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Visual Analysis for Decomposing Multimodal Humor in Public Speaking | What is DeHumor?
Despite being a critical communication skill, grasping humor is challenging — successful use of humor requires a mixture of both engaging content build-up and an appropriate vocal delivery (e.g., pause). Prior studies on computational humor emphasize the textual and audio features immediately next to the punchline, yet overlooking longer-term context setup. Moreover, the theories are usually too abstract for understanding each concrete humor snippet.
To fill in the gap, we develop DeHumor, a visual analytical system for analyzing humorous behaviors in public speaking. To intuitively reveal the building blocks of each concrete example, DeHumor decomposes each humorous video into multimodal features and provides inline annotations of them on the video script. In particular, to better capture the build-ups, we introduce content repetition as a complement to features introduced in theories of computational humor and visualize them in a context linking graph. To help users locate the punchlines that have the desired features to learn, we summarize the content (with keywords) and humor feature statistics on an augmented time matrix.
Humor feature analysis
Language features and glyphs. We compute and encode three types of semantic features at the sentence level: incongruity, sentiment, and phonetics.
Incongruity. Contrasting incongruous concepts is classic for achieving the comic effect. The semantic incongruity of a sentence can be modeled by the repetition and disconnection, or the relative semantic similarities between word pairs.
Examples of incongruity: (A) Disconnection and (B) Intra-sentence repetition.
Sentiment. Expressing strong sentiment using polarized expressions (how emotionally positive and negative) and subjective statements (how personal) enables a speaker to empathize with the audience.
An example of sentiment expression. ``stupid’’ in the example has a negative polarity, and is therefore displayed with a downside vertical offset. The subjectivity is shown with brackets around a word.
Phonetics. The most common techniques for phonetics include (1) alliteration chains, which denote multiple words that begin with the same phones, and (2) rhyme chains, which include words ending with the same syllables.
Examples of phonetic styles. A: Alliteration. B: Rhyme.
Audio features and glyphs. We extract and encode the following four representative audio features at the sentence level, including speed, pause (), volume (“”: louder, “”: softer), and pitch (), which reveal the speaker’s vocal delivery style.
Examples of vocal delivery styles. A: Speed variations. B: A combination of pause, volume and speed variations.
Context-level inter-sentence repetition. To reveal the relationship among build-ups of a punchline, we extract and link similar concepts in the punchline context. A speaker would more frequently repeat useful concepts to help prepare the audience for the upcoming punchline. In the example below, the core takeaway of the punchline is that Germany does not have fantastic food. The message becomes clear because of several repetitions in preceding lines. First, the speaker emphasizes his/her focus on the two countries by repeating (“the Italian community”, “Their people”, “Italy”) and (“Germany”) in several places. Second, in Lines #3 and #5, the different modifiers “a”” and “no” before the repeated “stigma for (being) evil” highlights the opposite reputations of Germany and Italy after WWII, and therefore builds a natural comparison between the two. The comparison is then carried on to the punchline, implying the German food is the opposite of Italian’s.
Repetition visualization. In a build up of humor, similar concepts are linked with links and different groups of concepts are highlighted with different colors.
Augmented time matrix. Besides sentence- and context-level, we design an augmented time matrix that provides an overview of distribution of humor occurrences and multimodal features of speech content and vocal delivery at the speech level.
The barcode chart of the time matrix shows the humor distribution. Besides, we organize the humor features, including the word usage, vocal delivery, and key concepts, around the matrix to summarize their distribution for each punchline and across different punchlines.
The design of augmented time matrix.
DeHumor features
Check out the following video for a quick look at DeHumor’s features.
Introduction to humor in public speaking (0:00–0:14)
Designs of DeHumor (0:14–1:29)
Augmented time matrix (0:36–1:02)
Context linking graph (1:02–1:29)
A case study (1:29–3:33)
Conclusion
In this work, we presented DeHumor, a visual analytics system for exploring and analyzing humorous snippets in public speaking. The system features multi-level exploration of multimodal humor features with an augmented time matrix and context linking graphs.
In future work, we can improve the system usability by supporting humor query and humor style comparison. We plan to integrate more contextual features (e.g., riddles) and features from other modalities (e.g., facial expressions) into the system. We can also apply deep learning models to improve feature extraction accuracy. Furthermore, we will conduct a long-term study with more experts to further evaluate the system usability and its effectiveness for humor analysis. | https://medium.com/@wangxbzb/visual-analysis-for-decomposing-multimodal-humor-in-public-speaking-4a555652b53c | ['Xingbo Wang'] | 2021-12-26 02:07:35.478000+00:00 | ['Public Speaking', 'Linguistic Analysis', 'Humor', 'Multimodality', 'Visualization'] |
2020 Made Me a 19 Year Old Failure | 2020 has been an incredibly tough year for all, from the ‘C-word’ to an election that divided people everywhere. This year has led people from all over the world to ask many questions about themselves and what they believe in. I am a 19-year-old, law student and this year has made me question my identity and who I am, I wanted to write this as a somewhat diary and to see whether people can relate.
Photo by Darren Halstead on Unsplash
So why have I called myself a failure?
In the span of one year, I dropped out a degree, quit my job and blew up personal relationships, and I unapologetically will blame this all on 2020. It goes without saying that that was a joke but as J Cole says behind every joke there is truth. Life of a student through the pandemic is widely known to be pretty tough, but for me, I didn’t struggle with the missing out on the social side, of the sudden turn to online teaching as much as the motivation for this work. I started as an accounting and finance student as for a long time I saw it as a ‘safe’ degree, it provided me with accreditations needed to be an accountant whilst still giving me the flexibility to branch into other areas of finance. I never disliked finance, but I had this passion for law which I told myself if it was a true passion I can switch after I get my degree, but in the madness of 2020, I said… Fuck it. Simply woke up one day and said I’m just going to take this jump and drop out my current course to do law, bear in mind I have terrible language skills and simply put am a slow reader. But 2020 taught me life is short don’t waste times doing things you’re not passionate about switch course, so I did. I am one semester deep in Law and it is HARD. I am not achieving what I once was and now I have this debate in my head is doing something you’re passionate about and achieving worse better than achieving good grades in something I wasn’t passionate about. This change in my performance has led me to this feeling of being a failure.
Photo by Siora Photography on Unsplash
Relationships are hard and 2020 was a hard year to start, without delving into the details of my relationships in the interest of privacy this year has to be unequivocally the hardest year to get a relationship to work. Dating in two lockdowns was an incredibly unique experience where the lack of physically dating and more just talking time forced relationships to accelerate so very much. By this I mean the emotional connections grew at a rate I’ve never experienced and was something extremely odd to reflect on. So why do I call myself a failure for ruined relationships, for me it comes down too emotional immaturity and as much I want to blame 2020 for making me so bored but to try seeking out a girlfriend, the issues after are mine.
I’ve spoken to friends about considering myself a failure and they all say the same thing; “you’re young”, “don’t be so hard on yourself” and when I think about it they’re right I am young only 19 hardly experienced anything in the grand scheme of things. But today in 2020, there is this pressure on all people to just have their lives together you hear stories of 19-year-old millionaires from tik tok, to 25-year olds with a real estate portfolio’s whilst having a wife and kids. All this just does make a normal average 19-year-old like me, unfortunately, feel like a failure
2021 is grind season my year :) | https://medium.com/@aumsharda/2020-made-me-a-19-year-old-failure-3f07ca8eefa6 | ['Aum Sharda'] | 2020-12-15 01:35:52.471000+00:00 | ['Failure', 'Life', 'Mental Health', 'Students', 'Growth'] |
How to hack you’re way back in Kubernetes | How to hack you’re way back in Kubernetes NEwa Follow Mar 11 · 7 min read
Have you try turning it off and on again ?
Kubernetes is great, Kubernetes is powerful, Kubernetes is the best way to get your containerized workload scheduled and frankly I really love it, but imagine to get this magnificent tool and not being able to do anything with it because you lost the key that get you in like the newly bought house of your dream, painful isn’t it ? Enter my scary world and learn how I manage to get in by the basement.
Right, here’s the context, I’m an infra guy with nearly 10 years of experience in network and system, this past 3 years I’ve made some move to cloud native technology and had the opportunity to get hands on some project with Kubernetes, recently I needed to make RBAC rules to limit velero’s service account to backup system namespaces.
In order to get you all at the same level, a service account is an account that will allow an application deployed inside your Kubernetes cluster to communicate with the Kubernetes api.
In my case Velero’s service account is using cluster-admin role which if your not so familiar with Kubernetes is a role with privileges to do anything on your cluster.
You remember this song from the Beastie Boys, yes this one with the tum tum tum at the beginning (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5rRZdiu1UE), well after installing and removing the cluster role binding from the service account, I could hear the last sentence of the song infinitely. I did it Like every one last of us at least once in their IT life, I delete the cluster-admin role.
At first I didn’t realized it, when I did try to create a pod and get an error message I thought I was using a viewer user, but when I did changed back to an admin user and get the same error message when trying to list the pod running, let’s say I cried a little.
I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick some Kubernetes clusters
I have two options now, recreate the cluster from scratch and maybe lose some work that I know was not backed up and be ashamed to tell my colleague it’s my fault, or try to get my way back in it.
Honestly I’m a lazy guy, the kind that will eat a 4 days old bread not to go to the bakery, I may then consider a lot the option to simply recreate the cluster. But I did not know what was running on this cluster, and moreover our trainee did work on it and maybe it was an evaluation test for him, I don’t want to be responsible for his failure here.
OK then, Google is my friend, most of the time, so let’s try to get some Stack Overflow good fella who did get this kind of use case. I can’t directly ask the question on the net and wait since my colleagues could need to get access to this cluster, let’s hope someone has already did what did it on purpose or by accident like me.
Let’s say that trying to get some information about cluster role from Kubernetes is pretty easy, but for an obscure reason people who delete their cluster-admin role are not so numerous, maybe I am only human after all and failure is always an option, maybe I should reconsider all my choice in life.
Hell no, I worked with Kubernetes for at least 3 years now and know how gears interacts under the hood,so why not recover it by myself.
First thing first, Kubernetes’s resources are stored in ETCD, so lets check if we can get anything from it.
In my misery I have some luck, this cluster is deployed through PKS on an on premise VMware platform, accessing ETCD from a service provider managed Kubernetes cluster would certainly be impossible.
Anyway, I connect myself on the master node, and check if there is an etcdctl binary on it, and there is one, alleluia ! Now I need to find the ETCD certificates, a simple ps command will get me the info:
Now that I now where to find the ETCD certificate I could try to get the Kubernetes resources list, what I want to know is, am I able to recreate the role from the ETCD directly. From my previous experience with ETCD I did use the version 2 of the API, but the version 3 as way more options and since I need to redo the CKA this year let’s try it and learn to use it, one stone two birds if you know what I mean.
From what I read from the help and some example on the net, to get the list of resources from ETCD is pretty simple:
Whoohoo we got something ! Now let’s be more precise and select a role, at this point all I want is to know if I can get the full content of a role as an example to recreate the one I deleted:
And once again I got what I wanted.
We have the capability to make the worlds first bionic role
Now the fun part, try to recreate the cluster-admin role via etcdtcl.
I have two options before me, create the cluster-admin role from what I got from the admin role or connect myself on another cluster and get the ETCD key/value from it.
You know what I did, yes you know, I told you that I’m lazy, no need to scratch my head over that.
Looking at the JSON structure from the role it appears that there is an information about an UID , this could be a problem, but it’s been nearly two hours since I break the access to the cluster, times ticking.
Ok I’m a little bit stressed out now, but reading Kubernetes documentation about UID, they are system generated and unique to track object through cluster lifetime.
Since my old cluster-admin role is not there anymore, it could be harmless to push a new one without the same UID.
It’s time now to test if the creation of the resource directly in the ETCD is working by simply put the key and value with this command:
Command return said OK, logs seems fine, every block of the Kubernetes cluster runs OK or at least it looks like it, with my change I reboot the node, you know the drill : when in doubt, reboot.
The node is rebooted so lets try to connect back to my cluster and check if everything is OK.
And … it failed.
Houston, we have a problem
But the worst part is that now I can’t even communicate with the API server from the Kubernetes with kubectl.
I was so sure of myself I didn’t create a backup of the ETCD before doing that, I am feeling the heat going on, flames surrounding me, I drink my coffee straight and get back to work.
Back to the master node to check the log from the API server, and the problem was quick to find in the log.
The value for the cluster-admin resource is not right and I know why, i did forget that my double quotes from my echo command won’t be kept when send to the etcdctl, getting back the put command and putting simple quote at start and end of the echo content would do the trick:
Now the API server is running fine, no more error logs.
I just need to check if everything is OK with a simple kubectl command:
Eye of the tiger baby
Hell yeah ! I’ve did it, it was not without some pain but the result is here, the cluster is safe and sound, and I know now that I could recover this kind of disaster without too much problem.
Well OK nothing to be pretty proud about, and if backup where done consistently, I could have sold the problem in five minutes, but you know small victories are victories after all.
As I said it before, I could do this trick because I was able to access the master nodes, against a managed Kubernetes it would be more catastrophic.
I hope this trick could help you when needed, share this blog if you found it useful or just if you liked the side story. | https://medium.com/data-essential/how-to-hack-youre-way-back-in-k8s-622d134f0a8d | [] | 2021-03-11 13:55:40.662000+00:00 | ['Help', 'Failure', 'Recovery', 'Security', 'Kubernetes'] |
Why Green Swans Are Key To Any Post-COVID-19 Recovery | John Elkington
Why it’s time to move from Responsibility to Resilience and Regeneration.
Once again, people are talking about “Black Swans”, which typically take us exponentially to places we don’t want to go. But there is also growing interest in the potential for exponentially positive “Green Swans”. This short series of articles is based on extracts from my latest book, just published by Fast Company Press. Sub-titled “The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism”, Green Swans (now available in hardback, ebook and Kindle formats) outlines key principles that must now guide our recovery from the COVID-19 discontinuity.
Welcome to the Exponential Twenties
The Green Swan is a symbol of radically better times to come-although the diagram suggests that we must go down before we have any chance of coming up. An old order is coming apart at the seams, a new one struggling to be born. And such times of disruptive change upend market and political pecking orders, creating political shock waves that can last for decades-even generations.
As a decade, meanwhile, the 2020s do not yet seem to have sticky branding like the “Noughties” or the “Teens,” but they will, and that branding will likely reflect a period of exponential change. The Exponential Twenties? To paraphrase Dickens, this will be the worst of times for those clinging to the old order, yet potentially the best of times for those embracing and driving the new. Buckle your safety belt.
This book, my twentieth, has had an unusually long genesis. It has morphed and mutated considerably along the way. You can expect an often personal account of a learning journey that has taken me around the world and, at times, deep into the future. It’s an investigation, an exploration, not a definitive, unified field theory. It is intended as the beginning of a conversation, not the end.
Like the fictional Forrest Gump, played by Tom Hanks in a film of the same name featuring a slow-witted man who was witness to-and sometimes unwittingly had a hand in-major cultural events, I have been involved in many initiatives that have shaped the change agenda. In citing some of those experiences, I aim not to out-Gump Gump but to demonstrate that my conclusions and recommendations are based on real-world interactions, not just desk research. That said, I have also been profoundly influenced by what I have read.
The impact of the highly improbable
Most obviously here, I have been inspired by the work of Lebanese-American author, risk analyst, and former options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In his 2007 book, The Black Swan, Taleb provides a series of timely lessons about the “impact of the highly improbable,” as his subtitle put it. His timing was impeccable, as the global economy descended that same year into a financial meltdown few had seen coming.
Early on in his book, Taleb noted that he was sticking his neck out, in claiming that “against many of our habits of thought [. . .] our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable (improbable according to our current knowledge)-and all the while we spend our time engaged in small talk, focusing on the known, and the repeated.”
What follows riffs off Taleb’s metaphor of the Black Swan. He argues that Black Swans are unpredicted-and generally unpredictable. And on those grounds he has insisted that COVID-19 is not a Black Swan. It was predicted-but we decided to ignore those predictions. But it shares with true Black Swans the characteristic that afterwards reality will have shifted on its axis.
I will also riff off the language of the Chinese communist party. Just as the world’s most populous nation vaunts “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” we will explore aspects of capitalism (in post 2), democracy (post 3), and sustainability (post 4) with either Black or Green Swan characteristics-and sometimes a combination of both.
People also now talk of “Grey Swans,” which are predictable and may have been predicted, but which when ignored for too long erupt in ways that can rock the world on its heels. One of the most obvious is the trend of ageing in modern societies.
There are many benefits from our living longer lives, but it has been estimated that by 2020 the number of people over sixty-five in the world would outnumber, for the first time in history, children aged five and under. Again, there are many things to be said in favour of experience, but an ageing world will bring many systemic challenges that we have only just begun to think through.
Enter the Green Swan
This growing colour spectrum of Swans is where the riffing comes in. To the reasonably well-defined categories of Black and Grey Swans, I want to add two other emergent concepts: “Green Swans,” which are systemic solutions to global challenges, solutions that tap into positive exponentials, and “Ugly Ducklings,” defined as embryonic innovations and trajectories that can take us in various directions-good, bad, or ugly. Here’s the definition we use:
A Green Swan is a profound market shift, generally catalysed by some combination of Black or Grey Swan challenges and changing paradigms, values, mind-sets, politics, policies, technologies, business models, and other key factors. A Green Swan delivers exponential progress in the form of economic, social, and environmental wealth creation. At worst, it achieves this outcome in two dimensions while holding the third steady. There may be a period of adjustment where one or more dimensions underperform, but the aim is an integrated breakthrough in all three dimensions.
As Green Swans went to press last year, I “soft launched” the Green Swan agenda at a major business summit in Copenhagen, hosted by Dansk Industri (Confederation of Danish Industry)-attended by the country’s new prime minister, Mette Frederiksen; various committed royals from Denmark and Sweden; and 1,300 CEOs and business leaders.
As I took the stage, I noted that this was highly appropriate, given that one of Denmark’s most famous sons had been Hans Christian Andersen, author of The Ugly Duckling. But what truly blew me away that day was the way that the Danish government, the country’s leading industry federation, and the wider business community are now working together to drive a wildly ambitious green transformation.
A Green Swan economy in the making? Certainly, their timing looks exquisite. Successful businesses and economies invest into a downturn, aiming to emerge on the other side ahead of their competitors. And now we are in the mother of all downturns following the global COVID-19 outbreak, governments will be testing that theory to its limits.
Welcome to the U-Bend
Source: Volans, via Green Swans.
My assumption in researching Green Swans has been that the world is headed into some sort of historic U-bend, well beyond a single, normal recession, where the established macroeconomic and political order goes down the tubes, and new ones surface.
I have been using variants of the diagram above for some years now, one key point being that as we head deeper towards the bottom of the U-bend, we enter a period of maximum confusion and uncertainty. Historically, too, this is often the point at which major wars occur.
In the process, established ideologies and mind-sets are coming under intense pressure-among them capitalism, democracy, and sustainability (a concept I helped launch decades back). I explore each of these in separate articles. | https://medium.com/volans/why-green-swans-are-key-to-any-post-covid-19-recovery-2c790ce98a80 | [] | 2020-08-27 08:58:00.167000+00:00 | ['Green Swan', 'Capitalism', 'Sustainable Development', 'Sustainable Business', 'Climate Change'] |
“The Moon" | The day keeps passing
The night comes out
I just wait for you
To come out,
With your thousand friends(stars)
In the beautiful sky,
Where i can see you
always by my side,
Look at our destiny
which keep us apart,
Both are unable to meet
just can see each other from far.
-by kamal | https://medium.com/@iamkamal9667/the-moon-36bc8df58cf3 | ['Kamal Parihar'] | 2020-12-12 17:53:54.977000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Feelings', 'Moon', 'Poem', 'Emotions'] |
Is it Important, How We Earn Money? | Is it Important, How We Earn Money? – Essay
Earning money has always been a subject of talk and the various methods on how one could make money has been discussed many a times through various platforms and media’s. Yet the opportunity of making money is so vast, that most of the people do not really understand their potential or the potential of chances in making money.
Definitely, earning money is important. You need money to sustain yourself, yet you should never have the urge to have more than what is required. Be content in what you have and with a little bit of careful analysis and careful spending, one could surely earn enough and more money.One could earn money in many ways. There are plenty of opportunities for someone who really wants to make money in the legal manner, rather than opting for the illegal mannerisms. We will discuss a few ways in which you could make money and save for yourself.
The traditional method of making money or the common 9-5 office jobs. Here the income is steady and there are chances that while climbing the professional ladder, the income also gets increased. Even though it is said a 9-5 job, most of the time you leave home early and get back late. Hours spent with your loved ones get minimal here.
Another method is in investing. Investments are in various methods and depend on how one looks at it. Some people opt for the share markets, where you buy shares of different organizations and sell them based on the market fluctuation. It could be profitable but at times even huge looses are faced. While some others opt for the very traditional methods like investing in metals such as gold or silver. Again another class of people go for mutual funds, bonds, insurance plans and various such options for long terms investments.
Another option which is now widely catching up is through the Online market. Online jobs is high in demand and you get paid for what you do. A flexible kind of job and more and more people are turning to this kind of jobs. Another platform that people make money is through their interests being publicized such as blogs. Blogging is possible any anyone and gradually you could generate revenue from it.What ever be the mode that you opt, the main agenda should be profit at the end. So spending unwisely or more than what you make is never a wise choice and you should keep a close eye on the current markets and financial status to have a better understanding to place yourself in the best suitable position. Face boldly any situation that comes up in life and then, learn from mistakes (if any), on how to earn your income and how to save it for a better future.
If you want to learn more about making money online you can visit :
https://www.scribd.com/document/504644309/50-Ways-to-Make-Money-Online | https://medium.com/@mohammed72015/is-it-important-how-we-earn-money-5b32508f36f3 | ['Mohammed Ali'] | 2021-04-25 03:08:32.492000+00:00 | ['Make Money', 'Marketing', 'Affiliate Marketing', 'Make Money Online', 'Earn Money Online'] |
Friend Software Labs is moving development to Github | The FriendUP project is maturing, and in order to increase the scope of our development activity and include open source developers from all over the world, we are moving our own development activity to Github. This allows everyone to stay up-to-date with our daily grind, and it will pull our emerging community closer together.
For the past four and a half years, we have operated using two repositories. Our daily activities were committed into our private repository, while every stable release was deposited to Github with several months inbetween.
This strategy was useful while nurturing the project in the formative years of the project — creating a track for the first stable versions of the platform. Now that the base of Friend has been manifested, we feel ready to include others at every level.
Friend is finally maturing into a fully fledged cloud platform for real users.
With Friend, we aim to produce an Internet Operating System for users and developers all over the world, following in the footsteps of Linux and BSD operating systems seen from a humanitarian perspective, with a strong focus on user experience, ease of use and network computing. This can only work if we build a healthy, world-wide community of developers and creatives; which is why we are making this pivotal change in development strategy.
At the moment, Friend is tuned for B2B (business to business) and B2G (business to government) markets — which ought to be understood as a kind of low hanging fruit strategy seen from a marketing perspective. B2C (business to consumer) is much harder, and will take more time, but we will get there together.
Contributor agreement
We have decided to utilize a contributor agreement as the instrument to on-board developers into the Friend project. The reason for doing so is that we want to prevent fragmentation while we are building the fundamental first versions of Friend.
Our company will provide professional support and financing into the project, which means that we can ensure that the platform has ear-marked activity and project management that can steer the technology in the direction of real world users. In our assessment, open source projects take many years to get to a user friendly state, and we want to accelerate this by being active participants with our funds, employed staff and partners.
Our chosen contributor agreement enables Friend Software Labs to benefit from the activity in the open source project, while you, the developer, retain your rights as a contributor, under which license you are contributing.
Vision
The world needs an alternative to Chrome OS, the Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, AWS and others. Big Tech is growing old, and users are looking for a privacy oriented platform where they can work, collaborate, create, compute and publish. Friend is such a platform, and it is being built for and by its users. Given enough love, passion and commitment, we will energize the movement to decentralize information technology and infrastructure, it being for Blockchain, decentralized storage, compute, communication and even internet freedom itself.
Please check out our website: https://friendup.cloud/
Our Github project page: https://github.com/friendupcloud/friendup/ | https://medium.com/friendupcloud/friend-software-labs-is-moving-development-to-github-286b57e650d1 | ['Hogne Titlestad', 'Co-Ceo', 'Founder', 'Friend Software'] | 2018-11-14 16:08:55.214000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Cloud Computing', 'Operating Systems', 'Open Source', 'Decentralization'] |
Where to Scale Your Workloads | Where to Scale Your Workloads
Season of Scale
“Season of Scale” is a blog and video series to help enterprises and developers build scale and resilience into your design patterns. In this series we plan on walking you through some patterns and practices for creating apps that are resilient and scalable, two essential goals of many modern architecture exercises.
In Season 1, we’re covering Infrastructure Automation and High Availability:
In this article I’ll walk you through the compute options to scale your workloads.
Check out the video
Review
In the last article we learned about immutable infrastructure. It’s a key operational best practice for creating scalable environments that don’t put you at risk of configuration drift. If you are rolling out changes to your operating system, application, etc., you want to make sure your changes are tracked, rolled out through a CICD pipeline, and will be applied with certainty to fresh, immutable instances. Now Critter Junction is facing a new dilemma: deciding where to run their new game app on Google Cloud. While each application has its own infrastructure and scaling requirements, GCP offers a multitude of compute options. But how do you balance performance, flexibility, cost efficiency, and language support?
The Layout App
With more users than ever, and with their new immutable infrastructure, Critter Junction was in a great place to launch a new app. They wanted to launch a companion game that used the same database, but let you build and share house layouts using your inventory, codenamed The Layout App.
With a new app launch, scale and unpredictability is always a big challenge. You may never know exactly how many players will show up on launch day. They needed to find a solution on Google Cloud that could automatically handle any amount of load. The team already knew they wanted the layout app to scale independently from their web servers, but they had lots of options.
One solution is to run the layout app on a separate set of VMs. Using Google’s global load balancer, you can send traffic to backend managed instance groups (MIGs). These can automatically scale multiple, identical machines based on metrics like CPU utilization, so they could easily handle more traffic across regions.
Containerization
But it turned out the Layout App didn’t need to run with access to the operating system. And the team wanted their apps to be lightweight and portable across environments, so they decided to containerize it. Containers are basically isolated packages for just running an application. It’s a great way to build a cloud-native app, but you still need to serve it.
Two choices for serving containers would be managed instance groups running container-optimized OS, or Google Kubernetes Engine. Both solutions automatically scale up as demand increases, adding new machines as needed and removing them when demand is low. This can increase availability at peak times while keeping your costs manageable.
Either would work to run their app and meet their unpredictable scaling needs, but the team wanted further abstraction from the infrastructure. They decided they didn’t want up front provisioning and wanted the ability to scale down to zero resources.
While you must have a minimum of 1 instance for MIGs, you can specify a minimum of zero nodes for GKE (an idle node pool can scale down completely). But, at least one node must always be available in the cluster to run system Pods.
Serverless
It was time for the team to look at serverless technology. These technologies almost completely abstract away the infrastructure and orchestration. Unlike the previous options, these handle automatic resource scaling with virtually no configuration or server provisioning. Serverless keys in on running your application, so you can focus on your code. Google Cloud has three main options for running serverless.
Cloud Functions
First up, Cloud Functions is great for snippets of code and small, single-purpose applications. Functions scale up by creating new instances as demand rises, and each function handles a single request. You can scale down to zero and limit the maximum number of instances for full flexibility. It’s perfect for gluing together different cloud services like calling an API based on a schedule or sending notifications — but it was too simple for running the layout app.
App Engine
So they looked to App Engine, which offers the ability to run containers and custom web applications in a serverless way, automatically creating and shutting down instances as traffic fluctuates. You can configure the settings for automatic scaling based on your app’s needs. For example, scaling can be based on CPU utilization, throughput utilization, or maximum concurrent requests.
This could run their containerized app without a problem, but the team wanted to make sure they could run their app in multiple clouds down the road and didn’t want to re-architect.
Cloud Run
Finally, there’s Cloud Run, which is built on a project called Knative. Knative is a Kubernetes-based platform to build, deploy, and manage modern serverless workloads. With Cloud Run, Kubernetes management is taken care of behind the scenes. Each deployment is automatically scaled to the number of instances needed to handle all incoming requests, and it can scale from zero to your specified max instances. Because the app team expected traffic spikes, Cloud Run allowed them to keep a number of idle instances to minimize cold starts. If they wanted to later port to multiple clouds, they would be able to use the same application by leveraging Knative.
Given their needs for container portability, fast scaling, and minimal infrastructure overhead, the team decided on Cloud Run and was able to launch faster than they thought possible! While each compute option I covered has autoscaling capabilities built in, you can decide which of these solutions works best for the requirements of your app, giving you the power to choose and scale.
Stay tuned for our next piece on autoscaling web services. And remember, always be architecting.
Next steps and references: | https://medium.com/google-cloud/where-to-scale-your-workloads-6420150bf825 | ['Stephanie Wong'] | 2020-09-01 23:24:18.737000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Serverless', 'Scalability', 'Google Cloud Platform', 'Cloud Computing'] |
Stop Idolizing Politicians at Stanford | By Berber Jin
There should be few higher honors than politics — to be elected by others to serve as their representative, and to devote one’s life to that duty. But politicians have changed from lifelong public servants to short-termists who seek speaking fees, advisory roles, or celebrity stardom after leaving office.
At Stanford, the bar is even lower. All it takes to be idolized is to have served somewhere, in some position, and to preach progressivism and have a cuddly relationship with Beyonce.
A few weeks ago, I found myself waiting anxiously for one of SIG’s biggest events of the year, “An Evening with Barbara Boxer,” with the recently retired Senator for California. I was excited to hear Boxer’s perspectives on her career in public service, the Democratic Party’s 2016 election failure, and expectations for Trump’s first presidential term.
Boxer had the chance to engage an intelligent audience on issues that genuinely matter. Instead, we heard a motley assortment of meaningless liberal punchlines. Boxer criticized Trump’s fitness to office with a voice bordering on a low moan. She had essentially no words for Republican politicians’ proposals beyond crass comments about their demeanour. On rebuilding the smouldering political wreck that is the DNC, her most valuable contribution was to trot out the tired platitude of building “diverse coalitions”.
Though the event did have brighter moments, it was largely devoid of relevant, or interesting, political analysis. Not that anyone seemed to care. About halfway through the talk, the girl in front of me stopped even pretending to listen to Boxer, and instead grabbed a Snapchat of the Senator with the thought-provoking caption, “omg my hero.” Meanwhile, the group of students behind me spent the time before the event cooing over a picture one of them took with Cory Booker.
Of course, Boxer faced almost no tough questions about herself, her policy record, or her party’s future. She repeated a blatant mistruth — that the Republican healthcare bill will mean twenty million Americans lose health insurance — and was greeted with eager nods. When a libertarian dared speak up about the IRS’s enforcement powers, Boxer obnoxiously dismissed his question to the smugness of the audience. And, worst of all, when Boxer told us that she somehow just knew that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction back in 2003, my surrounding peers expressed shock, delight, and amazement in equal proportion at the Senator’s mystical intuition instead of realizing the sheer preposterousness of her statement.
“An Evening with Barbara Boxer” undoubtedly saw glimpses of meaningful political commentary — I found her rise through finance and politics as a woman to be inspiring, and she gave occasional nuanced responses to difficult questions such as campaign finance reform. However, more often than not, the event felt like a game of meaningless finger-snapping. It failed to engage its participants in a level of political conversation suited to a US Senator representing the country’s most populous state. Instead, Boxer’s juvenile game of virtue-signalling — playing upon our presupposed disdain for Trump, our support for feminism, and even the Stanford-Cal rivalry — left the crowd with yet another progressive persona to admire, but no new political knowledge.
It would be unfair to entirely blame SIG or Boxer for this phenomenon, though. Essentially all ‘politics’ at Stanford has become insidious idolization. Our mailing lists are stuffed full of ludicrous Biden memes. Our laptops have Obama 2012 and “I’m Still With Her” stickers on the back, as if Hillary will rise from the political graveyard or Trump will quake in his boots at these symbols of ‘resistance’. “The Notorious RBG” is worshipped for her progressivism, and her condemnation of Colin Kaepernick is conveniently ignored as a result.
Our infatuation with Michelle Obama’s fashion and affability has led to calls for her to run for president, even though all we know about her political viewpoints is that she isn’t Donald Trump and wants schoolchildren to exercise. Idolizing Kamala Harris would be noble were it not for the fact that I have yet to see a single fan of hers cite a policy she has implemented — instead, her support on the Farm seems wholly due to her minority identity and occasional #NoBanNoWall tweets.
This essentialist idolization is embarrassing and infantile. It strangles meaningful political debate and analysis, turning politics into a meme war and dragging the noble efforts of the Stanford Political Union and Political Journal further into the gutter. Worse still, it creates dangerous political apathy when the addictive personalities and dramas of the political world fade away — turning us away from policy just when we need to be informed more than ever.
Nowhere is political idolization more apparent than in President Obama. Obama’s close relationship with his children and wife often make him the subject of “dad jokes,” and his close relationship with Biden has turned into a never-ending series of memes. Light-hearted Buzzfeed videos of Obama’s antics, coupled with a ten-second snippet from a political speech, have elevated Obama to God-like status in liberal California.
What has resulted from the Obama idolization is the development of the affective heuristic, where we allow our emotions and attachment to Obama being a good person to cloud our judgment of his policies. Despite a witty sense of humour and picture-perfect family, Obama also expanded our drone strike program in the Middle East, violating international law and killing hundreds of innocent civilians. He maintained the least transparent administration in presidential history, and sat by while the worst humanitarian crisis of our time unfolded in Syria. He engaged in illegal spying on our closest allies, and continued to provide support to regimes with oppressive human rights records like Saudi Arabia. The Human Rights Watch viewed Obama’s term unfavorably — perhaps something of a shock to those enamored with Obama’s inspiring speeches on America being welcoming to all. We see Obama as a lover of humanity in his selective defense of illegal immigrants and Syrian refugees, while filtering out information that contradicts this angelic image.
Meanwhile, our projection of Trump as an ugly and pompous brat with a history of abusing women and exploiting low-income workers makes it impossible to assess political reality. When Trump enacted policies that aligned with this caricature — his immigration ban, or his proposals to build a wall — Stanford valiantly fought back with hundreds of tweets.
But Trump has also called for paid maternity leave; he intervened effectively in Syria where, by contrast, Obama stayed silent and trusted the Russians (who, unsurprisingly, lied); and he has announced plans for massive infrastructure investment and tax code reform. All of these measures are popular across the political spectrum. Yet essentially nobody talks about or commends them on the Farm, because they jar so strongly with the image of Trump that our psyche wills us to hold.
The idolization of politicians threatens to destroy meaningful, policy-based discussion. But even worse, once we attach ourselves to an idol — and not a politician, with actual policies — it is far too easy to get bored. Trump’s travel ban is unconstitutional and his wall has been blocked by Congress. The angry liberals who protested so strongly in January are gone, replaced by a wall of apathy even as his policies — which include cuts to social welfare programs and a pivot away from human rights — grow more realistic, and thus more important to discuss.
The fetishization of politicians goes far beyond Obama and Trump. The idolatry behind the “Notorious RBG” prevents us from seeing the dangerous politicization of her (deliberately apolitical) role. It existed with Bernie Sanders, and continues to exist today with Warren, Clinton, and Harris. As we focus more on looks and affability, we become less informed and rational in our understanding of complex political situations.
The idolatry we see today is a modern reincarnation of the Founders’ greatest fear: rule by the ignorant masses. Politicians have two jobs: to listen to what people want, then do it. Respect them as enactors of the popular will, but don’t worship them as pop art. | https://medium.com/stanfordreview/stop-idolizing-politicians-at-stanford-fda17bdbbecc | [] | 2017-05-31 05:31:02.377000+00:00 | ['Hillary Clinton'] |
My New Writing Buddy, Jeremy | My New Writing Buddy, Jeremy
He faithfully stands on my desk and smiles at me, while nurturing a few happy little succulents on his back. Lisa LeBlanc Jun 17·2 min read
I have two collies that are also good writing buddies, but they are much higher maintenance. They need to be walked. They get bored. They want to play at the most inopportune times. They drool on the windows and bark at everyone passing by. When they aren’t passed out under my desk, that is.
Princess the rough collie, in her favorite nap spot under my desk.
Jeremy does none of these things. He does however, cheer me up. His cheeky little grin makes me smile. If he can grow succulents, I can surely grow an idea into a new blog post. He reminds me how he got his name to begin with.
Jeremy came to me in a dream.
I have some wild, crazy vivid dreams, and my dream starring Jeremy was no different.
In this dream, my husband Steve and I went grocery shopping at Superstore. Steve was playing on the shopping cart — balancing one foot on the bottom bar while pushing off with the other foot, riding the cart around the parking lot. I told him he should stop before he broke the big window in the front of the store. Which, of course, he did. He shattered the giant window and created mass panic for the customers unlucky enough to be checking out at that precise moment.
The security guard appeared and took us upstairs to the store manager’s office. Steve went into the manager’s office while Jeremy and I stayed in the waiting room. Jeremy did what bored Alpacas do — he ate all the office plants. Now I was in trouble too.
We received a life-time ban from Superstore, and now no one can shop with their Alpacas, ever again. And it’s all Steve’s fault.
My new Jeremy is very well behaved. I may even sneak him into Superstore next time I go, because that’s the kind of passive aggressive person I am.
Go ahead — tell me I’m not allowed to bring my Alpaca shopping. | https://medium.com/words-on-the-wing/my-new-writing-buddy-jeremy-cf5467359c5a | ['Lisa Leblanc'] | 2021-06-17 11:32:46.886000+00:00 | ['Dreams', 'Alpacas', 'Siretona Creative', 'Writing Life', 'Writers Life'] |
Smart Ways People Spend Money to Save Money | Frugal people have a reputation for not spending money. At its core, this reputation harbors much truth, but it’s not always the case. Being frugal doesn’t mean pinching as many pennies as possible, it’s also a longterm strategy to save money. If you see a frugal person making a big purchase, you should be sure they’ve given it much thought.
If you’ve earned money once, you can likely earn it again. This also gives you perspective, and it makes blowing money a lot less fun. Fortunately, some expenses that hurt in the moment prevent more money from coming out of your pocket in the future.
It’s possible to be both frugal and rational. This means you’ll have to let go of some money. It also means you’ll see a return in the future. After a while you’ll be glad you made certain purchases. These money saving habits aren’t just reserved for frugal people, they’re the things smart people do.
1. They Buy Insurance
Not every state requires car insurance, and not every product is worthy of an insurance plan. When it comes to repairs on certain products, the risk of damage is greater than the risk of not having insurance. Smart people invest in insurance for big products like their smartphone or computer, because the replacement or repair could be far more expensive. If the insurance is never used, $200 might be lost. If you shatter your laptop’s screen, it might cost $600 for one incident.
They’d never even think about forgoing car insurance. The thought of major car repairs is enough to cause nightmares, but the thought of dealing with another person’s car after an accident is even worse. Car insurance is one of those things you hope to never use. If you use it once, you’ll be glad you had it.
2. They Buy Quality Where It Matters
Saving money requires you to know your own habits. If you wear articles of clothing a few times, there’s no need to spend big. A frugal person will invest in quality if it means replacing an item fewer times. A shirt for work is worth spending a few extra dollars if it means less maintenance and more wears without replacement.
In 2010 I bought a pair of Ray Ban sunglasses. The frame is strong, and after 10 years they still hold up. They’re wayfarers, so the style is pretty timeless even if they’re not the trendiest right now. I could have gone through 20 $15 pairs of sunglasses at this point: forgetting them at the beach or leaving them on restaurant tables. Instead, I take care of my Ray Bans, keep them protected and I’ve never had to replace them.
3. They Buy in Bulk.
When most people make a purchase, they look at the price tag. Frugal people look at the cost per unit to find the best deal. They know not to spend $3.99 on a four pack of toilet paper when a twelve pack costs $8.99. Essential items like that will get used and never go bad, so the cost per sheet is more important than the single transaction.
Shopping in bulk is a rich person’s sport. Dollar stores make a killing off by selling single units for higher mark-ups. Even though the price tag is low, $1.49 for one roll of toilet paper means the store gets a higher percentage of the profit. Frugal people would rather make fewer transactions and allow the store to get a lower profit.
4. They Address Problems Quickly
Some products are designed to be replaced, but others are designed to get repaired. Money savers know not to let problems linger because a small issue can easily transform into a bigger one. If you can prevent a bigger repair, or even a replacement, it’s best to bite the bullet and fix problems quickly.
Imagine never getting an oil change when your car gives you a warning. The oil change costs about $34.99 if you’re not doing it yourself. Replacing your engine costs a lot more. Other products experience issues that can expand, whether it’s a problem with your washing machine or your health. Taking care of it quickly will save money in the long run.
5. They Get Things Done Right
Some people think they can solve small problems by themselves. With the power of the internet and YouTube, you can get a tutorial for almost anything. That doesn’t make you an expert and soon you’ll be causing more damage than repair. Smart spenders stick to what they’re good at and leave the rest to the pros.
Perhaps you have a leaky pipe under the sink. You can try to fix it by yourself, but you might not address the real issue. You get some tools, but the leak just becomes worse. Now, you need to get a plumber to do more repair work and you wasted your own time and money.
6. They Invest in Education and Motivation
If you’re looking to increase your employment potential, you might invest in eduction. Even if it’s just a single course or a certificate, having increased credentials can help you earn a promotion or raise. Perhaps your newly acquired skills can translate to a secondary source of income or new career prospects.
Even books can motivate people and guide the learning process. These resources are an investment in personal development, and if it leads to more money then there’s more to save. The costs of a degree looks extreme up front, but the long term benefits can exceed the initial investment.
7. They Invest in Their Future
While saving money technically isn’t spending it, there are certain contributions that will allow you to save money in the future. These often mean you won’t have limitless access to money in the present, but eventually you’ll see a benefit. I recently spoke about the importance of having a Health Savings Account. This fund allows for pre-tax contributions and never taxes you when using the funds for medical expenses.
For some people, this could mean investing in stocks, for others it may be a Roth IRA. The financially savvy know not to pay taxes when they don’t have to. If they’re not spending their money, they want it to grow. It might not be accessible this very moment, but in the future you’ll be happy with the savings and growth.
Spend to Save
The smartest people view money as a longterm game. Certain moves mean you have less in your pocket right now, but will put you in a great position years down the road. It can be hard to let go of money without instant gratification, but it’s worth it when the rewards come.
Next time you’re given a choice, think of the ways your future will be impacted. Holding onto $500 is nice, but if you can lose it in a single incident it might not be worthwhile. Rather, think of the ways that money can turn into more money. It might mean taking a loss in the moment, but sometimes you need to spend money to save it. | https://beausoleil.medium.com/smart-ways-people-spend-money-to-save-money-6477a5e1a719 | ['Michael Beausoleil'] | 2020-08-17 04:14:56.586000+00:00 | ['Financial Planning', 'Saving', 'Adulting', 'Money', 'Finance'] |
4 Reasons an Agreement Benefits Student House-Shares | Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
Why it’s a good idea to make an agreement for you and your housemates
Moving out of halls and into private accommodation is a right of passage for many students and a great part of the experience of University life. One of the most important elements of this is that you are moving in with your friends made in the first year and the prospect of renting a place together is truly exciting. So with all this positivity, why should making an agreement be a consideration? In this article we will talk about some of the reasons why it might be a good idea for you and your housemates.
1. Great friends doesn’t always equal great to live with
One of the reasons you may consider making an agreement with your friends is to make sure that after you have lived with one another you will remain exactly that — as friends, just because they are great to be around doesn’t mean they will be a considerate house mate, and vice versa, you might not be as much of a delight to live with as you may wish to be. Perhaps playing music loudly after certain times or partying late into the night might be great in the first year, but this can be disruptive to your course performance if your housemates are not being considerate of your needs. Consider setting some mutual ground rules to put you all at ease.
2. Assumption is the cause of all bad things
Have you ever gone for a meal with someone expecting to split the bill, only to find out they have left their wallet at home, or assumed it was your treat? Not a great situation to be in, but easy to occur if you’re not all on the same page. What may be obvious to your house mates, may not be obvious for you. For example assuming its ok to bring guests back during exam time, or using a shisha in the living room so long as it’s only once a month. Talking about these things ahead of time and recording them really helps to make a happy household.
3. Everyone has different standards
Have you ever washed the dishes, only to find someone else re-washing them after you’ve finished, or maybe you are the re-washer? This is because we all have different definitions of done. Maybe you’re a fastidious cleaner, or you just rinse repeat, but when you share living spaces then having a level playing field of what everyone agrees to as a standard helps to lower the mercury and reduce friction in a house share.
4. Human memory isn’t as reliable as you might think
Unless you are a savant, the ability to have perfect recall is sadly limited, and generally not to be expected with the people you live with. Memories change over time, details become fuzzy and sometimes our unconscious biases help to mould those memories. Maybe before the move you all agree to split the bills equally, then once moving in the person in the smallest room starts to think they’ve got a bum deal and wants to be (rightly or wrongly) compensated by not paying as much. These conversations are much easier to have when you’ve all taken the time to discuss and record the agreements.
Now when it comes to making agreements, these don’t need to be overly complex or require you to make friends with a law student to ensure pro-bono contract drafting. They just need to be transparent and engaged in with all those involved. A great place to start could be opening up the conversation with your future housemates and jotting down a few ideas, and if you so desire, we at wegree have just the tool to get you started all for free, so if you want, give us a try.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Barnes
I’m a product manager, engineer and devils advocate on most topics. When I’m not doing my day job, I’m thinking of new products, hiking or listening to surrealist audio books.
We hope you have enjoyed this article. As always, your feedback and suggestions are welcome. | https://medium.com/@davidwbarnes/4-reasons-an-agreement-benefits-student-house-shares-33fce04688bb | ['David W Barnes'] | 2020-12-23 08:28:38.153000+00:00 | ['Living Together', 'Contracts', 'Students', 'Life Advice'] |
Guide to the Types of Collaboration with Brands | By Pritika Matkar
Image credit: Hobo Video
It is a well-established fact that influencer marketing works for a brand. These social media celebrities do have the power to ‘influence’ people and drive the audience to purchase a product or a service.
About 63% of marketers these days work with at least ten influencers on every campaign. They rely highly on these influencers, mainly micro influencers to sell their products.
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
It is the efforts that an influencer puts in making a connection with the audience and creating personalized and well-researched, authentic content that drives any campaign to success. It is worth mentioning that these influencers have the power to make or break any marketing campaign just through their posts. This is where it becomes essential that the brands work in developing a good relationship with the influencers, and vice versa. | https://medium.com/@hobovideo/guide-to-the-types-of-collaboration-with-brands-e5da747a7ed1 | [] | 2021-02-20 09:58:02.298000+00:00 | ['Collaboration', 'Instagram Influencers', 'Influencer Marketing', 'Marketing', 'Brand Strategy'] |
How Pakistan can diversify, digitally | A year ago, Farzana had no idea that an online business would so drastically change her life. She was drowning in debt with no way of repaying, worrying about her family’s financial future. Reaching for a lifeline, she joined GharPar, a women-founded, women-led social enterprise that connects beauticians with clients seeking at-home salon services through an Uber-like digital platform.
In just one year, her situation has completely changed. “Before joining GharPar, our family conditions were extremely dire, we never knew where our next meal would come from,” she says. “After being on the platform as a beautician for one year my whole life has changed. I now make around PKR 60,000 (about $450) per month. Through my savings, I have been able to buy a motorcycle for my family and currently, I am saving money for my son’s education.”
Farzana is not alone in her success. Since launching in 2016, GharPar has attracted over 100 beauticians to its platform — and, as part of the company’s social mission, nearly all come from marginalized and minority backgrounds.
Taking home 70 percent of the price of every GharPar request, beauticians’ incomes have soared. So while the average monthly salary of a beautician in a brick-and-mortar salon is estimated to be PKR 11,000 (US$82), according to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, a GharPar beautician makes PKR 60,000 per month on average. Top earners can double that. This jump in income has allowed these women to climb out of poverty, becoming household breadwinners and strong female role models in their families and communities.
“Before joining GharPar, our family conditions were extremely dire, we never knew where our next meal would come from.”
Pakistan’s emerging tech sectors
GharPar is just one of many startups that are taking advantage of Pakistan’s rising comparative advantage in technology. And a ‘tech boom’ could help to reenergize and diversify the country’s economy.
Pakistan’s primary exports — textiles, leather, and rice — have stagnated over the last decade. Rising oil prices, relatively high minimum wages in key sectors and a lack of innovation have eroded the country’s competitiveness in the global value chains that move these products around the world.
Yet, ICT services exports have been rising steadily since 2007. Many multinational IT firms, including Cisco, S&P Global, and Mentor Graphics — have already opened offices across the country, relying on Pakistani talent to deliver IT services to global markets. The industry is targeting $10 billion in exports by 2025, which would be 400% growth from 2017.
As technology continues to reshape global industries, supporting diversification towards IT and IT-enabled services is one way the Government of Pakistan can reinvigorate growth today while also helping build the global brand of Pakistan’s tech sector for the future. That means focusing reforms and incentive policies in three main areas of activity: (1) software-as-service exports, (2) virtual freelancing (e-lancing), and (3) e-commerce.
Software-as-service exports
Pakistan’s software-as-service exporters have been able to leverage Pakistan’s increasingly large pool of young software engineers and computer science graduates to offer services to global clientele at a competitive quality-to-price ratio. Industry associations report Pakistan now has more than 300,000 English-speaking IT and IT-enabled service professionals. With nearly one quarter (23.3 percent) of its population between the age of 10–19, there is potential to develop a pipeline of skilled young workers and entrepreneurs to help this sector grow.
Virtual Freelancing
Many of those who have not found jobs with Pakistan’s larger tech companies have become e-lancers in the global ‘gig economy’. Today, an estimated 150,000 Pakistanis offer their services on online e-lancing platforms, according to the Punjab Information Technology Board. This has helped make Pakistan the 3rdmost popular country for virtually outsourcing tasks, according to the Oxford Internet Institute’s Online Labor Index, trailing only India and Bangladesh and ahead of the United States and the Philippines.
E-Commerce
As the world’s 6th most populous country, Pakistan is also an attractive market for global e-commerce and a petri dish for young Pakistani tech entrepreneurs. Many of these entrepreneurs are trying to find marketable solutions to local problems — like GharPar — focusing on social impact and helping to drive social change.
Given all of this momentum and potential, how can the Government of Pakistan best support its rising tech sector? At the World Bank Group, we see a few ways to start:
Strengthen the regulatory framework around e-commerce. This will help to safeguard data and to build trust between buyers and sellers. The government is already working on this — in particular, on consumer protection rights and on privacy/data protections. These are critical building blocks that will help to protect domestic consumers and to alleviate the concerns of potential foreign direct investors.
This will help to safeguard data and to build trust between buyers and sellers. The government is already working on this — in particular, on consumer protection rights and on privacy/data protections. These are critical building blocks that will help to protect domestic consumers and to alleviate the concerns of potential foreign direct investors. Reduce the costs of regulatory compliance for start-ups and small businesses through consistent, streamlined, and transparent administrative procedures. Addressing the country’s complex tax system is already on the new government’s agenda, and this is a start. Granting small start-ups a temporary waiver on paying the Employee’s Old-Age Benefit could be another option. To help new businesses grow and to encourage them to formalize, the government needs to make it easier for them to interface with regulators.
through consistent, streamlined, and transparent administrative procedures. Addressing the country’s complex tax system is already on the new government’s agenda, and this is a start. Granting small start-ups a temporary waiver on paying the Employee’s Old-Age Benefit could be another option. To help new businesses grow and to encourage them to formalize, the government needs to make it easier for them to interface with regulators. Strengthen oversight and regulatory mechanisms to foster cross-border electronic transactions. The State Bank of Pakistan is currently working on amending foreign exchange policies — a major constraint on the tech sector. Establishing dispute resolution mechanisms for e-commerce and formulating licensing requirements for establishing and operating e-commerce businesses will help.
The State Bank of Pakistan is currently working on amending foreign exchange policies — a major constraint on the tech sector. Establishing dispute resolution mechanisms for e-commerce and formulating licensing requirements for establishing and operating e-commerce businesses will help. Focus on skills development — but not just technical skills and not only at the tertiary level. For Pakistan to continue to build its brand as a country known for excellence in digital technology and skills, the workforce of the future will need to be creative, agile, and resilient — skills that should be fostered at all stages of the education system. And fostered for all parties. Pakistan will need more women workers and entrepreneurs. The government should continue to level the playing field for women in education and in the workforce, to ensure sustainable, inclusive growth.
Read more World Bank blogs. | https://medium.com/world-of-opportunity/how-pakistan-can-diversify-digitally-ecd452603b85 | ['World Bank'] | 2018-11-08 15:42:40.868000+00:00 | ['Innovation', 'Startup', 'Gender', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Ict'] |
Transforming Google Translate | Given the global popularity of Google Translate, we knew we had to prepare for change aversion. There are a lot of great articles written about the topic that provide strategies for minimizing the change aversion response. But as it is often the case with projects of this scale, there are some lessons that can only be learned through hindsight. Here are my top takeaways from redesigning the Google Translate website.
1. Your users are your crystal ball
If you’ve read about change aversion, you’ve likely come across a chart like this:
It shows the different possible outcomes after a change is introduced, but it doesn’t help you predict the outcomes for your change. This lack of clarity and control frustrated me initially. But with each iterative experiment, I realized our users were naturally guiding us through their actions and feedback toward the best possible outcome.
During our experimentation stage, Google Translate website users were submitting feedback submissions ranging from laudative to castigating. It wasn’t always an easy read, but my team and I spent hours reading as many of them as we could and responded by filing bugs or tweaking the design. For example, by reading through the comments we realized we had inadvertently changed the tab order for some elements, causing productivity headaches for our everyday users, so we changed it back. Similarly, we tightened up the information density of the page after we heard loudly that people preferred seeing more information on the screen.
It’s tempting to obsess over having the perfect design before showing it to real users. But it’s better to focus on designing a phased experimentation plan that allows you to collect and respond to user feedback at scale. As long as you have a mechanism for doing that, your users will help you figure it out.
2. Soliciting preference in usability studies can be a trap
Usability testing your new designs can help you catch its biggest issues and give you a broad assessment for your design direction. Typically these studies are done with low sample sizes– a dozen participants or fewer. While it’s tempting to ask usability study participants which design they prefer, the results are not statistically reliable and can mislead you into a false sense of security.
We did several rounds of qualitative user research studies for Google Translate’s new website, discovering and correcting usability issues early on. We also solicited participants’ design preferences, who overwhelmingly preferred the new version. But we were mindful not to draw strong conclusions from the preference data, and it was just as well — the actual spread of user preference after our initial roll out did not quite match what we had seen earlier in user testing.
3. Let A/B testing be your arbiter
With the new design, we wanted to bring more vibrance to Google Translate’s website. In our early iterations we used colorful illustrative icons (created by the talented Alexander Mostov), but early experiments with those assets in our mobile apps didn’t show good results. So we dropped them in favor of simpler Material icons. | https://medium.com/google-design/3-ux-takeaways-from-redesigning-google-translate-3184038f43bf | ['Pendar Yousefi'] | 2019-05-21 16:28:42.247000+00:00 | ['UX Design', 'Case Study', 'Google', 'Redesign', 'UX'] |
Why Do Two Of My Three Favorite Countries Disappoint Me? | Why do two of my three favorite countries disappoint me?
Two women were comparing notes. The first said, “my husband bought a world map, gave me a dart and said, ‘throw this and wherever it lands- that’s where I’m taking you when this pandemic ends. Turns out that we will be spending two weeks behind the fridge.”
There are times in life that I feel like I would like to go hide behind the fridge with no newspapers no television and no media input at all.
There are three countries that I deeply love; United States of America, Israel, and Canada. In two of the countries, I have homes that I reside in. I have family in all three countries and in two I have children and grandchildren but in only two of the countries would I like to hide behind the fridge. In Canada I would sit on my deck, look out on the world and smile.
What has happened in the United States and in Israel that makes me want to hide and even more so, how is it that the reasons are so eerily similar?
This past shabbat I happened to read two different articles in two different publications. One was the New York Times, and one was Moment magazine. Both were datelined Jerusalem, and both talked about Israel and yet I could hear overwhelming parallels to the United States. In fact, The New York Times headline for its article was, “Explaining Right Wing Politics in America, Via the Middle East.”
The second article by the well-known author Naomi Ragan was titled, “Covid Is Ripping Israel Apart”. I want to summarize and share each of these articles and where necessary point out the American similarities. It may not be pretty to either country, but I hope it may explain the ugliness of division that is overwhelming both countries. If we have any chance at creating a better situation it will have to start with first recognizing what is going on in both countries.
The New York Times article begins with the following.
“Liberals were confounded. The right- wing incumbent’s blue-collar base was sticking by him, cheering as he weaponized identity politics, attacked Democratic institutions and appeared to place his own interests ahead of the nation’s”.
As they say on law and order, “ripped from the headlines”. Except this was not an American headline, it was talking about Israel and Bibi Netanyahu. The liberals were primarily Ashkenazic Israelis and the working class were primarily Jews whose roots were North Africa and the Middle East. The article features a Tel Aviv University sociologist Professor Nissim Mizrachi, and his attempt to explain why Mizrahi Jews in Israel vote overwhelmingly in favor of the right wing. He points out that it is not because they are confused, as some liberals contend, or they are suffering from some form of Stockholm Syndrome. It is that liberals fail to see that working class Israelis consciously spurn liberalism.
“What they see as the end game of a liberal worldview is not a world they wish to inhabit. It’s really hard for liberals to imagine that their message, their vision itself, poses a threat to the core identity of other people.”
The similarity between Mizrahi voters in Israel and Trump voters in the United States is overwhelming.
Both groups, Professor Mizrachi says, see themselves as the most patriotic citizens of their country and they demonize the left and its allies in the news media, and academia as, “traitorous enemies”. Both groups feel they are dismissed by the elites, as racist, ignorant, or self-defeating. They feel ridiculed as being undemocratic or dangerous, yet they see themselves as the “we” in “we the people”.
Liberals imagine that their views should be attractive to Mizrahim who have long been treated as second class citizens, and do not understand why the Mizrahim do not flock to the Liberal parties.
This is the same question Democrats are asking themselves right now in analyzing why they did so poorly in rural America and amongst non-college educated whites?
The answers are strikingly similar. It is all about how they understand their self-identities. Professor Mizrachi recalls seeing a demonstration by Liberals calling for coexistence with Palestinians and they proposed jailing Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah fighters for war crimes. For Liberals this was, “an expression of shared humanity that liberals found ‘morally sublime’, but which had onlooking Mizrahi taxi drivers boiling over in rage”.
He says that the reaction to the Liberal calls were like a physical assault, like trying to steal your property, or rape your daughter. For Mizrahi Jews who came from Arab controlled countries, the Liberal view is like an assault on their being Jewish in a Jewish state. This is who they are, and it is not negotiable. It is existential, and the Liberals are threatening that existence.
It is the MAGA cry all over again. “We are real Americans and black and brown people are trying to take it away from us, or they want to make us Socialists and we who came from Socialist countries like Cuba or Venezuela will never let that happen to this country. We define ourselves as not being socialists. We do not want unlimited immigrants illegally coming into our country and taking our jobs away. Charity begins at home so forget the trade deals we want American jobs.”
For Mizrahi Israelis, the last thing they want is a hostile country right next door that wants to kick them out of their country and would not mind killing all of them in the process.
Their self-perceived identity attracts them to the strong man who says laws and empathy and sharing are for suckers who would naively sell us out. Forget rules and laws and democracy, we need to save our country above all else.
I give you Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu.
Naomi Ragan’s approach is less about the foreign affairs side and more about the internal strains, but again it is all about identity politics.
When Covid first hit Israel, they were superstars in controlling it. People looked at Israelis and said all those years of fighting existential wars for survival developed a society that could sacrifice for the common good even at the cost of work, the economy and freedom of behavioral choice. That did not last. The death toll has been climbing and Israelis are, in the words of Ragen, “rebelling in infantile ways against the simplest, most basic rules of public hygiene..”
A country that always held police and the IDF in great respect is losing faith in their institutions and leadership. (Sound familiar?)
Initially it was the Haredim who responded the worst to public health calls. One Haredi Rabbi publicly said that students going 6 months without Torah study and the influence of their Rabbis would be a spiritual death and the students would be better off with Covid.
By the second lockdown 51% of all kids with Covid were Haredim. This has echoes to me of some of President Trump’s advisors and sycophants who wanted herd immunity even if meant a few million deaths.
The religious right are not the only ones to put their personal, religious, or political needs first. There is a group called Black Flag protestors. They gather in the street to demonstrate by the thousands against Bibi and his corruption and demand his resignation. (They clearly don’t know Bibi who in a snail race to resign would come in 5 miles behind Trump). They are congested in the streets with masks at a very ineffective below the chin position, screaming and yelling and occasionally attacking the police. Watching this group protest regularly (think Black Lives Matter protests) took the public eye off the Haredim and weakened the public resolve to abide by restrictions.
Haredim returned to big weddings and even bigger funerals for great Rabbis some of whom died of Covid. ( Who said irony is dead?) One B’nai Brak shule hung a banner declaring their worship services to be a “protest”.
In another similarity to our experience with government leaders, after the first lockdown, Bibi told the public to “go out and have a beer”. The Israelis finally followed their leadership leading to a second wave that had Israel in first place per capita of infections. (I guess it could have been worse, he might have recommended they try a bleach cocktail.) After imploring the public to not gather for yom tov celebration both the Prime Minister and the President of the country celebrated the holidays with people from outside their households. (Shades of Dr Birx, Governor Newsom, and countless other politicians) It is enough to make you want to hide behind your fridge, except in Canada where people listen and respect others and their worst outbreaks that have caused shutdowns are at levels we hope to be at after mitigation.
What will it take to get us out from the back of the fridge?
We need to start listening to each other with respect and tolerance. No one owns all the truth. It is a shared commodity. We are all different but with more perspective we can see that our similarities and our desires are closer to each other than are our differences. We should not have to wait for an external enemy to bring us together and if we continue the road we are on, even that may not be enough.
We need to insist on truth being told especially by our leaders. Fake news is not news, it is a lie. Opinion is not only allowed it is encouraged but instead of just arguing the opinions we need to add an extra layer of dialogue which is to try to understand not just the what but the why of the opinion. What can you share with me about how and why you got to this opinion so I can understand who you are, not just the argument you are making. Justice Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsberg could not have been more divergent in approach to issues but had a fantastic relationship. I may not agree one iota with you, but I will never demonize you or treat you as the “wacko other”.
This is not pollyannish, it may be the only way we can come back together as a nation and leave the back of the fridge for a day in the sunlight.
I want to wish everyone a happy and healthy new year. No one will miss 2020 and better days are around the corner, so take no chances get your vaccine and start planning the next hug with a loved one.
Please share with family and friends and all are invited to join the list by emailing me ([email protected]) your full name and email. | https://medium.com/@rabbipaulplotkin/why-do-two-of-my-three-favorite-countries-disappoint-me-230aff17162f | ['Rabbi Paul Plotkin'] | 2020-12-24 00:49:49.877000+00:00 | ['Netanyahu', 'Israel', 'Trump', 'Canada'] |
You Too Can Become A Better Blogger. Heres How To Start: | You Too Can Become A Better Blogger. Here’s How To Start
Being a great blogger is a skill that can be deliberately cultivated and improved. If you want to attract more people to your blog, have more people return, have people get more from your blog and finally make more money from your blog, then read these tips carefully and see which ones you can apply to your blog.
Where to Find Great Post Ideas
The #1 skill you could have when it comes to finding great post ideas is to be on the lookout for post ideas constantly. Anytime anything significant happens to you, ask yourself: Can my audience learn from this? How can I make this relate to my blog? How can I use this experience to deliver value to my readers?
Read through related websites and through your readers’ comments. What are common problems, experiences, concerns, etc that they have in common? What’s a thought that you personally would like to express about your topic?
Let Your Personality Come Through Stilted and stale “how to” personalities seldom get much followers online. People don’t just come for your content; they come because they like you.
The more you can let your personality out, the more the people who really enjoy your personality will stick around. Yes, it also means some people will get turned off — But that’s far, far better than being “just another blog” that didn’t quite make an impression at all.
Don’t feel like you need to speak in “corporate speak.” Don’t try and “sound professional.” Instead, speak in an informal, person to person kind of personality.
Outline a Post With Bullets, Then Fill it Out Instead of trying to write a great post from top to bottom, try writing out the big bullet point ideas instead.
This allows you to see the whole article from a bird’s eye view before you start writing. It allows you to order your ideas and make sure they all fit together right from the beginning.
Then, once you have the main ideas of the blog post, write an introductory paragraph then fill out your bullet points. Finally, end you post with your finishing comments.
Many authors try to write in the typical top to bottom fashion and have a very hard time coming up with ideas that flow. By mapping out your blog post before you even start, you make your content better and easier to write.
Pay Equal Attention to Marketing Having great content and great marketing are both crucial.
If you don’t have great content, people who come to your site won’t want to stay and won’t come back.
However, if you don’t have great marketing, if you aren’t getting the word out about your site, then people aren’t even going to know you exist in the first place.
As a blogger, it’s crucial that you get great at both providing high quality, valuable content AND at getting hordes of visitors to your websites.
If you apply these four principles — Finding truly great ideas for blog posts, writing with personality, mapping out your blog posts before writing and applying proven marketing techniques — You’ll find that your blogging and your visitor stats will very noticeably improve.
For more articles like this you are welcome to our blog>> | https://medium.com/@s-m-b/you-too-can-become-a-better-blogger-heres-how-to-start-135099c4822c | ['Self Motivation Blog'] | 2020-12-20 18:47:07.011000+00:00 | ['Money', 'Blogger', 'Blog', 'Blogging'] |
Tukey’s forgotten techniques | Photo by The Creative Exchange on Unsplash
One of John Tukey’s landmark papers, “The Future of Data Analysis”, contains a set of analytical techniques that have gone largely unnoticed, as if they’re hiding in plain sight.
By Ron Sielinski — 16 min read | https://towardsdatascience.com/tukeys-forgotten-techniques-25707513800e | ['Tds Editors'] | 2020-08-24 13:24:39.766000+00:00 | ['The Daily Pick'] |
AXNET lists KIK with KIN/ETH and KIN/TUSD pairs | AXNET’s Decentralized Exchange has now launched KIK’s KIN Token available for immediate trading, deposit & withdrawal. KIN will have the following pairs in our decentralized exchange: KIN/ETH & KIN/TUSD
The AXNET DEX allows traders to get access to a high-speed trading engine, with a centralized user-experience, while keeping custody of their funds. Users can connect their wallet via Meta-Mask, Trust Wallet, Ledger, Creating a New ETH account, or importing their private key(Not Recommended).
About KIN
Kik Interactive Inc. is creating a cryptocurrency as a first step to launching a decentralized ecosystem of digital services. The Kin cryptocurrency will first power a digital economy inside of Kik, and then will serve as the basis of interoperability with other digital services in the Kin Ecosystem.
About AXNET:
Asset Exchange Network OÜ (AXNET) is a licensed virtual currency to fiat exchange with a licensed virtual wallet platform based out of Estonia. We service our traders worldwide by giving them the first hybrid trading platform that offers both a Centralized and Decentralized exchange that allows our traders to toggle between the two. We are listing traditional BTC, ETH, and USDT pairs with also fiat pairs like USD and EUR through our license and banking networks. We are also launching TUSD pairs for our decentralized exchange to give a stable-coin trading experience. | https://medium.com/axnet/axnet-lists-kik-with-kin-eth-and-kin-tusd-pairs-3bef5ca5e91f | [] | 2018-08-23 16:56:16.207000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Ethereum', 'Bitcoin'] |
7 Things I Learned During My 2 Years in an AI Startup | 1. Be genuinely excited and let it radiate
Read that again, with the keyword being ‘genuinely.’ Everyone claims to be excited when they join a new job. But few genuinely are and continue to be. And it makes a huge difference.
As I joined the team, I started sharing the same dream and vision of the Startup. I was fascinated by how big of an impact this small team could create. I started putting in extra effort and time to learn and improve myself because I wanted to learn more and grow faster. I was genuinely excited to complement my team and solve real-world business problems using AI. And the thought of it still excites me. I had always tried hard to control my excitement, but I would fail terribly.
During these 2 years, I started handling clients, got promoted to a Machine Learning Engineer, and finally started leading the data science team's projects. I was genuinely excited about every single opportunity that came my way, and I let it radiate. I grew, and the startup grew.
So here’s my secret, if you’re joining a startup (or any organization), be genuinely excited about the work they do, and don’t hide your excitement; let it radiate because career growth is more that way. You’ll realize this sooner or later. | https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/7-things-i-learned-during-my-2-years-in-an-ai-startup-4a638e2ceacd | ['Arunn Thevapalan'] | 2020-12-05 18:01:12.909000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Startup', 'Learning', 'Data Science', 'Machine Learning'] |
Fall 2018 product recap: students sprint to success in IT 355 | Clients from Rap For Youth alongside software development students at Green River College
IT 355 Agile Development Methods is a 10-week project-based learning course with a simple premise: build a piece of working software that delivers value to a real-world client.
Students work in self-directed Agile Scrum teams and deliver product increments every two weeks to their clients. At the end the course, teams present their finished products to an audience of faculty, staff, peers, and clients.
Yesterday’s IT 355 Project Showcase at the Auburn Center campus did not disappoint. Below, find a roundup of products that emerged from a recent offering of the course taught by Tina Ostrander.
Washington Ombudsman
Student team: Conner, Christian, Aaron, Bradley, Edward
Finding a suitable nursing home for your elderly loved ones is no laughing matter. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have an easy-to-understand interface for making hard decisions? The Washington State Long-Term Care Ombudsman advocates for residents of nursing homes, adult family homes, and assisted living facilities. Students created a heatmap to aid and assist the volunteers and employees of ombudsman, who can now filter and find the nursing homes that have the most need. The website features color-coded marker pins to represent the different nursing homes; a search box where the user can look up a nursing home by name for ease of access; and allows users to individually sort which nursing homes they would like to look at.
Multi-Service Center of Federal Way
Student team: Benjamin, James, Dmitry
Administrators at Multi-Service Center of Federal Way sought to move from a paper-based to an online employee tracking system. Students worked with Executive Assistant Kristin Logue and MSC employees to develop a mobile-friendly website: MSC Timesheets. The new check-in portal allows employees to share their status at work or on-the-go, saving receptionist overhead and making employee activities more transparent for administrators.
Rap for Youth
Student team: Chauncey, Ben, Mary, Nick, Mershelle, Michael
Rap for Youth is a non-profit helping struggling students in the Kent, WA area who have experienced significant trauma, and it needed a web and mobile-based student input form. The online form replaces a massive 10 page intake form that both students and parents must fill out to apply, giving users an easy way to get involved and access services.
Multi-Service Center of Federal Way
Student team: Diana, Janell, Geoff, Mominur
Multi Service Center is a non-profit that provides a place to live for those in need. Housing services include family shelter and transitional housing, affordable permanent housing, senior housing, and clean and sober housing for both men and women. Each program has different eligibility requirements and a different application procedure. Students created an online application form that allows displaced individuals in recovery from substance abuse to apply for housing. The app also provides a database that allows MSC administrators to appropriately view and keep track of applicant data.
Multi-Service Center of Federal Way
Student team: Caleb, Joseph, Alex, Abdalla
The business problem: automating and taking a job application process fully online. Until now, MSC has required job applicants to fill out and submit a paper-based application form. MSC staff then have to go through each application to find the right candidates. With their new tracking system, applications are online and staff can check on an applicant’s status based on position applied, location, or on a variety of other filters. This tool also helps MSC staff keep more reliable and manageable files and records. | https://medium.com/green-river-web-mobile-developers/students-sprint-to-success-in-it-355-3938f18ed4e6 | ['Andy Orr'] | 2018-12-05 18:51:13.158000+00:00 | ['Project Based Learning', 'Diversity In Tech', 'Agile Scrum Methodology', 'Community College', 'Student Success'] |
Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to Analyze Social Media Posts by Local Politicians | If you are a social media active person, you may understand how highly impactful social media content can be in creating visibility in audiences’ minds. You could post texts, do live videos, share posts, and much other social media content with your friends and followers. As all this occurs quite frequently as a normal part of daily living for most people, tens of thousands of data are generated in the process. Analyzing text data can be valuable in providing meanings to the opinion of people and organizations. And this is exactly what Natural Language Processing (NLP) is developed to do. NLP simply uses computers to understand human language by extracting and analyzing text to provide insight into the meaning of those texts.
Quite recently, I came across a python script that uses NLP to analyze and visualizes Donald Trump’s Tweets. Being curious to explore what such analysis would make of social media texts by local politicians, I replicated the project but instead of using Twitter, I used Facebook. I used python and NLP and related packages to extract Facebook posts from Sierra Leone’s State House and Mayor of Freetown. The textual data were scrapped, analyzed, and visualized to reveal top words, top organizations, and top people mentioned in thousands of social media texts posted on Facebook by the State House and Mayor of Freetown.
Analysis — Facebook Posts(texts) by State House, Sierra Leone
Analysis on State House, Sierra Leone, Facebook post reveled top words to be: “Presid”, “bio” , “maada”, “Sierra” “Leon”, “govern”, and “contri” “develop”, “support”,” excel”, “educ” and “new” etc.
NLP was also used to extract the top organizations and people mentioned in social media posts. State House has mentioned top organizations such as the UN, Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), EU, RSLAF, and others. The top people mentioned are Maada Bio, Fatima Maada Bio, Dr. Mohamed Juldeh Jalloh, Jacob Jusu Saffa, David Sengeh, etc. | https://lfvibbi.medium.com/using-natural-language-processing-nlp-to-analyze-social-media-posts-by-local-politicians-a78ada98db97 | ['Leonard Francis Vibbi'] | 2020-10-25 12:15:31.381000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'NLP', 'Civictech', 'Civic Engagement'] |
Who to turn to? | In the previous article, we went through the difference between emotional and academic intelligence. But one question remains; why have we not looked at this before? Surely, our ancestors also faced emotional challenges, so why has the topic remained underdeveloped for so long? Well, in most societies, the influence of religion kept emotional intelligence in a dark, unexplored corner.
This isn’t to say that religion is to blame, far from it. For most of human history, religion has served as an emotional pacifier, a safe haven to run towards when things go bad. Religious leaders speak of ethical behavior, a meaning in life, community spirit, and a purpose to work towards. They show us the way to live, love, and exist in harmony with others. Even after we die, there is a promise of continuity — an afterlife.
“the influence of religion kept emotional intelligence in a dark, unexplored corner.”
It is for this reason that religions have (openly or subliminally) served as points of reference during times of emotional hardship. I still vividly remember my grandparents saying that during times of crisis, their first point of call all would be a priest. It was a belief shared by many, especially in fervently Christian nations.
So why do we not run to a priest anymore? Why is religion no longer our go-to point? For starters, the idea that we should blindly obey a dogma doesn’t seem to fit into a world of rationale and reasoning. Today we focus on understanding how things work, rather than abandoning ourselves to the powers of a greater being. Even this article itself seeks to unravel the concept of emotional intelligence, and not merely accept it. Our individual searches for emotional wellbeing have led to the proverbial ground being pulled from underneath us. We are no longer on a level playing field but on different, separate islands each with its own set of challenges.
“For most of human history, religion has served as an emotional pacifier, a safe haven to run towards when things go bad.”
When things go wrong, where do we run? The answer is automatic; we gravitate towards what we have always known, to what seems familiar — to our cultures. In the absence of religion, culture fills in the gaps. We rely on our cultures, norms, values, and traditions to guide us as to what is ethically correct. How do we understand ourselves emotionally? What is our purpose? To whom do we turn to in despair? These are all questions we subconsciously pose to our cultures.
“We are no longer on a level playing field but on different, separate islands each with its own set of challenges.”
A Shakespearean tragedy can teach us to be wary of those around us. The Mona Lisa instructs us through an enigmatic smile. Musical compositions evoque feelings of sadness or joy. Altogether, they provide a replacement for the guidance our faiths used to offer. This isn’t to say that religion is obsolete, however, it would be a mistake to completely write off the influence of culture on our emotional beings.
Just as Milan’s Duomo holds a certain atmosphere of reverence, so do the world’s prominent museums and libraries. Whether it be a greater being which we believe in or a vast accumulation of knowledge, we can’t help but feel humbled. Seeing the achievements of man or the power of a god has a profound effect.
“This isn’t to say that religion is obsolete, however, it would be a mistake to completely write off the influence of culture on our emotional beings.”
So what does this all mean? Will we be rushing into museums, gazing at portraits, and rationalizing our feelings in a few year's time? I doubt it. As compelling a case as culture makes, it has not replaced scripture, nor does it give us all the answers when we feel troubled.
It does however serve as a reminder that we are not alone; that is some distant past, other people have felt the same way. This in itself is comforting, but not enough.
Taking a step back, it seems the answer we seek was never readily available. In the past people looked to religion, today we are expected to deal with our emotions somehow or other. Although it makes no sense, we expect any moderately educated, sensible person to be able to deal with the concepts of life, death, happiness, and grief. It seems absurd that’s some of us may need guidance, however, it is the reality. The moral of the story is that although culture and religion can enable us to experience emotions such as tranquility and empathy, a deeper understanding is needed if we truly want to achieve emotional intelligence. | https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/who-to-turn-to-c13067f92a67 | ['Daniel Caruana Smith'] | 2020-12-31 04:16:34.049000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Emotional Intelligence', 'Self Improvement', 'Mental Health', 'Psychology'] |
Using AI to detect Cat and Dog pictures, with Tensorflow & Keras. (1) | Cat or Dog?
Hey everyone!
I am going to write up a few articles exposing the power of Convolutional Neural Networks in image detection. To begin with, we will attempt to recognize whether an image is a Cat or a Dog using a vanilla neural network.
Google Collab:
First I would like to recommend using google collab as you don’t need to install any pesky packages and can start your AI journey right away. All you need is a Gmail account, to follow this link and click File-> new notebook.
Once you create a new file press Edit -> NoteBook settings and using the drop-down menu choose the GPU hardware accelerator. This will help speed up your TensorFlow process.
Basic google collab image.
Developing the Dataset:
First, we need to import several packages:
import numpy as np
import tensorflow_datasets as tfds
import tensorflow as tf
from tensorflow.keras import layers
Numpy will be for data manipulation, tensorflow_datasets will be used to import our dataset and we will use layers for image rescaling.
We now will import our cats_vs_dogs dataset:
totalSet = tfds.load('cats_vs_dogs', split='train', shuffle_files=True)
In this case, we want our image to be 64px by 64px. Thus we will Keras to resize each of our images to this size. Furthermore, we also want to normalize our data so our network can analyze the images quicker.
#final image size
IMG_SIZE = 64 #resize and rescale images function
resize_and_rescale = tf.keras.Sequential([
layers.experimental.preprocessing.Resizing(IMG_SIZE, IMG_SIZE),
layers.experimental.preprocessing.Rescaling(1./127.5, offset=-1)])
Next, we want to separate our dataset into image data and corresponding labels. The labels will be “0” or “1” for cats and dogs respectively. We will also transform these arrays into NumPy arrays and resize our images.
#loop through
trainX = []
trainY = [] i = 0 for example in totalSet:
i += 1
print('loading %d'%(i))
trainX.append(np.array(resize_and_rescale
(example['image'])))
trainY.append(np.array(example['label']))
Next, let’s transform our X and Y dataset into NumPy arrays. We will then check what the shape of our datasets will be.
#set as arrays
trainX = np.asarray(trainX)
trainY = np.asarray(trainY)
print(trainX.shape,trainY.shape)
Your output should be:
the shape of X and Y arrays
As you can see we have 20,000 photos and 20,000 corresponding labels. The X/trainX arrays each image is 64 by 64 pixels and the “3” represents the RGB color for each pixel.
Next, we want to transform our data from the RGB format to a gray image. This is simply for preference as I have no interest in color at the moment.
For RGBtoGray transformation, we simply need to transform the RGB vector to the value R*0.2126+G*0.7152+B*0.0722. This will grant us a final image shape of (20,000,64,64).
We also need to reshape our array into the shape (20,000,64*64) so each image can be inputted into our neural network. Whereby the network will train on 20,000 [64*64 = 4096] inputs.
def rgb2gray(rgb):
return np.dot(rgb[...,:3], [0.2126, 0.7152, 0.0722]) newTrainX = []
for image in trainX:
newTrainX.append(rgb2gray(image)) newTrainX = np.asarray(newTrainX)
newTrainX = newTrainX.reshape(newTrainX.shape[0],64*64)
Developing the Model:
We now want to develop a model capable of analyzing our dataset. First, we will import several packages:
from keras import models
from keras import layers
from matplotlib import pyplot
Next, we will set up a Sequential model that goes from Nodes
512 → 256 → 128 → 64 → 10 → 1
Each node will be followed by a soft plus activation layer which essentially transforms the output using the following function:
soft plus function
Graphically:
SoftPlus Graphical Function
As you can see it essentially trims off negative numbers.
The code for our network is:
#setup network network = models.Sequential() network.add(layers.Dense(512,input_shape=(64*64,)))
network.add(layers.Activation(tf.keras.activations.softplus)) network.add(layers.Dense(256))
network.add(layers.Activation(tf.keras.activations.softplus)) network.add(layers.Dense(128))
network.add(layers.Activation(tf.keras.activations.softplus)) network.add(layers.Dense(64))
network.add(layers.Activation(tf.keras.activations.softplus)) network.add(layers.Dense(10))
network.add(layers.Activation(tf.keras.activations.softplus)) network.add(layers.Dense(1, activation='sigmoid'))
You should notice that our last layer uses a sigmoid activation function, this is used to force our output to be between 0 and 1. This is needed since our outputs are going to be either 0 ( cat) or 1(dog). The output will thus display a probabilistic outcome (0.2 means most likely cat while 0.8 means most likely dog).
Sigmoid function
We will compile our model using the rmsprop optimizer. Since our output is binary (0 or 1) we will use binary_crossentropy loss and we will measure our accuracy.
#compile network network.compile(optimizer='rmsprop', loss='binary_crossentropy',metrics=['accuracy'])
Finally, we will separate our data into 19000 training data and 1000 validation data. The latter will be used to analyze how good our network is with non-training data.
We will also train our system in batches of 128 and run it for 100 epochs.
val_x = newTrainX[:1000] partial_x = newTrainX[1000:] val_y = trainY[:1000] partial_y = trainY[1000:] #FIT history =
network.fit(partial_x,partial_y,epochs=100,batch_size=128,validation_data=(val_x,val_y))
Measuring accuracy:
The history variable stores the validation accuracy and our training accuracy. The former is the accuracy with non-training data, the following code will output the maximum accuracy granted by our network with non-training data and graphical output of accuracy vs epochs.
#show loss and accuracy #get loss for training acc = np.asarray(history.history['accuracy']) #get loss for testing val_acc = np.asarray(history.history['val_accuracy']) # x axis will display epochs running from 1 to the number of losses we have - 1 epochs = np.asarray(range(len(acc))) pyplot.plot(epochs,acc,'r',label='Training accuracy') pyplot.plot(epochs,val_acc,'b',label='validation accuracy') pyplot.title('Training and accuracy') pyplot.xlabel('Epochs') pyplot.ylabel('Accuracy') pyplot.legend() print(max(val_acc)) pyplot.show()
With our network we have the following output:
Accuracy vs Epochs (1)
We can see that the accuracy rate peaks at around 65%. This means our system recognizes cats from dogs 65% of the time which is okay but not great!
Next time we will see if we can get higher accuracy rates using a Convolutional Neural Network.
GITHUB CODE:
Part 2:
Link | https://medium.com/@codewebduh/using-ai-to-detect-cat-and-dog-pictures-with-tensorflow-keras-1-6e880cbc14c6 | ['Maxamed Sarinle'] | 2020-11-23 14:05:42.839000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning Python', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'TensorFlow', 'Keras', 'Neural Network'] |
TOP 10 UNKNOWN FACTS ABOUT YOUR BRAIN | The human brain, our proverbial font of knowledge, the capsule which contains everything we know. With all our brain does and remembers for us, have you ever considered about how much you know about your brain? Join us, as we venture into 10 unknown facts about your brain!
Too much food for thought. Ever been called a fat head before? Well, perhaps you shouldn’t be upset by the truth! What we mean by that is, the average weight of a human brain is 3 pounds or 1.35 kilograms, or about 1% to 3% of your body weight, making it the second heaviest of your internal organs, only getting beaten out by the liver. Of that weight, 60% of that is fat, making it also the organ with the highest concentration off at, found in a healthy human body. This isn’t as bad a thing as it sounds, and no, dieting and exercise won’t slim it down. In recent years, it has gone to show that fatty acids are among some of the most important molecules that determine your brain’s ability to perform. The fats of your brain also creates all of the cell membranes in your body; these “good fats” are known as lipids, and our bodies don’t manufacture these fats, they come from the foods we eat. A couple good choices to increase this lipids is to eat lots of raw almonds and avocados.
For more brain facts click this link- https://topenigmaticfacts.blogspot.com/2020/12/top-10-unknown-facts-about-your-brain.html | https://medium.com/@evil-shadow1232/top-10-unknown-facts-about-your-brain-3172d807551 | ['Shantanu Bhadouria'] | 2020-12-08 12:21:41.732000+00:00 | ['Body', 'Brain', 'Facts'] |
Monte Carlo Simulations: The Intersection of Probabilistic and Deterministic | Hi welcome to my blog, I hope you find this helpful as an introduction to Monte Carlo Simulations. What this is, a minimal mathematical approach to Monte Carlo Simulations with simple graphics to illustrate my various points. What this is not, a deep dive into Monte Carlo simulations for very specific and well defined industry problems.
This data and premise of this Monte Carlo Simulation comes from Coursera’s Advance Business Analytics course taught by the faculty at the University of Colorado. Originally, the calculation was performed on Analytic Solver, but I decided to bring the process into an environment that I’m (and hopefully you) more comfortable in, Python.
First, I used the words probabilistic and deterministic, I should define them in the context of this article.
Probabilistic: something that can be quantified by a probability distribution. E.G. How many people show up for their flight?
Deterministic: something that can be calculated from parameters. E.G. If 150 people show up for a flight that has 134 seats, how many people are bumped to the next flight?
A Monte Carlo Simulation can account for the uncertainty (probabilistic nature) in the parameters of a Deterministic model yielding a probability distribution of possible results.
The Problem
On any given flight, not all passengers complete the process to utilize their purchased seats. In response, airlines typically overbook flights to maximize occupied seats and revenue. However, if the overbooking rate is too high bumped passengers will have to reschedule flights and the overall reputation of the airline will be damaged.
Goals:
Determine an appropriate overbooking rate, using bumped passengers and revenue cost
Determine the revenue of any given flight
Givens:
Historical Data for this specific
Booking Capacity of Plane: 134 passengers
Price of ticket: 314USD
Cost to bump passenger: 400USD
At this point you maybe tempted to use the expected values of the historical data, or the max/min values, to calculate the expected values for overbooking rate, bumped passengers, and revenue. However, it is possible to have a distribution where the expected value is not a good approximation of the distribution. Such as something multimodal or something with heavy skew.
Both distributions have a mean of zero and a variance of 5
Both distributions have a mean of 1 and variance of 1
The Solution
To tackle this problem we need to break it into the follow steps.
Fit the distributions of the supplied historical data (Probabilistic Inputs) Build a mathematical model for flight overbooking process (Deterministic) Choose at random from the historical distributions, calculate the results, and repeat (Probabilistic Output)
Distribution Fitting of Historical Data
#############
###IMPORTS###
############# import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
import fitter from scipy.stats import exponnorm , genlogistic
Import historical data to python using pandas and view a quick summary
hData = pd.read_csv('data/historicalData.csv')
hData.describe()
hData.shape
730 observations of 3 features, with zero missing data.
Flight Demand, Historical
Number of People that are Ready to Board, Historical
Let’s use the Fitter Package to model the distribution. Fitter uses 80 distributions from scipy to fit distributions and allows you to plot the results for a visual check.
f_demand = fitter.Fitter(hData.Demand, timeout= 100)
f_demand.fit()
f_demand.get_best() demand_params = list(f_demand.get_best().values())[0] f_shows = fitter.Fitter(hData.Shows, timeout =100)
f_shows.fit()
f_shows.get_best() shows_params = list(f_shows.get_best().values())[0]
The demand fitter output from f_demand.get_best() and f_shows.get_best() are presented below as a python dictionary. The best scipy distribution is the key and the parameters are the stored in the value tuple.
{'exponnorm': (0.4319945610366508, 145.53002093494484, 11.26683008052343)} {‘genlogistic’: (0.03148397254846405, 144.0118676463261, 0.3243429345277982)}
Mathematical Model | https://towardsdatascience.com/monte-carlo-simulations-the-intersection-of-probabilistic-and-deterministic-2720a0b541b1 | ['William Yee'] | 2019-06-25 14:19:29.071000+00:00 | ['Probability', 'Monte Carlo Method', 'Optimization', 'Determinism'] |
Are We Doing Enough to Avert A Possible Mental Crisis Disaster ? | As countries continue to have a rise in the number of people infected with the novel coronavirus, other ugly experiences are equally trending alongside. Economies around the globe have been crippled, and health situations don’t seem to be getting any better, as well as some other occurrences that may very well be leading us to a possible humanitarian crisis.
But even as we watch the current events as they unfold and hope that we don’t end up in the ditch of a humanitarian crisis, something is happening now that we have to pay serious attention to. We have got a mental crisis unfolding before our very eyes, and the majority of governments are yet to take any measures to stem the tide.
Even as we pray and hope we never arrive at that dead zone of mental crisis, here are some scenarios that are, unfortunately, aiding the process:
People without access to usual support systems
It is not everybody that had the privilege of fending for themselves before the pandemic struck. The less privileged comprised the aged, physically challenged, people with life-threatening sicknesses, the unemployed, and many others. The state of the world’s economy has not helped issues either. That is why the majority of governments, especially in places with a stable economy, were using support systems to cater to the needs of those who find it difficult to fend for themselves. With such support systems in place, the less privileged were able to provide for their basic needs.
However, the spate of events triggered by the current pandemic is doing well enough to cripple the hopes of the less privileged. Furthermore, is the fact that more people are losing their jobs, which will make it more difficult for the government to continue with their support systems.
The inability of people to get the support they need is very likely to lead to more frustrations and depressions, which means we could have a mental crisis in the making.
Stress/Anxiety over Future
There is one thing that has been quite common with this pandemic, and that is the fact that people are overwhelmed with uncertainties. The uncertainty of what life would become after the virus saga; the possibility of where their next meal will come from; the uncertainty of what governments intend to do next, and, more importantly, the uncertainty of what the future holds for everybody.
Stress and anxiety are beginning to eat people up all over the place. What used to be the problem of the poor and the sick has now become the problem of everybody. The influential and unrecognized, the strong and weak, the blacks and whites, everyone is beginning to have a considerable dose of anxiety and stress. That can undoubtedly trigger a mental crisis if people are not informed on how they can reduce their fears and anxieties.
Those isolated with abusers
Abuse has been an inevitable part of human existence. Some persons cannot help but think irrationally and act irresponsibly. Coincidentally, various polls have indicated that abuse cases have risen by a sharp number within this period. That is because the lockdowns have mandated people to stay indoors, leading them to spend more time with their partners or spouses.
As such, you would expect the slightest provocations to give rise to abuses. Sadly, that has been the trend as we go through these trying times. Hence, as some persons do what they can to put up with their abusers, you would expect them to break down psychologically at some point. And when that occurs, we may be in for a disaster of mental crisis.
Frontline workers
Frontline workers have been described as heroes everywhere they turn to, particularly those who are functioning as health workers. In a sincere bid to contain the spread of the virus, quite a few them have contracted the virus in the course of their discharging their duties. Some have even lost their lives, while others have deliberately stayed away from their families or loved ones, so they don’t end up infecting them with the virus.
These frontline workers have demonstrated what it means to render selfless service as a sign of patriotism. But even as these selfless heroes sacrifice their time to combat this novel virus, their psychological abilities are being stretched to the limit. People have locked themselves in labs to ensure they find a vaccine or come up with a cure. The situation requires that they flex their mental capabilities and do whatever brainwork that is required to bring this to an end. However, the thing is, they might be doing way more than their bodies can allow. That could amount to a mental crisis.
People who have lost someone and don’t have access to a support system/can’t funeral rituals
Death has always been part of life. People die daily, and loved ones are left behind to grieve their passing away. That said, the passing on of people is being handled differently, especially when it is coronavirus related. Governments have passed regulations around the world that forbids people from conducting funeral service for their loved ones or even attending any social gathering in general. This was deemed necessary as one of the measures of stopping the virus from spreading beyond control.
While everyone understands that such a measure was meant for their good, it is a decision that seems to be causing survivors to grieve more than they should. Some cannot imagine that the long-standing culture of burying their loved ones have suddenly become an act that is berated by the government.
As approximately 260,000 people have lost their lives to this unseen enemy, families have been thrown into longer grieving acts as they have no access to give the deceased the burial rites they deserve. This is something that would undoubtedly result in a mental crisis should we continue in this trajectory.
Conclusion
The novel coronavirus has changed lives as we knew it, and we are beginning to adjust to some of those changes. Although we are still transitioning regarding our new lifestyle, it is expedient the authorities pay special attention to the rise in mental health cases that have rocked various places at the moment. So, we don’t end up having a mental crisis disaster on our hands. | https://medium.com/@mohamud/are-we-doing-enough-to-avert-a-possible-mental-crisis-disaster-2e84ac0a3121 | ['Mohamud Al-Jabarti M.D'] | 2021-01-07 22:41:05.253000+00:00 | ['Anxiety', 'Quarantine', 'Covid 19', 'Mental Health', 'Stress'] |
Biodiversity and climate: joining the dots for a sustainable future | In the run-up to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, when the Peruvian government was preparing its official position, I remember the focus was squarely on biodiversity. As a tropical country, on the western edge of the Amazon rainforest, Peru saw biodiversity as an essential asset for its development, and as a crucial element of its culture and history.
Climate change, in contrast, was seen as a concern for rich countries, of little
relevance for Peru and countries at a similar stage of their economic evolution.
What a difference 25 years makes. Now, the tightly woven links between climate and biodiversity, the land and the oceans, and between ecosystem health and human society and culture are understood and even evident to all.
As a conservation organization, WWF has always viewed our work on energy
and climate through the additional lens of species protection. We recognize the impact that a changing climate can have on the ability of ecosystems to support plant and animal life, and the challenges that biodiversity will face in a warming world.
Tomorrow, we will be releasing a landmark report setting out the latest research on how climate change will affect biodiversity across 35 of WWF’s ‘Priority Places’. These regions contain some of the richest and most remarkable biodiversity on the planet, including iconic, endangered and endemic species.
The report makes sobering reading. It paints a picture of ecosystems under
pressure, and widespread biodiversity loss, even if we manage to keep the global temperature rise to below 2ºC. But it also suggests actions we can take to help protect endangered species, by connecting to earth and sparking never-before action for conservation and protecting biodiversity. It outlines the impact we can create through redoubled conservation work, and by helping species disperse to more favourable habitats as their existing ranges become less hospitable.
The science is clear: we need to rapidly and deeply cut greenhouse gas emissions. Given the effects on biodiversity of even 2ºC of warming, we need to increase the ambition of the Paris Agreement, and accelerate efforts to cut
emissions even before the agreement comes into effect in 2020.
But perhaps the most important message from the report is one that is implicit — the need to better connect the dots between climate, biodiversity, and the other social and economic development challenges that we face.
Without urgent action to reduce emissions, global climate will change to such an extent that adaptation becomes impossible for many species. Without smarter development, we will encroach on natural habitats so greatly that dispersal becomes impossible. Without recognition of the importance of protecting biodiversity, species will become extinct, representing an irreversible loss for everyone who lives on this planet.
Connecting the dots will also help us find solutions to these problems. Emissions from agriculture, forestry and other land-use represent around a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions — but efforts to protect biodiversity will help reduce emissions from these sources. Protecting marine biodiversity will help protect the fish stocks on which many millions of people rely for protein. Ensuring healthy ecosystems can support sustainable agriculture, help ensure clean water, and reduce the impact of natural disasters.
The Paris Agreement recognizes many of these linkages. Next year, the UN is due to produce two major reports on climate change and the oceans and the
terrestrial environment. In 2020, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity
(CBD) meets in China with a view to adopting a working plan that could be as
significant for protecting biodiversity as Paris was for protecting the climate.
These developments, alongside the UN Sustainable Development Goals, hold the promise of a new development paradigm that could change how we think about nature and human societies. It could provide a framework that ensures human prosperity grows in a manner that is in harmony with the ecosystems we rely on — if we make sure we join the dots and connect to earth today.
Manuel Pulgar-Vidal is the leader of WWF’s global climate and energy programme. He is based in Berlin. [email protected] | https://medium.com/wwftogetherpossible/aligning-objectives-by-connecting-the-dots-331517453276 | [] | 2018-03-14 03:03:51.400000+00:00 | ['Climate Change'] |
How the DNC and Other Democratic Party Institutions Dysfunction | Here’s a Twitter thread from a newly elected DNC member telling us all how the DNC works — or doesn’t. Every Democratic voter should read this. We need to know the problems of the Democratic party and its subgroups.
It sounds like Atkins means well and wants to do well for the DNC. Even so, the situations he describes illustrate well how institutions such as the DNC are wasting tremendous amounts of liberals’ time, money and energy, while not getting much of the work done that needs to be done to save democracy.
Atkins’ description leads me to a different conclusion than he apparently draws from it. He seems to think there is hope of changing the DNC and other organizations within the Democratic party to become more functional. That doesn’t seem possible to me, because the party seems rigidly stuck in old habits and very attached to and trusting toward consultants who aren’t helping much with winning down ballot elections. New liberal institutions need to be developed because so many of the old ones are not functioning very effectively to stop the spread of fascism.
That’s why I have written an essay asking philanthropists to create new liberal institutions and/or for others to create such institutions and then to seek funding. We need to start over — with organizations that are focused on effectiveness in tasks Democrats must tackle. The party can’t keep wasting endless amounts of money, time, energy and commitment from voters, while being tone deaf to their needs. Instead of the needs of our base, the party has operated based on the ingrained habits of an in-group of politicians and consultants who have been around for decades and who keep the Democratic party firmly in their control . All the while, they keep losing one down ballot election after another.
Open Letter to Liberal Donors: Please Consider Donating to Create Missing Liberal Institutions
There are many outside groups and individuals that do various functions to help the Democratic party. For example a lot of pro-Biden anti-Trump messaging was done this year by the Lincoln Project, VoteVets, MeidasTouch and Don Winslow. I hope to see them continue to help with overall liberal messaging in the future. Democrats need a ton of help there, as the party is not good at messaging.
Moveon and Indivisible have been helping liberals for a long time and have contributed a lot to Democrats and to the nation.
These people and groups don’t ask the Democratic party for its approval. They just form their organization and begin doing the work. That’s good, because the DNC and the Democratic party don’t realize they need help, and would likely say no if asked. That is the best way to do it — just create a group or movement, set liberal goals and achieve them.
I hope to see many more groups doing this. My Open Letter essay above outlines all the kinds of liberal institutions I think we need and why. Atkins’ Twitter thread, at the beginning of this essay, points to a number of problems that need to be resolved — or just avoided from the outset — the new organizations. I hope to see a lot of these new organizations popping up, to help steer the nation away from lies and fascism and toward truth, justice and democracy. | https://medium.com/@upine/how-the-dnc-and-other-democratic-party-institutions-dysfunction-5fd18b5a63bd | ['Julie Hotard'] | 2020-12-17 21:58:46.481000+00:00 | ['DNC', 'Democratic Institutions', 'Philanthropy', 'Down Ballot Politics', 'Messaging'] |
How Our Journalism Creators Program is Taking Flight | How Our Journalism Creators Program is Taking Flight
Launching our 100-day online-only pilot program
I’m excited to share that today we’ve invited 20 journalism innovators to join us from around the world, selected from a stellar application pool for the first iteration of our new Journalism Creators Program. We received 163 applications from 56 distinct countries. Here’s our official announcement with the participant bios.
Our cohort includes a Marine Corps Veteran, a former NPR Executive Producer, an LA Times Arts Reporter, a former NYC Media Lab director, a restorative justice pioneer, two TEDx speakers, an anthropologist and others developing niche independent projects. Many are focused on market gaps ignored by larger media organizations.
65% of the accepted cohort is female
60% are people of color
The accepted candidates come from all over the world:
7 from the US including three from New York City
the including three from New York City 5 from Europe including Germany, Switzerland and Turkey
including Germany, Switzerland and Turkey 4 from Asia including Hong Kong, Singapore and India
including Hong Kong, Singapore and India Plus Brazil, Mexico, Qatar and Tanzania
An emerging ecosystem
Our new Journalism Creators program is part of a burgeoning ecosystem made up of creators themselves, supportive journalism organizations, and emerging platforms that provide publishing infrastructure for independents. Funders supporting nascent efforts also play a crucial role—providing room for experimentation.
Anchored by a new generation of creators opting out of larger organizations, the ecosystem is strengthened by institutions like the Local Independent Online News Publishers network (LION), the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), the new News Product Alliance, and so many other journalism institutions now making a habit of sharing toolkits, best practices, case studies and other practical resources.
Emerging platforms are another key element empowering creators to focus on serving communities directly. Substack, Pico, Patreon, Kickstarter, Steady, Anchor, Glow, Supercast, Memberful, Medium, Subtext and many others enable creators to set up direct financial relationships with readers, listeners, viewers, and members.
This word cloud illustrates terms that frequently appeared in application responses
Whereas in 2010 many of the applicants to our then in-person entrepreneurial program expressed a sense of curiosity and excitement about journalism innovation, our 2020 pool exhibited a clear passion for overhauling career trajectories.
This fall’s applicant pool was so strong that we could have accepted a full second cohort of outstanding professionals. We’re starting with a small initial group for this pilot as we experiment with creative new approaches to flexible remote learning. We’ll invite applications in January for a second cohort, followed by a third next fall. Our founding objective, as outlined in my post about planting the seeds for a new era of entrepreneurial journalism, remains to support independent journalists in creating new products and services, in particular those reaching underserved communities.
If you’d like to follow along with the 100-day program that begins October 13, join our newsletter list for periodic updates. Or follow this Twitter list of the participants. And if you have ideas for collaborating on this effort to strengthen the new journalism creators ecosystem, please be in touch: [email protected]. We’d love to continue expanding our network of partners. | https://medium.com/journalism-innovation/how-our-journalism-creators-program-is-taking-flight-aee0d7aca346 | ['Jeremy Caplan'] | 2020-10-07 18:40:47.890000+00:00 | ['Passion Economy', 'Journalism Education', 'Journalism Innovation', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Journalism'] |
Former High School Classmates Kidnapped Frank Sinatra Jr. in 1963 | Who kidnapped Frank Sinatra Jr.?
Barry Keenan was the mastermind of the kidnapping. He was described as an “alcoholic, drug addict, and devout Catholic.”
Barry and his accomplice Joe Amsler were former classmates of the Sinatra children. Frank Sinatra Jr. was only 19 at the time of the kidnapping, and his kidnappers were just a few years older than him.
Although Barry and Joe were the ones to commit the kidnapping, there was a third criminal involved: John Irwin. John was the one responsible for contacting the kidnapped boy’s father, the famous Frank Sinatra Sr., and demand the ransom.
54 Hours of Terror
On December 8, 1963, days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, another tragedy struck: the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra’s son.
Frank Sinatra Jr. was just starting his own music career, and he was performing a small gig at Harrah’s Club Lodge in Lake Tahoe.
It was late in the afternoon and the singer was said to be dressed down to his underwear and eating a chicken thigh when the kidnappers knocked.
A friend that was in the room with him answered it, and that was when Barry entered under the guise of a delivery. Barry and Joe tied up Frank’s friend then nabbed the singer, dragging him into a waiting car on the side of the lodge.
Frank’s friend actually freed himself and called the police, who set up roadblocks. The kidnappers were stopped by the cops, however, they managed to bluff their way past the roadblocks and get to their base in Los Angeles.
Frank Sinatra Jr. was held for 54 hours before kidnappers were able to communicate their ransom demands and the drop was made. But there was a hiccup during the ransom demands.
A Dead Phone Line
John Irwin, the man responsible for negotiating the ransom with Frank Sinatra Sr., insisted that they communicated using gas station payphones to avoid the FBI tracing the call.
When they spoke on December 10, it became clear that the kidnappers were only interested in money. Sinatra Sr. was quick to offer it to them. He said, “I’ll give you a million dollars if you let my son go!”
It was while Frank Sinatra Sr. was on the phone with John, coordinating details for his son’s safe return, when something terrifying happened: he ran out of dimes for the payphone and the line went dead. Later, Sinatra Sr. openly admitted that he had “panicked.”
Thankfully, he was able to get back on the line with John, who demanded $240,000. Although that may seem a lot lower than a million, and it is, that is still the equivalent of two million dollars today.
On December 11th, Frank Sinatra Sr. made the drop at the specified location in California, and his son was released and found near Bel Air, unharmed.
The Arrests and Verdict
Days later, John Irwin was arrested after he told his family about the kidnapping and they called the FBI. This led to the arrest of Barry and Joe too.
The trial lasted just four weeks.
Defense for the three men claimed that Frank Sinatra Jr. orchestrated the kidnapping to gain publicity.
However, the prosecutors and FBI had enough evidence to say otherwise, including a confession letter from Barry Keenan that was found in a safety deposit box. All three men were convicted.
Barry Keenan, the mastermind of the kidnapping, was sentenced to twelve years of prison, however, he only served four and a half before he was released.
After he got out, he made millions of dollars in real estate and owned multiple properties around the United States.
Why target Frank Sinatra Jr.?
Besides the obvious reason that Frank Sinatra Sr. would be able to pay the ransom to get his son back, Barry had other reasons to target the 19-year-old.
In 1998, 35 years after the kidnapping had taken place and prison sentences were served, Barry Keenan agreed to an interview about the infamous kidnapping.
He claimed that he had convinced himself at the time that it was an “act of goodwill.” In his eyes, there were two main benefits of the kidnapping:
It would help unite and strengthen the Sinatra family. The ransom money would save his own family.
He actually had debated between kidnapping Frank Sinatra Jr. and Bob Hope’s son, Tony. However, he decided that kidnapping Tony would be “un-American,” thus Frank Sinatra Jr. became his target.
In the interview, Barry said (regarding Frank Sinatra Sr.) that he had thought, “It wouldn’t be morally wrong to put him through a few hours of grief worrying about his son.”
A Roll of Dimes
After the kidnapping, Frank Sinatra Sr. had lasting trauma from the “panic” when he ran out of dimes mid-call with John Irwin.
As a result, he carried ten dimes with him at all times until he died. It became a sort of quirk of his. When he died and was buried, his daughter Tina Sinatra said, “He never wanted to get caught not able to make a phone call. He always carried 10 dimes.”
The Sinatra children made sure that their father was buried with a roll of dimes in his jacket pocket. | https://medium.com/the-true-crime-edition/former-high-school-classmates-kidnapped-frank-sinatra-jr-in-1963-3e1b8ce2e895 | ['Malinda Fusco'] | 2020-11-24 01:58:41.328000+00:00 | ['History', 'Crime', 'Culture', 'Short Read', 'True Crime'] |
Seo friendly cost effective pagination with firestore | Lately, as my news site grow bigger, I’ve been struggling with Seo friendly pagination with firestore query, which maily means firestore jumping page.
First I go to query with offset, end up with huge bill. Cause offset(1000) mean 1000 reads cost for nothing.
After digging into many many dicussions on Github or stackoverflow, I fount that I’t impossilbe. But really , I am just not digging it enough.
I paid for an answer at a website that pay for answer, proved that money is knowledge. Here the article of Seo friendly cost effective pagination with firestore that does not use offset but achieve great flexiblity to paginate , Easy to make everything static with server side render.
That is a smart solution.
Basically a well designed page id system saved my life. It is easy to understand with a simple data structure, how can’t I think of that on my own .
Along with nextjs ssr and incremental static gereation , I successfully turned my pagination into many individual page that can be visited directly. | https://medium.com/@ramaild/seo-friendly-cost-effective-pagination-with-firestore-15098782dbf0 | ['Ramaild M'] | 2020-12-16 11:46:10.422000+00:00 | ['Server Side Rendering', 'Firestore', 'Firebase', 'SEO', 'Pagination'] |
TV Review: ‘The Boys’ Are Back In Town For Season Two | In July of last year, before all the horrors of 2020 were unleashed on the world, Amazon released a little show called The Boys. Extreme violence, dark humour, and a subversion of the superhero genre made the show an instant hit and one of the tentpole shows for Amazon Prime. Since its release, The Boys has had everyone clamouring for more, making the second season’s release last month a much-needed bit of good news. But did it live up to the hype? For the most part, yes.
Season two picks up pretty much exactly where season one left off, with Billy Butcher’s (Karl Urban) dramatic discovery that his wife is still alive and raising her and Homelander’s child, as well as the introduction of super-terrorists. From there, things just keep escalating, with the introduction of new characters like Kimiko’s brother Stormfront, and a whole roster of new ‘heroes’, making the Boys’ job of bringing Vought and the Seven down just that bit harder.
One of the best things about the first season of The Boys was how it shook things up in the superhero genre, which up to that point, had quickly become oversaturated with content. The show’s satire of iconic superheroes like Superman, Wonder Woman and Aquaman, as well as mega-corporations like Disney, helped make the show so good in its first season. This only gets better in the second run, with several scenes in the show being borderline self-aware and on the nose. The showrunners know what audiences liked in season one, and are happy to deliver more of the same by the truckload. Perhaps one of the best in-jokes this series was the casting of former X-Men star Shawn Ashmore as the pyrotechnic superhero Lamplighter, showing just how far the writers are willing to go to satirise this genre.
But while superhero satire is still a common theme this season, it actually isn’t the thing the show pokes the most fun at — that would be America. Season one certainly made fun of the nation and its political system more than once, but season two takes it the whole nine yards. This could be something that gets boring quickly, and a lazy way to appear woke, but thanks to talented writing, it is anything but. Things like the influence of corporations and organisations like Vought or The Church of the Collective in political matters, as well as their exemption from taxes, give us a not-so-fun-house mirror look at many corrupt institutions in not just the US, but all over the world.
Antony Starr’s Homelander is perhaps one of the best aspects of the series, with Starr giving one of the most engaging performances seen on television recently in season two, as Homelander’s character becomes less a pinnacle of how bad a superhero can be, but rather someone who exists in shades of grey. As with many of the characters, Homelander is a victim of a greedy corporation, and on several occasions you can’t help but feel sorry for the guy. At times he seems like a decent person, especially scenes with his son Ryan (Cameron Crovetti), and others he’ll be getting frisky with a Nazi, with this back and forth being consistently interesting. In short, Antony Starr is long overdue an Emmy.
“A common issue with many sophomore seasons where they introduce several new characters is that some, old and new, will slip into the background in wasted performances and potential. Thankfully, this is an issue that The Boys doesn’t suffer from… mostly.”
While Homelander is undoubtedly the central villain of the show, he takes a backseat when it comes to being the big bad for season two. That honour goes to Aya Cash’s meme-generating, lightning-throwing fascist, Stormfront. A newcomer to the show, Stormfront is the newest member of The Seven, but soon pushes herself up the hierarchy, creating an interesting dynamic between her and Homelander. Cash gives an amazing performance — it’s easy to hate this character even before her villainous origins are revealed. But considering recent events, the depiction of Stormfront as a Nazi looks like a decision made in poor taste.
Following on from the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests, certain scenes with this new character are uncomfortable, unnecessary, and take away from real events. During the reveal of Stormfront’s origin, we learn she ‘mis-profiled’ a black man for having stolen a car, and subsequently beats the man to death in front of his sister. Yes, it’s an effective way of making us quickly hate this character, but it harms the actual narrative by replacing the actions of racist cops with that of fictional superheroes. This scene could easily have been cut and we still would have known that Stormfront was evil.
A common issue with many sophomore seasons where they introduce several new characters is that some, old and new, will slip into the background in wasted performances and potential. Thankfully, this is an issue that The Boys doesn’t suffer from… mostly. Both characters old and new are given meaningful development, with most getting a chance to hit emotional beats, particularly Tomer Kapon’s Frenchie and Karen Fukuhara’s The Female, as well as Dominique McElligott’s Queen Maeve. Over season two’s eight-episode run, we get to see much more emotional sides of Frenchie and The Female, whose blossoming relationship is one of few sweet moments in the show. As for Queen Maeve, it was great to see her redemption arc from season one continuing here, making her one of few superheroes you actually want to root for, and definitely the MVP of this season. Even characters like the mute Black Noir are given more time to shine, something I’m sure many fans are happy to see.
One of the most controversial things about The Boys season two was the decision to have a week-by-week episode release, rather than the usual season dump. Many were frustrated by this, resulting in a review-bombing campaign when the first episode dropped. A great many people think this was a ploy by Amazon to get more money, but when asked by Collider, The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke said “For the record, it didn’t come from Amazon. It came from the producers…we’re the ones who pitched them” and after finishing season two, the decision is understandable. While season one had a clear overarching main plot, there wasn’t one to be found here. Each episode is, for the most part, its own self-contained story, meaning that waiting for a week for a new episode isn’t particularly torturous. This lack of direction clearly has its drawbacks early in the season, but thankfully, the latter half really picks up with some of the best episodes of the show.
With Marvel and DC content a distant memory at this point, The Boys is a great fix of all that superhero content we have been missing, whilst also being a darkly funny subversion of what we’re used to.
Both seasons of The Boys are available on Amazon Prime.
Words by George Bell | https://medium.com/the-indiependent/tv-review-the-boys-are-back-in-town-for-season-two-bf479e5a0675 | ['George Bell'] | 2020-10-17 16:22:07.043000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'Television', 'Entertainment', 'Superhero', 'TV'] |
Machine Learning in the Cloud using Azure ML Studio | Context
As evident in my previous posts, my self-taught journey to date focused on building predictors and visualizations using machine learning algorithms with Python. My interface was the Jupyter notebook, and my work lived on my laptop. As I was getting ready to practice and learn deploying models, I started the Nanodegree that — among other concepts — covered the deployment of models in Azure.
How this article is organized
Topics covered in this article about Nanodegree’s Capstone project are:
Purpose
Setting up for the project.
Development — HyperDrive and AutoML
Deployment
Conclusions
Throughout this article, I’ll discuss points that were good learning opportunities for my fellow students and me.
Purpose
The capstone project is the culmination of training on various concepts; therefore, it tested our ability to:
run a HyperDrive experiment to comb through the hyperparameter search space to find settings that maximize the performance of a pre-selected scikit-learn algorithm on a problem of choice
use AutoML to find the best algorithm that maximizes performance on the aforementioned problem
deploying the best performing model as an active endpoint that can be queried by anybody — getting the product out of my laptop so anybody can use it
Setting up for the Capstone project
The first step was to select a problem and dataset: I chose the problem of predicting vehicle fuel efficiency with the Auto MPG dataset from the UCI repository. Since I was familiar with this dataset from a prior post, I could focus on the mechanics of Azure’s Machine Learning (ML) Studio.
Microsoft and Udacity provide a virtual machine for the capstone: Standard DS3V2 with 14 GB RAM that can provide up to 4 CPU nodes. After launching a workspace that uses this virtual machine, the next setting-up step is to upload and register the dataset, which currently is a .csv file on my desktop.
Once completed, AzureML provides the user with the necessary code to consume the registered dataset, as seen in Figure 1 below. The line declaring the Experiment is my own and not necessary to consume a registered dataset.
Figure 1: consuming registered dataset
With the dataset ready for use and a workspace launched on a running virtual machine ‘compute,’ we are ready to develop the project. | https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/machine-learning-in-the-cloud-using-azure-ml-studio-5948b1347bc6 | ['Ranganath Venkataraman'] | 2020-12-07 21:02:46.286000+00:00 | ['Azure', 'Azure Ml', 'Azure Machine Learning', 'Deployment', 'Azure Ml Studio'] |
An Open Letter to My Ex | An Open Letter to My Ex
Raw real and honest ❤
Your love was like looking in a mirror: My soul reflected back to me. Only, I didn’t realize it. That is why it hurt so badly when you didn’t look back. I never chased myself, so why would you? Loving you was work.
When you disregarded my feelings it was just me overlooking myself. I always put others first so why wouldn’t you. You loved me like I loved myself: Not at all.
When you looked at me, I was seeing myself reflected in your eyes. I made it okay for you to devalue and belittle me. I wasn’t worth it in my own eyes, so why would you think differently?
I didn’t respect me. Why would you?
I was living in a false mindset that if I led with sexuality everything else would fall into place. No wonder love was so gut wrenching.
Now I am raw and real. Loving myself.
Take it or leave it because I’ve got me and I am loving me.
I don’t need you to validate me. I don’t need you to complete me. I don’t need you to be the glue that holds me together.
I’ve got me.
If you want to disrespect me, ignore me, devalue me, then brace yourself. I’m not taking that crap anymore. I don’t do it to myself anymore so you surely won’t be allowed.
I am my own true love. I am everything I need all bundled into one awesome package.
It all makes sense now that I’ve been awakened. I will be the one to heal myself. You can do whatever you like but it won’t be by my side.
I yearned to have you back in my life. Sobbed my eyes out hoping you would think of me and miss me. Ask me back. I begged you to talk to me so we could work it out.
Thank God you didn’t call me or text me. Thank God you told me to “move on.”
At first I moved on in the way I always told my girlfriends to: “The best way to get over someone is to get under someone.” I spread my legs and gave myself away to even more men who saw me for the reflection I was projecting: worthless, something to be used.
I drank myself into a stupor. Stopped eating and cried endlessly, longing for your validation.
I even thought about running my car off the side of the mountain. What was the point in living? I couldn’t see beyond the fog of my despair.
Then a sliver of light shined through my darkest of days. It pierced into my heart and soul and slowly started a fire.
Now an untamable flame burns deep inside.
It cannot be smoldered. I see me.
I see me in all my nakedness. I see me in my raw power. I love every scar on my flesh. I love every stretch mark on my thighs. I love every freckle on my body. I love me.
I won’t be tossed aside as a forgotten lover. I won’t tolerate disrespect. I won’t be ignored. I won’t react with hatred or even cause a scene. But when I disappear from your life, you will know why. If you don’t love me the way I love me, I don’t have time for you.
I love me today, tomorrow and always. I am awesomely me. I am loving me.
This blog was written by guest blogger Rachel Johnson ❤ | https://ivaursano.medium.com/an-open-letter-to-my-ex-368d3fc9aa66 | ['Iva Ursano'] | 2019-05-31 01:43:08.909000+00:00 | ['Self Love', 'Relationships', 'Inspiration', 'Love', 'Personal'] |
Key things I picked up while working with Scala | Technology vector created by fullvector
As an individual who, up until only a couple months back, predominantly worked with languages such as Java and C#, Scala seemed like a whole new world. In the beginning, it was quite challenging to grasp and get comfortable with as it was so different from what I was used to. Now, coming toward the end of my 4 month co-op placement here at Hootsuite, I’d like to share some of the things I learned whilst working with Scala.
No more Null values
NullPointerExceptions are thrown when a method unexpectedly returns null and when this possibility is unhandled in code. Code bases and patterns I was more familiar with would generally be scattered with many instances of these if item != null or try/catch statements as a safety check in order to avoid this and similar exceptions.
I soon came to realize how null is not really a necessity as it’s merely a representation of an optional value that can be absent. In Scala, the idea of returning null is strongly discouraged as we prefer an explicit type representation. Scala, therefore, provides the opportunity for a type safe, clean and error handled code base, where we use practices such as an Option , Either , or Try .
Option:
Option is a way to represent values that may or may not be available. Option[T] holds the optional value of type T which is either an instance of Some[T] , if there is a value present, or, an instance of the object None , if there is an absence of value.
def name(first: String, last: String): Option[String] = {
if (valid case) Some(first + last)
else None
}
Having the method signature return with an Option[T] , explicitly informs the caller if there is some value, they will get Some[T] for use or if there is a possible absence, a None is returned. We can then use pattern matching, Scala’s version of a switch statement, to handle these cases:
val greeting: String = maybeName match {
case Some(name) => “Hello ” + name //ex returns “Hello John Doe”
case None => “Hello No Name”
}
Either:
Either, similarly to Option, is an instance of two types: either a Left or a Right. By convention, Right is used on a successful return of our expected value, much like Some[T] is. Left is used as a replacement of None , a failure path in which we are presented with a missing value. Unlike Option, Either allows us to smoothly throw specific exceptions or other types of errors instead of merely returning None . This, thereby, provides the caller with more context when something goes awry.
def name(first: String, last: String): Option[Exception, String] = {
if (valid case) Right(first + last)
else Left(new NoNameException(“Invalid Name”))
}
Try:
Try, similar to both Option and Either, results in a successful computed value or some throwable in the case of error. Try[T] , if successful, is an instance of Success[T] and results in the value of type T . It is an instance of Failure[T] , however, if during computation something unexpected occurs.
def name(first: String, last: String): Try[String] = {
if (valid case) Success(first + last)
else Failure(new NoNameException(“Invalid Name”))
}
Having the return type to be Try[T] , informs the caller that the computation can result in an error and they need to deal with the possibility of it.
val greeting: String = maybeName match {
case Success(name) => “Hello ” + name
case Failure(exception) => “Hello No Name”
}
Benefits:
These changes result in both more explicit and refined code. Using Option , Either , and Try also led me to understand a new style of programming and, more importantly, a powerful and cleaner approach to handling errors.
Using Higher Order Functions
One thing quite unfamiliar when learning Scala code was trying to understand a more functional programming approach on things. Being used to objects, constructors, getters, setters, and so on, in Scala all these boilerplates and accustomed patterns were gone. What became very recurrent was the use of higher order functions, and as a result, I was deeply exposed to working with them.
A higher order function is simply one that can take other functions as parameters and can return other functions. This allows functions to be passed as arguments to other functions. Map is a key example of a highly used higher order function.
.map
Map is commonly used to perform an operation on each element of a collection, resulting in a new one. Say we are given a list of integers and we want to double the value of each element, we can use .map :
val myList = List(1, 2, 3)
val myNewList = myList.map(i => i * 2)
// List(2, 4, 6)
The compiler knows the parameter type based on the type .map expects, so no need to explicitly declare int i . Moreover, in Scala, an underscore is a placeholder for parameters inside anonymous functions, so a shorthand practice, we can also use an _ to write the same code:
val myList = List(1, 2, 3)
val myNewList = myList.map(_ * 2)
// List(2, 4, 6)
Other collections, like the List example used above, have their own map method. For example the Map Collection:
val myMap = Map(“a” -> 1, “b” -> 2, “c” -> 3)
val newMyMap = myMap.map{case (key, value) => key -> (value * 2)}
// Map(“a” -> 2, “b” -> 4, “c” -> 6)
Shorthand:
val myMap = Map(“a” -> 1, “b” -> 2, “c” -> 3)
val newMyMap = myMap.mapValues(i => i * 2)}
// Map(“a” -> 2, “b” -> 4, “c” -> 6)
Small Aside: Immutability and Referential Transparency
Immutable means that we cannot change or mutate variables. In Scala, we prefer immutable code.
Referentially transparency refers to if functions evaluate to the same result given the same argument values. This is an ideal practice and requires functions to be free of any outside sources that can modify it’s behaviour. To clarify what I mean with an example:
def timesTwo(x: Integer): Integer {
x * 2
}
Given timesTwo(3) , we know that passing in 6 in place of this method will provide the same output, however:
var two = 2
def timesTwo(x: Integer): Integer {
x * two
}
Because the variable two can be modified by external sources, this method is not referentially transparent as the call timesTwo(3) may not always result in 6 now.
Benefits of Map:
So what are the benefits of .map versus say a for loop? Well, this is a lot more polished and uses less lines of code than if we were to use a for loop for the exact same output. Maps also provide the immutability factor which for loops lack. Although for loops can be written, albeit with more code involved, to account for not modifying the original collection, maps provide this immutability cleanly. In addition, Map works inside its own scope and utilities the variables within. A for loop may need variables outside of its scope, further increasing the overall chance for unwarranted mistakes.
.flatMap
FlatMap, can be thought of as a combination of the .map function followed by .flatten for the final result. Flatten meshes a collection of collections to create one single collection with the elements now becoming the same type.
val myList = List(List(1,2), List(3))
val newMyList = myList.flatten
// List(1,2,3)
FlatMap is a lot more powerful than Map as it allows us to chain operations together and it also becomes extremely useful when we are working with optional values. For instance, say we have a list of strings and we want to convert them to a list of integers:
val strings = List(“1”, “2”, “a”, “b”, “3”)
using .map , we have Some and None in our list because toInt cannot convert strings “a” and “b” to integers:
val mapStrings = strings.map(toInt)
// List(Some(1), Some(2), None, None, Some(3))
using .flatMap , this can be avoided:
val flatMapStrings = strings.flatMap(toInt)
// List(1,2,3)
For Comprehensions
At first, when trying to comprehend Scala code, it was quite difficult for me to have a clear understanding of what these .map on top of numerous more .map functions were doing. For-comprehensions which, not to be confused with for loops, are syntactic sugars for the organization of multiple operations. Example, this line of code:
a.flatMap(x => b.map(y => function(x, y))
…is equivalent to the following piece, but using for-comps:
for {
x <- a
y <- b
} yield function(x, y)
The <- are calls to .flatMap and the yield calls .map . An = may used for any other basic variable assignments. Furthermore, see how it is much more clear to comprehend? One notable benefit of for-comprehensions are that they allow code to become a lot more understandable as it greatly improves readability when dealing with numerous operations.
Final Thoughts
Although I mentioned the difficulty of Scala numerous times, it is now by far one of the most rewarding languages I have learned and I hope this sheds some aid to anyone learning Scala for the first time! 🤗 | https://medium.com/hootsuite-engineering/keys-things-i-picked-up-while-working-with-scala-51fe335f92aa | ['Mayesha Kabir'] | 2019-08-29 22:45:51.551000+00:00 | ['Sofware Development', 'Functional Programming', 'Co Op', 'Scala'] |
Epoch, Batch size, Iteration, Learning Rate | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/%E4%BA%BA%E5%B7%A5%E6%99%BA%E6%85%A7-%E5%80%92%E5%BA%95%E6%9C%89%E5%A4%9A%E6%99%BA%E6%85%A7/epoch-batch-size-iteration-learning-rate-b62bf6334c49 | ['Ken Huang'] | 2020-11-06 06:26:39.493000+00:00 | ['Epoch', 'Batch Size', 'Gradient Descent', 'Iteration', 'Machine Learning'] |
Atari VCS Q&A with COO Michael Arzt | All of the VCS hardware, including the controllers, are currently being tested for functionality and reliability, receiving final tweaks as needed. We are also in the final stages of software development and ramping up our efforts to onboard additional game and app developers.
In terms of software, our Atari VCS GUI and storefront is being developed in Unity and is almost complete. The Atari VCS is fully compatible with the Unity game engine, which powers almost 50 percent of the world’s games, and we are working closely with Unity to ensure that their large and talented developer community has the resources and support it needs to bring the best games and apps to the Atari VCS platform. We have several studios lined up for the VCS launch window and will have more to say about them and their titles when we are closer to retail launch.
Q: Do you anticipate any further changes to the scheduled launch date of March 2020? What about the Indiegogo backers?
Michael Arzt: Right now, the product is progressing according to the updated schedule of March 2020. Our team is committed to bringing a successful product to market that we can be proud of, and that our customers will treasure for many years to come. Atari will always prioritize delivering a high-quality product over a self-imposed deadline. That was true at the project’s start, it was true in March 2019, and it is true today.
Our Indiegogo backers are extremely important to us, and the entire team and I would like to thank our backers once again for their loyalty and continued support. I am sure they will understand our prioritization of delivering a quality product above all else.
When we adjusted our schedule in March 2019, we were aiming for year-end 2019 delivery goal for the Indiegogo backers. Today, given the work still to be done, including the final stages of our certification and testing cycles, we now realize we will need a few more weeks than anticipated. Our teams, factories, and supplier partners are all working incredibly hard to make it happen; but as we all know, the devil is in the details, and we can win or lose a few days during each remaining step and will update our Indiegogo backers as soon as we have a final date.
No matter what, we are talking weeks here, not months, and the Indiegogo backers remain our top priority. Backers will definitely receive their Atari VCS systems before the general public. We will also try to come up with some kind of bonus to reward our backers for their patience.
Q: Can you share your communication plans for the next few months?
Michael Arzt: That’s a good and important question. We always want our backers, fans and customers to know how much they matter to us, and we want them to remain informed.
We understand that all of our stakeholders would like to know where things stand every day and want immediate answers to their individual posts and messages. I respectfully ask them to please understand that, as a public company, we must follow specific protocols that are in place.
In addition, because we also must always consider the needs and wishes of our various partners, we do not always have full control over the pace or timing of our communications. We aim to make periodic updates to our community with complete transparency. If there was one thing I’d want people to always know, it’s that “no news is good news” where the Atari VCS is concerned!
Q: Let’s return to the redesign of the Atari VCS in March 2019. Why was it so important?
Michael Arzt: The first and most impactful improvement was the switch to the new AMD Ryzen™ Embedded R1000 SoC in order to support 4K 60fps HDR content. The all-new Ryzen APU is also faster, cooler, and more efficient, allowing the VCS to benefit from a simpler and more effective power architecture and thermal solution. The new processor includes built-in Ethernet, Native 4K video with modern HDCP, and a secure frame buffer that fully-supports DRM video. This upgrade will translate to better overall performance in a cooler and quieter machine.
We also announced some great changes to the industrial design of the Atari VCS, including a subtle rise to the base of the chassis that both looks better and allowed us to add front-facing USB 3.0 ports which makes them more accessible and therefore more useful to our users. Modifications were made to both the Modern Controller and Classic Joystick as well. These improvements came from rounds of internal testing that helped us identify more specific requirements for the products, allowing us to also incorporate feedback from backers who are most passionate about the project.
Q: There has been some vigorous debate in social media about the Atari VCS. What do you make of it?
Michael Arzt: The Atari brand generates a lot of passion. It is only natural that we will attract interest and speculation, especially in the quiet periods heading into a major product launch like this one. Building a complex product like the Atari VCS from scratch takes time and care, and with any gaming and video platform, content in particular involves extensive discussions and cooperation with third-party partners. As tempting as it might be, we can’t comment publicly on confidential partnerships and licensing discussions while they are in progress. As you can imagine, we are talking about some large brands that have rigorous confidentiality guidelines.
We are glad to be reaching a stage where we can slowly start revealing more details and answer open and new questions from our community.
Q: Will the Atari VCS have original games, native apps, or a browser experience?
Michael Arzt: All three. The Atari VCS will be a gateway to a mix of original games and native apps. The primary way to access games and services will be through the proprietary Atari VCS interface and app store. If a service is not available as an app on our platform at launch, it can still be accessed through the internet browser. Content will include classic, new, and indie games from both Atari and third-party developers, along with entertainment apps for streaming video content, including TV shows and movies.
We have several game studios lined up for the VCS launch window and will have more to say about them and their titles when we are closer to retail launch. Our compatibility with Unity obviously opens things up as well.
In addition, the exclusive Atari VCS Edition of the Antstream Arcade app will give Atari VCS users immediate access to a library of more than a thousand licensed retro games.
Q: One recent report claimed there will be no native apps at launch, and that all services such as Netflix will be accessible through a Chrome-style browser.
Michael Arzt: As I already mentioned, the primary way to access games and services will be through the proprietary Atari VCS interface and app store. For example, if a service such as Netflix is not available as an app on our platform at launch, it can still be accessed through the web browser and the Sandbox Mode really allows unlimited possibility to reach anything on the web.
We don’t expect the pre-launch version shipping to our Indiegogo backers to have a full complement of native third-party apps. There will be games to play and things to do, but the first big wave of apps isn’t likely to come before Q1 of next year as we build toward our full retail launch and see a ramp up of the installed base. Much of this is obviously dependent on the app development timelines and contributions of any developers looking to make their apps available on the Atari VCS.
Atari’s goal is to have the content providers that our community values the most be accessible via apps, and the team expects the volume of content available will grow over time as more Atari VCS units sell into the market and we expand our gaming and entertainment partnerships. Articles that suggest otherwise are inaccurate.
Q: What can you tell us about the custom UI?
Michael Arzt: The VCS is a flexible system designed for multi-peripheral input, including the new Classic Joystick, Modern Controller, and mouse-keyboard. We are hard at work on the UI, which is being developed in Unity and looks really awesome.
The version of the UI we shared with reporters at E3 was serviceable as a demo but was nowhere near the level of quality we have achieved now and will deliver at launch. We’ve made some dramatic improvements to the user experience, and I’m really happy with the team’s current direction and progress. Our goal has been to create a modern UI that “feels like Atari,” meets contemporary expectations and also works seamlessly with our new Classic Joystick and other peripherals.
Q: Has the advent of streaming services and subscriptions, like Stadia and Apple Arcade, affected your approach at all?
Michael Arzt: Actually, it has validated our approach. The Atari VCS was designed with digital delivery as part of the plan from conception. Digital delivery is the current and future state of the games and entertainment industry and how many customers increasingly prefer to discover and purchase new content.
When we made the decision to upgrade to the new AMD Ryzen™ Embedded R1000 SoC, we did so primarily because it enables the VCS to fully-support 4K 60fps HDR content from the ever-growing list of new streaming services. The Atari VCS is designed to be able to embrace any compatible game streaming platform, like Stadia and others still to come down the road.
We see the Atari VCS as a game machine that is also a flexible multi-purpose platform for the living room that will offer natively installed games and content, along with other entertainment options through a myriad of streaming services. Plus unmatched freedom via the Sandbox Mode.
Q: Will the OS and store be part of the Atari VCS when it ships to Indiegogo backers?
Michael Arzt: Yes. The Atari VCS Indiegogo units are going to ship with the Atari OS and integrated storefront. The VCS features an intuitive, easy to navigate graphical user interface, designed for joystick or controller, and an integrated store for games and apps, running on the proprietary Atari OS which is based on a Linux foundation.
In addition, the Atari VCS Sandbox mode — a unique feature not available on more traditional closed-off console ecosystems — will also let users install and boot to a second compatible operating system such as Linux, Windows and others. This open, flexible, multi-platform approach has drawn tremendous user interest and is part of what make our system unique. The VCS will allow you to play games, access all your streaming services, like Steam and other game libraries, all through one device.
The release of the Atari VCS to our Indiegogo backers is an opportunity to get early feedback from a heavily engaged and invested community of passionate users prior to our official launch. We promised backers involvement from the start and this is similar to a software pre-release, which is quite common in the tech and gaming industry.
We expect that early and ongoing user feedback will lead to software updates that improve the experience and functionality. “Early access” does not mean incomplete or unfinished; as with any game system, we look forward to engaging with the community to deliver the best possible Atari VCS experience.
Q: Stepping back, why did you elect to crowdsource the funding of the Atari VCS using Indiegogo?
Michael Arzt: Atari is fortunate to have a thriving business and a loyal community that loves our games and is passionate about the Atari brand. But would our community want a new, modern console from Atari? The Indiegogo platform and campaign allowed us to answer that question by offering a proof of concept and letting us see how the market would respond.
As widely-reported, the first-day response to the Atari VCS crowdfunding campaign in May 2018 ended up crashing the Indiegogo site. That initial response was truly incredible — not only did we get the support of more than 11,000 individual backers; we were able to sign major retailers and enter discussions with a host of partners. We decided to close our active Indiegogo campaign after 30 days when we hit the $3 million mark so we could focus on product development.
We can’t thank our community enough for its support and enthusiasm. We’re incredibly excited about our progress over the past year and can’t wait to share the fruits of our work. As I’ve said before, we are all huge fans ourselves and know that Atari means a lot to our passionate community, and we are looking forward to making this product something they will use and love for years to come! | https://medium.com/@atarivcs/atari-vcs-q-a-with-coo-michael-arzt-645c1a6d3e0 | ['Atari Vcs'] | 2019-11-28 05:03:45.069000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Retro', 'Vcs', 'Streaming', 'Atari'] |
Digital Marketing Tactics to Expand Your Business | There are multiple online marketing tactics at your disposal today. You can hear recommendations from people about the most suitable ones for your business. But when it comes to their application, you need to do your research properly. Only choose those strategies that you think will efficiently advance your business. Here are five of the best strategies you can implement to this end.
Digital marketing
Social Media Marketing
Many brands are under the assumption that just posting promotional stuff to their followers on various social media channels will increase their customer base and sales. But that’s far from the truth. Contrarily, such actions are highly likely to turn off even your existing customers.
A good social media marketing strategy should begin by listing everything you want to do and the outcomes you want to get from your social media. Your social media marketing strategy will guide all your actions on different channels. You can start by directing all your attention to only a single social media channel. Developing and maintaining a solid follower base takes considerable time and effort. If you direct your attention to many channels, you’ll only get confused. It will hinder you from attaining a robust follower base in any of them.
Deciding on a particular platform is very simple. Just find where your target customer base hangs out most of the time. Then, discover why they choose this particular platform and the manner in which you can serve them better here.
Email Marketing
It’s a marketing strategy wherein you send emails to your potential customers and existing clients. This strategy is great for generating leads. You can also request your subscribers to forward the emails they receive from you to their acquaintances. SEO-optimized emails result in greater conversion rates and sales. Moreover, you can ensure that the right email campaigns target the right people through email marketing segmentation. It allows you to send appropriate emails at appropriate times. This process nurtures your subscribers and grows your customer base.
Video Marketing
It’s a highly popular digital marketing strategy that marketers leverage to the utmost. A lot of video content accrues from YouTube. It’s because people everywhere search on YouTube to find answers to their queries. As a business owner, you can create videos about your services to address your viewer’s needs. You can also include various video testimonials and business tours.
A great video marketing tactic is based on storytelling. You will generate a lot of leads when you tell a story that tells about your business strengths and how you can resolve customer issues.
Podcasting
You can effectively market your products and services by creating your own podcast. You also have the choice to get interviewed in another person’s podcast. The latter is better than the former because it may take some time before people start to notice you if you create your own podcast. You may also not have the requisite equipment or relevant industry connections to increase the popularity of your podcast.
But when you get interviewed on another person’s podcast, you directly get noticed from their audience base. Look for podcasters who are interested in interviewing people from your domain. You can also pitch to hosts and tell them why you are a perfect fit to appear on their podcast.
Influencer Marketing
Hiring influencers is a cost-efficient technique for commencing a digital marketing campaign. An influencer does not mean a celebrity. They are people who have a decent number of followers and are known for promoting products on their channels. With a little research, you can know who are the top influencers in your domain and then begin reaching out to them on various channels. Note that they also ask for a fee for promoting your products.
These are some affecting digital marketing strategies you can leverage to boost your business growth online. You don’t have to implement all of them. Start with a specific one and track your progress. You’ll understand which ones get you the most results over time. | https://medium.com/@palani-92109/digital-marketing-tactics-to-expand-your-business-6774efed05d4 | ['Palani Muthukumaran'] | 2021-12-24 17:06:18.516000+00:00 | ['Seo Services', 'SEO'] |
Are you famous? | Are you famous?
“Are you famous?” asked a slightly inebriated German man sitting at the other end of a communal dining table at Le Bistro du Paradou where nephew and I had stopped for lunch on our road trip to Andorra last week.
I’d taken the train from Paris to Marseilles early that morning, rented a car, and picked up nephew from a street corner near a youth hostel where he’d spent the previous night. One large backpack hung from his shoulders and a smaller pack clung to his chest like a baby Bjorn. He carried a bag filled with pastries and a baguette in one hand and the stinky shoes he’d worn through Europe over the last three months were inside another bag in the other hand.
We’d barely left Marseilles on the drive through southern France when I saw a sign pointing to Les Baux de Provences, the tiny medieval village near the unpretentious bistro serving rustic Provençal cuisine I’d discovered two years ago. I’d sat under the cool shade of ancient plane trees on a hot summer day drinking cold rosé and dipping vegetables, boiled eggs, potatoes, and snails into creamy, garlicky aioli. The meal ended with their signature cheese course, eight generous portions of cheeses from around the region served on an enormous rattan tray. I vowed to return one day.
I briefly considered the wisdom of detouring for a leisurely four-course meal at the beginning of a seven-hour drive through winding, unfamiliar mountain roads in the dark. My doubts disappeared when one of the servers welcomed us outside the unassuming building on the side of a country ride and pointed to the menu of the day, cassoulet. Though I’d been dreaming about the aioli, I’d told nephew that I hoped we would eat cassoulet in Andorra, which was near the part of France where this dish was a specialty. Turned out, the Paradou changes its menu with the seasons and Wednesday was cassoulet day!
Cheerful chatter filled the crowded restaurant. Our gregarious server double-checked to make sure we ate meat. He suggested we bypass the wine list and drink from the open bottle of regional red wine on the table that was included with the meal. I complied.
Nephew and I sat at one end of a long wooden farm table. Two German couples occupied the other end. One of the women leaned over and asked us where we were from. After I told her Washington, DC, she nodded and then pointed at nephew and said, you’re not from there, where are you from?
As soon as we’d gotten out of the car and as we walked into the restaurant, I’d noted we were the only people with Asian faces in the busy place. I habitually survey my surroundings everywhere I go and unconsciously count how many people around me look like me. I don’t brood over the information, but I am aware that I am often the only one.
Every once in a while, I detect less friendly treatment. On occasion, someone says something disparaging. Sometimes someone like the German lady points out my nonconforming visage, but with genuine interest. Regardless of the intent, I maintain constant vigilance. I wish I could free up that space in my brain.
I felt protective of my nephew and told the friendly lady that he was from Northern Virginia. I think my firm tone made it clear that there would be no further discussion of that fact and she moved on easily to a different line of inquisition. I told her I was writing about what it means to be American based on my conversations with people from across the political spectrum. She didn’t speak English well enough to express everything she felt about that, but when her eyes opened wide and she drew back suddenly, her body language told me enough about where she stood.
When her husband leaned over her to ask me if I was famous, I smiled mysteriously.
“You don’t have to tell me. I can Google you!” he exclaimed.
I later explained to nephew that whenever my hair is blond, people often tell me they think I look like (pre-facelift) Renée Zellweger. Sometimes people don’t immediately make the connection to Renée, but they have a hazy recollection of someone famous who vaguely resembles me.
Nephew shrugged and asked, “Who’s that?”
Stunned, I quizzed him on Bridget Jones and Jerry Maguire, neither of which he’d seen or even heard of. She hasn’t been in any big movies lately, so I suppose you’d have to be of a certain age to see the resemblance.
At the end of our trip to Andorra, nephew traveled south on a bus to Barcelona and I headed north to Toulouse to catch a train back to Paris. I badly needed coffee, but there were few places to stop along the two-lane road down the mountain, through the national forest at the foothills, and across the plains of Occitanie. I hesitated to pull over because I worried about the intolerant people I might encounter if I stopped at a café in a rural area. I might have been able to make it all the way to Toulouse without a coffee break, but my bladder had other ideas. I reassured myself that blondness created a thin shield of whiteness. Even though I knew my blond hair did not guarantee protection from peril, I felt a little safer. Someone with real blond hair never thinks about such things. (Though we women are always thinking of the dangers of traveling alone.)
The barista at the roadside café greeted me with a hearty “Bonjour” when I entered the building. I used the bathroom, drank an espresso and ate a croissant, and paid two euros, which is the least I have paid for those two things in the three months since I have been in Europe. He cheerfully wished me “bonne journée” as I resumed my journey. | https://artisfear.com/are-you-famous-afdda8540927 | ['Philippa Hughes'] | 2021-10-29 17:05:47.262000+00:00 | ['Race', 'Travel', 'Identity', 'Travel Writing', 'Paris'] |
Greatest challenges faced by Belgian commuters | And how we can solve them together.
The average commuter in Belgium spends almost an hour stuck in traffic daily, with one in five Belgians spending twice that time navigating through the streets. Considering that over 60% of Belgians drive to work, it’s not unsurprising that the country that boasts the Headquarters of the European Parliament, unfortunately also tops the charts in traffic congestion year on year in Europe — Brussels and Antwerp leading the list across all cities in European Union.
The Brussels government has set itself steep targets of cutting down the car traffic by 20%. Individuals and corporations will need to play a defining part, if Brussels is to clear its roads of traffic congestion. With initiatives, such as Slim Naar Antwerpen and Good Move Brussels, the government has shown intent to address the problem head-on. Today, we take a look at the main challenges faced by Belgian commuters and what we can do to help the government in tackling these challenges.
Challenge #1: The cars in front of me do not move!
We all have heard it before — maybe thrown a tantrum while we sat behind the steering — there are so many cars in front of me! Look at this haunted traffic! If you commute in Belgium and travel short distances to work and back by car, you are — no offense — part of the problem. All travel distances less than 8 km, defined as micro-mobility, consist of more than 50% of all trips made in the EU and thus contribute the most to traffic nuisance and air pollution. With a host of mobility options available across Belgium, it is perhaps the time to ditch your car and take the tram, the bus, a bike, an e-scooter. Which brings me to the next challenge…
Challenge #2: My company insists to give me a car, how can I say no?
I just literally got handed this beautiful looking car from my company. I have to accept it, right? Wrong! Belgian companies have been notorious in the past in handing out cars, rather than a raise or a bonus, in order to escape from paying higher taxes (over 50% of new cars on the road are company cars). Yet, as companies get more responsible and start offering alternate mobility solutions, such as Mobility Allowance (or Cash for Car), employees need to start adopting them. As of March 2019, the government passed the legislation on the ‘Mobility Budget’ as an alternative to company cars, which can be used by eligible employees to get more environmentally-friendly commuting options — such as eco-friendly cars and other sustainable modes of transportation (fully untaxed), including a large host of new generation mobility options — or can be exchanged for cash.
The ball is in our court now to trade our company car for better, more sustainable options!
Company cars contribute to almost 15% of all cars on Belgian roads
Challenge #3: Public transport in Brussels sucks!
Fair enough. Your bus may not come on time, or even sometimes may not come at all. You might be stuck inside a metro, because the line is disrupted for some reason. Your train is late by 15 minutes every single day. Rather than complaining, take matters in your own hands — speak to your local representative, carpool to work, use a free-floating (Dott / Lime / …) e-scooter, get a Swapfiets or rent a STEP e-scooter. There are hundreds of startups trying to fight this problem and to push Belgium into a new age of mobility, with help of the government. Companies are increasingly allocating mobility budgets to their employees with the intention of providing a freedom of mobility and saving time and effort in that process. If you are one of those thousands who spend more than 80 hours a year in traffic (and are probably reading this on your mobile phone while waiting in the traffic right now), it is time to embrace these new solutions, and respectfully bid adieu to your car that clutters up this beautiful country.
Want to know more about how you can choose more eco-friendly mobility options like rental e-scooters? Please send in an email to [email protected] or head on down to www.ridestep.co. | https://medium.com/ridestep/greatest-challenges-faced-by-belgian-commuters-b9f1480452b3 | ['Step Mobility'] | 2019-11-21 12:01:36.252000+00:00 | ['Mobility', 'Transportation', 'Belgium', 'Eco Friendly'] |
Tubics — YouTube SEO tool for any active YouTuber | Tubics… I guess it stands for youTUBe analytICS — which works for me. Their website claims to be the #1 SEO tool for YouTube, which, in all honesty, I don’t know if I’ve seen anyone else doing what they do, so it might very well be the case. It’s like the MOZ of YouTube.
The tool is intended to lift organic YouTube traffic through SEO optimization by making your videos rank better on… not just YouTube, but also on Google (duh, they’re connected), ergo giving your channel more traffic.
My Asana To-do list.
As you see above, I’ve had a task for tagging YouTube videos in my Asana list for the longest and tagged the task as “assist” because I was hoping that maybe some day an assistant can help me manage these. Well, today is only day one of me using Tubics, but I think I can finally mark this task as done. After one day of using this tool, this is what I’ve found:
Pros:
Nicely integrated with the YouTube API. Allows you to view and improve your channel to get more eyes on your videos. Sweet!
Kudos:
Design is clean, minimal, and easy on the eyes. Dashboard page is nicely balanced and shows the channel score, suggestions and ranking changes.
Tubics Dashboard
It would be nice to see the total number of non-optimized videos on the dashboard, but all in all, I can’t complain.
The videos list allows you to filter your videos so it shows only the ones you haven’t optimized yet, which always makes me feel warm inside when I can see that number decreasing and I know that my task is finite. It’s a shame that the filter resets after you navigate away from the page and come back.
Support team is on fleek. Shoot. I’m old, I don’t know if I use that term correctly. No matter, Matthias Funk responded to my question almost instantly and provided with the answers I was looking for. Nothing beats a team that cares about their product. And hey, they all wear matching t-shirts. If that’s not worth a grade bump, then I don’t know what does… :)
Tubics Team
Pet peeves:
Doesn’t keep you logged in… or actually… it does, but when you go back to the landing page at www.tubics.com it gives you an option to “login”. How about a quick link to the dashboard? I know, I know, I don’t really have to go back to www. subdomain, but if I do, it feels like I have to log in each and every time.
When editing videos, the first page that loads asks you for “Tags”, but the page doesn’t even show the title… what am I tagging exactly? In their defense, they made the bullets up top clickable so you can navigate to the description, but how hard would it be to show the title of the video I’m editing right now?
What does the save button do? It doesn’t publish anything, right? If I click next does it also save my changes? I’ve lost my edits plenty of times in my lifetime, which makes me want to click that save button every 10 words.
Cons:
Information in the audit doesn’t update nor does it provide me with instructions on how to fix the problem. It literally took me 20 minutes to figure out how to add tags to my channel since the top 5 tutorials on how to do so on Google provide you with outdated instructions. I had to do a lot of clicking around just to change that, and once I did… well, nothing. The score didn’t change, nor did I have an option to reload the score. Do I wait until the next rescan? I’m pretty sure that is the case. When will the next rescan be? Is it daily? Can I rescan it somehow myself?
Recommendations:
What I’d love to have in the future is a place where I can save some macros or templates that I can reuse for all the videos. An ability to reuse common tags, or ability to auto add hashtags at the end of each video could really go a long way for me.
The videos page shows number of views per each video, but you know what would be a nice addition to that? The number of comments. It seems obvious to me, but hey, who knows, maybe it’s a pain with the API so they skipped it on purpose.
Verdict:
All in all, I’m really happy with my purchase and am looking forward to optimizing each and every video I upload to YouTube. I give it a 4.5 out of 5 Samurai Swords, but I’m sure they’ll still keep on tweaking this tool and it’s going to be a 5 out of 5 before I even finish optimizing all my videos, but hey, I call it as I see it.
If you’d like to check them out, they DO have a lifetime access to this tool on Appsumo right now for just $39 — it’s not gonna last long, I’ll remove the link once it’s gone:
or get a free audit here:
And of course, since we’re on topic, here’s my YouTube channel: | https://medium.com/@webforactors/tubics-youtube-seo-tool-for-any-active-youtuber-bfdea303984 | ['Tomasz Iadb Guy'] | 2019-05-15 16:00:00.573000+00:00 | ['SEO', 'Deal', 'YouTube', 'Analytics', 'YouTuber'] |
İyi Yazmak Üzerine - Part II | Get this newsletter By signing up, you will create a Medium account if you don’t already have one. Review our Privacy Policy for more information about our privacy practices.
Check your inbox
Medium sent you an email at to complete your subscription. | https://medium.com/t%C3%BCrkiye/i%CC%87yi-yazmak-%C3%BCzerine-part-ii-e8563985af57 | ['Safa Kutlu'] | 2017-10-21 16:31:27.604000+00:00 | ['Yazmak', 'Blogging', 'Türkçe', 'Kitap', 'William Zinsser'] |
Liven Explains: Why do we Need the Blockchain? | Liven’s platform will drive cryptocurrency adoption for the everyday user.
Ask not what the blockchain can do for Liven, but what Liven can do for the blockchain
Despite the future-shaking possibilities of blockchain technology, there have been numerous cases of companies around the world shoving it where it might not be needed. Did anyone really ask for a cryptocurrency for the dental industry? Or a blockchain solution to sexual consent?
These, ahem, dubious cases have led a lot of punters to question why the blockchain should be added to any project that announces its use of the distrubuted ledger tech. Fortune 500 chief executives have also jumped on the detractor bandwagon, questioning crypto’s purpose and advantage over other traditional financial systems.
And while this is reasonable skepticism in many cases, for Liven, a cryptocurrency and blockchain integration simply made sense as the next evolution of our payments platform. Our 200,000+ users have been receiving their rewards in our own network currency — LivenCash — for four years now, and switching over to our digital currency LVN will not only be seamless, but hugely beneficial.
Our new digital currency will allow Liven to reward our users with credits that have real value, both inside and outside of the platform, and unlock a loyalty and incentive program for merchants without the common rigidity of existing ones.
Still not convinced? Here’s four reasons why Liven chose to use blockchain technology.
Firstly, to help globalise and enable immediate expansion for our current network currency economy. Having our rewards currency as a borderless digital currency allows Liven to fast-track our expansions into locations such as London, New York, and San Francisco. Secondly, to expand our capabilities in peer to peer finance, social spending, gifting, and further the way our currency is used between different people to create a more fluid and dynamic payments system. Thirdly, to decentralise to our existing donation features, opening up never before seen transparency in the world of charitable giving. The fourth reason is more around the blockchain’s use case for Liven. We want to create a user-facing product that interfaces blockchain technology with traditional currency infrastructure to allow people to use a great product while easing them into everyday blockchain adoption.
That last point really sums up why Liven chose to implement cryptocurrency into its platform. As we’ve said before, cryptocurrencies have a utopian problem, and are actively being limited by their lack of everyday recognition and adoption.
By shifting our internal LivenCash network currency to our LVN cryptocurrency, the billions of dollars in Ethereum and Bitcoin globally will be accessible by small businesses around the world. Furthermore, the 99.9% of the population that do not engage with cryptocurrencies will find an accessible use case for blockchain tech in their daily lives.
And while you still might not be able to buy a burger and a coke with your Bitcoin, you’ll be able to buy so much more with LivenCoin through our network of over 1,000 restaurants. Truly a cryptocurrency for the future, and for the people
So to (badly) quote famous US President John F. Kennedy: “Ask not what the blockchain can do for Liven, ask what Liven can do for the blockchain”. | https://medium.com/livenpay/liven-explains-why-do-we-need-the-blockchain-a3ceb696fa79 | ['Dominic Powell'] | 2018-05-15 08:21:28.663000+00:00 | ['Innovation', 'Charity', 'Crypto', 'Bitcoin', 'Blockchain'] |
The Rooted Angel | Their newly purchased home had everything that Mr. and Mrs. Peter wanted, except for the littleness. The house was located at the corner of the street and had a harvest garden and picturesque surroundings. Most of the time, they spent time in their garden. There was an enormous oak tree a few meters away from their bedroom window. They preferred to spend more time in the shade of the oak tree. When Mrs. Peter writes, that oak tree provides better shade for her writing desk in their bedroom. In time, that oak became an essential part of their lives. | https://medium.com/weeds-wildflowers/the-rooted-angel-867f8342f29e | ['Theewari Dulandiya'] | 2020-12-16 01:48:24.164000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Nature', 'Short Form', 'Fiction'] |
Basics of Donut charts with Python’s Matplotlib | Pies
There’s no method for drawing a donut chart in Matplotlib, but we can quickly transform a Pie chart with wedgeprops.
Let’s start with a simple pie.
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt plt.pie([87,13], startangle=90, colors=['#5DADE2', '#515A5A']) plt.show()
Pie — Image by the author
Now we can add the parameter wedgeprops and define the width of the edges, where one means the border will go all the way to the center.
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(6, 6))
ax.pie([87,13],
wedgeprops={'width':0.3},
startangle=90,
colors=['#5DADE2', '#515A5A']) plt.show()
Donut — Image by the author
That’s very straightforward. And now that we can use the space at the center to make our data even more evident.
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(6, 6)) wedgeprops = {'width':0.3, 'edgecolor':'black', 'linewidth':3} ax.pie([87,13], wedgeprops=wedgeprops, startangle=90, colors=['#5DADE2', '#515A5A']) plt.title('Worldwide Access to Electricity', fontsize=24, loc='left') plt.text(0, 0, "87%", ha='center', va='center', fontsize=42)
plt.text(-1.2, -1.2, "Source: ourworldindata.org/energy-access", ha='left', va='center', fontsize=12) plt.show()
Donut chart with details — Image by the author
Donut charts are specifically helpful when we have a simple comparison or proportion to display. In my opinion, the best way to use them is like a circular progress bar, such as the example where we have a single proportion to highlight.
In these cases, we can simplify the chart even more.
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(6, 6)) data = [87, 13]
wedgeprops = {'width':0.3, 'edgecolor':'black', 'lw':3}
patches, _ = ax.pie(data, wedgeprops=wedgeprops, startangle=90, colors=['#5DADE2', 'white']) patches[1].set_zorder(0)
patches[1].set_edgecolor('white') plt.title('Worldwide Access to Electricity', fontsize=24, loc='left')
plt.text(0, 0, f"{data[0]}%", ha='center', va='center', fontsize=42)
plt.text(-1.2, -1.3, "Source: ourworldindata.org/energy-access", ha='left', va='top', fontsize=12) plt.show() | https://towardsdatascience.com/basics-of-donut-charts-with-pythons-matplotlib-100cf71b259d | ['Thiago Carvalho'] | 2021-07-13 15:39:13.873000+00:00 | ['Donut Chart', 'Data Visualization', 'Donuts', 'Matplotlib', 'Python'] |
Kotlin on a Raspberry Pi. There are a bunch of articles and… | There are a bunch of articles and videos on how to use Kotlin on a Raspberry Pi, but they all are focused on using Kotlin/Native to compile code directly to the Pi. What if you want to use Kotlin on the Raspberry Pi, while not worrying about cross-compiling? Kotlin on the good old JVM is your answer!
TLDR: All of my code has been uploaded to this github repository.
Why JVM?
The JVM is a great piece of engineering, it’s fast, battle tested, and it runs pretty much everywhere. You also get the benefit of a huge ecosystem of tools and libraries.
That all sounds pretty great, now how do we do it?
Setting up the Raspberry Pi Itself
If you’ve already got a Raspberry Pi setup, you can skip to Adding Java, otherwise, let’s start at the very beginning.
Downloading the OS
The first step is download the OS from the Raspberry Pi website. There are a bunch of options, but the easiest way is to use the Raspberry Pi Imager tool that is linked at the top of that page. If you’d rather, you can download OS image directly, and flash it onto your SD card with your tool of choice.
Setting up Wifi on the Raspberry Pi
Once you have the OS flashed onto your SD card, the next step will be to get your Raspberry Pi connected to your local network. This is really easy if you have a monitor with a keyboard and mouse connected it (you can just set it up using it’s GUI like any other computer), but what if you don’t have either of those, or what if you flashed the “lite” version of the OS that doesn’t include a GUI by default? Luckily for us, there’s a way to get the Raspberry Pi connected to wifi without any of those things.
Plug your Raspberry Pi’s SD card into your computer Create a wpa_supplicant.conf file in the Raspberry Pi’s boot folder, it’s contents should be the same as below:
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
country=<Insert 2 letter country code here>
network={
ssid="<Name of your wireless LAN>"
psk="<Password for your wireless LAN>"
}
Remember to set the name of your network, its password, and your 2 letter country code.
The next time your Raspberry Pi boots, it’ll connect to your wifi! Now since you have the Pi’s SD plugged into your computer already, let’s enable SSH too.
Enabling SSH
Enabling SSH will allow us to control the Raspberry Pi remotely. It allows us to easily deploy files and debug our code, without needing direct access to the Raspberry Pi itself. It’s super important to enable.
There are a few ways of enabling SSH, but the easiest is by creating a blank file in the root of the Raspberry Pi’s SD card named SSH (note the file doesn’t have an extension). If you are using Linux, or a Mac, the easiest way to do this is by typing the following command into your terminal: touch /PATH_TO_RASPBERRY_PIS_SD_CARD/SSH . The touch command will create a blank file for you. If you’re using Windows, you can open the SD card in Explorer, right click and choose New, then choose text file, enter the name SSH, and finally delete the .txt file extension.
Connecting to the Raspberry Pi for the first time
At this point, your Raspberry Pi should be setup and ready for its first boot. You can take your SD card out of your computer and plug it into your Raspberry Pi. Plug in your power cable and give it a few minutes to start up, some of the lights onboard should start to light up and blink. After waiting a few minutes, it’s now time to test out and see if everything you did so far worked. We are going to try and remotely connect to the Raspberry Pi for the first time.
To connect to the Raspberry Pi, we need to first figure out its name on our local network. The easiest test is by typing the following command into your terminal: ping raspberrypi.local . If it’s successful, it’ll result in something like this filling your terminal:
$ ping raspberrypi.local
PING raspberrypi.local (192.168.1.131): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.1.131: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=2.618 ms
If the results look like this instead:
$ ping raspberrypi.local
ping: cannot resolve raspberrypi.local: Unknown host
You’ll need to do a little more work to figure out what the Raspberry Pi is called. There are a few more suggestions here to help. Most likely you’ll need to call the Pi by its IP address, rather than raspberrypi.local.
The ping command will keep repeating until you stop it. Pressing CTRL + c on your keyboard will put an end to it. Now that we know the Raspberry Pi’s name, we can connect to it.
Still in your terminal, type: ssh [email protected] or ssh [email protected] (if you’re using its IP address). Your computer will now connect and “SSH into” your Raspberry Pi. It should prompt you to enter in a password, which by default is raspberry . If it asks you a yes/no question about “finger prints”, you can just type out “yes”, and you’ll see that it’s connected. You can now use your terminal to move around your Raspberry Pi, as if it was your personal computer.
Changing the root Password
While not needed, it’s good practice to change your Raspberry Pi’s root password away from the default. While not likely, this will make it more difficult to hack.
While logged into your Raspberry Pi’s pi account, type the command passwd . This will ask you to enter in the current password, then your new password, then to confirm your new password.
Adding Java
We have one final thing to set up on the Raspberry Pi itself: making sure Java is installed. If you have the standard “full” version of Raspberry OS, Java is probably already installed. To test, in the terminal where you’ve SSH’d into your Raspberry Pi, type java -version . If it outputs something like the following, you’re good to go and can skip to the next section:
$ java -version
java version "11.0.1" 2018-10-16 LTS
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment 18.9 (build 11.0.1+13-LTS)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM 18.9 (build 11.0.1+13-LTS, mixed mode)
Otherwise, you’ll need to install Java. Luckily for you, this is actually pretty easy. All you need to do is run the following two commands to install it:
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install default-jdk
Once this is finished, you can check that Java was install properly by running the java -version command again, it should now output something similar to what I outlined above.
Awesome! That takes care of setting up the Raspberry Pi, now onto the good stuff! You can now log out of your SSH session by entering the command exit into your terminal, we are going to focus on your host computer for a bit.
Getting Your Environment Ready
You can write Kotlin using pretty much any text editor, but IntelliJ is an awesome IDE (and it’s free) and a great tool for Kotlin development. Both IntelliJ and Kotlin were created by the same company, so its Kotlin support is first rate.
Installing IntelliJ
You can download and install IntelliJ directly from their website. We will only need the free Community edition, and not the Ultimate one. Once it’s downloaded and installed, open it up and work through the “first time setup wizard”. You should eventually come IntelliJ’s start screen, where you can choose to start a new project/open an existing one.
Installing the Embedded Linux JVM Debugger Plugin
Now that we have IntelliJ all setup, we are going to install a plugin that will make running and testing our Kotlin code on our actually Raspberry Pi way easier. It’s called the Embedded Linux JVM Debugger plugin and it allows you to run, deploy and debug Kotlin code directly on your Raspberry Pi via IntelliJ’s UI. It’s a really time saver and makes the overall development experience substantially nicer.
From the IntelliJ welcome screen, click on the Configure in the bottom right corner. This should open a drop down menu, from that menu, click on Plugins. Select the Marketplace tab at the top of the window and start typing Embedded Linux JVM Debugger, and click the Install button. The plugin should start downloading and installing, once finished, click the Okay button to finish up and return the welcome screen.
Now that we have our environment set up, let’s get programming!
The Programming Part
Before we get into the code, we have to step through the project wizard, to set everything up.
Project Setup
Click on the + New Project button to get started. You’ll be greeted with a huge amount of options to choose from. For our use case, it’s pretty easy, we will choose Kotlin from the list on the left. Then set the options from the top:
Choose a Name for your Raspberry Pi project, and a Location to save it (any name you want and any where you want)
for your Raspberry Pi project, and a to save it (any name you want and any where you want) Choose the Console Application under Project Template
under Choose Gradle Kotlin for the Build System
for the Choose a Project JDK that matches what you installed on the Raspberry Pi earlier, if you don’t already have a JDK installed, click on the Download JDK option, and choose one from the list. OpenJDK is a great choice here, but you really can’t go wrong.
that matches what you installed on the Raspberry Pi earlier, if you don’t already have a JDK installed, click on the option, and choose one from the list. OpenJDK is a great choice here, but you really can’t go wrong. Click Next
On this next screen, you can leave everything default:
Default options here, feel free to change the Test Framework, if you want.
Click Finish and it’s time to get started!
Initial Test Run
This will open up a new window that looks like: | https://medium.com/@pete32/kotlin-or-java-on-a-raspberry-pi-de092d318df9 | [] | 2020-11-27 20:17:42.642000+00:00 | ['Kotlin', 'Raspberry Pi', 'Software Development', 'Java', 'Programming'] |
Why I Find The Trailer For “Nappily Ever After” Problematic | When it was announced that actress Sanaa Lathan was going to star in Netflix’s Nappily Ever After, there was a sliver of skepticism that overtook me as I contemplated what to expect from an offering, that was supposed to tackle the complex relationship that Black women have with their hair.
Weeks later, Lathan posted the first image of her shaved head, as proof that production was underway, and then weeks after that, the next post showed a burst of curls sprouting on her head, and that’s when my excitement for Nappily Ever After — faded.
The highly-anticipated trailer recently dropped, and it confirmed my earlier assumption of how the casting of a light-skinned Black woman with hair texture that women like me would probably kill for — is typically always the safer bet in narratives that require a more prolific fit.
I’m actually a huge fan of Sanaa Lathan, and my appreciation started with the The Best Man and then escalated with Love & Basketball. She was part of the crop of Black actresses that dominated my generation, and while her talent was and still is indisputable, she also represented the era when actresses of color had to possess certain features and skin hues in order to be palatable for the big screen.
Nothing has changed much since the nineties, but at least there’s a level of progression spawned on by the thread of conversations on social media, that highlight the issues of diversity in Hollywood, and how despite all the chatter, dark-skinned actresses with heavy doses of ethnicity are still dismissed or even trolled by disapproving fans who aren’t down with out-of-the-box choices.
I try not to jump the gun when it comes to judging things I haven’t experienced, but there was no way to contain the mixed reaction that followed after seeing the trailer about a successful Black woman who seemingly has it all, until it she doesn’t.
And then as a form of emancipation, she decides to get rid of her crowning glory, in order to end her reign as a “control freak” while finally “letting herself grow.”
The general reception to the sneak peek was expectedly positive as praises from Black women poured in with rapid glee. Anything to do with hair is usually an easy sell, and Netflix has obviously caught on to this fact. And when your leading lady is a popular actress who has paid her dues, there’s really no way to lose.
And while there’s no doubt that Nappily Ever After, will be another win when it hits the queues of over-zealous viewers, I will remain cautiously open to the possibility of being swept off my feet, even though it’s unlikely that my instincts have led me astray.
The main reason why I find the trailer for Nappily Ever After problematic is unfortunately entangled in the leading lady, who is demonstratively not qualified when it comes to claiming the woes that accompany the texture of hair that is historically described as “nappy.”
I have written extensively about the shaming of Black women’s hair especially by Black men who seem to enjoy publicly ridiculing our grooming habits for the pleasure of exacerbating an already highly-sensitive subject. It’s no secret that when it comes to Black women and hair, there’s definitely a political and societal element that can be primally offensive.
And once you add the bitterness of appropriation, and how seamless it is for Kim Kardashian and her sisters to readily adhere to the braided styles of the moment without any pushback, and with the full support of fashion editors who label the looks as “trendy” — there’s even more incentive to resent the hostility and inflexibility of a climate, that still rates Black women the lowest in the desirability category.
Every woman regardless of race or creed wants to feel beautiful, and that ability to walk into a room and own it, is usually tied into the way you feel about your tresses. Bad hair days are the ultimate buzz-kill, and when the timing coincides with events that can’t be fucked with — that’s when you almost curse God for the burden of nappy strands.
And this is why Lathan’s casting as the woman who shaves off her hair to emancipate herself from the habitual straightening doesn’t quite make sense. As much as I would like to cheer her character’s new lease on life, there’s a huge part of me that wishes the part was assigned to a relatively unknown Black actress, who resembles my template, and sports a hair texture similar to mine.
For Black women like me who have a tougher time relaxing our strands compared to our comrades, who are able to wet their edges, gel it down, and air dry to perfection in less than an hour, the stakes are higher when it comes to presenting our finished looks to a gawking and judgmental crowd.
Sanaa Lathan is a very capable actress, but I don’t have to see the movie to know that she won’t be convincing enough as the Black woman who needs to separate herself from the struggle of a high maintenance hairstyle, in order to find the deeper meaning of her roots — because that’s not a personally relatable cause.
She has always proudly exhibited her “good hair” for all to see on Instagram, just like the biracial women who splatter their pages with odes to the natural hair movement by utilizing popular hashtags to celebrate their #blackgirlmagic and the pure joy of being a #naturalista.
Lathan isn’t biracial, but she’s also not the Black woman who is ceremoniously vilified for being “too dark” or “too ethnic” for Hollywood, and she’s definitely never complained about having hair that’s too coarse for comfort.
My point is that my disappointment over the choice for lead actress, in an offering that centers around the tender topic of how hair encompasses the life’s blood of Black women, who can’t easily roll out of bed and neatly brush back the strays of their existence — has everything to do with the lack of visibility for dark-skinned Black actresses.
They never get the ingenue roles that Zendaya and Storm Reid accrue, and they are systematically shut out of the romantic comedies that star leading men who need to be paired with actresses that are demure and light enough to beef up their manhood.
Nappily Ever After had the potential to make an impressive impact, by effectively illustrating the layers of mental disarray that can be complicated by the reliance on a grooming regimen that is mandatory for emotional upkeep.
Most Black women who are challenged by their hair texture tend to hide under temporary fixes that prevent the responsibility of dealing with the root of the matter. This is why the natural hair movement is so poignantly necessary for those who’ve constantly battled the stigma of their “tight coils” and the “nappiness” that they were told would never lead to happiness.
It would’ve simply been refreshing to see a Black actress who acutely reps the image that exemplifies the validity of a movement that has been hijacked by those who can’t possibly relate to the core of the issue.
Of course, at the end of the day, the messaging will be delivered, and perhaps my pettiness will be defeated by the sheer charisma of Lathan who never fails to supremely light up the screen.
But there’s no way to avoid the truth of how these stories that are specific to the Black woman aesthetic, are often times diluted to serve the purpose of viability, due to the cast list that limits the entry of up and coming actresses with the features that are still too potent for acceptance and increased exposure.
When you imagine a dark-skinned actresses with hair that’s resistant to the straightening techniques that some Black women are able to muster with ease — embodying the character who ends up being the heroine of Nappily Ever After — that’s when the story gets the boost it needs and becomes much more than a makeshift fairytale with the predictable ending.
If we’re going to go there, then we should really go there without the security of guarded choices, that don’t yield the emotional investment that viewers like me are yearning for — and until that happens dark-skinned women with “bad hair” like me will have to continue to wait for the wave of diversity to sweep into our neck of the woods.
I just hope we don’t have to wait forever. | https://nilegirl.medium.com/why-i-find-the-trailer-for-nappily-ever-after-problematic-8fc4f4ac9ae5 | ['Ezinne Ukoha'] | 2018-08-17 11:52:45.689000+00:00 | ['Beauty', 'Black Women', 'Culture', 'Film', 'Diversity'] |
Heart vs. Hands vs. Head: The Top Product Marketers Rank the Most Important Traits | And the results may break your heart, hurt your head, or cramp your hands.
The Product Marketing Alliance, a rapidly growing community of nearly 30,000 product marketing managers (PMMs), recently published their Top 100 Product Marketing Influencers of 2020. The report details the answer to a question on a lot of those 30,000 PMMs’ minds: What makes a great product marketer?
Before I could dive in to the report (it is 100+ pages after all), I received Lenny’s Newsletter, “A comprehensive survey of Product Management.” In it, he asks 1,000 product managers, a field intrinsically linked to product marketing, to rank the importance of Heart (e.g. empathy, culture) vs. Hands (e.g. execution) vs. Head (e.g. intelligence).
I couldn’t help but wonder (okay, I’ve been watching some Sex and the City recently — sue me!), how would product marketing managers answer this same question? How would impactful product marketers rank Heart, Hands, and Head in their qualities that make up a great product marketer?
As I went through the profiles and advice of the 100 influential PMMs, I tallied each trait they mentioned as one of these three Hs.
Heart was by far the most popular, with empathy and storytelling being the most frequently mentioned traits. Other popular traits in this category were being customer-centric (I stopped counting once the fourth person used the expression “take a walk in their shoes”), collaboration, and being able to work cross-functionally across the organization. I was tickled that a few people said trustworthiness, but one person said gossip. So maybe the best PMMs have some duality in them. Big Gemini energy.
Following behind was Head, which had curiosity and strategic thinking cited most often, and in last place was Hands, which occurred half as often as qualities related to the Heart. The most common Hands qualities were the ability to pivot and multitask, or juggle, as one PMM called it.
How are you balancing your skills as a PMM between Heart, Head, and Hands? Do you agree that execution is less important than matters of the heart? | https://medium.com/@abbybarsky/heart-vs-hands-vs-head-the-top-product-marketers-rank-the-most-important-traits-740888238f51 | [] | 2021-01-05 17:41:25.533000+00:00 | ['Storytelling', 'Empathy', 'Marketing', 'Product Management', 'Product Marketing'] |
Theft Detection Using Machine Learning | Theft is a common criminal activity that is prevailing over the years and is increasing day by day. To tackle this problem many surveillance systems have been introduced in the market. Some are simply based on video surveillance monitored by a human while some are AI-based capable of detecting suspicious activity and raising an alarm. However, none of them are intelligent enough to identify what kind of suspicious activity is being carried out and what kind of protective measures should be taken in real-time. This blog presents the design of an effective surveillance system using machine learning techniques.
Introduction
Theft is the most common crime committed across the world. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), ~80% of the criminal cases are related to theft [1] as shown in figure 1. Increasing theft rates cause people to suffer both financially and emotionally. Therefore, there is a need to develop a more deterrent surveillance system, which is convenient to use, free from false alarms, minimize human interference, and cost-effective.
Fig. 1. Contribution of theft in crime
Machine Learning (ML) techniques prove to be fruitful in developing efficient surveillance systems. This blog aims to design a theft detection and monitoring system, which would be capable to detect theft using a motion-sensing camera using ML and alarm the owner with an alert message along with the captured image of that instance of motion.
The major contributions are:
To detect and activate motion in the still place according to requirements
To recognize facial expressions and detect people wearing the mask using the ML model
To detect the suspiciousness in the surrounding for any kind of weapon and raise alert messages
Proposed Methodology
The proposed methodology consists of three phases- Data Collection and Acquisition, ML models, and Actions are taken. The workflow of the proposed methodology is shown in figure 2.
Fig. 2. Flow Chart
3.1 Data Collection and Acquisition: Datasets utilized are taken from Google Pictures, Kaggle, and Flickr 8k dataset are utilized, which contains 8000 pictures each with 5 captions. This dataset is fitting sufficient to prepare the demonstration. Bigger the number of pictures, troublesome to prepare the show with the given computational prerequisites.
Video is captured utilizing an IP camera, which is associated with the remote organizer. This is often done by utilizing the OpenCV library. Once the video is captured, it is at that point handled and broken into outlines of pictures. These picture outlines are at that point nourished to ML models to encourage investigation. Information is cleaned and pre-processed sometime recently applying ML models. In information cleaning, a lexicon of one of a kind words shown in all the captions of the dataset pictures is created and spared on the disk. To create the show ended up more strong to outliers we considered as it were those words, which happen at the slightest 10 times within the whole corpus.
In information pre-processing, the image is changed to a fixed-size vector, which is then fed to a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based on exchange learning. This demonstration is prepared on the ImageNet dataset to perform picture classification on 1000 distinctive classes of pictures but since we needed to extricate a fixed-length instructive vector for each picture so we evacuated the final softmax layer from the show and extricated a 2048 length vector (bottleneck highlights) for each picture.
3.2 ML Models: Image frames are processed and fed to different ML models. Each model performs a task in a particular sequence so as to analyze different evaluation parameters.
3.3 Actions: According to the results obtained from the ML models the actions will be taken such as raising alarms, sending alert messages to the owner only, sending alert messages to cops only, sending an alert message to the owner and cops both.
The system consists of several levels of surveillance at each level the activity in each frame of the video will be monitored thoroughly using ML models, which are solely trained to perform their specific job. There are a total of six levels of surveillance and the system consists of two modes (i.e. day and night) and it will totally depend on the user which mode is required at the moment.
Motion Detection: To detect the motion we firstly detected if any human being is present in the frame or not and to do so we used CNN. Convolution can be used to achieve the blurring, sharpening, edge detection, noise reduction, which is not easily achieved by other methods.
In the convolution method center of the kernel is kept at each element of the image input and the corresponding elements are multiplied and added together. CNN is a type of neural network, made up of a large number of neurons with weights and biases which define the relations between them. Each neuron receives several inputs, takes a weighted sum over them, passes it through an activation function, and responds with an output.
After getting quite normal results from the model trained on a dataset with 2000 images with a human being and 2000 images without a human being. We tried transfer learning for that we used the YOLOv4 neural network and extracted the weights just before the last two layers of the network and then used those pre-trained weights to train the model which can detect the human being in the image and using the transfer learning technique accuracy got improved. After detecting the human being in the frame we now can detect the motion and so we used the python library “OpenCV”.
To identify the motion different strategies like frame differencing, background subtraction, optical flow, etc. and got the most excellent comes about with frame differencing. The frame differencing strategy employments the two or three adjacent frames based on time series picture to subtract and gets diverse pictures, its working is exceptionally comparative to background subtraction, after the subtraction of the picture it gives moving target data through the edge esteem. This method is straightforward and simple to execute, conjointly it is comparable to the background subtraction. But this strategy is exceedingly versatile to energetic scene changes; in any case, it by and large falls flat in identifying entirely significant pixels of a few sorts of moving objects. Extra strategies that ought to be received in order to identify ceased objects for the victory of the next level are computationally complex and cannot be utilized in real-time without specialized equipment.
Mask Detection: Thieves usually wear masks to hide their identity while attempting theft. Therefore, the output of this module will help in determining if the theft is real or false. Dataset used in this module is from Google Images and Kaggle. Google images are scraped using the selenium package and Chrome Driver extension. To get better results in a short time the approach Transfer Learning is used and the MobileNetV2 architecture is trained on the weights of ImageNet. Amid training, the main focus was on stacking the face cover detection dataset from disk, training a model (utilizing Keras/TensorFlow) on this dataset, and after that serializing the face mask detector to disk. The model was trained on the information set containing 1000 images for a person with a mask and without a mask each.
The distinctive steps utilized in this module are:
Train mask detector: Accepts the input dataset and fine-tunes MobileNetV2 upon it to make a model.
Detect mask image: This module performs face mask detection in static images
Detect mask video: Utilizing the camera, this module applies to confront cover discovery to each frame within the stream.
For mask detection, we utilized a crossover model in which we, to begin with, recognized the face utilizing haar cascade and after that identified the cover on the face utilizing MobilenetV2 prepared on the weights of the Imagenet. Once the confront veil finder was prepared, we at that point moved on to stacking the mask locator, performing face discovery, and after that classifying each face as ‘with mask’ or ‘ without a mask’.
Facial Expression Detection: As a pre-processing step, the images are cropped around the faces and intensity normalized. Features are extracted and local descriptors are calculated. This computation is represented using a Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors (VLAD). This labeled dataset is trained on the emotion classes using the SVM classifier. Lastly, the face is identified from the image using a haar cascade classifier and the image is cropped into 256 x 256 resolutions. Weapon Detection: Weapon detection is another important module for differentiating between false and actual threats [8]. The approach we have used to detect weapons is similar to that of Mask Detection except that we use a haar cascade to detect the hand of a person and then detect the weapon in the hand. To train the model we used the data set containing 4000 images of a person with a weapon and person without a weapon each. The label of the images employed in the dataset is categorical. Therefore, we used a one-hot encoding to convert the categorical labels to binary values. As our dataset is small, we used augmentation technique to achieve good accuracy. Data augmentation could be a technique that may be used to artificially expand the dimensions of a training dataset by creating modified versions of images within the dataset. Kind of like mask detection, transfer learning is used for training the model. The MobileNetV2 architecture is trained on the weights of ImageNet to realize better accuracy during a short time. During training, callbacks like checkpoints and early stopping are used to save the best-trained model. Pose Detection: The issue of human posture estimation is frequently characterized since the computer vision strategies that foresee the circumstance of changed human keypoints (joints and points of interest) like elbows, knees, neck, bear, hips, chest, etc. It’s a very challenging issue since different components like little and barely unmistakable parts, occlusions, and huge inconsistency in enunciations. The classical approach to enunciated posture estimation is utilizing the pictorial structures system. The fundamental thought here is to speak to a question by a bunch of “parts” orchestrated in an exceedingly deformable setup (not inflexible). A “portion” is an appearance format that’s coordinated in a picture. Springs appear in the spatial associations between parts. When parts are parameterized by pixel area and introduction, the coming about structure can demonstrate verbalization which is uncommonly significant in posture estimation. (A organized expectation assignment). This strategy, be that as it may, comes with the impediment of getting a posture demonstrates not looking at picture information. As a result, inquire has centered on improving the representational control of the models. After getting a few unsuitable results from the above-mentioned strategies inside the final, we utilized a neural organization by Google which gave us the desired results. After getting the posture recognized, we prepared a show that portrays whether the postures recognized in outlines ought to concern approximately suspiciousness inside the outline or not [9]. To do so, we made a fake dataset that contains 10,000 pictures labeled with their postures and a word reference which contains data almost the postures and their pertinence to the sort of action conceivable at that point. Activity Captioning: Activity captioning is a task similar to image captioning but in real-time that involves computer vision and natural language processing. It takes an image and can describe what’s going on in the image in plain English. This module is essential for determining the course of actions that are being performed by the person in view. In surveillance systems, it can be used to determine theft by captioning the frames obtained from the camera and finally alerting the authorities. We again used the approach of transfer learning by utilizing the ResNet50 architecture trained on the weights of ImageNet. After getting the results from the above six modules those results are combined and then further becomes the input to an ML model which decides to whom it should address for the alert message whether it should be the owner or the cops or both [10].
The main aim of the project is to embed computer vision into a camera. We designed the system in such a way that the camera is connected to an external computer on which the algorithms will run. The client is also connected to this computer through the internet. Whenever a suspicious activity is detected an alert message will be sent to the client. The message will consist of an image captured through the camera along with the various features extracted by our 6 modules. We can also use Raspberry Pi instead of a regular computer to reduce the cost of the project.
Results
To distinguish the movement we basically utilized the outline differencing method without identifying the human creatures in it which gave great comes about but inevitably, movement get identified indeed by the development of the creepy crawlies or other undesirable things, to expel that commotion we attempted to set a limit nearly same as the alter in pixels to happen due to nearness of a human within the outline. But in this case, moreover, the clamor was tall so in the end, we made an ML show that can detect human creatures within the outline. After identifying people within the outline movement is recognized utilizing outline differencing techniques.
In the “mask detection” module where masks are going to be detected using the ML model, the model was first trained using simple CNN a combination of some convolution layers, max-pooling layers, and some dropout layers followed by dense layers but the accuracy was not up to the mark. Then to improve the accuracy of the model trained on the smaller datasets we used the transfer learning technique and got great results with that.
In “facial expression detection”, we primarily developed a model which detects the frontal face of humans present in the frame and then we build another model to determine the facial features using CNN with activation function ‘Relu’ but we got a poor response with that so we replaced ‘Relu’ with ‘elu’ and got great accuracy.
In “weapon detection”, we detected the weapons in the image and we used the same technique as of mask detector and achieved good accuracy.
In “pose detection”, we used a model trained by Google to detect the poses and then getting results from that we processed those results to an ML model which detects the poses in the image relates to suspicion or not and to do so we used classification techniques and got best results with multivariate logistic regression.
In “activity captioning”, where we designed an ML model which captions the activity is the combination of computer vision and natural language processing and we firstly tried basic image classification and text generation algorithms but didn’t get good outcomes then we used transfer learning for image classification and Bert for text generation and eventually we got great results.
Finally after combining the outcomes of these modules the input for another ML model is created which determines to whom the alert message should be sent and to design such a model we used several classification techniques like logistic regression, SVM, etc. But getting the best results with decision trees.
An Intruder without a mask.
An intruder with a mask.
Conclusion and Future Scope
The work carried out in this blog is basically centered to plan and create effective and helpful observation frameworks to unravel security issues that are able to offer assistance to reduce/stop a theft. Though a significant amount of research has been done in the past to solve such security problems, it still remains challenging due to increased complexity and various theft actions that are taking place daily. The system will capture images only when there is any human being in the frame and motions exceed a certain threshold that is pre-set in the system. It thus reduces the volume of data that needs to be processed. Also, it will help to save data space by not capturing static images which usually do not contain the object of interest. Users using this system need not worry about supervising the cameras all the time instead the system will inform the user about the activities happening and will also suggest that the user should take some action or not. After successfully implementing the project, it can be applied in a smart home security system which would be very helpful in auto theft detection for security purposes. It can also be useful in banks, museums, and streets at midnight.
References | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/theft-detection-using-machine-learning-a4232ea51f1c | ['Jatin Arora'] | 2020-09-25 13:23:41.439000+00:00 | ['Deep Learning', 'Neural Networks', 'Computer Vision', 'Data Science', 'Machine Learning'] |
White Pure Muslin Readymade Palazzo Suit | White Pure Muslin Readymade Palazzo Suit is designed for festive occasion or evening event. This set features digital exclusive print on its pure muslin full flared top, paired with pure muslin free size palazzo bottom. This designer attire will surely fetch you compliments for you glamorous sense of style. Team it up with statement jewellery and fancy clutch to look mesmerising.
This set comprises of full flair top, palazzo bottom. This set is the best choice to wear on eveing party or as an casual wear outfit. Digital print work is completed with fril on top. | https://medium.com/@shezonedlabel/white-pure-muslin-readymade-palazzo-suit-d3b82e38836e | [] | 2020-12-23 10:36:29.316000+00:00 | ['Eos', 'Designer Dresses', 'Designer', 'Indo Western Dresses', 'Indo Western Gown'] |
We May Be The Ones Hurting Our Children The Most | We May Be The Ones Hurting Our Children The Most
We fear outside influences, but maybe we should be fearing ourselves.
Photo by Emir Kaan Okutan from Pexels
Sometimes it seems emotional abuse is overlooked in favor of its more visible counterpart — physical abuse. But the scars emotional abuse leave are just as real and just as damaging.
We fear someone hurting our child. We fear them being introduced to dangerous habits, ideas, and substances. The thought of another person mistreating them may feel us with indignation and anger.
But do we fear the impact we have on them? Do we fear ideas and behaviors we may introduce to them?
Not so much. We think that as long as we provide a roof over their heads and make sure their basic needs are met, everything’s fine. We have our problems, they have theirs, and the two don’t interact with each other.
Or do they?
Children learn by watching their parents. By mirroring the way they act, and saying and doing the things they see. They look to them for their emotional needs, not just their physical ones.
But this is easy to forget.
Adults struggle too. There are a myriad of things we struggle with, and all too often our kids pay the price for those struggles.
We don’t think twice about snapping at our child to give us some space. But they do. We don’t consider constantly telling our children to clean up their messes and stop being so loud as damaging in the least. But they do.
They come to us for love and kindness, and are constantly pushed away. They’re told their feelings aren’t as important as ours and are confused when we seem so angry.
Sometimes we are angry. And instead of getting help, we take it out on our children. To me, this is scarier than any outside influence there is. | https://medium.com/invisible-illness/we-may-be-the-ones-hurting-our-children-the-most-8fa05f40188b | ['Ashley Walker'] | 2020-11-21 17:44:08.481000+00:00 | ['Abuse', 'Mental Health', 'Family', 'Parenting Advice', 'Parenting'] |
LA’s finest | This is a story about aspiring screen writer, Hadley, who moves from a small town in Michigan to Los Angeles. On her way to California, she reunites with her high school ex boyfriend who offers to take her in due to financial issues. Their time together opens up doors of Hadley’s past that change the course of her life.
Bishop International Airport, Michigan
“Flight from BIA, Michigan to LAX, California, gate 44 will be boarding in approximately 9 minutes,” The speakers echoed through the walls of the airport.
“Damn it,” I ran out of the bathroom dragging my bags behind me. I’m never this unorganized. “Excuse me, sorry!” I said repeatedly as my clumsy feet stumbled into people. “Gate 41, 42, 43,” I looked up at the boarding screen. “Ah, gate 44.”
“We will now be boarding all coach customers,” The loudspeaker boomed.
“That’s me,” I whispered to myself. I dragged my big suitcase to the long, long line. “This could take a year, am I right?” I jested to the person behind me. All I got was a weird look, so I pressed my lips together and looked down at my phone. I opened my writer’s page and looked at all the comments.
MistyB1234
YOU HAVE TO WRITE MORE OF THIS OR ELSE I’LL DIE!!!!
Gm720
Love this story. Shared it with all my friends already haha
Corinne_xoxo
You got some real talent girl… Rock on!!
I smiled and stepped up in the line.
“Ticket please?” A deep voice said.
“Huh? Sorry,” I took out my wallet and rummaged through it to find the ticket, “Sorry, my wallet is a little full,” I said awkwardly. I even made myself cringe. “Found it,” I smiled apologetically and handed the man the the crumpled up, thin piece of paper.
The man nodded and handed my ticket back to me as I stepped onto the plane. The smells of the plane, so familiar. Even if you haven’t been on a plane in nearly eleven years, like me, you still recognize it. I found my seat pretty quickly. Window seat, hell yeah! As I got myself situated, a deep voice came on the loudspeaker.
“Hello! Welcome to Cap Airlines! This is your captain speaking, Captain Weiss. The flight from Michigan to California should take about 3 hours and 42 minutes. In case of emergency-” I zoned out. I put my phone on airplane mode and pulled out my computer and decided to do some private writing for a while. A blonde flight attendant made her way through the crowded aisle towards me.
“Ms. Stevens?” Her fake smile was irksome.
“What?” I viciously looked up at her.
“You’ve been moved up to first class.” She replied.
“Seriously?” Why me?
“Yes, Ms. Stevens. You are in seat 2A. Can I help you with your bags ?”
“I’m fine, thank you.” I gathered my stuff, and headed up to first class! I’ve never been in first class before. I’m thrilled.
As I approached my seat, I thought I saw a familiar face, “Eric Gates,” My jaw dropped. “What are you doing here?”
“Is that you, Hadley?” The boy, now man turned to me.
“Wow, it’s been a while,” I pushed up my glasses and looked him up and down. “You’ve really changed.” I couldn’t believe it.
“You have, too.” Eric sat down next to me.
“Is this your seat?” I asked hoping he’d say no.
“Yep, 2B,” Eric replied checking his ticket. “We have tons to catch up on. I haven’t seen you since senior year!”
I nodded, “I’m sure there’s a reason for that.”
“Look, Hadley. I was a different guy in high school, and you have every right to be mad. But I really have changed,” Eric looked me straight in the eyes. I couldn’t help looking at the clear ocean blue color of his.
“I believe you, but you really hurt me and you know that,” I explained. “Actually, nevermind. I don’t want to discuss this. It’s been years-”
“I have changed. I don’t know h0w to prove it to you, but I have,” Eric touched my arm.
Quickly, I pulled my arm away and folded them, “I hope that you did.” I sat in silence for a little thinking of what to say, “So, what’s bringing you to California?”
“I’m starring in a movie,” Eric responded.
“I guess you’ve always had a thing for getting caught up in drama,” I laughed.
Eric laughed along, “And you? Why are you going to Cali?”
“I’m a writer’s assistant for a screenwriter. You know I’ve always loved to write.” I replied.
“Yeah, I’ve read some of your stuff on that site actually. You have a lot of talent,” Eric winked at me.
“Thanks,” I blushed, but then I remember what he did and straightened myself out. Not knowing what to say, I cautiously pulled my computer out of my bag and opened it. The screen displayed one of my journal entries. I rummaged through my carry on looking for the cord to charge my computer and plugged it in.
“What are you writing?” Eric said after a minute. He looked over my shoulder.
“Not any of your business, thank you very much,” I turned my computer towards the window.
“Just wondering,” Eric backed off.
“Sorry, this is just private stuff.” I put my hair behind my ear.
“Ooh, about a boyfriend per say?” Eric chuckled as if he were in the tenth grade again.
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I rolled my eyes and kept typing.
“Noted.” Eric smirked.
“Yeah, okay, don’t get any ideas,” I lightly elbowed him.
“I’m just kidding around,” he grinned. His dimples pulled my eyes toward them as if they were magnetic.
“I have to say, I’m pretty impressed that you got a starring movie role,” I closed my computer to avoid distraction.
“Yeah, I mean, I worked really hard for this role and I’m pretty excited,” Eric put his fingers through his hair.
“You ended up going to CalArt for drama, didn’t you?” I asked trying to remember his application in my hand six years ago.
“Nope, Julliard,” Eric corrected me.
“Really?” I asked in confusion, “But, you aren’t — nevermind.”
“What?” Eric looked at me.
“Nothing,” I shook my head and looked down at my lap.
“I’m not talented enough?” Eric laughed.
“That’s not what I meant,” I paused not knowing what to say.
“I actually worked really, really, really hard on audition day. It was always my dream school since Mr. Hernandez gave me the lead in the school play,” Eric explained in a cheerful manner.
“Oh, Mr. Hernandez,” I sighed. A sense of nostalgia came over me, “I’ll never forget the day he ‘accidentally’ walked into the girls dressing room during the musical.”
Eric broke into hysterical laughter, “I could hear the girls scream from the other side of the auditorium!”
I giggled along with him.
“How’d you like Michigan?” Eric asked.
“I mean, I’ve never really been outside of Michigan, so it was pretty similar I guess. I still lived at home,” I laughed reminiscing about how boring my life was.
“Why?” Eric asked.
“I mean, it’s not like we just had money to throw around and all my family lived in Michigan so I didn’t exactly have a reason to leave,” I responded.
“Of course you have a reason,” Eric said like one of those motivational speakers that stop twelve year olds from having sex and doing drugs.
“And what’s that?” I crossed my arms.
“The world is out there,” Eric put his hand on my shoulder and with his other hand, swayed it, piercing the air. “That has to be what you’re doing on this flight: exploring?”
“I’m just taking a job. There’s not much out there for me to explore. I’m not really that type,” I shrugged.
“Everyone has some kind of reach. Or at least a little fun.” Eric looked at his phone.
“Hey, I have tons of fun!” I fired back playfully.
“Yeah? What do you do for fun?” Eric asked, half-laughing.
“Write,” I replied bravely.
“Oh yeah, tons of fun,” Eric did jazz hands, just to add to the sarcasm.
I paused thinking of fun things I do, “Oh! And I knit and-”
“Stop right there, Grandma,” Eric joked. “You knit? For fun?”
“I’ll have you know, it’s very relaxing,” I scoffed. “You should try it, you know, for the experience.”
“Okay, how about this,” Eric cracked his knuckles. The sound of his fingers making that noise made me cringe, “After we land, I will try knitting.”
I grinned.
“Only if you will do the 60 hot wings challenge with me at the diner by the airport,” Eric maliciously smiled.
“No way,” I shook my head.
“Okay, be a chicken then,” Eric paused, “or eat some.”
Alright, how bad could this hot wings challenge be? “You know what? I’m in. Can’t wait to see you try to make me a scarf. My favorite color is purple by the way.”
“Or I could make you a rag to clean up all the hot sauce that’s going to be on your face after the hot wings challenge.” Eric raised his eyebrows.
“You’re good, Gates,” I felt like a kid again. Having fun and doing stupid things for no reason. Just because.
“Sorry for the wait, we will be taking off in T minus two minutes,” The captain said over the PA.
“I haven’t been on a plane in over a decade. I’m kind of scared,” I admitted.
“Are you afraid of heights?” Eric asked.
“Extremely,” I nodded pressing my lips together.
“What about roller coasters?”
Again, I nodded.
“Oh, boy,” Eric laughed.
“Told you I’m not the adventurous type,” I rested my chin on my hand.
“You’ll break out of your shell,” Eric looked me up and down.
I blushed a little, then recomposed myself. I hate that a part of was still drawn to him. I just had to keep reminding myself of the Eric I knew in high school. There’s no way he changed this much, and he was always a pretty good actor.
“Okay, please get seated and make sure your buckles are tightly fastened. There is a flight attendant in each section demonstrating safety procedures. Thank you. Enjoy your flight,” Hopefully that was the final announcement. That lady’s voice makes me want to stab knives in my ears.
“God, that lady’s voice is the most annoying thing in the world,” Eric rolled his eyes.
“I was just thinking the same thing,” I sighed. I felt a huge a push and my stomach must have jumped to my heart. “What was that?”
“The plane just moved, here, look out the window.” Eric reached over me and pulled up the window covers. The illuminating light from the outside nearly blinded me.
“Whoa!” I gasped in reaction to the light. Then, we started moving, like, a lot, and backwards. “Are we meant to be going backwards?”
“Yeah, we’re just pulling out into the runway,” Eric replied.
“So, it’s like a parking lot?” I asked.
“I guess, but way more spacious and it definitely serves different purposes,” Eric explained.
“Sorry for all the questions,” I bit my thumb in embarrassment.
“Don’t be, I like being the more knowledgeable one for once,” Eric laughed.
I blushed. Okay, Eric has made me blush like three times in the past five minutes. I was instantly put out of my state of engagement to him when the plane started going really fast. I looked out the window.
“Are you okay?” Eric asked.
“Um,” I was too jumbled to answer his simple question. “We’re just, um, going so fast.”
“Hey, it’s okay. I promise. It’s safe,” Eric paused. “You’re safe.”
And those were the words I needed to hear. I grabbed his hand, shut my eyes, and felt my stomach jump. I opened my eyes and looked out the window. We were going up towards the troposphere, or sky for those of you less educated.
“See? You’re okay,” Eric smiled sweetly.
“Yeah,” I exhaled. I realized what I was doing and let go of his hand. “Sorry.” My cheeks flushed red, and not because I was blushing.
“Anytime,” Eric nodded and stretched.
“I think I’m going to do some more writing and then maybe try to get some sleep.” I said.
“Go ahead, I won’t interrupt.” Eric put a neck pillow on and took out a book. It was a Shakespeare play.
“You’re reading Shakespeare?” I asked.
“Yeah, Othello,” Eric said, his eyes not leaving the page.
“Is this required for your role?” I asked, half-laughing.
“No. I read plays for pleasure. It helps me with my acting and study of character,” Eric explained.
“Huh, that’s cool,” I grinned. “I love Shakespeare.”
“I remember,” Eric yawned and leaned back in his seat.
“I’ll leave you to it,” I turned back to my computer and started typing away.
I think hours must have gone by before I passed out. I had already written eleven pages and it felt like no time at all. I invested a lot into this piece, I guess. It definitely knocked me out, though.
LAX Airport, Los Angeles
“Hey, we landed,” A voice said. “Hadley?”
“Hmm?” I groaned. Then I opened my eyes and realized that I was leaning my head on Eric Gates’s shoulder. I jolted up, “Sorry.”
“It’s more than okay” Eric laughed.
I rubbed my eyes and yawned, “Were you awake the whole time?”
“No, I took like a twenty minute nap,” Eric stretched.
“That’s nice. What time is it here?” I asked, taking out my pocket watch to adjust it.
“Almost seven,” Eric replied.
“Pm?” I gasped.
Eric nodded.
“Oh geez! My Airbnb reservation was an hour ago! I thought they said that we’d be in by 5:45!” I grunted and stood up.
“Hadley, it’s okay,” Eric stood up, too, “We’ll find a place for you to stay tonight, okay? I promise.” A warm, contagious smile spread across his face.
“Would you, um, pass me my bag, please?” I asked shyly.
“Of course,” Eric got down his suitcase, then mine. “You have stuff at baggage claim?”
I took my bag, “I don’t. Do you?”
Eric shook his head, “Hey, at least now we’ll have time for the 60 hot wings challenge.”
As much as I didn’t want to do it, I couldn’t back out. My reservation is late, and I don’t exactly have a place to stay, and I don’t have anything else to lose, so, “Can’t wait.”
“Look at you, taking risks and having fun. What a change!” Eric laughed sarcastically.
“Yeah, what a change,” I rolled my eyes.
“Let’s head,” Eric and I began to exit the plane. “Also, I have my own apartment in LA so if you want, I could just put some pillows down on the couch and you could take my bed.”
“I wouldn’t want to make any trouble,” I said politely.
“No trouble at all,” Eric paused. “Please, Hadley. I want you to.”
“I can just find a motel for the night. It’s no big deal, and besides. I think there’s one close to the movie set.” I replied.
“Happen to be along Santa Monica Boulevard?” He asked.
I nodded.
“It’s not called ‘LA suites’, is it?” Eric looked at me with a disgusted look on his face.
“Um, yeah, why?” I asked unsurely.
“Absolutely not. That place is revolting. They have a roach problem, and once my cousin found a roach in his carry on after the bellhop took it up.” Eric gagged at the thought of it.
“Ew,” I shivered in disgust.
“Seriously, just stay at my place. It’s no trouble at all, and you don’t have to pay.”
Okay, staying in the apartment of my ex-boyfriend from high school? It’s only one night, and it’s not like we’ll be staying in the same room. I guess it couldn’t hurt, “Alright, but just one night.”
Eric grinned. “Don’t worry. It’s not going to be awkward, I’ll just sleep on the couch, you can have the bed.”
“What? No!” I said, “I’m not going to kick you out of your own bed.”
“It really wouldn’t be a problem. I have to wake up early tomorrow as well, and I wouldn’t want to wake you.” Eric replied.
“I’m an early bird,” there was a long awkward pause. “Please, sleep in your own bed.”
“If you insist,” Eric laughed and rolled his eyes.
As we got off the plane and headed down to the parking lot, things felt natural. Like we were together again, and we ran away. It was almost perfect, except it wasn’t real. We weren’t together. Besides, it’s temporary. After tomorrow, I’ll doubtfully see him again in an unprofessional setting.
Eric opened the trunk, “I’ll take your bag now, madame.” His French accent was awful, but I couldn’t resist smiling a little.
“Thank you, good sir,” I played along. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that this car was the same car my dad owned before he passed. The same exact one. It was cleaned up, but it was still the 1986 red mustang. It even had the rip my sister made on the seat when we were kids, but the plate was different. “Eric, where did you get this car?”
“After senior year, I came here to look for some kind of summer job behind the scenes, but I needed a car to get around and some guy sold me this for an insanely good price. Originally, I thought there was something wrong with it for a price so low, but man, I really think that guy was just generous or stupid.” Eric explained.
What if it really was dad’s? No, I’m crazy. The odds of that are so low. He was gone long before senior year. My stomach felt upset by the thought of dad and the plane ride. “Um, Eric? Is it okay if we do the hot wings thing another time? I’m just really jet lagged and tired, that’s all.”
“Fine by me,” Eric closed the trunk. “Hop in.”
“Welcome to la casa de Eric,” Eric flung the door open.
Wow. “Nice place,” I dragged my bag behind me as I looked around. Black leather furniture, huge plasma television, a marble dining table, polished floors, and a staircase leading up to a mezzanine with the master bedroom and bathroom and a balcony.
“I’ll bring you pillows and a blanket for the couch.” He dropped off his bag in his room, then went to the closet.
“Thanks,” I shyly smiled and pushed my glasses up. Eric went back into his room. I turned around seeing a full window looking out on Los Angeles. I slowly walked up to it and smiled. It’s like my future in the palm of my hand.
“Enjoying the view?”
I quickly turned around, “Sorry, you startled me.”
“No worries,” Eric grinned. “Just dropping off your sheets and grabbing some water. Can I offer you any?”
“With those manners, I just have to accept,” I turned back to the window.
“What time do you have to be at the movie set?” Eric asked.
“Ten AM sharp.” I checked my phone to be certain.
“You’re kidding, I don’t have to be anywhere until eleven. It’d be my pleasure to drive you.” Eric offered.
“You’ve already done so much for me,” I turned to him.
Eric walked up to me and gave me the glass of water, “What’s the address?”
I showed him my phone.
He laughed in a slightly devious but playful manner.
“What?” I chirped.
“Hadley, I think we’re working in the same movie. In that I’m acting and you’re writing.” Eric’s smirk accentuated his dimple even more.
“Are you kidding?” I blundered.
“I’m not,” Eric laughed even more.
“Well then. I’ll, um, see you tomorrow business partner?” Oh, lord I am the most awkward person on the earth.
“You kicking me out?”
“What! Of course not,” I reassured.
“Hadley,” Eric touched my left elbow, “I’m completely joking.” He paused and grinned, “You really haven’t changed at all.” He took a deep breath, “It kind of feels like home seeing you.”
I could barely breathe, “It is really nice to see you again, as well, Eric.”
Eric wanted to kiss me. I could tell. I even remember in sophomore year the first time he kissed me.
After the first football game of the season, his team lost. It was around ten thirty and I sat in the bleachers, staring at the stars after everyone left. Eric came out devastated, still with his sweaty jersey on, and sat next to me. After hours of talking, my little flip phone rang and it was my mom. He drove me home, and before I got out, he grabbed my hand. He looked at me the same way he’s looking at me right now. Only this time, I didn’t kiss him.
“Good night, Eric. Thank you for everything.” I said as genuine as I could. I meant it. I mean, he provided me food, shelter, and even a bit of closure.
“Good night, Hadley.” Eric’s soft voice sent chills up my spine. I hate that I keep having to remind myself that Eric and I have nothing anymore. Our time has passed.
An extravagant view comes with a price; blinding sunlight. Usually I wake up before that, but jet lag hit me I suppose. Slowly, I opened my eyes and blinked a few times. There was some kind of smoothie and a note on the side on the coffee table. I read the note.
Early bird, huh? Just kidding. I’m in the shower right now. I made you a smoothie with strawberries, blueberries, and bananas. If you want anything else, just check the fridge.
-EG
I couldn’t decide whether he really changed or if he was just pretending to so he could have sex with me or something. I fully sat up and sipped on the smoothie. It tasted so healthy. Despite my thin physique, I eat a great deal of junk food.
I poured what was left of my smoothie into the sink and rinsed the glass. I typically don’t eat breakfast. I’ll have a cup of coffee or green tea, but rarely a proper meal. Even the fruit smoothie was a lot for me. I heard footsteps coming down the stairs.
“Good, you’re awake,” Eric beamed.
“Sorry, jet lag kind of dropped a load on me.” I chuckled nervously. I could feel my heart rate slightly speed up.
“No worries. Do you want to shower or anything? We still have lots of time before we have to be on set.” He offered as he adjusted the collar of his baby blue button-up.
“Actually, that would be nice.” I nodded.
“Of course. Use my shower, though. There’s already clean towels and the shower head in the guest bathroom can be unreliable.” Eric laughed.
“Okay, I can be quick if we need to get a move on,” I dug into my suitcase to get clean clothes for the day.
“Take your time,” Eric’s warm voice was so soothing. “There may be some women’s shampoo and conditioner that belonged to my ex under the sink.” Not so soothing anymore.
“I’m just going to tie my hair up for the day, but thank you. Really.” I grinned and raced up the marble stairs. I didn’t want to keep him waiting, but I have to say, I am curious about his ex. I mean, if her stuff is here, that means they moved in together. If they moved in together, they were probably in love. I wonder if Eric is still in love with her. Or is it possible that Eric is still in love with me? No, I’m crazy. If he genuinely changed this much in less than six years, it’s no question that he’s over me.
Figuring out a shower that you’re not accustomed to is like the government broke down your door and are ordering you to fly a futuristic spaceship and you just have to do it. You have no idea what to do and it’s too weird to ask for help. Also, you’re naked. I swear this shower is from another dimension. There are four shower heads and only three handles. It is just illogical at this point.
I felt bad when I was with Eric in his car. Rather than focusing on him, I looked around for clues leading to my father. The gash in the back seat had to be from May, my younger sister. It was in the same exact place. It even had the same gray duct tape on it.
“Right, Hadley? Hadley?” Eric repeated.
“Sorry, yeah. I was just distracted.” I explained.
“What’s on your mind?” He asked as he made a turn.
I didn’t want to tell him about my dad just yet. He knew that my dad wasn’t in the picture, but he doesn’t know the full circumstances, “It’s just so new for me.”
“It’s amazing how quickly you get settled in,” He sighed. “I mean, once you get here you never want to leave. It’s like the ocean is fine wine and the atmosphere is a drug. California, especially Hollywood, is almost too perfect.”
“Nothing’s perfect, Eric,” I said sourly, “but you’re similes are impressive.”
“Why, thank you, madame.” Eric playfully smiled. “Actually, I think you’re wrong.” He paused. “I can think of something absolutely perfect.”
“And that is?” I crossed my arms. If he said me, it would have been sweeter than the icing on the cake for my sixteenth birthday.
The car stopped abruptly before Eric ended up saying anything, “Sorry. That idiot came out of nowhere. You all right?”
I nodded, “Are you?”
“Always,” Eric winked. What a flirt.
We pulled into the parking lot of the set. A short, chunky man with brown, receding hair ran up to Eric.
“Mr. Gates, I’m so sorry. I forgot your coffee, for I was not informed of your early arrival to set. I did not bring your guest a coffee either, for I was not informed you were bringing a guest. I saw your car pull in from the lobby.” The short man was incredibly out of breath.
“David,” Eric got out of the car and put his hand on the man’s shoulder, “you’re good. She’s not really a guest. She works here, too. Her name is Hadley Stevens. Would you shadow her today? Make sure she gets everywhere she needs to be.”
“Will you be alright on your own, Mr. Gates?” David asked.
“Absolutely. Thanks, David.” Eric patted him on the back twice then pulled me in close and whispered to me, “Text me if you need anything. I airdropped you my work and personal contact information. Text my personal.”
I nodded.
“Are you due in a certain location?” David asked me.
“Yes, room R3A.” I replied.
David’s face looked terror-stricken. “Are you sure it’s R3A?”
I showed him the email from the company.
After looking at it for a minute, David lead me into the building. “Who exactly are you working for?”
“His name is Arjun Briar.” I read the name off my phone.
“You must be pretty talented, then.” David said.
“Thank you, but why draw that conclusion?” I asked.
“If you didn’t know, Mr. Briar has been in the top ten most successful screenwriters in the world since the eighties.” David explained.
“How did I not know that. I was so busy writing scripts for him I didn’t even brush up on researching Mr. Briar at all.” I felt a sense of panic and forgetfulness. Usually, I am on top of things like this.
“Hadley, was it? I don’t think you should be worried. He usually doesn’t meet with his assistants until weeks, sometimes even months after working with them. Mr. Briar must be very impressed with you.” David eased my anxiety.
“Really?” I beamed.
“Wouldn’t doubt it,” David replied.
We approached room R3A. My heart beat sped up, which also increased the ATP flowing through my body so I was jumpy. Who needs coffee, anyway?
“I’ll leave you to it.” David turned and walked down the hall to the elevator.
“Thank you,” I said graciously. I took a breath and knocked on the door.
About eleven seconds passed before Mr. Briar opened the door. “Who the hell are
you?” His eyebrows curved inwards.
“I’m Hadley Stevens. I’m one of your assistants. I’m due in this office right now.” I explained straightforwardly. I learned from very early on how to talk to powerful people like this. Be smart, but not too smart. Don’t show fear, but don’t show confidence. There is always a gray area.
“Ah, you’re the anonymous Hadley,” Mr. Briar nodded and invited me into his office.
“Andrea, get out of my office. Now, please.”
The old woman shakily stood, and without a word, left the office.
“Parents, am I right?” Mr. Briar chuckled. I couldn’t tell if he was joking, so I just lightly giggled and sat in the chair across from him. “Hadley, you have done a terrible thing.”
My face dropped, “Pardon?”
“Yes. You did a terrible, terrible thing.” He paused. “You keep yourself anonymous online. Do you have any idea how much extra work I had to do to track you down?”
“I apologize for my hardships, sir. I keep myself anonymous because I’d prefer to keep myself out of the spotlight.” I replied.
“Are you living in Los Angeles now?” He asked.
“I still have to get settled in,” I dodged. I didn’t want Mr. Briar to think that I’m some homeless junkie.
“Since you live here, keeping yourself out of the spotlight is not exactly an option, sweetheart.” Mr. Briar stated.
I didn’t know what to say.
“It is a crime to keep yourself anonymous. What about your first book? Plan to keep that anonymous, too?” Mr. Briar asked bitterly.
“I’ve never really thought about it,” my hands started to sweat.
Mr. Briar’s eyes narrowed, “You obviously have never taken anything seriously in your whole life. You are lucky that I’m not going to fire you.” He took a breath. “You have too much talent to waste it. Starting this Monday, you will get to this office no later than eight every morning and leave no earlier than eight at night. If that’s a problem you may walk out now.”
Let’s see — I don’t have a car, let alone a proper home. At least for the next day or so, I have to base my schedule off of Eric’s. I can’t borrow money. I can’t call a cab every morning, but it’s too expensive to buy my own car. This is most definitely a problem. “Not a problem, sir.”
“That’s what I like to hear.” Mr. Briar grinned. “Now, go get me a copy of the script so I can make final edits.”
“Where would I get a copy?” I asked sweetly.
“Figure it out,” he chuckled.
I anxiously stood from my seat and opened the door. Outside stood David, “David! I’m so glad you’re here. I need a copy of the script for Mr. Briar.”
“Are you Mr. Briar’s personal assistant now?” David asked.
“I don’t think so, but he offered to mentor me and help me with publishing works of my own.” I replied. If I’m being honest, I’m very excited. I haven’t really thought about proper publishing, mostly because I don’t crave publicity. However, it’s always been a dream of mine to be a successful writer. I guess the two contradict a little bit, but I don’t like the idea of people waiting outside in the rain or cold to get one signature and a hug from me. I like being that person waiting outside. I like being inside of things and being in the real world. Fortune leads to success, and success leads to fame, but fame leads to loneliness and essentially living in a bubble. I don’t want to live in a bubble. I just want to be a real person.
David’s face dropped, “Script copies are on the second floor.” He scurried away like a rodent. Weird.
That’s not very specific. I sighed and made my way down a flight of stairs.
I must have taken two laps around the entire floor before I finally just decided to ask somebody, “Excuse me. Can you direct me to the room with the script copies?”
The man turned around. “You’re standing in it.” His voice was very deep.
“Do you know where I could grab a copy? It’s for Mr. Briar.” I explained.
The big, dark, bald man with a deep voice looked as if he shriveled up like a dead flower. He nodded, and without saying a word, handed me a copy.
“Thank you,” I smiled, “have a nice day.”
No response.
I raced up the stairs to Mr. Briar’s room and knocked on the door.
“Who is it?” He boomed.
“Hadley!” I called.
“Enter,” Mr. Briar commanded.
I walked through the door.
“Close the door,” another imperative, “and sit, please. Hand me the script.”
I did just as he said. Mr. Briar does not seem like the type of person that you would want to disobey 0r upset. I can imagine that an enraged version of him would be frightening. His mood swings are also quite unsettling, especially due to my weakness of reading people. All I want to do for Mr. Briar is please him, but how can I do that if I never know what he wants from me?
“Hadley!” A voice called for me as I walked out of the office building by the set. As I looked around, I saw Eric, waving his hand in the air.
I walked towards him with a grin, “Did you wait for me?”
He nodded, “I had to. I know you don’t have a place to stay yet, or a car. I want to be here for you.” He opened the passenger’s seat door.
“Eric, you don’t have to do this. You’ve already done more than enough.” I was so happy and grateful, but I felt guilty.
“Get in the car,” Eric’s eyes gleamed at me.
I stiffly grinned, and sat in the leather seat. I felt something weird that I hadn’t felt since I was back home in Michigan — security. I feel safe with Eric. I trust him. Don’t I? I mean, I spent a year and a half with him being the one of the most important people in my life. He was my rock, and now he is my rock again. Eric is giving me himself for me to fall back on. He literally is letting me sleep at his apartment, driving me back and forth, and so many other things.
“So I hear from David that you are Mr. Briar’s apprentice,” Eric said while starting the car.
“He, um, offered to mentor me,” I blushed.
“He’s a big deal, that Arjun Briar. Just be careful, though,” Eric looked at his right mirror and backed out of the parking lot.
“Careful?” I asked.
“He can be,” Eric searched his mind for the word, “hardcore.”
I laughed, “I noticed.”
Eric’s eyes hardened, “Hadley, I’m serious.”
I asked him to elaborate.
“Arjun Briar is a dangerous man.” Eric moved his eyes back to the road, turning onto the highway.
Would he just spit it out already? “What do you mean?”
“Look, you just got here and I don’t want to scare you. Just always stand your ground, okay? Hollywood isn’t all sunshine and smiles. There’s a lot of really fucked up people.” Eric quickly turned his head back to the road.
“Is Mr. Briar one of those fucked up people? You’re kind of scaring me saying that you don’t want to scare me,” I scoffed.
“We can talk about it later.” I felt like he was treating me like a child. We are both adults, and he shouldn’t have to keep professional information from me.
“Pull over.” I demanded.
“What?” Eric glanced at me, confused. “We just got onto the highway.”
“You heard me. Pull over!” I raised my voice.
Eric began to slow down and pulled over, “What’s wrong?”
“You’re telling me to stand my ground?” We came to a stop. “Tell me what the hell you’re talking about. Everyone who knows I’m working for him acts so secretive and fearful when I just say his name.”
“Hadley, it’s not that simple,” Eric softened his voice.
“I don’t care. Tell me anyway,” my eyes narrowed and stared into his.
Eric looked away.
“Tell me, Eric.” I growled.
“What’s the matter with you? I’m trying to protect you, and you’re acting crazy.” Eric turned his head towards me again.
I felt my heart pulse in my ears and my blood boiling, “I don’t need to be protected. I’m not a kid.”
“You don’t have half the experience I have in this world. You have it easy for now,” Eric responded.
How were we already fighting? “You think that this has been easy for me? Moving here all at once and trying to get my financial shit together hasn’t exactly been a breeze. All I want to do is know why everyone is so scared that I’m working for this man. I mean, aren’t we all working for him?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that,” he tried to console me and rubbed my back.
“I just agreed to Mr. Briar that I would come in no later than eight A.M. every morning, leave no earlier than eight P.M. every night, and work my ass off for him throughout all those twelve hours. I don’t even have a place to stay or enough money to rent! I don’t have a car, I don’t have a home, and I don’t have a future out here.” Uncontrollable tears rolled down my face. I opened the car door and got out and started to walk along the side of the highway.
Eric jumped to his feet and ran after me, “Hadley, get back in the car! Where the hell are you going?”
“I don’t know.” I broke down.
Eric embraced me tightly, trying to lift me up, “Everything is going to be okay. You can stay at my place for as long as you need and I will drive you to set at eight am and drive you back twelve hours later. You do have a future here, okay? You have so much talent and after this job passes, you will move on to beyond amazing things, and probably be even more successful than me.”
I looked up at him with a flush of helplessness in my face and tried to take a few breaths, “I’m sorry.”
“I get it. It’s not so easy for the first few out here,” Eric put his jacket around me. “Let’s say we get back into that car and I’ll get you some hot chocolate. Sound good?”
I nodded and followed him back to the car, clutching the side of his brown leather jacket that reeked of men’s body spray.
I sat down on the tall bar stool across from Eric as a waitress with countless tattoos and the stench of cigarettes approached our table with waters.
“A beer for me, and a hot chocolate for the lady.” Eric ordered.
“Yes, sir,” the waitress disappeared into the kitchen.
“I didn’t know we were drinking,” I chuckled.
“You don’t have to,” he checked the time.
“I know, but now I kind of want to.” I replied.
“Is this the same Hadley Stevens from Dyrewood High?” He asked as we both broke into laughter.
“I could throw quite a few shots back in college.” I bragged.
“Well, then,” Eric cleared his throat. “Can we get a round of tequila shots, actually?”
The waitress came back over, “Including the beer and hot chocolate?”
I shook my head.
“Alright,” the waitress huffed and walked back to the kitchen.
“Tequila? Really?” I groaned.
“Can’t take it?” Eric’s competitive demeanor humored me.
“You wish. I’m just surprised you chose my favorite,” I smirked.
“Oh, is it really?” He asked sarcastically.
“One hundred percent,” I pushed my glasses up and smiled.
He crossed his arms and sat back in his chair. He started to laugh a little.
“What?” I playfully rolled my eyes.
“Life is just,” Eric paused and took a breath, “funny.”
“Okay, we haven’t even started drinking yet.” I chuckled at my own joke.
“Just look at us.” He paused. “We’re started out as ordinary Michigan grown little kids and now we’re in Los Angeles, and despite everything that happened, we still found our way back to each other.”
I simpered as the waitress put eight shots in front of us, “Here’s to us.” I took the first shot, then comforted the bitter taste on my tongue with the lime. It burned my throat, but I refused to cough or gag. I don’t want Eric to see me as the same girl that I was in high school, because I’m not.
Effortlessly, Eric downed a shot, too. Then another, and another until he even touched the lime.
Suddenly, childish impulsive and competitive instincts kicked in: I had to drink the rest of my shots before he finished his. I plugged my nose drank the other three as fast as I could. I wanted to throw up. Sucking on the lime didn’t help at all.
“Damn, Hads,” Eric laughed and sipped on his water. “Nice try, but I finished mine first.” He winked.
“We’re done?” I pretended to be confused.
“Okay,” Eric huffed, “very cute, Hadley, but you just took four shots. I know that you’re still a lightweight.”
He was right. I’ll be shitfaced by the time I arrive back at his apartment, “Eric, please. I’m an adult, and I know my alcohol tolerance a hell of a lot better than you do.”
“Personally, I don’t really want to drink more. I still have to drive us back home,” he said, “but whatever you want to do.”
“Well, there’s no fun in being drunk alone,” I quickly said. Thank god he didn’t want to drink any more.
Eric signaled to the waitress to bring us the check.
I started to pull out my wallet.
“Hadley, don’t,” he lightly touched my hand.
“Please,” I sighed, “it’s the least I can do.”
“The least you can do is save money for either an apartment or house, and I won’t let you spend it on frivolous things like tequila.” Eric pulled a black card out of his wallet and handed it to the waiter with the check. He was right, though. I should get out of his hair as soon as I can.
“Thank you,” I shyly grinned. My vision started to blur. I took off my glasses, cleaned them with my breath and sweater, then put them back on. Of course my vision isn’t blurry because of my glasses. It’s the tequila.
The waitress came over with the check.
Eric flashed the waitress a smile of gratitude and began to fill out the payments. He
put his card in the check-holder. “I don’t want you to spend a cent when you’re with me. In all honesty, I have more money than I know what to do with. I don’t have a wife that I can buy shoes and handbags for. I don’t have children that I can send to fancy private schools. My parents won’t accept money from me when I try to pay their bills. I’m only going to get more money with this movie coming out next year.”
“I wish that I had these problems,” I sighed, “and you are really a saint. I can’t let you spoil me like this, though. I’m not your girlfriend, at least not anymore.” I batted my eyes at him. Alcohol always makes me flirtatious. “I don’t want to be dependent on you forever, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t want you in my life.”
“That’s sweet of you, Hadley. I want you in my life, too,” he smiled. I wanted to kiss him so bad, but that’s probably just the tequila talking.
The waitress came back and took the check-holder off the table.
“It seems like you’re feeling better now,” Eric remarked.
“I’m feeling amazing,” a goofy grin spread across my face.
Eric laughed at me, “It’s kind of funny to see you let loose. You should try the wine back at my place. It’s Italian: Dolcetto.”
“Sounds sweet, because dolce means sweet in Italian. Get it?” The room started to spin and I began to breathlessly laugh.
He snickered and glanced at his watch. “It’s getting pretty late. I recommend that you just go right to sleep when we get back.”
“The night’s just getting started!” The shots have officially taken over my mouth. I could control my thoughts, but not anything I was actually saying. My filter was nonexistent. All I could do was wonder how the hell am I still a lightweight at twenty four. I mean, isn’t this when I’m supposed to be able to drink until my liver collapses?
The waitress handed Eric the check-holder.
Eric signed the slip of paper, put his card back into his wallet, thanked the waitress and stood up. “Okay, Hadley. Let’s go.”
I stood from the chair, but my legs felt like jello. As I walked towards the door, I lost my balance and slipped.
Eric caught me just before I hit the ground, and put my arm around his shoulder. “Jesus, you only took four shots.”
“So did you,” I whined. Eric was so dreamy. “You’re so dreamy.” Oh geez, did I really just say that out loud? “I mean, I’m so dreamy,” That really didn’t sound much better.
Eric continued to snicker as we approached the car. He took out his key and rested me up against the hood so he could open the door on the other side. After he unlocked the doors, he came back over to me, put his hand around my waist, and helped me into the front seat. “Put your seatbelt on, and watch your feet.” He slammed the door shut, then came in on the other side and turned on the ignition.
I struggled to get my seatbelt on. All of this is so embarrassing. Why on earth did I think it was a good idea to drink my first night in Los Angeles? I knew I’d get carried away.
“Need some help?” Eric took the seat belt tongue from my hand and clicked it into the buckle.
“Wow, you’re fancy,” I giggled.
Eric turned his head to the windshield and leaned back in the seat. He put on his seatbelt, without struggling, and stuck the keys in the ignition.
As we drove through East Hollywood, I felt exhausted. All the turns and stops Eric seemed sharp and abrupt. I was glad when we finally reached the parking lot.
Eric turned off the car and got out. He opened the door for me and took my hand to help me out of the car.
I was too wasted to look for more traces of my father, but I couldn’t stop making up unrealistic scenarios in my head.
“How are you feeling?” Eric asked.
I couldn’t concentrate on what he said, so I just smiled. I leaned on his shoulder for support, “I’m sorry,” I said.
“You’re slurring your words, Hads. What did you say?” He pressed the elevator button.
“I’m sorry,” I tried to say clearer.
“Whatever for?” Eric walked me into the elevator.
“I am such a stupid mess,” I felt like I was drowning in my own words, “I’m broke, homeless, and drunk, and you have to help me. That isn’t fair. I need to do something for you, or else karma will bite me in the butt.”
Eric laughed and looked down, then looked back up at me. “You aren’t a mess. It’s just taking some time for you to settle in, and that isn’t your fault. You’re also in Hollywood; you’re supposed to have fun. I’m happy to help.”
I have no idea what happened to Eric Gates in the past five years. The shallow, careless, playful socialite had become a well-mannered, respectful, professional actor. It almost seemed like a parallel universe.
Eric helped me out of the elevator as the doors opened. As we walked down the hall, and I just had to look at him. I still love him.
An alarm that I didn’t remember setting went off. I abruptly woke up with a massive headache. My empty stomach growled, but I didn’t know whether it demanded food or a trip to the bathroom. I rubbed my eyes and reached over for my phone to check the time. However, my phone wasn’t there. It took me a minute to realize where I actually was, and of course, I was in Eric’s bedroom. Worry flowed through my body, hoping I didn’t sleep with him. My underwear was on, and I was in an oversized tie dyed shirt. I picked up my glasses that must have fallen on the floor in my sleep, and put them on. Despite my pounding headache, I stumbled out of his bedroom and down the stairs.
Eric was in the kitchen cooking eggs on the stove. He looked up, “Good morning, party girl.”
“I’m so sorry about last night,” I sat down on the couch and put my face in my hands.
“No worries,” he smiled and brought me over two aspirin and a glass of water. “You must have a killer headache.”
“I do,” I swallowed the pills and chugged the water. “Thank you, Eric. I hope I didn’t sleep talk or anything.”
Eric chuckled, “Hadley, I slept on the couch.”
“Of course you did,” I awkwardly laughed. I leaned my head on my hand.
Eric smiled at my self deprecation, “We do have to leave in twenty minutes, though.”
That startled me. Usually it takes me around twenty five minutes to be completely ready, but I can just shower when I get back and tie my hair up again for the day.
The day was the same as the one before, except I was starting to find my way around the building and keep Mr. Briar happy at the same time. I figured things would get easier and I would learn more as time progressed.
The clock read 7:53 P.M.. I anxiously waited for Mr. Briar to come back to his office and dismiss me for the day.
A minute later, he barged in, “Hadley.” He boomed.
“Yes, Mr. Briar?” I looked up at him.
“You will get your check at the end of the week,” Mr. Briar remarked.
“Thank you for letting me know.” I grinned.
“You can go now, if you want to,” he sat down in his black leather armchair, which seemed so comfortable compared to my small wooden one.
“Okay,” I got up and placed my papers in my folder, then neatly stuffed the folder into my purse. “Have a good night, sir.”
“You too, Hadley,” he didn’t look up from the script he was reading.
I left his office and stopped to put on my chapstick. Then, I heard Mr. Briar grunt in frustration and throw something heavy onto the ground. Without being nosy, I continued walking and headed to the parking lot.
Sure enough, Eric stood outside, waiting for me, “He let you out early tonight, huh?”
I looked at the time, reading 7:58 P.M., “I suppose he did.”
“How was the day?” Eric asked as he opened the passenger door for me.
“Excellent. I am learning the lay of the land and he said my first check would come Saturday, so I can finally get out of your space.” I gleamed.
A sort of upset expression spread across Eric’s face. After a pause, he asked, “Well, do you know your salary?”
“I know how much I get paid an hour. This paycheck should have $1,600 which will be more than enough to rent a studio apartment.” I explained.
“Not for long in this city,” he barely laughed. “Hadley, what about food? And your phone bill, and clothes and-”
“I can’t lie and tell you I’ve thought this all through.” I uttered.
“That’s why I want you to stay with me for a bit until I know you’re financially stable here.” Eric looked away from the road at me. “I’ve thought about it a lot and I think that’s safest for you.”
“And I truly appreciate how kind you are to want to do that, but you know me, Eric. You do. You know I won’t let you take care of me like a babysitter.” That’s how I felt. Like Eric had to babysit me. He was right: I am not financially stable. However, this paycheck will start getting me somewhere, and without his help.
“This isn’t babysitting if I’m offering.” I didn’t know what to say to that. A long awkward pause lingered throughout the car, “I missed you, Hadley.”
“Eric, I missed you, too. But that doesn’t mean that you can just let me take over your life.” I didn’t want him to make compromises for me.
I knew Eric was about to say something, so I shut up and let the silence resonate.
Finally he said, “I did once.” And look how well that ended.
I didn’t know what to say. I felt something run up my back that I hadn’t felt since high school: desire. I looked out the window for an answer but saw nothing but an endless, crowded highway and trees looking out onto the beach.
“I’m sorry,” Eric shook his head, “I made it weird.”
“No, you didn’t,” I exclaimed in reassurance, “in all seriousness, I can’t thank you enough for what you’ve done already. I don’t know what I could do for you in return if you keep this up.”
“It’s just,” again, Eric paused in thought, then finished his sentence, “the twinkle in your eyes when you came into my apartment. I didn’t want that expression to leave your face.”
I blushed and teared up a tiny bit, but I bit my tongue. I had forgotten the heart this boy had. The awkwardness of our conversation brought me back to high school.
“I know I’m rambling,” he went on, “but you know I’m a family man at heart.”
“I know.” I interrupted him. I tried to let on that I didn’t want this dialogue to go anywhere too far, but I think he was having a moment.
“I feel like I’m providing for you, and it’s kind of like the sixteen year old dream we, or I,” he stuttered, “always thought about.” As he finished there was a gloomy look in his eye when he glanced at me.
I wanted to make him feel better, but I didn’t want to continue where he did, “It’s not like I didn’t think about it, too. But we were not healthy, Eric. Aren’t we a little too mature for all this?” I solemnly asked him.
“We’re both very different from who we were in high school,” Eric turned onto his street.
“I suppose that no one could argue with that.” I tried to lighten the mood. “That’s why we need to rise above these old feelings. That’s all they are.”
His face froze, but a grin bled through, “So you’re having feelings, too.”
My cheeks flushed red, “Shut up!” I playfully smacked his arm and laughed.
He pulled over in front of his building and took his apartment keys out of his jacket pocket, “Go on up. I’m going to park,” he handed me the keys, “I’ll be home soon.” A warm, welcoming smile spread across his face. He was close to me, too close.
“Thanks,” I quickly said and stumbled out of the car. As he drove to find parking, I examined the car, once again. It was too familiar. Something just didn’t feel right about it, but I can’t just interrogate Eric about the car. He would be suspicious.
I waited for him on the couch in his apartment, thinking about everything he said. How he mentioned old feelings, and how I’m feeling them, too. I worked so hard to be independent and content without him. If I give myself to him all over again, all the self-growth will be for nothing. Eric is my past, LA is my future.
The doorbell rang. I went to the door and peered through the peephole to make sure that it was Eric, but it wasn’t.
At the door stood a tall, skinny woman with dark hair. She looked like one of the models you see on the cover of magazines. She was stunning.
As I opened the door, a disgusted look spread across her flawless face.
“Who are you?” She asked bluntly.
“Hi,” I nervously replied, “I’m Hadley. What’s your name?”
“Where’s Eric?” She strutted into the apartment, though I hadn’t told her she could come in.
“He’s just, um, parking his car,” I stammered.
“So, who are you? What are you doing in his apartment?” She crossed her arms and glared at me.
This was a complicated question that I was ashamed to give her the answer for. She was so sleek and so elegant. Extremely rude, but I didn’t want her to know of my financial instability, so I said, “I could ask you the same thing. I don’t even know your name.”
She rolled her eyes, “Victoria. Victoria Mercier. I’m sure you’ve heard of me before.”
I hadn’t.
Just in time, Eric strolled in with his suitcase. His face turned pale when he saw Victoria, “Vic, what are you doing here?”
“What is she doing here?” Victoria pointed to me.
“That’s none of your business,” Eric set his suitcase down on the kitchen counter and walked up to her. “You need to go.”
“Not until we talk,” she demanded, “upstairs.”
As she began to walk up the stairs, Eric grabbed her arm, “No. We can talk outside if it’s that important that you had to come here unannounced.”
“Because of her? Who even is she?” Victoria whined.
“She doesn’t concern you,” He glanced at me, then looked back at her. “Let’s go outside.”
Again, she rolled her eyes. When Eric turned to the door, she purposefully dropped her lip gloss. I could tell what she was doing. She dropped her lip gloss so she would have an excuse to come back in again. A girl knows a thing or two about what girls do to get their way.
I waited for them to both be outside the front door before I picked up her lip gloss. It must have been designer lip gloss or something. I had never seen anything like it. The only makeup I’ve ever used is drugstore makeup. It was so sparkly.
“Sorry, excuse me,” I handed her the gorgeous lip gloss, “you dropped your lip gloss.”
She snatched it out of my hands. Her long, fake nails left a scratch on my index finger, “Uh, if you’ll excuse us? We’re obviously having a conversation here.”
“Do not be rude to her.” Eric boomed.
“Who even is she?” She asked him for the second time.
I hate drama. It ruins everything. It ruined my freshman year of college and it ruined my relationship with Eric before. I closed the door and left them to their conversation.
I made up the couch as a bed, then opened my computer to review my schedule for tomorrow. Before I knew it, Eric was back and Victoria was gone.
“I’m so sorry about that. That must have been really weird for you,” Eric sat down next to me, rearranging the sheets that I had just set down.
“It’s okay,” I sighed and closed my computer, “I’m sorry you had to deal with that. Who is she, though? She’s beautiful.”
“My ex-girlfriend. She’s crazy,” he chuckled uncomfortably, “she took the breakup really badly.”
“How long were you guys together?” I felt like I was asking too many questions about her. I was just curious, though.
“Not nearly as long as we were together,” Eric inched a bit closer to me on the couch, “it was about a year. We just moved too fast, you know?”
“Yeah,” neither of us said a word for a long moment.
“We’re like a hundred percent over though,” he reassured me, “She just can’t wrap her head around it.”
“I guess I kind of understand where she’s coming from.” I looked over at him.
He looked back at me, “It’s not like you ever showed up at my house unannounced.”
We both started laughing. An awkward silence lingered after.
“It’s getting late,” I finally murmured.
“Late? It’s only nine!” He got up to go to the kitchen and opened the top cabinet. He reached for a bottle of chardonnay, “Here, I’ll pour you a glass.”
I sat in the barstool on the other side of the kitchen counter. I had never tried chardonnay. I didn’t know if it was like the white wine that my grandmother let me take sips of when I was thirteen or the tequila that had gotten me wasted the night before, “I’ll pass.”
“Hadley, I promise you will barely get tipsy from this. It’s just chardonnay,” he poured his glass to the top, then filled mine half way, “and if you don’t want it, I’ll just have to drink yours.”
“What is it, like, wine?” I asked. I must have sounded so naïve.
“Exactly, but fancier,” Eric smirked and handed me my glass, “cheers!” He raised his glass.
“What are we toasting to?” I swirled the beverage around.
“How about,” he paused and looked around his apartment, then back at me, “to reconnecting.” The smile that spread across his face was too familiar. I couldn’t explain how it made me feel.
I smiled lightly back at him and took a sip. It was delicious, but it was dangerous. I tried to think of a way to change the subject, but it didn’t seem smart to talk about his ex-girlfriend.
“You know,” I finally said, “I’m getting pretty tired.”
He sighed and set his glass on the counter, “Are you sure you don’t want to sleep in my room tonight? I just feel bad that you’re always on that little couch.”
I looked at him, puzzled, because I didn’t understand whether he wanted me to sleep in his bed with him or if he would just trade places with me.
Clearly, he understood my confusion, “Not with me, of course,” he awkwardly stuttered.
I laughed and took another sip.
“What’s so funny?” Eric jested. He crossed his arms like an angry child who wasn’t allowed to get the candy he wanted.
I couldn’t stop laughing, “Seeing you trip over your words like that. It’s almost like we’re back in junior year.”
“Yeah,” he rubbed his neck and glanced around the room nervously, “it’s actually just like we’re back in junior year.” Eric followed his bold statement with a light chuckle, as he always does. I can usually never tell if it’s sarcasm, but from the way he was looking at me, I could.
For about half a second, I really thought that we were going to kiss. I’m not that girl, and I’m not that dumb. Hooking up with an ex subsequently he just interacted with the girl he dated after you? Please. I’m not sixteen anymore.
“I feel like the couch would miss me,” I grabbed one of the pillows and hugged it.
“Of course, of course,” Eric picked up his glass.
“Of course? What do you mean of course?” If he had already predicted my answer, why even ask?
“Oh, nothing,” he raised the glass to his lips, then pulled it away, “I’ve just noticed you don’t do well with change.”
“Your couch is what made you realize that?” I giggled.
“Well, it certainly helped.” Eric rested his arm on the edge of the couch and put his feet up on the coffee table, “What are you scared of, Hadley?”
Failing. Living out of a rental car. Getting fired. “Nothing.”
His eyes were detecting my bullshit.
“I just don’t wanna mess up.” I sighed and put my face in my hands, “I dropped everything back home to be successful here. It hasn’t been easy, and I really miss my family.” Tears filled my eyes thinking of Mom and May, but I blinked them back.
Eric put his hand on my cheek, “I know.”
His hand felt so familiar. Too familiar, too weird. My heartrate was speeding up.
“Stay in my room tonight,” he pushed my hair behind my glasses.
“Eric, your ex was just here. Do you really think that’s a good idea?” I shyly said. I knew it wasn’t my place to speak on his relationship.
Eric rolled his eyes, “God damn it, Hadley,” he stood up and walked to the staircase, “what I get for being the nice guy, right? You think I care about her like I care about you?” His firm tone startled me.
“Clearly I spoke on a touchy subject, I-” I tried to explain.
“You said you missed home just now.” He slammed a scotch glass on the counter, “I was trying to give you that sense of home.”
I saw him reaching for the bottle. Eric’s go to when he’s upset is alcohol. It’s always been. At Vivian Chesterfield’s after-homecoming party we got in a fight. He got so wasted that night that he fell asleep on my best friend’s roof after trying to break into her house to apologize to me.
“You’re right!” I shouted.
His shaking hand stopped right before opening the cabinet.
I went over to the kitchen, “I’m sorry, Eric. You’re helping me out beyond belief and I’m over here being judgmental for no reason. I was scared that I was just a rebound.”
“No, Hadley, what?” He rubbed his eyes with his palms, “Why would you think that? You were talking about how much you missed Michigan. I thought you were trying to tell me you missed me.”
I looked at him blankly. I didn’t know what to say. He misinterpreted what I was saying, and that’s not my fault.
“I guess not,” he scoffed. “I just have always associated you with Michigan, my home, because-” he stuttered and tripped over his words, “You’re like a piece of home to me here in LA. That’s why. I’m such a dumb ass.”
“No, you’re not. I wasn’t trying to send mixed signals or anything.” I pushed up my glasses. “I just can’t compromise any opportunities. You understand, right?”
“Yeah, totally.” The disappointment on his face was indisputable. “Sorry I freaked out.”
“It’s okay. I’ve witnessed worse.” I grinned and put my hand on his large shoulder.
“Thanks, I think?” My contagious smile spread across his face.
“Yes!” We laughed.
Eric and I ended on a weird note that night. How could we not have? He basically confessed the feelings we both have for each other and I shut them down.
I woke up in the middle of the night to find Eric laying at my feet. He was holding my hand. When I opened my mouth to say something he put his finger to my lips and crawled on top of me. He gripped the sides of my hips and kissed my neck, then further and further down my body. Just as he was about to take off my panties, I woke up again, but for real this time.
I grabbed my phone to check the time. It was about a quarter past four. I tried to go back to sleep, however I just couldn’t stop thinking about Eric. I wanted to get some fresh air, but I’m not exactly sure how to open the living room windows and I don’t think I should make a ruckus trying to figure it out.
There is a balcony right next to Eric’s bedroom. I just have to be as silent as possible. I remember how light of a sleeper he is. He would wake up if all I did was turn over in bed.
I quietly made my way up the stairs, walking slowly, careful not to make any noise. Eric’s bedroom stank of tobacco and liquor. As I passed his bed, I saw that he wasn’t in it. I figured that he was maybe in the bathroom, so I quickly slid the door open to the balcony and shut it.
As I turned away from the door, the incredible view of the city captured my eyes. I fell into a trance and walked closer to the railing, overlooking the beauty of Los Angeles at night. A quarter past four and the lights are still on, the city is still alive.
“Need something?”
I promptly turned around and started trying to talk, “Sorry, Eric — I was, um, just-”
He started laughing at me, “You’re fine,” he let out a puff of cigarette smoke, “want to come sit?”
This was an easy room to read. It’s a late night on a balcony with my ex boyfriend who is under the influence.
I stayed where I was, “Are you okay?” I asked him.
“Are you okay?” He stood up and took a few steps towards me, “You’re the one up on my balcony this late at night.”
“Well, you’re the one awake smoking a whole pack.”
“These aren’t cigarettes, they’re CBD cigarettes,” Eric said bluntly. He put his hand on my shoulder and the CBD cigarette up to my mouth, “Try it. It doesn’t do anything.”
“What’s CBD?” I pushed his hand away from my lips.
He hysterically laughed, “It’s like pot, Hadley. Remember how high you used to get?”
Don’t remind me. “Oh, I’m okay then-”
“But not really pot, like-” Eric hiccupped, “like diet weed. It doesn’t really do anything, it just chills you out.” His face got close to mine. His breath stank of scotch, “Just try it, don’t be a baby.”
“Eric, you need to go to bed,” I laughed anxiously. “We have to get up for work in a few hours. Don’t you want to get some sleep?”
“I didn’t realize I was living with my mother.” He threw the CBD cigarette off the balcony, still lit.
“I’m not mothering you, I’m just-” I began.
Eric interrupted me, “Yeah, you are. You have been since you got here. You’re throwing off my routine.”
“Oh! You’re routine of staying up until four in the morning, smoking and drinking your thoughts away?” I huffed, “We are adults.”
“I am an adult. I have my own house, my own car, my own bills, and I can pay for it all. I’m not sure you could relate.” He sounded like a child.
“That was a low blow, Eric.” I crossed my arms, “We used to make fun of celebrities and people who’s money became their personalities in high school. Now look at you-” I watched his eyes soften, “that’s exactly what you’ve become.”
We sat in silence, staring at each other for an awkwardly long amount of time.
“Why did I do that?” Eric crumbled into his hands.
“Do what?” I asked.
“Did you think you just got lucky when that flight attendant took you to first class? Did you think that your seat was next to mine by chance? Are you that naïve?” He looked up at me.
Maybe I really was that naïve. The fact that none of this had added up until now made my head spin. “I-”
Eric interrupted me. “When I saw you boarding that plane it was my only second chance,” he paused and took a deep breath, “All I wanted was a second chance.”
Flashes of drunk texts from him years ago, begging me to come over ran through my mind like a slide show.
I sat down next to him. “I’m not that naïve. I know that there’s really something special between us, but Eric-” tears filled my eyes, but I blinked them back, “Every time I let you in, I get hurt.”
“But things are so different now!” He whined, “We aren’t kids anymore. You said it yourself- we’re adults. I don’t have those toxic tendencies anymore. I’m not the same stupid kid, don’t you see that?”
He’s changed as a person so much. He’s more stable, smarter, kinder. However, it’s his ways that haven’t changed. He’s wide awake at half past four in the morning smoking and drinking. If his indulgence habits haven’t changed, I sure don’t expect his emotional habits to. We really did have such a strong connection, but I don’t know if I’m willing to sacrifice my mental well being for a ‘second chance.’
“I want things to work, Eric. I really, really do. I have to be confident that I’m not putting myself in a position to get hurt, and I’m not confident that I will be in that position with you.” I put my hand on his cheek. “You know how I feel about you, but it’s better this way.”
He turned his head towards me and caressed my hand. We couldn’t stop staring at each other.
I don’t know if it was the city’s bright lights or the California water, but I let go of everything I had just said to Eric. I wrapped my arm around his neck, pulled him in, and kissed him. I expected it to feel as good as the first time we kissed, but it didn't. It simply felt natural.
PART 2 COMING SOON IF YOU GUYS LIKE IT ❤ | https://medium.com/@cymaberk/las-finest-d460dc69bf09 | ['Cyma Berk'] | 2020-12-27 15:45:51.828000+00:00 | ['Drama', 'Mystery', 'Romance'] |
I got this | by Hidarinia
Sensations, emotions, coming and going. I feel this now but tomorrow might be different — will be different. The fear and anxiety dissipate through the night and the morning brings hope and faith. Which one is real? Which one should I listen to?
Fear is ever present. Through the laughs, the plans, the excitement, it is right there, whispering in my ear — what if the worse happens? Of course it might, but it also might not. I believe in energies, I believe that what you visualise does materialise. Not in a genie-grant-me-my-wish kind of way — obviously. But I believe the broader picture is drawn by the energy we project onto it.
So, I am learning to tame my fear. I am getting to know it better too. I know when it will show up strong, to throw me off balance. There is no point in fighting it head on, it is there to be seen and heard. I listen to it — I let it ramble on. Then it is my turn to speak. I hear you — but you do not decide. I will take your opinion into account — but you do not decide. You may have valid points — but you do not decide.
Then who does? If I push back this fear, how do I know if my judgement isn’t clouded by stubbornness? I don’t. I do not.
What I do know is this. My glass is half full. And life is fucking beautiful. It is not easy, but it’s worth it — always. I do not have control over many things — but I am in this since the beginning. There must be something I am doing right. I will keep on doing, failing, learning, for as long as I can breathe. I got this. | https://ronaki.medium.com/i-got-this-c80a4e01fe15 | [] | 2018-08-26 21:20:52.613000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Gratefulness', 'Believe', 'Fear', 'Trust'] |
‘They Treated Me Like a Discardable Object’ | ‘They Treated Me Like a Discardable Object’
In the early days of December, one of the world’s most well-known Black A.I. researchers, Timnit Gebru, made national headlines when she was ousted from Google, where she studied the limitations of artificial intelligence.
Her dismissal stemmed from an email she sent to internal groups for women and allies that expressed frustration at the lack of action taken by the company. She was also working on a research paper critical of the company’s tactics for developing massive algorithms, specifically how they can affect already marginalized communities.
Listen to Gebru tell her story in her own words on Slate’s What Next: TBD podcast, where she talks about her firing, the research paper, and co-founding the group Black in AI.
I also recommend reading the interview Gebru did with VentureBeat’s Khari Johnson. Here’s a preview: | https://momentum.medium.com/they-treated-me-like-a-discardable-object-d3cd63675fab | ['Dave Gershgorn'] | 2020-12-17 06:32:23.251000+00:00 | ['Racism', 'Work', 'Technology', 'Silicon Valley', 'Google'] |
Standing Tall as a Solo User Advocate in an Organization | User advocacy is an inevitable characteristic for a UX enthusiast. They always think in user perspective, they stand strong to get what users needs from the product even though no one backs them.
UX or User Experience practitioner are bowed to stand for the user and lead the show. There is no space for compromise in that space. While rest of the professions can compromise user needs, but a UXer cannot.
I could help budding designers and aspirants to excel and shine in an organization if you feel that you are the only one thinking about users while designing solutions or the user problems.
First of all understand you are not alone, but you are the only one capable to bring user perspective to the screens. We UXers cannot blame any other disciples for this deed. No one will help us until we could show them how the user is going to use the product or the screen. Here are some best and healthy organizational practices and team building tips from my experience.
User Experience is not a solo deliverable. It is a teamwork. A team of cross-functional disciples involving junior, senior and director level professionals. So it is important to create a similar mindset across the organization that drives to the similar goal.
Creating rapport with the cross-functional teams
As a first step, we should build a good rapport among the entire project team. Always help them understand what the user need from the system. Bring in more scenarios, user personas and other artifacts that could help create a commonly shared goal towards the user.
Deliverables shared with a supporting story
When you deliver a prototype, share it with a story behind — why the user use the screen, how they use, when the use it. This will make a change in the reporting managers expectations. Thus, they can contribute more ideas and perspectives to your design solutions and thus help you do more satisfied user centered designs.
Iterative prototypes with more team involvement
It is very important to make other teams feel that they are involved in the solution making and ideations. This helps to bring more perspectives and ideas for the solution. Another advantage of this practice is to identify the feasibility challenges from the technical aspects.
Never spend huge amount of time for initial drafts of prototypes. This helps you prevent iterations bias and keep self open for criticism and changes.
A lways share rapid prototypes, that are capable enough to convey your ideas and help others bring in more ideas and perspectives. Once you make sure that the problems are solved, move to hi-fi prototypes.
Involvement in the development phase
Once you deliver the design to the development team, make sure you visit the team regularly and inquire the progress in a friendly manner without bothering them too much. This will help you to understand the technical feasibility of the solution and the challenges they face. Alternate design solutions can be recommended here in case. | https://uxplanet.org/standing-tall-as-a-solo-user-advocate-in-an-organization-75a68dd97a96 | ['Rejeesh Acharya'] | 2020-11-19 14:30:08.342000+00:00 | ['Solo', 'Team Building', 'User Advocate', 'UX', 'UX Research'] |
Teresa Carlson of Amazon Web Services: Five Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective Leader During Turbulent Times | Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
My current role is leading Amazon Web Services’s (AWS) public sector, energy, telecommunications, global financial services, and aerospace & satellite business units. That’s a diverse group of customers, but they’re united by the fact that each one is in a period of reinvention and transformation, and each has a tremendous potential to move faster with digital technology. I am starting my 11th year at AWS, and I am as passionate as when I started about helping customers through significant change so that they can serve their missions, and adapt more quickly to meet their strategic goals.
I firmly believe in the potential of technology to deliver real impact because I wasn’t always in technology. I have a masters and an undergraduate in Speech and Language Pathology, and I actually started out in healthcare as a speech/language pathologist. I spent the early part of my career working as a speech and language pathologist with the U.S. Department of Defense in Nuremberg, Germany.
When I eventually returned to the U.S., I went way out of my comfort zone in healthcare and accepted a role with a workflow and document management company. This job changed my world, because suddenly I saw how the right technology and tools could have had such a positive impact on my ability to respond to my patients, and I wanted to bring that same insight to other customers. I knew that I wanted to dive deeper into this idea, and here I am today. I feel so privileged that I can help customers to use technology to deliver better results.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
My mom and dad have been incredibly formational to who I am today. My mom taught in a one-room school classroom and loved what she did. She was also a constant learner, and was always working on ways to improve herself and her community. While raising us she went back to school, earned a graduate degree, and became the first female principal in Pulaski County, Kentucky. My father was a basketball coach — and I learned a lot about teamwork from him.
Extensive research suggests that “purpose driven businesses” are more successful in many areas. When your company started, what was its vision, what was its purpose?
AWS is a part of Amazon that launched in 2006. After over a decade of building and running Amazon.com, we realized that we had developed a core competency in developing technology infrastructure that could massively scale on demand. We embarked on a much broader mission of serving a new customer segment — developers and businesses — with web services they could use to build sophisticated, scalable applications to fit their needs. When I started the AWS Worldwide Public Sector business in 2010, we had a vision — and I made a commitment — to provide government customers the same tools as the world’s most innovative companies so that they could pave the way for disruptive innovation to build a better world. Since 2006 we’ve really seen the adoption of cloud technology take off — which is exciting because cloud can be a powerful accelerant of positive change. We’ve seen that especially during the pandemic.
We’ve supported organizations and governments in using the cloud to help people access critical information and services, keep schools going, accelerate research, and support people and communities. For example, we helped the World Health Organization (WHO) build an application to support health workers around the world who are caring for patients infected by COVID-19. In a quick response to COVID-19, we worked with WHO to deliver the application 12 months ahead of schedule. In Canada, we are supporting the University of British Columbia and Vancouver General Hospital as they use machine learning to help quickly determine whether patients have COVID-19 by examining CT scans. The research team has launched this as an open source model available to any researcher or health care provider as a diagnostic tool, which they hope will lead to better care of patients. We are supporting customers, employees, and our communities in other ways too — in fact, we recently announced that Amazon will help 29 million people get free cloud skills training by 2025 through AWS-designed programs. This is just a small snapshot of the ways we’re working with customers to solve some of the world’s toughest challenges.
Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion. Can you share with our readers a story from your own experience about how you lead your team during uncertain or difficult times?
This is such an important topic. I was having this discussion recently with Amazon board member and former Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo Indra Nooyi at re:Invent, and these are the three keys to success that came out of that discussion:
First, I emphasize with my teams to take time to take care of themselves. It can be so hard to disconnect, with so many of us working remotely. We don’t have the commute to decompress and create some space between work and home — so I emphasize with my team the importance of prioritizing health and well-being. For me, exercise has always been an important part of my routine, and I’ve made an effort to maintain that in these turbulent times. It helps me start the day to clear my mind.
The second thing is to operate with grace. As we work remotely, I’m encouraging my teammates to be patient and kind when working with one another. Children may scream in the background. A family member may walk through a video. Dogs will certainly bark when those packages arrive at the front door. These moments can be a way to find humor, common ground, and create shared experiences.
Third, dive deep on the details and work with subject matter experts. For example, during the pandemic one of the teams that has been instrumental in informing our response has been the AWS Disaster Response team. They’re specialized in using cloud technology to help organizations respond to disasters and health outbreaks. I was having frequent calls with them to understand, in real time, the worldwide impact of the pandemic and how we could best help our employees, our customers, and our communities use our cloud services and our scale.
Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the motivation to continue through your challenges? What sustains your drive?
I mentioned my mom and dad earlier — they really showed me how to have a passion for the work that you do. I wake up every day so excited and humbled that I get to work with an incredible team who is focused on digital transformation. I feel very lucky in that regard.
That’s not to say that I never need to reset and recharge! In those moments, I benefit the most from meeting directly with our customers, learning about their missions, and listening to their stories of success. I’m equally inspired by the talented set of leaders that surround me every day at AWS, and our colleagues around the globe who are dedicated to making a difference. And of course, whenever things feel particularly challenging, it’s a good moment to stop and take a break — even just a short walk or a quick stretch — and come back a little more refreshed and ready to jump right back in.
What would you say is the most critical role of a leader during challenging times?
Change is happening at such a dramatic pace. I think one of the biggest challenges is getting a unified operating picture of your business and being able to then anchor your business in what matters. In a crisis there is so much static. It’s my job to distinguish the signal from the noise, and keep us focused on what matters– our customers. At AWS we often say we’re ‘customer-obsessed’ and we take that commitment very seriously. Many of our customers in the public sector are particularly challenged right now and I’m focused on finding creative ways to support them in this time of critical need.
When the future seems so uncertain, what is the best way to boost morale? What can a leader do to inspire, motivate and engage their team?
It’s so important to stay tuned into how the team is doing and making sure that amid this craziness we find ways to stay connected. During the pandemic — and particularly at the start — I would take a few minutes to bring a bit of levity to the team to take a break from the intensity. I began to hold twice daily calls with my leaders to coordinate our COVID response. During these calls, I would carve out time for group jumping jacks over the video call. It was an easy and lighthearted way to share a smile. My team created a “stuck at home” team playlist with songs like “Don’t Stop Believing” and “Stuck in the Middle with You.” We also participated in community projects, including a care basket distribution for hospitals worldwide to honor frontline healthcare workers on International Nurses Day. That really helped keep our collective morale high and maintain a sense of team, even when we were so dispersed.
What is the best way to communicate difficult news to one’s team and customers?
Well, Colin Powell once said “Bad news isn’t like wine. It doesn’t get better with age.” I’ve always found that timely, direct, and honest is the best approach. I can’t change the fact that I’m delivering bad news, but my goal is to make sure that the recipient knows that I haven’t held anything back and they can count on me to help them. Honesty earns trust.
How can a leader make plans when the future is so unpredictable?
The key to dealing with unknowns is to find ways now to build resilience and agility. This will make you better able to respond quickly to new challenges. There a few ways to quickly build resilience into your operating model.
For example, assess your workforce and make sure you have the plans and technology in place keep them safe and productive — no matter where that work is taking place. Are you equipped to help them work remotely? If employees can’t work, they can’t respond to the new situation. And what does a remote workforce mean for the customer experience? For example, prior to COVID‑19, a handful of agents staffed the State of Kentucky’s unemployment call center using technology that required them to work from state offices. Using Amazon Connect, the Kentucky Office of Unemployment Insurance set-up a cloud based call center in one afternoon and trained its agents in just 30 minutes, so they could work from home to accommodate social distancing restrictions The state then used Amazon Connect to build a statewide call center to manage about 200,000 daily calls fielded by more than 1,000 call center agents.
Is there a “number one principle” that can help guide a company through the ups and downs of turbulent times?
Amazon’s mission is to be Earth’s most customer-centric company. Keeping customers front and center is always our North Star and guides our thinking and approach.
Can you share 3 or 4 of the most common mistakes you have seen other businesses make during difficult times? What should one keep in mind to avoid that?
Each leader faces their unique circumstances, so I can’t point to specific examples of decisions made by other leaders that I would have made differently. But I will echo something that our CEO, Andy Jassy, recently said: It’s really hard to build a business that sustains for a long period of time. Less than 20 percent of the Fortune 500 companies listed in the 1970’s are still Fortune 500 companies today. In order to build a business that lasts, you need to reinvent yourself on a regular basis. And you need to be proactive about reinventing yourself so that you can make changes while your business is healthy. Technology, especially cloud computing, offers an opportunity to easily and quickly experiment with new ideas so that you can better position your organization for long-term success.
Generating new business, increasing your profits, or at least maintaining your financial stability can be challenging during good times, even more so during turbulent times. Can you share some of the strategies you use to keep forging ahead and not lose growth traction during a difficult economy?
This is advice I give to every organization: Move fast. There’s no other way to say it, this has been a crazy year. Every industry and sector has faced dramatic changes. If the last 9 months have proved the critical value of IT, the next 9 months are an opportunity to shape new processes, seize new opportunities, and set new goals.
I think the first step to moving fast is understanding your data. Data is being created faster than ever, and it can be a powerful tool to understand how a black swan event like a pandemic is impacting a business.
Of course, leveraging your data has always come with hurdles — from breaking down data silos to the cost of storage. Cloud computing can help you overcome these hurdles, quickly, so that you can begin to analyze your data, make decisions, and act. Once you begin making decisions based upon a unified operating picture, you can continue to evolve your thinking and inform your actions, now and well into the future.
The second is to build a culture of innovation, and that really starts with leadership. Employees want to work in an environment where they feel empowered and accountable. It’s important to reward teams who are willing to think of amazing ways to solve their customers’ biggest challenges through experimentation, failure, and iteration until they get it right. Not just tolerating that process — but celebrating it — is the key to innovation.
Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things a business leader should do to lead effectively during uncertain and turbulent times? Please share a story or an example for each.
First and foremost, stay customer obsessed and work backwards from their needs. Doing that will help keep in focus what really matters, and cut down on noise and distractions.
At the start of the pandemic, we were talking to customers around the world and saw that there was an opportunity to help researchers who needed the scale of cloud computing to accelerate the pace of diagnostic research. As a result, we launched the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative, committing $20 million in credits and technical support to help accelerate diagnostic innovation.
Second, remember that speed disproportionately matters, as I mentioned earlier. That’s especially true in turbulent times. Prioritization and delegation are two important enablers of speed, and that boils down in practical terms to empowering your team.
Third, recognize the difference between one-way doors and a two-way doors. That’s something we think about a lot at Amazon, and it means thinking about whether a decision is hard to reverse or not. Most decisions are two-way doors, so you can adjust or reverse them with some time and effort. One-way door decisions are permanent, so require a lot more thought. Thinking about the kind of decision you’re making is another good enabler of speed, and can help avoid the “analysis paralysis” trap.
Fourth is knowing what I don’t know — and asking experts. I explored this question with Amazon board member and former PepsiCo Chairman and CEO Indra Nooyi at AWS re:Invent, and we both agreed strongly on this point. AWS’s Public Policy team was invaluable early in the pandemic, reaching out to leaders around the world to offer our immediate on-the-ground help and support. Indra noted how, when she was appointed to chair the ReOpen Connecticut Advisory Group, the first thing she did was to go to Yale University and sit down with health experts to get steeped in the details of this pandemic.
Finally, hire and develop the best — and then rely upon them to make smart decisions. You may have the instinct to try and control everything when times get tough. But if you hire the best talent, help them to develop their skills, and then empower them to take responsibility, you’ll be surprised about how you can scale smart decision-making and navigate uncertain circumstances, faster and with better outcomes.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
This is a phrase I share with my teams regularly: “find a hole and fill it.” What I mean is, you find a problem, and you sit there and say, “There’s a hole and nobody’s filling that hole.” So I like to say, “Here’s how I’m going to do that. I’m going to solve it.”
By the way, that is especially true when you are building your own career. In the past, I have literally written the job I wanted, based upon my own observations about what was and wasn’t working within an organization. Alternatively, you can take a job description that’s there, and you rewrite it, and you say, “I can do all these things, but I can also do these things.”
This type of proactive approach shows to others that you have capabilities that no one really thought about. And some of that is demonstrated because you take initiative.
How can our readers further follow your work?
I recommend following the About Amazon blog and AWS Public Sector blogs for stories about how we’re innovating, supporting our customers, and helping communities.
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health! | https://medium.com/authority-magazine/teresa-carlson-of-amazon-web-services-five-things-you-need-to-be-a-highly-effective-leader-during-14a388f215e6 | ['Charlie Katz'] | 2020-12-29 16:25:40.622000+00:00 | ['Tech Feature'] |
Automating Rust and NodeJS deployment on AWS Lambda using Lambda Layers | Part of our stack at Clevy is written in Rust, and we use Neon to ease the bindings with other parts of the stack written in NodeJS.
Recently, we needed to deploy this stack on AWS Lambda, which runs a very specific NodeJS runtime, not cross-compatible with our existing stack.
Since we struggled a little bit with getting Lambda/Rust/Node to play nicely together, I figured I would post a short how-to of what we found worked well for us. You can of course take this as a base and change it to your liking!
1. The Setup
The first thing you need to know is that AWS Lambda runs on either Amazon Linux 1 or 2, depending on the version of NodeJS that you plan to use. So your build pipeline needs to reflect that. Luckily, Amazon provides Docker images for both: amazonlinux:1 or amazonlinux:2 . In our case, we want to use node v10.x, so:
FROM amazonlinux:2
Then of course, you need Rust and NodeJS to be installed onto the amazonlinux image.
# Install rust
RUN curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh -s -- -y --default-toolchain stable && \
PATH="/root/.cargo/bin:$PATH" rustup install stable
ENV PATH $PATH:/root/.cargo/bin # Install node
RUN curl -sL https://rpm.nodesource.com/setup_10.x | bash - && \
yum install -y nodejs && yum clean all
Then, Neon requires a few dependencies, that you can customize based on what you actually require for your own needs. In our case we needed to add quite a few dependencies over what is stated in the docs, especially all the *-devel dependencies which were definitely not straightforward.
# Install dependencies
RUN yum install -y make gcc gcc-c++ libgcc openssl-devel readline-devel sqlite-devel && yum clean all
Finally, install neon-cli and you are all set.
RUN npm i -g neon-cli
Save this base image somewhere and use it for your AWS Lambda-compatible builds later!
docker build -t lambdabuildbase .
2. The Build
There are several ways to use this image, so let me share my script, which you can customize to your liking. The goal with Neon is to create a NodeJS addon that you can then require elsewhere like any other node module, but precompiled for the environment it runs on.
Let’s put our sources into a src/ folder, and inside, consider the following package.json :
"name": "
"version": "1.0.0",
"description": "AWS Lambda demo",
"main": "lib/index.js",
"scripts": {
"build": "neon build --release && mv native/index.node lib/addon.node"
}
} "name": " @clevy/l ambda-build-demo","version": "1.0.0","description": "AWS Lambda demo","main": "lib/index.js","scripts": {"build": "neon build --release && mv native/index.node lib/addon.node"
The reason why we mv native/index.node lib/addon.node is that we don’t need the whole native directory after the build. It is quite huge (over 700MB in our case), compared to what we really need (only the compiled addon, which is only a few MB). But of course you can leave it as is if you are happy with your final build size, simply note that AWS Lambda functions (including all the layers together) can never exceed 250MB unzipped.
The main lib/index.js contains:
module.exports = require("addon");
And of course, native/ contains all my rust code.
Let’s create a second Dockerfile that looks like the following:
FROM lambdabuildbase WORKDIR /dist COPY src .
RUN npm install && npm run build # remove now useless native/ directory
RUN rm -rf native
To extract built files from the Dockerfile, one easy way is the following bash script:
#!/bin/bash image=lambdabuildpkg
docker build -t $image . id=$(docker create $image)
docker cp $id:dist - | tar x
docker rm -v $id
This will build the image (which will in turn build the node module with the FFI bindings), copy the resulting built node module from inside the docker image into the dist/ folder on your host machine, then cleanup.
3. The Deployment
Lambda requires node layers to be prepared in a very specific way. First, it needs to be inside a directory called exactly nodejs . Then, if you are preparing a layer that contains a node module, it needs to be inside the usual node_modules/namespace/package_name tree, so in our case nodejs/node_modules/@clevy/lambda-build-demo .
path=node_modules/@clevy/lambda-build-demo # remove any existing data
rm -rf nodejs
mkdir -p nodejs/$path
mv dist nodejs/$path
Then, Lambda tells us they need the layers to be zipped before we upload them. Fine:
# cleanup then zip again
rm nodejs.zip
zip -r nodejs.zip nodejs -q
Then, proceed to deploy onto AWS Lambda (using the AWS CLI, so you can add your own credentials in whatever way you like). If the package is too big, you can simply send it to S3 first, then upload to Lambda Layers from a S3 bucket. The documentation is quite simple, you can customize it easily.
aws s3 cp nodejs.zip s3://my-bucket/nodejs.zip
aws lambda publish-layer-version \
--layer-name "my-lambda-layer" \
--content "S3Bucket=my-bucket,S3Key=nodejs.zip" \
--compatible-runtimes "nodejs10.x"
Voilà, you have your Rust-powered NodeJS-compatible AWS Lambda Layer ready to use in your Lambda functions!
4. The Usage
This is the easiest step. Create a lambda function in whichever way you want, select nodejs10.x as the runtime, use the newly imported layer as one of its layers by selecting “layers” just below the lambda function:
Then click again on the Lambda function and inside your code, simply import your module as usual:
Notice that there are no node_modules in this Lambda function? That’s because the node_modules are inherited from the underlying layer.
Of course you can stack layers (up to 5) and you can also import your own node modules very easily, but using layers is a very simple way to use weird runtimes on AWS Lambda as well as to share common code.
Hope this tutorial helps you as much as it would have helped me to find it in the first place! | https://medium.com/clevyio/automating-rust-and-nodejs-deployment-on-aws-lambda-using-layers-2d47d129a6bc | ['Francois Falala-Sechet'] | 2019-06-06 11:28:57.140000+00:00 | ['AWS', 'Nodejs', 'Rust', 'AWS Lambda', 'Aws Lambda Layer'] |
Cycling while black | The bicycle has for decades mobilised minorities, yet cycling today is a startlingly white sport. Mani Arthur is at the forefront of a movement for change.
When Mani Arthur was seven, his father bought him a bike for his birthday. It was pink and white. In Kumasi, a city in the southern Ashanti region of Ghana, few of Mani’s friends had wheels of their own. Older boys began paying Arthur to use his bike. More than pocket money and popularity, it gave Arthur freedom. He would ride to the local football pitch, to the shops and to the dusty trails at the city’s edge.
“I used to absolutely adore that bike,” Arthur told me. “It gave me independence I wouldn’t have had. It gave me the freedom to explore.”
Arthur moved to London when he was 10. His father was a security guard. His mother worked as a cleaner for Haringey council. Football quickly became the boy’s new obsession. Apart from a brief fling with a BMX bike, memories of cycling began to fade.
Much later, Arthur began riding to work in Westminster, where he had become a civil servant. In 2011, he joined three colleagues on a charity ride from London to Copenhagen. Arthur, then in his mid 20s, found the going hard. But the ride was a reawakening. “It brought those childhood memories back and just made me feel, like… the awe of the world and that sense of adventure,” he recalled.
In 2012, Arthur watched Bradley Wiggins become the first British rider to win the Tour de France. He marvelled at the victories of Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton, who were among a dozen British gold medallists on the track and road at the Olympic Games in London.
Britain was waking up to its potential as a cycling nation. Arthur wanted to be part of it. He joined Strava, the popular fitness app, and began trying to race against his own personal best times on sections of his commute. He got some budget Lycra and cycling shoes and found a cycling club in North London. One Sunday morning in 2013, he joined a club ride in the quiet lanes of Hertfordshire.
Arthur was not surprised to find himself as the only black cyclist in the group. It had not escaped his notice that every victorious British cyclist in London had been white. It was the same in Rio in 2016, where British teams in more than half of sports were all-white, including all 26 cyclists. Kye Whyte, a BMX racer from Peckham in South London, is the only non-white rider in Team GB’s cycling squad for the Tokyo Olympics, which start next month.
It took 98 editions and more than a century of the Tour de France, meanwhile, for a single black rider — Yohann Gène, who was born in Guadeloupe — to make the start line, in 2011. Another decade later, Nic Dlamini of South Africa is the only black rider in this year’s Tour, which started on Saturday.
Arthur, who had the gear and was by then in pretty good shape, quickly gained the attention of an older man on the club ride. “I was comfortable, riding along and talking but he kept saying, ‘hey, this is a racing club, we really want racers — do you think you’re up to it?’” The man pointed at two fast guys at the front. “He told me, ‘These are the kind of riders we’re looking for’,” Arthur said. “I was like, ‘yeah, I can aspire to be like them, give me a 12 months and I’ll be as good’. That was my mentality — to be constantly positive.”
At the end of the ride, the group gathered at a cafe for a coffee. The little comments kept coming. “Eventually we saw a cyclist riding past and the man looked at me and said something like, ‘ah, look at this guy, you should probably join him’. It was a black guy riding a bike. Everyone laughed, and I laughed uncomfortably. And that’s when it dawned on me. He didn’t want me in his club, and all the things he’d been saying were hinting at that. He was like, ‘isn’t that guy your friend? You should join him’.
“I just thought, for fuck’s sake, really? I laughed it off, went home and never wanted to join a club again.”
****
At 8am on a humid Saturday morning last Summer, a group of cyclists was gathering on the grass inside the running track at Regent’s Park in central London. They stood two metres apart with their bikes at their feet. It was the first time since lockdown had been introduced in March that the Black Cyclists Network (BCN), a two-year-old and rapidly growing group, had hosted a ride.
Soon, the cyclists would be riding laps of the Outer Circle, an almost three-mile loop of road inside the park’s perimeter that has long been a popular place for cyclists to train and commune. As more riders arrived — soon there would be almost 100 — some were chatting. Many, including me, didn’t yet know anyone. We were all waiting for Mani Arthur.
“Hello everyone,” Arthur, founder and leader of the network, shouted as he entered the centre of the group. “I thought you were all going to make excuses and not turn up. That’s why we have our rides on a Saturday so you can’t say you’ve got church and blame God for it — you have to show up.”
Arthur, who is in his mid 30s, had an easy smile and a thick beard. He was dressed in the Black Cyclists Network’s all-black kit with its three fine stripes around the chest and upper arms. The colours of the stripes — red, yellow and green — honour a tradition of tricolours in cycling as well as several Afro-Caribbean national flags, including Ghana’s.
Not everyone was dressed in Lycra. Nor were all the bikes expensive carbon fibre machines. There were tracksuit bottoms, and commuter bikes worth less than some other riders’ sunglasses. There were women and older riders, and new riders. It was, by the standards of Regent’s Park, where I have been riding for more than 15 years, a diverse group. Everyone, bar three or four of us, was black.
Arthur was on a mission to transform a startlingly white sport, from the grassroots to the elite level. More than a century after bikes gave flight to women’s suffrage, he is also part of a wider movement to revive the bicycle’s potential as a vehicle for change.
“It’s a historic moment, what we’re trying to do here,” Arthur told the group. He had expected 40-odd people to show up after putting word out on the BCN social media channels (the network now has more than 2,000 members on Strava and 18,000 Instagram followers). But word quickly spread.
As Arthur prepared to split riders into smaller groups for what remains a weekly ride, he suspected a sense of wider solidarity weeks after Black Lives Matter marches in the UK had combined with surging interest in cycling in lockdown. “We’re trying to bring more people of colour into cycling and it’s amazing to see the community react to that,” he told the crowd.
****
Marlon Moncrieffe, a black former racing cyclist and a lecturer at Brighton University’s School of Education, believes some of the imagery attached to London 2012 only reinforced its whiteness. “There were links with colonialism and cultural imperialism, with Victoria Pendleton dressed as Britannia and Bradley Wiggins as the English Mod,” said Moncrieffe, who, after 2012, created an exhibition devoted to Britain’s handful of mostly forgotten black champion cyclists.
Diversity is only slightly better away from racing. The statistical picture is also incomplete, and most research has taken place in London. In a 2017 “analysis of cycling potential”, Transport for London found that black, Asian and minority ethnic groups accounted for only 15% of cycle trips, despite making up almost 40% of the city’s population.
Arthur largely blames a lack of role models. For many would-be riders, cycling looks as if it’s not for them. Henry Boateng, a 22-year-old electrician, had come to Regent’s Park from Hackney in east London. “Where I live, the area isn’t really white but the people riding bikes are,” he said.
Many people I spoke to also cite economic factors in a society where income inequality is tied to race. The potential costs of cycling, including maintenance and storage, have mounted during the past 15 years as the sport and industry has moved away from its working class roots. “The gap wasn’t as huge as it is now, with carbon [frames] and all these things,” said Maurice Burton, the former track and road champion, who features in Moncrieffe’s exhibition.
Burton, now 64, was one of Britain’s best riders in the 1970s and early 1980s. He is aware that he has become part of the problem. When he qualified for the Commonwealth Games in 1974, he rode the same knackered bike he’d found and repaired aged 12. Today, he owns De Ver Cycles, a shop in Streatham in south London, where most of his customers are white men who are able to spend anything up to £10,000 on a bike.
It is still possible to cycle cheaply, not least when you factor in the savings on public transport. “But too often the message out there is that it’s now a rich man’s sport,” says Jools Walker, a cycling advocate known as Lady Velo, and the author of Back in the Frame, a cycling memoir.
Walker, 37, agrees that imagery, including in marketing, is vital. She was dismayed in 2019 when RideLondon, cycling’s answer to the London Marathon, Photoshopped a black woman into a picture to make the event look more diverse. That summer, 94% of participants in the event’s longest ride, from London to Surrey and back, had been white. Hugh Brasher, director of RideLondon, said he regretted “the unfortunate error made by a temporary member of staff”, adding that the event was working hard to improve diversity.
Walker says other barriers exist in minority communities. “Once upon a time, and maybe in some places still, if you had a bike the whole thing was to get a car,” she told me. “The perception was that you were poor if you were riding around on a bike.”
And then there is racism. Burton says he experienced it when he was overlooked for selection at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. He was booed when he won a race in Leicester. Decades later, Arthur faced it on his first club ride, after which he nearly quit the sport he had come to love again.
Arthur went back to cycling alone until, months later, he made friends with a member of another north London group, Finsbury Park Cycling Club. “They restored my faith in cycling,” he said. He became an amateur racer, and remembers fighting to stay in contention in his first event in Milton Keynes. “I was hanging on for dear life but I needed to close the gap out of sheer embarrassment, knowing I was the only black person there,” he said.
Arthur quickly got better, and met other riders of colour on similar journeys. By 2018, he had about 20 numbers on his phone, and formed the Black Cyclists Network. Then, in November last year, Arthur was cycling home to north London after a Sunday ride to the Surrey Hills. It was a big day for the network; they were riding with Team De Ver, the club attached to Maurice Burton’s shop. Burton was also on the ride.
Afterwards, Arthur gave Burton a hug and headed home with two other BCN members in their all-black kit. As he waited at some central London traffic lights, a police officer crossing the road in front of Arthur told him he had stopped too far forward. Arthur politely explained he was staying out of the blind spot of the truck behind him.
When the lights went green, the officer stopped Arthur, claiming to have smelled cannabis. On a busy pavement, the officer searched and sniffed Arthur’s shoes and wallet. He then frisked Arthur, despite the fact his Lycra kit left little room to conceal anything. “At that point I had to laugh,” Arthur said. He rode home with his friends, one of whom had filmed the search, feeling humiliated. He believes it was a petty show of force, and that it would be inconceivable for a white rider to be treated the same way.
The clip went viral, and the Independent Office for Police Conduct investigated the case. It found that the grounds for Arthur’s search “were not reasonable”. But it did not uphold a complaint that the stop was discriminatory because the officer “used the same unreasonable grounds to stop and search people of all ethnicities and genders”, a statement reads. The Office recommended that the officer receive “reflective practice”.
Initially, Arthur had hoped the BCN would be a group of like-minded amateurs. “Then the George Floyd incident happened,” he says of Floyd’s death under a Minneapolis police officer’s knee in May last year. “The whole Black Lives Matter movement galvanised us to really try and see if we could make a bigger impact than we had planned.”
The racism Arthur had already experienced added rocket fuel to a mission to tackle the diversity gap at all levels of cycling. BCN launched a fundraising campaign to raise its profile and to finance what Arthur hoped would become an official racing team. He ultimately wants to help improve diversity at the elite level.
That cause became prominent during last year’s Tour de France, which started in August as protests against racism gripped the planet. Kevin Reza, a French pro and the only black rider in the 2020 peloton, spoke out about the sport’s failure to promote diversity and lack of solidarity. He said cycling had “a lot to learn and is really far behind”.
Arthur’s and Reza’s activism coincided with lockdown and surging demand at bike shops. Cities were adding miles of new bike lanes to meet demand among new riders. By July last year, the relaxation in social distancing rules permitted group cycling again. Yet Arthur was still stunned by the turnout at Regent’s Park. “It’s fantastic and proves what we’re trying to do — that there is a community out there,” he said.
****
Peter Kerre is a 40-year-old DJ and activist who grew up in Kenya and lives in New York City. He began cycling to Black Lives Matter marches in June last year. Others did the same, creating a rolling vanguard that prevented police from determining the route of the marches. Soon there were so many cyclists that they came together to form Street Riders, and began organising separate protests. More than 1,000 people joined their first ride on 1 July 2020.
Within weeks, the group’s “Justice Rides” were attracting 15,000 cyclists. Kerre told me the addition of two wheels had added a new energy and mobility to activism in the city. “I’ve been an activist for years and if you say we’re gonna march two miles from Brooklyn to Manhattan, everyone’s exhausted,” he said. “But with a bike, in the same three hours you can cover a whole borough.”
Kerre said the rides, which are still happening, had encountered racial slurs and aggression in wealthier neighbourhoods, and warm welcomes in poorer areas. This had been an education for the white protesters joining the rides. “Many are from privileged areas and we’re taking them to parts of Harlem and Brooklyn they’ve probably never seen before,” he said. “We’re destroying stereotypes.”
Smaller protest rides sprung up across the US. They carried historical echoes. Bicycles have long been machines of emancipation, mobilising the oppressed. Suffragettes used early bicycles — the “people’s nag” — to organise and protest. Hitler banned cycling unions in Germany in 1933, confiscating bikes that were being used by early anti-Nazi movements. In China, pro-democracy demonstrators arrived at Tiananmen Square by bicycle.
But the Suffragettes also just really loved cycling. There is a desire among contemporary activists to celebrate bikes as vehicles for “black joy”, as well as emblems of freedom, at a time when joy can feel scarce. “It’s about not having only to be defined by our grief, our pain and our struggles,” said Jools Walker, who resents only being asked to talk about cycling in the context of colour. “It’s traumatic opening up your inbox and hoping that one email is going to be about something positive or not related to race at all,” she explained.
Walker’s most joyful moment on a bike came when, after a stressful few months, her boyfriend gave her a fold-up bike as a Christmas present. “I was still in my Disney pyjamas riding it around the housing estate where I live, not caring how cold it was or how ridiculous I looked,” she said. “No grief, no pain, no politics — I was just that kid who got their dream gift and had to play with it.”
Joy is central to other groups gathering in cities all over the world. Legion of Los Angeles is a US professional team devoted to promoting diversity. Chapters of the group Black Girls Do Bike have spread across the US from its base in Pittsburgh. In the UK, Reece Watt, a cyclist and graphic designer, launched the Black Cyclists Collective in Leeds in 2019, with a mission similar to Arthur’s. And in London, in 2018, My Choice, a social enterprise with links to Nigeria, launched the Black Riders Association to improve access to cycling for adults and children.
Brothers on Bikes, which started as a charity ride between London mosques in 2015 (they called it “Tour de Salah” or Tour of Prayer), has become a national network of cyclists of mainly Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani descent. “We want to push cycling for health, and discipline for young people,” said Usman Malik, 38, who leads a 40-strong “BOB” group in Leicester.
****
In Regent’s Park, Arthur had assigned groups of eight riders to a ride captain taken from the core members of the network. He took the beginner group to the Inner Circle, a quieter, shorter loop deeper inside the park. They included Jo McLean, Arthur’s girlfriend of 15 years. McLean had only really started riding herself in lockdown after being furloughed from her job as a flight attendant. She had begun to help run the network, and had a hand in designing the kit.
As well as the stripes, the uniform includes a pattern based on an Adinkra symbol from Ghana’s Ashanti culture. The symbol means “Ese Ne Tekrema”, which translates as “the teeth and the tongue”. “You need your teeth and tongue to work together so you can eat,” Arthur explained. “Cycling is about collaboration.”
Brands were soon attracted to Arthur and his network, chapters of which he is now planning to open across the country. Wiggle, the online sports store, now provides the customised kit using its dhb range, and Science in Sport, the sports nutrition company, is also a sponsor. Trek and Zwit soon joined the network as cycling brands themselves woke up to the demand for better representation in the sport.
In the middle of June this year, Arthur led a team of five BCN riders to Colchester for their first race as a domestic cycling team. “Tonight is a proud moment for the squad,” he said in an Instagram post the next day. “It’s a dream come true and an opportunity to inspire current and future generations of Black and Brown riders.”
It is the mission to engage new riders that has fuelled Arthur’s mission — to share the joy and adventure he discovered as a boy on a pink bike in Kumasi.
The BCN logo contains a silhouette of a woman holding up a bicycle wheel. Arthur and McLean told me they wanted to include a black woman to represent what they saw as the sport’s most marginalised demographic. “If this whole project was going to be judged a success, it had to be based on how many women of colour we could attract,” Arthur told me.
Elaine Swaby, who is in her 40s, had come to Regent’s Park from Crystal Palace in south east London. She too had only taken up cycling in lockdown and heard about the ride on Facebook. She wanted to gain more skills and confidence. “But I also liked it because it was for people who look like me,” she told me as she rode a simple hybrid. “People aren’t looking at me wondering what I’m doing here… when you’re my colour you get to know that look. But this feels fantastic! This feels like I’m home!” She stretches the “o” in “home” as we freewheel down a slight hill. | https://medium.com/@simonusborne/cycling-while-black-f2b4ec286049 | ['Simon Usborne'] | 2021-06-28 15:00:19.974000+00:00 | ['Tour De France', 'Cycling', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Olympics'] |
Global HVN Presence: From Hong Kong‘s Thriving Blockchain Communities to the Crypto Summit in Zurich! | From Hong Kong’s Thriving Blockchain Communities …
After Token2049 ended, we were invited, as the only fintech company past the ICO stage, to present our success story to Hong Kong’s flourishing blockchain community at the EuroBlockShow event. The crowd was thrilled by our long list of accomplishments — from winning at CoinAgenda Global to delivering our DEMO platform and getting such important business deals in place so early in our development.
It was a great evening all round. Ugur’s blog detailing the new letter of intent we have in place covering Latin America, as well as my presentation of Hive Project’s success story, served as the perfect introduction for all the discussions we had with potential users of the platform in Asia.
Presenting Hive Project‘s Success Story at EUROBLOCKSHOW HONG KONG
AND WITH SO MANY SMALL BUSINESSES, INVESTORS AND CRYPTO ENTHUSIASTS SHOWING SUCH GREAT INTEREST IN OUR PLATFORM, WE DECIDED TO TRANSLATE OUR BUSINESS ROADMAP SUMMARY INTO CHINESE! WE WILL POST IT TO OUR WEBSITE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE TO HELP OUR ASIAN COMMUNITIES SEE WHERE WE ARE HEADED.
… to the Crypto Summit 2018 in Zurich!
Now that our Hong Kong mission has concluded, we are travelling to Zurich, Switzerland, to be a part of CRYPTO SUMMIT 2018! This event brings together global influencers, policy makers, investors and entrepreneurs to engage in open dialogue and shape the future of crypto. With our advisor, Richard D. Titus, one of the Wired 100 in 2010, there as speaker, we will be bringing Hive Project to new highs in the world of fintech & blockchain!
With Jure, Ugur, Domen and Richard there to discuss our success story with industry leaders, we are proud that Hive Project is truly going global, which will be of HUGE benefit by the time our platform is officially launched. We are fully aware that high levels of trust and recognition are vital components for success in our go-to markets.
And with our business and tech development going so well, we have lots of eye-catching content to present when talking about Hive Project’s successful past and even more successful future! We will keep you posted on events in Zurich and keep the good news coming in our March of Madness!
As always, be sure to join our active, thriving and ever-growing TELEGRAM community HERE and be the first to receive the rest of the NEWS BLASTS to come in our March of Madness! Our amazing team and community are waiting for you! | https://medium.com/hiveterminal/global-hvn-presence-from-hong-kong-s-thriving-blockchain-communities-to-the-crypto-summit-in-b28aa95731ed | ['Domen Ursic'] | 2018-03-26 14:51:00.199000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Bitcoin', 'Hong Kong', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Fintech'] |
Are you a tactical product manager without any strategic role? | Are you a tactical product manager without any strategic role?
Pro-Tip: Transition to a strategic role as soon as possible
What does a Product Manager really do? Image by Product School
Product Managers— Everybody wants them but only a few are sure what to do with them.
A Product Manager can be considered as Jack of All, master of none. In a lot of companies, their scope of work is very loosely defined. As a result, it tends to expand whenever a task comes up for which no one else is directly responsible.
Thus, you have the “always busy” product manager, who is constantly juggling meetings and responsibilities. Their job is to run around, execute the orders of the upper management, push the developers hard and get things done. I call them the tactical product manager.
Being a tactical PM may bring you a lot of work but is it really helping you grow in your role? Are you slowly learning the art of building great products? Are you learning how to think strategically? Do you have an idea of the vision of your product?
If the answer to the above questions is NO, then you are definitely a tactical product manager. You should try to bring in strategic elements to your role as soon as possible.
Before we discuss how to do that, let me take you through my first year as a Product Manager. This will give you a very good idea of what a tactical PM’s life looks like.
The time when I too was a tactical product manager
In April 2019, I graduated with an MBA from a decent college.
As I set foot in the big bad world, there were dreams in my eyes and revolutionary thoughts in my mind. I was going to change the world.
Turns out, I was getting ahead of myself. First, I had to rectify this small matter of putting my career back on track.
I was a product manager with the following major responsibilities:
Get issues reported by support and account management team fixed on priority. Take up the feature requests from the management— CXOs and VPs. My job was to scope these out and get them implemented. Run the daily standup. Our team comprised one tech lead and two freshers (with no prior experience). If something was not fixed on time, then I was responsible, not the tech lead. Give daily updates to the stakeholders about the team’s progress and provide the week’s plan.
I was the proverbial “busy guy at work”. Lot of fluff but little substance.
As you can see from my responsibilities, I was NOT focusing on many of the core aspects of product management:
Talking to customers — We never seemed to talk to customers. It was mostly the heads who would identify market opportunities or major product improvements.
Prioritizing features— The priorities were decided by the heads. You were only responsible for delivering a bug-free version on time.
Planning —Whatever product roadmaps we made, we never referred back to them again (Because, priorities would change frequently).
The major reasons for these gaps were: 1)Little understanding of the product manager’s role among the higher-ups. 2) Centralization of decision making with others being viewed primarily as executors rather than equal stakeholders. 3) Absence of middle management, which helps bring structure and aids the planning process.
Moral of the story — If you are a PM, its not necessary that you will actually be doing a PM’s work.
How to identify if you are a tactical PM
My story is not unique. A lot of PMs are in the same situation. The problem becomes especially acute when random responsibilities are dumped on product managers.
The first step towards fixing a problem is to identify it. Following are some red flags to indicate if you are in a purely tactical role:
You have little idea of the vision of your product/organization. You can’t recall being part of discussions around strategic priorities for your product. All the tasks you work on are top down. You rarely get a chance to take initiative on your own. You are not carefully tracking product metrics. The impact of your changes on product metrics is rather unclear. You are so overwhelmed with ad-hoc tasks that you rarely get time to identity new priorities for the product.
Becoming a more strategic Product Manager
The best way to avoid this situation is to understand in advance the culture of the company you wish to join. Talk to Product Managers(current and past) at the same level as you, who have been a part of the company. Understand their role and day-day responsibilities. This will give you a good idea of what to expect when you join. Avoid organizations where the PM’s role is purely tactical.
In case you already are in such a role, you should try to convince your company to add more strategic weightage to your role. Following are some tips on doing that.
Identify PMs in your company who, in your opinion have a more strategic role. Understand how they reached there, the kind of experience they have and whether their initial responsibilities were similar to yours.
2. Take some initiatives on your own:
For a feature that you have been given, don’t start scoping it out immediately. Research on it — articulate the pain point it is solving, try to see if there are other ways to solve that pain point, talk to customers to understand how big that pain point is, do a competitor analysis to identify how other products are solving the same pain point.
Begin studying your product level metrics more deeply. Use an analyst’s help to gather insights and identify scope of improvements.
Reach out to some customers on your own or with the help of the sales/support team. Understand their biggest pain points.
After you have got something solid to recommend, present your findings to your manager (in a separately scheduled meeting or during the weekly sync up). If you have done your work well, atleast a few recommendations should get approved. Even if they are not, your efforts will definitely be noticed.
3. Instead of just reacting to other’s requests, start becoming more forward looking. Draft a 90 day roadmap for your product and share it with your seniors. Regardless of whether you stick to it or not, you will atleast become aware of the strategic priorities for the team.
4. Talk to your manager and express your desire to take up more strategic responsibilities. Seek their guidance on how you can contribute on that front. Most probably, they will find a way out.
The above should start a virtuous cycle. Once you take the initiative and work hard to deliver results, your boss/super-boss will develop more confidence in your abilities. Gradually, the “strategic nature” of your role should expand.
However, if your efforts consistently fall on deaf ears, changing the company is the only option. You shouldn’t waste your time at a place that is 1) Run without a semblance of a strategy 2) Doesn’t value the skills you can bring on the table.
Conclusion
Getting a job is easy but the challenge is to find the one that fits your dreams and aspirations. Never get comfortable doing a job which is not constantly helping you become a better product manager. If you recognize that the role is not providing you responsibilities in accordance with your expectations, make a sustained effort to change the status quo.
After all, if you don’t take charge of your career, nobody else will. | https://medium.com/agileinsider/are-you-a-tactical-product-manager-without-any-strategic-role-3832500b28ea | ['Vikram Goyal'] | 2020-10-07 23:37:06.234000+00:00 | ['Strategy', 'Career Development', 'Product Management', 'Product Manager', 'Career Advice'] |
Workplace bullying: The impacts on employees and organizations | Our previous article explained that workplace bullying is a harmful, targeted behaviour that happens at work. It might be spiteful, offensive, mocking, or intimidating. It forms a pattern, and it tends to be directed at one person or a few people.
Workplace bullying is harmful to the physical and mental health of employees. But, do personal factors lead to workplace bullying?
There might actually be a significant relationship between individual (personality) factors and the vulnerability to workplace bullying. For example, individuals with low self-esteem and low social competence, and a high level of anxiety are more likely to be bullied at work. Also, individuals that are more suspicious, less assertive and with limited coping resources are more susceptible to workplace bullying.
Surprisingly, people that are rule-focused, bossy and controlling and more cautious are exposed to greater covert workplace bullying such as gossip, covert insults and sarcasm.
These are theories that require further research. Indeed, individuals may experience major personality changes as a consequence of exposure to workplace bullying, which disregards the view that individual characteristics may be antecedents of workplace bullying.
Negative consequences of workplace bullying
Moreover, various empirical evidence shows the negative impact of workplace bullying on mental and physical health. Workplace bullying is severely associated with stress, anxiety, depression, fatigue, loss of self confidence, aggression, insomnia, apathy, muscle pains, headaches, stomach problems, and even hand tremors.
Like bullying in childhood, bullying in adulthood is also associated with a number of negative consequences, affecting emotional/psychological, medical, and socioeconomic areas of functioning.
Emotional/psychological consequences of workplace bullying:
Workplace bullying can result in increased stress and mental distress, even up to two years later. If you have been bullied at work or seen someone who has, then you will have experienced first-hand the increase in stress it brings to people’s lives. A genuine anxiety becomes pervasive, as the bullied individual worries what might happen next, and in some cases is even afraid to go to the office.
Workplace bullying causes mood and adjustment disorders, as well as reactive depression, as it is caused by events external to the victim. It can also result in panic attacks, insomnia and the inability to sleep soundly through the night, which has further mental health consequences beyond the impact of bullying.
Bullied individuals are also likely to face detrimental consequences such as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD is characterized by avoidance, social withdrawal, emotional numbing, irritable and angry behaviours and difficulty concentrating. These symptoms suggest that various self-management competencies, such as emotional self control, achievement drive and adaptability, are impeded. So, exposure to bulling in the workplace could develop into psychological distress, which subsequently results in the decrease of self-management ability. Psychological distress develops as a result of stressful circumstances, such as workplace bullying, which then results in increased instability, impaired decision-making and lack of insight.
In more severe cases, work-related suicide can occur. When victims are depressed, they become withdrawn and lose interest in activities they previously enjoy. Some are anxious about going to work or even going out at all. All this can lead to a frame of mind where it becomes difficult to stay optimistic and they feel suicide is the better option.
Medical consequences of workplace bullying:
In addition to emotional/psychological consequences of workplace bullying, there are a number of medical consequences as well. Greater exposure to workplace bullying results in greater general health complaints, neck pain, musculoskeletal complaints, acute pain, fibromyalgia and cardiovascular disease. Indeed, bullied individuals are 1.59 times more likely to develop a cardio-related illness, such as heart disease or stroke (Xu and colleagues, 2017). In other words, the incidence of heart-related problems increases by 59% in bullied individual compared to non-bullied individuals.
Moreover, being bullied at work increases the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by over 45% over the ensuing decade (Xu and colleagues, 2018).
Admittedly, observational epidemiological studies cannot outrightly prove the relationship between workplace bullying and heart problems or diabetes. Indeed, pre-existing mental health vulnerabilities can increase a person’s risk of being bullied and their risk of developing physical health challenges later on. But some mechanisms such as chronically rising levels of stress hormones and bullying victims adopting harmful coping behaviours, such as eating excessively or drinking too much alcohol, could explain how bullying leads directly to physical illness.
Socioeconomic consequences of workplace bullying:
The socioeconomic consequences of bullying has to do with how it affects the workplace. These include:
Financial loss resulting from legal costs or bullying investigations
Decreased productivity
Increased absenteeism
High turnover rates
Poor team dynamics
Reduced trust, effort, and loyalty from employees
Do you know your health can also be affected if you witness workplace bullying?
Even though you do not directly experience workplace bullying, you could experience future declines in work-related wellbeing, such as depression, by just merely witnessing the act (Singapore University, 2008).
Merely witnessing bullying can harm employees who lack social support or who are pessimistic in nature (Sheffield University, 2019). This is why it is important to first and foremost talk about bullying if you observe it in the workplace. You could talk about it with the victim (asking how they are doing) or with others (forming a plan to address it, or maybe just sharing experiences).
Being aware of bullying in the workplace and deciding not to take action is just the same as being responsible for any future abuses. Witnesses of bullying behaviour should be encouraged to report any such incidences. Individuals are less likely to engage in antisocial behaviour when it is understood that the organization does not tolerate such behaviour and that the perpetrator is likely to be punished.
People who bully may eventually face consequences, such as formal reprimands, transfer or job loss. But many types of bullying are not illegal. When bullying is not addressed, it becomes easier for people to continue bullying, especially when the bullying is subtle. Bullies who take credit for work or intentionally make others look bad may end up receiving praise or being promoted.
So what steps can you take if you are exposed to bullying at your workplace? Read our next article to find out.
At P.A.T, Consulting, we provide robust solutions to individuals, organizations and individuals in the area of mental health and wellbeing. Given the detrimental effects of workplace bullying to employees and organizations, it is paramount to stamp it out of your business. If you or your organization need advice in dealing with this issue and other issues related to mental health, we are here to provide professional help and advice. Send us an email at [email protected]
#PATCares | https://medium.com/@patconsultingng/workplace-bullying-the-impacts-on-employees-and-organizations-8e6fc2d123c0 | ['Pat Consulting Ng'] | 2021-03-04 10:10:18.501000+00:00 | ['Employee Well Being', 'Workplace Culture', 'Workplace Bullying', 'Workplace Wellness', 'Mental Health Awareness'] |
The First Supper | It burned.
My first time having a guest over. My 100th time making this recipe. Cooking is my zen. And it burned.
"I'm at the junction."
Expletives are unbecoming. I'm a lady after all.
It burned.
"5 minutes," I text back.
It burned. What do all the gods of food and fire and flavor and pots and pans want me to learn?
It burned. He can probably smell it from out there.
I lock up--force of habit. I walk past the small shops, trying to think of an emergency supper for two. Instant noodles? Ugh, no. I'm trying to save my face, not destroy it to oblivion.
Oh gods, there he is. I realize that I've been hoping he was at the wrong junction. Shame is a powerful thing.
I can't duck. There's nowhere to hide. Maybe he senses my embarrassment and turns and smiles at me. It aggravates the butterflies.
"Hey," he says, bundling me into a hug. "How are you?"
Is he genuinely happy to see me or am I dreaming this?
"I'm good," I grin. Don't ruin this.
"I burned our food." Yep, ruined.
He laughs. At me, probably.
"I thought we agreed. Don't cook."
"I had to. Couldn't help myself."
We're almost home. I'm shaking. Can he tell?
I fumble with the padlock, can't get the damn key in. Done this a million times and today...
"Relax, Shiku," he says.
I click my tongue and curse him quietly.
I didn't mean it, honest. But when I'm having a nervous breakdown the last thing I want to hear is bloody "relax".
Gods, it smells of burned burnedness. I can't even look at him. I don't want to see him wrinkle his nose. I'm on the verge of tears.
"Would you like some tea? Coffee?" I try to keep the quiver from my voice.
"Coffee please, thanks." He sits on the mat on the floor. I had warned him: I have no furniture save for three wooden palettes, one as a table and two as my bed. He had said, "Cool."
He did seem comfortable enough in my bare single room. I watched him sidelong as I waited for the kettle to boil. He looked up at me and put his phone aside. "Dinner will be here in about half an hour."
"I'm really sorry," I begin. Apologizing is my gift to the world. "I didn't want you spending anything on me--"
"Listen, if you apologize one more time I’m walking out."
Well, that worked. I want to scream, but I concentrate: stir the coffee. Stir the coffee.
"How much sugar?"
"None."
I hand him his mug and sit beside him.
"Not having any?"
"I prefer tea," I say.
He sips. He swallows. He sighs.
The mug doesn't make it onto the palette table. I snatch it before the coffee spills.
He folds neatly, falling sideways onto the floor.
Three. Two. One. My phone buzzes.
"It's done," I say.
"Cleanup is on the way."
I chose the wrong profession. The nerves are never an act. I am brittle, haunted constantly. But someone must clean up the scum of the earth. He was one of them. My first hit. His body is gone in 10 minutes. A text says my pay has arrived, five minutes later.
I stare at the burned pot soaking in a basin. Supper is obviously cancelled--the boss took care of it as soon as the scum hung up.
Fine. I’ll buy some bread. | https://medium.com/@kawirakoome/the-first-supper-52297c42bac5 | ['Kawira Koome'] | 2020-12-17 13:16:57.629000+00:00 | ['Creative Writing', 'Fiction', 'Writing', 'Kenyan Writer', 'Writing Prompts'] |
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Note: *All orders are subject to verification prior to shipping, and if additional information is required our Order Verification Department will contact you at the email address or with the phone number you provided | https://medium.com/@unikequipmentsales/welcome-to-unikcctv-com-957272761a2c | [] | 2019-11-08 07:46:22.498000+00:00 | ['Security Systems', 'Ecommerce', 'Security Camera', 'Unikcctv'] |
The Mindset of the TPLF: Forget School, You’ll Think What We Want You to Think | The Mindset of the TPLF: Forget School, You’ll Think What We Want You to Think Jeff Pearce May 15·9 min read
A GUEST ARTICLE from a Source for “A Morally Bankrupt Institution”: How the UN is Betraying Ethiopia
A couple of days ago, I published on Medium a story with multiple sources over how senior UN officials are lying, threatening and harassing Ethiopian aid workers and colluding with the TPLF. One of the sources works in the education cluster of the international aid initiative in Tigray. This person, frustrated and appalled over what’s going on, prepared a long letter originally intended to be sent to the federal government on how the TPLF is still able to instill a climate of fear in the region and psychologically manipulate innocent Tigrayans. This is connected to the revelations over the UN’s interference in national exams.
But this individual knows even more than what can fit into that article, and I thought their insights were worth passing along in a separate piece. They chose to share that letter with me in addition to their interview comments, and I have cut this material for length and given what would be called a very “light” edit in terms of style, syntax, etc. so that I can preserve this person’s voice.
These are their words, not mine. Their views are their own.
For all the Western journos who keep claiming, “I’ve been on the ground, I’ve seen the truth!” here is the perspective of an Ethiopian who lives and works in Tigray; and who lived and worked there long before the conflict began. You didn’t find them. You didn’t talk to them. It makes one wonder if you even bothered to look.
And I consider their voice and their observations far more authentic than yours.
The greatest achievement of the TPLF is arguably having control over every aspect of life it ruled for so long. The TPLF since its inception deliberately incorporated a web of security apparatus within every community it ruled that allowed it to act quickly and with deadly force. It did not tolerate any form of dissent.
That is why a high school deputy principal and veteran teacher could openly proclaim that he would rather kill his five-year-old daughter than allow her to go to kindergarten classes — to show his loyalty to TPLF. Keep in mind, this is in the aftermath of November. His explanation is that he cannot accept a world without the TPLF.
This shows he would do anything to make sure that the daily activity of the people never returns to normal in his area. His declared mission is to make Tigray Hell on Earth until it prevails. This is a phenomenon currently growing in some corners.
It is truly sad and delusional. Nothing on the ground supports the return of the TPLF. Therefore, these wishful thinkers are destroying the lives of many innocent people for a lost cause. Children are suffering because they cannot get fundamental service like education. And their parents are afraid to send them to school. They are sometimes afraid to go to work themselves. They are afraid the TPLF will return at any moment and punish them for betraying their cause.
More importantly, most people live in fear because they see the TPLF political operatives still working in public service in their local communities. The government has called 100 percent of the civil servants to return to work. These people have history in the community. They are known to be enforcers of the TPLF agenda.
It is an open secret that most civil servants are TPLF operatives and sympathizers. Everyone knows even a low-level job in the civil service requires total loyalty to the TPLF. This means TPLF. This is particularly true in field of education. That is where the TPLF lived and breathed.
Therefore the TPLF network is untouched and empowered to rebel as time goes by. The TPLF operatives have not yet been fully investigated for their roles in the past government. They were not even asked about their role in the attack on the defense forces before they could return to work. Some of them returned from the battlefields and started to work at their desks.
People who had active roles in mobilizing communities for the war are back in business. They are collecting their pay checks from the government while rebelling in their office by not doing any work. They even complain about the members of the defense forces and incite hostility against them. They openly talk about wanting to chase away the defense forces from the region.
The unbelievable thing about the defense forces is that they are protecting communities in which TPLF operatives remain, individuals who hoped to kill them in their sleep. Now they are trying to fight them through propaganda, misinformation and public incitement using their civil servant roles in the government.
The TPLF operatives openly talk about false atrocities and fictional criminal acts committed by the defense forces. They try to ridicule the soldiers that are patrolling the streets. Simultaneously they talk about how their TPLF super warriors are killings thousands and thousands of the defense forces every day. They talk about how many are being slaughtered like sheep on the battlefields because of their lack of experience. In their minds it is only a matter of time before TPLF fighters finish all the defense forces in the region and return to power.
When events or forums are organized for discussions regarding government business such as reopening schools, the TPLF operatives are the first to talk. They start out with demanding Eritreans forces must leave every town in Tigray where they are constantly committing war crimes. They proclaim that the Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers are raping women and pillaging communities. The sad thing is that they know full well what they are saying has no truth to it. It is just their political strategy to create chaos and open the possibilities for the TPLF to return.
If a concerned parent says schools should reopen at some point, the TPLF operatives will start to shout down the parent. They send a clear message to the parent that the safety of any child will not be guaranteed. They threaten anyone that is thinking about restarting school in any part of the region including Mekelle. This is how they are able to block the school reopening effort for the past three months.
Every time the education bureau tries to start the school reopening process, they start shouting and screaming about how they are in constant fear for their lives. However, the real reason that they do not want schools to reopen is because they consider it as a sign of the region returning to normalcy without TPLF. They want to show that only TPLF can bring law and order in the region and no one else.
Even when they are educated about the dangers of children staying at home away from school for extended periods of time, they say they know, but they do not care. Their political agenda is more important than the development of their children. Their operatives demanded that private school teachers be paid by the interim government some 40 million ETB. They can make this kind of unreasonable demand because they feel that they know the political landscape in the region. Schools could be closed for another full year and they couldn’t care less.
When a delegation from the federal Ministry of Education came to visit one elementary school for general assessment of the reality on the ground, the few teachers who were in the school premises abruptly dispersed before being seen. They all went in different directions. The scene was incredible to watch — they ran from the compound like their lives were in some imminent danger. That is because even being seen with people known to be from the federal government or people who speak Amharic can make a person suspect in the community. The level of fear they display of the TPLF operatives is beyond comprehension.
The phenomenon is similar to a widow who fears her dead husband and continues to obey his abusive rules. Even though she knows there is no way her husband can return from the dead, the nightmare continues until she is able to get some professional help.
Loyal supporters can sometimes admit the soldiers did not deserve to be killed by their own brothers and sisters in their own country like they are some enemy forces. Nonetheless, their years and years of trainings that the TPLF is always right blocks them from using their own mind. They are made to believe it is dangerous for them and their family to entertain facts other than what the TPLF presents.
Every opportunity is used to tell fictional heroic war stories of the TPLF fighters. For instance, if someone from a different world came to visit Tigray during the TPLF reign in the past three decades, that person would believe the TPLF’s version of its war with the Derg. All TV and radio stations would talk about the TPLF’s armed struggle. All the songs are war songs and would be played over and over again. The people were always in the struggle mindset. They were told again and again that they were heroes for singlehandedly bringing down the Derg regime. They were just the best fighters in the whole world.
They were even told that they could disarm an army general with their bare hands or a stone. TPLF children could also capture a soldier without any military training because they were so brave and indispensable. People from other ethnicities in Ethiopia were so weak compared to their superior abilities and heroism. Their psychological makeup is unbreakable and unique. The other Ethiopians fear war and would not know how to fight without the TPLF fighters’ encouragement and support. TPLF fighters could not miss if they shoot, and all TPLF generals are tactical masterminds. This belief is not held by just the ordinary people. It is held by people who are college professors and distinguished academicians that teach in the universities and colleges across the region.
These people genuinely believe that they are some chosen race that have innate political and warfare abilities. They even claim that the TPLF’s security capabilities are better than the First World security agencies. They claim TPLF leaders’ give advice to international security agencies on their latest spying techniques and intelligences operations.
This is important to know how the TPLF is aggrandized in the minds of the people. That is why any activity that the TPLF does not approve — even on its deathbed — can face extreme challenge. The party was built to be effective even in its own dying gasps.
That has made them feel they are still in power. They are starting to develop the feeling everyone around them and in the interim government is a TPLF supporter or a sympathizer or just scared of them. Some even operate as if the TPLF is still in power. So, managing a reputation is an important survival skill. Each person is expected to be extremely loyal. However, loyalty alone is not sufficient. The individual must also be vocally and practically intolerant of any other party or independent thinking.
If a Tigrigna-speaking person chooses to speak in Amharic in a public setting, that person is taken as a traitor. That is the case even if it is accidental. Speaking in Amharic has become a taboo. Amharic is the language of the enemy. Even the Tigrigna must be pure. It has to sound in a certain way and not include any Amharic words to be accepted by the TPLF operatives.
Therefore disloyalty can only be erased through overt acts of support to the TPLF. Generally speaking, in Ethiopia, the collective benefit is more important than the individual. When it comes to the TPLF, it has exploited this angle in a particular way. The TPLF has morphed to be more important than the livelihood of the individual, the family unit and even the collective benefit of the society. Everyone fears everyone. The operatives roam the streets and the office hallways observing who may be working with the enemy.
The unofficial plan is to show to imagined international supporters that Tigray is in a political turmoil. The operatives want the world to believe that every person is resisting and opposing the activities of the interim government at every step of the way. Active resistance is vastly taking hold and sooner or later the TPLF will come riding the wave of the resistance. And the loyal people who are orchestrating the resistance from the inside will be rewarded with political power in the TPLF government just like in 1983. Working for the TPLF from the inside was always a big thing.
But the loyalty to TPLF is not always rooted in ideology or politics — it is rather rooted in fear. And fear has a long history which predates the party’s ascension to power. In the TPLF circles everyone knows your thinking. This is similarly observed in organized criminal enterprises. Notorious criminal organization control their operatives’ thoughts and actions.
The only difference with the TPLF is that it was at one point a political powerhouse that ruled a regional government with constitutional mandate. | https://medium.com/@jeffpearce/the-mindset-of-the-tplf-forget-school-youll-think-what-we-want-you-to-think-daa6f8e11e81 | ['Jeff Pearce'] | 2021-05-15 04:32:27.560000+00:00 | ['Tigray', 'United Nations', 'Ethiopia', 'Journalism', 'War'] |
Xcode 12.3 模擬器的黃色問題 | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/%E5%BD%BC%E5%BE%97%E6%BD%98%E7%9A%84-swift-ios-app-%E9%96%8B%E7%99%BC%E5%95%8F%E9%A1%8C%E8%A7%A3%E7%AD%94%E9%9B%86/xcode-12-3-%E6%A8%A1%E6%93%AC%E5%99%A8%E7%9A%84%E9%BB%83%E8%89%B2%E5%95%8F%E9%A1%8C-d99ab11da28c | ['彼得潘的 Ios App Neverland'] | 2020-12-18 04:08:22.572000+00:00 | ['iOS', 'Xcode', 'Swift'] |
Best E-mail Marketing System | Best E-mail Marketing System
The Secret Email System is a counterintuitive approach to creating an running an online business, specifically the freedom life-style business model, that allows you to build a sustainable and profitable long term business that gives you the freedom, fun and adventure. Nafis iqbal akil ·Dec 24, 2020
We achieve this by creating a “business machine” that works for you 24/7 where your only job is to oversee the system, not to create products, services where you have to chase new clients or deliver to them.
And as a result…this free’s you up to live and enjoy your life while the business works for you — this is the Secret Email System.
<<<Book Your Copy Now>>>> | https://medium.com/@helperhands/best-e-mail-marketing-system-953a04c6ff79 | ['Nafis Iqbal Akil'] | 2020-12-24 03:51:08.856000+00:00 | ['Email Marketing', 'Email', 'Business Strategy', 'Email Marketing Tips', 'Business'] |
Protecting Yourself and Your Bitcoin: Two Important Tips for Staying Safe from Cryptocurrency Scams | The world of Bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies, in general, can be intimidating and confusing. As Bitcoin becomes more mainstream, it is essential that we be aware of potential dangers that may be lurking out there.
Since the beginning of commerce and bartering, there have always been bad actors looking to make a quick and easy buck off of those who are unaware. Because Bitcoin has value and there is a demand for it, unfortunately, it is no exception, and there are many cryptocurrency-related scams to be aware of.
IF YOU ARE ASKED TO SEND BITCOIN FOR ANY OF THE FOLLOWING IT MAY BE A SCAM:
IRS Payment
Utility company payment
Airbnb Reservation
Job Posting
Vehicle purchase via eBay or Craigslist
I’m here to share how to protect yourself and your Bitcoin from scammers who are trying to take advantage and to help you educate yourself on how to identify and avoid these scams. Below are my main tips for staying safe when it comes to cryptocurrency scams:
1. Know Exactly Who You Are Sending Cryptocurrency To
If you’re at all skeptical, don’t send the money until you are confident.
Due to Bitcoin having a certain level of anonymity, it is tough to find out who owns a specific wallet address. Add to this the fact that Bitcoin transactions by nature are irreversible, and you can begin to see why it is imperative to know who you’re dealing with.
Most scams you will encounter involve sending Bitcoin or cryptocurrency to someone you don’t know, often in exchange for goods or services. If you are not dealing with someone that you know to be trustworthy, it is essential to be very skeptical and err on the side of caution. A good rule of thumb is to not send Bitcoin to anyone you are not 100% sure is on the up-and-up.
As an example, one scam that we see often is for automobiles or vacation rentals. You may find these ads on Craigslist or other similar sites offering up deals that seem almost too good to be true. When you think something sounds too good to be true, you’re probably right. Once you initiate contact with the vendor, you will be asked to send cryptocurrency to pay for the item, and after you do, you will never hear from the ‘seller’ again. This is why the most important piece of advice I can give to protect yourself is to know who you’re dealing with.
2. Don’t Take Action Until You Verify Who is Calling and Requesting Cryptocurrency.
Generally, you shouldn’t be receiving calls with legal threats and cryptocurrency payment requests.
Another threat to be aware of is ‘IRS’ scams. These ‘IRS’ scams are typically phone calls you may receive threatening you with legal action due to unpaid back taxes. The caller on the other end will threaten to have you arrested and thrown in jail unless you pay them the amount of money they say you owe.
These scammers have used all sorts of payment methods, including gift cards, but have now started asking for cryptocurrencies. If anyone calls you claiming to be from the IRS and threatening you with legal action, these are without a doubt scams. Do not send any money to these individuals. The IRS will not contact you by phone with threats of legal action.
If you’re ever unsure about a transaction, our Customer Success team is available seven days a week from 9am-7pm PST to answer any questions you may have, and we will help you make sure that you’re safe with your coins. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us! | https://medium.com/coinme/protecting-yourself-and-your-bitcoin-two-important-tips-for-staying-safe-from-cryptocurrency-scams-83acb2c6d675 | [] | 2018-07-20 16:55:24.352000+00:00 | ['Fraud', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Startup', 'Scam', 'Bitcoin'] |
Story: Upon learning his predicament, Nathan began to reason his options. | Story: Upon learning his predicament, Nathan began to reason his options. They were few. He noticed the walls closing in, but everybody he knew felt at ease and displayed nothing but concern and love toward one another. Nathan achieved his life-long goal, bringing people together.
The meeting went on forever, and his patience thinned. Why didn’t people get the hint? They were overstaying their welcome. Nathan rose, intent to ask his guests to leave.
A strong wind sliced across the room.
Nathan gasped, “Ooohh…,” the cool breeze chilled his bones. He screamed, “Get out!” No one paid attention.
Why didn’t they understand, he thought. Everything had been going so well.
“That’s it. I’m going to put a close to this, get on with my life,” Nathan mumbled.
They lowered Nathan’s coffin into the ground. His wife said, “Now he can practice patience that kooky meditation never worked in him.” | https://medium.com/short-shots-city/story-upon-learning-his-predicament-nathan-began-to-reason-his-options-82eedc323b62 | ['Greg Prince'] | 2020-12-07 20:21:39.771000+00:00 | ['Microfiction', 'Short Form', 'Fiction', 'Short Story', 'Short Fiction'] |
Importance of Landing pages | Importance of Landing pages
A landing page is any web page that a consumer can land on, but in the marketing realm, it’s usually a standalone page, distinct from your homepage or any other page, that serves a single and focused purpose. A landing page is a follow up to any promises that you’ve made in your content. Essentially, it’s the next step toward a visitor becoming a customer. Your landing page lets you make a trade, some sort of special offer, piece of information or a deal, in return for providing contact information.
Landing pages can be click through, leading to another page such as your e-commerce site, or lead generation based. Lead generation landing pages typically offer items like an eBook, free trial, contest entry or webinar registration in return for the submission of contact information. A good landing page will do its job by convincing a potential customer that it’s worth it to provide personal details in return in exchange for whatever you have to offer. Landing pages can be found through a general search or via your company website, increasing the likelihood that a potential customer will end up there.
There’s no need to have just one landing page, or even just one landing page at a time. In fact, experts in the marketing would probably suggest that you maintain multiple landing pages, targeted toward segmented customer populations.
Why Use Landing Pages?
You’ve done a great job building your brand and creating a website that represents it. Now you have to make sure that all of that hard work translates into sales. If you are looking for an effective lead conversion tool, landing pages are definitely the way to go.
A landing page is a great way to drive traffic, improve your SEO and build your brand. Approximately 68% of B2B businesses use landing pages to generate leads for future conversion. Fortunately for you, 44% of these clicks are directed toward home pages, which, as we’ll discuss, is not a good strategy. Landing pages lead customers to a specific product, service or offer and encourage them to take action. This is your opportunity to create conversions and build your customer base.
If landing pages are so important, why isn’t every business using them? Well, there is a misconception that they are hard to create and maintain. Fortunately, that simply isn’t true. Building an effective landing page is less about flashiness and more about getting the consumer what they’re after.
What Makes a Good Landing Page?
First off, your home page should not be your landing page. You need to send prospective customers to a page that will let them take advantage of whatever special offer you’ve promised them. Since they are tied to something specific, your landing pages have a better chance of capturing attention for a longer period of time. Good landing pages do several things:
1. They zero-in on the offer, not the company. Your future customers are clicking for a reason, and duping them by not giving them what you’ve promised is not going to form a good first impression. Now is not the time to give a detailed history of your company. This isn’t to say that the landing page should not be tied to your company brand. Just the opposite. They should serve a separate function, yet it should still be an extension of your brand.
2. They are focused and free of distractions. The content on your landing page should have the end-goal of getting the user what they want while completing the registration process.
3. The forms are not intimidating. Lengthy forms can be daunting to visitors and may encourage them to move on, rather than take advantage of whatever opportunity you are offering. If you simply can’t shorten your form, break it into steps, and let the user see exactly where they are in the process. For example, listing their name and address may be step one of four.
4. They speak to a specific audience. Segmenting your customer base helps you to target specific consumers through customized campaigns. If you have a base that’s drawn to a particular offer, such as an eBook or discount, your landing page can serve as a built-in segmentation device, allowing you to nurture these leads effectively going forward.
5. They collect specific information about your prospective customers. Speaking of specific audiences, even if you draw the right crowd, they can’t be converted if you don’t collect the right information. The collection of demographic data should include more than simply a name and email address. It should also give you some idea of why a person clicked and what their long-term connection to your company might be.
6. They provide your special offers with a home. Unless they are tied to landing pages, your online special offers will do nothing to benefit your business. Creating landing pages provides a place for your offers to reside.
7. They provide a thank you. Your landing page should always be followed up with a thank you. This is not only polite but assures the consumer that they have completed the registration process.
8. They allow users access to other marketing channels. A customer likes what you’ve just offered. Now you can provide links to other offers, your social media profiles or an email list sign up.
There is no doubt about it, we are certainly living in a digitally connected world. Moving boldly forward with a digital marketing campaign can easily be one of the best investments that you make for your business. As you build your digital marketing toolbox, including landing pages is a smart move, and both you and your customers will reap the benefits.
If you would like to learn more about the importance of landing pages, or want to get in touch with an expert who can improve your landing page strategy, we’d love to chat with you right now! | https://medium.com/@aankush471/importance-of-landing-pages-f9ded4144016 | [] | 2019-11-20 14:23:20.801000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Digital Marketing', 'Social Media', 'PPC Marketing', 'Landing Pages'] |
Align Your Life: Menstrual Cycle 101 | Until you embrace your cyclical nature you will be in a constant fight with yourself. MOON {menstrual}🩸CYCLE 101.
Your moon cycle is a GUIDE.
As a woman, it is a roadmap to your alignment, flow and ease in life.
𝙉𝙤𝙬, 𝙄 𝙙𝙞𝙙𝙣’𝙩 𝙖𝙡𝙬𝙖𝙮𝙨 𝙛𝙚𝙚𝙡 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙨 𝙬𝙖𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙢𝙖𝙮𝙗𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙙𝙤𝙣’𝙩 𝙚𝙞𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙧. 𝙔𝙀𝙏.
The magic of our bodies as women have been co-opted for millennia.
For a decade, I felt shame, frustration & disgust around this aspect of being a woman. I felt cursed.
Now, my moon cycle is something I celebrate. It 𝙎𝙐𝙋𝙋𝙊𝙍𝙏𝙎 me in flowing with all aspects of my life.
My body’s 𝙣𝙖𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙖𝙡 𝙧𝙝𝙮𝙩𝙝𝙢𝙨 influence the foods I eat, the workouts I do, my sexual desires, how I socialize with others, my creative expression + work flow.
Aligning my life with my moon cycle gave me the permission to begin truly honoring myself.
It gave me permission to 𝘽𝙀 as I am. Period 😉.
🩸 Permission to be withdrawn.
🩸Permission to be social.
🩸Permission to be shadowy.
🩸Permission to be flirty.
When you begin to 𝙐𝙉𝘿𝙀𝙍𝙎𝙏𝘼𝙉𝘿 + 𝙃𝙊𝙉𝙊𝙍 the fluctuations of your hormones ( endocrine system ) you access a new state of self-love + freedom.
The 4️⃣phases of your cycle each have a different energy expression.
💥Reclaim your body as a sacred temple.
💥Reclaim the beauty of your moon 🌚 cycle.
💥Reclaim the power within you.
This is a beautiful part of your 𝙨𝙖𝙘𝙧𝙚𝙙 feminine nature.
Want more on this? Send me a DM to learn about my Feminine Magnetism Course.
Embrace your flow💞🙏🏼Serena
@serenavamoroso | https://medium.com/@serenavamoroso/align-your-life-menstrual-cycle-101-9c5718cd3143 | ['Serena V Amoroso'] | 2020-12-15 18:49:13.041000+00:00 | ['Moon', 'Embodiment', 'Womens Health', 'Wellness', 'Menstruation'] |
Is My Deep Dark Fantasy More Myth Than Reality? | At the time, it was just too much for me to speak my mind and start the conversation. Too much of a confession. It was too “weird” of a thing for me to mention, so I settled for sitting there next to him while he slept and fantasizing about it all by myself.
“How do you even breach the subject without sounding like you’re suggesting your partner isn’t enough,” I wondered at the time. I had to settle for watching it and fantasizing about it for the time being.
My mind began to wander. I closed my eyes and envisioned myself in her place, surrounded by beautiful hunks of men who were each salivating and ready to indulge in unbridled sex with me. I wanted them to want my body.
I wanted it to be me they were staring at like that. Like I was the most beautiful woman they’d ever seen, so enamored by me and overtaken by the carnality of the moment that they set aside whatever insecurities they’d had to satiate their desires.
Am I really that greedy? Of course, I am!
Ideally, the men in my fantasy would be men who were quite like me. I wouldn’t want men who spent their time looking to orchestrate something like this, but men who found themselves playing a fun game of poker with me or something when, suddenly, desire overcame us all and everything just flowed organically.
I wanted so badly to touch myself. But I couldn’t. He was right there. And I didn’t want to ruin the moment. That made it all even more arousing. I had to wait. When it comes to sex, I don’t like being told to wait — but I love being told to wait — if you know what I mean.
Opening my eyes, I stared back at my screen. The woman was bent over before the lucky fellow who was positioned behind her. She grasped a man in each hand while she gave oral sex to another. I know porn is fake, but she really seemed to be enjoying herself. It seemed like an ecstatic moment for her. I know it would’ve been if it were me in her situation. My eyes returned to closed while I imagined myself doing this now. It seemed so hot.
But at the same time, it seemed so remote. Could this ever really happen to me? I began to wonder. I watched and imagined until I couldn’t take it anymore and then I shut off my screen and went to sleep.
The next day I’d finally get some time alone and I gave in to my urges to pleasure myself while I fantasized about being in her shoes. Shoes were the only things she was wearing in the video, after all.
I felt so in touch with myself and I mean that both ways. I felt connected with myself in a new way as I stopped and imagined how it would feel to stare up and into the eyes of all those men, peering down at me with nervous grins, fumbling around with their hands, and unsure how to treat me.
I imagined how this would all play out. How I’d love to go down on them all. How I’d love to be so bad and misbehaved that I could have casual sex with several men back-to-back and bathe in the overwhelming pleasure of one another’s bodies. Share the love, people. I want to be the star of the show, but let’s make sure everybody has a good time, okay?
My masturbation was so unbelievably satisfying that night. I climaxed like never before. I shook and moaned. I felt possessed even though I was all by myself. It wasn’t an act. It was the release I deserved.
I would go on to have this same fantasy repeatedly over the years. No matter who I was dating or sleeping with at the time, it would always be a fantasy I had by myself. I never talked to anyone about it.
I mean, threesomes are one thing, that’s commonplace, but this? This is totally different. I feel so greedy.
I feel like it’s so off-limits, so taboo. And it’s not that I haven’t tried to bring it up before. I have. It’s something I get so nervous thinking about discussing with someone else, I can’t even begin to speak of it.
I try to work up the courage and fail. And then I’m hit with a dose of reality. How hard would something like this be to pull off? I imagine it’d be easy if you’re a porn actress, but does it really happen outside of porn? And would I enjoy it? Or is this one of those kinds of fantasies that I hear about all the time that are better left a fantasy than real experience?
I wonder. But you know what? I know that I’ve had a great time all by myself throughout the years, pleasuring myself to this untouchable fantasy. And I find the parallels poetic.
Ironic, isn’t it? That a fantasy with many would be something that I can only enjoy all by myself. I can add as many partners as I’d like in my mind, but at the end of the day, it’s a sexual experience I have all alone. It’s my own private sexual world that takes place inside of my mind. It’s a fantasy filled with others, but accessible only by me. It’s my sexuality and I own it. And I’m completely okay with that.
Will my fantasy ever become a reality? I have no idea. I hope so. But I sometimes feel like this will be the way it is for the rest of my life. My own little personal dirty diary of mental fantasies that I share with only myself in detail.
The takeaway I have from all of this (besides the fact that you don’t need anybody else to enjoy your own sexuality), comes in the form of a question. Why is it that we have such a tough time talking about things that are sexual? Why are we so ashamed that we’ve created a world where we watch porn but don’t dare utter a single word about our viewing habits, except on blogs?
Why is it that we have this disconnect? Why can’t we be more mature and just be honest with who we really are in the bedroom?
I understand that not all people should be privy to our sexual lives, but what about our friends and even our lovers? Aren’t they the people who are closest to us? If anyone should understand us enough to have a mature conversation about sex with us, shouldn’t it be them? I think so.
What would it take for us to create a more honest world, one that wasn’t so sex-shy? I wonder. It might make it easier to sort out the fantasy-reality question if sex wasn’t such a minefield of awkward conversations. | https://medium.com/sexography/is-my-deep-dark-fantasy-more-myth-than-reality-e0ca53cfbcb5 | ['Nicole Mackenna'] | 2020-12-28 01:18:08.784000+00:00 | ['Sexuality', 'Self', 'Pornography', 'Relationships', 'Culture'] |
3 of the most adorable pets for your family | Every one of us at some point in our life has had the urge to pet an animal, an adorable animal that we can care for, play with, take it for a walk, or just hold it in our hands to feel the warmth and cuddle with it. Having a family, a pet can be a lovely companion for your children. Children are amazed by pets and that is why every parent at some point has heard their kid ask for a pet whether it would be a dog, a cat, a hamster, or a parrot.
Pets although can be very friendly, cute, and adorable, do need maintenance and care like a family member however if you are in for the lifestyle change they would bring, the attention they would need and the space you could provide them with then having a pet is an amazing experience in itself.
Here we will mention the 3 most adorable type of pets that can make your days full of entertainment
Dogs
Yes, dogs! You’d find dogs in the top charts of every article the reason for that is dogs are the most loyal, lovable, caring, friendly, exciting, and the cutest pets. Adopting a dog is not an easy feat, you would have to look after it as you would look after your child. However dogs and kids together are the most adorable combination, both being the epitome of unconditional love, joy, happiness bringing energy to you daily routine and making the house a pleasant place, yet finding the best dog for your family is not easy and needs a bit of research. Dogs are the highest maintenance pets, depending on their size their food cost increases, while having a furry dog increase the time required for its grooming and may cause allergy, their temperament is important and it depends on your lifestyle. Dongs belong to different habitats and maybe purebred or mixed there for research should be done before getting a specific breed also the size of the dog should be studied before adopting one but in the end, it always comes down to personal preferences. Here are some of the best family dogs which when adopted can be an exhilarating experience for the entire family including your children.
1. Labrador retrievers
Intelligent, lovable, adorable, protective. They are high energy level dogs and need a little extra exercise.
2. Boston terriers
Affectionate, friendly, and being non-aggressive is what makes them one of the best family dogs. They also have a low maintenance cost.
3. Golden retrievers
Playful, intelligent, and best trait is that they are very gentle with children. But they are prone to diseases.
Cats
If you are a feline person and want cats to be a part of your family, want your children to have a friend in the shape of a cat, the only consideration that you should have is that wether the cat is friendly or not. Though children and cats together can be delightful, children, generally preschoolers are fascinated by everything and that is why they tend to poke, hold, squeeze, and tease thing that maybe cat dog or any other living or non-living thing, cats unlike dogs are relatively more aggressive and can hurt you or your child while protecting themselves. That being said cats are precious animals, they are excellent secret keepers, they are low maintenance pets. Before adopting a cat you should be aware of your lifestyle as well as know the type of cat you want, their nature, energy levels, and whether it is a mature cat or not.
Here we would share a few that can be best suited for your family.
1. Exotic short hair cats
Looking for a Persian cat, this is the one for you. They are playful, loyal, and calm but don’t like to be left alone.
2. Maine coon
They are affectionate, loyal like dogs, are soft and nice around kids with a great life expectancy and their size can grow alot.
3. Birmans
Gentle, relaxed, sociable and are best around kids as well. They follow their owners around.
Birds
Birds are incredibly beautiful creatures, from pocket sizes to large feathery birds that can astonish you with their beautiful voices. Some may even mimic and learn the language you speak while others would amaze you in the type of colors they come in. However, that doesn’t mean the most beautiful bird may be the best pet for you alone or in a family. Birds depending on their nature can be moody, some of them have very high energy levels and are loud which can be irritating sometimes, others may need a wide area and some birds are extremely expensive. That being said some birds are loyal, affectionate, playful with their owners and if you lavish them perfectly then you are in for an amazing ride. They can learn tricks and whistle which can be delightful for children and can bond strongly with their owners, having very long ages they can be a part of your family for a long time. Here we will share some of the most lovely birds that can be well suited for every family but in the end, it always comes down to personal preferences
1. Cockatiels
They are gentle, less expensive, can be held, mimic voices can whistle and learn tunes, and are not very loud. They make the best bird pets for children as well.
2. Green wing-macaw
They are easy-going, calm, requires a few hours of your time, and are very gentle parrots with beautiful colors.
3. Loving birds
As the name suggests they are extremely gentle and makes a strong bond with their partners and owners. They love taking baths. | https://medium.com/@zarabjan/3-of-the-most-adorable-pets-for-your-family-d5465bf60218 | ['Zarab Jan'] | 2020-12-02 07:43:59.311000+00:00 | ['Dogs', 'Pets', 'Cute', 'Birds', 'Cats'] |
Consciousness: Redefining the Mind-Body Problem | “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of Nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
-Max Planck
The following excerpt from my book Theology of Digital Physics: Phenomenal Consciousness, The Cosmic Self & The Pantheistic Interpretation of Our Holographic Reality may be hard to swallow for some die-hard materialists. This is why I urge some of you to read it with an open mind and abstain from making hasty conclusions. Keep in mind that this excerpt is but a small sample of much larger discussion of the hard problem of consciousness covered quite extensively in my book with the “meta-analysis” of leading theories of consciousness, substantiated claims, certain proposed solutions in regards to phenomenology, future possibilities of mind-uploading and, as the title suggests, theological implications of Digital Physics.
First, we need to recognize that the physicalist approach is limited in scope and can only depict neural correlates of consciousness without identifying the causal role of biochemical processes on producing a conscious experience. This is a very old mind-body debate deeply rooted in the debate of Idealism vs. Materialism. Arguably, consciousness is not generated by the brain. You can’t get consciousness out of a piece of matter. We have discussed elsewhere the many reasons why we can be certain that this is true. Consciousness is fundamental, pre-exists our Universe and manifests in everything that we think of as real. A brain, as important as it seems, is nothing more than the way that non-local consciousness operates at an “avatar” level during a lifetime. The evidence that all of this is true is consistent and overwhelming. But mainstream science is still bound by the centuries-old “materialist dogma” and stuck with the “hard problem” of consciousness.
If we assume that consciousness doesn’t arise from the brain activity, as some neuroscientists still presume to be true, where does it come from? Some thinkers propose that “local” consciousness arises from “non-local” quantum processes at large while consciousness is posited to be Nature’s sole ontological primitive. Besides the Unified Field, I use the term Quantum Akasha in the book, bridging perennial theosophy and modern quantum theory, and submit to you a conception of Experiential Realism. Similarly, British-American philosopher Peter Russell refers to the Primacy of Consciousness, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman puts forth the notion of Conscious Realism, and idealist philosopher Bernardo Kastrup defends Metaphysical Idealism.
To use the metaphor of our Information Age, consciousness to humans is as Cloud to computers. Just like your smartphone, your brain is a ‘bio’-logical computing device of your mind, an interface for physical reality. Our minds are embedded into the greater mind-network, as computers in the Cloud. Viewed in this way, consciousness is ‘non-local’ Cloud, our brain-mind systems are receivers, processors and transmitters of information within that Cloud.
I wouldn’t be surprised if all that hype about testing for the ‘seat of consciousness’ could only end up refining our understanding of neural correlates — not how consciousness originates in the brain because its origin is not there. The Internet or a cellular network is not generated by your smartphone — only processed by it. Species-wide mind-networks are ubiquitous in Nature. What’s different with humans is that the forthcoming cybernetic mediation is about to become synthetic telepathy and beyond that — the emergence of one global mind, the ‘Syntellect Emergence’.
Perhaps what would pull the rug from under physicalism is a notion of ever deeper levels of abstraction that only minds can create and perceive. Physicalists might make a concession by saying that information, now widely accepted as fundamental, is physical but idealists would insist by saying that information, conveyed by symbolism, originates only in the mind.
Intersubjectivity is a particularly great example of layered abstractions, from memes to social institutions to collective unconscious well beyond materiality. Subjective values, such as patriotism, and complex concepts are inherently mental in nature. What’s even more indicative that our world is entirely mental rather than physical is that advanced consciousness like augmented humans and artificial superintelligence will generate even deeper levels of abstraction from extradimensionalities to virtualities of our own design. Quantum computers would compute parallel slices of abstraction. And inner space exploration could eclipse outer space exploration. Before long, we’ll start to create new virtual worlds coming right out of our imagination, instantly “materialized” with help of advanced AI.
Would it be logical to accept that it has already happened in our bi-directionally causal (self-causal, retrocausal) Universe and our human mindspace is but a fractal of the larger cosmic mind? In a real sense, we all constitute levels of abstraction with top-down propagation emanating from the Omega Singularity, the transcendental projector of all possible observer timelines. As Isaiah Berlin famously said: “To understand is to perceive patterns.” Self-causation of reality becomes apparent when a phenomenal mind, which is a web of patterns, conceives a novel pattern and perceives it. All mass-energy, space-time itself emerge from consciousness. Those are epiphenomena of consciousness. Period. As Arthur Eddington once put it, the stuff of the Universe is mind-stuff.
Also, speaking of levels of abstraction consider that what we perceive as physical well may be imaginary in the minds of inhabitants of parallel Earth where events turn out slightly different from ours, hinting once again that everything is made of information and ultimately is but a mental construct.
-Alex Vikoulov
Theology of Digital Physics by Alex M. Vikoulov
P.S. Theology of Digital Physics: Phenomenal Consciousness, The Cosmic Self & The Pantheistic Interpretation of Our Holographic Reality is now available as eBook on Amazon:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B081DN7W1K
Written by Alex M. Vikoulov; Foreword by Antonin Tuynman, PhD; Format: Kindle eBook; Print Length: 325 pages; Price: $9.99.
Tags: redefining hard problem of consciousness, hard problem of consciousness, digital physics, holistic perspective, theology, theology of digital physics, digital theology, digital pantheism, holism, holographic reality, holographic principle, phenomenal consciousness, cosmic self, transcendent self, self-transcendence, theogenesis, cybernetic singularity, syntellect emergence, intelligence supernova, artificial superintelligence, Syntellect Hypothesis, Antonin Tuynman, Alex Vikoulov, primacy of consciousness, perceptronium, noocentrism, digital theologian, cosmic consciousness, quantum mechanics, Arthur Eddington, Max Planck, Perter Russell, Donald Hoffman, Bernardo Kastrup, conscious realism, metaphysical idealism, Omega Point, cosmic mind, quantum theory
About the Author:
Alex Vikoulov is a Russian-American futurist, evolutionary cyberneticist, philosopher of mind, essayist, media commentator, painter, author of “The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution,” “The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and The Omega Point Cosmology,” “The Physics of Time: D-Theory of Time & Temporal Mechanics,” “The Intelligence Supernova: Essays on Cybernetic Transhumanism, The Simulation Singularity & The Syntellect Emergence,” “Theology of Digital Physics: Phenomenal Consciousness, The Cosmic Self & The Pantheistic Interpretation of Our Holographic Reality,” “NOOGENESIS: Computational Biology,” ‘“TECHNOCULTURE: The Rise of Man,” “The Cybernetic Singularity: The Syntellect Emergence.” Self-described digital theologian, neo-transcendentalist, transhumanist singularitarian. Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area). More Bio…
Author Website: www.alexvikoulov.com
e-mail: [email protected]
* Image Credit: Shutterstock
**Original article first appeared on EcstadelicNET (www.ecstadelic.net) in Top Stories section on November 16, 2019 | https://medium.com/@alexvikoulov/consciousness-redefining-the-mind-body-problem-d44bd0c27526 | ['Alex Vikoulov'] | 2021-01-29 23:51:43.895000+00:00 | ['Physics', 'Mind', 'Theology', 'Self', 'Consciousness'] |
Spotify + Machine Learning. A game changer. | The issue of taste.
How many songs exist today? Though there’s no consensus, the order of magnitude is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions. Added to this stock are the thousands of songs released each year. Due to this sheer volume of music, listeners are challenged to discover music they like. Additionally, some listeners don’t know exactly why they like a particular song and may even prefer a broad range of genres. This is what makes stumbling upon a song or getting a recommendation from a friend so exciting. Song discovery has historically been aided by subjective sources such as DJs. In the 2000s, music streaming platforms such as Pandora relied on manual curation or tagging to drive their song recommendations.1 Though better than discovering songs by pure luck, discovery aided by manual curation and tagging is ultimately tough to scale and can’t provide truly individualized recommendations.
Spotify… A game changer in music streaming industry.
Launched in 2008, Spotify is the world’s largest music streaming service with 159 million monthly active users across 61 countries.2 At the time of the company’s initial public offering (IPO) in April 2018, Spotify generated €4 billion in revenue and was growing 45% annually. Music streaming services have experienced outsized growth compared to the music industry overall (see Figure 1). Accompanying this rapid growth is intensifying competition as Pandora, Apple Music, Tidal, SoundCloud, Amazon, and Google all fight to attract new subscribers.
How Spotify winning the market drastically.
Core to Spotify’s strategy for winning in this crowded market is its ability to provide personalized recommendations and help users discover new music, which is enabled by its investments in machine learning. In its IPO prospectus, the company highlighted this strategy stating that it will, “continue to invest in our artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to deepen the personalized experience that we offer to all of our Users” and that “this personalized experience is a key competitive advantage.” Given Spotify’s deep pool of data (200 petabytes compared to Netflix’s 60 petabytes)2, the company is well-poised to create competitive advantage and provide users with a continually improving service.
Spotify’s strategy for recommendation.
Spotify’s strategy has consistently focused on machine learning. First, its machine-generated, personalized playlists such as Discover Weekly and Release Radar account for 31% of all listening on the platform compared to less than 20% two years ago. The company employs three types of machine learning to enhance its recommendation engine: collaborative filtering, natural language processing (NLP), and raw audio models1. Through collaborative filtering, Spotify provides recommendations to users based on the preferences of users with similar tastes. With NLP, the company scours articles, blogs, and song metadata to generate “tags” associated with each song and compares those tags with those of other songs. The company also analyzes which artists or songs are frequently mentioned along with the song in question to refine the pool of song recommendations. Through raw audio processing, Spotify is able to identify commonalities between songs through their musical elements (e.g. tempo, time signature, key). While collaborative filtering and NLP allow Spotify to point users to popular songs they may enjoy, raw audio processing allows the company to make predictive suggestions for songs with very little user awareness.
Spotify uses three forms of recommendation models :-
Collaborative Filtering : Collaborative Filtering is a popular technique used by recommender systems to make automated predictions about the preferences of users, based on the preference of other similar users.
Collaborative Filtering is a popular technique used by recommender systems to make automated predictions about the preferences of users, based on the preference of other similar users. On Spotify, the collaborative filtering algorithm compares multiple user-created playlists that have the songs that users have listened to. The algorithm then combs those playlists to look at other songs that appear in the playlists and recommends those songs.
Natural Language Processing(NLP) :- NLP is the ability of an algorithm to understand speech and text in real-time. Spotify’s NLP constantly trawls the web to find articles, blog posts, or any other text about music, to come up with a profile for each song.
NLP is the ability of an algorithm to understand speech and text in real-time. Spotify’s NLP constantly trawls the web to find articles, blog posts, or any other text about music, to come up with a profile for each song. Convolutional Neural Network :- Convolutional Neural Networks are used to hone the recommendation system and to increase accuracy because less-popular songs might be neglected by the other models. The CNN model ensures that obscure and new songs are considered.
Convolutional Neural Networks are used to hone the recommendation system and to increase accuracy because less-popular songs might be neglected by the other models. The CNN model ensures that obscure and new songs are considered. The CNN model is most popularly used for facial recognition, and Spotify has configured the same model for audio files. Each song is converted into a raw audio file as a waveform. These waveforms are processed by the CNN and is assigned key parameters such as beats per minute, loudness, major/minor key and so on. Spotify then tries to match similar songs that have the same parameters as the songs their listeners like listening to.
With these key machine learning models, Spotify is able to tailor a unique playlist of music that surprises its listeners every week with songs they would have never found otherwise.
Second, Spotify has bolstered its strategy through several acquisitions. In 2014, Spotify acquired Echo Nest at a $100 million valuation3 strengthening its music recommendation capabilities. In March 2017, Spotify purchased Sonalytic which develops audio feature detection technology.4 In May 2017, Spotify acquired Niland, a startup which provides more accurate music search and recommendation.5
Finally, Spotify is exploring the use of machine learning to help artists compose songs. To do this, Spotify hired François Pachet in the summer of 2017 to be the Director of the company’s Creator Technology Research Lab. Though Pachet views machine learning as a complement to the artists’ creative process, one could envision a future where Spotify uses its machine learning capabilities to compose its own original content based on its users’ preferences.
Though it seems like Spotify is the market leader today in part due to its use of machine learning, how else can the company ensure that no other company sprouts up with a better algorithm to make personalized recommendations? How will Spotify, given its market clout, shape artists’ process of new music creation? | https://medium.com/@abhiwritestech/spotify-machine-learning-a-game-changer-c651efe89f72 | [] | 2020-12-18 13:05:14.368000+00:00 | ['Spotify', 'Vimal Daga', 'ML', 'Righteducation'] |
5 Reasons to Not Use Observables in C# | When I was first introduced to Observables in C#, they sounded pretty damn good. “They just model streams of data”, “It’s just data over time” and “It’s just the push equivalent of an IEnumerable”. After working with them for a little while, I don’t think they’re as good as I was told.
The statements above might be true. Observables might be simple from a birds-eye perspective. Unfortunately simple doesn’t always mean easy and there’s are some things that will end up biting you in the ass. Here’s five of them.
The Framework Has No Consistent Name
When searching for documentation and solutions to problems with Observables, I always felt like I didn’t know what to search for. Previously I’ve always known the terms to use, django {your-problem-here} , serilog {how-to-do-x} {framework}-{problem description}
However with Observables I had a lot of problems finding people encountering similar issues, and I was never really sure what to put for the {framework} part of my queries.
I spent a little time trying to figure out what the right term is. Turns out — nobody seems to know.
On Stack Overflow the most used tag is system.reactive , but looking official documentation and Stack Overflow questions, I've seen it referred to as:
With all of these names that are subtly different — what am I supposed to search for?
We’ll call it Rx.Net in the rest of the post — at least it’s short
The Documentation Is Hard To Find
Finding documentation online for Rx.Net is pretty close to impossible. While figuring out the search terms to use is hard, finding comprehensive documentation is much, much harder.
Rx.Net is the .NET flavour of ReactiveX, which luckily seems to have quite a bit of documentation! Unfortunately you pretty much have to know what you’re looking for already. If I want to read the documentation for how the C# Select works, I need to know that in ReactiveX, Select is called Map
When I know that, in the ReactiveX documentation I can find a language-agnostic explanation of what a Map/Select does. There's also language-specific documentation for each of the different flavours, including Rx.Net!
Just kidding
There’s also no API reference online anywhere. I can find the documentation in the editor, so I know it’s been written — but it isn’t hosted anywhere. The closest we get is this API reference from MSDN. From 2011.
Observables are hard to debug
Observables can be a pain to debug. Most debuggers aren’t particularly suited for tracing streams of data, and the stack traces you get are unimpressive. Let’s dive a little deeper into the stack traces. Take this piece of code which throws an error after a few integers have passed through the stream.
[Fact]
public void ObservableTest()
{
IObservable<int> observable = Observable.Range(0, 5)
.Select(i => i * 2)
.Do(i =>
{
if (i > 5)
{
throw new Exception("That's an illegally large number");
}
});
observable.Subscribe(
onNext: (i) => Console.WriteLine(i),
onError: (err) =>
{
throw err;
});
}
The humongous Stacktrace is as follows:
Error Message:
System.Exception : That's an illegally large number
Stack Trace:
at MyProject.Test.ObservableTest.<>c.<Foo1>b__0_3(Exception err) in /home/geewee/programming/MyProject.Test/ObservableTest.cs:line 30
at System.Reactive.AnonymousSafeObserver`1.OnError(Exception error) in D:\a\1\s\Rx.NET\Source\src\System.Reactive\AnonymousSafeObserver.cs:line 62
at System.Reactive.Sink`1.ForwardOnError(Exception error) in D:\a\1\s\Rx.NET\Source\src\System.Reactive\Internal\Sink.cs:line 61
at System.Reactive.Linq.ObservableImpl.Do`1.OnNext._.OnNext(TSource value) in D:\a\1\s\Rx.NET\Source\src\System.Reactive\Linq\Observable\Do.cs:line 42
at System.Reactive.Sink`1.ForwardOnNext(TTarget value) in D:\a\1\s\Rx.NET\Source\src\System.Reactive\Internal\Sink.cs:line 50
at System.Reactive.Linq.ObservableImpl.Select`2.Selector._.OnNext(TSource value) in D:\a\1\s\Rx.NET\Source\src\System.Reactive\Linq\Observable\Select.cs:line 48
at System.Reactive.Sink`1.ForwardOnNext(TTarget value) in D:\a\1\s\Rx.NET\Source\src\System.Reactive\Internal\Sink.cs:line 50
at System.Reactive.Linq.ObservableImpl.RangeRecursive.RangeSink.LoopRec(IScheduler scheduler) in D:\a\1\s\Rx.NET\Source\src\System.Reactive\Linq\Observable\Range.cs:line 62
at System.Reactive.Linq.ObservableImpl.RangeRecursive.RangeSink.<>c.<LoopRec>b__6_0(IScheduler innerScheduler, RangeSink this) in D:\a\1\s\Rx.NET\Source\src\System.Reactive\Linq\Observable\Range.cs:line 62
at System.Reactive.Concurrency.ScheduledItem`2.InvokeCore() in D:\a\1\s\Rx.NET\Source\src\System.Reactive\Concurrency\ScheduledItem.cs:line 208
at System.Reactive.Concurrency.CurrentThreadScheduler.Trampoline.Run(SchedulerQueue`1 queue) in D:\a\1\s\Rx.NET\Source\src\System.Reactive\Concurrency\CurrentThreadScheduler.cs:line 168
at System.Reactive.Concurrency.CurrentThreadScheduler.Schedule[TState](TState state, TimeSpan dueTime, Func`3 action) in D:\a\1\s\Rx.NET\Source\src\System.Reactive\Concurrency\CurrentThreadScheduler.cs:line 118
at System.Reactive.Concurrency.LocalScheduler.Schedule[TState](TState state, Func`3 action) in D:\a\1\s\Rx.NET\Source\src\System.Reactive\Concurrency\LocalScheduler.cs:line 32
at System.Reactive.Concurrency.Scheduler.ScheduleAction[TState](IScheduler scheduler, TState state, Action`1 action) in D:\a\1\s\Rx.NET\Source\src\System.Reactive\Concurrency\Scheduler.Simple.cs:line 61
at System.Reactive.Producer`2.SubscribeRaw(IObserver`1 observer, Boolean enableSafeguard) in D:\a\1\s\Rx.NET\Source\src\System.Reactive\Internal\Producer.cs:line 119
at System.Reactive.Producer`2.Subscribe(IObserver`1 observer) in D:\a\1\s\Rx.NET\Source\src\System.Reactive\Internal\Producer.cs:line 97
at System.ObservableExtensions.Subscribe[T](IObservable`1 source, Action`1 onNext, Action`1 onError) in D:\a\1\s\Rx.NET\Source\src\System.Reactive\Observable.Extensions.cs:line 95
at MyProject.Test.ObservableTest.ObservableTest() in /home/geewee/programming/OAI/MyProject.Test/ObservableTest.cs:line 25
Removing all the Rx.Net internal stuff, this is the only information in the stack trace we care about:
Error Message:
System.Exception : That's an illegally large number
Stack Trace:
at MyProject.Test.ObservableTest.<>c.<ObservableTest>b__0_3(Exception err) in /home/geewee/programming/MyProject.Test/ObservableTests.cs:line 30
at MyProject.Test.ObservableTest.ObservableTest() in /home/geewee/programming/OAI/MyProject.Test/ObservableTests.cs:line 25
We get the line number where we subscribed to the observable, and the function inside the chain where the error was thrown. I have no idea what transformations the data has gone through. If the stream has been dynamically constructed I might not even know what it looks like.
These issues aren’t unique to observables. Composing long LINQ-expressions suffer from the same issues. When composing several different functions together, the stack traces very quickly stop becoming meaningful. The below is the complete stack trace the Enumerable/LINQ version of the Observable code.
Error Message:
System.Exception : That's an illegally large number
Stack Trace:
at MyProject.Tests.ObservableTests.<>c.<TestLinq_StackTraces>b__2_1(Int32 i) in /home/geewee/programming/MyProject.Test/ObservableTests.cs:line 55
at System.Linq.Utilities.<>c__DisplayClass2_0`3.<CombineSelectors>b__0(TSource x)
at System.Linq.Enumerable.SelectRangeIterator`1.MoveNext()
at MyProject.Tests.ObservableTests.TestLinq_StackTraces() in /home/geewee/programming/MyProject.Test/ObservableTests.cs:line 60
It’s much cleaner, but it doesn’t give us any more information than the observable version.
The poor debugging and stack-traces are a perpetual thorn in my side when working with Observables. But if the same issues exist with long chains of Enumerable, why is that less of an issue? The short answer — I don’t know.
My best guess is that when using Observables there’s a strong tendency to keep everything as an Observable stream. The longer your streams are the harder debugging with a minuscule stack trace becomes.
It’s Hard To Use Scopes
A very common thing I need to do is attach some sort of context to a request or a series of events.
var id = "myCoolId"
using (LogContext.PushProperty("id", id))
{
// Every log statement in here will have the `id=myCoolId` attached
await DoSomething(id);
}
This is a very common usage patterns for logging, for example in Web Apps if you want to attach a specific GUID to a Request, so you can later correlate all logs for that specific request.
Something like this isn’t possible when using Rx.Net, as it’s threading model doesn’t carry over the ExecutionContext. [1] [2]
This means that we can’t use something like an AsyncLocal or a ThreadLocal to keep context for a specific piece of data or stream. If we want the myCoolId to be attached to all of the logs, we'll need to pass it into every step of our observable chain, and manually pass it to every logging call. I know there's a value in being explicit, but this is a time where choosing Rx.Net locks you out of some pretty handy language features.
It never really took off
Looking at the timelines, it seems like Rx.net in the hype cycled peaked a few years ago. If it ever really took off.
Google Trends for system.reactive compared to the Javascript version of the ReactiveX framework.
Comparing it in google searches to RxJS it seems much less widely used. Looking at the Stack Overflow trends reveals a little more nuanced picture however:
Stack Overflow trends for system.reactive compared to the Javascript and Java versions of the ReactiveX framework.
While still much less popular than RxJS and the Java ReactiveX version, Rx.Net does seem to predate their popularity by quite a few years. Microsoft was out early with the reactive paradigm but never really seemed to manage to make it take off.
Now while your technology choices shouldn’t be about how hyped something is — the popularity is always worth taking into account. Some old technologies are sturdy, battle-tested and well-documented. Then they don’t have to be shiny.
However with some of the pitfalls, particularly around the documentation issues, Rx.Net feels neither robust or shiny to me.
While this is a negative article, I’m not saying Rx.Net or the Reactive paradigm is always bad. Some of the issues are about the tooling and documentation. I mention that most debuggers aren’t suited for debugging streams, but this is a tooling problem and not inherent to the reactive paradigm. E.g. Jetbrains has an excellent Java Stream Debugger.
Observables seems like a very natural fit for some languages and domains, like reacting to user interactions in JavaScript, as the large adoption of RxJs suggests. I’m just saying that it doesn’t feel like a particularly natural fit for C#, and if you have some data that can be modelled as either Enumerables or Observables, I would think twice about using Observables.
Did you enjoy this post? Please share it! | https://medium.com/swlh/5-reasons-to-not-use-observables-in-c-be757392a09e | ['Gustav Wengel'] | 2020-11-12 19:28:12.724000+00:00 | ['Observables', 'Dotnet', 'Csharp', 'Software Development', 'Reactive Programming'] |
Be A Voucher & Discount Queen: How To Get Money Off Literally Everything | By Jess Commons
PHOTOGRAPHED BY KIERAN BOSWELL.
Did you know we’ve got a Money Diaries Facebook group?
What we didn’t expect when we set this group up was for it to turn into a one-stop-shop for millennials’ financial problems. You guys are so smart when it comes to money. From which ISA to get, to how to deal with a mortgage, to which debit card to use, there’s no question too small or too silly for the group to take on. So it’s no surprise that a 2019 study revealed that millennials are the thriftiest generation.
We’ve collated the best money-saving tips from the MD group so you can get money off everything. And we all love a good bargain, don’t we?
Cashback
For shopping online, buy via Avios or TopCashback, or similar. Also check for retailer offers on your debit and credit cards to earn cashback there. –Rowan
Corporate Discount FTW
If you work for a large company check if you have access to a discount scheme. I buy gift cards often for friends and family as gifts through the work discount portal and I get up to 12% off cards and vouchers that I use on top of sales if for myself. –Amanda
Let at app do the work for you
I’ve got the Honey extension on Google Chrome which automatically applies discount codes at checkout! It’s not perfect but it does score me a pretty good discount every now and then! –Bhavi
Play the company
Sign up to HotUKDeals for daily emails on bargains. Always research purchases online to ensure you get the cheapest price.
When buying something online add it to your basket and then exit the website. Some sites will email you a money off coupon. MoneySavingExpert has a list of sites this works on. Also check if you get a discount for signing up to their newsletter or Google if there are any current discount codes. If buying in John Lewis go into the store and haggle. They always give discounts! –Erin
Get free food
I use the Vouchercloud app especially when eating out it, has some great discounts on chain restaurants. –Raji
Hack the system
Websites usually offer new customers 10–20% off their first purchase if you sign up to their newsletters. So visit the website using a private browser (Chrome incognito etc), sign up to the newsletter to get the code, buy the product then unsubscribe. –Emma | https://medium.com/refinery29/be-a-voucher-discount-queen-how-to-get-money-off-literally-everything-9c42aa09ea84 | [] | 2020-06-24 15:11:01.101000+00:00 | ['Saving Money', 'Discount', 'Discount Vouchers', 'Saving Tips', 'Money'] |
“Civil Servants could employ a greater emotional range” | “Civil Servants could employ a greater emotional range”
Paul Gray has been the Scottish Government’s Director-General for Health and Social Care and Chief Executive of NHS Scotland since December 2013. Paul joined the then Scottish Office in 1979. For the last 18 months he has been joint chair of the Health and Justice Collaboration Board. He spoke to our team this week.
Paul Gray (above) retires on 15 February 2019
Paul, you have been in post for just over five years. A huge amount has been achieved and a lot has changed in that time. But do the NHS and the Scottish Government feel any different today than they did five years ago?
I think the context around our work is more complex than it was when I came into post. For instance, since the vote on EU exit, we have gone to great lengths, both at Ministerial level and across the NHS leadership, to demonstrate that we welcome the people from the EU — and beyond — who have come to Scotland to work in the NHS and in wider care provision, and that we value their contribution very highly. We have also been very forthright on how people are treated in our workplaces as individuals. We have been crystal clear that we will not tolerate any behaviour which amounts to bullying or harassment. This is also something Ministers have been very strong on. And we’ve also continued to make strides in terms of patient safety and the quality of care we provide.
We’re perhaps more aware than ever that the outcomes we are trying to achieve have many and complex causes. How does that affect how we think about these problems?
There’s no magic bullet. If you want to get to grips with inequalities from you have to be collaborative: leaders and organisations must work together more effectively. It’s also clear that you have to have communities designing the solutions to the issues they face. There is no place any more for top down solutions imposed on people and communities. If you want local change it has to be done locally.
Is there a contradiction between that approach and the stories we tell about governmental and Ministerial accountability?
I don’t think there is a contradiction there. There is still a strong role for government to take action to improve people’s health on a population level — a smoking ban in public places, minimum unit pricing, for example. That’s not in conflict with engaging local communities to design solutions to the issues faced in localities.
Much collaborative working occurs on the ground — between nurses, police officers and firefighters, doctors, social workers. What’s the role for leaders of organisations in that space?
There is a great deal we can do as leaders. We can be clear about the outcomes we want to see, we can create an authorising environment which helps them work together, we can address the barriers that prevent collaboration, we can resource, advise, support their work, and help them share best practice.
You’ve often visited frontline police officers over the last 18 months as part of the Health and Justice Collaboration work. What have you learned from those conversations?
I’ve learned a great deal. I’ve learned that the reality on the ground is often very different than you perceive it to be, and how valuable that lived experience of dealing with problems at first hand can be. I’ve learned how utterly committed police officers are to improving the well-being and outcomes of the people they serve.
I’ve also seen that police officers take data and information very seriously indeed. They’ve presented me with very thorough data analysis of how their services work and what the opportunities are to improve them. I’ve also learned that police officers can be very forthright in presenting that evidence!
Do you think we might not be forthright enough in the civil service?
I think, perhaps… perhaps civil servants could employ a greater emotional range. We say we are just “content” when we are absolutely delighted and that we are “concerned” when we mean something is just terrible. Perhaps we could be more authentic in that regard?
What’s stopping us from doing that?
There can be a tendency to behave as people expect us to as civil servants. There is obviously absolutely no place for bad behaviour, and it’s essential to understand and respect the feelings of others. But we do need to be genuine, and just be truthful. Sometimes that can mean drawing attention to good things we are doing as much as being truthful about things that are not going well. We shouldn’t feel self-conscious about just telling the truth.
For instance, if the police officers I met hadn’t presented me with their evidence, I wouldn’t know how long on average police officers spend in A&E, which is something which is informing our work around distress.
You’ve also spoken about the importance of kindness in public services. Where do very human, personal values like that fit into a policy context?
Oh, my interest in that is not based on sentimentality or emotion. There is a clear evidence base that goes back to 1964 (and probably much further) that shows that if people experience kindness and compassion in healthcare their outcomes improve.
You’re retiring at the end of this week. Do you have any personal advice for Malcolm Wright, who is stepping into your role on an interim basis?
It’s a role in public life in which you can at times feel very exposed, and where the public — quite rightly — expect a great deal from you. So it’s important to look after yourself. I don’t mean put yourself first, but to make sure you remain healthy and resilient and protect your wellbeing. Actually, I think that Malcolm’s already far better at that than I am!
And what’s next for you?
Well, I’m intending to devote more time to my family and my church, but beyond that I have no hard and fast plans. I’ll take a few weeks off. There may be some possible public service roles, but they are quite rightly offered through open competition, so I shall have to wait and see. There are also things that some individuals and organisations have asked me to help them with, so I’m not going to disappear from public service any time soon, that is unless the public decide they have had enough of me!
The Health and Justice Collaboration Improvement Board
Strong collaborative working is a key part of creating public services that are preventative and person-centred. Across health and social care and justice this can be critical in how we respond to health inequalities and reoffending.
The Health and Justice Collaboration Improvement Board, made up of senior leaders from Scottish health and justice agencies, has been established to explore how we can improve collaboration between health and justice and deliver benefits to people using services.
The Board meets quarterly and focuses on three main priorities of Distress, Forensic Services for victims of sexual offences and Health and Social Care in Prisons. If you would like to know more about the Board, visit
or get in touch with the team, [email protected] @sghealthjustice | https://medium.com/@SGHealthJustice/civil-servants-could-employ-a-greater-emotional-range-41d500ceed81 | ['Scot Gov Health', 'Justice Collaboration'] | 2019-02-15 11:52:51.847000+00:00 | ['Collaboration', 'Justice', 'Government', 'Improvement', 'Health'] |
Activist Mokah Jasmine Johnson on Georgia’s Progressive Sheen | Activist Mokah Jasmine Johnson on Georgia’s Progressive Sheen
Graphic by Izzie Ramirez. Photo courtesy of the Johnson campaign.
While the rest of the U.S. only recently fixed its anticipatory gaze towards Georgia following its transformation from a red state to a (very light) blue state, women like Mokah Jasmine Johnson — a local Athens activist and former Georgia State House District 117 candidate — have been working to mobilize people across the state to support social justice and voter reform for years.
It’s been a slow and steady process for both Georgia and Johnson. Over the nearly ten years her family has lived in Athens, the collegetown home to the University of Georgia, Johnson has progressed from an educator and small business owner to the co-founder of the Athens Anti-Discrimination Movement. In tandem, turnout for young Georgia voters grew to the highest in the nation this year, skewing mostly Democratic.
When Johnson first moved to Athens, she never envisioned herself becoming an activist, let alone a Congressional candidate. (She lost to incumbent Houston Gaines by a 13.2% margin in 2020.) But after a local bar allegedly named a drink after a racist slur in 2015, Johnson felt compelled to leave the private sector for public service. At the beginning of the next year, Johnson organized her first march in protest of discrimination in the downtown area.
“I thought that was a great opportunity to prove the point that there is racism, and there is discrimination and there is a segregation and a division that’s happening downtown where people are just walking around, like this is not really happening,” Johnson said. “I really just act on what I feel inside in addition to the conditions that are happening.”
Seeing Through the Illusion
Johnson and her husband, Knowa, moved to Athens in 2011, thinking it was an artsy and open-minded music town that welcomed all genres. This led Johnson to believe Athens was the perfect place to set up shop for her business, United Group of Artists Music Association (UGA Live), which she co-owns and runs with her husband. But, when they began approaching venues to book her clients’ hip-hop shows and urban music showcases, Johnson said they were mostly met with rejection.
“There wasn’t a lot of people that was for the kind of line of work that we do. There wasn’t an avenue for that,” Johnson said. “And that was a surprise, because this is supposed to be a music town. But it was more catering to rock and folk type music.”
Johnson then began to look more closely at her newfound community. She noticed a lack of diversity in the downtown area, and a clear prioritization of music and entertainment that would cater to the white population of Athens. There weren’t any fully Black-owned businesses or a wealth of places for the Black community to congregate. The few in existence were contained to the Hot Corner — the last vestiges of Athens’ historic Black business district located at the intersection of Washington and Hull Streets.
While she liked the small town and the overall ambiance of the city, seeing these invisible lines that were only being wallpapered over with half-hearted sentiments for change and a progressive veneer made her question whether or not she wanted to stay. The Athens Johnson experienced — and continues to experience — isn’t the one seen by most of the white college students and residents of the community, but it’s one she wants people to know and confront.
“If you’re enjoying Athens in a certain way, take a look at the color of your skin,” Johnson said. “If they feel like they’re advancing, and they don’t see the problems that I see and they’ve never experienced the things that I’ve experienced, or that other people talk about, or try to tell them that is happening in this town: take a look at your skin. And then ask yourself, you know, what can you do to change that?”
Because, despite the lists and the rankings heralding the Athens area as one of the “cutest Southern towns” or “a great place to retire,” Johnson saw clear segregation.
High-rise UGA dormitories and stately sorority mansions tower over public housing, which is home to 88% of the city’s Black population in 2012. About 50 years prior, much of that same population was displaced from the Linnentown neighborhood as their community became another casualty of federal urban renewal projects, eclipsed by the interests of a wealthy state university.
Yet many — both in the Athens community and out — still view the town area as a splash of liberal blue in an otherwise red state. But, in August, a local magazine reported that an Athens-Clarke County Jail roster showed 223 of the 289 men and women locked up were people of color. Downtown, Black men still get denied entry from bars for not following the dress code of the business.
“Athens is stuck in a place where they see progressive, but it’s not as progressive as they think it really is,” Johnson said. “Everybody’s talking about diversity and inclusion. There is no Black owned entertainment venue. Yes, we have Hot Corner. But, if you still look at that, that’s segregated.”
When General Beauregard’s allegedly approved a racist slur on its menu in 2015, it further reinforced the issues Johnson had been seeing for a long time. As a mother of teens who would soon spend more time downtown, Johnson said it was the last reckoning between her and the city she couldn’t quite reconcile as the home she wanted. She said that if her kids were going to encounter racism, she didn’t know if she wanted to stay in Athens.
“And if people aren’t going to do anything about it,” Johnson said, “I for sure don’t want to live here anymore.”
Johnson recalled what she felt during that first protest during the Martin Luther King holiday weekend in 2016. As she looked around at the hundreds marching with her, she said her mind went to the 1960s and the Civil Rights Era. Even though she was not alive then, the anxieties and fears of how others might react washed over her, and she began wondering if someone might attack them.
“I remember when we were marching, and I was surrounded by all these people, I’m thinking to myself ‘Are we going to be okay? Are they going to send out the police? Are they going to set dogs on us,’” Johnson said. “We kept marching. And like I say, we have been marching ever since. I don’t have that concern anymore.”
Progression to Politics
Throughout the years, Johnson has progressively become more of a fixture in local activism and politics. Following her first protest, Johnson and her husband began the Athens Anti-Discrimination Movement (AADM) to push for racial and social justice in Athens. In 2018, she served as the Democratic representative on the Athens-Clarke County Board of Elections.
“I wanted to learn more about it from the inside out, not just as the person standing on the outside as an activist, but what is really going on,” Johnson said. “There’s a certain system in place, and a lot of people [are] afraid to challenge that system. They’re more willing to go with the flow of what’s already in place, even if it’s wrong, even if they know that it’s broken.”
That same year, as Stacey Abrams tirelessly campaigned to be the governor of Georgia, Johnson began the “Get On the Bus and Vote Initiative” through AADM. Although the organization couldn’t officially endorse a candidate, Johnson wanted to mobilize voters, specifically those from marginalized communities, to show up to the polls by providing free and safe transportation.
The issue of voter suppression is a layered and systemic one. According to Johnson, the fire Abrams ignited in Atlanta concerning voter suppression shed light on an issue that had long been present, and provided a bit of hope for disenfranchised voters — even those who had become disillusioned with the voting process.
“They don’t believe that it’s really going to make a difference, because they’re suffering too much,” Johnson said. “We still have to figure out a way to penetrate those people. And that’s what the ‘Get On the Bus and Vote’ initiative is.”
80% More to Go
But when the 2020 election cycle rolled around, Johnson shifted gears out of local activism to campaign for Georgia House of Representatives. Her platform focused on “justice, equity, and education,” and with some of her policies centered on criminal justice reform, voter suppression, affordable housing, worker’s rights and access to public education.
Her campaign raised over $258,000, an amount notably higher than previous House District 117 candidate, Deborah Gonzalez, who raised $134,249 when she ran in 2018. Although she lost, Johnson said she still feels proud of her campaign’s numbers as well as the impacts her activist efforts played in this election.
“To see this shift in Georgia throughout the week [of the 2020 election], even though we did not tangibly win,” Johnson said. “I feel like we played a role in that shift.”
While the victories of the presidential election taste sweet, they don’t come without recognition that there’s still much farther to go.
“I’m proud of the race that we ran. But it’s disappointing because I felt honestly, like white supremacy won, again, in this moment, not forever,” Johnson said. “I mean, you can see racism is involved in it when I’m on a Zoom call, and someone calls you [the n-word] — you cannot tell me racism was not involved, or did not influence this race.”
Although there’s been slight growth in raising visibility of social issues and passing anti-discrimination directives, she still sees many of the same problems as she did when she first moved to Athens. The past few months have marked progress to Johnson, both for the state and the city, but that doesn’t mean she’s plateaued — quite the opposite.
“I would say we’re at 20% of some of the changes and we have 80% to go,” Johnson said. “Right now is just an awakening. It’s just a conversation.” | https://medium.com/the-interlude/activist-mokah-jasmine-johnson-on-georgias-progressive-sheen-1aef27911d9b | ['Megan Wahn'] | 2020-12-19 21:11:58.150000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Power', 'Mokah Jasmine Johnson', 'Features', 'Georgia'] |
The Lean Approach to Strategy | A strategy is the plan a business uses to achieve their guiding vision. Every successful business has had a good business strategy, at least at some point.
But what once worked is no longer a valid foundation for your business’ strategy. The world is moving faster than ever. A company strategy needs to be cognizant of the current landscape, not the landscape from a few years ago. And the beliefs behind that strategy need to be tested, proven, and acted on before they expire.
Going beyond the PowerPoint
In the past, a company would hand a set of problems off to a strategy team, and get back a comprehensive PowerPoint deck. They would hand that deck to a design team, get back some high definition mockups, and finally throw those over to engineers for implementation. And the thing is — that model worked.
The PowerPoint approach was popular because it was successful for so many years, and it’s hard to give up on something that’s worked before. People and businesses alike prefer to do the same old until something breaks — and in today’s world, you need to be proactive, not reactive. Your strategy can’t play catch up.
Companies who get stuck in outdated thinking end up creating products that are obsolete by the time they’re built, created for a market that has already moved on. Unless you can predict the future, the playbook that worked so well in the past is doomed to failure.
Photo by Justin Tietsworth
The agile solution
For years, software developers have been advocating a move away from traditional methodologies with high theoretical predictability to the aptly named “Agile” and “Extreme” programming methods.
The basic molecule of an Agile project is the collaborative “sprint,” which emphasizes empirical feedback and team self-management. The “inspect-and-adapt” philosophy aims to always have a version of the project to test and compare against design and need, giving creators the flexibility to adapt a project to the changing world. No need to be a fortune teller — Agile workplaces move with the times. This philosophy is one that can (and should) extend beyond programming, and indeed beyond the tech industry. Strategy, design, and marketing should be in the game right from the beginning, creating a workplace that’s agile — with a lowercase ‘a’.
Proving the worth of your strategy
Successful strategy is more than a roadmap; it’s philosophy put into a plan, flexible enough to adapt over time but concrete enough that it can never be misinterpreted. Its foundation cannot be built on untested assumptions or outdated data from as few as two years ago.
Because Axiom Zen builds businesses on the edge of emerging technology, we can’t depend on past successes to justify our assumptions. We also can’t expect a partner to invest based on untested assumptions. Research, core concepts, and vision may be valid, but none of these are meaningful until they’re tested. Any guiding strategy needs to be proven in a current, real-world setting. And, assuming our thesis proves valid, we need to act before those assumptions become outdated.
Navigating this tension of fast-but-proven requires a slimmed down approach to strategy. We’ve spoken about the necessity to bridge thinking and doing in the past, but in strategy, it’s necessary for these two concepts to occur in sync with one another. As assumptions are proven or disproven, actions need to follow pace and the project as a whole needs to be steered accordingly.
The lean approach to strategy
Lean Strategy isn’t strictly new, but many companies flounder when they set out to bring agility to their workplace. They simply don’t know where to start. Effectively implementing lean strategy requires a reorganization of the basic molecules of a business, from the size of teams to the length of project timelines.
A successful company is built on intelligent, opinionated, and driven employees. Making sure those strong personalities work in tandem is critical to the success of a new venture, and the key to that success is ensuring that everyone understands the product vision as a whole. It means they can claim ownership enough to make key decisions, on the fly, that can have profound impact on product vision. That’s why agility isn’t only about moving fast — it’s also about moving smart. The need to constantly make decisions that could change your product from the bottom up is a strategic hazard of agile development, one that most companies haven’t been trained to tackle.
At Axiom Zen, we keep each project team small (under twelve) and multidisciplinary: designers, marketers, and strategists join every sprint planning meeting and standup. We all plan, track, and manage our work in GitHub using ZenHub. This centralization and transparency allows each team member to respond to learnings and variations from the plan immediately, but also to contribute input into the product early — building a powerful sense of ownership that is taken into every part of their work.
To ensure momentum and agility, our teams operate on sprints no longer than two weeks. If a project requires a longer timeline, we break it up into two week intensive periods. Designers, marketers, and strategists all attend the Design Thinking sessions, and all continue to work together as the project moves into production mode.
Photo by Redd Angelo
Overcoming the traditional approach to strategy
If companies don’t want to be one of the 40% of Fortune 500 companies that will be gone in ten years, strategy is the only way forward.
Unfortunately, the larger and more established a company is, the more difficult it is to effectively implement concepts like lean strategy. Titans of industry have to move in degrees; they can’t restructure, reorganize, and then pivot in a bold new direction without upsetting a precarious balance.
Traditional strategists focus on research and thinking, but once they come up with a strategy they hand it off to the doers and walk away. Lean strategy, on the other hand, provides a compass for the entire company. Through daily standups, transparent project management solutions, and a team that is constantly in communication from design straight through to implementation, teams can move in lockstep towards a goal they all share and understand. | https://medium.com/axiomzenteam/the-lean-approach-to-strategy-991b6efc670e | ['Axiom Zen'] | 2017-10-30 16:18:27.774000+00:00 | ['Innovation', 'Business Strategy', 'Agile', 'Business', 'Startup'] |
Best of the Week — November 30/December 6 | Hi guys! Here we are with another appointment of the “Best of the week”, reviewing best articles from the previous week. Let’s see them.
Most Viewed Articles
Recommended Articles
Resource Articles | https://medium.com/javarevisited/best-of-the-week-november-30-december-6-2ab4e93ebc86 | ['Dario De Santis'] | 2020-12-07 08:11:23.127000+00:00 | ['Java', 'Programming', 'Software Development', 'Coding'] |
AEM — JMX Solution to delete packages programmatically | Package — A package is a zip file holding repository content in the form of a file system serialization that enables easy to use and edit files & folders.
Package also contains vault information including filter definition, import configuration. Additional content properties can be included in the package such as description, a visual image or an icon.
Imp: Packages are current version of content repository at the time package built.
Following action can perform on/with packages.
Create package, preview package content, build package, view package information, view package content, modify package definition, rebuild package, download/upload packages etc.
Create package:
Go to Package manager -> create package -> provide information — Package name, version, group. Minimum information package name must be given to create package. And by default, packages created under “my_packages” group.
Once package create, we can view the package information by clicking edit option.
Delete package: If we do not manage packages, packages consume lot of space on AEM instance. Its always good to delete unwanted packages from AEM instance and free up the space.
We will discuss about JMX solution to delete packages where JMX is java technology that provides tools for managing and monitoring application, system objects and devices.
Why JMX?
1) Easy solution and intuitive
2) JMX operation can be performed only by the user with access to system console on AEM — this ensures no accidental delete operation
3) Delete operation can be done only when necessary
Steps to delete packages:
1) Create an interface for JMX MBean
@Description(“DeleteAEM Packages MBean used to delete unwanted packages from group my_package group”)
public interface DeleteAEMPackagesMBean {
@Description(“DeleteAEM Packages MBean used to delete unwanted packages from group my_package group”)
String deletePackages();
}
2) Create an implementation class implementing DeleteAEMPackageMBean interface
@Component(service = DeleteAEMPackagesMBean.class, immediate = true, property = {
“jmx.objectname=au.com.example.core.services.impl:type=Delete AEM Packages” })
public class DeleteAEMPackagesMBeanImpl extends AnnotatedStandardMBean implements DeleteAEMPackagesMBean {
private static final Logger LOGGER = LoggerFactory.getLogger(DeleteAEMPackagesMBeanImpl.class);
public DeleteAEMPackagesMBeanImpl() throws NotCompliantMBeanException {
super(DeleteAEMPackagesMBean.class); }
@Override
public String deletePackages() { //implementation
}
}
AnnotatedStandardMBean provides JMX metadata through annotations.
3) Package API for working with packages
Get reference to Packaging from vault packaging implementation that gives access package manager
@Reference
Packaging packaging;
Get JcrPackageManager reference using packaging object by passing session.
JcrPackageManager jcrPackMgr = packaging.getPackageManager(
session.getServiceResourceResolver(ApplicationConstants.SubService.BREVILLESERVICE)
.adaptTo(Session.class));
From jcrPackMgr object, get the list of package with filter group/build etc.
List<JcrPackage> jrcPackages = jcrPackMgr.listPackages(“my_packages”, true);
Iterate over List and have custom implementation logic to filter the packages.
4) Delete package
Once you get the desired package to delete based on custom logic, below line can be used to delete the package.
jcrPackMgr.remove(jcrPackage);
@Override
public String deletePackages() {
LOGGER.error(“deletePackages method has been invoked”);
try {
JcrPackageManager jcrPackMgr = packaging.getPackageManager(
session.getServiceResourceResolver(ApplicationConstants.SubService.BREVILLESERVICE)
.adaptTo(Session.class));
LOGGER.error(“JcrPackage Mgr object = {} “, jcrPackMgr);
List<JcrPackage> jrcPackages = jcrPackMgr.listPackages(“my_packages”, true);
LOGGER.error(“Packages list size = {} “, jrcPackages.size());
double totalSizeMB = 0;
for (Iterator iterator = jrcPackages.iterator(); iterator.hasNext();) {
JcrPackage jcrPackage = (JcrPackage) iterator.next();
PackageId[] packageIdArr = jcrPackage.getResolvedDependencies();
LOGGER.info(“Dependent packages = {}”, packageIdArr.length);
// dont delete if this depends on some other package
if (packageIdArr.length == 0 && jcrPackage.getSize() > 0) {
LOGGER.info(“Package size = {} “, jcrPackage.getSize());
jcrPackage.getSize();
double kbs = (jcrPackage.getSize() / 1000d);
totalSizeMB += kbs / 1000;
JcrPackageDefinition packDefinition = jcrPackage.getDefinition();
if (packDefinition != null) {
String nodeName = packDefinition.get(“name”);
if(nodeName != null && nodeName.equals(“breville-commerce-nodes”)) {
jcrPackMgr.remove(jcrPackage);
}
}
}
}
LOGGER.info(“Packages total size in MB = {}”, totalSizeMB);
} catch (LoginException e) {
LOGGER.error(“Error while getting session {} “, e.getMessage());
} catch (RepositoryException e) {
LOGGER.error(“RepositoryException occured while getting packages {} “, e.getMessage());
}
return “Successfully deleted my_packages”;
}
Run delete operation from JMX console.
JMX console:
Invoke operation:
Success message: | https://medium.com/nirman-tech-blog/aem-jmx-solution-to-delete-packages-programmatically-50bdc61155e5 | ['Pradeep Moolemane'] | 2020-11-07 18:28:17.829000+00:00 | ['Jcr', 'Delete', 'Aem', 'Package Manager', 'Jmx'] |
Impact On The Financial Sector Of Blockchain Technology | Impact On The Financial Sector Of Blockchain Technology
A multitude of use cases around the numerous industrial segments is now contained in the blockchain technology that once began as the underlying system for Bitcoin trading. One of the main impacts on the financial sector has been felt. Blockchain technology has been publicly adopted by businesses like JP Morgan. The financial sector is suffering from data protection problems, faster transactions, transparency, and other bottlenecks that hamper the growth of businesses that rely on monetary transactions from banks and NBFCs. Blockchain could therefore be a possible solution here. Banks and financial sectors can easily solve the disadvantages that hold back the banks’ smooth functioning with Blockchain’s involvement.
Some of the biggest developments we have seen in the Blockchain sector are the creation of Blockchain platforms such as Hyperledger Sawtooth, Hyperledger Fabric, Corda, etc This approved Blockchain not only ensures that the system operates efficiently, but also ensures that transactions take place at a faster rate. It actually helps the banking system work much better and in a more effective way.
How the financial sector is impacted by Blockchain:
1. Providing a safe platform- The need for a secured platform is one of the greatest challenges facing most banking and financial institutions. As most of the transactions and other work have now been digitized, most banks and other allied companies are looking for a stable platform that is free of any mistakes or defects. In addition, there is also a high rise in the need for a network that can efficiently combat data breach problems, and so we have Blockchain. By time-stamping all information or data on it this DLT platform works. This guarantees full security. And with the introduction of approved Blockchain networks, the security feature is even more assured.
2. No third party- Time lag and paperwork are two weaknesses of the financial sector that appear to hold up the processes and ultimately influence the company’s efficiency as well. We can solve these problems with the assistance of Blockchain technology and thus ensure quicker transactions. Blockchain technology operates on peer-to-peer transactions, ensuring that for authentication and approval, there is no need to rely on a third party, which speeds up the transaction process.
3. Tracking and tracing- For banking firms, these features can be highly beneficial. Banks invest a large amount of money on authentication and verification, amid all the efforts of false identity cases, and fraud reports are growing, we can easily put an end to it with Blockchain. As data tracking and tracing become simpler and history can be easily traced back, compared to the traditional technologies that banks use, it becomes easier to rely on this platform.
These are the three big benefits that Blockchain can reap from the banking and financial field. Blockchain developers and Blockchain experts are in high demand because of this, and we will see an increase in this number in the times to come.
Conclusion- The Blockchain Council provides Blockchain with the best online certificate program. This detailed curriculum will allow you to absorb all Blockchain-related knowledge while also learning how to incorporate it. Then what are you going to wait for? Register for today’s Blockchain certification. | https://medium.com/@yashasvi-9094/impact-on-the-financial-sector-of-blockchain-technology-1a4cf924a5e1 | ['Yashasvi Gupta'] | 2020-12-03 04:25:46.374000+00:00 | ['Blockchain Experts', 'Blockchainprofessional', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Blockchain Development', 'Blockchain Developer'] |
Healing and Familial Denial | Healing and Familial Denial
What happens when your change is uncomfortable for others?
The little one has some anger issues…must be your side of the family. Photo by Daniel Cheung on Unsplash
I have a relative who has not worked as a waitress in over a decade.
And yet people still ask me, “Is she still a waitress at Friday’s?”
She’s had four corporate jobs and three kids since then.
What is going on? | https://medium.com/invisible-illness/healing-and-familial-denial-4eb660b9f727 | ['Lisa Martens'] | 2019-05-31 11:01:36.271000+00:00 | ['Stress', 'Healing', 'Anxiety', 'Family', 'Mental Health'] |
Movie Review: Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010) | This movie’s definitely unique. It’s a Christmas fantasy/horror movie, and it’s probably the only movie I’ve seen from Finland, as well. And it’s gorgeous.
It’s a movie that involves Santa, native Finno-Ugric burial mounds, reindeer slaughtering. It’s really out there, but the movie’s committed to how weird and ultimately fun it is.
It’s a pretty good movie. It’s entertaining and will keep your attention pretty easily with its weird story and beautiful cinematography.
Rating: 7/10 | https://medium.com/as-vast-as-space-and-as-timeless-as-infinity/movie-review-rare-exports-a-christmas-tale-2010-3c5a736194ba | ['Patrick J Mullen'] | 2020-12-23 14:13:12.266000+00:00 | ['Christmas', 'Movie Review', 'Horror', 'Fantasy', 'Finnish'] |
How to Become a Certified TensorFlow Developer? | If you are looking to enhance your career possibilities in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science you need to get recognised certification to back your skills.
One of the recognised certification that can boost your resume is TensorFlow Developer certification read this blog till the very end if you have the following query :
How to apply for TensorFlow Developer Certification? What is the cost of this certification? How to prepare for this certification? How much time does it take to clear this certification?
What is TensorFlow?
If you are an active contributor to the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning or even if you are trying to enter into the Artificial Intelligence world and just a beginner, you must have heard or even used this great framework but for the rest,
TensorFlow is an end-to-end open-source machine learning platform for everyone, where you can preprocess data, model your data and even deploy your solutions to showcase your work to the world. Companies like Intel, DeepMind and Google use this to power all their machine learning services.
Why do you need Certifications?
Certification is not mandatory to land a good job in Artificial Intelligence domain, it’s more kind of proof to show the employer that you possess following skillsets which align with the company requirements. It is the skills and knowledge which is valued as that’s what is going to help you sustain and grow further in this field.
There are a plethora of certifications available but you have to be very smart choosing which one to pursue as all the certification are not everybody, there are certain requirements and sometimes monitory clause too to take some of the courses and certification. Investing the good amount of time on things you cannot get benefit from is painful hence select your path right to do research, find out whether that certification is relevant to your skillsets or not? Do you need this? Is it worth investing time and money on it?
TensorFlow Developer Certification is high valued and authentic, time on it are well invested. Now let’s take a look at what it is?
What is TensorFlow Developer Certification?
TensorFlow Developer Certification, as you might already have guessed is to showcase your skillsets and proficiency to use TensorFlow to build a range of deep learning models such as Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision (Image Processing ) and time-series forecasting. All of them are much needed to work in the industry and more and more companies are shifting towards Deep Learning solutions.
Is it for you?
It is a $100 question, literally. Before going for this certification you need to ask yourself this question and then if you find it useful go for it.
In general, this certification is for those who want to test and show their understanding of TensorFlow to develop Deep learning Models like Computer Vision, NLP, Time-series Forecasting.
Why do you should know TensorFlow?
According to Hacker News’s Who is hiring Page, Data TensorFlow was leading ahead of other frameworks in May 2020 wit margin and still leading.
According to KDnuggets.com(a website that shows trends in skill demand in job listings on different platforms ), the Deep Learning Framework which is growing fastest is TensorFlow followed by PyTorch.
How to prepare for TensorFlow Developer Certification?
First of all, you need to visit the certification website and review candidate handbook to know all the intricacies of the exam.
After reading candidate handbook you will be familiar with the test pattern. Now outline the topics you need to cover or revise if you are already familiar with them.
If you are not able to prepare your learning path then try below mentioned end-to-end learning path to prepare for the examination.
1.TensorFlow Developer Certification Candidate Handbook | free
Usefulness: 10/10
Relevancy: Extremely High
How to approach?
Try giving it a read without any pre thoughts and try to grasp as much as possible and use it as a guide to prepare for the test if you want a good result.
It covers all the queries about Eligibility, fees and payments, registration, Exam details etc.
2. DeepLearning.AI TensorFlow Developer Professional Certificate|₹3,641/m
Usefulness: 10/10
Relevancy: Extremely High
How to approach?
This Coursera’s course offered by deeplearning.ai is framed according to candidate handbook which you already have gone through. You can start with this immediately after completing the candidate handbook.
Skills you will gain after completing this course are TensorFlow, Machine learning, CNN, RNN, Computer Vision, NLP, Inductive Transfer, Augmentation, Time Series Forecasting.
Try writing all the codes from scratch for when doing practicals, this will help to adapt to exam scenario.
3. MIT 6.S191 Introduction to Deep Learning | free
Usefulness: 8/10
Relevancy: High
How to approach?
Try setting through first two lectures it will hardly take 1 hour each if you are reviewing each video too.
Must-Try Lab Codes and Project Proposals offered by them, it makes learning fun.
Stick to relevant topics and keep your goal fixed on the TensorFlow Developer Certification Exam.
4. Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras and Tensor Flow|₹2,275
Usefulness: 6/10
Relevancy: Medium
How to approach?
Keep your focus clear and read at your speed, only second half of the book is relevant to the exam hence try stick to the chapters listed below if you are preparing for the sole purpose of clearing the certification exam.
Chapter 10: Introduction to Artificial Neural Networks with Keras
Chapter 11: Training Deep Neural Networks
Chapter 12: Custom Models and Training with TensorFlow
Chapter 13: Loading and Preprocessing Data with TensorFlow
Chapter 14: Deep Computer Vision Using Convolutional Neural Networks
Chapter 15: Processing Sequences Using RNNs and CNNs
Chapter 16: Natural Language Processing with RNNs and Attention
5. Getting familiar with the PyCharm(a python development tool) | free
Usefulness: 10/10
Relevancy: Extremely High
How to approach?
Getting familiar with PyCharm is extremely important as the exam takes place in PyCharm. Getting started with PyCharm is an excellent series on YouTube where you can learn about PyCharm in no time.
What is the cost of taking this Exam?
Cost:$100
As already mentioned it takes $100/₹7360 to take this test if you clear it in the first attempt you will receive the confirmation through your email. In case you fail to clear the exam you have to wait around 2 weeks to retake the exam.
Tip: You can apply for TensorFlow Education Stipend to cut the cost of the exam by 50%.
Time Limit: 5 Hours
You get 5 hours to complete the coding and train the deep learning model in your local system and submit the results. (Make sure it is working in your computer )
Tip: It takes a maximum of 3 hours to complete the exam, utilises the time to make your model more effective. | https://medium.com/@allaboutdata/how-to-become-a-certified-tensorflow-developer-54a5d3be3562 | ['Rajat Tiwari'] | 2020-12-23 14:29:13.328000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'TensorFlow', 'Deep Learning', 'Certification', 'Artificial Intelligence'] |
Italian police accuse cryptocurrency exchange boss of huge fraud | ROME (Reuters) — Italian police said on Monday a man who ran a cryptocurrency exchange that was declared bankrupt last year is suspected of being responsible for a series of hacks that caused losses of 120 million euros ($146 million).
More than 230,000 people were defrauded by the cyber-theft of a cryptocurrency called Nano which was held by the company BitGrail, the postal police said in a statement.
“It is the biggest cyber-financial attack in Italy and one of the biggest in the world,” the police said.
“For the first time in Italy and in Europe, we have documented fraudulent and rapacious conduct to the detriment of investors carried out entirely on IT platforms and via the use of virtual currencies.”
Police said the suspect was a 34-year-old from Florence, and gave his initials as F.F. He faces charges of computer fraud, fraudulent bankruptcy and money-laundering.
It was not immediately possible to contact the man or his lawyers.
F.F. himself contacted police in February 2018 to flag the hack and the loss of “a huge sum” of Nano Coin, a thinly traded currency which was launched in 2015.
Ivano Gabrielli, director of the national centre for cyber crimes (CNAIPIC), told Reuters that after it started to investigate it became clear the BitGrail chief was involved.
“It is not yet clear whether he participated actively in the theft or if he simply decided not to increase security measures after discovering it,” he said.
The police said it would have been easy to prevent the theft once the first hack had been spotted, but instead, “F.F. knowingly failed to prevent them”, thereby allowing the Nano currency to be drained from accounts.
Original post: https://ethones.blogspot.com
by https://ethones.com & https://officiale.webs.com | https://medium.com/@ethone/italian-police-accuse-cryptocurrency-exchange-boss-of-huge-fraud-e565937b422f | [] | 2020-12-21 13:52:01.675000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Ethereum', 'Blockchain', 'Bitcoin', 'Token Sale'] |
How To turn out to be A successful digital Marketer? | The people around you are crucial for knowing how to become a digital marketing success. So, it’s important that you listen, identify, and take care of them and make sure they are satisfied. Since managers are interested in their employees, they need to take responsibility for fixing any problem they have.
A good manager will help you develop and improve your Digital Marketing strategy. Be respectful to your manager. He must focus on things that can influence your performance. Communication with your manager, however, is an important tool. Receiving the information you need is the best way to boost your performance.
It is difficult to know how to transform data from digital channels, product layout, or content hosting platforms. Marketers should know to this day what they need to know when they get into digital marketing.
Who is Digital Marketer?
It is a term that has been around for quite a while now, yet the technology of digital marketing still looks like it is in the past. The “digital Marketer” method is that a virtual marketing commercial enterprise organization owns the client and manages their digital marketing accounts in the selling and marketing of their products and services and customer relationship management.
However, the number of marketing companies has slowly been increasing in the last years and the trend of digital marketing is still going. Once the marketing manager is overstretched to managing the huge quantity of users and the great responsibilities of the digital marketing strategy of the business organization has transformed into the nowadays world of digital marketing that is naturally propelled by the marketing team.
Become A Successful Digital Marketer:
If you are a young digital marketer and looking for good motivation, in this blog, I will be discussing the best methods to become successful. The following key aspects that are necessary to become a successful digital marketer are:
1. Learn From Online Courses
Learn From Online Courses
In case you are working online, you can learn online properly. Technology gives a number of opportunities to folks that are looking to train themselves for a particular career route. There are numerous sources obtainable and most of them are absolutely free. These resources and structures help you study new abilities, broaden your digital marketing horizons, and discover new superior strategies.
These guides won’t simply assist you to learn new talents and techniques. You could add them to your resume properly to decorate its attraction. There are more than one online platforms and website from which provides guides from top-tier universities and groups like Udemy, Coursera, Lynda, and extra. You can locate and soak up a route that’ll help you enhance your talents and develop your profession.
2. Learning From Experts
Learn From Eperts
Whilst taking up a web direction can be extraordinarily beneficial in mastering new abilities, consuming information from the digital advertising and marketing professionals who have worked in this field for years is an entirely specific learning revel in.
Digital advertising and marketing leaders already have massive experience beneath their belt and they have polished their talents and techniques through the years. A number of those specialists have their personal websites and social media accounts where they actively have interaction with folks who want to make their career in this area. they impart their know-how on stated platforms, giving new virtual entrepreneurs an opportunity to analyze.
3. Become A Content Creator
Become Content Writer
The first-class way to study new virtual marketing capabilities is by way of developing. Writing and sharing what you recognize about digital marketing will help you refine your own information and ideas. once you do your studies for content material, you’ll be uncovered to new ideas. you could create and percentage content material on multiple systems. you can preserve a non-public weblog or write articles, if viable.
you may additionally make a video on Facebook stay or every other platform wherein you’ll communicate approximately new digital advertising principles. Finally, you may create a social media account totally devoted to sharing know-how about virtual advertising.
4. Stay Up to Date
The corporate international has been evolving continuously because of technological advancements. With that in mind, it’s far critical for marketers to live up to date on new different marketing principles and techniques. you could follow predominant digital advertising and marketing websites to pick up information approximately nowadays’s tendencies. To find out about the state-of-the-art buzz in the enterprise you can additionally follow influential marketers on social media.
A generation has made it fairly simple for people to stay up to date on new information approximately virtual marketing. Articles, blogs, and podcasts are simply to be had online. you may keep tabs on on line structures that provide new data approximately digital marketing. | https://medium.com/@aamirmajeed6005/how-to-turn-out-to-be-a-successful-digital-marketer-6300f4f28234 | ['Aamir Majeed'] | 2021-12-29 05:40:14.394000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Tips And Tricks', 'Digital Marketing', 'Digital Marketers', 'Internet Marketing'] |
JS Shorts — Call and Apply. The call and apply are both used to… | The call and apply are both used to call a function using a desired this value and a set of parameters.
Both these functions accept the first argument as the value of this . The only difference between the two is that .call accepts the list of parameters as a comma separated list of function arguments while .apply accepts an array as the list of arguments. An easy way to remember this is Call -> Comma and Apply -> Array .
Notice the example above, it shows how the output can be changed by providing a desired value for the this keyword.
There are a wide range of situations where this comes in handy.
One of the most simple example is when we want to conditionally change the value of the scope in which the function executes.
Another situation is when we want to conditionally change the number of arguments provided to the function.
Image by Dhruvil Patel from Pixabay
— That’s all for today | https://medium.com/@iamprakharjaiswal/js-shorts-call-and-apply-3a40fbdbf687 | ['Prakhar Jaiswal'] | 2020-11-22 15:33:04.670000+00:00 | ['Javascript Interview', 'JavaScript', 'Javascript Development'] |
Apples | Apples
Round
Small, and big
Red, green and yellow
All tasty for a bite
Sweet and sour
Just as a snack | https://medium.com/illuminations-mirror/apples-401b1567e581 | ['Agnes Laurens'] | 2020-12-30 19:15:45.492000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Poetry', 'Fruits', 'Life', 'Writing'] |
A City Driven By Design | Design, whether we realize it or not, is present in everything we experience — our work environments, the app you used to order your coffee this morning, our transportation, the craft beers we consume, and so on. The list is limitless — design is everywhere. And perhaps its most compelling (albeit covert) superpower is its ability to influence civilizations, shape communities and help foster a new age of growth and opportunities.
This superpower is not lost on AIGA Arizona though. The organization has long held, through its mission, that design is capable of encouraging social impact and promoting community excellence.
Phoenix is a testament to this belief. Throughout the years, the Greater Phoenix community has been subject to a number of circumstances that have led to innovative change. And design has been at the heart of it all.
Here are but a few of the many industries impacted — and elevated — by design with commentary from some of the area’s creatives who can speak to design’s multifarious and far-reaching impact.
Education and classrooms
Recently, there’s been a shift in creating classrooms better outfitted to support experiential learning, which in turn has been proven to impact the short- and long-term effects of students’ learning outcomes. One of the keys to creating a learning space conducive to many different types of educational approaches is flexibility. Ultimately, the way a learning space is designed directly influences the learning activities that can occur there. For example, Phoenix’s Biltmore Prep Academy and Creighton Elementary, among other schools, have turned to open classroom designs to keep kids engaged and learning in a variety of ways.
How is education and the modern-day classroom impacted by design?
“We are becoming a more planned community, thus requiring design and sustainable planning to converge. Specifically, I see that office space and creative thinking design has been translated to the classroom à la whiteboard walls, creative workspaces, etc.” — Lisa Glenn Nobles, executive director for CO+HOOTS Foundation and Phoenix resident for 11 years.
“As leadership begins to realize the importance of design and design-thinking, more and better changes are being made to accommodate students, facilitate learning, and provide a physical (and digital) space that encourages the sharing of knowledge and an affinity to the school. Tools, especially, are easier than ever for students to use, making educational environments more inclusive and welcoming.” — Perri Collins, social media specialist at Arizona State University and Phoenix resident for 18 years.
Technology and the digital space
Design is an indispensable factor in creating humanized and easy-to-use interfaces in the rapidly evolving digital landscape. In many ways, great tech cannot exist without great design. And it’s the creative’s job to help technology deliver the desired experience users crave. This is especially significant in Phoenix, a city dubbed as the next tech hub. With some of the biggest names in tech — along with countless promising startups — relocating or rooting their companies in the Valley, there has been an increase in opportunities for creatives to gain a foothold in this emerging industry.
How is design changing how we interact with technology?
“Design is a key player in the tech space because it helps customers visualize and understand new technology that hasn’t even been built yet and make technical concepts easier to understand.” — Julie Bonner, marketing director at FreeFall Aerospace and Tucson resident for 16 years.
“Design has helped to bring technology and the internet to the masses… I think how well things work is overlooked in favor of how good things look. People tend to gravitate toward beautiful products over simple products. I think beauty in design has its place, but I would take a simple tool — regardless of how ugly it is––like Craigslist, over a beautiful but difficult to use tool any day of the week.” — Carter De Angelis, product design consultant and Phoenix resident for nearly two years.
City planning
One of the most prominent ways design is reflected in the City of Phoenix is its well-known grid system. Taking advantage of the area’s relatively flat positioning, the city’s early designers mapped out roads on an easily-maneuverable layout, replete with big, arterial boulevards that supported the transportation conducive to our city’s original purpose as a farming town.
Civil engineers and designers were also heavily influenced by the techniques used by the native inhabitants of this land, incorporating their methods to build up civilizations that support various ways of life.
How Phoenix as a city works with — and for — its residents.
“Design is very much alive and integrated throughout Phoenix’s construction industry. The majority of citizens don’t realize the level to which our cities and environments are designed… One of the most prevalent ways is its grid system. It is a powerful, yet subtle influence from design that many take for granted.” — Janelle Elizabeth Thomas, marketing lead at DPR Construction and born and raised in Arizona.
“Design is the act of evolving… For hundreds of thousands of years, native peoples have been designing homes, communities and cities, to create a continuation of cultural stories through the means of sustaining our way of life. Take Phoenix, for example. This city is here because of native peoples and the canal systems they designed to sustain life in a desert. It is important for our community to preserve these designs for our young to learn and grow from, especially now that we are in the technical age. It will help us to contribute our inherited design systems to a larger world that will still sustain our homelands, cultural knowledge, newer engineered communities, careers, economic prosperity, etc. This is the impact design will have in our world.” — EuniQue Yazzie, creative director at euniQue Design LLC and a member of the Navajo Nation.
Government workflows and services
In addition to city planning, there has also been a rise in creatives working within local governments. Designers’ abilities to create products that work for people rather than systems have been keenly sought after by government officials who are striving to create systems and services better suited to meet the needs of their constituents. Creatives offer a different perspective, looking to identify the root of the problems that may be causing issues within a city. Chief among these issues is typically failure to integrate human-centric design — both in regards to the buildings themselves as well as the service they provide.
Reimagining the citizen experience through design.
“If government services were designed as well as our road system, I imagine we’d all enjoy a much more pleasant ‘citizen experience.’ The user experience of interacting with our public services is mundane at best and abysmally counterproductive at worst. Visiting the DMV, voting, interacting with our courts and even trying to track down a record of receiving a government grant — practically none of it is memorable and nearly all of it is a pain in the ass. We need proper design work, like what some agencies are doing with the help of 18F and others. Whoever can redesign the citizen experience — what it means to interact with our government on every level — will win big in the long term.” — Jérémy Chevallier, cofounder of PubLoft and GigLoft, and Phoenix resident since 1993.
Restaurants and hospitality
Phoenix is one of the fastest-growing foodservice markets in the country, making it a desirable destination for those in restaurant architecture and interior design. A restaurant’s aesthetic — from the paint colors, to its wall decorations, and all the way down to the uniformity and intricacies of the table setting — has become a crucial part in delivering the ultimate guest experience today’s restaurant-goers expect.
One of our area’s most renowned chefs, Chris Bianco, views restaurant design similarly to how he views the food he creates, asking himself how he can bring out the essence of each so that they’re the best versions of themselves. According to Bianco, “You have to look at a space and ask what it wants to be, or look at a community and ask what it needs. Then, do the thing you like to do the best you can possibly do it. Seeing something you disagree with doesn’t mean you need to tear it down; it means you do your thing as well as you can to bring light to the darkness.”
How restaurant design can elevate the guest’s experience.
“Today’s restaurant design agencies have a responsibility to encourage their core clients to design for quality and responsible experiences — not disposable products or wasteful, irresponsible sourcing and manufacturing. Our city’s bars, restaurants and event venues such as the Arizona Science Center are created for the community — and all aspects of their design should be made available to everyone. I hope new venues and experiences that come to the Valley continue to reflect our established knowledge of good design.” — Diane Serpa, art director and owner of GreyCatDot Digital Design and Arizona resident since 1976.
Breweries and beer
Design has also helped elevate the Valley’s micro-brew scene. From the breweries to the product packaging, beer-making has opened up another avenue for designers to flex and expand their creative prowess. Additionally, the design that goes into marketing these craft brews has been crucial to breweries’ successes, helping put Arizona’s local beer on a national stage.
How design supports local brews’ marketing efforts.
“Design has played a huge role within the brewery world. Since the beginning of the craft beer revolution that’s been sweeping the county, Arizona included, breweries have provided an outlet for designers to create for a newer platform that before they would not have had the opportunity to be a part of (with the exception of the limited large companies).
Local beer and design go hand-in-hand. If you want to stand out from everyone else you better damn well have a fun, unique, and new take on your branding, your voice, and ultimately its labels. There has been a lot of great designs and illustrations that now have a new and exciting platform to be paired with — not to mention one that’s a fun, recreational product most people enjoy. It’s also been an exciting space for designers to push the boundaries a little since there aren’t as many rules to what makes good beer packaging.
I think if anything, the brewery industry has helped the design world get more attention by providing more direct exposure to packaging design––exposure that’s now seen by the masses. This ultimately demonstrates the importance of good design to non-designers.” — Mark Johnston, co-owner, designer, illustrator and pixel-pitted Pisces at Prickly Pear Paper.
As is abundantly evident, design infiltrates our lives in countless ways — the examples mentioned above are only the tip of the iceberg. As a result, design has helped shape and transform Phoenix, serving as a catalyst to its evolution throughout the years.
To learn more about the ever-morphing craft of design, the diverse implications it has within our everyday lives, and the creatives (both local and national) who are leading the charge, come out to the Evolve Design Conference, which will take place on October 12 and 13, 2019. | https://medium.com/yesphx-stories/a-city-driven-by-design-34670d1100ff | ['Breanne Krager'] | 2019-09-25 21:29:55.525000+00:00 | ['Phoenix Design', 'Design', 'Phoenix Design Week', 'Phxdw', 'Aiga Arizona'] |
June 18 — pricing blackout kit for drop shipping | Alex from HighTech3D gave me a great opportunity! He offered to do drop shipping with my blackout vinyl on his website. The deal is that he’d list the product on his website, and if he gets an order, he’ll send me a shipping label so that I can ship it.
Here’s the pricing breakdown for the goal price of $20:
$4 materials
$1.50 for Alex (exposure on HighTech3D and shipping logistics)
$1 for a 1.5" x 24" mailing tube
$1 Paypal fees (30 cents + 3.4% of price)
$4 shipping (to New Jersey from San Francisco as a test)
$8.50 my time and 10% cut failure rate (the vinyl often slips in the cutter and messes up the cut, also I’ve spent hours debugging the vinyl cutter)
I think this is pretty reasonable as it includes shipping, and if you were just to buy the matte vinyl from TAP plastics, it’s $3 per 1ft of the 2ft wide roll, so it would cost you $15 to buy the vinyl domestically anyways. I was able to get it cheap because I paid $400 for three 1.52x30m rolls (shipped via FedEx from China).
Now that the pricing is sorted out I bought the mailing tubes and we’ll have to make some nice photographs and copy for the website.
Shipping
My vinyl roll weighs 175g rounded up.
I bought this scale for a wagyu beef costco group buy that never happened… did you know costco sells wagyu beef for $1200 for 13 pounds? wagyu steaks are supposed to melt in your mouth like butter. :O
The mailing tubes on Amazon are 12.4lb for 50, so about 115 grams. 290 g to oz is 10.23 oz, so let’s say my package weighs 10.5 oz.
Shipping from San Francisco to New Jersey is $4! I figure shipping across the country is a good estimate.
Packaging test
The biggest piece of vinyl is just over 15" tall, so a 24" length mailing tube should be perfect.
I checked to see if the vinyl would fit inside a 1.5 inch diameter (well actually 1.38 inches taking into account the width of the mailer walls), and so long as I wrap it around a dowel that is the diameter of my marker (1.5cm) or smaller, it should fit fine. This is great news because the next size up is twice as expensive.
I also noticed that painter’s tape sometimes leaves sticky residue on the vinyl, so I made sure that the pieces of painter’s tape holding the rolls together were small, and it looks like it works. This one’s been in storage for about a month now, and no sticky residue left from the tape.
Never perfect
The thing I’m self conscious about with this product is that sometimes when I cut it the backing is not cut through on the whole cut, so there’s a bit of extra backing sticking out past the edge of the sticker.
It doesn’t affect the vinyl sticker, it just looks less professional. I experimented with doing a kiss cut instead of cutting through, but if you have to take the sticker off the backing before application it gets deformed really easily and it’s hard to apply it nicely (without tons of wrinkles). I can also adjust the blade to make a cleaner cut, but with a completely through cut the vinyl is more likely to slip and ruin the cut. I have been convincing myself that it should be fine as it doesn’t affect the function. To have it consistently nice I would either have to trim them off by hand (which would take a really long time), or invest in super expensive die cut tooling, which is how the professionals do it.
Similarly, the other things on the website are 3D printed rather than professionally injection molded with expensive tooling. We’re not rich corporations after all, just people. | https://medium.com/grow-bucket-life-project-kickstarter-diary/june-18-pricing-blackout-kit-for-drop-shipping-923f455a6b2 | ['Ruth Grace Wong'] | 2017-06-19 05:35:44.500000+00:00 | ['Startup'] |
These are Some Mean Times | We dumped our investment advisor because he loved Donald Trump.
Oh, there was more to it than that. Somehow, he felt emboldened to send me a nasty, untruthful meme about Barack Obama during the 2016 election. It was so out of character I figured someone had hijacked his account.
But no, it was him. He defended himself even after I pointed out how his meme was factually incorrect (as if facts matter). And then he went on to explain how Trump’s election would be fabulous for all of us.
We’d known this guy for a long time. Trusted him with some pretty important decisions and certainly a lot of information. We had invested years in our professional relationship with him but it was finished in mere minutes. Done, just completely done.
There was no way we were going to do business with him anymore. That’s how immediate and extreme our reaction was. And that was before we even knew how epically bad Trump would be as president.
Now, I’m not sure I could even carry on a conversation with someone who still supports Trump. And that’s not good. We used to be able to overlook someone being a Democrat or Republican. Heck, we figured all stockbrokers were Republicans, focused completely on making money and minimizing taxes. We were down with that even though when we aren’t talking investments we are on the far left of the political spectrum.
So we straight up asked the next investment guy if he voted for Trump. We now had a litmus test and there was only one right answer. A yes with an explanation wouldn’t work. This was a yes or no question, the upshot of which might have been stuffing our money in the mattress.
It hasn’t stopped there. I just can’t fathom someone still supporting Trump and, as unpleasant and closed-minded as it seems, I can’t knowingly do business with a Trump supporter. I will cross the street, find another gas station, find a different store, change my own oil if I have to but come at me with anything with the slightest whiff of MAGA and I will have to go.
And it’s not one-sided. Oh no, don’t think that it’s only liberals who are drawing their lines in the sand. The MAGA folks are doing the same only they’re louder and not so discreet. Don’t get me started.
It’s kind of crazy if you think about it, that we basically can’t even stand to look at each other. Let’s hope it’s just a moment in time. | https://medium.com/@jwilberg/these-are-some-mean-times-ba82e0129113 | ['Jan Wilberg'] | 2019-02-12 16:29:06.436000+00:00 | ['Anti Trump', 'Divisiveness', 'Republicans', 'Politics', 'Donald Trump'] |
Commercium — White Paper v.2 | Executive summary
Consumers are consistently using the digital environment to transact. The expanse of digital transactions covers a wide arena of industries and sectors with a plethora of services, products and value transfer. Commercium is designed for the consumer of the digital environment and modern world, with an emphasis on capital & commerce markets.
Commercium comprises of cryptographic proof dual blockchain, decentralized and purpose built for real world uses with functionality enabling individuals and business entities to intuitively, and confidently facilitate and operate several electronic financial instruments and activities securely.
Commercium’s ecosystem consists of cryptocurrency & blockchain technology architectures combined with business architectures segmented to facilitate seamless integrations for the electronic (digital) environment and serve as a conduit of physical assets into the electronic environment. This is achieved within being a store of value and value transfer through electronic financial instruments of contracts, swaps and swaptions, private equity interests, ISAs, which are created, modified, traded and settled within the commercium ecosystem.
Through its ecosystem Commercium will harness, being a store of value and value transfer in additional areas such as wealth management & death care markets. Aiming to work with and develop partnerships with regulatory bodies and create necessary entities as it continues to evolve. Modernizing blockchain and realizing the benefits of technological advancement starts with consumer level accessibility and delivering the tools that meet the demands of corporate and regulatory frameworks. | https://medium.com/commercium-cmm/commercium-white-paper-v-2-acf778fa4051 | [] | 2018-09-13 19:13:37.067000+00:00 | ['Blog', 'Commercium', 'Announcements', 'Cryptocurrency', 'White Papers'] |
How to be An Actor | Being an actor is an amazing job. It is a tough job but also extremely rewarding. Get a lot of money, being known by everyone and meeting famous people every day are a few of the advantages of having this job. The glamour that we see on the red carpet happened through blood, sweat, and tears that the actor has sacrificed. In order to be a good successful actor, these are steps that will guide you to be one of them.
First, get educated. The beginning of a good career in acting starts from school. Drama class introduces students to many subjects that can help them improve their acting skills. They learn about performing, character development, methods in acting, writing play materials, costume design for stage, etc. It is very important for students to learn the basic subject of drama because in the future they will need good skills to survive working in the tough acting industry. In drama school, they will also know fellow actors that will help them in the future by adding new relations. It is also important to go to drama school because we have to adapt to the real actor’s job in the future. Let’s imagine that drama school as a simulation before we join the actual work environment. Prepare to practice a lot when you are in this stage of your career because practice makes perfect. Also, you can ask your friends to practice with you about knowing your character in the play to make practicing become more fun. Intense interaction between actors and actresses will add more chemistry which will make the performance even better on the stage.
Second, building up an acting resume is very important. When we register for an audition, the casting director will ask if we have acting experiences to prove that we are capable of it. After that, if our resume is suitable for the role that they search then they will ask us to sign a contract. It means that they want us to be in their movie. Most people are confused about where to start building an acting resume because they are not familiar with it. If you have someone that works for a big-budget movie with a great reputation cast, you may join it. That is a very good opportunity and will make you become a famous actor easily. But not everyone has that opportunity, so the easiest way to start is by finding more experience outside school such as joining local theater in your circumstances. If you are still at the start of your career, you can start from the easiest role but do not forget to improve your skill and aim for a bigger role for the next play.
Third, hire an agent to get more relations. Having an agent may not be mandatory but if you want to work for a big movie or theater project then you will need one. A good agent can give an actor huge networking access. They have access that you would not get on your own. Acting agents submit their clients for auditions because most of their clients are busy. Then, they follow up on submissions and auditions. Also, they help their clients to negotiate better pay and contracts. That is why huge actors and actresses have an agent. But, it is fine if you, a newcomer in the acting industry, do not have them now. Hiring an agent or joining an acting agency is quite expensive for a newcomer. They take approximately 10% to 20% of a client’s gross earnings for every job they book from an audition they sent you on. For a newcomer, that amount of money can be used for surviving life. Right now, you can start only with yourself also do not forget to work hard, and maybe in the future, you can start hiring them.
In conclusion, the steps to be an actor are get educated, building up an acting resume, and hire an agent. I suggest you do your best to get this job because you will find a lot of competitor actors. Being an actor costs your blood, sweat, and tears but the result is very worth it. Do not forget to be your best self and never give up. | https://medium.com/@snazura/how-to-be-an-actor-755f3675809a | ['Salsabilla Noor Azura'] | 2020-12-09 13:56:53.781000+00:00 | ['Actors', 'Movies', 'Hollywood', 'Jobs'] |
Hi, Nicole | Hi, Nicole
We’ve added you as a writer.
Please follow the guidelines while submitting your best unpublished-drafts.
Thank You and Welcome to The Masterpiece. | https://medium.com/@meetmamun/hi-nicole-3526586b4ee4 | ['S M Mamunur Rahman'] | 2020-12-22 09:21:48.443000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Publication'] |
America’s Biggest Gold Mine Turned Sour | America set out on a mission to strike gold… and they did. Just off the Persian Golf, in what is now known as Dhahran, American’s found the first commercial quantity of oil in Saudi Arabia (home to some of the most holiest sights of Islam). This was great for both countries. American’s got their oil (and no shortage of it), while the Saudi’s became rich and supplied with protection and new found connections with the United States.
Building a military base around the oil sight, Saudi’s became very concerned with their own government and the relationship it had with American’s. This base was built on the terms that no American flag should touch the soil, instead the flag’s were hung on plaques on the side’s of buildings. Meanwhile the citizen’s of Saudi Arabia were becoming so concerned, so was the rest of the Middle East.
Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash
The Middle East’s new found country, Israel, needed help from the American military, due to Israel creating tension with other countries in the Middle East. America set out to help Israel, supplying them with money, weapons and support in what is now known as the Yom Kippur War. This saw America’s shortage of oil in 1973 (and to anyone else who supplied any type of aid to Israel at this time).
All the while this was happening, a man by the name of Osama Bin Laden, travelled to Afghanistan in attempts to stop the Soviet Union from invading. It is also worth noting that Osama provided much more background than many of us know. Osama Bin-Laden, child to Mohammad Bin-Laden, was born into a very wealthy family… the family that owned the oil company in Saudi Arabia (by the name of Abrusto Energy). Osama worked close with rebel fighters in Afghanistan, such as Mujahideen, bringing money, construction gear and dedication. However, this is not the only story to tell. While America was helping Israel, they also funded Afghanistan with money and weapons to fight against the Soviet Union. Together, they won, preventing the Soviet Union from invading Afghanistan.
Photo by Specna Arms on Unsplash
Saudi Arabia and the United States came back together to continue the oil production. However, Osama Bin Laden grew increasingly concerned with the government of Saudi Arabia. A neighbouring country, Iraq, began to invade kuwait. This grew concerns in Saudi Arabia’s government in fear of invading of their own country soon after. With this, Osama Bin Laden offered to help the government take back kuwait and push back the Iraq military. This seemed preposterous to the Saudi government, with them quote on quote telling Osama that ‘there are no caves in Kuwait’ (in reference to Osama’s previous war in Afghanistan and how he fought to protect against the Soviet Union invading).
Osama’s great dedication towards his own ideologies against American’s being on such sacred ground bought around the provoking of his own passport and rejection from his own government. In turn, this may seem very questionable, for the Saudi government to let American’s built military bases on their own land and to then try to hush their own citizens who have growing concerns about what is happening. However, the Saudi’s were growing very very rich from American’s doing what they were doing.
Photo by Yasmine Arfaoui on Unsplash
From here Osama Bin Laden created and funded Al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. From Somalia, Osama conducted many attacks against America and other big countries attempting to come into Saudi Arabia. This resulted in one of the most known terrorist attacks on American soil. The day of 9/11. 2,977 people died as a result of 19 hijackers on kamikaze missions. This later on resulted in the Global War on Terrorism. This was launched in response to the 9/11 attacks by the United States military.
As of 2018, the United States has only imported 9.1% of it’s annual oil import from Saudi Arabia. This is a major drop from 11.9% in previous years. Although Saudi Arabia remains the second largest oil production country, the US is taking less oil each year.
In March of 2020 (yes, the same time most of us went into lockdown due to the Coronavirus), the Russia-Saudi Arabia oil price war began. The economic war was in response to Russia’s refusal to slow oil production in order to keep oil prices at a moderate level. This has resulted in the drop of oil prices since the spring of 2020, with US oil prices falling 34%, crude oil falling by 26% and Brent oil falling by 24%. This is on top of the demand shortage of oil in the waking of COVID-19, which saw oil prices already down by 30% at the beginning of 2020. How’s that for stuff you missing in the news during a global pandemic?!
It is fair to say that America’s dwelling in the Middle East has resulted in much more than the gold mine they bargained for, whether it be the war between Al-Qaeda, America’s oil shortages or the Global War On Terrorism.
Thank you for reading! I would like to thank Johnny Harris on YouTube (link is below) for helping me write this, despite him not even knowing I exist! Follow for more interesting stories, opinions and the daily dose of education! | https://medium.com/@knilafiable/americas-biggest-gold-mine-turned-sour-46a535230e42 | [] | 2020-11-24 11:24:51.374000+00:00 | ['America', 'Money', 'Politics', 'War', 'Middle East'] |
Hadoop speculative execution | You can found a good description about speculative execution at Wikipedia. Here are the two properties to configure the use of this feature:
mapred.map.tasks.speculative.execution
mapred.reduce.tasks.speculative.execution
Or if you are using Hadoop 2.x:
mapreduce.map.speculative
mapreduce.reduce.speculative
Most time it is useful but in some scenarios disabling it will make a big difference.
source | https://medium.com/not-data-science/hadoop-speculative-execution-63b2dca71eaa | ['Not A Data Scientist'] | 2020-04-13 09:40:06.048000+00:00 | ['Big Data', 'Data Science', 'Hadoop'] |
There Are 1,385,000 New Articles Posted on Medium Every Month | I kind of stole this title...
I mean, not really. But credit where it’s due. Earlier this week, J.J. Pryor wrote a post about Medium statistics and how much people earn. But in the article, I came across this line…
— There are 1,385,000 new articles posted on Medium every month
What the…?
Seriously? 1,385,000 posts every month? That’s 47,000 posts every day. 1,958 new posts every hour. Tick tock. Another couple thousand posts.
And you wonder why there’s a curation queue? Omg, the poor curators! Can you even imagine having to wade through that amount of content to pick the shiny bright ones from the stinking piles of hot steaming garbage?
How do you even get seen?
A lot of it is crap. And short reads.
Sorry to be so blunt. There’s a lot of content that goes up that no one is ever going to read. I don’t know if people are using content spinners or robots to churn out content but there’s a lot of bad content.
I’m not talking about decent writers who haven’t found their audience yet.
I’m talking about content that’s not readable.
There’s a writer “out there” who pastes in excerpts from public domain works taken off Gutenberg. It never gets any reads. He keeps doing it.
I’m sure there’s a reason people do stuff like that, but I don’t have the mental hijinks to understand why. I shake my head and move on. Don’t even ask me how I know about those people. If you know, don’t say it. Thanks.
Also? Short reads.
There’s a guy who pumps out half a dozen haiku every day. I guess he likes them. I’m not sure that volume makes up for lack of read time. Those 5 line verses aren’t really a one minute read. It’s just that Medium doesn’t log read time under a minute. Know what I mean?
Here’s the thing. Now that Medium brought in “short form content” we might as well use some of that to stay in the feed. But if all you DO is short form? I’m not sure that’s going to go so well.
Point is, most of the competition — isn’t. Know what I mean? It’s just not. But still. 47,000 posts per day. It’s a lot going into the publication feeds.
How do you even get seen?
We writers aren’t writing for ourselves.
I mean, I know we “say” we are. But no. It only starts there, in that we choose what we want to write about. But after that — once we hit publish ?
No one wants to publish to the sound of crickets.
If we really didn’t care if anyone read our writing, we’d be writing in a paper notebook. Or on our computer. For ourselves. Hitting publish means we want readers.
So I started thinking about it. Really. How do people get seen?
7 ways to up the odds of getting seen…
It made me think about how to stand out of the crowd. So I came up with a few ideas. If you have more, feel welcome to add them in the comments.
1. Frequency really helps
Here’s the thing. All those 47,000 posts every day aren’t in one giant feed. What a nightmare that would be.
But no. They’re going up in publication feeds. And they’re going into the feeds of your followers. So that gives you a couple of shots at getting seen.
You can up the odds of visibility through frequency. Tim Denning posted 66 posts in the past month. Many of the top writers post every day.
Some people think that sounds crazy. And it kind of does. But think about it. If you have a job, doesn’t your boss expect you to show up and do some work every day? Yeah. Mine too.
It might mean you do some writing on the weekend. Might mean you need to come up with a system that works for you. But frequency helps.
If you can’t write daily, at least be consistent. Tell your readers when you post. Tell them you’ll be there every Monday and Friday, or whatever.
Caveat — because there’s always one of those. Writing a big volume of crap won’t help. It will do the opposite. People will unfollow and dismiss. Doesn’t matter if a buffet is all you can eat if nothing there is worth eating.
2. You’ve got to be interesting, dammit.
I wish I could say it’s about good writing. But nope. It’s really not.
It’s not about excellent writing. It’s about excellent topics. You can write about your sister in law’s baby shower if you want to, but really, how many people are going to be interested?
The internet isn’t really your diary. Unless your life is really that juicy. The people writing personal experience posts know how to spin it into a story with an actual take away for the reader.
Because it’s not about you. It’s about the reader.
Unless you’re Kim Kardashian. Then nevermind.
But if you’re not a celebrity with millions of snoopy McGee fans that want to know the minutiae of your life? You’re going to have to grab their interest with the topics you pick to write about.
Caveat — don’t lean on meta posts. People don’t go to Business Insider to read articles about how to succeed on Business Insider. That meta thing is big on Medium, and I get it. Like bringing candy to the playground. But it won’t ever get curated, and the curated articles tend to live longer. In my experience.
3. Your title has to kick. serious. butt.
So many writers have lame, lame titles. So weak. If you can figure out how to write great titles, you’re halfway home.
First of all, don’t use titles that read like they belong on a book cover. Think newspaper headlines. Roughly half the people who click the title will read the entire article. So work on titles. The more clicks you get, the more reads.
Also? You have 100 characters with title and subtitle combined. Use them. You can check the character count at: https://charactercounttool.com/
If you really suck at titles, you need to come up with something that work to help you do better.
Here’s one idea. Go grab a list of the titles in the popular reads. Then modify them for your topic.
For example, the #3 article right now is:
The Overwhelming Racism Of COVID Coverage
Make that into a formula. Like so…
The Overwhelming ___________ of __________
You can do the same using titles off news feeds. Or newspapers. Or magazines, or even other content sites.
Here’s another idea. Do what I did. If you’re reading a post and you see a line marked “top highlight” see if you can use that as a title to write about. But give credit for heaven’s sakes. Writers need to give credit when due.
As your titles get better, your views will increase.
4. You need to open strong.
It sucks when you nail the title— but once the reader clicks, you lose them. Poof. Instantly. Because the opening was weak and boring.
Stephen King once said he can spend months or even years figuring out the opening for a new book. If you’re writing online, it’s even more important.
Everyone says headline, headline, headline — but a weak opening can undo all the work you put into crafting the best headline.
The best openings often start with a person the reader can relate to, or a fact they didn’t know and want to know more about.
I was not sorry when my brother died.
That’s the first sentence in Nervous Conditions. You can’t read a sentence like that and not read the next one. See what I mean?
Start strong.
Caveat — use formatting. Please. It doesn’t matter how strong your opening is if you don’t use the enter key (like, ever) and your writing is a wall of text. People bail on that. Too hard to read.
5. You’ve got to be smarter about publications
I wrote an entire post about this so I won’t drone on. I’ll link it at the bottom.
Here’s the reader’s digest version. People click on familiar faces.
If you’re jumping around looking for the magic publication that will give you a whack of views — that’s the recipe for failure. Because you’re not posting to any one publication often enough to become a familiar face.
Think about going to a concert or some place there’s 20,000 people in the audience. You’re not going to recognize someone you’ve only seen once. But magically, you can scan the crowd and spot your co-worker.
Same concept. You need to build familiarity with an audience. More in the article linked at the bottom.
6. Comment. Lots.
How many comments can you write in the time it would take you to write another article? A lot, I bet. Comments are a great way to make an impression on people. When you do that, they often check out your work.
But don’t be trite. Don’t post crap like “nice post” — that’s Facebook junk. You’ll just be ignored. Have conversations. Add something to a discussion.
And don’t be a jerk, running around disagreeing with all the people who have different opinions than you. That will make an impression on people, for sure, but probably not the impression you were hoping to make.
Also? Don’t paste links to your stories into other people’s comments. That’s just tacky and gauche. People see right through that. Might as well just put on your invisibility cloak, because that’s what the end result will be.
Think of Medium as a place for conversations. If people like what you have to say in comments, if you come across as helpful or insightful, they’ll come check out your work.
7. You need to build your own list!
If you’re not building a list, most people will never see your posts. They can’t. It’s not humanly possible. 47,000 posts per day.
I mean, how many people do YOU follow? Do you see all their posts? No.
Reader loyalty is part of the new algorithm, here. You know that, right? When readers “loyally” read your writing, that increases your earnings.
By calculating a share of member reading time, we support authors who write about unique topics and connect with loyal readers. [more info here]
Doesn’t matter how much your readers love your writing, if you don’t show up in their feed and you’re not curated, you might as well be invisible.
It can be a fancy list with opt in and such if you want. But even a digest of your posts sent once a week for people who like your work is helpful. For you and them. I hate when I “miss” posts by my favorite writers.
If you have your own publication, you can send newsletters. But if you’re publishing to other publications — start a list. In the beginning, it will be a lot of work for little result. Count on that. (Ask me how I know)
But as it grows? You’ll start to see that when you send out that digest, you get a real nice bump in traffic. It’s enough to make you truly appreciate those readers. Which is kind of the point, know what I mean?
And it doesn’t even have to cost money. Here’s 5 places to build a list free.
Is it worth the bother?
That’s what I’ve heard people ask. There’s so much competition here, is it even worth the bother to try to get some visibility.
2 years ago, Medium was getting 90 million unique visitors per month.
Today? Medium gets around 416 million visits per month. You know anywhere else that draws that many readers? I mean sure — instagram has a ton of traffic. Facebook, too.
But here, they’re all self identified readers.
What more could a writer ask for?
Yes, it’s hard work. Hard, hard work. You’re going to have to work your butt off. Learn to write more compelling. Create stronger titles.
That which is “easy” and that which is “worth it” are seldom the same.
The numbers boggle my mind. 47,000 posts a day is a lot of competition. A lot. Staggering. But still — 416 million visits per month.
Even a small piece of that pie would taste so lovely. Right? | https://medium.com/linda-caroll/there-are-1-385-000-new-articles-posted-on-medium-every-month-37f988c31b64 | ['Linda Caroll'] | 2020-09-18 14:46:12.964000+00:00 | ['Self', 'Self Growth', 'Inspiration', 'Marketing', 'Writing'] |
7 Best Ideas To Enjoy Summer Vacations of 2020 | The summer vacations always sound nice, doesn’t it? Those thrilling heat waves, the air conditioning, the cool breeze, all of that stuff. All this time in the sun. And it just never seems to end.
But after a while you wonder what you’re doing up there, standing in the sun for eight or more days a week. Wouldn’t it be great if we could just go home after a few days at work and get some rest? A short summer vacation would solve that problem for us.
Of course, there’s a catch. And I can’t stress how bad a deal this is. The summer is here, and summer vacations have already started.
Plan Your Holidays
It’s time to start looking for summer vacations. Now if you haven’t been shopping for one yet, you should really get ready. I’m talking about looking at offers right now. No, you don’t have to wait for a few weeks or months.
Starting now, you should take a look at what’s out there. If you use the internet, this is easy. Just type summer vacations in the search engine and you’ll see the results instantly. You may be amazed at the number of sites that show up on the first page. It’s so easy.
Online Vacation Packages
Most of the sites are too good to be true. That’s why it’s so important to do your research first. Take some time to look through a few of them.
Some of the options you will find are free to use and also require that you sign up as a member to someone else’s site. Some of these are made by corporations. So you better be careful when you choose a site that offers that.
Most of the ones that require a year membership cost thousands of dollars. Some companies don’t care about their members at all. They only care about their profits.
Travel Agents
You should try to stay away from companies that give out information about summer vacations as well. Once again, there are many companies that offer deals.
For example, many companies will give you a free trial to start off with. This is fine. Just be sure that the offer is for a real product that you will benefit from.
Free trials are great for a couple of reasons. First, you can get a feel for how the products are before you pay full price. Second, you don’t have to spend all your money on one.
But remember, summer vacations are usually expensive. You can save yourself money and still get a great vacation. All you need to do is take a few minutes to research.
Family Trip
Summer holidays are usually the best time of the year for families, but for those of us who can’t take the weather we sometimes miss out on the many different things that we can enjoy in summer. If you’re one of these people, here are some tips on how to enjoy in summer. These might be helpful for your next family holiday.
No, there’s no need to turn your favourite pastime into an activity, but there is still much to be enjoyed in summer. It’s the most enjoyable time of the year, and you should make the most of it.
If you have budget issue or have limited sources so there are a lot of stuff to do that is completely free. So how do you do this? I’ve got a few ideas for you below:
Indoor Activity
You’ll probably have a lot of things you want to do, and some that you only want to do once. To enjoy in summer, you might have to pick and choose your activities wisely. Watch movies at home theater that are indoor source of entertainment available at 4kprojector within all price ranges. Not only does it help to keep you busy, but it also keeps your senses entertained too.
If you only want to do something once, that’s great, because then you can go back and do it over again. You’ll be able to enjoy in summer without the stress of boredom.
Outdoor Activity
If you want to give your family something completely different to worry about, try an outdoor picnic. Gardening is also fantastic hobby to stay busy and have good vacations. Just put seeds and grow fruit plants in your lawn or grow plants using collapsiblewagon that won’t take lawn area. Take care of your plants and plan more. Here you get to mix with family and friends there’s nothing quite like getting out under the sun and air and watching the children play.
Some local parks now have events that they hold during the summer. They host festivals, concerts and other activities. There’s something for everyone and you’ll find it hard to choose.
Something that you could consider doing for a short term, or something that could last for longer is volunteering. Volunteering could be a great way to unwind and spend some quality time with friends and family.
Camping
If you don’t want to take anything with you, the same applies, but you can either go on a long weekend or a short break with friends. Missing Camping isn’t an activity you should leave behind it’s a great way to enjoy in summer. Summer is an incredibly busy time of year for airlines. When it comes to finding something to do for a break, people love the idea of camping. It’s cheaper than hotels, easier to arrange, and just loads of fun.
You’ll also find it hard to choose if you want to just hang out with your family. If so, why not consider joining up with a community centre or library?
You might have heard of the term ‘cultural activities’. These could be similar activities to what you might have done in summer, but on a bigger scale. | https://medium.com/@the2the1/7-best-ideas-to-enjoy-summer-vacations-of-2020-815fd3a0367 | ['No Excuse'] | 2020-06-27 08:42:24.186000+00:00 | ['Gardening', 'Vacation', 'Summer', 'Holiday'] |
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