to a boxing session as possibly I would have been intimidated by the image that surrounds boxing, being a little shy and with a gym kit where neon pink features heavily I wouldn’t have thought boxing could be for me.
My preconceptions were so wrong, I cant speak for all gyms but certainly at CBK Boxing it really is for everyone, no matter your age, sex, fitness level or weight.
So with a certain amount of personal bravery I signed up to experience a one to one session of boxing for myself.
Heres how it went:
I turn up in my neon pink feeling slightly nervous and not sure what to expect. I’m straight onto the bike for a warm up. While I’m on there there’s people in the ring having a training session and I’m having a chat about all kinds of stuff with Rosie. By the time I’m off the bike I’m totally relaxed. Everyone is relaxed and welcoming and the most chilled out dog is padding around the side of the ring.
Now over to the punch bag. The gloves go on and I’m suddenly feeling very silly but excited to get started. My nerves get the better of me and I start giggling, what on earth am I doing, I cant throw a punch. Can I ?
Rosie talks me though the basics and encourages me to take my first punch. Oddly I definitely held back on that first punch, why? I’m sure the punch bag is quite used to this by now. By the 3rd and 4th punch it was actually starting to feel much more natural and so much fun.
Next we move onto using the pads, Rosie stands in-front of me with pads over her hands and tells me exactly how to hit and where to hit. The punch bag was one thing but what if I’m really rubbish and I throw a punch, miss and hit Rosie. Rationally Rosie is obviously not going to let that happen. Thankfully this did not happen and I connected with the pad. I’ve got to say I’m honestly really enjoying myself by this point. The more times I hit the pad, the more I start to focus on the instructions, my stance and punches. The giggles are gone and I’m very much in the moment and loving it. Rosie is super encouraging and I’m feeling like this is actually something I could enjoy doing. I feel focused, relaxed and honestly so proud of myself.
Photo by Matheus Ferrero on Unsplash
By the end of our session I’m feeling on a natural high, I’m proud I booked the session, that I turned up and walked through the door and I’m thrilled that as it turns out I had a great time. I’d had a tough morning but the tension is now gone and I’m sure I’m walking just a little bit taller. I can certainly see how boxing can be a great asset in building self belief and stress management. If this has sparked your interest then I urge you to put your fears aside, take the plunge and walk through the door of your local gym and see what benefits boxing can offer you.
I’d like to say a personal thank you to Rosie for making me feel so at ease and totally transforming my attitude towards boxing. Pushing myself out of my comfort zone has been a really good experience for me and proves to me that I can do what I want if I just try. Whats holding you back? Why not take a step in the right direction, step out of your comfort zone and realise nothing bad happens when you do. Find something you want to try and take that first step, you can do it. | https://medium.com/@mindthesmallthings/boxing-out-of-my-comfort-zone-d65c10bac521 | [] | 2019-06-06 17:33:20.771000+00:00 | ['Womens Boxing', 'Boxing', 'Fitness', 'Self Worth', 'Self Esteem'] |
Say goodbye to Prop Drilling with Contexts | Here we are again my dear same 10 people who read my articles, I’m back with another react article. This time it’s on using contexts as a solution for prop drilling. All right before we drill down deep (yeah, pun intended) into the subject, just like in all of my articles a little back story on why and how I ended up using contexts.
The major focus in our SEF dev team for last few weeks was on developing a platform to make ScholarX mentor/mentee registration and selection process automated. So in the frontend, as we let users sign in to the platform all the views should render in a specific way for each user, depending on all the programs that particular individual is enrolled or applied to and the specific roles he or she is taking in each program. As I analysed the full requirement of the platform I realized that though most of the scenes do depend on the user object we receive when a user logs into the platform there are some views we can generalize over every user.
The basic way in react to do this is to get the user object in a component in the higher part of the component hierarchy, most of the time in the root component, and pass down the user object as a prop to the child components where a conditional rendering depending on the user object is needed. The problem in using this way is if a child component of component that does not depend on the user object does depend on the user object we have to pass the user object to the parent component just so that it can pass the object down to the child. Let me illustrate that in a graphical way. (Yeah, yeah, the last sentence is kind of complex, but you don’t have to mention it) | https://andrewsgravewalker.medium.com/say-goodbye-to-prop-drilling-with-contexts-b781aba4db45 | ['Heshan Andrews'] | 2020-08-16 08:19:18.818000+00:00 | ['Scholarx', 'Typescript', 'React', 'Prop Drilling'] |
Want to amplify your humanity? AI and robotics can help. | AI is polarizing — you see it referenced in pop culture as a savior (Star Trek) or a threat (Terminator). Or similarly, in the media — with positive news about drug discovery and health implications, and disturbing news regarding facial recognition and the potential of autonomous drones. Should we remain optimistic about a future increasingly reliant on AI? Why?
Daniela Rus is an Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor at MIT, as well as the Director of its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
When I tell people that I am a robotics researcher, I tend to get one of two reactions. Some people get nervous. They make jokes about Skynet, and ask when the robots will take over their jobs. They worry about autonomous vehicles because they don’t trust computers to avoid crashes as well as they could themselves.
The other group gets excited. This is the group that buys Roombas to vacuum their living room, and dreams of the day when their car will drive them home from work. They can’t wait to hear about the latest research, and discuss all the ways that robotics and artificial intelligence will change our lives and our world for the better.
As the Head of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that I’m in the latter group. But I also know it’s an important part of my job to understand the fears of that first group, to listen, to ask questions, and to give them some perspective on why I see things differently. That starts with understanding that AI is just a tool. It’s an incredibly powerful one; but- — like other tools — it isn’t inherently good or bad. It is what we choose to do with it. And I believe we can do some truly incredible things.
On a global scale, AI will help us generate better insights into addressing some of our biggest challenges: understanding climate change by collecting and analyzing data from vast wireless sensor networks that monitor the oceans, the greenhouse climate, and the plant condition; improving governance by data-driven decision making; eliminating hunger by monitoring, matching and re-routing supply and demand, and predicting and responding to natural disasters using cyber-physical sensors. It will help us democratize education through MOOC offerings that are adaptive to student progress, and ensure that every child gets access to the skills needed to get a good job and build a great life. It may even help those kids turn their childhood dreams into reality, as Iron Man stops being a comic book character and becomes a technological possibility.
On an individual level, AI will offer opportunities to make our lives safer, more convenient, and more satisfying. That means automated cars that can drive us to and from work, or prevent life-threatening accidents when our teenagers are at the wheel. It means customized healthcare, built using knowledge gleaned from enormous amounts of data. And counter to common knowledge, it means more satisfying jobs, not less, as the productivity gains from AI and robotics free us up from monotonous tasks and let us focus on the creative, social, and high-end tasks that computers are incapable of.
All these things — and so much more! — become possible when we direct the power of computing to fix the things that humans haven’t been able to fix on our own.
I asked this question to Dan Huttenlocher and am also interested to hear your thoughts — President Reif [of MIT], in an early note about the new College of Computing, mentioned that its students will be “navigating an algorithmic future.” That is a provocative concept. How do you envision our algorithmic future? Is it one in which algorithms recede into the background, helping us in invisible, but profound ways? Or one in which the algorithms supplant facets of the physical world? A mix? Or something else entirely?
Today telepresence enables students to meet with virtual tutors, and doctors to treat patients thousands of miles away. Robots help with packing on factory floors. Networked sensors enable monitoring of facilities, and 3D printing creates customized goods. We’re surrounded by a world of possibilities — possibilities that will only get larger as we start to imagine what we can do with advances in artificial intelligence and robotics.
Picture a world where routine tasks are taken off your plate. Fresh produce just shows up on your doorstep, delivered by drones. Garbage bins take themselves out, and smart infrastructure systems support automated pick-up. AI assistants — whether embodied or not — act as our guardian angels, providing advice to ensure that we maximize and optimize our lives to live well and work effectively.
How will we live in the future? How will we work? How will we get there? How will we get paid? What will we do for leisure? How will we ensure that everybody’s life will be better? Many are thinking about these questions.
Technology has the potential to support us in how we live and how we work, from small things — like making riding to work easy and safe — to the much bigger things. As a society, we have a lot of big challenges to solve: inequity, poverty, hunger, affordable housing, health care, education, climate change, fake news, and everything in between.
Technology in general — and AI in particular — can be an incredible vector for positive change as we work together to figure these things out. It can bring us together and give us ways to navigate the truth in a world inundated with alternative facts. It can take care of the routine stuff, and that gives us more time to focus on solving the big challenges that require creativity, collaboration, and strategy.
I know this sounds optimistic. AI is not going to solve all of our problems any more than it is going to destroy the world. Today AI can crunch numbers, and remember, and make predictions better than people can, but AI can’t learn, communicate, nor understand the world like we do. It doesn’t have common sense. This doesn’t mean AI isn’t a powerful tool. Only that it isn’t either/or: humans or machines, consider instead humans and machines. Working together with AI systems, humans can augment and amplify many aspects of work and life.
How has your perspective on AI, especially as it pertains to robotics, evolved since your time as a doctoral student at Cornell?
20 years ago computation was a task reserved for the few. Computers were large and expensive and hard to access. A person needed a level of expertise to know what to do with them. This began to change with the advent of home computers. Suddenly, every office and classroom had a computer sitting in it.
Still, most people could only use these computers for very limited number of tasks: type up documents, browse the Internet, maybe play a few games. But all that changed with the smartphone.
The smartphone democratized computation. Suddenly, there was an application for every task — an application that anyone with any level of knowledge could use. Computation became the new normal — so normal, in fact, that we stopped noticing how central it was to almost every part of our lives.
I believe we are about to experience this type of change again. But this time, it will be AI, ML, and robotics that transforms how we live and work. Machines will help us deliver on all types of cognitive and physical tasks, and just as with computing, the benefits will be shared by people of all ages and education levels.
Which sector(s) do you see being most affected by autonomous robotics and systems in the short term (2–5 years) and the long term (10+ years)?
Transportation, logistics, and warehousing are great examples for 2–5 years impact. It’s much easier to move a robot through the world than it is to build a robot that can interact with it.
Over the last few years, significant advances in algorithms and hardware have made it possible for us to dream about the ability to move people and goods in a much safer, more convenient way. This is all possible because of rapid advances in technology.
Today, we can do so many simultaneous computations, crunch so much data, and run algorithms in real-time. We’ve built better hardware components including sensors and actuators. We’ve advanced our understanding of how to make maps, localize information, and plan routes. These technologies have taken us to a point in time where we can realistically discuss the idea of autonomy on the roads.
But not full autonomy. Not yet — this is for a longer timeframe. The perception system of a vehicle doesn’t have the same quality and effectiveness as the human eye. To be clear, there are some things that machines can do better than people, like estimate accurately how quickly another vehicle is moving.
But robots don’t share our recognition capabilities. How could they? We spend our whole lives learning how to observe the world and make sense of it. Machines require algorithms to do this, and data — lots and lots and lots of data, annotated to tell them what it all means. To make level 5 autonomy possible, we have to develop new algorithms that help them learn from far fewer examples in an unsupervised way, without constant human intervention.
Looking further out, robots will revolutionize production. Today, robots have enabled mass fabrication. In the future, they will enable a world of customized production where making will be easy, intuitive, and pervasive, much like printing is today. Eventually, robots won’t just be producing items of any shape and size; they will become them.
Imagine the ability to program matter to change shape or even become invisible. It may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but I believe that eventually, we will be able to program robots to change a wide range of mechanical properties — for example changing optical properties to become invisible, changing acoustic properties to move in “stealth” mode or to enable easy localization, or visco-elastic properties to become vibration-absorbent or to allow high jumps.
There is also great potential for doing more for healthcare. For example, robots can measure vital signs in the case of highly infectious patients. MIT’s e-vent project is an open source project for an easy to fabricate low-cost robotic device that turns AmbuBags, which are broadly available, into emergency ventilators — which are in short supply at the moment.
These are 3 example sectors — many other industries will be greatly impacted by this technology.
What innovations in robotic hardware excite you most? What makes them transformative?
I am particularly excited by the transformative potential of soft robotics. While the past 60 years have defined the field of industrial robots and empowered hard-bodied robots to execute complex assembly tasks in constrained industrial settings, I believe the next 60 years will be ushering in robots in human-centric environments and our time with robots helping people with physical tasks.
While the industrial robots of the past 60 years have mostly been inspired by the human form — the next stage will be soft robots inspired by the animal kingdom with its form diversity and by our own built environments, with broader applications potential. With the development of soft materials, machines and materials are coming closer together with machines becoming compliant and fluid-like materials and materials becoming more intelligent and this raises an interesting question: what is a robot?
Traditionally we have considered industrial manipulators and robots on wheels but what about robots made our of food or paper or ice, or giving everyday objects the ability to move and compute so they become intelligent and autonomous?
Will AI, like calculus or geometry, become a prerequisite for every engineering program?
I believe that computational thinking should be part of literacy in the 21st century.
Finally, we’ve seen our investments coalesce into three general groups, those companies whose core technology will help solve climate challenges; those that will create new human health solutions; and those that will usher in computing & systems of tomorrow. Briefly, where will we see the greatest impacts of AI in each of these groups?
AI is instrumental in addressing climate change. New innovations can slow the impacts of warming, whether through stopping deforestation, preserving biodiversity, or ensuring there’s enough food to go around and food is not wasted. But there’s also an opportunity to address some of the underlying causes. Our planet is a feedback system. Reducing carbon emissions is not enough to reverse climate change. We need to cool the planet. Instead of aiming to limit global warming temperature increase by 1 degree Celsius, we have to think about what we’d need to do to reduce temperatures by 1 degree Celsius. The solution will be at the intersection of Robotics, AI, Materials, Environmental Studies, and more.
In healthcare, AI is enabling new approaches to better diagnose, treat, and monitor disease, toward an era of fully individualized healthcare, where medicines will be synthesized for each person as they need it and treatments will be customized.
AI, ML, and robotics will continue to transform how we live learn and work. Machines will help us deliver on all types of cognitive and physical tasks, and just as with computing, the benefits will be shared by people of all ages and education levels. | https://the-engine.medium.com/want-to-amplify-your-humanity-ai-and-robotics-can-help-31b5a1b92d12 | ['The Engine'] | 2020-06-05 01:00:22.108000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'MIT', 'Science', 'Engineering', 'Robotics'] |
4 Tips for Stunning Social-Media Visuals (Infographic) | 4 Tips for Stunning Social-Media Visuals (Infographic)
Engage your social audience across networks with more compelling visuals.
Images are critically important in social media marketing strategies across just about every platform. While networks like Instagram and Pinterest are obvious, most of the other major networks have made changes to their platforms to make visuals more prominent and give images more space.
People process visual information 60,000 times faster than text, which explains why 93 percent of the most engaging posts on Facebook include images.
In fact, Facebook led the charge, with wider, taller images in their Newsfeed design, though Twitter and LinkedIn weren’t far behind.
Wherever you are on social, visuals are your opportunity to stand out and get noticed.
How can you make your social visuals more compelling?
The Media Octopus put together an information-packed infographic on the importance of social visuals. It contains a lot of great advice and creative ideas for marketers looking to up their visual game, including these four tips for visual social success:
Be consistent with color. Show personality through typography. Choose the right imagery and filters. Don’t overlook positioning.
Learn more about each of these tips in the full infographic below:
Image credit: The Media Octopus
Originally published in Inc.com
About The Author
Larry Kim is the CEO of Mobile Monkey and founder of WordStream. You can connect with him on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. | https://medium.com/marketing-and-entrepreneurship/4-tips-for-stunning-social-media-visuals-infographic-b77c3f50630f | ['Larry Kim'] | 2017-04-30 16:22:34.087000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Digital Marketing', 'Graphic Design', 'Infographics', 'Social Media'] |
The Questions | The Questions
When poem becomes a question for the reader
Photo by Luke Ow on Unsplash
when you read me
what do you find on the page?
a poem waiting to kiss the stars
or a story waiting for that ending?
when you hear me
what do you see in my eyes?
those stars which keep burning me quietly
or those poems which I carry like a longing.
when you see me
do you see that map which I hide?
those crevices in my mind, that emptiness.
do you see that sky which I hold inside. | https://medium.com/scribe/the-questions-4717a508642c | ['Priyanka Srivastava'] | 2020-09-08 17:48:06.346000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Writing', 'Awakening', 'Reflections', 'Reading'] |
B21 Invest | Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies have captured the attention of investors worldwide, not only because of the ingenious technology that lies underneath and the ability to challenge the status quo of many industries including banks but also because of the massive returns these have offered over a period of time. In 2019 itself, an investment of $1000 in Bitcoin would have risen to $1910 by the end of the year, an absolute ROI of 91%. Because of this, crypto assets have been termed “the best performing asset class of 2019”.
Our journey for B21 began with a simple yet challenging mindset-
‘To bring digital asset investing mainstream so everyone can participate in potential returns without worrying about the complicated technology associated with digital and crypto assets.’
After hustling for two years setting up the legal and regulatory framework, acquiring licenses and developing the cool tech that is the heart of our product, we are now proud to bring you B21 Invest — a mobile application where any user can create and manage a multi-asset portfolio at their fingertips.
“No Complexities involved, Simple interface to create and manage your digital assets portfolio!”
With the B21 app, you can easily invest using your payment cards, Domestic and International wire transfers and ACH.
B21 offers full custodianship of your digital assets, you are not exposed to CFD like our competitors, we buy and hold your actual assets. You can withdraw your cash value to your bank account at any time.
We are currently offering B21 Invest live in 65 countries including the US and we support 5 languages with more coming soon!
You can download ‘B21 Invest’ now in Google Play and App Store.
Stay Safe. Stay Healthy. Wash Hands.
Happy Investing!
Team B21
B21 and Digital Software Solutions | https://medium.com/b21official/b21-invest-b0c338add331 | [] | 2020-03-20 07:26:02.062000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency News', 'Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Ethereum', 'Bitcoin'] |
Little Birds | The littlest birds
Form beneath hands,
Folds upon folds of intention
Collect and build each other
As the cat on the stair swish-
Swishes her tail through feathered fantasies
Living just outside the sill.
The turning continues,
A wing takes shape,
A wee beak pokes its way
Out of a finely fingered nest
As the dog’s eyes glaze over
And little paws kick-box the air
Chasing dream cars down the street.
A hole is poked,
And a red string hangs another
Little bird’s destiny
Inside, where it’s safe
From most predators and harm,
But without the risk of failure
She never learns to fly.
Until nightfall,
When all those who dictate
What makes sense
In the world
Have dropped off, leaving
Only the cat burglar,
The detective dog,
And a little paper bird
Designed to outsmart them all. | https://medium.com/literally-literary/little-birds-f9e4515edd82 | ['Elizabeth Helmich'] | 2018-09-25 13:25:27.738000+00:00 | ['Personal Growth', 'Poetry', 'Dreams', 'Fantasy', 'Perspective'] |
The Daily DevOps — Author’s Preface | Introduction
Un-learn
— There are some presumptions that this is just another fad tool or skill to hone which could be added to your profile . Nah !
Rewinding the clock to roughly a little over 2 years ago when I started my slow transition into DevOps, I quickly realised I had to unlearn that this is not a tool or skill which I could be proficient at, but rather it is a practice or principle which needs to be imbibed into my way of work.
So what’s DevOps all about ?
One can google for all the definitions and explanations, but I would like to put forward my line of thought that arose from this intriguing ongoing journey..
An amalgamation of Dev & Operations processes coated with robust automation and faster deployment strategies to deliver a secure product with utmost quality.
Yes, I just spoke my mind, that’s my definition !
In more general terms, we can build, test and deploy features much faster than before, while still adhering to all of the SDLC norms.
Now I leave it you to go through all the definitions available and pick one that makes sense and more importantly ideate around this thought of DevOps.
Re-learn
— So let’s start to snorkel the ocean of DevOps via this series, which would provide the basic essentials and enable one to dive much deeper into the depths and be adept at the various practices of DevOps at a later stage.
The word embark mentioned in an earlier context was carefully chosen as learning is the only constant and it rings so true as this space evolves way quicker than expected, thus always demanding constant learning.
Here is the roadmap I have laid out for myself .Obviously this roadmap not setting stone, but more or less aligns to the majority consensus in this space.
Note: I will try to adopt the VARK model of learning where we have visuals (images & diagrams ), auditory content(videos — audio within), reading (text — similar to this very content ) & kinaesthetic (hands-on — via the Chapter projects), as most learners generally gravitate towards any/all of these four.
Foundation
— Let us consider the different facets of the foundation. I will try to illustrate the same with an image of a tetrahedron puzzle commonly known as a Pyraminx (you can blame my latest obsession with solving rubik’s puzzles for this illustration) which has 4 faces . The 3 faces(top view) seen in the image can be imagined as :
Tetrahedron puzzle or Pyraminx — 4 Faces
Red — Linux
Green — Python
Blue — Cloud (be it any)
Yellow — Security & Networking (the often ignored and not to be seen here too)
Linux — most, if not every server runs on linux ! Having a good and clear understanding of the OS and the use of shell is vital if one needs to excel in this space. Mastering Linux would take years, however we all have to start somewhere.
Python — kind of a “must have” knowledge now in this data world. Community support and ease of learning has made this programming language the new buzz and it is perfectly married into the DevOps ecosystem.
Cloud — it is again imperative to know one , be it AWS , Azure, GCP , Oracle Cloud Infrastructure(OCI) or any public cloud of your choice. Understanding the intricacies of Cloud Computing is an absolute essential. Pick any cloud of your choice and start understanding the basics or probably get the Associate certifications to start with and later move on to Advanced/Speciality. However we will be covering a little part of this in one of our upcoming Chapters .
Security & Networking — be exposed to some of the basic networking and security concepts like DNS, OSI Model, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SSL, TLS, etc.
Next
— Yet again I will pick another puzzle to illustrate the next steps of the DevOps practices across the development life cycle.
Note: We will be covering each of these in detail in one or more chapters (within a project).
Rubik’s Cube — 6 Faces
Yellow — Infrastructure as Code
Blue —Version Control
Orange —Containerization
Green — Deploy (CI-CD)
Red — Container Orchestration
White — Monitoring & Alerting
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
is the process of managing and provisioning computer data centers through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools.
— where to deploy : Terraform (infra provisioning) — more
— rules to deploy : Ansible (configuration management) — more
Version Control
also known as source control that help software teams manage changes to source code over time and help software teams work faster and smarter. Useful for DevOps teams to reduce development time and increase successful deployments.
— where is the code: Git (version/source control) — more
Packaging or Containerization
is the packaging of software code with just the operating system (OS) libraries and dependencies required to run the code to create a single lightweight executable — called a container — that runs consistently on any infrastructure.
— how to package code: Docker (Containerization) — more
Continuous Integration & Continuous Deploy
CI — new code changes are regularly built, tested, merged to a shared repository CD — can refer to automatically releasing changes from repository to target env.
— build, deploy & repeat :Jenkins — more
Container Orchestration
is a process of automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized (uses container runtime) applications
— run, manage & scale :Kubernetes aka k8's — more
Monitoring & Alerting
does the surveillance duty — observes, tracks operations & activities of users, applications & network services . It reports and alerts.
— how is the app doing :Prometheus — more | https://medium.com/@DSK19/the-daily-devops-authors-preface-a96e26a05fa6 | ['Durgasuresh Kagitha'] | 2021-09-06 11:42:31.862000+00:00 | ['Jenkins', 'Kubernetes', 'Cloud', 'Docker', 'DevOps'] |
Chasing Down a Dream, Part I | Florida Manatee coming up for a breath.
Like all other plants and animals, we have certain conditions for which we are best adapted. In ecology this is known as a tolerance range and, for example, an animal like a manatee would require — among other things — water temperatures that are above 68 degrees Fahrenheit and certainly below an upper threshold as well.
When it comes to humans though, we’ve been able to, more or less, circumvent our biology and adapt to just about every possible range of environmental conditions on the planet.
Our tolerance range therefore is no longer a matter of survival necessarily, as it is with the manatees’ ability to find warm water, but rather a matter of the mind. It’s a puzzle of wants and needs, environmental conditions, and cultural expectancies.
With variables like temperature no longer barring us from entry, we’ve been free to judge a places’ fit for us based on a whole other host of factors, like say, the prevalence of breweries or access to hiking trails and/or city life. In other words, we’ve developed a cultural tolerance range that we’ve superimposed on our biological one.
Preening Barred owl in a cypress tree
Over the years I’ve found my ability to “like” a place to be a malleable thing. You can adjust to whatever situation you find yourself in, but your ability to do so doesn’t necessarily mean it’s where you want to be.
My body could adapt to the humidity and heat of Florida. I could learn to navigate the swamps and the alligators within them, as well as the cities congested with snowbird traffic, but no matter how physically or mentally adjusted I may become, there would always be something missing. An important part of who I am would always be forced to lie dormant if I stayed.
At the time of my internship in Florida I didn’t exactly know what I wanted, and I still don’t. There is no one size fits all situation, but as I ventured out into the unknowns of adult life, I was starting to understand which puzzle pieces were most important to me. | https://medium.com/@leifslog/chasing-down-a-dream-part-i-980d1d5b2e9f | ['Leif Johnson'] | 2021-07-26 16:57:33.141000+00:00 | ['Journey', 'Dreams', 'Florida', 'West', 'Autobiography'] |
The Trials of M | Chapter 11: You Cannot Change Your Own Future
The man looked with open astonishment at Magnus’ weapon, darting between looking at Magnus himself and the sword.
“How.” the man questioned.
“You know how, Joranduin.” Magnus replied.
The man before him stood in a loose stance, his sword pointed at the ready but otherwise he was relaxed. He had silver-blonde hair that fell to his nape, cradling his ears and young face, a few longer strands falling softly before his eyes. He was dressed casually; no armor but instead a well tailored gentleman’s suit that accentuated his lithe form. His handsome looks struck a sharp contrast to the murderous intent that dripped from him. He brushed the hair away from his forehead and behind an ear. A tattoo of an eye shone prominently on his brow in that same shade of his weapon, just as Magnus’ own brand shone.
“That’s impossible. You never received your contract!” Joranduin announced, obviously displeased.
“Yet here I am.”
“Yes. yet here you are! Stealing from my patron. One of the tenants of Eirskottir is never interfering in another God’s territory.” He growled in frustration. “No. You are no Eirskottir. You and that blade are not worthy to be.” Joranduin then lowered himself slightly, readying his attack. “You know the punishment.”
“Death it will be, then, old friend.” Magnus replied gravely.
“Death, indeed.”
Joranduin took off towards Magnus at an alarming speed, catching Magnus off-guard, but able to react just in time to avoid a heavy overhead slash from his opponent. Joranduin flourished his sword and stood back to a relaxed posture, smiling. As he did, a gash appeared down Magnus’ midsection, blood trailing down and splashing on the stone. He buckled for the briefest of moments before steadying himself again, suffusing his body with mana.
Joranduin’s sword was thin, its blade long and straight with a flowery hilt protecting the tang. Much like Magnus’ own weapon it gave off an unsettling aura. Despite its unusual appearance, Magnus was certain it hadn’t connected with him and yet, here he was bleeding from it.
Instead of allowing the flow of the fight to be determined by his enemy, Magnus decided to charge straight forward, sweeping his blade in a wide horizontal arc aimed for Joranduin’s midsection. He missed by a hair as the thin man deftly avoided the attack, but Magnus was already following up with a spin that lashed out an arm, Magnus hoping to catch the man with his claws. Once again, he caught the air and was rewarded by a devastating kick from Joranduin.
Magnus took a step back and drew more mana into himself, pressing on with a savage flurry of attacks. Each stab, thrust, swipe, or cut connected only with empty space as the man continued to expertly move out of harm’s way. After a few more futile attacks from Magnus, Joranduin replied with a cut of his own, dragging his blade through the air as Magnus pulled out of its way. Once again, a swallow cut appeared across Magnus’ chest, stretching from his collarbone to below his ribs on the opposite side.
Magnus had a look of sheer confusion cross his face as he looked down at the cuts he sustained during battle. He hadn’t had direct contact with Joranduin’s blade, but yet, here he was being wounded by it all the same. Joranduin laughed, mocking Magnus’ ignorance.
“You look so stupid, Magnus.” Joranduin chuckled again, “You have absolutely no idea what’s happening, do you?”
Magnus could only growl in reply, and pressed onward. Magnus continued to attack with his weapon, but Joranduin seemed to always be one step ahead. I’ve got to slow him down somehow, he thought as he dragged his sword across the ground to kick up dust and debris aimed at Joranduin, who in return, jumped back in retreat, scoffing at the tactic.
“Not on my suit, you mangy beast! Some of us like to have clean clothes.” He hollered as Magnus closed in, coming in with a quick lunge towards the man’s midsection. Once again, Joranduin sidestepped the attack and dodged it perfectly, despite still having his eyes closed from the dirt. He spun in place and backhanded Magnus with a fist that held surprising power from his slender frame. The attack put Magnus off balance, but Joranduin allowed the opportunity to pass, instead retreating a few more paces.
“Coward!” Magnus roared, anger fueling him. Unable to make contact with his foe, he was essentially robbed of his main strategy; absorbing so much of the foe’s mana source that they gradually weakened while that same mana fueled Magnus’ increasing strength. He could only hope the provocation would inflame Joranduin and cause him to attack more aggressively. There was a limit to how much mana Magnus could continue to use to reinforce his body, and he was quickly closing in on empty. He couldn’t even spare any to initiate his mana beast transformation; the term he coined when he first learned of how his body reacts when he infuses mana into himself past his limits.
“I am a coward, Magnus,” he said, smiling, “that’s why I don’t start fights I won’t win.” Joranduin then lowered himself close to the ground, spreading his limbs out in a wide stance. His sword shimmered for a moment, then reshaped into two small daggers which he held in both hands, one reverse gripped and one pointed outwards. “Let’s get a little more serious, friend.”
Without warning, Joranduin disappeared from his location on the ground and appeared above Magnus, a tremendous leap taking him the entire distance in the blink of an eye. He came down hard, both daggers cutting downwards at Magnus. This time, Magnus reacted by catching the blades with his own sword and immediately trying to absorb their mana. The daggers faltered for a brief second, then appeared in both of Magnus’ shoulders. He screamed in pain.
“You still don’t get it, do you?” Joranduin questioned, ripping the blades free and kicking off of Magnus’ chest, flipping over in the air and landing back nearly where he leapt from initially. “See, you’re so painfully slow,” he spoke, tossing the daggers in the air, juggling them between his hands as he paced in a steady circle around Magnus, “you’re whole strategy so far has just been to grab me, then hit me as hard as you could. I mean, it even looks like you still can’t cast any magic just like back in training. Honestly, how do you even manage to summon the Eirskottir’s blade?”
“I haven’t seen you cast any magic, either.” Magnus retorted.
“Oh no my dear man. You see, I’ve never stopped casting magic since our fight began.” Joranduin relished the look of confusion on Magnus’ face. To him, nothing was sweeter than someone who didn’t know as much as he did. “You see, Ialdin’s Knowledge is much more… potent than most people realize. No, it’s not just knowledge of the past that is within the realm of his influence, he has given me the gift of foresight. I can see your attacks before you even launch them. That kind of ability gives my weapon a very interesting property, you see.” Joranduin flashed a wicked grin at Magnus, “this mana ensures that my blades attack before they even move in the present time. Basically, by the time I begin to swing, the blades have already completed the motion and I’m just catching up.” He pointed a dagger at Magnus, continuing, “Against me, you cannot change your own future.”
“You’re always so quick to spill your secrets, Joranduin.” Magnus reprimanded him.
“Knowing about my abilities and being able to defend against it are two vastly different things.” He darted behind Magnus before he could realize again, “I’m faster than you are, and that’s all that matters now. You can’t escape my blade.” As if to reinforce that point, Joranduin’s daggers caught Magnus in his arms before he could turn to attack, and just as quickly as he arrived he retreated again.
Magnus realized he was very nearly being overwhelmed. Was he always this strong? He thought to himself, No, they always told us the Awakening would change us. Magnus sighed. There has to be a way to fight this. Magnus knelt down, preparing himself to run. Joranduin noticed this too and tried to close the gap, but Magnus was ready and pushed off from the ground, throwing himself backwards into the swirling blue dome.
He hadn’t had a chance to move the little mana he had from within himself to create an aura around him and the gravity of the densely packed magic forced Magnus to the ground, halfway through the field. Joranduin stopped well short of the field and looked down with derision.
“You idiot. That’s going to kill you, you know.”
Countless shards impaled Magnus’ body as the mana that flowed was mostly crystallized, and it took precious moments for Magnus to stretch his mana outwards to begin the absorption process. Almost immediately following Magnus could feel a flood of power entering him, and he took some excess mana and put it back into his muscles, this time allowing more mana to seep deeper into him, soaking his bones and tendons in turn. He rose as the mana continued to fuel him, rapidly changing his form and size. Joranduin looked on in horror as Magnus stood tall under the onslaught of forceful mana growing stronger and larger with every passing moment. Soon, Magnus could feel his reserves bursting at the seams, and stepped out from under the fountain of power he had uncovered. After a moment, Joranduin appeared again in Magnus’ blind spot and slashed with his blades.
Acting on instinct, Magnus decided to attempt something he hadn’t tried before. He knew even with the increase in physical prowess he obtained by refueling he still didn’t have much of a chance if he couldn’t stop Joranduin’s attacks from connecting. He was a bigger target, now, and his senses were a lot sharper meaning even the pain seemed worse; he could acutely feel each gash he had withstood in the fight so far. The only way to turn the tables now was to try something he had only theorized he could do. Magnus dragged all the mana he could spare towards his center, infusing it with Hesh’s imprint, and forcefully expelled it from himself.
The result was something akin to an explosion. The ground quivered under its weight and Joranduin was thrown past the waterfall of mana, crashing to the ground by it with an audible crack, the torrent itself was disrupted by the void and erased any trace of mana in the air. Magnus fell to a knee as he realized an unwanted side effect: the explosion had eaten all of the mana he was using to reinforce his body and the recoil of the instant removal was jarring. Without any more reserves of neutral mana, he was defenseless.
Looking over, he could see Joranduin lying motionless on the ground, drops of blood splattered in a few locations. Slowly Magnus rose and forced himself a step at a time towards the ever-present mana dome separating the two warriors, the attack he unleashed only stopped its function for a few brief seconds. He nearly crashed in front of it and plunged his right hand in, taking in as much as he could as Joranduin stirred awake.
To his credit, Joranduin took the damage much better than Magnus had expected, and he was dashing towards Magnus before he could finish absorbing a proper amount of mana. Joranduin bound through the mana completely ignoring the shards that stuck into his shoulders and back and swiped with his hand, completely missing Magnus by inches. Joranduin stared down at his empty palm.
“Where’s…?” he started before Magnus interrupted.
“Gone.” he spoke definitively as he plunged a fist that was instinctively reinforced into Joranduin’s chest, forcing him downwards back into the ground which buckled and cratered under the impact. Joranduin didn’t move after that.
Magnus bent down and placed his hand on Joranduin’s chest, feeling for a heartbeat. Once he confirmed Joranduin still lived, he stood back up to leave, saying, “I’ll let you live, this time.” As he walked towards the exit, thoughts of his childhood came to mind.
* * *
Everywhere he looked the scenery was unfocused; layered in alternating facets of streaking lights and unsteady walls. Magnus had forced himself past his own limits, and nearly killed himself in the process. He knew he had barely won against his former friend, and his final gambit was closer to the throes of a dying man. The desperate technique would have cost him his life if his enemy had paid slightly more attention. Magnus knew he couldn’t worry about that at this point; he needed to move as quickly as his limbs would take him. Although he was sure he defeated the strongest member of Ialdin’s guard here, even an average soldier would no doubt pose a deadly threat.
As he braced himself against the wall of the stairwell, Magnus mentally inspected his body, attempting to sense how many injuries he sustained. He could tell he had at least a few broken ribs and he had lost count of how many cuts Jordanduin was able to inflict. Many of them were superficial, but there were a few that were deep enough to require some serious attention when he made it out of the enemy’s stronghold.
He clambered over the final steps in front of the long hall of horrors, his legs unsteady from both his blurred vision and his weak muscles. He gripped the frame of the doorway as he passed the threshold, and looked down at his hand noticing a slick substance left on it. It was hard to see in the low light, and upon further inspection, he smelled it’s metallic nature. Ahnkiin’s blood? He must have taken a hit from Joranduin; it landed before he could teleport.
He continued down the hallway without incident. As he approached the next set of stairs, he saw three men unconscious on the ground. He gingerly stepped over them with much effort, a foot landing in another puddle of blood below. Magnus could feel his worry growing over Ahnkiin, but forced himself to let it go. Worrying about him now won’t serve anyone. He should be able to patch himself up.
Magnus nearly collapsed as he tripped over the final two steps into the public library area. Fortunately, nobody was around to see and he snuck his way around the unseen edges of the floor like they had done when they entered. He was still losing strength fast, and couldn’t find a new source of magic to absorb. He couldn’t both use his mana to keep his body moving and generate new neutral mana at the same time, and releasing his reinforcement would cause him to collapse. He also couldn’t absorb the mana that naturally existed in organic objects, like the stones around him. Hesh’s magic was potent, but it could only take in mana that was intended for magical application and repurpose it. How, then, did his void explosion spell work? It had somehow caused a chain reaction that wiped out even the neutral mana that Magnus had stored; completely undermining everything Magnus thought he knew about his power.
Magnus strained against the door, attempting to open it. It wasn’t nearly as light as it had seemed before, but somehow he did it. As he walked towards the alley that they had started this heist from, onlookers stared in open disgust at the bloodied Oth’tun. He made it a few steps into the darkness before collapsing on the soiled path, his mana had run completely dry.
* * *
Magnus woke slowly, a soft breeze billowing through the curtains of their modest accommodations in The Gold Feather. Ahnkiin stood above him, bloodied rags and bandages in hand as he worked meticulously to clean and repair Magnus’ many wounds. Ahnkiin smiled down at Magnus as he noticed his friend wake. A large gash decorated Ahnkiin’s dark blue fur, the moonlight offering a glimpse of the shredded shirt he wore.
“Looks like we will both have scars after today, yes?” Ahnkiin said. His soft words were a comfort to Magnus, who had been endlessly worried over the psychological state he had witnessed from Ahnkiin earlier that day.
“The book?” Magnus spoke wearily. In response Ahnkiin lifted an edge of his cloak he still wore wrapped around himself and saw the aged tome tied neatly and securely to the fabric.
“Better to keep it hidden, I think.”
Magnus groaned in response, and fell back into unconsciousness for a time. The sun hadn’t yet begun to rise when he woke for the second time. With a heavy hand he rubbed his bleary eyes and roused himself, slowly rising from the bed. He could feel his wounds pulling at their bindings and stitchings as he attempted to sit up, taking extra care to move slowly and with purpose. Magnus wouldn’t trust himself to stand and walk, yet, but there was something about lying down that made him feel more vulnerable and weak. Palvar stood by the still open window, staring down at the road.
“How’d you make out?” Magnus asked.
“A lot better than the two of ya, that’s fer certain.” Palvar shared a warm grin with Magnus. “My makeshift ram with the door managed ta take out most of the buggers,” -he shrugged- “by the time I cared ta look back, nobody was chasin’ me.”
“It seemed our little ploy with the cloak did its job, then.”
“Aye.” Palvar looked over towards Ahnkiin, who seemed to be resting on his bed. He didn’t speak for a long time as he watched the blankets rise and fall with each of Ahnkiin’s breaths. “You need to take better care of that one.”
Magnus looked back up at Palvar with a hint of hesitation. Palvar noticed it immediately.
“I mean it. Ever since he found ya in that alley he’s been taking care of ya over himself.” Magnus looked down at the floor in response, shame weighing down his broken body. “For hours he poured mana into ya, channeling all the healing power he could. We both knew ye couldn’t recover with it, but he just kept saying that yer body will know what ta do with the mana he was giving ya.” Palvar rubbed at his eyes, the emotion welling inside of him threatening to escape, quivering in his voice.
“He got hurt.”
“Aye. Bad.” Palvar lifted his hand pointing towards a large basin on the ground filled with water and bloodied bandages. “Most of that blood is his. He refused to even let me stitch him up until he got ye finished up. That little cat nearly died fer ya. He is not yer servant. Stop letting him believe he is.”
“I-”
“No.” Palvar shut Magnus up, then walked over and sat next to him.
“Look, none of us know each other that well. I only help ya because I’m honoring me ancestor. I help him” -he lifted his head back towards Ahnkiin- “because I care fer him. Few men are as honorable as that one, not even ye are, Mag.” Palvar sighed in frustration. “I’m not gonna stop helping ye two. I won’t betray ya. I’m just saying me peace.” The large man then walked unceremoniously out of the room, closing the door quietly behind him. Magnus could only watch as Palvar left, contemplating what had just occurred. Ahnkiin woke only a few minutes later behaving much like the joyful companion always had.
“I am glad you are awake, my friend.”
“I have you to thank for most of that I hear.” Magnus responded, smiling at Ahnkiin.
“It is what anybody would do, in the same situation.”
Magnus was unsure how to respond to that, and wasn’t entirely sure that was very truthful, either. In fact, he wasn’t clear on how long he had been in that alley, but he was certain Ahnkiin wasn’t the first to notice him there, bleeding to death on the stone.
“I am sure you would like to look through the book now, yes?”
Magnus’ breath stopped in his throat. He nodded quickly and attempted to wrest out the anxiety welling in his chest. Ahnkiin slowly approached, taking care to steady himself as he walked, and took a position next to Magnus. Silently, he withdrew the book and handed it down to Magnus.
The book was white, impressed with the symbol for each of the nine gods of Liuwrend. In a small font near the top of the cover read simply “The Nine’’ in black type. Curiously, his brand didn’t burn or glow as he touched the book, as it had when he was searching for it. He flipped through the pages in a cursory glance, then flipped back to the beginning of the book, reading snippets at a time.
“What does it say?” Ahnkiin asked as he lowered himself down to sit.
“This thing is like a history book. Here on the first page it just says ‘The world is broken into three parts, each ruled by their own, each given creators and destroyers.’”
“Does that mean the Nine are not the only gods?”
“Growing up, Dottie always told us that Atul was governed by forces outside of the control of our gods. I never had much reason to question it further, but I suppose if Ialdin wrote it here, it must be true. There must be a third continent, then.”
“This is only the first page and already I must question my own knowledge.” Ahnkiin pointed out.
“Yeah, but that’s not really my concern right now.” Magnus flipped over to about halfway through the book, skimming the passages on a few pages before he stopped to read aloud again.
“‘The land of the Gods and of the men are merely mirrors of themselves; with many ways to travel between the two, but the land itself chooses who is worthy. The Godstone Gates stood long before anything else, gifted to mortals by the land to those who possess the strength to rule over it. And so, seven mortals etched their name into the land, chosen as protectors and providers to further the land’s prosperity and life. Their names were Fincoris, the God of Illusions, Aphaeleon, the God of Laws, Shydde, the Goddess of Beasts, Lilea, the Goddess of Life, Khetros, the God of Death, Ialdin, the God of Knowledge, and Thaldir, the God of War. Their power was a gift, to contrast the natural born power of Hesh, the Goddess of the Void, and Yldos, the God of the Elements and Creation. They were to usher in a new era of peace and evolution. Instead, they unwittingly began the death of Liuwrend.’” Magnus took a sharp breath.
“I… I think I know what a Godstone Gate looks like. I think I found one when you lost me in the forest.” Magnus looked over at Ahnkiin with wide eyes.
“Are you certain?” Ahnkiin asked.
Before Magnus could answer, however, loud footfalls thudding up the stairs and stormed into the room. Palvar stood there, surprise and fear decorating his features.
“Scions!”
Magnus and Ahnkiin leapt from their feet just as Nik backed into the room, pleading with someone in the hallway to prevent from making a scene. A few moments later, Roniv, the Scion of the Third Ray entered with two other unknown Scions behind.
“When the good general commanded me to find the intruder,” Roniv said with disdain, “well let’s just say I was happy to oblige in finding and arresting the two delinquent Oth’tun that he wanted captured.”
The small room was dwarfed by the large assortment of persons now crowding inside. They all were nearly shoulder to shoulder, and fighting would have been near impossible in the confined space, not that Magnus was in any shape to do so. I knew we were on borrowed time. I don’t think I can get us out of this, not with these injuries.
“Kneel and accept your shackles!” Roniv commanded the air, compulsion magic flooding the atmosphere. Instantly, Palvar and Nik both dropped to their knees as Magnus and Ahnkiin managed to resist. Magnus glanced over at Ahnkiin who displayed a wicked grin, and Magnus was once again surprised at Ahnkiin’s speed of comprehension, already being able to utilize his mana to fight against the Scion. He could see the tension behind his friend’s breathing, however, and knew he had precious few moments before Roniv broke through his defenses.
“The kitties have claws, do they?” Roniv regarded them. A scowl deepened across his face as his piercing green eyes looked down his nose at them. He stomped a single boot on the floor and commanded the world around them again. “Kneel!”
The room shook with tremors after Roniv spoke, the mana packed tightly into the air. Magnus could feel the power the man held, and watched silently as Ahnkiin exhausted himself and fell to his knees. Even with his reinforcement technique, Magnus knew he couldn’t win against Roniv right now, and despite not being compulsed, he fell to his knees in defeat. At that same moment, something behind Magnus fell to the ground, something that he had forgotten he still kept.
As the sack hit the floor, Magnus could hear the head rolling free, coming to a stop a short distance away. Magnus tilted his head ever so slightly, seeing just in time the head beginning to float from the ground. Black tendrils of smoke and ash poured from its stump of a neck and formed into something resembling a body, the wispy trails of magic flowing upwards and covering the head. Four gleaming yellow eyes gazed through the shroud as horns of many points grew from the scalp. Roniv was the first to speak.
“Who are you?”
“Silence, child.” The form spoke cruelly.
“I am Roniv, Scion of the Third Ray, and I asked you ‘Who are you’? Magnus could feel Roniv exploding with magical ability, attempting to compulse the entity behind him into compliance.
“And I said silence.” The form lifted up an incorporeal limb and suddenly Roniv’s mouth disappeared, a fleshy patch taking its place. Roniv began to panic as he noticed the change and claw at his now missing mouth. He scraped with his fingers so strongly that he ripped and tore pieces of the flesh off, and began to bleed from the wounds. The other two Scions who had come with him stepped forward to challenge the magical beast but also found themselves lacking mouths with which to speak.
“Now,” the monster cooed, searching the room before landing on Magnus, “ah, yes. There it is.”
Magnus and the others stood slowly, watching the new form of the troll’s head float over towards them, reaching down to grab the book that Magnus still held. Instinctively, Magnus flinched backwards and pulled the book out of the monster’s reach.
“Cheeky one, aren’t you? But then again, you always have been.”
“You won’t take this book.” Magnus spoke.
“I do not want to take the book, Magnus. Merely… destroy it.” The form said. “You see, Ialdin has a terrible propensity for, well, let’s call it disobeying, especially when it comes to things better left forgotten.” Magnus eyed the beast with caution. “Now, I’ll deal with that little display of disloyalty later, but first, I must thank you. That book has been hidden from my eyes for a very long time. Thanks to you, I can finally destroy it.”
“You dare think I’ll let you?” Magnus said. Palvar and Ahnkiin looked suspiciously around, both seemed to be searching for an advantage of some sort. Nik seemed to be frozen in place, out of fear or lack of strength Magnus was unsure of.
“Child. Don’t presume to be able to defeat a god.” The form began to grow in size and density. “I am Fincoris, and I have been meaning to kill you for a long time.” Suddenly, a vacuum began to swallow all of the magic out of the air, the amorphous form the center of it. “Oh! I almost forgot. Thanks for carrying around one of my minions, it made it so much easier to find you once you got that book out for me.”
Just as soon as it had started, the beast who called himself Fincoris stopped whatever he had been doing and for the briefest of moments, the world stood silent. There was no sound or movement, and everything seemed to grow brighter and overwhelming. Magnus was the last to realize what was happening.
A blinding explosion with the force of a sun collapsed in the center of the room where Fincoris had stood, its forceful wave of energy blasting outwards in all directions. It was devoid of mana making it impossible for Magnus to guard against. Magnus stared wide-eyed as the shockwave shot towards him, and just then, someone stepped in front of him and covered his body with their own. Magnus looked over to see Nik instantly vaporized by the explosion, his own consciousness broken by that same force. | https://medium.com/@jcharlesramirezwrites/the-trials-of-m-94593bbab5a4 | ['J. Charles Ramirez'] | 2021-01-21 20:43:36.265000+00:00 | ['Serial Fiction', 'Litrpg', 'Fantasy', 'Epic Fantasy', 'Novel'] |
On Transportation: Our Nation’s Blinker Fluid Shortage | Where has all the fluid gone?
This will be shocking for many to grasp. Personally, I was not even aware that automobiles required such a fluid. I had heard of brake fluid, windshield wiper fluid, power steering fluid, and so on. When a car lacks any of those fluids, those systems falter or fail. It is a simple concept, though I had no idea it also applied to blinkers.
The plot thickened after speaking with staff at several local, reputable auto parts stores. Not a single retailer carried blinker fluid. I thought maybe it was simply an oversight by salespeople, though after speaking with store managers, I received the same answer. I checked with the Subaru dealership while my car was in for service, and not a mechanic in the shop could point me in the direction of any blinker fluid. Several phone calls to the Texas Department of Public Safety on the subject went unreturned.
Unsure where else to turn, I decided to conclude my investigative journey. Though I still have questions about why it is so difficult to find blinker fluid, part of me feels relieved to know that it is not, in fact, an issue with the actual drivers in our great city. They are just calm, level-headed, mindful people, trying to get from place to place; they are simply unable to do so effectively due to a shortage of what Unsure where else to turn, I decided to conclude my investigative journey. Though I still have questions about why it is so difficult to find blinker fluid, part of me feels relieved to know that it is not, in fact, an issue with the actual drivers in our great city. They are just calm, level-headed, mindful people, trying to get from place to place; they are simply unable to do so effectively due to a shortage of what should be an easily accessible substance. | https://medium.com/the-haven/on-transportation-our-nations-blinker-fluid-shortage-c1c297c3f240 | ['Evan Wildstein'] | 2020-12-22 13:03:11.089000+00:00 | ['Driving', 'Automobile', 'Satire', 'Cars', 'Transportation'] |
BootstrapVue — Accordions and Dropdowns | Photo by Kouji Tsuru on Unsplash
To make good looking Vue apps, we need to style our components.
To make our lives easier, we can use components with styles built-in.
In this article, we’ll look at how to add an accordion and a dropdown with BootstrapVue.
Accordions
We can create an accordion with the b-collapse component.
To create one, we’ve to nest it inside a b-card component.
For instance, we can write:
<template>
<div id="app">
<b-card no-body class="mb-1">
<b-card-header header-tag="header" class="p-1" role="tab">
<b-button block href="#" v-b-toggle.accordion-1 variant="info">accordion 1</b-button>
</b-card-header>
<b-collapse id="accordion-1" visible accordion="my-accordion" role="tabpanel">
<b-card-body>
<b-card-text>accordion 1 text</b-card-text>
</b-card-body>
</b-collapse>
</b-card> <b-card no-body class="mb-1">
<b-card-header header-tag="header" class="p-1" role="tab">
<b-button block href="#" v-b-toggle.accordion-2 variant="info">accordion 2</b-button>
</b-card-header>
<b-collapse id="accordion-2" accordion="my-accordion" role="tabpanel">
<b-card-body>
<b-card-text>accordion 2 text</b-card-text>
</b-card-body>
</b-collapse>
</b-card> <b-card no-body class="mb-1">
<b-card-header header-tag="header" class="p-1" role="tab">
<b-button block href="#" v-b-toggle.accordion-3 variant="info">accordion 3</b-button>
</b-card-header>
<b-collapse id="accordion-3" accordion="my-accordion" role="tabpanel">
<b-card-body>
<b-card-text>accordion 3 text</b-card-text>
</b-card-body>
</b-collapse>
</b-card>
</div>
</template> <script>
export default {
name: "App"
};
</script>
We have 3 cards which are combined to create our accordion.
We have the b-card components on the outside.
Then we have the b-collapse component on the inside to create the accordion.
This way, we have the headers always displayed.
But the body is only displayed when we clicked on the heading, which also hides the other cards.
Dropdowns
Dropdowns are toggleable and contextual overlays for displaying list of links and actions.
To create one, we create the b-dropdown component with some b-dropdown-item components inside.
For instance, we can create a simple dropdown by writing:
<template>
<div id="app">
<b-dropdown id="dropdown-1" text="menu" class="m-md-2">
<b-dropdown-item>apple</b-dropdown-item>
<b-dropdown-divider></b-dropdown-divider>
<b-dropdown-item active>active</b-dropdown-item>
<b-dropdown-item disabled>disabled</b-dropdown-item>
</b-dropdown>
</div>
</template> <script>
export default {
name: "App"
};
</script>
We have the b-dropdown component with the text prop, which is set to the text of the drop-down button.
Therefore, we set our dropdown button text to 'menu' since that’s the value we have for text .
Inside it, we have the b-dropdown-item with various props.
The content is between the tags.
active makes a dropdown item active.
disabled makes a dropdown item disabled.
b-dropdown-divider is a divider on our dropdown menu.
Dropdown Button Content
We can customize our content of a drop with a template element to fill the button-content slot.
For instance, we can write:
<template>
<div id="app">
<b-dropdown>
<template v-slot:button-content>
<b>menu</b>
</template>
<b-dropdown-item>apple</b-dropdown-item>
</b-dropdown>
</div>
</template> <script>
export default {
name: "App"
};
</script>
We have the template element which fills the button-content as indicated by v-slot:button-content .
Inside it, we have <b>menu</b> to show bold text.
Below it, we have the usual dropdown items.
Menu Alignment
The menu alignment can change according to our preference.
The default is to left-align the menu.
If we want to right-align the menu, we can add the right prop to the b-dropdown component.
For instance, we can write:
<template>
<div id="app" style="padding: 100px">
<b-dropdown right text="right">
<b-dropdown-item>apple</b-dropdown-item>
</b-dropdown>
</div>
</template> <script>
export default {
name: "App"
};
</script>
to right-align the menu if there’s enough room on the left edge of the screen.
Otherwise, it’ll go back to left aligning the menu.
Dropup
We can also make the menu stay above the button instead of below it.
We just have to add the dropup prop.
For example, we write:
<template>
<div id="app" style="padding-top: 100px">
<b-dropdown dropup text="right">
<b-dropdown-item>apple</b-dropdown-item>
</b-dropdown>
</div>
</template> <script>
export default {
name: "App"
};
</script>
to do that.
Drop Right or Left
We can add similar props to make the menu show on the right or left instead of above or below the button.
dropright makes it show to the right of the button.
dropleft makes it show on the left of the button.
Photo by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash
Conclusion
We can create accordion with cards and the collapse components.
Also, BootstrapVue has menu components we can use.
JavaScript In Plain English
Did you know that we have four publications? Find them all via plainenglish.io — show some love by following our publications and subscribing to our YouTube channel! | https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/bootstrapvue-accordions-and-dropdowns-f0939a2cb07d | ['John Au-Yeung'] | 2020-06-22 16:18:51.793000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Web Development', 'JavaScript', 'Software Development', 'Technology'] |
Vitamins or Medicines? A Simple Copywriting Approach | Vitamins or Medicines? A Simple Copywriting Approach
Picture bought by the author on Depositphotos
If you are struggling with the right words to sell, think of yourself as a doctor, your leads as patients, your product as the treatment, and your copy as a medical consultation.
Even if you are not operating in the trillion-dollar pharma industry, there is power in this simplicity.
The cure approach
Medicines bring salvation when the harm is already done.
Your leads are in pain. They bloody well know where their pain points are situated. As a copywriter, it’s your task to show that you are aware of the discomfort and stress.
Here are a few examples of how you can start your sales headline.
Are you sick of…
Do you feel bad when…
Your trained eye noticed that these are simple yes/no questions. That’s not an accident. Questions have a strong side effect.
Have another look at the subtitle of this article:
Are you tired of slow growth?
If this triggered you into reading this article, that’s kind of strange. After all, you answered the question with a yes or no. And yet, you are here because our brain is wired to follow the path of curiosity.
Questions grab attention. In the overload information era, that’s a big win. It’s not a sale, but you are getting a huge step closer.
Let’s have a look at the vitamin approach.
The boost approach
Vitamins boost your system. They build up resistance and give you energy.
Your solution does the same. It can give your customers
a head start
advantage over competitors
a motivation kick to perform better
Here are some simple examples of how you can use this in your headline copy:
Boost your …
Do you want to revive your… ?
Gain more…
Fill in the dots with whatever magic your product or service offers.
As with most simple stuff, this works wonderfully well.
Now what?
Your sales headline can either open or close the door to your remarkable remedy.
In that respect, the above is only a starting point. If the rest of your copy stinks, your headline won’t make a difference.
On the other hand, the beginning is the hardest part. Once you get that right, the rest of your copy can come easier.
Two more things before you take off to kill the pain of your customers:
You can apply this everywhere: your marketing emails, ads, landing page, call to action in your blog posts… You can mix medicines and vitamins. The combination of treatments can result in healthier sales figures.
Hope this helps you somehow. Thanks for your time. | https://2madness.com/vitamins-or-medicines-a-simple-copywriting-approach-8ce6ccdec488 | ['David Vanhee'] | 2021-09-13 23:01:22.438000+00:00 | ['Headlines', 'Tech', 'Marketing', 'Writing', 'Copywriting'] |
Sanctions Top-5 for the week ending 30 April 2021 | Here are five things that happened this week in the world of economic sanctions that I think you should know about.
Sign up here if you would like to receive these summaries by email. Click here for an index of past Sanctions Top-5 briefings.
Comments
OFAC is cranking out the settlements lately. This week brings us two cases showing that sanctions compliance is one part technology and one part people. (Or maybe two parts technology.) In the first case, the money transmitter failed to identify SDN transactions in part due to “screening, technology, and fuzzy logic failures” as well as “limited instances of human error” where analysts confused prohibited commercial transactions with permissible personal remittances. In the second case, the software company failed to implement geolocation and IP-blocking controls to prevent users in sanctioned territories from downloading and accessing its products. Meanwhile, a compliance team responsible for the cloud-services business “was not resourced or empowered to manage these processes appropriately.”
Both companies received mitigation credit for beefing up their compliance programs after discovering the apparent violations.
Check out this article from the South China Morning Post about the EU’s reaction to the PRC sanctions announced by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in March 2021. According to the author: “China’s sanctions — unlike those imposed by Western countries that were based on the Global Magnitsky Act or similar frameworks — are not defined by Chinese laws.” If that sounds familiar, it’s because I made this point myself back in March when the sanctions were first announced. I wrote: “[T]he statements do not point to a law or regulation authorizing the sanctions, what the penalty for breaching them is, or where to go for guidance.” The PRC’s sanctions framework is a work in progress. | https://medium.com/@nicholaswturner/sanctions-top-5-for-the-week-ending-30-april-2021-53b962f0992a | ['Nicholas Turner'] | 2021-05-03 22:39:49.218000+00:00 | ['Iran', 'Sanctions', 'UK', 'China', 'Corruption'] |
New Feature Request Process | Among the most significant advantages of working on a popular open codebase is the constant feedback stream in all forms, including GitHub issues and pull requests. Over the past 6 months, our team did a lot of work triaging over 4.5k issues across our 3 main repositories and merging hundreds of pull requests. Going through this process, we responded to long-standing tickets and solidified our understanding of the most frequent requests by the community.
It’s fantastic receiving such rich feedback, but at the same time, processing thousands of requests could be cumbersome. It could slow us down in responding in the discussion threads and could often distract us from developers’ top needs.
Many times we’ve talked about different processes for automation. A significant concern for most of them was the risk of losing valuable comments without being able to address them or incorporate them in our future vision for Angular.
Analyzing the issues in our three main repositories, we found that a large portion of them are feature requests:
Although tempting, it’s unrealistic and unhealthy to incorporate all the requests for features. If Angular takes this path, there are risks for the framework becoming unlearnable and unmaintainable. But clearly such feedback is precious — there are hundreds of bright ideas coming from the community that align well with Angular’s future vision and are worth exploring.
Automating feature request
At GitHub Universe, the VSCode team gave a fantastic talk on “How we make VS Code in the open.” Alex and Benjamin shared how their team automated the feature request process by including the community.
In the next couple of weeks, in the Angular project, we will introduce a similar approach to managing existing and incoming requests for features.
When we receive a ticket, an Angular team member will review it manually and categorize it as a feature request or an issue.
As the next step, we’ll verify whether feature requests align with any existing projects on the roadmap. If they do, we’ll prioritize them. If not, they will go through a 60-day voting process.
During this period, anyone could vote for the corresponding feature by giving it a thumbs-up reaction (👍). If at the end of the 60 days the request has collected a certain number of votes, our GitHub bot will automatically label it for consideration. Otherwise, it’ll close it. Following the process set by the VS Code team we’ll consider requests with 20 or more votes and iterate if a different number of votes will give better results.
If a request has a label for consideration, we’ll manually review it again and verify if it aligns with Angular’s future vision. If it does, we’ll move it to our prioritization queue. Alternatively, we’re going to close it with an explanation. We want to keep Angular coherent. Closing a feature request often means it’s a better fit for an external module which the community could distribute as an extension of the platform.
Historically, we’ve always been hesitant to close feature requests, even in cases when we don’t think we would realistically move forward with the feature. By actively closing more feature requests, we set better expectations and make it clear that we’re trying to focus on the work that impacts the largest number of developers.
You can preview the process in a higher level of details by looking at the activity diagram below:
Open source at scale
We value all the incoming feedback and for us it’s a top priority to be responsive and mindful of anyone’s requests.
To continue scaling sustainably, we’re looking forward to kicking this process off the ground to make us more efficient and fair in the feature request management process! | https://blog.angular.io/new-feature-request-process-a9f69d106fc8 | ['Minko Gechev'] | 2021-05-27 17:01:40.841000+00:00 | ['Feature Request', 'Angular', 'Process'] |
Our Brains Can Continuously Change For the Better Throughout our Lifetime | Our Brains Can Continuously Change For the Better Throughout our Lifetime
Neuroplasticity gives humans new hope for the future.
happybrainlife.com
When I saw the PBS TV show recently about Neuroplasticity it happened to be the same week my therapist mentioned it to me. She was doing a speech about Neuroplasticity to a group of her colleagues.
She said, “This is wonderful news. Our brains can alter in positive ways as we age!”
So, twice in one day, I heard the word Neuroplasticity. That seemed like one of those Universal signs, so, I went to research the subject. I wanted to learn more.
Here’s a short definition from Wikipedia:
“Neuroplasticity, also known as brain plasticity, neuroelasticity, or neural plasticity, is the ability of the brain to change continuously throughout an individual’s life... The brain can respond to life and change itself by forging new neural pathways and circuits while pruning away old ones, as needed.”
So we can reprogram our brain!
Isn’t this great news for people with traumas and PTSD issues too?
webmd.com
People used to believe the brain became fixed after a certain age, but newer research has revealed that the brain never stops changing in response to learning.
I love this!
In instances of damage to the brain, such as during a stroke, the areas of the brain associated with certain functions may be damaged but eventually, healthy parts of the brain may take over those functions and the abilities can be restored.
Neuroplasticity also offers real hope to everyone from stroke victims to dyslexics.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to know that our brains are malleable and could actually shift and change for the better over time? | https://medium.com/crows-feet/our-brains-can-continuously-change-for-the-better-throughout-our-lifetime-77769ea50cad | ['Michelle Monet'] | 2019-12-20 01:39:54.962000+00:00 | ['Brain', 'Neuroscience', 'Trauma', 'Health', 'Aging'] |
B | B is for blood.
Blood that runs wild but not free.
Blood that calls out to you from beneath your skin.
Blood that keeps pulling you back home.
B is for buildings that are a cage to your troubled soul,
For brick walls that enclose a space that has always been a house to you and not home.
B is for the blood of covenant that will always be thicker than the water of the womb for you.
B is blood poured like libation to gods who don’t know you, in your honor.
B is for believing in yourself because you’re your number 1 fan.
B. Be yourself, but you don’t even know who you are.
B is becoming different versions of yourself in the face of different people.
B. Be you. Even when you is the last person you want to see.
B is for buts.
B is for because; reasons.
B. B is for believing in a better tomorrow because you’re trying so hard not to give up. Not to be the pessimist.
B is for your breaking point because you’re ridiculously close to it.
B is for broken hearted girls up at 2 am high as kites, crying for lost loves and explaining why they don’t need them anymore.
B is for broken homes because mum left while we were little and dad cut loose when we turned 13.
For bodies we hate.
For bodies we don’t feel at home in.
For bodies we keep trying to get out of.
For bad decisions we make in the heat of the moment. For bad decisions that we save ourselves from. For bad decisions we will make.
B is for broken promises.
For bandages used to hide cuts we dare not explain for fear of exclusion.
For being constantly tired.
B is for beginnings that seem so hard.
Square 1 that has become home to your troubled soul.
B is for Beta — second chances. | https://medium.com/@Ogenna/b-169ddabec0a1 | [] | 2019-02-14 07:14:25.708000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Alphabet', 'Sad', 'B', 'Life Lessons'] |
Biden’s New Multicolored Cabinet | There it is. Resplendent with possibility. The Cabinet members to be entrusted with carrying out the business of the nation. And for the first time ever, it will be made up of people representing the vastness of our population.
The selection process is not complete and we already have in place Hispanic Americans, African Americans, East Asian Americans, Native Americans with more to come. And it is to be a cabinet with a balance of men and women reflecting who we are. A cabinet that implicitly accepts that nature is very democratic in assigning ability even as human prejudice repeatedly attempts to thwart the process.
Joe Biden is staying true to his promise to govern the nation with all of the nation, not just White Americans.
These appointees are all men and women of merit who would not have had a chance to rise had it not been for Biden’s commitment to diversity.
He got elected because he appealed to that diversity, the many sections of the nation that had been bypassed because of the color of their skin.
Now they have a chance to shine and they will.
And what an example to the world.
At a time when nationalist movements rage against the influx of immigrants, Joe Biden is saying, ‘yes, we are a nation of immigrants and we will remain a nation of immigrants.’
Biden is saying it loudly, confident that his choices will deliver for him and for America.
Those talents were always there but owing to a sense of entitlement by the White majority, those talents were blocked, relegated or ignored.
In business, in the sciences, in entrepreneurship and the many other walks of life, diverse Americans as well as immigrants of color from all over the world were blossoming and enriching the nation that welcomed them. But the dominant majority would not let them have access to help guide the nation.
Now the time has come.
If sections of White America are resentful that they have been held back, then they have to examine themselves to see why it is that it happened while their own kind were in power.
And so in other nations across the world now confronting the rise of nationalism who choose to attempt to block the contributions of immigrants, i.e. Britain, Poland, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands.
Joe Biden’s cabinet will be a transformational cabinet, because of his inclusiveness.
And he will not be disappointed. The men and women of diverse origins will not let him down.
They will strive to shine just as Barack Obama did when he was chosen as the first African American head of state.
This multicolored cabinet will have far reaching consequences and so become a formidable catalyst for human powers eager to contribute to this great land.
Oscar Valdes oscarvaldes.net oscarvaldes.medium.com oscar valdes@widehumor | https://medium.com/@oscarvaldes/bidens-new-multicolored-cabinet-461ed93d8434 | [] | 2020-12-19 21:34:56.106000+00:00 | ['Immigrants', 'Joe Biden', 'Diversity', 'Politics'] |
Love letter to the men I love in restaurants | The last few years I’ve been working on a piece I hope to pursue publishing for, on how to move forward in restaurants in the wake of #MeToo. It’s been alternately cathartic, painful, triggering, hopeful, and exhausting to write.
There’s a lot of me in there, a lot of my pain, but fundamentally my hope. Here’s a snippet — very rough, needs a lot of editing — in case you are interested/Wanna give me any feedback or help edit. Content warning for sexual assault obv. Plz don’t share anything without my permission
********************
To me, what’s at the heart of a lot of this stuff — these disparities in understanding between men in restaurants who would never see themselves as perpetrators of sexism or sexual misconduct and the women and others who nonetheless, feel uncomfortable around them — is an issue of intent versus effect. I don’t believe you can know the full story about anything without understanding both.
Yes, some men treat women like objects — your Mario Batali’s, your Harvey Weinstein’s. But personally, I feel that far more men are operating under a misguided assumption, one that makes it impossible for them to perceive what effect they might have on us — the idea that we are all on a level playing field. That men and women come to the same kind of workplace. That the way they experience kitchens, restaurants, and the people within them is the same way everyone else does. And that’s simply not true.
In the US, one in 3 women experience sexual violence in their lifetime. 1 in 3 women experience intimate partner violence. Those statistics go up even more dramatically for people of color and members of the LGBT community. We’re not coming in the workplace as the same people. As writer Katie Anthony puts it, “What threatens me might love you, or at least leave you alone. What smiles at me might scowl at you, or even do you harm.”
A large percentage of us come to this work in bodies that hold unspeakable traumas. All of us as, women, BIPOC folk, TGNC folk, and non-dominant-power-group folk, in bodies that are disproportionately at risk to these traumas, in a world that makes sure we know it. We often don’t react to things the same way as male kitchen workers because we don’t live in the same world as male kitchen workers, even as we pass each other daily in the same spaces.
In his book on trauma and its effects on cognitive function, Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk describes how an early thaw in the Russian Neva River left Pavlov’s famed dogs immobilized as their basement cages flooded with water. In observing the dogs’ behavior after the flood, Pavlov noted that “after exposure to extreme stress, animals find a new internal equilibrium different from the previous organization of their internal housekeeping. The traumatized dogs kept acting as if they were in grave danger long after the waters of the Neva had receded. When [Pavlov] measured their physiology he found both markedly increased and depressed heart rates in response to minor stresses […] as well as full-blown startle reactions in response to slight changes in their environment, like approaching laboratory assistants.”
Many of us who work in restaurants are those dogs.
You could say that’s not your fault, and you might be right. But I don’t want it to have to be your fault. I don’t want to need the power to get you fired or put you in jail in order for you to care about my discomfort.
We are your coworkers, your employees, your bosses. Your teammates who work alongside you to produce something great together. And this is part of what it means for us to come to work.
This is part of the invisible weight we carry, and if we are good at our jobs it means in part that we are good at making room inside us for assault culture, and if you experience us as pleasant to work with it means we have carved that space out to skillfully that you don’t even see it. In her deadly little poem, Yrsa Daley-Ward calls it “A Fine Art”: “Swallowing discomfort down in spades. Holding it tight in your belly. Aging on the inside only. keeping it forever sexy”
I want you to share the weight of that discomfort with me. I want you to be uncomfortable with that being part of our skill set. I don’t want it to be something I do so well. But my not-wanting is not enough. I want you to want to share this weight. Not because I can get you fired. Because I am a person.
This is going on, whether you choose to look at it or not.
But I hope that you will.
**********************
Even during the terrible weeks of fighting with HR after fighting a chef off my body in a world-renowned establishment, throughout the endless meetings and canceled meetings and phone calls and excuses to my day job for why I was missing paid hours, all I kept repeating was: “I just want to do my job.”
The response from HR: “well, if you just focus on that, on doing your job, I think all of this should be fine.”
Ironically, that was probably the most honest exchange of the whole ordeal, if not the most direct. In case you’re confused, I’ll translate.
What I meant was: I don’t come to work with the hope of getting men fired. When I take a job, at no point is the possibility of getting to exert power and vengeance over a man a factor that enters into my consideration. And when I come to work, I’m not looking to do anything other than put in my hours for the job I signed up for, collect a paycheck, and leave.
What she meant was: this is the job you signed up for. This is part of it. It may not be in the description, but it’s definitely in the fine print — the things you are expected to put up with, much like the on call shifts that keep you from making plans but don’t guarantee you will make money, or guests who stay long after closing and keep you from going home at a reasonable hour, or not getting to have the days off you’d ideally like. This is one of the things that may not be great, but isn’t bad enough to make a complaint from someone of your expendable position weigh heavier than a title above yours. What happened wasn’t Bad Enough. The company isn’t liable enough. So if what you want is this job, you’re gonna have to pipe down and take it.
The thing is, she was right.
*****************************
I don’t come to work to get you fired, and I believe you don’t come to work to upset your coworkers (at least not the vast majority of you). Yet here we are. The potential for being uncomfortable or disrespected has been an invisible part of my job description since before I began this work. The potential to face consequences for causing this discomfort is only just beginning to become a part of yours. It’s new. Men aren’t sure how to feel about it. But the shifting power dynamic is definitely making them pay attention.
Where we’re at now is a necessary starting point. I don’t think it can be the end game.
I don’t want to need power over you in order for you to listen. I’m not interested in countering your power over me with mine over you. I don’t want to need it and as long as I do, I don’t see how we can move past this point. I don’t trade your power over me for mine over you and call that freedom.
I just want us to talk. But I need you to be willing to listen.
I need to know that if I write this bridge, you will at least meet me there.
I need to know that you won’t scoff at me, belittle me, look for the ways I might be exaggerating, “play devil’s advocate,” look to take the side of the person who looks more like you, reserve your sympathy or your open mind for only the most gruesome of horror stories.
I need to know you will listen to me first.
I need to know you will believe the mammal that I am. Believe my fear. My discomfort. Believe that they come from somewhere real.
If we’re to move forward we need to move beyond this dance of relating to each other from a place of has power over whom. That’s going to take a huge leap of faith from women and minorities; the hard reality is, I don’t think we can get where we need to without it. But you need to show us it’s worth it. We need to see that you’re ready to listen. I need to know that if I put down my anger and fear, you can put down yours. That you will open your ears and your mind, to the possibility of lives you have never lived. To truths your body hasn’t been made to know.
I can write you this bridge to my pain. I need you to come to meet me here willingly. | https://medium.com/@asoftrevolution/love-letter-to-the-men-i-love-in-restaurants-74b70f018a5b | ['Eva Wright'] | 2020-10-27 03:44:39.311000+00:00 | ['Restaurant', 'Sexual Assault', 'Metoo', 'Gender Equality', 'Opinion'] |
Bad Strategery In Stumptown Threatens Portland, the President, and Us | Bad Strategery In Stumptown Threatens Portland, the President, and Us
There are no good solutions in Portland. There are many moving parts that, should any of them rub together, means a human tragedy.
After the protests and riots. US Courthouse. Portland Oregon. June 2020. Photo by drburtoni via Flickr
A city with a long history of protesting and activism and a president looking to make an example of that same city is making for a combustible mix in downtown Portland:
Night upon night the chant goes up in front of Portland’s federal courthouse: “Whose streets?” The answer depends on the hour of the day. After Donald Trump sent federal agents to take control of a city he said had been abandoned by its mayor to anarchists and mob rule, the protesters still turning out in support of Black Lives Matter can make a legitimate claim that these are, as the chant goes, “our streets”. Department of Homeland Security taskforce agents were again out firing waves of teargas and throwing stun grenades against a hard core of a few hundred demonstrators in the early hours of Wednesday morning. The confrontation centered on the courthouse at the heart of several blocks of downtown Portland that have effectively fallen under the control of the protesters after the city police withdrew. But after pushing back demonstrators, many of them kitted out in helmets and gas masks, the federal agents retreated into their courthouse citadel to mocking jeers and women who were part of the “Wall of Moms” protest linking arms and chanting: “Our streets.” This ritual was played out three times on Wednesday morning but the end result was the same as every other night. The DHS officers dispatched by the president to put down the demonstrations have instead become prisoners of the building they are ostensibly there to defend.
President Trump has made a real mess for himself here. While he can rightly point to the vandalism and often out-of-control behavior of the long-running protests in Portland, Oregon, as skipping along the line of anarchy, declaring he is sending in the feds to fix optics in the west might very well turn into his own version of the Eastern front. To make matters worse, he is also hinting at sending federal agencies to Chicago and other deep blue cities that he senses are law and order problems. While the Windy City has long been the bloody shirt the president’s own party and supporters like to wave at the Black Lives Movement, sending in feds is something many have talked about but few actually thought of doing. The legalities, not just the legal and moral aspects, but the practical ones of what the mission would be other than appeasing a president who doesn’t like what he sees on TV.
But in Portland, we now have data on the ground to go by. Multicam clad forces of DHS’s Customs and Border Patrol and other federal agencies have been on the ground, but not gaining any. Every night they work to disperse the crowd, every night at some point they have to cede the blocks around the Federal Courthouse back to the throngs of mostly protesters, a few rioters, and no doubt several troublemakers taking advantage of it all to wreak havoc. Far from discouraging the protests, the arrival of the feds is fueling the crowds and the media coverage that goes with it.
Which begs the question: now what?
The hard truth for the President is this is a situation that can only get worse if he pushes ahead on his present course. There is no win here. Having bragged about how great a job they were doing, pulling out the federal agencies and ceding federal property the masses would be an unimaginable defeat for a president obsessed with the appearance of strength. The crowds are such that federal authorities present, especially without help from local authorities which grow more hostile to them by the day, have almost no chance of maintaining order without a massive escalation in force used. The president will no doubt threaten that very thing.
But will he pull the trigger on it?
Herein lies the trap for President Donald Trump. A nation that has been gorging itself on riot porn for the better part of four months has never been more aware of policing actions and conduct. It’s all well and good for certain folks to cheer on from their screens police lines dropping the hammer on protests that challenge them, along with tear gas, mace, batons, and other non-lethal means. But these situations are not controllable from afar. Passions run high, and the federal agents being sent out into the mob night after night are going to be growing increasingly tired of the mockery and restraints put upon them. The throng outside will feel increasingly emboldened every day that passes that they are still in the streets. With the president locking himself into a corner where he cannot de-escalate, the calculus for something truly horrible to happen is getting simpler, and more likely, by the minute.
God forbid it happen, but all it takes is one second, one mistake, one multicam-wearing fed to seriously injure, maim, or kill someone in the crowd on video, and all the vandalism in the world won’t excuse it. Imagine the imagery of camouflage feds under the direct orders of the president committing some atrocity overlaid with his own voice vowing to bring law and order to the streets of Portland. He may succeed in putting down the mob, but there far more chances of his actions combining with an emboldened mob and stretched-to-the-limit law enforcement causing another Mary Ann Vecchio moment.
When National Guardsmen shot and killed four and wounded nine more at Kent State on May 4th, 1970, it was the image of a screaming Vecchio kneeling over the body of just-shot Jeffrey Miller that remains one of the indelible images of not just the Vietnam-era but in American history. Vecchio wasn’t even supposed to be there, as a 14-year old runaway kid in the wrong place at the wrong time. That black and white image has just as much power 50 years on as it did when the screaming was still audible. In the two parks adjacent to the Federal Courthouse and other municipal buildings that have become the base camp for protests, rioters, and anarchists alike how many potential Vecchios are there with the waiting media and power of the internet able to magnify a tragic event a thousand fold?
It will only take one, is the frightful, unimaginable answer.
The president has, by putting federal agents clad in multicam against the mob, taken full ownership of the situation. The previous actions of the city and state authorities, or lack thereof, to rein in the crowds before it got to this point will not be remembered. The prayer is some point of de-escalation can be reached. But the mob has been given no reason to back off, and reasoning with this or any other mob never works out. Agents with their backs quite literally against the wall have only force to issue to them, and a mandate to do so by a president who will see a mob mocking his authority and attempts to exert it, a media of all sides doing the same, and an election bearing down. The media catastrophizing with “City Under Siege!!!!” headlines what happens in a few blocks and protests that occur in the same place at the same time so regularly you can set your watch, Twitter notifications, and DVR to them has not helped either.
There are no good solutions to the problem of rioters in the Rose City. There are many moving parts that, should any of them rub together, means a human tragedy. There certainly doesn’t appear to be anyone or anything that is going to magically fix this. The president would do well to remember that of the several memorials at Kent State, none are for the National Guardsman or the authorities that sent them there, failed to control them, and had to live with what happened that day. The mob should take the W of embarrassing a president who talked bigger than he could deliver and not push the issue with federal authorities that do not like such mockery of the law, and especially of their authority.
Pray for Portland, that God will have mercy on them and us, that we don’t lose a piece of our national soul there like we did in Ohio half a century ago. For the president and the mob sure seem disinclined to have it on each other. | https://four4thefire.medium.com/bad-strategery-in-stumptown-threatens-portland-the-president-and-us-5fc5a484051a | ['Andrew Donaldson'] | 2020-07-22 22:45:23.805000+00:00 | ['Protest', 'Politics', 'Blm', 'Portland', 'Trump'] |
Let It All Out | Let It All Out
Photo by Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash
I started this blog in June, only a handful of days after injecting myself with my very first dose of testosterone (T) alone in my childhood bathroom.
I also uploaded the sequel to my initial trans coming out letter, detailing the struggle to get my name legally changed, asking for my pronouns to be respected, working through my first month on T, and beginning the lengthy process of getting top surgery.
I had hardly been out of the trans closet for six months, and I was holed up in my childhood bedroom with nothing but time and gender dysphoria to spare. I spent my pandemic summer blogging my feelings, learning the trans and gender non-conforming lexicon, and trying to figure out who I was and who I wanted to become.
I eventually began submitting my work to Prism & Pen and Gender from the Trenches, two fabulous trans-inclusive publications.
From there, I started meeting other trans and queer Medium writers — reading their work, secretly (or not so secretly) looking up to them, and learning from their ways of bending language in order to tell stories from the heart.
I expanded my thinking and poured my thoughts and emotions out in article after article, positioning my time in the lonely summer of 2020 as an olive branch I could slowly extend to my gender.
Little by little shifting from a newly-on-T, pre-top surgery, baby trans who lacked the words to define themself by anything other than what they were not to a more experienced, more educated, and more open-bookish genderful human. | https://medium.com/prismnpen/let-it-all-out-14a72be9c44a | [] | 2020-12-17 22:29:41.068000+00:00 | ['LGBTQ', 'Transgender', 'Creative Non Fiction', 'Nonbinary', 'Gender'] |
How to Gift Bitcoin for Christmas | How to gift Bitcoin for Christmas? There are a few good rules of thumb for gifting any cryptocurrency (Bitcoin is obviously only one option), starting with one of the most obvious gift-giving hints applicable for ANY holiday gift of Christmas present-make sure the recipient actually WANTS your Bitcoin gift.
If you’re tempted to give cryptocurrency as a gift to someone who is barely computer literate, chances are good you’re wasting your time and money. You may as well buy them a Star Wars: The Mandalorian costume while you’re at it because chances are good it will have the same reaction. If it’s unwanted, your gift is a dud.
But for those who DO want or would be happy to receive cryptocurrency as a gift, here are some practical tips on how to do it.
How To Gift Bitcoin
Gifting any cryptocurrency like Bitcoin requires you to provide the public keys and the private keys to spend the currency. This means you’ll have to provide a wallet of some kind that contains the keys whether digital or physical.
There are varying degrees of risk associated with certain kinds of crypto wallets; you can use a paper wallet to gift bitcoin. This will contain public and private keys and usually some kind of QR code or related mechanism to allow for scanning to a digital wallet later on. The biggest risk factor with paper wallets for digital currency is that if you lose the paper or can’t otherwise remember or access the keys, the currency is basically LOST for good. Some companies turn a fair amount of coin (pun intended) by selling fancy paper wallets you can use to give cryptocurrency as a Christmas gift or for any other holiday present. B itcoinpaperwallet.com is just one of them.
Consider A Hardware Wallet To Gift Bitcoin
A safer way to store cryptocurrency keys is via a hardware wallet which stores the same information on a paper wallet, but digitally. Hardware wallets often come as USB drives or other hardware and the basic risks associated with giving a Hanukkah gift or Kwanzaa gift in the form of cryptocurrency; if you lose the hardware wallet, you have lost your currency unless you have a backup of the keys somewhere.
Physical Coin Gifts
Yes, some companies manufacture “physical” Bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies. The coins themselves are NOT what has the value-there are still public and private keys to deal with in order to buy and sell using your Bitcoin even if it’s gifted to you in physical form. These “coins” are more symbolic in some cases of the value of the Bitcoin keys you get with the physical coin; some companies do manufacture “aspirational” physical Bitcoin gifts with precious or semi-precious metals intended to up the value the artifact itself and not simply have it act as a symbol for the value purchased.
When making purchases of cryptocurrency as a gift, be sure to research the companies you select the way you would with any important purchase; don’t assume all companies offering services to the crypto community are all fair, reputable, and customer-friendly. Do some research into the company you’re reviewing BEFORE you buy. | https://medium.com/@amandamarieblankenship/how-to-gift-bitcoin-for-christmas-3a8990e898f0 | ['Amanda Marie Blankenship'] | 2020-12-22 17:23:34.320000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Cryptocurrency News', 'Crypto', 'Cryptocurrency Investment', 'Bitcoin'] |
Why $ ERRROR? | “ Legend has it that some developers, tired of continuous scams, wanted to create a token to scam others in return, but something went horribly wrong …
During the deployment a big mistake occurred and the token became irreversibly honest and fair. OMG!
It was too late for the evil developers, as they had already renounced the ownership and burned the whole LP, so $ ERRROR was now driven by the community.
For ever and ever. “
$ ERROR was born from the desire for redemption. To date, the BSC has become a lottery for even the most experienced investors, for noobs is actually more like a wishing well.
Scams are becoming the norm and we hear more and more people saying
phrases like “I lost everything, it was scam, what a bad luck”.
They are resigned to this as if everything is normal.
For us it is not at all. It’s not about “bad luck”.
We are born as a token aimed at creating a tokenomic base to be used as the final goal for the creation of an advanced web platform that combines human skills and abilities with the power of an algorithm in order to identify a potential scam with a user friendly interface and in a therefore simple way.
This will be possible by crossing social data, keeping a history of scam-wallet and their interactions and solidly verifying contracts to identify obvious vulnerabilities such as honeypots and directly hard-coded scams.
$ ERRROR works like a classic speculative token but with the intention
of retaining holders for a greater purpose. In addition, an intermediate step could include a public help and sharing group for novice crypto investors and more, which provides the skills of expert figures always with the aim of minimizing scams.
ERRROR Dev team | https://medium.com/@errror/why-error-7d350a2275d8 | [] | 2021-06-08 08:18:13.129000+00:00 | ['Token Economy', 'Bsc Token', 'Binance Smart Chain', 'Bsc', 'Errror'] |
Rosa Parks: Whose protest changed history | who changed the History of the protest and identified herself as a woman committed to civil rights. Not surprisingly, Rosa Parks is the first black woman to take the lead in the civil rights struggle. It revived protests in the 1950s and 1960s that led to the emergence of leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and revived the long struggle for racial equality.
was born in Alabama and was named Rosa Macaulay. Her father was a carpenter and her mother was a teacher in a one-room rural school. When Parks was two years old, her parents separated. Rosa and his younger brother moved to Pine Level Alabama with their mother and grandparents. After Nana’s death, Rosa and her family moved into an aunt’s house in Montgomery.
Rosa enrolled at Montgomery Industrial School, where she was trained in cooking, sewing, basket-making, and embroidery. After graduating from junior high school, she attended Alabama State High School but was repeatedly cut off from caring for her ailing mother and elderly grandmother.
In 1932, Rosa married Raymond Parks, a barber and civil rights activist. He worked as an insurance agent and repaired people’s clothes and received a high school diploma in 1934.
During the economic crisis, job opportunities for African Americans were scarce and there was constant racial abuse. Parks writes in her autobiography, “Whites would accuse you of making a mess even though you were acting like a normal human being.” He had to die every time he faced this kind of discrimination. “
also started the Montgomery Chapter (NAACP) Youth Council from 1943 to 1956 and became secretary of the Montgomery Voters League. While he actively participated in the voter registration. She also worked at a department store.
The reason for fighting for civil rights…
It all started when Rosa Parks was returning home from work one day. When the bus arrived, she got on it. In those days, blacks were allowed to travel in the back of the bus, while the front was reserved for whites. Due to a lack of space at the back, Parks took an empty seat that day, and the bus driver told him to leave. Rosa Parks denied this and this denial proved to be historic.
The driver called the police. He jailed Parks for violating Montgomery’s transportation laws. She was released on 100 bails and the trial is set to begin on Monday, December 5. On the holiday, 7,000 members of the black community gathered to protest Parks’ arrest.
The gathering led to the formation of the Montgomery Improvement Association and the election of 26-year-old MartinLuther King Jr. as its president. King called for a one-day bus boycott, which was later extended because Parks was convicted and fined 10 and fined 4.
He refused to pay and appealed to Montgomery Circuit Court. As a result of these incidents, both Rosa Parks and her husband lost their jobs and were intimidated. Finally, in 1956, the United States District Court ruled that racial discrimination in buses was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court upheld the ruling and ordered an end to the discrimination on Montgomery buses.
protested for 381 days. None of them boarded public transport during that time. Eventually, the allocation of seats in buses ended. Montgomery’s peaceful boycott fueled the African Americans civil rights movement and became a model for nonviolent campaigns throughout South America.
Martin Luther King Jr. also led sit-ins and boycotts elsewhere. She became nationally famous after the Montgomery incident. Rosa Parks and her husband moved to Detroit in 1957 when they could not find work in Montgomery. There, Parks sewed clothes and took an active part in the movement.
In Detroit, she worked as a staff assistant for the movement, which she continued until she retired. Rosa Parks was honored in various ways, including the “Non-Violent Peace Prize” with Martin Luther King Jr. In fact, Rosa Parks is a great woman who, with her steadfastness and determination, made a significant contribution to American history. | https://medium.com/@ysheedi/rosa-parks-whose-protest-changed-history-d75e4a353096 | ['Sheedi Yaqoob'] | 2020-12-12 16:06:15.260000+00:00 | ['Black People', 'History', 'Civil Rights', 'USA', 'Black Women'] |
I Miss All the Strangers in Coffee Shops | I Miss All the Strangers in Coffee Shops
Photo by ababaka at Envato Elements
March 7th was my husband’s birthday and what we now call our “quarantine anniversary”. On the 7th of every month since, we joke we’ve hit another one. We didn’t know it at the time but March 7th would be the last time we’d split a pitcher of sangria and tapas at our favorite restaurant before the phrase “social distancing” entered our vocabulary.
We started self-isolating for all but essential things pretty early on — we were fortunate enough to be able to work from home and we had no reason to keep going out if there was any risk. We quickly fell into a new routine and lost so many pieces of our old habits. I don’t know when we’ll be able to return to some semblance of normal. The last time we went to a restaurant was his birthday.
I’m clinging to a mental list of last times.
The last time I spoke to a classmate before we left for spring break not knowing we wouldn’t see each other again. The last time I Googled a place in Spain to add to a trip that never happened. The last time I went to a coffee shop, explored an art museum, saw each of my friends, had dinner with my family, talked to a coworker in person, or made small talk with a waitress.
It feels like all those memories are slipping away, like details of a dream vanish upon waking when you try to hold onto them. I’ll remember one detail and then wonder how many other pieces I’m forgetting. After months of losing your routine, details of your day-to-day life that used to flicker out of your thoughts in seconds start to feel precious. Small moments become dimmer like water lanterns disappearing into the horizon.
I’m nostalgic for all the little things I’ve done a million times and never stopped to cherish.
Holding the door for strangers in coffee shops and exchanging a smile with someone as you sit down at a table next to them. Meeting my friend at our favorite Irish pub and talking for hours over Guinness and Smithwick’s. Passing a friend in the hallway and catching up before we rushed off to class. Making small talk with the girl who works at the coffee shop down the street about the weather, how her dog is doing, and what fresh baked item she’d recommend this morning. | https://psiloveyou.xyz/i-miss-all-the-strangers-in-coffee-shops-503fb4616c03 | ['Nadine Clay'] | 2020-07-20 13:46:01.162000+00:00 | ['Self', 'Writing', 'Relationships', 'Love', 'Covid Diaries'] |
WPP Energy GmbH has signed a binding MOU to purchase a 90% stake in BioPower | WPP Energy GmbH has signed a binding MOU to purchase a 90% stake in BioPower
WPP TOKEN is poised to be accepted as a payment method to purchase BioPower Stock WPP ENERGY Apr 12, 2019·3 min read
Geneva Switzerland, April 12, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — WPP Energy GmbH, a private Swiss Company (“WPP”) announced today that its Board of Directors has approved, and that the Company has entered into a Binding Memorandum Of Understanding with BioPower Operations Corporation, a Nevada corporation, to acquire a 90% interest in the BioPower, OTCMKTS Symbol “BOPO” . Pursuant to the MOU the parties agreed to negotiate and enter into a definitive agreement to set the terms of the Transaction in accordance with the MOU.
WPP is interested in licensing to BioPower its technologies, for the purpose of BioPower becoming the manufacturer of the technology units, distributor and providing the necessary Operations and Maintenance as required.
WPP is also interested in licensing its Blockchain technology and deploying WPP TOKEN to restart the Entrade Exchanges, first introduced at Exelon (NYSE: EXC) in 1997 by Robert Kohn, President of WPP’s Green Energy Rebate Program. WPP’s Blockchain technology will significantly enhance the capabilities of each exchange as it comes online.
The new Exchange(s) will use business know-how of on-line and off-line commercial trade desks and strategies that were developed at Entrade. The exchanges will license to governments and government agencies and major corporations to sell products and services to business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets across the globe.
WPP intends for WPP Token to be accepted by these exchanges in the form of credit against purchases.
WPP also intends for the BioPower subsidiary to launch World Small Business for businesses with less than 100 employees across the Globe and Professionals. WPP Token will be accepted by this exchange for products and services used every day in small businesses such as office supplies, computer supplies, shipping, etc.
ABOUT WPP
Headquartered in Geneva Switzerland, WPP is seeking to be a repository for disruptive green energy technologies, aiming to make electricity available at lower costs and to reduce landfill waste by up to 97%.
WPP intends to build, own, license, operate and maintain these advanced technologies and enters into strategic joint venture partnerships for the purpose of accelerating the deployment of important environmentally friendly technologies for the benefit of the entire world.
WPP intends to transmit its energy and biofuel production, and that of its partners, into WPP’s upcoming Global Green Energy Futures Contract Trading Platform using Blockchain Technology.
For more information on WPP Energy please visit https://wppenergy.com
For more information about WPP TOKEN please visit: https://wppenergy.io
For more information on BioPower please visit https://biopowercorp.com
Previous PR’s by WPP
WPP TOKENOMICS OVERVIEW
https://medium.com/@wppcoin/wpp-tokenomics-overview-7a2debc6459c | https://medium.com/@wppcoin/wpp-energy-gmbh-has-signed-a-binding-mou-for-wpp-to-purchase-a-90-stake-in-biopower-1d7a8f84185e | ['Wpp Energy'] | 2019-04-12 17:00:56.823000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Energy', 'Green Energy', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Stock Market'] |
Huge Blast in Nashville, US on Christmas Day | Huge Blast in Nashville, US on Christmas Day
created by author
The Metro Nashville Police Department tweeted that the blast happened at 6:30 a.m. on Friday after which the fire department and other emergency services along with the rural and federal powers reached there. Flames and black smoke were seen at the scene.
On Christmas morning, an explosion in downtown Nashville, the US, broke the glass windows of nearby buildings and caused other damage, and injured three people. The administration believes that this explosion was done intentionally. The FBI is investigating the case. Police spokesman Don Aaron said — that the blast occurred at half-past six on Friday morning and it seems that someone deliberately carried out the blast.
Fires and black smog were seen at the view. By the way, it is crowded with tourists and there are restaurants and many other retail shops. Due to this blast, a shock was felt in the neighboring buildings, and a booming sound was detected.
Local resident Buck Mc Coy said, — ‘It was like a bomb. He was like that. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee tweeted that the province will provide the necessary resources to find out what happened and who is responsible for it.
Nashville explosion,nashville news, explosion downtown nashville
, nashville bombing,tennessee, nashville explosion today | https://medium.com/@statusbook/huge-blast-in-nashville-us-on-christmas-day-f9baaa0a315e | ['Status Book'] | 2020-12-26 11:23:37.949000+00:00 | ['Trends', 'Nashville', 'Christmas', 'News', 'Breaking News'] |
The MiniDisc: the failure of a forgotten format | Sony first launched the MZ-1 MiniDisc player/recorder in 1992 and ‘MTV Unplugged: Mariah Carey’ became the first MiniDisc to be released in the US.
Sony were confident that this technology would transform the way we listen to music. At the time cassettes were flimsy and prone to snapping. You couldn’t yet record on CDs and they were easily scratched and skipping was an issue when used on-the-go in an early Discman. The MiniDisc should have been a great alternative; it offered the digital sound quality of a CD and the recordability of a cassette. Unlike a cassette, once made, a minidisc recording could be divided, combined, deleted and named.
Unfortunately this new technology came at a cost. A cost that at £463 / $750 proved off putting for most and completely unattainable for teenagers. The other issue was the fact that there were only a small number of pre-recorded albums available on MiniDisc as relatively few record labels embraced the format.
Sony made the mistake of assuming that the benefits of using their ‘superior’ product would be perceived as important enough by potential users to change their existing behaviour and overcome the costly price tag.
Changing the format of your music is a big deal, especially if you already have a large music collection. Unsurprisingly Sony only sold 50,000 units in its first year. Cassettes continued to be used for recording and the Walkman and Discman for portability.
In 1996 further competition came in the form of the newly affordable Recordable Compact Disc (CD-R). The CD-R was being used by professionals from as early as 1991 but the technology was far too expensive for the consumer market. In 1994 the cost of a blank CD-R was around $12 and Sony wrongly assumed that it would take around a decade for them to become affordable. This happened much quicker than they expected and by the late 90s blank CD-Rs sold for under $1.
I was gifted my Sharp MiniDisc player in 1999; just after Sony decided to relaunch this technology, confidently declaring 1998 ‘The Year of the MiniDisc’. Sony backed this with a thirty million dollar marketing campaign and lower priced systems, the cheapest costing £154 / $250. They also licensed MiniDisc technology to other manufacturers, leading to JVC, Panasonic, Pioneer and Sharp all producing their own MiniDisc players.
The Minidisc was relatively popular in Japan and the United Kingdom during the 1990s, but did not enjoy comparable sales in other world markets. It seems that MiniDisc did have a loyal customer base or ‘niche cult following’ of mostly musicians and audio enthusiasts and it appears there is still some interest, judging by the amounts some old MiniDisc players sell for on eBay. | https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/the-minidisc-the-failure-of-a-gorgotten-format-fdb691f6987f | ['Katie Richmond'] | 2020-12-17 06:31:40.854000+00:00 | ['Minidisc', 'Failure', 'Design', 'Assumptions', 'Music'] |
Get to Know Some Important Facts About GMAT Online Exam | The COVID-19 pandemic impacted worldwide education systems and caused the almost complete closure of schools, universities and colleges. If you are preparing for the GMAT with a dream of a successful MBA personality, then don’t lose your hope. The GMAT online exam is there to fulfil your dream.
This exam is a remote proctored, and online exam pattern developed to provide support to schools and candidates who are facing difficulties due to the rise of the Covid-19 pandemic all over the globe. The exam shows score reports online. The candidates who would like to apply in b-schools can submit their forms through this online platform before deadlines.
What is the basic GMAT online exam structure?
To appear in the GMAT online exam, one needs to pay a certain amount of registration fees that allows you to send unlimited scores. If you want, you can appear for a free GMAT exam as well, but it entirely depends on your preference. Candidates are allowed to reschedule their exams any time before the exam’s commencement or the test day. However, the candidates have to bear a certain amount of cancellation fees within 24 hours of the scheduled exam.
This GMAT online platform offers the most convenient medium to appear for graduate management admission. The basic structure of this exam includes Verbal, quantitative, and integrated reasoning sections. Each section contains the same number of questions as well as time. Let’s have a look at the structure of the GMAT exam for graduate management admission councils.
31 quant/62 minutes
12IR/30 minutes
36 Verbal/65 minutes
The candidates should keep in mind that this exam pattern will remain the same for the GMAT online exam, including verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, and integrated reasoning. The time allotment for the online exam is 3 hours. Anyone can use this time into two sections — 2 hours and 30 minutes for the exam, the rest 30 minutes to check the online proctored system. All the candidates appear for management admissions council GMAC will get five minutes of optional break before the starting of the integrated reasoning test.
If you want to know about the GMAT score, then have a look at the GMAT Score Calculator — How Does It Calculate the Score?
Advantage of the GMAT Online Exam
The best part of this online exam is that you can do all these things from the comfort of your home. You don’t need to go outside or to interact with any outsiders to give this exam. All you need is a trusted internet connection, and you can easily appear for the GMAT online exam and make yourself eligible for the graduate management admissions council. The test-takers will get the flexibility or the option to use an online whiteboard for completing any kind of scratch work or take notes while the examination is going on.
What Should Be A Good GMAT Percentile for MBA Or Higher Studies?
Things to know about scoring
This online exam will use a particular scoring algorithm and display the scores in respect of each section. When the candidates receive their official scoring report, they can check out the scores divided into two sections — one if the individual section score, and the other is the exam’s total score. All the candidates, please note that they can view their percentiles on the score report. The scores acquired in GMAT online exam will remain valid for five years.
Facts to know about sending scores
The GMAT online exam has introduced a new kind of flexibility for the candidates that allow them to send their scores to the programs. The candidates will get the flexibility to view their official scores online, including GMAT online fees, and then they can choose to send their scores to the respective programs.
Please take a note that here all scores are complimentary. If anyone wishes to send his/her scores to any program, it is absolutely free of cost. The official scores will be sent to the candidates via their email id within seven days of the exam’s commencement. The official scores will become available to schools within 24 hours a day or 7 days a week based on the candidate’s request.
Know the availability of the GMAT online exam
The GMAT online test dates will be notified to the candidates via their Gmail ids. The GMAT online exam dates are made available for the candidates during the Covid-19 pandemic. In order to increase the appointment times and flexibility available for 24 hours a day or 7 days, candidates get permission to schedule their examination appointment up to 24 hours. The appointment dates are made available from April 20, 2020, to February 2021. The test-takers will continuously monitor the conditions and future appointment dates.
This GMAT online exam has been made available in most locations except Cuba, Iran, and North Korea due to some regulatory and data privacy protocols. The candidates must remember that the GMAT online exam is taken only in English. The exam can be given both from Windows PC and Mac computers. The candidates must know about some system requirements before appearing for the exam.
8 BEST GMAT PREP BOOKS TO FOLLOW FOR GMAT QUESTIONS AND STRATEGIES
How to reschedule or cancel the exam?
Candidates can easily reschedule or cancel their appointment for an exam at any time before the commencement of the exam by logging into the mba.com account.
Frequently asked questions
Who will be eligible for the at-home GMAT online exam?
This GMAT online exam is available in almost all locations except Mainland China, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, and Slovenia. If a candidate fails to appear for the exam physically due to the COVID-19 pandemic is eligible to give GMAT online exam at home. However, the test takers of Cuba, Mainland China, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Slovenia are working closely with the government protocols to find an alternative solution.
For more, click here 👉👉👉https://bit.ly/3oGtt1R | https://medium.com/dev-genius/get-to-know-some-important-facts-about-gmat-online-exam-c53a190c36ca | ['Online Tutors Helpline'] | 2020-12-09 21:19:51.050000+00:00 | ['Careers', 'Students', 'Education', 'Mba', 'Mba Admissions'] |
The Science of Social Distancing | It’s Much More Than Keeping Our Distance, Covid-19 might have a long-term effect on the way we think about Personal Space
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
Origins
Since the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak, many guidelines changed. Masks were initially advised against, and then for. Gloves were regarded as an essential accessory by many at first, and later even considered as causing more harm than gain by some experts. Stay at home orders changed to carefully go out. Besides washing our hands and practicing hygiene (always good advice), the only major guideline that survived these past months is social distancing. Seemingly, a simple enough request, but it is a lot more complex than it might seem.
According to WHO guides a distance of at least 1 meter (3 feet) is required between one person and the other. The logic goes that if you are too close, you can breathe in the droplets originated by an infected person coughing, sneezing, or speaking. These droplets might contain the Covid-19 virus.
The 3 feet rule was first recommended in the 1930s, based on a study done by William Wells from the Harvard School of Public Health. Wells researched tuberculosis and found that infected droplets tend to land within 3 feet of the place they originated in. Since then, the same findings were observed with the flu, SARS, and MERS. And so the 3-feet rule was brought back time and time again, with every similar disease breaking. Most recently, Covid-19. | https://medium.com/myselfies/the-science-of-social-distancing-defa59fd95e | ['Elad Simchayoff'] | 2020-07-31 14:45:13.503000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Socialdistancing', 'Science', 'Human Behavior', 'Coronavirus'] |
Muck Rack and I Just Tusseled in Bed | Long pull on the cigarette.
Blows out smoke from mouth and nose — just like in the movies.
Ahhhh. That was good. Was it good for you? You seemed to be the ‘Little Engine That Could’ there a few times but in the end? Oh yeah. You definitely came through for me.
I said all of that to say this. I am now on Muck Rack. If there’s a specific article/story of mine you’re looking for, this will be the easiest way to find it. That is until, eh hem, Medium makes more changes.
Now I can finally get out of bed and actually adult some today! Thanks to Roz Warren for the idea. | https://medium.com/illumination/muck-rack-and-i-just-tusseled-in-bed-e4ab864630dc | ['Terry L. Cooper'] | 2020-12-07 14:39:43.301000+00:00 | ['Journalism', 'Publishers', 'Writer', 'Portfolio', 'Authors'] |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.