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Live Search with React | Instant Search | Pagination | | In this blog, we will learn about how to create a live search input field, which fetches the result as the user types in the query.
Of all the results available for that query, we will only fetch 20 results. We will create a pagination for the user to navigate to the next or previous 20 results, until no further results are available.
We will achieve this by working on the following steps:
Create a Search.js component Create a stylesheet Search.css Create an onChange Event Handler for Search Input Install axios and create fetchSearchResults() Call fetchSearchResults() on user’s query Create renderSearchResults() to show the results Add the loader, error message and styles
Pagination:
8. Initialize state for storing page information
9. Update state with pages information
10. Create handlePageClick() to handle page click
11. Create a component for Pagination links
12. Include PageNavigation Component into Search.js
13. Add styles for Navigation Links
API link: https://pixabay.com/api/docs/#api_search_images
Tutorial Video:
You can also watch the tutorial to understand in detail.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Step 1: Create a Search.js component
Create a component called Search.js inside the src/components directory.
Initialize the state, and define below properties:
query: to store user’s query.
results: to store our fetched data.
loading: initially set to false, which will help us show loader while the results are fetched.
message: To store any error message
Add an input inside label, wrapped in a container div, for user to enter his query
import React from 'react'; class Search extends React.Component { constructor( props ) {
super( props ); this.state = {
query: '',
results: {},
loading: false,
message: '',
}; } render() {
return (
<div className="container">
{/*Heading*/}
<h2 className="heading">Live Search: React Application</h2> {/*Search Input*/}
<label className="search-label" htmlFor="search-input">
<input
type="text"
value=""
id="search-input"
placeholder="Search..."
/>
<i className="fa fa-search search-icon"/>
</label>
</div>
)
}
} export default Search;
Now import Search.js into App.js
import React from 'react';
import Search from "./components/Search"; class App extends React.Component {
render() {
return (
<div>
<Search/>
</div>
);
}
} export default App;
Include font awesome inside public/index.html
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.7.0/css/font-awesome.min.css">
Step 2: Create a stylesheet Search.css
Create a stylesheet src/Searc.css. Add styles for the above elements
.heading {
font-size: 30px;
padding: 16px 0;
color: #444;
text-align: center;
} /*Container*/
.container {
margin: 36px auto;
width: 100%;
max-width: 800px;
}
.search-label {
position: relative;
} .container input {
width: 100%;
padding: 16px;
font-size: 36px;
font-style: italic;
color: #444;
box-sizing: border-box;
outline: none;
} .search-icon {
position: absolute;
top: -10px;
font-size: 24px;
color: #555;
right: 18px;
}
Now import Style.css into Search.js
import '../Style.css';
So at present you app would look like this:
Step 3: Create an onChange Event Handler for Input
Create an onChange Event Handler function that takes that sets the value of the query property of state to what user entered in the input. We will set loading to true and message as empty which will nullify any message that was printed before.
handleOnInputChange = (event) => {
const query = event.target.value;
this.setState({ query, loading: true, message: '' } );
};
Now add that event to the input.
<input
type="text"
value=""
id="search-input"
placeholder="Search..."
onChange={this.handleOnInputChange}
/>
Step 4: Install axios and create fetchSearchResults()
Install and import axios
$ npm install axios // Search.js
import axios from 'axios';
Now create a function called fetchSearchResults() , which takes two parameters :
updatedPageNumber: Page number to be served which will help us later when we do pagination
query: What user has entered in the search input field.
We then add the searchUrl for which we are using pixabay API, which gives us the images data.
As we don’t want to keep making API call, every time the user enters a character, we would initialize a variable called cancel in our constructor and cancel the previous request before making a new one. We will use CancelToken that axios provides us for this.
1. We cancel the previous request,
2. generate a new token and,
3. Pass this token as a the second parameter in axios.get()
4. We make a get request to Pixabay API and store the response in state, using setState(). We also set the loading to false, and the relevant message when we have received the response.
5. If we receive any error we set that in the message property of state.
constructor( props ) {
super( props ); this.state = {
query: '',
loading: false,
message: '',
};
this.cancel = '';
} /**
* Fetch the search results and update the state with the result.
*
* @param {int} updatedPageNo Updated Page No.
* @param {String} query Search Query.
*
*/
fetchSearchResults = (updatedPageNo = '', query ) => { const pageNumber = updatedPageNo ? `&page=${updatedPageNo}` : ''; // By default the limit of results is 20
const searchUrl = `https://pixabay.com/api/?key=12413278-79b713c7e196c7a3defb5330e&q=${query}${pageNumber}`; if (this.cancel) {
// Cancel the previous request before making a new request
this.cancel.cancel();
}
// Create a new CancelToken
this.cancel = axios.CancelToken.source(); axios
.get(searchUrl, {
cancelToken: this.cancel.token,
})
.then((res) => {
const resultNotFoundMsg = !res.data.hits.length
? 'There are no more search results. Please try a new search.'
: ''; this.setState({
results: res.data.hits,
message: resultNotFoundMsg,
loading: false,
});
})
.catch((error) => {
if (axios.isCancel(error) || error) {
this.setState({
loading: false,
message: 'Failed to fetch results.Please check network',
});
}
});
};
Step 5: Call fetchSearchResults() on user’s query
When the user types his query in the search box, we will :
1.Check if the user’s query string is empty , if it is set the result to empty object.
2.If its not empty, set the query in the state, set loading to false, message to empty string
3. Call the fetchSearchResults() which will take page number ( 1 for now ) and query,
4. Cancel the previous request, make a new token .
5. When the response is received fetch results and set the result in state, loading to false, and message if any.
6. Set the error message if error received.
handleOnInputChange = (event) => {
const query = event.target.value; if ( ! query ) {
this.setState({ query, results: {}, message: '' } );
} else {
this.setState({ query, loading: true, message: '' }, () => {
this.fetchSearchResults(1, query);
});
}
};
Its important to note that we call fetchSearchResults() after we have set the query and loading to true, by calling it inside the call back function of setState() . This is because setState() is asynchrnous and does not guarantee that the values will be set immediately.
Step 6: Create renderSearchResults() to show the results
Lets create a renderSearchResults() to render the results of the query.
1. We pull the results out of state using ES6 Object restructuring.
2. Check if the results has data and . then loop their each item to display the images using ES6 array map function.
renderSearchResults = () => {
const {results} = this.state; if (Object.keys(results).length && results.length) {
return (
<div className="results-container">
{results.map((result) => {
return (
<a key={result.id} href={result.previewURL} className="result-items">
<h6 className="image-username">{result.user}</h6>
<div className="image-wrapper">
<img className="image" src={result.previewURL} alt={result.user}/>
</div>
</a>
);
})}
</div>
);
}
};
Now lets call this function inside render(). Also pull query from state and set that to the input value
render() {
const { query } = this.state;
return (
<div className="container">
{/*Heading*/}
<h2 className="heading">Live Search: React Application</h2> {/*Search Input*/}
<label className="search-label" htmlFor="search-input">
<input
type="text"
value={query}
id="search-input"
placeholder="Search..."
onChange={this.handleOnInputChange}
/>
<i className="fa fa-search search-icon"/>
</label> {/*Result*/}
{ this.renderSearchResults() }
</div>
)
}
Step 7: Add the loader, error message and styles
Add loader.gif from Git repo Pull out message and loading from state using const {message, loading } = this.state; Import loader in Search.js using import Loader from '../loader.gif'; Include the loader image, and error message inside render method of Search.js just beneath label.
{/*Error Message*/}
{ message && <p className="message">{message}</p> } {/*Loader*/}
<img src={Loader} className={`search-loading ${loading ? 'show' : 'hide' }`} alt="loader"/>
Lets add some CSS to our results container inside Search .css
/* Results */
.results-container {
display: flex;
flex-flow: wrap;
} .result-items {
position: relative;
padding: 16px;
border: 1px solid #898989;
margin: 16px;
text-align: center;
min-width: 200px;
text-decoration: none;
box-shadow: 2px 2px 2px #898989;
} .image-username {
color: coral;
font-size: 18px;
position: absolute;
bottom: 0;
right: 0;
margin: 0;
background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8);
padding: 5px 10px; } .image {
width: 100%;
height: 200px;
} .image-wrapper {
display: flex;
align-items: center;
box-sizing: border-box;
height: 100%;
justify-content: center;
} /*Loader*/
.search-loading {
position: absolute;
left: 0;
right: 0;
margin: auto;
} /*Show and hide*/
.show {
display: inline-block;
} .hide {
display: none;
}
Now if we make a search , we get the results and the loader shows while its fetching the data like so :
Bravo !!
We have got our app working. Now all we have to do is add pagination.
Pagination
Step 8: Initialize state for storing page information
Add totalResults , totalPages and currentPageNo properties to state, to store these information
constructor( props ) {
super( props ); this.state = {
query: '',
results: {},
error: '',
message: '',
loading: false,
totalResults: 0,
totalPages: 0,
currentPageNo: 0,
};
this.cancel = '';
}
Step 9: Add getPageCount() to calculate the no of page
Create a function getPageCount() to calculate how many pages will exists based on the result we received. So for example if the result total is 61 and we are serving 20 results per page.
total = 61
denominator = 20
This function will return 4 pages. ( 20 each for 3 pages makes a total of 60 and the remaining 1 result will go on the 4th page )
Here Math.floor() converts the number passed to an integer.
// Search.js
/**
* Get the Total Pages count.
*
* @param total
* @param denominator Count of results per page
* @return {number}
*/
getPagesCount = (total, denominator) => {
const divisible = total % denominator === 0;
const valueToBeAdded = divisible ? 0 : 1;
return Math.floor(total / denominator) + valueToBeAdded;
};
Step 10: Update state with pages information
Calculate the total results and store it in total Calculate total pages count using the getPagesCount() and store it in totalPagesCount Current Page no will be equal to the updated page no received in the parameter of fetchSearchResults()
Now update these information using setState() when we receive the response.
axios
.get(searchUrl, {
cancelToken: this.cancel.token,
})
.then((res) => {
const total = res.data.total;
const totalPagesCount = this.getPagesCount( total, 20 );
const resultNotFoundMsg = !res.data.hits.length
? 'There are no more search results. Please try a new search.'
: ''; this.setState({
results: res.data.hits,
totalResults: res.data.total,
currentPageNo: updatedPageNo,
totalPages: totalPagesCount,
message: resultNotFoundMsg,
loading: false,
});
})
Step 10: Create handlePageClick() to handle page click.
We will now create a function called handlePageClick . This will take a parameter type . We will call this function when the user clicks on Next or Previous button ( which we will create in a moment ) .
If prev is passed, it will add 1 to the current page number, else it would subtract one from the current page number.
Remember that on our initial query we are passing 1 as the updated page no. and setting the current page no to 1. So when the users clicks on Next the current page no would become 2 (1+1).
Also we won’t show the the previous button if the current page value is 1
Now we check if loading is false (means the previous request is complete).
Then we call the fetchSearchResults() to get the new search results with the same query but new updated pageno.
/**
* Fetch results according to the prev or next page requests.
*
* @param {String} type 'prev' or 'next'
*/
handlePageClick = (type) => {
event.preventDefault();
const updatedPageNo =
'prev' === type
? this.state.currentPageNo - 1
: this.state.currentPageNo + 1; if (!this.state.loading) {
this.setState({ loading: true, message: '' }, () => {
// Fetch previous 20 Results
this.fetchSearchResults(updatedPageNo, this.state.query);
});
}
};
Now lets pull out currentPage and totalPages and create constants showPrevLink and showNextLink to help us decide when to show the Prev or Next links.
So if the current page is greater than 1 means user is either on the second or high page, and we should show the Prev link.
If the current page is less than the no of total pages, that means we still have more pages to show and we can show Next link
const { query, loading, message, currentPageNo, totalPages } = this.state;
// showPrevLink will be false, when on the 1st page, hence Prev link be shown on 1st page.
const showPrevLink = 1 < currentPageNo; // showNextLink will be false, when on the last page, hence Next link wont be shown last page.
const showNextLink = totalPages > currentPageNo;
Step 11: Create a component for Pagination links
Lets create a component called PageNavigation.js inside src/component directory. We will create two links one to navigate to Prev page and the other to the Next page. This component will receive props from the Search.js which we will define in a moment when we import this component there.
– showPrevLink and showNextLink props will be boolean values and will decide whether to show these links or not.
-And handlePrevClick and handleNextClick functions will called when the Prev and Nex t links are clicked respectively , to show results of the relevant pages.
-We will grey out the color of the these links to show the user they are not clickable until their previous request is served, using the loading prop. Loading will be true while the request is being served.
import React from 'react'; export default (props) => {
const {
showPrevLink,
showNextLink,
handlePrevClick,
handleNextClick,
loading,
} = props; return (
<div className="nav-link-container">
<a
href="#"
className={`
nav-link
${ showPrevLink ? 'show' : 'hide'}
${ loading ? 'greyed-out' : '' }
`}
onClick={handlePrevClick}
>
Prev
</a>
<a
href="#"
className={`
nav-link
${showNextLink ? 'show' : 'hide'}
${ loading ? 'greyed-out' : '' }
`}
onClick={handleNextClick}
>
Next
</a>
</div>
);
};
Step 12: Include PageNavigation Component into Search.js
Lets import it into our Search.js using import PageNavigation from './PageNavigation'; And add PageNavigation component one before and the other after this.renderSearchResults() . This is so that we have navigation available before and after search results and the user doesn’t have to scroll up or down to go the next page.
{/*Navigation Top*/}
<PageNavigation
loading={loading}
showPrevLink={showPrevLink}
showNextLink={showNextLink}
handlePrevClick={() => this.handlePageClick('prev')}
handleNextClick={() => this.handlePageClick('next')}
/> {/*Result*/}
{ this.renderSearchResults() } {/*Navigation Bottom*/}
<PageNavigation
loading={loading}
showPrevLink={showPrevLink}
showNextLink={showNextLink}
handlePrevClick={() => this.handlePageClick('prev')}
handleNextClick={() => this.handlePageClick('next')}
/>
Step 13: Add styles for Navigation Links
Lets add styles in Search.js for these navigation links
/*Nav Links*/
.nav-link-container {
margin: 20px 0;
display: flex;
justify-content: flex-end;
} .nav-link {
color: #555;
text-decoration: none;
border: 1px solid #898989;
padding: 10px 20px;
margin-right: 10px;
}
.greyed-out {
background: #f1f1f1;
opacity: 0.5;
}
Now we should update our handelOnInputChange(), by setting totalResults , totalPages , and currentPageNo to zero when there query is empty
handleOnInputChange = (event) => {
const query = event.target.value; if ( ! query ) {
this.setState({ query, results: {}, totalResults: 0, totalPages: 0, currentPageNo: 0, message: '' } );
} else {
this.setState({ query, loading: true, message: '' }, () => {
this.fetchSearchResults(1, query);
});
}
};
Awesome!!
Thats all guys we have our entire live search application ready with pagination.
If you liked my blog, please give a thumbs up and follow me on twitter
Git Repo: https://github.com/imranhsayed/react-workshop/tree/live-search-react/src
My Blogs | https://medium.com/@imranhsayed/live-search-with-react-instant-search-pagination-6acd476af756 | ['Imran Sayed'] | 2019-05-17 19:23:56.279000+00:00 | ['Search', 'Pagination', 'Live Search', 'React', 'JavaScript'] |
Trump’s Great Voter Fraud Diversion to Win 2024: A Discourse Analysis | Trump’s Great Voter Fraud Diversion to Win 2024: A Discourse Analysis
Gage Skidmore / Flickr
On Dec. 14, Hawaii’s four electors cast the final Electoral College votes, making Joe Biden’s lead at 306–232 — and the Democratic presidential nomination — official. But this came as no surprise to many voters since, as of over a month ago, most news organizations including Fox News projected the election to end up in Biden’s favor.
If there was any doubt of a Biden presidency, it was borne out of Donald Trump’s rhetoric. Following the news in early November that Democrats would be projected to win the 2020 presidential election, 45th President Donald Trump commenced an unprecedented campaign strategy. Seemingly, the goal was to make Americans question the validity of current voting procedures and cast doubt on the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory. On Nov. 5, Trump’s response to Biden’s projected win was no concession, instead arguing “if you count the legal votes, I easily win” before providing a list of explanations on how the voting system may have illegally and unjustly worked against him. Even after all 538 electors voted on Dec. 14, Trump fired back on Twitter the next day. “Tremendous evidence pouring in on voter fraud,” the 45th president said. “There has never been anything like this in our Country!”
CityOfStPete / Flickr
Trump’s response to the Biden win has elicited mass controversy from all fronts, with Democrats expectedly aghast, half of Republicans viewing Trump as a sore loser, and the other half further emboldened in an image of Trump as America’s only bastion of truth against legions of corrupt Democrats, political traitors like Bush and Romney, scholars, scientists, and the entire news media (except OANN and Newsmax), now that Trump supporters have been “abandoned” by Fox News which dared to report on Biden’s projected win. Still, recounts in favor of Biden stayed in his favor, numerous fact-checks put Trump’s arguments into question, and despite promises of litigation, he had no legal recourse, with no court finding instances of fraud after dozens of cases. What, then, was his goal? Or more aptly, what was the point?
Trump might claim that “there has never been anything like this,” but it turns out he’s not the first president to contest the results of an election — that legacy stretches back to 1824 with election controversies that have sent the media and campaign aides abuzz. However, he might just be the first to employ election fraud rhetoric to ignite the first moments of the next presidential campaign. In addition to the 2024 election, Trump knows that a lot is riding on the 2021 Georgia Congressional race — after all, the results would decide which party controls the Senate.
Biden won the 2020 election, and Trump likely knows it. But knowing the political circumstances we’re in, it’s unlikely Trump is trying to win this election in good faith. He’s playing the long game, and that’s worrying. To win in 2024 and 2021, it’s advantageous to keep Trump supporters angry. Spreading misinformation about voter fraud, which many will believe, is a convenient way of doing that. This incongruency between Trump’s language use and his underlying motives become more apparent the more we investigate his speeches and many tweets following Biden’s projected win.
Trump and the Language of Non-Concession
Matt Johnson / Flickr
On Nov. 5, Donald Trump delivered a speech on the election results that would live in infamy, breaking the trust of Democrats and Republicans alike. This was no ordinary concession. Instead, he delivers a number of remarks about why he thinks the 2020 electoral process was rigged in Biden’s favor. Trump employs language to craft an image of himself as a bastion of progress, fairness, and law, even social justice, while constructing Biden as an archetypal thief out to steal the election from American voters.
That’s unusual. Trump is known for being controversial, even among his loyal supporters — Trump isn’t afraid to be polarizing, and many like that about him — yet Trump appears to position national unity as the focal point of his speech. However, he doesn’t do it like Biden does, or like how any other president has before. Instead, he delivers a balance of self-affirmations and face attacks against all fronts — Democrats, pollsters, the media. One of the many ironies that ensue is the paradox of Trump being both a one-man legal system yet also a rebel against it, which gets echoed with close discourse analysis.
All of these appeals are embedded in Trump’s language. In his opening statements, he emphasizes a marked/unmarked relationship between legal and illegal. “If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” Trump says. “If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.” Here, legal holds a lot of ideological weight within itself. What is legal, and what is illegal? Trump seems to lump late votes, mail-in ballots, and suppression polls as “illegal,” despite none of these actually being illegal processes in many states. Unmonitored polling sites would be illegal, if Trump is correct that this is happening on widespread scales.
Trump doesn’t seem to be citing actual legislature here. Instead, he seems to be emphasizing some higher law. Maybe none of these practices are illegal, but Trump argues that maybe they should be. When Trump makes the distinction between legal and illegal, what he actually means is corrupt, another word he mentions frequently. “They become corrupt; it’s too easy. They want to find out how many votes they need, and then they seem to be able to find them.” He constructs a truth in which “poll workers in Michigan were duplicating ballots,” where “[mail-in ballots] really destroyed the system.” But illegal has an edge that corrupt doesn’t. It reveals a Trump who dreams to bring law and order to a perceived injustice that no one but him is fighting. His attempts at litigation, to him, aren’t in service of disrupting fair and legal voting, but instead “it’ll probably go through a process — a legal process.” Simultaneously, illegal serves as an acclaim and an attack that implies that those who believe in fair voting ought to back Trump’s noble cause. Everyone else is committing an illegal crime or, at least, a moral crime that should be illegal.
If his opponents are illegal, Trump counters by crafting an image of himself as the embodiment of all the good traits associated with legality — law and order, fairness, equality, justice. After all, Trump believes he, the legal candidate, “easily won” the legal votes. The crooked pollsters “got it knowingly wrong.” He praises himself for “decisively [winning] many states” “despite historical election interference.” “We kept the Senate, despite having twice as many seats to defend as Democrats.” There’s a clear pattern of providing an acclaim, then following up with a face-attack to demonstrate his victories despite unjust adversity. His opponents, meanwhile, are “trying to steal an election.” In fact, the words “steal” and “stole” appear four times, supporting Trump’s narratives of his opponents as thieves. “It’s a corrupt system,” but Trump positions himself as a rebel knight fighting off the band of robbers and vagabonds that have taken over the kingdom, with the virtuous goal “to defend the integrity of the election.”
Gage Skidmore / Flickr
So the language crafts a narrative of Trump as defender of the people, of equality, but in a way that positions his own brand of law and order as a necessary qualification. Surprisingly, Trump spends a moment talking about what kind of looks like social justice, and what he argues are steps toward equality by Republicans, pointing to more Republican women being elected to Congress “than ever before.” “I won the largest share of non-white voters of any Republican in 60 years.” Look at the meaning baked in “We’re … the party of inclusion” set against his adversity/triumph statements. “Inclusion” and “equality” are leftist words with leftist ideological connotations, but Trump turns the words on their head, implying that social equality is attainable under Trump, possibly only Trump, and their ability to achieve that is hampered by voter fraud.
In the spirit of that inclusivity, Trump ostensibly tries to extend an olive branch. “I challenge Joe and every Democrat to clarify they only want legal votes. … We want openness and transparency.” Anticipating the response that Trump’s underlying goal is to himself steal the election, he defends himself by saying “It’s not question of who wins — Republican, Democrat; Joe, myself.” Instead, Trump’s recurring use of we, of terms like inclusion, create a narrative of Trump-as-unifier. “We want an honest election, and we want an honest count.”
Seen like this, there’s a deliberate attempt to pose the allegations of voter fraud as uniliteral, which on the surface eliminates Trump’s accountability in attacking Democrats. What might be seen as an anti-leftist tirade becomes an anti-voter fraud tirade. Trump makes it out like it just so happens that Democrats were face-attacked 13 times by name because they’re coincidentally the group most likely to commit voter fraud.
Gage Skidmore / Flickr
Nonetheless, Democrats are the object of scrutiny in Trump’s image of corrupt voter-fraud America. Voting apparatuses are “run, in all cases, by Democrats.” “Democrats … try and ban our election observers.” “Democrats … never believed they could win this election honestly.” “That’s why they did the mail-in ballots” as “they’re supposed to be to the advantage of the Democrats.”
Trump in his speech wants his cake and to eat it too — to call out Democrats but make it out like he’s gesturing toward a larger systemic voting issues problem. However, the ideologies baked in Trump’s language at times betrays him. “Democrats are the party of the big donors, the big media, the big tech.” The ideograph big is repeated three times. Normally this connotes just a nonpartisan ideology of large organizations overstepping boundaries, but here Trump attributes three “bigs” all to Democrats. That’s not to mention the overtly Republican ideology present through a speech supposedly meant to be nonpartisan. Should mail-in ballots really be illegal? If you’re a Democrat, you might see mail-in voting as not only legal and not fraudulent either, but the morally right choice in the midst of a pandemic. Is Trump accurate that Democrat-run polling places are cheating, but not Republican-run? The many honest Democrats will feel discontinuity with this statement.
Trump’s speech is simultaneously pro-everyone but anti-Democrat. Every argument Trump makes is a standard Republican ideological argument in hiding, claiming instead to be in the spirit of unilateral fairness and justice. The result is non-accountability for Trump for those unaware of the power of ideographic language as he repeatedly and covertly considers voter fraud an exclusively Democrat problem, likening them to thieves stealing the election and committing illegal crimes.
Who Was Persuaded — and Who Wasn’t?
Maryland Governor Larry Hogan (right) was one of several Republicans to speak against Trump’s election rhetoric. Maryland GovPics / Flickr
However, given the widespread controversy just a week after Trump’s speech, it seems that his efforts backfired, at least in the short-term. That isn’t to say that the speech didn’t embolden a subsection of Trump’s base (it did), but it also garnered criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike.
And why wouldn’t the Democrats dislike what Trump had to say? As communication scholar Ronald Lee would put it, ideographic language leverage powers to dole out what is and isn’t acceptable and enact punishments accordingly. Whether Trump meant to directly call out Democrats or not, they were nonetheless routinely the subject of face attacks. Democrats are fundamentally the cause of voter fraud, Trump says. Those who support voter fraud are thieves, corrupt and committing “illegal” acts. Democrats are then thieves, corrupt, and lawbreakers, if we’re to take Trump’s speech at face value.
More surprising was the number of Republicans who took issue with Trump contesting Biden’s projected presidential win. Fox News reported on the many Republican politicians who took issue with Trump’s rhetoric. Rep. Will Hurd of Texas saw Trump’s speech as antithetical to core American values: “A sitting president undermining our political process & questioning the legality of the voices of countless Americans without evidence is not only dangerous & wrong.” Maryland Governor Larry Hogan agrees, tweeting that there is “no defense for the President’s comments tonight undermining our Democratic process. America is counting the votes, and we must respect the results as we always have before.” Meanwhile, Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois wasn’t convinced on the details, telling Trump on Twitter, “If you have legit concerns about fraud present EVIDENCE and take it to court. STOP Spreading debunked misinformation. Eric Shawn, a Fox News anchor, was similarly concerned at the lack of evidence arising from Trump’s speech, sparking controversy and support in his view that “such baseless and false claims are an insult to the thousands of election officials and workers across the country.”
Republicans appeared to reject Trump’s premises for two compelling reasons: A) lack of evidence and B) the speech’s threat to the American exceptionalism narrative of our democratic process. These interact with the ideographic language in distinct ways.
The body of evidence against Trump’s claims was substantial, so much so that Republicans were convinced by the fact-checks happening across a number of left-wing media outlets. AP News notes that “He has portrayed the tallying of mailed ballots received after Election Day as illegitimate, but in fact that is explicitly allowed in roughly 20 states, and the Supreme Court did not stand in the way of it. NPR responds to Trump’s claim that “observers were excluded from the counting site in Detroit,” quoting city officials who clarified that not only were observers not excluded, but Republican observers were present. USA Today took issue with Trump’s premature declaration of victory . Despite claims that he won Michigan and Wisconsin as of Nov. 5, “Trump did not win either state” despite “leading in early turns,” and despite claims of being “on track” to win Arizona, Trump was “57,000 votes behind,” leading to a projected Biden win. Ronald Lee’s writings on ideographic language point to the complicated relationship between ideographic narratives and truth — such that ideographs can create “constructed truths” composed of convincing falsehoods— that doesn’t mean, however, that compelling evidence is incapable of debunking a narrative. This is something seen in full force with how many Republicans responded negatively to Trump’s remarks.
In other cases, Republicans reported feeling a sense of cognitive dissonance between Trump’s statements on voter fraud and the narratives of stable, free, lawful democracies they’re accustomed to. The fact that so many Republicans argued Trump actively undermined democracy with his speech demonstrates how ideographic narratives can compete with one another for control over partisan beliefs. And in this case, the stronger ideographs of American exceptionalism and strong democracies won out for many.
Demonstrators rally at Million MAGA March Nov. 14 following the election results. Evert Barnes / Flickr
But what about the ones convinced by Trump’s statements? The moment Fox News reported on Biden’s projected presidential win, Trump took to Twitter, on multiple occasions advising his supporters that “This is why @FoxNews daytime and weekend daytime have lost their ratings … Try @OANN & @newsmax, among others!” And they readily listen. Quartz quotes one Twitter user saying “Fox has been completely unfair and untruthful … Moving to Newsmax,” who makes up just one of the many conservative news viewers contributing to Newsmax’s skyrocketing ratings. Meanwhile, Newsweek reports that conservative protestors chanted “Fox News sucks” during Nov. 14’s online pancake breakfast, the “Million MAGA March.” For these supporters, it seems no amount of traditional Republican appeals to strong democracies, nor the body of disconfirming evidence will deter them from an unwavering belief in Trump’s rhetoric. While evidence has the power to dismantle an ideograph, we cannot forget the power of discourse-based narratives in tying the blinding folds too.
Initially, it was unclear which of these two groups of a fractured Republican party is more prominent. Two major polls that have come out so far reveal conflicting sets of data. Reuters found that six in 10 Republicans said Biden won and that they “trust their local election officials to ‘do their job honestly.’” Morning Consult’s poll tells a different story, specifically that 70 percent of Republicans said the 2020 election “was not free and fair.” At the start of December, NPR ran a poll finding that 75% of Republicans no longer trust 2020’s election results.
Was Trump’s Speech Actually the Start of His 2024 Campaign?
Dan Keck / Flickr
More data is needed to make a definitive conclusion, but unfortunately early polls are finding that misinformation won out among Republicans. This would be exactly what Trump needs to maintain support throughout the Biden presidency. In fact, his speech demonstrates a willingness to do everything in his power to keep Republicans angry. In fact, the content of his speech paired with the external context surrounding it indicates that the speech probably wasn’t to challenge the system and secure a 2020 win via litigation, but to ensure continued conservative support until 2024’s re-election campaign, as well as a party-deciding senate seat in Georgia next year. There are a few reasons to think this.
Trump’s plan to secure the election involved appealing the voting results in court. However, Ned Foley is one of many legal analysts who were doubtful of Trump’s outlook. “They’re just suing for the sake of suing,” Foley said. “It doesn’t seem like it’s a strategy that’s designed to win in court.” Law professor Gerard Magliocca, meanwhile, indicates that Trump’s only regal recourse is to ask for recounts, which is “unlikely” to reach higher courts. And as we ended up seeing, litigation did not work out for Trump, with judges routinely rejecting to hear his case across partisan lines. For a president who claimed to use litigation as a path to undo what he sees as political corruption, it’s odd that he staked his bets on a legal strategy had no chance to succeed. Why even bother?
A few days later the election results, Trump on Nov. 15 tweeted “He won because the Election was Rigged,” seemingly acknowledging that Biden won and he lost the election, in spite of previous remarks to the contrary. On Nov. 9, Trump advisers told Axios that Trump is “thinking about running for president again in 2024.” Politico and NPR later ran polls revealing Trump currently leads among Republicans for a hypothetical 2024 election.
Gage Skidmore / Flickr
All this is to suggest that Trump’s stated goal in his Nov. 5 speech isn’t his actual goal. Or at least, actually succeeding in litigation matters much less than the rhetorical statement decrying voter fraud, especially when taking Biden’s unity platform into consideration. TIME describes Joe Biden as American’s “healer-in-chief” for good reason. After all, Biden appears to be looking across partisan lines for support. In his victory speech, Biden pledges to be a president “who doesn’t see red states and blue states, only sees the United States.” “People who voted for Trump, I understand the disappointment — I’ve lost a couple times myself — but now let’s give each other a chance.” This kind of unifying rhetoric is bad for a politician like Trump, whose platform is defined by shifting conservative concerns onto others, such as immigrants and broadly to the far left. Rhetoric scholar Roderick Hart notes that Trump used the most appeals to anger out of any politician since 1948, and that anger is a demonstrably effective way to get voters to go to the polls. Thus, if Biden succeeds on his core promises and unifies America, that would pose an existential threat to Trump, as the Republican party could veer closer to the form it took pre-2016. Republicans swayed by Biden would want a Romney, not a Trump.
If Trump gave a non-solution to the 2020 election, is planning to run again in 2024, and has been quoted saying Biden won, it seems likely that Trump’s talk on election fraud is merely a diversion to keep Trumpian politics in vogue long-term, with or without him in office. Politico’s Anita Kumar notes that “the goal is to not only undermine the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s win, but to also rile up supporters for the runoff fight in Georgia,” whose open senate seat will decide which party controls the Senate next year. A Republican victory, supplied by Trump supporters angry over alleged voter fraud, would guarantee that Biden stays a lame duck for the duration of his presidency. “It’s all noise,” a former Trump aide told Politico. But thanks to an emotionally charged use of ideological language and face-attacking strategies by way of an easily exploited issue like voter fraud, Trump has managed to convince anywhere between 40 and 75 percent of Republicans that Democracy is at risk and they ought to secure the “legal vote” for the sake of America. And the powerful language of anger suggests that this was a speech many of Trump’s supporters will remember.
The Great Voter Fraud Diversion is a Long-Term Cause for Concern
Gage Skidmore / Flickr
The rhetorical significance of his remarks is something Americans should be aware of, and worried about. Trump’s speech revealed that language use of terms like illegal, stole, and corrupt crafted a narrative of Trump as an American savior, the one who will return law and order to an American society threatened by Democrats trying and succeeding to “steal” the election through widespread voter fraud. On the short-term, this may have failed — especially among Democrats unconvinced by what they might see as Trump’s faux-unifying language, but notably among a prominent subsection of Republicans who saw Trump as threatening the traditions of American democracy with misinformation, a perspective verified by a number of fact-checkers liberal and conservative alike.
Trump’s speech is likely more than just about voter fraud, though. The 45th’s lack of genuine legal recourse, along with his stated plans to campaign in 2024, and tweeting that Biden won all cast doubt on the stated goals of the Nov. 5 speech to pursue litigation as a way of securing the 2020 election. Thus, in the long-term, Trump’s packed speech might have angered enough conservative Americans to prompt red shifts in both the 2021 Georgia Congress election and the 2024 presidential election. As we’ll likely see, 2020 Democratic victory wasn’t the instant end of the alt-right’s influence, and Trump has planted the seeds to keep it going. | https://medium.com/politically-speaking/trumps-great-voter-fraud-diversion-to-win-2024-a-critical-discourse-analysis-2c80650cced2 | ['Cody Wiesner'] | 2020-12-18 13:13:08.141000+00:00 | ['United States', 'Rhetoric', 'Election 2020', 'Linguistics', 'Politics'] |
Loopring Wallet — Ethereum Unleashed | As many in our community know, we have been working on the Loopring Wallet (aka Hebao for our Chinese-speaking community) for nearly one year. It is a mobile Ethereum smart contract wallet, and it has Loopring protocol — our zkRollup layer-2 — baked in natively.
Smart contract wallets give users great security, flexibility, and user experience. [Visit Loopring.io to learn some of these features].
zkRollups gives users much of the same: complete Ethereum layer-1 security guarantees, plus a massive scalability boost: 1000x greater throughput, and 1000x lower fees.
What that means from a user’s POV is that it feels like they are on a traditional fintech app, except it is global, self-custodial, and presents Ethereum’s powerful opportunities. Freedom at your fingertips.
Launch Details
Today
Today, the Android app is available to download via link (APK) on Loopring.io. [We’ll get the app in Google Play and other app stores ASAP].
We know our iOS users want to get aboard too, so we are working hard on that. We hope to have it released in early 2021.
The wallet allows users to trade on the same orderbooks that are present on Loopring Exchange. Trade at a click, no delays, no gas.
It also allows users to send transfers instantly and for free, using Loopring Pay. Transfers can be sent to any of the existing 7400+ users on Loopring’s L2 (whether they have onboarded via wallet, or Loopring.io in past, or Rails.eth, etc).
Basically, it distills everything we’ve built protocol + product wise, and puts it into your pocket, with the extra features of a smart contract wallet.
But it’s really just a beginning, and a beta.
November 27
Those that follow Loopring may be wondering: is the wallet on Loopring v3.6? No, it is not. But… it will be in a few short days, Friday November 27th!
We’ve received the audit report for 3.6, which we will release shortly. On November 27th, we will deploy Loopring 3.6, which is the other thing we’ve been working on all year. Loopring 3.6 is a massive upgrade to the current protocol version, which we suggest you read about here, if you haven’t already.
Loopring Wallet + Loopring Protocol 3.6 = Our Baby
The BIG feature many are awaiting is 3.6’s AMM support on our zkRollup. So in a few days, AMM awesomeness will be in your pocket — where you can swap, add liquidity, remove liquidity, all gas-free, and instantly. [We’ll also release a Loopring AMM web UI at that time].
Another big feature is that you will not be limited to only send assets to users/addresses already on Loopring’s L2, but to any Ethereum address at all!
Important note: when we deploy 3.6 in a few days, it will be without a large, externally-participated trusted setup ceremony. We will do one internally amongst team members, for the sake of a rapid release. This requires a certain level of trust, that the Loopring team members will not collude to attack (rug pull) users. If you are not comfortable with that risk, then that’s OK, you will not be forced to upgrade to v3.6 in the wallet (nor web app), you can simply remain in the v3.1 protocol for now, which has been running smoothly for nearly 1 year.
Withdrawal Mining
We will run an incentive campaign from November 27th to December 26th that we call Withdrawal Mining. It is meant to incentivize people to take control of their cryptoassets, and take them off centralized platforms.
We all know the days of CEX-supremacy are coming to an end, and the winning platforms will empower users with self-sovereignty, openness, and endless opportunities. This is a little nudge to get you going, with 1 million LRC (currently ~$220k).
The TLDR is: place certain Ethereum-based assets into your Loopring Wallet, and earn daily rewards. You can increase the ‘weight’ of your assets by doing certain things, such as putting them on L2, not L1, adding ‘guardians’, etc.
Scroll to the bottom of Loopring.io for full details.
Notes
This app version is a beta. There are many small UI things on our radar we must tweak. Especially English translations. Expect rapid improvements.
The actual wallet smart contracts are much more mature than the UI. They have gone through several audits throughout the past few months, and the team and a few hundred beta testers have been using it in the wild with no incident. You can see all the wallet smart contract code here.
If you have any feedback or bugs to report, please feel free to create an issue on GitHub here. | https://medium.com/loopring-protocol/loopring-wallet-ethereum-unleashed-ac4173f940a5 | ['Matthew Finestone'] | 2020-11-24 18:59:42.065000+00:00 | ['Amm', 'Ethereum', 'Loopring Wallet', 'Loopring', 'Zkrollup'] |
NFTeGG vs. “Degen” DeFi Projects | why i should Invest in NFTeGG ? and where is the different to “Degen” DeFi X ?
NFTeGG Surprise Series #1 iClops.
At this moment one DeFi project after the other appears as fast as it comes and disappears again.
what are the differences ?
why is an ecosystem important ?
and what should I look out for ?
…
This post should give you a small overview what makes NFTeGG so special, and where exactly the differences to other “FOMO” DeFI projects are.
What are the differences in DeFi, Staking and Token Projects and System’s ?
Total Supply
Most projects have no supply limit, they just keep on mining if they need it for a Reward or Payment 💸.
NFTeGG started with 10.000.000 eFAME and different burn mechanism as there is NO WAY ! to mine future eFAME the Value will grow steady and allows us to ensure a stable chart. Presale
Many projects have a big Presale where they like to collect 100’s ETH upfront as Product or Service. They spend just 10ETH on advertisements and collect 100’s ETH in revenue. NFTeGG selected 20 different Presale Investors who were able to buy 1 Chunk of 50k eFAME for 1 ETH per person. This Presale was about 10% from the total Supply but ensures a long and stable running time and was also Provided to the Uniswap Pool. Airdrops and Free Token
Other projects often simply drop simple coins or nfts to interested people to generate attention through the ETH Fee as Fee Burner on Etherscan.
“Grab a “free” NFT just pay our 5–10$ mining Fee” or “Here you get 100 Coins as Airdrop” but the allowance and Trading Fee will be x10 as its worth in this moment.
NFTeGG just have one product, this costs 0.1 ETH and each eGG has the chance to draw an iClops that reflects at least 3–8 times the value in resale. Whoever comes first collects the most
Most farms have a total pool of coins which is output per block. The more people participate in the system, the less the individual user gets paid. This makes it almost impossible for late entrants to get a good payout rate.
NFTeGG works with one multiplier per Series. Each eGG has a power value which is calculated with a global multiplier. So the payout value remains the same no matter if there are 1 or 1000 items in the whole farm. Token1, Token2, Token3
It is common practice for a “Degen” Defi project to have 2, 3 or even 4 different ERC20 Reward or Function Token. None of these tokens has a correct value and is often represented as utility tokens. But its a systems which burn or use another value to create something “worthless”.
NFTeGG use 2 different Types Token NFTeGG ERC721 and eFAME ERC20. and NFT1, NFT2, NFT3…
In the same way that tokens are multiplied and created from the air, new NFT’s are constantly being brought out, which are expensive, rare or better. So you are always forced to follow the trend or you fall by the wayside.
NFTeGG has a strict plan that there will be 7000 items per series and 10 series in total. Each series starts one after the other and it will not be possible to buy 2 different eggs at the same time. Values decoupling Items and Token
As in the points already described, most attempts are made to create a decoupling of the values. Free Items, many different Tokens or any other way to find a way or hole to flood the Supply or empty the Market. NFTeGG works works in a different way. Every sale of eGG’s stabilizes our eFAME token, and every eFAME sale increases the return to our investors. We decided to go for a cycle because everything else leads to a worthlessness of a couple. Backdoors, non verified Contracts or 20 Proxy Contract
Many people just use some contracts they downloaded from Github and in the end don’t even know how deep they are.Whether money disappears or not is usually planned or covered up as a silly coincidence.
NFTeGG uses 3 contracts and all are open source and verified. These contracts were made directly for our purpose and are no copy cats or other “findings”.
Why is an ecosystem for a DeFi Project important ?
For a Defi project, the heart of the whole thing is its ecosystem and tokennomics. As soon as worthless or dead couples appear in an ecosystem, this part of the ecosystem pulls the whole system down in the long run or reflects a false value to the customer.
Ogri Clops
This is exactly the reason why we at NFTeGG decided against letting anyone participate in our ecosystem for free. of course, from a marketing point of view, it is not a smart move to demand money from your “investors” and supporters, but it is the only way to build a stable base for an ecosystem.
Continuous burning, not giving away large sums of tokens, and not endless supply are just some of the advantages that the NFTeGG project offers your supporters and invetors. At least we are a funny and crazy crew and happy about any new Face in Cloptopia 😎.
What should I look out for as i like to invest in a DeFi Project ?
If you consider all 8 points of the above list, you should be able to quickly see if a Degen DeFi project can develop a value or if it is a previously defined downward loop.
Go into the social media of your desired investment and see what they report about themselves or get in contact with the community in telegram or discord. If you meet people with whom you have fun on a project, you should also make your choice there.
But if you are impatient and only want to make a dull profit, maybe no community project is right for you, especially since there is always a give and take side on community projects ✌️. | https://medium.com/@nftegg/nftegg-vs-degen-defi-projects-73f3acde0cd0 | ['Nftegg Surprise'] | 2020-12-03 17:50:46.691000+00:00 | ['Nft', 'Defi', 'Farming', 'Erc20', 'Erc721'] |
New in Request Invoicing: Support for FTM, RDN, INDA and improved UI | Hello Request enthusiasts,
Happy holidays! We wish you all health and success as we approach the end of 2020 and the start of a new year.
In the last few months over $500,000 worth of cryptocurrency has been processed through Request Invoicing.
An obvious trend is that five currencies were the most used: DAI, USDC, USDT, ETH and BTC. We’ve taken this feedback into account and updated the currency selection UI* to make it easier to select these tokens to get paid in.
*Don’t worry, the other tokens are still via the dropdown menu at the end of the list.
Speaking of other tokens, we are happy to announce that we now support $FTM, $INDA and $RDN. As the adoption of cryptocurrency as a means of payment continues to grow, we look forward to supporting many new currencies in the future.
Is there a token you’d like to get paid in that is not currently available? Let us know at [email protected].
Also in this release:
🔢 Added the invoice number to the dashboard view
📧 Improved the email update flow
💬 Updated the copy and messaging
📛 Changed the PDF receipts file name
🔥 18 bug fixes and performance updates
Ready to start getting paid in cryptocurrency? Sign up for Request Invoicing here.
Now is better than ever before to take advantage of cryptocurrency for your business. Still on the fence? Grab a time in my calendar and let’s chat. | https://blog.request.network/new-in-request-invoicing-support-for-ftm-rdn-inda-and-improved-ui-dca1db285b13 | [] | 2020-12-21 15:00:23.753000+00:00 | ['Payments', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Invoice', 'Crypto', 'Blockchain'] |
tf-explain working with tensorboard | tf-explain is a pip installable library which is completely built over tensorflow 2.0 and is used with tf.keras. It helps in better understanding of our model that is currently training. In tf.keras we use all of it’s apis in the callbacks that is provided to the model while training.
Definitely, tf-explain is not the official product of tensorflow but it is completely build over tensorflow 2.0. One of it’s main advantage is the usage of tensorboard that provides us information related to the images with a better view and clear graphics.
The entire code is present at https://github.com/AshishGusain17/Grad-CAM-implementation/blob/master/tf_explain_methods.ipynb . The implementation of various methods over the images can be seen below with graphics.
Installation:
pip install tf-explain
pip install tensorflow==2.1.0
Usage of their API’s:
1.) Build a tf.keras model
img_input = tf.keras.Input((28,28,1))
x = tf.keras.layers.Conv2D(filters=32, kernel_size=(3, 3), activation=”relu” , name=”layer1")(img_input)
x = tf.keras.layers.Conv2D(filters=64, kernel_size=(3, 3), activation=”relu”, name=”layer2")(x) x = tf.keras.layers.MaxPool2D(pool_size=(2, 2))(x)
x = tf.keras.layers.Dropout(0.25)(x)
x = tf.keras.layers.Flatten()(x)
x = tf.keras.layers.Dense(128, activation=”relu”)(x)
x = tf.keras.layers.Dropout(0.5)(x)
x = tf.keras.layers.Dense(10, activation=”softmax”)(x) model = tf.keras.Model(img_input, x)
model.summary()
2.) Create the validation dataset for any particular label that will be given as input to the API’s. We have used mnist dataset with 60,000 training images and 10,000 test images. It has 10 classes with images of numbers ranging from 0–9. Let’s create the tuples for labels 0 and 4 as validation_class_zero and validation_class_four as below.
# Here, we choose 5 elements with one hot encoded label “0” == [1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0] validation_class_zero = (
np.array(
[
el
for el, label in zip(test_images, test_labels)
if np.all(np.argmax(label) == 0)
][0:5]
),None)
# Here, we choose 5 elements with one hot encoded label “4” == [0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0] validation_class_four = (
np.array(
[
el
for el, label in zip(test_images, test_labels)
if np.all(np.argmax(label) == 4)
][0:5]
),None)
3.) Instantiate callbacks:
Now, let’s instantiate various callbacks, that will be provided to the model. These callbacks will be for numbers 0 as well as 4. In some of them, you can see the name of the layer provided, which can be seen as a convolutional layer in the model above.
callbacks = [ tf_explain.callbacks.GradCAMCallback(validation_class_zero, class_index=0, layer_name=”layer2"),
tf_explain.callbacks.GradCAMCallback(validation_class_four, class_index=4, layer_name=”layer2"), tf_explain.callbacks.ActivationsVisualizationCallback(validation_class_zero, layers_name=[“layer2”]),
tf_explain.callbacks.ActivationsVisualizationCallback(validation_class_four, layers_name=[“layer2”]), tf_explain.callbacks.SmoothGradCallback(validation_class_zero, class_index=0, num_samples=15, noise=1.0),
tf_explain.callbacks.SmoothGradCallback(validation_class_four, class_index=4, num_samples=15, noise=1.0), tf_explain.callbacks.IntegratedGradientsCallback(validation_class_zero, class_index=0, n_steps=10),
tf_explain.callbacks.IntegratedGradientsCallback(validation_class_four, class_index=4, n_steps=10), tf_explain.callbacks.VanillaGradientsCallback(validation_class_zero, class_index=0),
tf_explain.callbacks.VanillaGradientsCallback(validation_class_four, class_index=4), tf_explain.callbacks.GradientsInputsCallback(validation_class_zero, class_index=0),
tf_explain.callbacks.GradientsInputsCallback(validation_class_four, class_index=4)
]
4.) Loading tensorboard:
%reload_ext tensorboard
%tensorboard — logdir logs
5.) Training of the model:
opt1 = tf.keras.optimizers.Adam(learning_rate=0.001) model.compile(optimizer=opt1, loss=”categorical_crossentropy”, metrics=[“accuracy”])
model.fit(train_images, train_labels, epochs=20, batch_size=32, callbacks=callbacks)
6.) Results:
Results that I obtained were loss: 0.4919 — accuracy: 0.8458. These were obtained after just 4–5 epochs. I tried with various optimizers and the maximum time were taken by SGD and AdaGrad for about 15 epochs.
7.) Tensorboard results:
Activation Visualisations of images numbered 0 and 4:
GradCAM implementation of images numbered 0 and 4:
Gradient Inputs of images numbered 0 and 4:
Vanilla Gradients of images numbered 0 and 4:
Integrate Gradients of images numbered 0 and 4:
Smooth Gradients of images numbered 0 and 4:
This is all from my side. You can reach me via:
Email : [email protected]
Github : https://github.com/AshishGusain17
LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashish-gusain-257b841a2/
Credits : https://tf-explain.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/tf-explain-working-283a311f1276 | ['Ashish Gusain'] | 2020-06-26 16:41:16.707000+00:00 | ['Keras', 'Tensorboard', 'Google Colab', 'Grad Cam', 'TensorFlow'] |
Happiness is a Choice. | Simple and mostly easier said than done. I’m sure at some point or time in your life you’ve heard the phrase perspective is reality. It’s easy to argue the truthfulness of the simple statement. If you change the way you receive and interpret messages you will begin to see your perspective change, followed by the way you project the messages you put out there for others to receive and interpret.
I hear it all the time I’m even guilty of doing it, telling someone “you make me happy” or stating how your happiness is directly related to a possession, a place, and any other than it being a personal choice is not correct. No one can make you happy, its a choice. Sometimes things happen that can cause the feeling of happiness, but it’s not sustainable to rely on things to make us happy. Sometimes circumstances can add up and cause us to focus on all of the negatives surrounding us instead of looking at, being grateful for, and appreciating the positives.
It’s easy to pick apart and identify the things in your life that are weighing you down. It’s not easy to change them, find solutions, and even more difficult to accept the things you cannot change. I think it’s important to identify when something is out of our control and let it go. It makes identifying and taking control of the things we can much more simple.
So, make YOUR choice and CHOOSE happiness. Keep this simple phrase in mind. Write it down, post it somewhere you can see it everyday. Pass it on to friends and strangers. | https://medium.com/@mk-galletto/happiness-is-a-choice-c3ebc41ab3b2 | ['Mk Galletto'] | 2020-12-16 13:49:16.975000+00:00 | ['Decision Making', 'Motivation', 'Change'] |
“Risk On” Prevails, Fed Minutes Reveal Optimism, GBP Shrugs off CPI Data | Market sentiment remained supported yesterday and during the Asian morning today, perhaps on optimism that China will do whatever it takes to contain the coronavirus. In the FX world, the greenback may have stayed supported due to relatively upbeat Fed minutes, while the pound was found lower, despite the better-than-expected UK CPIs for January. Perhaps GBP-traders paid more attention to headlines surrounding the Brexit transition period.
Equities Up on China’s Efforts to Contain the Virus, Fed Sees Rates Appropriate
The dollar traded higher against most of its G10 peers on Wednesday and during the Asian morning Thursday. The main losers were JPY, GBP and AUD, while the greenback underperformed somewhat against NOK and CAD. Against the EUR, it was fount virtually unchanged.
The fact that the yen tumbled at a time when gold continued gaining and the commodity-linked Aussie and Kiwi slid, provides confusing signals with regards to the broader investor morale. However, looking at the performance of the stock market, we see that major EU and US indices were a sea of green, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq hitting record closing highs as optimism surrounding China’s efforts to contain the spreading of the coronavirus grew further. The upbeat investor morale rolled over into the Asian session today as well, with Australia’s and New Zealand’s markets hitting new record highs. In Japan, Nikkei 225 closed 0.34% up, while China’s Shanghai Composite gained 1.84%.
Investors’ appetite remained upbeat due to a report that China is considering injecting cash or proceed with mergers in order to bail out airlines hit by the virus. Another slowdown in coronavirus cases, this time accompanied by a slowdown in deaths as well, may have gave another reason for investors to increase their risk exposure, while the PBoC’s cut in its benchmark lending rate, although expected, may have also been pleasant news.
Having said that though, we will maintain our cautious stance, despite many equity indices hitting new records. We still believe that the deaths will not stay for long in slowdown territory and that their slowdown will come with a lag compared to the cases. On top of that, with scientists saying that the virus may spread even more easily than previously believed, we cannot rule out the number of infected cases to start accelerating again in the days to come.
Yes, expectations that Chinese authorities will do whatever it takes to contain the virus may continue boost risk appetite, but what happens if additional measures prove not to be enough? We believe that the risks here are asymmetrical. Further slowdown in infected cases may help equities to climb higher, but not at the same pace as before. On the other hand, just a headline suggesting that things have gotten out of control again may be enough to spook investors, who could massively abandon risk assets and seek shelter in safe havens.
Tomorrow, we will get preliminary PMIs for February from several Eurozone nations and the bloc as a whole, as well as from the UK and the US. Market participant may be biting their nails in anticipation of signals with regards to whether and to which extent the coronavirus has left marks on the global economic landscape.
Back to the currencies, the greenback may have stood tall, despite the risk-on trading activity, perhaps aided by the minutes of the latest FOMC gathering, which revealed that policymakers were cautiously optimistic over their neutral stance, namely to keep interest rates untouched for the whole year. Although they acknowledged the risks the coronavirus poses to the economy, we have to recall that while testifying before Congress, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said that it is too early to tell whether the impact to the US economy will be severe of not. In our view, all this suggests that the Fed is very comfortable staying sidelined for now, but still, according to the Fed funds futures, investors are fully pricing in another quarter-point decrease to be delivered in September.
USD/JPY — Technical Outlook
Yesterday, USD/JPY exploded to the upside, breaking some key resistance barriers on the way. Eventually, the pair found some resistance near the 111.59 hurdle, from which it corrected slightly lower. That said, if the buying momentum remains uplifted today, we may see another uprise. But in order to get slightly more comfortable with further upside, a break of yesterday’s high, at 111.59, would be needed. This is why we will stay bullish for now.
If the rate does make its way above the aforementioned 111.59 barrier, that would confirm a forthcoming higher high and more buyers may join in. This is when USD/JPY could drift to the 111.91 hurdle, which is the high of April 29 th, 2019. Initially, the pair may struggle to push further above that barrier, which might lead to a small retracement. But if the rate remains above the 111.59 zone, the bulls may grab the steering wheel again and lift the pair to the 111.91 obstacle, a break of which may clear the way to the 112.24 level, marked by the high of April 24 th, 2019.
On the other hand, if USD/JPY starts correcting down and moves below the 111.10 area, which is today’s low, this could lead to a deeper slide. That’s when we will aim for the 110.67 hurdle, marked by the high of May 21 st, 2019. If there are still no bulls in sight, another drop could send the pair to the 110.29 level, which is the high of January 17 th. The rate might get a hold-up around there, as it could also test a short-term tentative upside line, which may provide some additional support.
GBP Down Despite Better-than-Expected CPIs, ECB Minutes on the Agenda
Now, flying from the US to the UK, yesterday, we got the nation’s CPI data for January, where the headline and core CPI rates rose by more than anticipated. Specifically, the headline rate climbed to +1.8% yoy from +1.3%, while the forecast was for an increase to +1.6%. The core rate also exceeded its forecast for an uptick to +1.5% yoy from +1.4%, and instead rose to +1.6% yoy. The pound gained at the time of the release, perhaps as the data lessen the need for a BoE rate cut, especially following the resignation of Sajid Javid as Finance Minister, a move which triggered speculation for more fiscal support.
However, the British currency was quick to give up those gains and to trade even lower against its US counterpart, perhaps as investors paid more attention to headlines surrounding the Brexit transition period. Yesterday, a senior EU advisor said that the European Union will not give special treatment to the UK, and it will determine its access to financial markets the same way it did for Japan and the US. It seems that both sides are hardening their stance, with the EU demanding fair competition guarantees, while PM Johnson’s adviser said that they will never abide to EU rules. With PM Johnson insisting that any accord should be reached before the end of the year, and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen noting that it is impossible for a deal to be agreed by then, the risk for a disorderly exit at the end of this year remains well on the table. Thus, despite data suggesting that there is little need for a BoE cut, the pound may be set for a bumpy ride, with any rallies due to upbeat data, perhaps being offset by disagreements in EU-UK talks.
As for today, GBP-traders may pay close attention to the UK retail sales for January. Headline sales are expected to have increased +0.5% mom after sliding 0.6% in December. That said, this will drive the yoy down to +0.7% from +0.9%. The core rate is also forecast to have rebounded. Specifically, it is expected to have increased to +0.8% mom from -0.8%, but the yoy core rate anticipated to have slid to +0.4% yoy from +0.7%. The case for lower yoy rates is also supported by the BRC retail sales monitor, the yoy rate of which declined to 0.0% from +1.7%. That said, at this point, we need to note that the BRC monitor is far from a reliable gauge of the official retail sales prints. Taking data from January 2011, the correlation between the BRC and the official headline yoy rate is 0.26. Its correlation with the core one is also low, at 0.29.
In any case, despite the potential slide in the yoy rates, a rebound in monthly terms could allow investors to push back the timing of when they expect a rate cut by the BoE. Something like that could prove supportive for the pound, but the negative sentiment surrounding the EU-UK negotiations may keep any gains limited and short-lived.
Apart from the UK retail sales, today we also get the minutes from the latest ECB meeting. At that meeting, the Bank kept its rates and guidance unchanged. Thus, all the attention fell to the Bank’s strategic review, with President Lagarde noting that that the aim will be reviewed, as well as the Bank’s toolkit and how inflation is measured. “How we measure inflation is clearly something we need to look at,” she noted.
This will be key for market participants trying to figure out how the Bank will act moving forward, as it may also result in a change in the target. For example, officials could signal commitment to the 2% rate, as most of the other major central banks, but this would mean more stimulus for hitting that goal, as any undershooting may not be dealt with the same tolerance as in the past.
We will dig into the minutes for further clues on that front, but given that the review is expected to be completed in November, we don’t expect market participants to start betting on further easing as early as in the next couple of months, only due to potentially dovish minutes, despite Lagarde adding that the Bank would stick to its current policy for now, which means that policy moves could still occur before a new strategy is adopted. We believe that investors will pay more attention to tomorrow’s PMIs, as they are eager to find out whether and how much did the coronavirus impact the Euro area economic outlook.
EUR/GBP — Technical Outlook
This week, after finding strong support near the 0.8281 hurdle, EUR/GBP accelerated sharply to the upside, breaking one of its key resistance barriers on the way, which is at 0.8347. Given that the pair had distanced itself from a short-term tentative downside resistance line drawn from the high of January 14 th, there is a chance to see a larger correction to the upside in the near term. For now, we will take a cautiously-bullish stance and aim for slightly higher areas.
Another uprise could bring the rate to the 0.8381 hurdle, which could temporarily provide decent resistance, possibly forcing the rate to correct back down a bit. However, if EUR/GBP remains above the previously-discussed 0.8347 area, this could help the bulls to take charge again and drive the pair higher. If this time the 0.8381 barrier breaks, this would confirm a forthcoming higher high and the path towards the 0.8400 zone could be open. If the buying doesn’t end there, a further move north may lead to the 0.8433 mark, which is the low of February 5 th. Around there, EUR/GBP could end up testing the 200 EMA on the 4-hour chart.
Alternatively, if the rate falls below the 0.8315 hurdle, which is an intraday swing high of February 18 th, at 0.8315, that may spook the bulls from the field temporarily and allow the bears to take control. The pair might then drift to the 0.8294 zone, which may stall the rate for a bit. That zone acted as good support on February 13 thand 19 th. If the slide continues and EUR/GBP overcomes that area, this may lead to a test of the 0.8281 obstacle, or the 0.8275 level, marked by the lowest point of December 2019.
Aussie Slides on Employment Report, Loonie Gains on CPIs
Passing the ball to Aussie and the Loonie, the former was among the losers, despite the upbeat investor morale, perhaps taking a hit from Australia’s employment report, released overnight. The unemployment rate rose to 5.3% from 5.1%, instead of ticking up to 5.2% as the forecast suggested. The employment change revealed that the economy added more jobs than anticipated, while the participation rate ticked up to 66.1% from 66.0%, suggesting that the rise in the unemployment rate may have not been only due to bad reasons. It could also be due to more people being encouraged to register for unemployment benefits and start seeking for a job.
In any way, a rise to 5.3% is not encouraging news for the RBA, the view of which is that the number that will start generating inflationary pressures is 4.5%. Thus, a rising unemployment rate combined with slowing real wage growth may have prompted participants to bring forth their expectations with regards to another cut by this Bank. Indeed, according to the ASX 30-day interbank cash rate futures implied yield curve, that timing was brought forth to August from September yesterday.
Yesterday, apart from the UK CPIs, we got inflation data from Canada as well. Both the headline and core rates increased by more than anticipated, which may allow BoC officials to stay away from the cut button for a while, especially following January’s better-than-expected employment report. The Loonie gained at the time of the release and today it was found in the 2 ndplace among the G10 gainers, just behind NOK.
As for the Rest of Today’s Events
From the US, we get the initial jobless claims for last week and the Philly Fed manufacturing PMI for February. Initial jobless claims are expected to have increased somewhat, to 210k from 205k the week before, while the Philly index is anticipated to have declined to 12.0 from 17.0.
The EIA (Energy Information Administration) weekly report on crude oil inventories is also coming out and expectations are for a slowdown to 2.494mn from 7.459mn barrels the week before. That said, bearing in mind that, yesterday, the API report revealed a 4.200mn barrels inventory build, we see the risks surrounding the EIA forecast as tilted to the upside.
As for tonight during the Asian morning Friday, Japan releases its National CPIs for January. The headline rate is forecast to have ticked down to +0.7% yoy from +0.8%, while the core one is anticipated to have ticked up to +0.8% yoy from 0.7%. Bearing in mind that both the headline and core Tokyo CPIs for the month slid to +0.6% yoy and +0.7% yoy from +0.9% and +0.8% respectively, we view the risks surrounding the National forecasts as tilted to the downside.
At its previous meeting, the BoJ kept its ultra-loose policy as well as its guidance unchanged, reiterating that it “expects short- and long-term interest rates to remain at their present or lower levels as long as it is necessary to pay close attention to the possibility that the momentum toward achieving the price stability target will be lost”. A slowdown in inflation combined with Monday’s disappointing GDP prints may encourage investors to add to bets with regards to additional easing.
However, we believe that with little room to do so, officials may prefer to wait for the picture to worsen significantly before they eventually decide to act. As for the yen, we don’t expect a major reaction due to the CPIs. Given its safe-haven status, we expect it to stay hostage to developments surrounding the broader market sentiment and especially to headlines surrounding the fast-spreading coronavirus.
We also have one speaker on today’s agenda, and this is ECB Vice President Louis de Guindos.
Disclaimer:
The content we produce does not constitute investment advice or investment recommendation (should not be considered as such) and does not in any way constitute an invitation to acquire any financial instrument or product. The Group of Companies of JFD, its affiliates, agents, directors, officers or employees are not liable for any damages that may be caused by individual comments or statements by JFD analysts and assumes no liability with respect to the completeness and correctness of the content presented. The investor is solely responsible for the risk of his investment decisions. Accordingly, you should seek, if you consider appropriate, relevant independent professional advice on the investment considered. The analyses and comments presented do not include any consideration of your personal investment objectives, financial circumstances or needs. The content has not been prepared in accordance with the legal requirements for financial analyses and must therefore be viewed by the reader as marketing information. JFD prohibits the duplication or publication without explicit approval.
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Copyright 2020 JFD Group Ltd. | https://medium.com/@jfd-group/risk-on-prevails-fed-minutes-reveal-optimism-gbp-shrugs-off-cpi-data-7022aa4b109a | [] | 2020-02-20 09:34:47.874000+00:00 | ['Trading', 'Forex', 'Economy', 'Macroeconomics', 'Forex Trading'] |
K-9 Conspiracy Files | K-9 Conspiracy Files
Years Ago, Date Unknown, Location: 39° 2' 46'’ N, 77° 2' 34'’ W
Today I met a new dog. Since my arrival with the lady, I have met several other dogs. Apparently, I am also a dog. I am not convinced. This new dog, though, like most dogs, came with a person. The dog itself was cool. He had an interesting set of markings, much like myself — one of a kind. He also was super eager to meet me, so surely he is aware of the power I possess. However, it was his person that gained my attention. Dark hair and tall, he commanded the presence around us. I couldn’t shake that he might be a clue or even a key to unlocking my full potential. I have had this thought before, though, so I am not holding out too much hope, especially since the lady appeared a bit more happy and animated after meeting him.
Back at the apartment, my relationship with the creature is tolerable; I think I love her. We spend our days together. Mornings when the lady is still here, Emily demonstrates what perhaps she believes is dominance over me. I am no fool. I am no longer smaller than her and her cleaning my head surely is a subservient act. Although the force she uses, given her size, is a bit concerning.
I wouldn’t ever let Emily know this, but I have learned a lot from her. She has taught me how to successfully wake up the lady in the morning. I use a combination of fear and exuberance. I sit loudly against the exit to the outside, and it makes a thud. Then I dash into the bedroom and jump on and off the bed. Over and over again. Meanwhile, Emily meows incessantly and paws at the lady’s face. We win every time with a reward of delicious nourishment.
Emily is flawed though. After the morning rush, she mostly just sleeps. Clearly wasting precious moments of planning. Although I must give her credit, she has learned how to have around-the-clock freedom in the apartment. I had the same freedom briefly; released from the cage during the day. But I was thwarted by daily visits from the nemesis. On days where the deliveries became particularly loud, my only outlet (and revenge) was to destroy. I ate an entire leash, except the buckle and clip and half a pair of what was apparently the lady’s favorite sweatpants. Of course, I did this all while never leaving my post right next to the door. But after the pants, I was back in the cage. I won’t remain there forever. | https://medium.com/@jamieebuss/k-9-conspiracy-files-dd033b9569bf | ['Jamie E Buss'] | 2021-08-10 23:13:43.983000+00:00 | ['Satire', 'Conspiracy Theories', 'Short Story Series', 'Pet Humor', 'Pet Stories'] |
Time Series Database Comparison | Introduction
A time series is a series of data points of some particular metric (and its tags) over time.
Picking a new (time series) database can oftentimes be difficult. Though the choice can sometimes seem like an agonizing decision, the best method of combating this sort of paralyzing fear is to enter the decision making process with as much information as possible. This blog aims to educate — with rather broad strokes — the differences between some of the heaviest hitters in the Time Series Database (TSDB) space. We will go through each of the following databases one by one and try to parse out general weaknesses and strengths: InfluxDB, TimescaleDB, OpenTSDB, and GridDB.
InfluxDB
InfluxDB was first released in 2013 and is written primarily in Google’s Go. It is maintained by InfluxData and is currently the #1 TSDB in use.
TimescaleDB
Written in C, TimescaleDB is based on the ever-popular and more “traditional” relational database PostgreSQL. This means that developers who are familiar with SQL will likely feel extremely comfortable with this database.
OpenTSDB
OpenTSDB was written in Java and runs entirely on top of Hadoop and HBase. Hadoop is a software suite which uses MapReduce to properly process very big data. HBase is a database modeled after Google’s Bigtable. Because of this, it may sometimes be considered to be a bit difficult to use.
GridDB
Toshiba started development for GridDB in 2011, with its commercial release coming in 2013; it was then open-sourced in 2016. GridDB is written in C++ and has language bindings for a ton of other languages. It has also been integrated with other open source projects such as MapReduce, KairosDB, Grafana, and Spark.
Basic Usage & Query Language
As a first point of comparison, let’s take a look at writing extremely simple writes and queries, just to get a quick peek at how exactly each database looks and feels.
InfluxDB
InfluxDB operates most usually via HTTP. Because you can make simple HTTP GET requests via its API, the easiest way to get up and running is to simply use the command line interface (CLI). From here, you drop down into an InfluxDB shell and query using its own query language: Influx Query Language (InfluxQL). Each data entry can be thought of as a traditional SQL table, with a timestamp always being the primary index. Each measurement will also contain tags for meta data (such as location, sensor name, etc) all of which can be thought of as columns and of which are indexed.
Here’s an example of using InfluxQL to insert some sample data.
> INSERT cpu,host=serverA,region=us_west value=0.64
The measurement name is cpu. Host and region are tags. The value is the value. The timestamp will be the current local timestamp (if none is specified).
To query:
> SELECT “host”, “region”, “value” FROM “cpu”
name: cpu
— — — — -
time host region value
2015–10–21T19:28:07.580664347Z serverA us_west 0.64
TimescaleDB
As mentioned before, TimescaleDB is built on top of PostgreSQL, meaning it gets a full and native SQL interface. Though it uses full SQL, it does offer some key advantages, including some added time-specific functions, that can push it over-the-top as a nice option for your time-related data and time-related applications. First, it’s much faster at certain queries, namely those involving time series data; in some cases climbing to up to over 20x faster. It also boasts much higher ingest rates (again, this is compared to “stock” PostgreSQL), which is absolutely essential because gathering time-related data can quickly get out of hand and snowball into huge tables which can no longer fit into memory, causing major performance issues.
To query with this language, you simply need to use the traditional SQL calls. The main nugget of information I would like to share is that querying time series-related data (example: GROUP BY), despite using a very large table — most generally a performance killer — can have similar or even faster querying (when compared to regular postgresql). This query, for example, can be up ~400x faster than a regular postgresql DB:
SELECT date_trunc(‘minute’, time) AS minute, max(usage_user)
FROM cpu
WHERE time < ‘2017–01–01’
GROUP BY minute
ORDER BY minute DESC
LIMIT 5;
The reason for this will be touched on a bit later.
OpenTSDB
When creating your DB’s schema, you can choose to base it on either HBase, BigTable, or Cassandra. Because HBase is the default, we will go over that, and because it is based on Hbase, it means all the data points are stored in a single, gigantic table. To query OpenTSDB, we can use any of the following: CLI tools, its HTTP API, and a developed GUI. A normal query with OpenTSDB uses a tag-based system which can seem quite tricky at first glance. Here’s the basic format of posting data to the DB:
<metricID><normalized_timestamp><tagkID1><tagvID1>[…<tagkIDN><tagvIDN>]
Here’s what sending some actual data looks like:
put http.hits 1578533444819 34877 host=A
put proc.loadavg.1min 1578533444819 1.35 host=A
Unlike the other Time Series Databases on this list, this one does not use a query system that resembles anything remotely looking like SQL. Instead, querying is done using tags.
Here’s the equivalent to a SELECT * from <column>. This is the easiest query to make:
m=sum:cpu.system
To further specify a tag, for example adding a specific machine/tag, you simply append to the original query:
m=sum:cpu.system{host=web01}
As for a more nuanced query, here’s one that will provide data from two different host names, separated out by group:
m=sum:cpu.nice{host=web01|web02}
Output:
[
{
“metric”: “cpu.system”,
“tags”: {
“host”: “web01”
},
“aggregated_tags”: [],
“tsuids”: [
“010101”,
“0101010306”,
“0102040101”,
“0102050101”
],
“dps”: {
“1346846400”: 63.59999942779541
}
},
{
“metric”: “cpu.system”,
“tags”: {
“host”: “web02”
},
“aggregated_tags”: [
“dc”
],
“tsuids”: [
“0102040102”,
“0102050102”
],
“dps”: {
“1346846400”: 24.199999809265137
}
}
]
GridDB
GridDB’s default usage comes from using Java to write small functions which call directly to GridDB; this can be seen in the official GitHub samples. If Java isn’t necessarily your preference, GridDB has connectors for various other programming languages (C++, Go, JavaScript/Nodejs, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby). Because Python seems to be a very popular connector (based on GitHub stars), we will focus on that.
Once your .py file properly connects to your DB, creating a new GridDB Container (think of a container as similar to a RDB table) is simply just creating a Python object with your intended schema:
conInfo = griddb.ContainerInfo(“point01”,
[[“timestamp”, griddb.Type.TIMESTAMP],
[“active”, griddb.Type.BOOL],
[“voltage”, griddb.Type.DOUBLE]],
griddb.ContainerType.TIME_SERIES, True)
ts = gridstore.put_container(conInfo)
Now let’s PUT some data to query:
now = datetime.datetime.utcnow()
ts.put([now, False, 100])
And now let’s use GridDB’s simplified version of SQL, TQL:
query = ts.query(“select * where timestamp > TIMESTAMPADD(HOUR, NOW(), -6)”)
And then to execute and iterate through the results:
rs = query.fetch() #Get result
while rs.has_next():
data = rs.next()
timestamp = str(data[0])
active = data[1]
voltage = data[2]
print(“Time={0} Active={1} Voltage={2}”.format(timestamp, active, voltage))
To execute your GridDB code, you would just run your python file. This workflow will be very similar for whichever programming language is used.
Time Series
Next I want to explore the specific time series functionality introduced by each different database.
InfluxDB
InfluxDB differs from traditional RDBMS in that it uses a narrow-table model with the timestamp being the primary key. This non-traditional data model is designed with an easy-to-get-started with time series dataset in mind. The main advantage of having a data model that does not have a strict schema is that if the incoming data already naturally fits into the predetermined data model, it is extremely easy to get up and running; and indeed, most data in this field will naturally fit into this data model without any extra initial set up by the developer.
This database also contains special time-based query abilities. If you wanted to query for data that occurred within the past hour, for example, it would look like this:
SELECT * FROM “foodships” WHERE time > now() — 1h
To add to that, InfluxDB also includes COUNT, MIN, MAX, time_bucket, first, last, and more. It can also be used to query geospatial data types combined with time-series analytics.
Another thing worth mentioning is that the UPDATE & DELETE portions of the traditional “CRUD” (Create, Read, Update, Delete) are toned down a ton to keep CREATE and READ more performant; this is done specifically because of what TSDBs typically prioritize.
TimescaleDB
Because it’s built on top of PostgreSQL, TimescaleDB offers all of the functionality of SQL while also adding time-specific functionality. For example, there are now built in functions for median/percentile, cumulative sum, moving averages, and many more.
TimescaleDB’s data retention policy is unique in that it will delete data at the chunk level. The “chunk level” refers to the automatic chunking of like-data (generally corresponding to specific time intervals and regions of the partitions keys’ space). Essentially, TimescaleDB is able to query the entirety of its large datasets because all of it is stored on a really, really big table (hypertable); all user interaction and querying of “other”/smaller tables are just an abstraction: chunking. It is precisely through this process that TimescaleDB can claim much higher rates of ingestion over traditional relational systems.
Nearly every time series database has specific abilities to query data with time-related parameters; one of the most common of these is sum/aggregate. In TimescaleDB, we can not only aggregate, but we can do a continuous aggregate, which helps a ton with performance. Essentially, this recomputes the query automatically at specified time intervals and sets the results into a new table — when the user queries that dataset, TimescaleDB can easily and efficiently query that new made table. Of course, beyond that, there are many more features such as working with popular PostgreSQL extensions, PostGIS, for example.
OpenTSDB
The best features of OpenTSDB are its flexibility and ingest performance, mostly stemming from its foundation of HBase. Because of its HBase base, this TSDB has no schema and can ingest millions of data per second without sacrificing granularity. From the CAP theorem perspective, this is the only DB on this list that is AP (Availability, Partitioning).
On that same token though, because of its HBase foundation, this TSDB may have the biggest and more fear-inducing learning curve, which is absolutely something to consider when thinking of making that plunge. For example, in the previous section, we already saw just how different interacting with this DB is when compared to the other ones on this same list.
As for some unique time-specific features: it scales extremely well, it has very nice downscaling abilities, and has a robust tags and metrics system to easily mark the various data being stored by the DB.
GridDB
GridDB’s unique key-container data model is using the Wide-table model, which can be closely compared to a traditional relational data model, complete with having a fixed schema. With this model, it has the timestamp as the primary key of the row, allowing all columns (tags) to be associated with each time slot.
While not completely built on the relational data model, the key-container data model is relatively close; from a cap theorem perspective, GridDB fits into CP paradigm (ACID compliant). The key (usually a sensor name) will its “value” as a container, which is essentially a rdbms table, of either the time-type, or collection-type. With the collection type, it’s mostly used for metadata, even including all sensor names as an array. And with the time series container, it’ll give each sensor its own rdbms table to store all relevant information.
GridDB can also scale linearly. According to their own benchmarks, the performance of the DB will linearly scale when adding extra nodes/extra hardware. This means that on top of the fast in-memory performance, throwing more compute power will almost always increase productivity, should the need arise.
And of course, like the other TSDBs on this list, GridDB has special time functionality such as data aggregation, data retention policies, and sampling/interpolation functions. It also has some advanced time series data placement algorithms in place for maximum performance.
Conclusion
Now of course, each TSDB has its own unique set of pros and cons. Let’s briefly touch on them here:
InfluxDB
Pros: Easy to get up and running. Good performance for one node
Cons: No strict schema can be seen as a detriment. Only one node in open source.
TimeScaleDB
Pros: Full SQL, fast ingest, fixed schema
Cons: fixed schema
Note: I list “fixed schema” as both a pro and a con, because — like many things — it has many tradeoffs. If you want to hit the ground running and expand aggressively, a fixed schema can be a detriment. But if you are ok with planning out your schema and making sure all incoming data fits the schema, having ACID compliance can be worth the extra effort.
OpenTSDB
Pros: Very scalable, very fast ingest
Cons: (very) difficult learning curve, no fixed schema, interface (telnet) too different
GridDB
Pros: very performant, fixed schema, scales out linearly
Cons: fixed schema
Of course, you should always be picking your new TSDB based on your specific use case and needs. | https://medium.com/griddb/time-series-database-comparison-aa83c5e257d2 | ['Israel Imru'] | 2020-08-05 23:39:42.388000+00:00 | ['Internet of Things', 'Data Science', 'Time Series Database', 'Big Data', 'Time Series'] |
Google Sheets Social Media Editorial Calendar 2021 for Your Personal Brand or Small Business (Free template) | Use cases
You want to build your personal brand and grow your audience. You do that by sharing your work with the world. If “the audience” finds your work valuable, they might stick around for more.
You can post something on the spot when inspiration hits you. But to keep your posting up consistently, you’re going to need a system. You won’t feel “inspired” all the time. Waiting for inspiration is a trap and can have you feeling like you’re always running behind.
Beat the clock by planning ahead.
For a small business or freelancing clients
To take one client as an example, I:
Select an image from a massive image database
Write a caption and, where needed, get it approved and/or translated (translations take longer because the person after me won’t start working on it the split second I ask them to)
Schedule the posts across Social Media and barely touch the account the rest of the month
I go through this process once a month. I don’t need to take chunks of time out of my day every day. This reduces lost time from unnecessary task switching. I “get it over with” and don’t have to worry about what to post today, because I already planned this out one month earlier. Yay, I can now worry about other or more important things.
How far you want to plan ahead may depend on your or on your client’s needs.
For myself
When I go crazy with projects and posting across multiple channels, I need to somehow maintain an overview. I also want to prevent myself from sitting down at the computer and wasting time deciding what to work on. That should be done beforehand. If I plan ahead, I eliminate this issue. | https://medium.com/google-sheets-geeks/how-to-plan-social-media-content-for-your-personal-brand-or-small-business-in-2021-with-google-995bee516cd9 | ['Gracia Kleijnen'] | 2021-01-03 13:02:24.215000+00:00 | ['Social Media Marketing', 'Social Media Management', 'Google Spreadsheets', 'Spreadsheets', 'Google Sheets'] |
Periods & Healthy Food to Add in your Diet | Periods & Healthy Food to Add in your Diet
Many females encounter excruciating pain during their periods. Food does affect these symptoms by a large extent, and some meals aggravate the symptoms, while others might reduce it. These symptoms affect you psychologically and physically which include Acne, Bloating, Breakouts, Breast tenderness, Excessive weight gain, Shortage of concentration span, Headaches/body aches, Food cravings/overeating, Fatigue, Tearfulness, Irritability, Restlessness, Anxiety, Mood swings or Depression.
If you experience any of the symptoms that are mentioned above, then adding certain items to your diet might help in controlling it.
1) Fruits- We are taught at a young age that fruits are healthy for our body, and it is true for PMSing ladies. Fruits that are rich in water like cucumber, strawberry and watermelon are great for hydration. Fruits that are sweet in taste help in controlling your sugar cravings and restricts the consumption of refined sugar. Refined sugar is not recommended for women in periods as it spikes the glucose levels and crashes instantly.
2) Green Leafy Veggies- Your iron levels drop tremendously during periods, especially when your menstrual flow is heavy. This results in bodily pain, dizziness and fatigue. That is where Green Leafy Vegetables step in as your saviour. These Veggies include Spinach, Kale, Beet Greens and Collard Greens. These Vegetables boost your iron and magnesium content in your body.
3) Ginger- Nothing sounds better than a hot mug of ginger tea when you wake up in the morning. Ginger can tackle certain symptoms by its anti-inflammation properties that soothe muscle ache. Ginger is relatively economical and helps you fight nausea. However, do not consume more than 5 grams in a day as it may lead to stomach ache and heartburn.
4) Chicken- If you consume Non-Vegetarian food, then add chicken to your diet. Your body needs protein and iron, which you can solve by eating chicken. It additionally can control your cravings.
5) Turmeric- Turmeric is known for its anti-inflammatory properties. Furthermore, the presence of curcumin in your diet reduces the chances of these symptoms.
6) Dark Chocolate- Don’t we all love chocolates? Dark chocolates, however, have a lesser fan base due to its strong taste. But, did you know that dark chocolate is rich in iron and magnesium? Thus, it helps women in PMS symptoms.
7) Nuts- Most of the nuts are a great source of protein and are rich in Omega-3 fatty acids. If you feel raw nuts are boring and not for your taste buds, then try nut-milks or smoothies with nuts for a yummier taste.
8) Yoghurt- If you are suffering from a yeast infection during or after your menstrual cycle, then food that is rich in probiotics like Yoghurt can help fight bacterias in your body. Yoghurt is also loaded with magnesium and other vital nutrients, like calcium.
9) Tofu- A conventional source of protein for vegans and vegetarians is tofu. It is made from soybeans which carry nutrients like iron, magnesium, and calcium.
10) Water- Last but not least, water. Drinking water will always remain important, especially during your periods. Staying hydrated can reduce your chances of getting dehydrated and headaches, a common symptom of your periods. Drink plenty of water so that you can control retaining water and bloat.
These foods are great to eat during your period. The foods you choose to eat or avoid will largely depend on your specific symptoms and food sensitivities. Pay attention to these factors, and stay healthy.
For more details, tips and advice on periods and sanitary pads, visit Wonderize now! | https://medium.com/@softwonderize/periods-healthy-food-to-add-in-your-diet-c447f423bd95 | [] | 2021-01-05 07:47:16.375000+00:00 | ['Sanitary Napkins', 'Womens Health', 'Menstrual Cup', 'Menstrual Cycle', 'Menstruation'] |
An Unnecessarily Long Caption for My Latest Thirst Trap | An Unnecessarily Long Caption for My Latest Thirst Trap
But first, let me justify this selfie.
Can you BELIEVE she took a hot picture of herself AND posted it??!!? The audacity.
I’m feeling myself! ✨
Well, to be honest, I was feeling myself when I took this selfie three hours ago. But now? After a burrito bowl? Not so much. But earlier? Definitely. The way the soft, dreamy 4 p.m. light came through my window and begged me to me un-hunch my back, purse my lips, change my top, flip my hair, re-hunch my back, and ignore work emails so I could take 263 pictures and land The Chosen Shot is truly something to behold — and to be shared! I have no qualms about posting a sexy photo of myself online. None. Not one.
Because frankly, what if this is the hottest I’m ever going to look? What if this is a peak moment in my life, physically, and I didn’t document it? What if you never had the chance to put a little fire emoji underneath it and validate my entire thought process and execution? My older, less attractive self would be so disappointed I didn’t seize such a fleeting moment. And think of my grandchildren! What would I say when they ask where all of Nana’s best thirst traps from the early 2020s are? Lost on the phones of unworthy men? I think not! What kind of lesson is that to teach our next, next generation?
Posting this hot picture is truly empowering. I will never apologize for having a body, or showing it off or sharing how I look sitting around in a flirty sports bra (that I’ve never once used for sports). And I definitely won’t apologize for how my hazel eyes turn a hypnotizing bright green in the sunlight. Or how my décolletage looks like it’s glowing and radiating in a healthy but suspicious way. However, I will apologize for the chaotic pile of blankets and laundry on the chair behind me. The audacity not to tidy up before an impromptu shoot, knowing this could be seen by up to 1,152 people around the world! See, even though this is a bangin’ photo, I’m not afraid to show you that I am obviously teeming with flaws.
OK, this caption has gone on so incredibly long, I’m actually starting to feel myself again! ✨
To be honest, I was just going to use a line I found while Googling “inspirational quotes for thirst traps that make you seem humble,” but I ended up getting a lot of conflicting recommendations. One site suggested both: “Does my sassiness upset you? — Maya Angelou” and “Hotness is uniqueness and just being yourself. That’s hot. — Ryan Cabrera,” and it made me think I was better off writing a few personal, original thoughts instead — until it was clear to you, dear follower, why I needed to share my one good hair, face, body and self-esteem day. (They rarely align!) Or until the ghost of Maya Angelou flew into my apartment and told me it really didn’t have to be this way.
Finally, I just want to give a shoutout to everyone who likes this photo — whether it be for the thoroughly workshopped thesis of a caption, or my incredible cleavage — and to anyone who sends it to one of our mutual friends with, “Wow, is she spiraling?” The engagement is appreciated, and the answer is: a little.
And to all the women who would’ve just captioned this “Couch vibes!” and posted it without giving it another thought? I’m feeling you, too. | https://omgskr.medium.com/an-unnecessarily-long-caption-for-my-latest-thirst-trap-84ef8a797648 | ['Sara K. Runnels'] | 2020-08-29 21:02:54.507000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Self', 'Satire', 'Culture', 'Social Media'] |
Upgrading PostgreSQL’s Enum type with SQLAlchemy using Alembic migration | Alembic is an awesome library to setup migrations for your database schema which works really great. There is one small thing which it isn’t capable of though. When you upgrade an enum value in your code, it may get pretty confused.
This tutorial will show you how to overcome this weakness, so you don’t get stuck with upgrading the enum types yourself on the PostgreSQL server, but rather create the migration file which will do that for you.
Basic model
Let’s jump straight into the code. Let’s say we have the following enum and SQLAlchemy’s ORM model:
Basic model example
Then, generating Alembic’s new revision will result in the migration file containing our status field details with available values imprinted:
First revision example
Updating the enum
What will happen if we want to add a new status to the enum definition? Let’s try and add one to our Status enum.
Enum after change
Now, after creating next revision, migration file is going to be empty i.e. it will look like this:
Empty migration
So, how can we make sure the REJECTED value is added so the database knows that it should be a valid one? Fortunately for us in PostgreSQL 9.1 an ALTER TYPE directive was added. With it, we can easily upgrade our enum type:
Enum upgrade
And what about downgrade to roll back the changes? In this case it would be a bit more work, but nothing that couldn’t be done:
Enum downgrade
This is still pretty easy, isn’t it?
Autocommit block
As you’ve probably noticed in the examples above I’ve executed all of the commands inside the autocommit block. Why is that?
If ALTER TYPE ... ADD VALUE (the form that adds a new value to an enum type) is executed inside a transaction block, the new value cannot be used until after the transaction has been committed. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/sql-altertype.html
As you can see from the documentation excerpt it’s necessary to run those commands within the autocommit block. Otherwise if our next migrations will try to use the new value (e.g. to insert new values to the database inside the migration) it will raise an exception as our updated type won’t be available until all migration files are properly executed.
Furthermore if you are using an older version of PostgreSQL (<12) you will have to add an autocommit block every time when using ALTER TYPE … ADD VALUE command, otherwise the migration will fail. The restriction is needed because using this directive may lead to possible index issues in the enum column.
Conclusion
In this tutorial we’ve successfully generated the migration file which can automatically upgrade enum types on PostgreSQL server. If you want to read more about this topic or Alembic migrations in general, take a look at an official Alembic documentation. | https://medium.com/makimo-tech-blog/upgrading-postgresqls-enum-type-with-sqlalchemy-using-alembic-migration-881af1e30abe | ['Kamil Kucharski'] | 2020-12-23 11:34:48.322000+00:00 | ['Postgresql', 'Enum', 'Python3', 'Sqlalchemy', 'Alembic'] |
What Not to Do When Preparing for Technical Interviews | What Not to Do When Preparing for Technical Interviews
Mistakes I’ve made preparing for technical interviews
Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash
Technical interviews can be super challenging. Very few people enjoy getting in front of a whiteboard to solve a tough coding question. That said, many companies use technical interviews in their hiring process for software engineers. Throughout college, I’ve spent a lot of time preparing for technical interviews and I want to go over some of the main mistakes that I made so that you can hopefully avoid them in your preparation.
The most detrimental mistakes I made are: | https://medium.com/the-innovation/what-not-to-do-when-preparing-for-technical-interviews-3351bc2248c5 | ['David Peletz'] | 2020-06-27 13:36:22.856000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Software Engineering', 'Business', 'Data Science', 'Technology'] |
Mishandling the Myth of Medusa. A Feminist Perspective on Medusa | The stories of ancient Greek and Roman mythology have, over the years, been rediscovered, repurposed, and reinterpreted in more modern contexts. Often times, this has allowed us to garner some sort of fable-like lesson from the stories of the Illiad or Metamorphoses. The story of Medusa continues to provoke renewed perspectives on its symbolism — including through the lens of feminism and psychoanalysis.
From a feminist perspective, Medusa’s story seems a cautionary tale of the symbolic decapitation of women and a loss of one’s power. In order to unpack the feminist implication of the mythology, let’s begin with the narrative of her story. Medusa was one of three daughters — born with extraordinary beauty and stunning hair. She becomes a priestess to her sister Athena and vows to her sister to remain pure. Athena grows jealous, as many men flock to her, only to glance at Medusa instead. Eventually, Medusa attracts the attention of Poseidon, who subsequently rapes her. Although Athena had the power to prevent this, she chooses not to. Athena is one of Poseidon’s sworn enemies, and through raping her sister, he is able to take power from her. When Athena discovers that Posidon has raped Medusa, she chooses to blame her rather than him. In order to punish her, Athena curses Medusa by replacing her beautiful hair with a head of venomous snakes and making it so anyone who looks into her eyes will be turned to stone.
At this point, Medusa’s head became a desired trophy for many warriors who wanted to brave her fierce monster-like powers. Many warriors are sent to kill her, including Perseus. It is only with help from all of the gods that Perseus is able to not only kill but fully decapitate her. Without the support of the gods, he would have been petrified like every other warrior. Perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of Medusa’s story is that she was pregnant with Poseidon’s child when she was killed. From her severed neck, her child Pegasus is born. As we’ve mentioned, the myth of Medusa can be interpreted in various ways, but I think perhaps the most fascinating analysis is done through a feminist perspective because it unveils just how swift we are to circumvent female rage.
turinboy/Flickr/CC BY 2.0
Despite her origin story being one of purity and renowned beauty, Medusa has come to connote only malevolence and her role as a gorgon, or mythical monster. She is the opposite of what Michael Foucault called, “docile bodies.” A concept in which women are expected to conform and submit to the enforced codes and structures of a patriarchal society. During the late 20th century, feminists began to reassess the myth of Medusa. In the 1994 book, Female Rage: Unlocking Its Secrets, Claiming Its Power, the authors claimed that “when they asked women what female rage looked like to them, it was always Medusa…who came to mind…In one interview after another they were told that Medusa is ‘the most horrific woman in the world.’” None of the women they interview could remember the details of the myth, and perhaps, had they been able to, they would have had a different perspective. Our image of Medusa is one of pure evil, but in reality, she is raped and impregnated by her rapist. She is then cast out and cursed by her own sister. Only to be stalked and haunted constantly by status-seeking men, and inevitably, murdered by Perseus. Then her “severed head, capable of transfixion even in death, is carted away to help him defeat the villain of his story.” There is a painful recognition in the fact that Medusa’s head — the center of her knowledge and power — is taken from her in order to empower a man and to fight his battles for him.
She is the symbol of what female power looks like in the face of threatened male authority
Ancient Greek artists originally portrayed Medusa “as an almost comically hideous figure, with a lolling tongue, full beard, and bulging eyes.” This image of Medusa began to shift when “mustache stubble was replaced by smooth cheeks, and fangs concealed by shapely lips,” as Classical artists began to feminize her once again. There are numerous images of Medusa in an almost angel-like state, or even once she had been cursed, images where the snakes in her hair function as more of an accessory rather than something fearsome. Through these renditions of her visage, Medusa is painted into a half-human, half-animal monster. She is both feminine and monstrous. While she may be known for her monstrosity, her beauty remains just as dangerous. In ancient Greek society, which was “a male-centered society, the feminization of monsters served to demonize women.” Medusa is, in other words, the ultimate femme fatale. She is a woman who “represents a conflicting view of femininity, one that is seemingly alluring but with a threatening or sinister underside.” The femme fatale archetype has found permanence in our storytelling, and confirms to us that: to be both beautiful and fearsome — to be a woman who has bodily autonomy and anger — is not at all normative and that those women must be cast aside or have power taken from them.
This is exactly why the story of Medusa continues to captivate us — because she is a character that demands to be reimagined, she pushes back against the story that places Perseus at its center, who claims him to be blameless and heroic. Medusa is so alluring to us, because she is the “image of intoxication, petrifaction, and luring attractiveness.” She is seductive to us in her contemporary application and dimensionality. Medusa remains of temporal importance because she is the symbol of what female power looks like in the face of threatened male authority. As Elizabeth Johnston claims in her 2016 Atlantic essay, Medusa may be “the original Nasty Woman.” In 2020, it might be easy to chastise the women in the 90s who called Medusa “the most horrific woman,” but perhaps we would be better suited to remind ourselves just how recently things have begun to change. After all, we are in a post #MeToo moment, when we can clearly recognize Medusa’s myth as a rape narrative — one in which the victim is blamed and cast out by her community for crimes perpetrated against her.
In 1976, Hélène Cixous, a noteworthy French feminist theorist, wrote an essay called “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in which she unpacks this myth. She calls women to write and express themselves fully. Throughout the essay she encourages women to come closer in relation to “her sexuality, to her womanly being, giving her access to her native strength.” She goes on to say that in doing so she will get “back her goods, her pleasure, her organs, her immense bodily territories.” Cixous continues on, saying that for too long women's bodies have been occupied and deemed guilty — “guilty of everything, guilty at every turn: for having desire, for not having any; for being frigid, for being ‘too hot’; for not being both at once,” perhaps even from being both woman and angry. Cixous emphasizes the importance of the female voice, of women’s story, she urges women to urgently learn to speak; because after all “a woman without a body, dumb, blind, can’t possibly be a good fighter.” Herein, we see Medusa’s head, cut from her body, being held up by Perseus, “she is reduced to being the servant of the militant male, his shadow.” In what insidious ways are women made to be in a man’s shadow? How might women’s stories actually be centered around women? Throughout all of her work, Cixous decries phallocentric storytelling and histories — in which men and the psychoanalytic lens of phallic imagery are centered in women’s stories.
Of course, one must never mention psychoanalysis and phallic imagery without then mentioning Sigmund Freud, who, during the 20th century, wrote prolifically about the intersection of sexuality and psychology. In 1950 his uncompleted essay, “Medusa’s Head,” was posthumously published. He poses the idea that “to decapitate = to castrate.” Through this framework, Freud posits that the female head is akin to her genitalia — keeping in mind that Medusa did in fact “give birth” to her child from her severed neck. Within this context, it seems as if both the male genitalia and female head are their respective centers of power. Thereby, to castrate a man is to severe his most vital organ; and to decapitate a woman is to take her most vital source of power.
SLAVA GERJ / WITR / SHUTTERSTOCK / ZAK BICKEL / THE ATLANTIC
The incomplete essay becomes far more phallocentric as it continues — explaining how the sight of female genitalia instills fear of castration, how Medusa’s snake-like hair is (of course) a phallic symbol, and finally that Medusa’s ability to cause onlookers to become stiff, is a representation of an erection and therefore a confirmation of their manhood and of still having a penis — it is in essence, their final confirmation of manhood. From Freud’s telling, the entire story takes place through the perspective of the man in the story, reducing Medusa to something sub-human. Medusa’s beheading is the ultimate offense because it involves a complete dismemberment, a permanence within the male gaze, and a “double darkness.” According to Hélène Cixous’ article “The Laugh of Medusa,” she claims that,
The mythologically beheaded woman is seen (or at least partially seen) does not see; she is blinded and those who have beheaded her are blinded to her real nature. She is transformed from a seeing subject to merely seen object, a demeaned and faceless body.
Freud’s analysis of the Medusa myth is that she was decapitated because she represents castration anxiety through phallic symbolism. According to Freud, it is for this reason that Perseus must decapitate her. Cixous disagrees with this analysis. She argues that decapitation is not a symbol of castration anxiety, but rather a result of it. In other words, symbolic decapitation, “is a symptom of the real dangers that women face in a culture that is anxious about the powers of masculinity.” Cixous demonstrates these points by claiming Freud himself is reductive and neglects to address the female experience in the Medusa myth, thereby erasing her experience, or, symbolically decapitating her as well.
In her book Put A Bag Over Her Head: Beheading Mythological Women, Wendy Doniger posits that — if men fear castration of the penis, then women fear decapitation of the head; therefore the penis and the head become the locus of power within the man and woman respectively. Doniger claims that “beheading equals the release or termination of sexuality, male or female.” Doniger submits that through the sexualization of the female head, (i.e. the mouth becoming the vagina) the woman, in essence, loses her voice, or rather she is denied of her voice. If the sexualization of the female head causes subjectivity of the woman, then I argue that Freud’s analysis (i.e. the hair as a phallic symbol) is also a sexualization of the female head. If women venture to claim control over their heads, then they become a threat to the phallic, male-dominated structure. Because Medusa refuses a fate of silence and subjectivity, Perseus is left with no option but to decapitate Medusa for wielding her power.
The myth of Medusa lies at the nexus of conversations about symbolism, feminity, rage, and the ways women are symbols of generativity, desire, and power. There is an alluring nature to Medusa, as she is both siren and saint — she is the complicated woman we all understand and fear. The phallocentric understanding of Medusa that attempts to claim her as an erotic object denies her of her full power of speech, thought, and importance. Her decapitation is in direct result of male anxiety about maintaining power and control. Google any famous woman’s name, perhaps Angela Merkel, Nancy Pelosi, or Hillary Clinton along with the word “Medusa.” For centuries “women in power (or fighting for power) have been compared to Medusa, from Marie Antoinette to the suffragettes.”It’s clear — in our society the sexually and intellectually independent woman is a fearsome sight to behold. | https://medium.com/an-injustice/the-mishandled-myth-of-medusa-1f66fda1874b | ['Tyler A. Donohue'] | 2020-12-30 20:40:39.036000+00:00 | ['Mythology', 'Feminism', 'Medusa', 'Analysis', 'Womens Rights'] |
Coda | Keeping cryptocurrency decentralized | “Coda is the first cryptocurrency protocol with a constant-sized blockchain. Coda compresses the entire blockchain into a tiny snapshot the size of a few tweets.”
co-authored by James Ruocco
Team
Evan Shapiro | CEO
Mozilla | Software Engineer
CMU Personal Robotics Lab | Researcher
HERB robotics platform
Carnegie Mellon | MS & BS Computer Science
Izaak Meckler | CTO
UC Berkeley | PhD Student
Cryptography
Jane Street Capital | Software Developer
Quixey | Software Engineer Intern
University of Chicago | BS in Mathematics & CS
Open Source Projects | Contributor
Elm compiler
Brad Cohn | Strategy & Operations
Bridgewater Associates | Investment Engineer
Currency Team
Ray Dalio’s Research Team
The Research Board | Research Analyst
IMC | Trading Intern
University of Chicago | BS in Mathematics
Brandon Kase | Protocol Engineer
Highlight | Software Engineer
Acquired by Pinterest
Mozilla | Software Engineering Intern
Facebook | Software Engineering Intern
Qualcomm | Interim Engineer
Carnegie Mellon | BS in CS
Corey Richardson | Protocol Engineer
Leap Motion | Firmware Engineer
NICTA | Proof Engineer
Thinkful | Python Mentor
Mozilla | Research Engineer Intern
Clarkson University | BS in Computer Science
Open Source Projects | Contributor
Rust Compiler & Libraries
Deepthi Kumar | Protocol Engineer
Oregon State University | Graduate Teaching Assistant
Subex Ltd | System Analyst
Oregon State University | MsC
Designed GitQL
Oxford College of Engineering | BE
Nathan Holland | Protocol Engineer
Bitversity | Founder/CTO
Self-Employed | Compiler Engineer
Granicus Inc. | Software Developer
Self-Taught | Programmer
Developed Programming Languages
Founder of an Educational Program | Computer Science
John Wu | Protocol Engineer
Udacity | Mentor
JetBrains | Software Developer
Amazon Web Services | Software Development Intern
Visa | Data Science Intern
New York University | MS in Computer Science
Programming Languages & Machine Learning
UCLA | BS in Applied Mathematics
Akis Kattis | Protocol Researcher
New York University | PhD Candidate in Computer Science
Cryptography, privacy, security, scalability of cryptocurrencies
University of Toronto | MsC in Theoretical Computer Science
Princeton University | BsE
Differential Privacy in Distributed Systems | Expert
Rebekah Mercer | Protocol Researcher
Aarhus University | Teaching Assistant
Machine Learning
Secure Distributed Systems
Clearmatics | Crypto R&D
Elliptic curves
Go
Aarhus University | PhD Student
Cryptography
University College London | MS in Information Security
The University of Manchester | BS in Mathematics
Advisors
Joseph Bonneau | Advisor
World Class Expert
HTTPS | Cryptography | Web Security | Encryption
Co-Author of “Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies”
First MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on Cryptocurrencies
Advisor to Algorand & Zcash
Stanford University | Postdoctoral in Applied Crypto
Princeton University | Postdoctoral in CITP
Cambridge University | PhD in Security
Stanford University | BS & MS in Computer Science
Jill Carlson | Advisor
IMF
Enterprise Products | Nasdaq & State Street
Goldman Sachs | Bond Trader
Advisor to 0x | Algorand | Tezos | Zcash | Coinlist
University of Oxford | Master of Science
Harvard College | Bachelor of Arts
Paul Davison | Advisor
Coinlist | CEO
Highlight | Founder & CEO
Metaweb | Vice President
Acquired by Google
Stanford University | MBA & Bachelor of Science
Notable Investors
Polychain Capital | Olaf Carlson-Wee
Naval Ravikant | Seed Investor of Twitter, Uber, Kraken & Advisor to Algorand
Elad Gil | Advisor to Airbnb, Coinbase, Instacart, Square, Stripe…
Fred Ehrsam | Co-Founder & Board of Directors of Coinbase
Charlie Noyes | Principal at Pantera Capital
“Success Breeds Success”
When assessing a team, prior accomplishments are the best indicators for success. When betting, the odds favor those who have a proven track record. This is why we feel more comfortable investing in people like, Silvio Micali (Algorand), who won a Turing Award; Or, Dr. Feung CAO (Pchain) who has published 22 papers and has 30+ international patents.
However, many of the world greatest companies would not exist if brave investors did not give people like Joe Gebbia (AirBnB) or Evan Spiegel (Snapchat) their first chance.
Many would agree that investing in proven success is probably the safest way to grow a fund. However, risk & reward are inversely correlated. It does not take a genius to realize that Algorand is an incredibly opportunity. The high demand for projects like Algorand creates a very competitive environment for investors. High demand also allows the founders to valuate their protocols at absurd levels (Tezos/Thunder).
Coda is different. While the team is filled with newcomers, these bright minds are hungry to make Coda their legacy. It is impossible to determine the passion of the team through a computer screen. Therefore, we looked at Coda’s advisors and investors. These are people who have put their money where their mouth is.
Advisors of interest
Jill Carlson and Joseph Bonneau only advise projects when they have faith in the team & the project. Time is the most precious commodity we have, and it only increases in value as we become more successful. The fact that Carlson & Bonneau are willing to sacrifice time for Coda, speaks for itself.
Investors of interest
Here we have Naval Ravikant, the founder of angel.co & Elad Gi, an advisor to airbnb. These two have seen their fair share of wannapreneurs. Rest assured, Coda is the real deal.
Coda 9 Technical Members
The team has strong academic credentials from top Universities (Carnegie Mellon, UC Berkeley, Princeton, Oxford and more). Out of the 9 technical members, two stand out: Izaak (CTO) & Akis (Protocol Researcher). Both are finishing their PhDs in cryptography & Akis is under the tutelage of the famous professor, Joseph Bonneau (one of the advisors — his resume deserves a second look).
While the team has a decently high profile resume, it lack extensive professional experience. The teams average professional experience is only 1–2 years. While brief, these years were spent at top companies such as Mozilla, Bridgwater Capital, Facebook, Visa, and AWS.
For example, Brad Cohn (strategy & operations) worked on the same team as Ray Dalio. Evan Shapiro (CEO) worked at Mozilla along with Brandon and Corey. We love teams that have worked together in the past as it greatly improves chemistry & company culture.
Most football fans know if you were to put Messi, Ronaldo, and Neymar on the same club, you would not win the Champions League (no synergy whatsoever). We see how Charles and Dan from Bitshares now despise each other. They could have continued to work together to address the main problems with crypto. While both of them are doing just fine, Bitshares is not.
While the team is young, it is their time to shine. The team impressed and captured investment from industry thought-leaders. Now we have learned about the personalities, let’s take a closer look at the project.
Word of caution: We apologize in advance for being unable to make this article shorter. Hang tight! It is worth it.
The Issue
So far, the motto for 2018 has been “Scalability, scalability, scalability”.. Are you tired of false claims & the 1M TPS marketing schemes? So are we. Well don’t worry, Coda’s forte is different, they are trying to solve (drum roll please) decentralization!!!
Woah hold on, hasn't decentralization been solved already? Not quite yet, many blockchain protocols are slowly becoming more centralized. EOS “solved” the scalability issue by allowing 21 super nodes to validate its ledger. Currently, most of them are hosted on corporate servers such as AWS/Google Cloud/Alibaba. Does 3 points of failure sound safe at all? Currently decentralization gets sacrificed to increase scalability, if we do not find a way to maintain decentralization, blockchain tech could become redundant.
Decentralization
It can be defined as:
“…the system being able to run in a scenario where each participant only has access to O(c) resources, i.e. a regular laptop or small VPS…” — Ethereum Wiki
Translation: Anyone with an internet connected device should be able to validate transactions.
Blockchains are slow and expensive databases with reduced functionality. Why do we love them so much? Because blockchains allow users to transact without trusting the counterparty. Trustless decentralization is valuable enough for us to bare with the shortcomings of blockchain.
It should also be noted that decentralization is not binary, it is a spectrum. On a scale of 0–100, 0 would be when local databases are controlled by a single business, while a score of 100 would be when a distributed database (like a blockchain) can be validated by any internet connected device.
There is an ongoing debate about how much decentralization is optimal. While it is an important discussion, it is outside the scope of this paper. But what if a project could maintain scalability while maximizing decentralization?
Note: We feel that being a maximalist is never good. Of course scoring a 0 in decentralization is terrible. But that does not mean every project should aim for a 100. Remember the crypto trilemma?!
Validation
To fully understand decentralization, it is important to understand validation. Imagine a Bitcoin ecosystem with only three citizens: a miner, a validator, and a spectator.
Miners receive the transactions and choose which transactions should be in the blocks. It should be noted that transactions do not get added to the block on a first come, first serve basis. Each project has their own set of incentives for miners (e.g. gas for ETH). Miners then compete against each other to solve a math problem a.k.a. mining. The winner gets to send his block (set of transactions) to the validators. But, the block does not have any value until it is validated by the majority of full nodes. Once validated, the miner receives 12.5 BTC in return.
Essentially, miners propose which set of transactions should be added to the blockchain; Miners write the blockchain history. This is important to know, because if the majority of full nodes (which are the validators) agree upon a falsified block, that block becomes reality, and allows people to falsify transactions. Think of it like fake news; if the majority thinks it’s real, then the event is perceived as real.
Once a validator receives a block, they compare it against the full blockchain ledger & the protocol’s rules. If everything checks out, the blocks are validated (legitimized). After a block gets validated, it is shared with other validators, so they can repeat the process. Once the majority of validators agree on a block’s legitimacy, it becomes a permanent addition to the blockchain. That is why you need to wait for confirmations after sending a transaction because it takes time for the majority of nodes to validate a transaction.
Please note: miners validate transactions as well because they are full nodes.
Finally, spectators receive a summary from the validators (Block Header) in order to receive and send BTC. They do not validate!
You can think of the validation process like a peer reviewed journal. With journals, a group of researchers (the miners) submit articles (blocks) to the journal editors (validators). The researchers are essentially proposing which set of facts, get added to the journal (blockchain). Regular people (spectators) can then read about the journal in the news.
Miners write the history.Validators turn the history into reality. Spectators, well…they just leech.
Wallets, Nodes, & Risks OH MY!
There are 4 main types of wallets (seen above). Which type do you use? I bet you either store crypto on Binance (no wallet) or on Metamask/Mew (a lightnode wallet). If this is the case, you are a spectator. This means, you are trusting a third party to determine the validity of your transactions. When you use a light wallet, you are not validating which means you are forfeiting the power to enforce the rules, and are trusting the FULL nodes.
If this reminds you of the incumbent financial system, it is because you are not far off.
The beauty of “blockchain technology” is that it allows anyone to enforce the rules (validation/consensus) of the protocol, so power remains in the hands of the many, not the few.
Unless you are running a full node (when you download and sync the whole blockchain ledger) you are not conducting trustless transactions. This is because a light node, only contains a small piece of the blockchain, which makes your tokens susceptible to attacks.
People stress over scalability like it is the number one issue. Scalability is important, but decentralization (trustless transactions) takes priority. There is no point in scaling a slow and expensive database (blockchain) unless it is trustless.
Full nodes allow for better privacy, full control over fees, mining, and smart contracts. While light node wallets (spectators) are open to the following attacks:
Bank Wallet = Exchanges | SPV Wallet = Lightnode Wallet | Bitcoin Core = Full Node
Read the details about the attacks here.
Have you finished reading all the vulnerabilities you are open to?
You have? Great!
Oh what’s that?
You are going to download a full node tonight?!
Perfect! Let’s move on.
The Beauty of Bitcoin
The Bitcoin protocol creates blocks that can store up to 1MB. These blocks are created every 10 minutes (this is how long it takes to solve the PoW puzzle).
The average transaction size is 540 bytes. This means that every block (1MB) contains approximately 1950 transactions. If you do the math, you would realize that Bitcoin can conduct 1950 transactions every 10 minutes (or 3 TPS).
Note: Recent updates like Segwit have improved how data is stored/validated, bumping 3tps to 7tps.
But why does Bitcoin create a block every 10 minutes? Why not 2 minutes or 5? Wouldn’t this drastically increase TPS? 1950 transactions every 2 minutes gives a TPS of roughly 16x. Wow I solved the scalability issue: increase the block size and reduce the block time! Hmm no unless you HODL Bitcoin Cash.
This misconception stems from not understanding the relationship between block sizes and bandwidth requirements. It’s like saying you can solve traffic by making all cars go faster.
The validators of a decentralized protocol come from vastly different demographics; some are rich, some are poor, some have fast internet, some have slow internet.
Bandwidth is the amount of data it can be transmitted over time (upload/download speed). Imagine two coins with the same block time of 10 minutes. But one has a block of 32MB while the other has 1MB.
Q: Which block would require less bandwidth to reach the majority of the validators in 10 minutes?
If a protocol increases the block size without adjusting the block time to achieve scalability, they are basically forcing the validators to pay for more bandwidth (faster internet). This leads to centralization as bandwidth access and prices vary greatly throughout the world. If the protocol allowed validation to be conducted with small bandwidth, forks would occur because it would take longer to propagate the block throughout the network.
Forks
Miners send their blocks to validators. The 1MB blocks in Bitcoin are to ensure that the block reaches the majority of the validators on the Bitcoin Network before a conflicting block is created. If the block time were to be reduced substantially (let us say 5 minutes) or if the blocks are too big for the average bandwidth on the network, forks would happen frequently.
Block Time
Consider this scenario:
Let us assume that it takes 1 minute to propagate a block to all Bitcoin validators. When a miner (Alice) wins the PoW puzzle, all the other miners are still trying to solve the puzzle until they receive her block. This means that all other validators wasted 1 minute of intense computation. In Bitcoin, 1 minute only represents 1/10 of a block (it takes 10 minutes to solve the puzzle). Now imagine a Bitcoin hard fork that would reduce the block time to 5 minutes, that 1 minute would now represent ⅕ of a block. It would represent a higher cost to miners. The 10 minutes was not an arbitrary number.
Block Size
In the scenario above, you want that 1 minute window to be as small as possible. Why? Just because Alice won the mining puzzle first, does not mean that all other miners will instantly be aware of Alice’s victory, they will still spend resources trying to win, until they receive Alice’s block. Often the other miners end up solving the puzzle in that window before receiving Alice’s block. Then, they start propagating their block to others miners, innocently thinking they were the first to solve the puzzle. Because blocks are unique, these miners are creating multiple versions of the Bitcoin ledger, forks.
Eventually, some validators would receive both blocks. How do they decide which fork of Bitcoin shall be the real one? They would opt for the block that was validated by more nodes. The validators would append Alice’s block and drop all the others. Since Alice’s block was propagated earlier and had more support, it would have had more blocks validated on top of it. That is why this process is often referred as the longest chain wins.
If you were to fork Bitcoin and increase the block size by 32 fold, the 1 minute propagation window would grow much larger. Unless you forced validators to purchase larger bandwidth.
As more and more full nodes start downgrading to light nodes or hybrid nodes (e.g. Ethereum calls them fast-sync/warp nodes). Validation starts looking like the image below.
Red dots: Full nodes | Green dots: Light nodes | https://bit.ly/2L7iRoU
Jim, isn’t there a center on that image?
Yes, the ledger is only being validated by the red dots. The green dots are trusting (wtf, isnt blockchain all about trustless consensus?) that the red dots are honest.
In Ethereum, we do not know the number of full nodes (it is not public) but as the blocksize gets larger, full nodes are forced to become light nodes (more red dots are becoming green dots).
Bitcoin is the OG/King, no the flippening will not happen, because they refuse to increase the blocksize. Because of this, people complain that Bitcoin is outdated and is not open to innovation. In bitcoin’s defense, they are afraid to lose their number of full nodes. Remember ERC20 + smart contracts make your blocks bigger (you need the extra space to run all that crypto kittie’s data). That is why Ethereum is becoming centralized over time. Centralization is the public enemy number 1. Well, at least in the crypto world.
Key Takeaways
The cost to become a validator is increasing.
The current solutions increase the costs of bandwidth, storage and computation.
Scalability is currently being “solved” through centralization.
Coda
Before we begin, It is important to understand that Coda’s whitepaper is still a draft. Non-technical reviewers like us can only explain the value of Coda at a 30,000 foot view. Even the famous Andre Cronje was left with questions after he reviewed their GitHub and whitepaper.
So what is Coda? Coda will be the first succinct blockchain.
Wtf does that mean? As a non-native speaker I had to google that one myself.
Jim what about you, do you know what succinct means be honest?
Succinct means quick/simple right?
Remember the red & green dots? Scalability is being achieved at the cost of centralization. But can we have our cake & eat it too?
Coda said: the solution is easy guys. Let’s forget the normal sized blocks and blockchain. Woah, hold on did Coda suggest that we throw the baby out with the bathwater?! Let’s revisit how we reach consensus on Bitcoin. Blocks are proof that miners won the PoW puzzle and picked transactions from the mempool (backlog of blockchain transactions). Validators then use the full blockchain & rules as proof that this new block is legitimate (no fake transactions).
Instead of blocks that are expensive to move around the network and the blockchain that is expensive to store and takes ages to sync with the new state of the network. Coda creates proofs of the state of that are small (<1kb) and take no time to validate/sync (<5ms).
“Coda compresses the entire blockchain into a tiny snapshot the size of a few tweets.”
You know how your mobile internet can easily download 1KB as opposed to 32 MB. That is how Coda achieves scalability. As for decentralization, all nodes in Coda will validate transactions — mobile phones, website clients, perhaps even your fridge in the future? Because all you need to validate your transactions is to have the proof of the state of the network (1kb) and create a new proof that includes your state. The total grand amounts to 20kb and 10 milliseconds of validation.
Imagine the possibilities. Your email client (e.g. gmail) will be able to validate the state of an ad on Craigslist. It will prove that the tickets bought online are legitimate (e.g. the tickets will be for the VIP area as promised on the ad) without seeing any verification of authenticity from the seller. This is called verifiable computation, you can verify the result of some computation without knowing its content.
Note: As you noticed. The Coda protocol itself will not keep a history of all the transactions. That responsibility will be on the users. To save their history locally, if they wish to check them at a later date. The Coda team said they might keep a copy of the entire blockchain for research purposes.
Zero Knowledge Proofs
How is this possible? Thanks to this cool technology called Zero Knowledge Proofs or zk-snarks. You know that privacy coin called Zcash, yeah that is what they use. When Alice sends 1 Zcash to Bob. The protocol proves that User A had enough Zcash to make transaction T to User B. All without revealing the amount that was actually sent, who User A (Alice) is, and who User B (Bob) is. To grasp the logic behind zk-snarks, I will share an old Pokémon Blue story of mine.
In Pokémon Blue, everytime you captured a Pokémon your name was forever registered in that Pokémon’s profile. So imagine if I captured a Pikachu and send it to Jim (James Ruocco the co-author). The pikachu profile in Jim’s game would have my name on it captured by Jose. Do you remember how it was impossible to capture the strongest Pokémon number 151, Mew? Not to brag, but I had Mew. No one else in my school had Mew. Of course many thought “no way, someone must have sent him a Mew. Show me where you caught him to prove it!”
I did not have to show them the whole process I went through to catch Mew. All I had to do was show Mew on my Gameboy and that my name was associated with Mew’s profile.
The idea behind zk-snarks is to prove a result (Jose Captured Mew) without showing the inputs/computation (the process to catch mew). Coda proves a result (state of the network) without showing its inputs/computation (the full blockchain/blocks). This is why they are able to validate transactions without the use of blocks.
If zk-snarks makes your head hurt, welcome to the club. The CTO of Coda Izaak Meckler created a high level language called Snarky (it is available on their GitHub). In essence, Snarky will allow any developer to write zk-snark programs (verifiable computation) in a language that will instantly look familiar to any developer (So someone who has programming knowledge should be able to pick it up quickly). Without Snarky, a programmer would need a masterful understanding of mathematics & cryptography to create zk-snarks.
Programs written in normal programming languages require many lines of code to validate transactions. With snarky, validation can be achieved with a fraction of the code, reducing the validation time to milliseconds
Lastly, we want to correct a misconception about open source projects. Some believe that projects need to stay private or get a patent. They believe that if a project is open source like Ethereum, any random blockchain, could copy/paste the benefits of Coda. That cannot be further from the truth. Coda had to carefully design their blockchain to be compatible with zk-snarks, they customized their cryptographic primitives (hash function/signature scheme/etc) in order to create a succinct blockchain. If Ethereum wanted to become succinct, it would require a massive protocol redesign if not outright impossible. Do not confuse verification with replicability. Open source is to allow users to verify that a project does what it is supposed to do. Of course you could fork Coda once its released and make some changes after but that is a different point.
No Partnerships | No Token Metrics | No Roadmap | No ICO Announced
Community
Twitter | 3,069 Followers
Telegram | 12,418 Followers
Alexa Rank | 1,081,251
425,471
Medium | 277 Followers
Verdict
Coda has a good team and a great mission. They have strong support from their investors and advisors. In terms of their “idea”, we at Alpha have yet to see a better one that addresses both scalability and decentralization. The code in GitHub looks good as shown by Andre Cronje and the CTO has built a high level language called Snarky. For now that is all we have as proof of concept. Remember, Coda is not trying to be the Ethereum killer (EOS), Wanchain Killer (Fusion), Nano Killer (Taraxa) or any other improved version of an existing project. Coda is a totally different animal. You will not be seeing a project claiming to be Coda 2.0 anytime soon.
Next Steps
We recommend that investors join all their social media channels (TG/Twitter/Medium). Please check their content on Snarky here and here. We are eager for the official release of the whitepaper to learn more as this is our second favorite project. Our articles are meant to help our readers gain a vague idea of the projects before diving into the whitepaper. Please do not take this as an accurate representation of Coda and do not assume that your research on Coda is done because you read our article. This is meant to be the starting point to make you interested in researching more. Not the final stop!
Disclaimer: Our goal is NOT to provide investment advice. We promote projects that can positively affect society and teach our readers how to properly analyze ICOs. This article is a product of the Alpha Community. | https://medium.com/alpha-club/coda-keeping-cryptocurrency-decentralized-56f076033870 | ['Jose Cerqueira'] | 2018-07-25 01:58:31.235000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Ico Review', 'ICO', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
The ABC of Christmas Survival | Unlike most children, I never liked Christmas mornings. Going to church before 6 am when it’s -20 C outside and only slightly warmer inside is not my idea of fun. Admittedly, things improved at the gifts’ time. But much of the break meant sitting, eating, and managing frustrations from spending so much time together.
Of course, Christmas was also fun. We kids competed who runs to church first, giggled from my uncle’s jokes, or sent snowballs behind each other’s necks. Above all, it was our best family bonding time.
I only started appreciating this after my first Christmas in Australia. I was celebrating it in the +42 C heat with people I barely knew. Everything smelled, looked, and felt different. I never felt more out of place in my life.
Whichever side you find yourself this Christmas — overwhelmed by people or cut off from them — it can be an emotionally trying time.
Christmas is a test to the fabric of our social connections. As such, threats to it can throw us off-balance emotionally. It can even threaten how we see ourselves — we often define ourselves in relation to others (e.g., single or married).
Like with most threats, 90% of managing them is preparation. But unlike with physical threats, we don’t take emotional threats seriously.
Here is my ABC of Christmas Survival.
We can spend whole weekends immersed in others’ dramas on Netflix but have an astonishingly little consideration for our feelings. For example, I once had a ‘close’ friend until I realized she didn’t start a single interaction in 2 years. As soon as I stopped calling, it was over. Should I have listened to my emotions earlier, I would have known I never felt great around her, sparing me two years’ worth of effort.
You know what makes you happy or angry, what situations or people trigger you, how, or why. You already know what and who exhausts you or replenishes you.
If your holidays can be difficult, make an emotional inventory of your main social interactions. Is there someone who always has a snarky remark up their sleeve, sees only the negative side of everything, or is an energy vampire? Think of the social activities planned — do you like Christmas carols or get a headache from them?
You know what you need and why — listen, and let that information guide you.
After you made a list, make a plan. Can you set the boundaries with the people who trigger you most? Or avoid activities that exhaust you? Have three things to disarm the snarky remarks, comebacks to critics, or establish ‘no-go’ zones for the needy family members.
If you ever avoided a negative person, you probably unconsciously applied boundaries already. But tapping into your emotions directly makes it easy to know what causes you the most trouble, e.g., sucks your energy or puts you down, and address it.
Smart boundaries will protect you — they are your emotional defense. But a good Christmas is not just a less negative one. It’s the one with joy, love, awe, and gratitude.
And nothing brings as many of these desirable feelings as connections — your emotional offense.
Right connections fill your emotional cup with positivity, energy, and meaning. They are about reaching out to people that replenish you. It’s about activities that fill you up, not exhausts you. Doing what lifts you not brings you down.
Instead of being a passive participant, purposefully seek connections, even with strangers. Say hi to your neighbor or clap to that terrible Christmas carols singer. It will bring you joy that only connection can bring. Also, include replenishing activities — whether ‘me time’ to connect with yourself or, vice versa, a chat with your best friend. | https://medium.com/@linaj/the-abc-of-christmas-survival-a72fe23ef69a | ['Lina J.'] | 2020-12-24 10:15:28.860000+00:00 | ['Christmas', 'Emotions', 'Mental Health', 'Eq', 'Emotional Intelligenc'] |
Fernish 2021: Our Year in Review | It was a year of elevated expectations. We became accustomed to our favorite restaurants’ charming outdoor setups, popular retailers offering curbside pickup, and local grocers shopping, bagging, and delivering goods to our door. The brands who won were those who adapted, and those who gave consumers what they truly wanted: more convenient options.
At Fernish, our focus has been — and always will be — on the customer. This year, we added more ways to furnish your home through rental, rent-to-own, and the option to buy upfront. We worked hard to evolve with the changing demands around us, and set out to beat our own personal records when it came to sustainability, service, and living out our mission to make it effortless to create your home.
While we may not win medals, we’ll always celebrate our wins. So, what impact did we have in 2021?
2021 Year in Review
We won when you won, by saving you money.
2021 was a huge year for customer savings — $25 million to be exact. By choosing Fernish, our customers avoided the exhausting and expensive process of buying, selling, storing, and moving furniture the traditional way. Instead, they gained flexibility, time, and money, better allowing them to make meaningful memories elsewhere.
We put in more reps: reusing, refinishing, and reducing furniture waste.
This year, we saved 268 tons of furniture from ending up in a landfill. That weight is the equivalent of 386 four-man Olympic bobsled teams (including the sleds!). Each piece of furniture we receive back from customers goes through a multi-step refurbishment process, allowing us to give it a second, third, even fourth life. Fun fact: we refurbished 183,838 square feet of hard good items this year. That’s 87x the playing surface of a curling rink!
We got you your furniture at lightning speed.
It seemed as though ordering anything this year took… forever. But feeling at home is important, and we aimed to do everything we could to get you there faster. So we continued to deliver and assemble hundreds of items every week, most often in 7 days or less. We even saved customers from 683 days of furniture assembly time. In that amount of time, an Olympic marathoner could circle the Earth 8 times.
We changed the playing field for more customers.
As life evolves, we believe your furniture should evolve with you. That belief is a huge part of our mission, and how we’re changing furniture for good every day. Fernish expanded to three new markets in 2021 — San Diego, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Austin — changing the furniture game for people in 755 more zip codes. East Coast, we’ll see you in 2022.
As we celebrate our accomplishments this holiday season, we also celebrate the relationships we have with each and every customer, partner, investor, supporter, and advocate who’s been there along the way. We could not have done it without you. | https://medium.com/@fernish/fernish-2021-our-year-in-review-6ad3f9b78272 | [] | 2021-12-17 17:21:33.952000+00:00 | ['Circular Economy 2', 'Furniture', 'Convenience', 'Sustainability'] |
The 7 Most Important Software Design Patterns | For a comprehensive deep-dive into the subject of Software Design Patterns, check out Software Design Patterns: Best Practices for Developers, created by C.H. Afzal, a veteran software engineer with multiple years of experience at Netflix, Microsoft, and Oracle. Much of the below is summarized from his course.
Why Design Patterns?
Design Patterns have become an object of some controversy in the programming world in recent times, largely due to their perceived ‘over-use’ leading to code that can be harder to understand and manage.
It’s important to understand that Design Patterns were never meant to be hacked together shortcuts to be applied in a haphazard, ‘one-size-fits-all’ manner to your code. There is ultimately no substitute for genuine problem solving ability in software engineering.
The fact remains, however, that Design Patterns can be incredibly useful if used in the right situations and for the right reasons. When used strategically, they can make a programmer significantly more efficient by allowing them to avoid reinventing the proverbial wheel, instead using methods refined by others already. They also provide a useful common language to conceptualize repeated problems and solutions when discussing with others or managing code in larger teams.
That being said, an important caveat is to ensure that the how and the why behind each pattern is also understood by the developer.
Without further ado (in general order of importance, from most to least):
The Most Important Design Patterns
Singleton
The singleton pattern is used to limit creation of a class to only one object. This is beneficial when one (and only one) object is needed to coordinate actions across the system. There are several examples of where only a single instance of a class should exist, including caches, thread pools, and registries.
It’s trivial to initiate an object of a class — but how do we ensure that only one object ever gets created? The answer is to make the constructor ‘private’ to the class we intend to define as a singleton. That way, only the members of the class can access the private constructor and no one else.
Important consideration: It’s possible to subclass a singleton by making the constructor protected instead of private. This might be suitable under some circumstances. One approach taken in these scenarios is to create a register of singletons of the subclasses and the getInstance method can take in a parameter or use an environment variable to return the desired singleton. The registry then maintains a mapping of string names to singleton objects, which can be accessed as needed.
2. Factory Method
A normal factory produces goods; a software factory produces objects. And not just that — it does so without specifying the exact class of the object to be created. To accomplish this, objects are created by calling a factory method instead of calling a constructor.
Usually, object creation in Java takes place like so:
SomeClass someClassObject = new SomeClass();
The problem with the above approach is that the code using the SomeClass’s object, suddenly now becomes dependent on the concrete implementation of SomeClass. There’s nothing wrong with using new to create objects but it comes with the baggage of tightly coupling our code to the concrete implementation class, which can occasionally be problematic.
3. Strategy
The strategy pattern allows grouping related algorithms under an abstraction, which allows switching out one algorithm or policy for another without modifying the client. Instead of directly implementing a single algorithm, the code receives runtime instructions specifying which of the group of algorithms to run.
4. Observer
This pattern is a one-to-many dependency between objects so that when one object changes state, all its dependents are notified. This is typically done by calling one of their methods.
For the sake of simplicity, think about what happens when you follow someone on Twitter. You are essentially asking Twitter to send you (the observer) tweet updates of the person (the subject) you followed. The pattern consists of two actors, the observer who is interested in the updates and the subject who generates the updates.
A subject can have many observers and is a one to many relationship. However, an observer is free to subscribe to updates from other subjects too. You can subscribe to news feed from a Facebook page, which would be the subject and whenever the page has a new post, the subscriber would see the new post.
Key consideration: In case of many subjects and few observers, if each subject stores its observers separately, it’ll increase the storage costs as some subjects will be storing the same observer multiple times.
5. Builder
As the name implies, a builder pattern is used to build objects. Sometimes, the objects we create can be complex, made up of several sub-objects or require an elaborate construction process. The exercise of creating complex types can be simplified by using the builder pattern. A composite or an aggregate object is what a builder generally builds.
Key consideration: The builder pattern might seem similar to the ‘abstract factory’ pattern but one difference is that the builder pattern creates an object step by step whereas the abstract factory pattern returns the object in one go.
6. Adapter
This allows incompatible classes to work together by converting the interface of one class into another. Think of it as a sort of translator: when two heads of states who don’t speak a common language meet, usually an interpreter sits between the two and translates the conversation, thus enabling communication.
If you have two applications, with one spitting out output as XML with the other requiring JSON input, then you’ll need an adapter between the two to make them work seamlessly.
7. State
The state pattern encapsulates the various states a machine can be in, and allows an object to alter its behavior when its internal state changes. The machine or the context, as it is called in pattern-speak, can have actions taken on it that propel it into different states. Without the use of the pattern, the code becomes inflexible and littered with if-else conditionals.
Want to keep learning?
With Software Design Patterns: Best Practices for Developers you’ll have the chance to do more than just read the theory. You’ll be able to dive deep into real problems and understand practical solutions with real-life code examples.
The course is based on the popular book by the Gang of Four, but presented in an interactive, easy-to-digest format. You will master the 23 famous design patterns from the book interactively, learn the proper applications of the 3 key design pattern types (creational, structural, and behavioral), and learn to incorporate these design patterns into your own projects.
Check it out now. | https://medium.com/educative/the-7-most-important-software-design-patterns-d60e546afb0e | ['The Educative Team'] | 2019-09-16 17:19:28.581000+00:00 | ['Object Oriented', 'Programming', 'Software Development', 'Design Patterns', 'Coding'] |
If You Don’t Get That Animatronic Santa Off Your Roof, I Will Burn Your Fucking House Down | Photo by Macau Photo Agency on Unsplash
If there’s one thing I know about Christmas, it’s that it’s a time to celebrate the birth of our lord and savior, Jesus Christ. If there’s another equally important thing I know about Christmas, it’s that it’s a competition, and I must have the best-decorated house in the neighborhood. For the seven years that I’ve lived in this street, we’ve had harmony. Everything in its rightful order. Then you moved in.
Carole, is it? Carole, as I’m sure you know, my house was featured in three local newsletters last year for its stunning Christmas lights, which have been referred to as a “revelation” by at least two women in the community who are truly terrified of my power on the Neighborhood Watch. How do I stay at the top? Every year, I get better. I add a new item, a new centerpiece, and 2020’s addition has been in the works for years. You see, the pièce de résistance of this year’s display was to be a top of the range, custom-made animatronic Santa Claus. He would be placed atop my awnings to wave down at the crowds of admirers, spreading joy, and the story of my undeniable talent.
So you can imagine my surprise when my Timothy came home from school yesterday to tell me that YOU, my dear new neighbor at number 38, had decorated with an animatronic Santa of your own, BEFORE ME. Of course, I didn’t believe him at first. ‘Nobody would be so evil,’ I thought. But there it is. Number 38 is trying to be number 1. Now, I know you only just moved in, so maybe you don’t understand how this works. I have an animatronic Santa. I have the best Christmas lights. It’s my thing. MY thing.
Carole, this year was to be my magnum opus. Whispers of my Winter Wonderland X North Pole Workshop theme have been the topic of conversation, in certain circles, since Halloween. I’m making a virtual tour for my Facebook fans. My children have even promised they’ll pay attention this year, because I told them that if they don’t, they’re not getting a PS5. I don’t think you’re understanding the seriousness of this.
Why are you trying to destroy me? How long have you been planning this? Weeks? Months? Since the day you were born? I worked HARD to get where I am in the Christmas light community. YES CAROLE, THERE’S A CHRISTMAS LIGHT COMMUNITY. I stay vigilant, not following the trends but setting them myself. I innovate. You can’t just move in and start with animatronics on your first Christmas. It’s ridiculous and you’re embarrassing yourself.
Listen to me. We can’t have TWO animatronic Santas in the same street — it makes no narrative sense. When people enter our alcove, the decorations should tell a story. That story should be: Look at this incredible house’s decorations, and all the other houses complimenting it, but not making any form of weak or pathetic attempt to overshadow it. My house is the main house. My reputation relies on it being the highlight. Your house is one of the complimentary houses. One of. Insignificance. Are you picking up what I’m putting down here, Carole? ARE YOU? DO NOT CHALLENGE MY POSITION.
I’m not the only one who's angry, Carole. Everybody is upset about this. EVERYBODY is talking. Yes, including Susan at number 32. NO DON’T ASK HER, you’ll only upset her.
You’re just not ready for animatronics, anyway. I wasn’t going to say anything because I was trying to be nice, but your rope lights are chaotic and your icicle display is in shambles. What’s your theme? You have blue, red, green, yellow… It’s like you didn’t even storyboard this. Do you even CARE? Because I CARE, CAROLE. I FUCKING CARE. You’ve thrown the entire street into disarray, and if you expect ME to rework MY decorations to fit your chaotic energy, you are sadly mistaken! Leave the animatronics to the professionals, love. STAY. THE FUCK. IN YOUR LANE.
I don’t want to be unreasonable, so I’m giving you until my early morning power walk to have that Santa off your roof and on his merry way back to the North Pole. And if you don’t? AND IF YOU DON’T? I WILL BURN YOUR FUCKING HOUSE DOWN, CAROLE. THAT’S A PROMISE, DO NOT FUCKING TEST ME, CAROLE. THIS IS MY STREET, CAROLE. MINE.
Seasons Greetings, motherfucker, and may God be with you. | https://medium.com/slackjaw/if-you-dont-get-that-animatronic-santa-off-your-roof-i-will-burn-your-fucking-house-down-6227bc719969 | ['Rachael Millanta'] | 2020-12-20 19:19:36.497000+00:00 | ['Comedy', 'Humor', 'Christmas Lights', 'Christmas', 'Satire'] |
Setting Up GPIO Interrupts in nRF52xx | Fig.1 nRF52832 Dev Kit
Prerequisites
This is tutorial is not intended to be a guide for learning C language or about the Nordic SDK platform. It’s primary target is to provide developers a concise guide about integrating peripheral modules and features into active applications.
If you are a beginner, I would recommend you look into an nRF52 Project Setup guide like this one.
Another easy way to get started with coding, without bothering with all basic stuff like files and driver inclusion, check out this Code Generation Tool
nrf52 Code Generator: https://vicara.co/nrf52-code-generator
GPIOTE
GPIOTE is a method to execute a section of code or steps when there is a specific input at the GPIO pin. This is different from the normal inputs as interrupts stop the current executing code, to execute an interrupt process before resuming regular execution.
Fig.2 Interrupt Functioning
Implementing SPI in nRF52832
In the following section, I will provide a guide as it has been tested in the nRF52832 Dev Kit. However, the same structure will remain common across all nRF52 devices.
Including correct Headers
Fig.3 Project Explorer in SES
Include the SPI Driver files. This file should be titled, nrf_drv_gpiote.c It is at SDK/integration/nrfx/legacy folder.
Update sdk_config.h File
GPIOTE_ENABLED has to be set to set to 1.
GPIOTE_CONFIG_NUM_OF_LOW_POWER_EVENTS has to be set to the number of pins which have are configured as low accuracy
In main.c File
Header File
#include "nrf_drv_gpiote.h"
Callback Function
static void in_pin_handler(nrf_drv_gpiote_pin_t pin, nrf_gpiote_polarity_t action)
{
//Callback function when the interrupt is triggered
}
Note: There can be one common callback function for all pins or a separate callback function for each pin.
Init Function
static void gpiote_init()
{
//VCE: This block is a one time configuration
ret_code_t err_code;
if(!nrf_drv_gpiote_is_init())
{
err_code = nrf_drv_gpiote_init();
APP_ERROR_CHECK(err_code);
}
//VCE: The below block needs to be called for each pin
nrf_drv_gpiote_in_config_t in_config_1;
in_config_1.pull = NRF_GPIO_PIN_PULLUP; //User defined
in_config_1.sense = GPIOTE_CONFIG_POLARITY_Toggle; //User defined
in_config_1.hi_accuracy = true; //User defined
in_config_1.is_watcher = false; //Don't change this
in_config_1.skip_gpio_setup = false; //Don't change this
//VCE: Configuring
err_code = nrf_drv_gpiote_in_init(13, &in_config_1, in_pin_handler);
APP_ERROR_CHECK(err_code);
nrf_drv_gpiote_in_event_enable(13, true);
}
Note: Do not change is_watcher and skip_gpio_setup in nrf_drv_gpiote_in_config_t . The rest of the parameters are user defined.
Add gpiote_init() to main()
gpiote_init();
Conclusion
With the above steps anyone can easily get started with incorporating GPIOTE.
NOTE
There is another easier method to initialize and auto-generate code for nRF52. This tool, will handle all library additions and code generations for a variety of peripherals like SPI, I2C, UART etc. | https://medium.com/vicara-hardware-university/setting-up-gpio-interrupts-in-nrf52xx-316ebf737ee1 | ['Sanskar Biswal'] | 2020-12-16 07:06:34.810000+00:00 | ['Nrf52', 'Interrupt', 'Electronics', 'Microcontrollers', 'Tutorial'] |
Never Leave the GPU: End-to-end Machine Learning Pipelines with RAPIDS Preprocessing | Photo by Andy Beales on Unsplash
Since its inception, RAPIDS cuML has offered dramatically faster training and inference of machine learning (ML) models through GPU acceleration. However, as any data scientist can tell you, the model itself is only part of what it takes to succeed when it comes to machine learning. Frequently, the best solutions to a machine learning problem involve extensive preprocessing of the input data to promote faster convergence or improve performance, and finding the perfect preprocessing approach requires the ability to quickly iterate through possibilities and test their performance impact.
With the v0.16 release of RAPIDS, cuML now includes a whole slate of new tools to speed up common preprocessing tasks, allowing you to try more preprocessing pipelines faster and narrow in on that optimal solution. Importantly, these new tools mean that for most ML pipelines, your data never has to leave the GPU, eliminating the overhead of device-to-host copies. On an NVIDIA V100 with a local GPU memory bandwidth of about 900 GB/s but a PCIe bandwidth of 32 GB/s, these device-to-host copies can be about 30 times slower than an equivalent on-device copy. With the new A100, GPU memory bandwidth stands at 2 TB/s, making for even faster on-device copies. The increased total memory of the A100 also means that you can have up to 640 GB of data loaded in GPU memory on a single server, allowing even relatively large datasets to stay on-device through an entire ML workflow.
In the following Jupyter notebook, we’ll do a walkthrough of several of cuML’s new preprocessing algorithms and demonstrate the significant speedups of keeping your data exclusively on the GPU.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Before digging into too much technical detail, it is worth acknowledging the tremendous debt of gratitude that cuML owes to Scikit-Learn. Thanks to its gentle learning curve, thoughtful design, and enthusiastic community, the Scikit-Learn API has become the defacto standard for machine learning implementations. It is no wonder that cuML made the decision early on to retain as much API compatibility as possible with Scikit-Learn, primarily trying to offer GPU acceleration to an already well-developed ecosystem of Scikit-Learn-based tools.
Because of this decision, the RAPIDS team was able to benefit even more directly from Scikit-Learn than we have in the past as we developed the new preprocessing tools we are demonstrating here. For the new “cuml.experimental.preprocessing” module, we have been able to directly incorporate Scikit-Learn code (still distributed under the Scikit-Learn license, of course) into cuML with only a small amount of adapter logic to gain the benefits of end-to-end GPU acceleration. So if you use these features in your work, remember that they are available thanks to the dedicated work of Scikit-Learn developers, and don’t forget to cite them.
The Preprocessing Menu
(Photo by Ulysse Pointcheval on Unsplash)
Preprocessing algorithms available in cuML can be divided into five broad categories: imputers, scalers, discretizers, encoders, and feature generators.
Imputers are responsible for filling in missing data based on the data that is available.
are responsible for filling in missing data based on the data that is available. Scalers can be used to recenter a feature by stripping off its average (typically mean or median) value and/or scale a feature by standardizing its spread (typically variance or interquartile range) or total range.
can be used to recenter a feature by stripping off its average (typically mean or median) value and/or scale a feature by standardizing its spread (typically variance or interquartile range) or total range. Discretizers take quantitative features and assign them to discrete categories or bins.
take quantitative features and assign them to discrete categories or bins. Encoders generally do something of the opposite — taking categorical features and assigning some more useful numeric representation to them.
generally do something of the opposite — taking categorical features and assigning some more useful numeric representation to them. Feature generators create new features by combining existing ones.
The entire array of preprocessing algorithms available in cuML is shown below:
Currently-available cuML preprocessors
Details on all of these can be found here and here in the cuML docs. Algorithms marked with an asterisk are currently classified as experimental. The RAPIDS team is looking for feedback and will continue to improve on this code in upcoming releases. If you have questions about these new features or run into issues, please do reach out to us through our issue tracker.
An Example
To showcase a few of these newly-accelerated algorithms, we have created a Jupyter notebook, which walks through their application to the BNP Paribas Cardif Claims Management dataset. This dataset contains a little over 100,000 samples, each with about 130 features, both categorical and quantitative. We chose this dataset both because it is somewhat challenging (many missing values and no information on the actual meaning of features) and because it is a good size to show off the runtime improvements of cuML without making it tedious to run the Scikit-Learn equivalent. The goal of this demo is primarily to show off the process of creating an end-to-end GPU-accelerated pipeline; for a detailed look at maximizing classification performance on this dataset, check out the leading solutions for the associated Kaggle challenge.
Jupyter notebook walkthrough of cuML preprocessing tools
If you would like to try running this notebook locally, you can do so by first installing RAPIDS v0.16 and then downloading the notebook from here.
Results
The final pipeline in our demo notebook included examples of all five major categories of preprocessing algorithms. Below are average timing results for the pipeline with both cuML and Scikit-Learn on an NVIDIA DGX-1, using a single V100 GPU.
Note that times for all of the preprocessing steps listed do not add up to the total preprocessing time because we have omitted some smaller and less interesting parts of the pipeline in the breakdown.
Conclusions
With v0.16 of RAPIDS, it is now practical to perform every step of complex ML pipelines on the GPU, resulting in a significant speedup for feature engineering tasks. End-to-end GPU acceleration with cuML enables us to iterate on preprocessing approaches more quickly and hone in on exactly the right features to maximize performance or convergence time.
For a deeper dive into preprocessing with cuML for natural-language processing, check out our two previous posts on the subject. For a closer look at how one Kaggler has taken advantage of end-to-end GPU processing with RAPIDS, check out Louise Ferbach’s recent article on using RAPIDS for the ongoing Mechanisms of Action competition.
If you like what you’ve seen here, you can easily install RAPIDS via conda or Docker and try it out on your own data. If you run into any issues while these preprocessing features make their way out of experimental, please do let us know via the cuML issue tracker. You can also get in touch with us via Slack, Google Groups, or Twitter. We always appreciate user feedback. | https://medium.com/rapids-ai/never-leave-the-gpu-end-to-end-ml-pipelines-with-rapids-preprocessing-e455cddd281f | ['William Hicks'] | 2020-11-23 18:54:53.324000+00:00 | ['Feature Engineering', 'Machine Learning', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Data Preprocessing'] |
Dependency Injections in Swift | We all as developers dream about writing codes that are hassle-free, loosely coupled and easily testable.
Initially, as beginners, we just try to put a code in place to accomplish the tasks and stay satisfied with it. But as we try to advance further, we may try to approach simpler things in a smart way by compelling ourselves to certain principles.
One such principle is Dependency injection!!!
What is Dependency Injection by the way??
It is just a fancy term used to demonstrate the concept of removing dependency from the object, thereby making the object more loosely-coupled.
So the better way of looking at it is, let the object continue to have its own responsibility without having to create the internal dependencies within it.
Rather dependencies are injected💉 to the object. This concept of injecting dependencies into an object is called Dependency Injection. Dependencies can be injected to an object through any of the below.
Property Injection Initialiser Injection Method Injection
Let us consider a case where the object creates the dependency with itself.
class PersonViewModel {
var person = Person()
}
Here the object PersonViewModel carries the burden of creating a dependency on Person object.
Now let us see how we can inject dependency to person object via a property
class PersonViewModel {
var person = Person?
} let personViewModel = PersonViewModel()
let person = Person()
personViewModel.person = person
Here the class PersonViewModel is now free from creating the dependency and uses the dependency injected via property. This method of injecting dependency via a property is called Property Injection.
Now let us see how we can inject dependency to person object via an initialiser
class PersonViewModel { var person = Person? init (person: Person) {
self.person = person
}
Here the initialiser takes the responsibility of injecting the dependency and with this, the PersonViewModel is fully initialised. This method of injecting dependency via initialiser is called Initialiser or Constructor Injection.
This is the most preferred method of dependency injection as the initializer usually tries to fully configure the object and is used as a dependency that doesn’t change during the lifetime of the dependent object
Lastly, let us see how we can inject dependencies via methods — implementing protocol methods or setter functions
protocol ResourceManager {
func processDetails(for person: Person)
} class PersonViewModel { ...... func setPerson(person: Person) {
self.person = person
}
...... }
Here too just like our previous two methods the dependency is externally injected, where the protocol takes it as a method parameter. This method of injecting dependency via method is called Method or Settler Injection.
So where is Dependency injection really useful?
Apart from creating readable code the major advantage here is it we who inject the dependencies to a loosely coupled piece of code.
This will help in the following scenarios
Help to mock classes — While passing instances of different classes to a chunk of code, it is easy to test the functionality and behaviour as we are injecting the dependency.
Help in unit testing — Unit testing involves testing the output of the code, for a given input and compare it with a predefined value. The modularity achieved by using DI plays a significant role as various class instances can be tested without having to replace any block of the code as the dependency is injected.
So that is basics of Dependency Injection in a nutshell. Hope you enjoyed reading
If you like this post, please click the clap 👏button below a few times to show your support!
For more articles, visit Nestedif Home page | https://medium.com/nestedif/dependency-injections-in-swift-c9244374d4f1 | ['Ashwin Kini'] | 2019-05-02 08:54:04.976000+00:00 | ['Apple', 'Dependency Injection', 'Design Patterns', 'Swift', 'iOS'] |
Focus Your Windows to Block Distractions | Photo by Dane Deaner on Unsplash
On my computer I love the option to have a window take up the entire screen. Not just to maximize it to cover the desktop, but filling the entire screen. As I write this I have only one window visible, no menu bar or icons in the dock. Do Not Disturb mode is enabled. Right now this computer is only capable of doing one thing.
Knowledge work, the kind of work many of us do all day, revolves around writing. For hundreds of years writing was a pretty simple task. Whether it was a letter, a recipe, or a novel, the person writing had a pen and some paper. The paper could be a loose sheet or part of a bound book. The pen could be a fountain pen or a quill or a ballpoint. The essential ingredients for this kind of work were simple.
Typewriters were a new tool in knowledge work, but the essential task was the same. One sheet of paper and one typewriter. The writer pressed on keys, letters and symbols were imprinted on the paper, and that was that. It wasn’t very efficient and if you made a mistake it meant some sort of manual correction, but pen and paper had the same challenge.
Computers and mobile devices changed this. Fixing mistakes was so easy! Press a key and delete the mistake. Sharing the work was much easier too. Email meant sending your work cost nothing and it arrived in an instant.
Technology made things better in so many ways, but it has also changed the equation. Rather than facilitating the basic tasks we do, it actively tries to take our attention away from that task. How many of your phone’s notifications do you really need to see right now? How often does a computer ping take you away from something you are doing in real life?
I don’t know that I have very many answers, but I know that when my focus is on only one thing at a time I get much more done.
It seems counter intuitive to work this way. Computers have trained us all to try and multi-task. They call out that this is the only way to do knowledge work. It must be right!
Remember that long before computers dinged for every email and pinged for every new YouTube video, people like you worked by single tasking. You don’t have to revert to pen and paper or a typewriter to get the benefits that kind of work brings. | https://medium.com/@invisible_man/focus-your-windows-to-block-distractions-8304cba56096 | ['Adam Tervort'] | 2020-07-07 03:21:49.107000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Focus'] |
Apriori Algorithm in Association Rule Learning | Before we go into Apriori Algorithm I would suggest you to visit this link to have a clear understanding of Association Rule Learning.
What is Apriori Algorithm?
Apriori Algorithm is one of the algorithm used for transaction data in Association Rule Learning. It allows us to mine the frequent itemset in order to generate association rule between them.
Example: list of items purchased by customers, details of website which are frequently visited etc.
This algorithm was introduced by Agrawal and Srikant in 1994.
Principles behind Apriori Algorithm
Subset of frequent itemset are frequent itemset. Superset of infrequent itemset are infrequent itemset.
I know you are wondering this is too technical but don’t worry you will get it once we see how it works!
Apriori Algorithm has three parts:
1. Support
2. Confidence
3. Lift
Support( I )=
( Number of transactions containing item I ) / ( Total number of transactions ) Confidence( I1 -> I2 ) =
( Number of transactions containing I1 and I2 ) / ( Number of transactions containing I1 ) Lift( I1 -> I2 ) = ( Confidence( I1 -> I2 ) / ( Support(I2) )
Algorithm in a nutshell
1. Set a minimum support and confidence.
2. Take all the subset present in the transactions which have higher support than minimum support.
3. Take all the rules of these subsets which have higher confidence than minimum confidence.
4. Sort the rules by decreasing lift.
Mathematical Approach to Apriori Algorithm
Consider the transaction dataset of a store where each transaction contains the list of items purchased by the customers. Our goal is to find frequent set of items that are purchased by the customers and generate the association rules for them.
We are assuming that minimum support count is 2 and minimum confidence is 50%.
Step 1: Create a table which has support count of all the items present in the transaction database.
We will compare each item’s support count with the minimum support count we have set. If the support count is less than minimum support count then we will remove those items.
Support count of I4 < minimum support count.
Step 2: Find all the superset with 2 items of all the items present in the last step.
Check all the subset of an itemset which are frequent or not and remove the infrequent ones. ( For example subset of { I2, I4 } are { I2 } and { I4 }but since I4 is not found as frequent in previous step so we will not consider it ).
Since I4 was discarded in previous one, so we are not taking any superset having I4
Now, remove all those itemset which has support count less than minimum support count. So, the final dataset will be
Step 3: Find superset with 3 items in each set present in last transaction dataset. Check all the subset of an itemset which are frequent or not and remove the infrequent ones.
In this case if we select { I1, I2, I3 } we must have all the subset that is,
{ I1, I2 }, { I2, I3 }, { I1, I3 }. But we don’t have { I1, I3 } in our dataset. Same is true for { I1, I3, I5 } and { I2, I3, I5 }.
So, we stop here as there are no frequent itemset present.
Step 4: As we have discovered all the frequent itemset. We will generate strong association rule. For that we have to calculate the confidence of each rule.
All the possible association rules can be,
1. I1 -> I2
2. I2 -> I3
3. I2 -> I5
4. I2 -> I1
5. I3 -> I2
6. I5 -> I2
So, Confidence( I1 -> I2 ) = SupportCount ( I1 U I2 ) / SupportCount( I1 )
= (2 / 2) * 100 % = 100%.
Similarly we will calculate the confidence for each rule.
Since, All these association rules has confidence ≥50% then all can be considered as strong association rules.
Step 5: We will calculate lift for all the strong association rules.
Lift ( I1 -> I2 ) = Confidence( I1 -> I2 )/ Support( I2 ) = 100 / 4 = 25 %.
Now we will sort the Lift in decreasing order.
I know you are thinking we have done all these calculation for what? Believe me I also didn’t get it in first time.
It means that there is 25% chance that the customers who buy I1 are likely to buy I2.
There you go. That’s the Apriori Algorithm where we find the association between different items.
References:
1. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/apriori-algorithm/
2.https://www.udemy.com/course/machinelearning/learn/lecture/6455322#questions | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/apriori-algorithm-in-association-rule-learning-9287fe17e944 | ['Amit Ranjan'] | 2020-12-04 17:15:22.880000+00:00 | ['Unsupervised Learning', 'Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Apriori Algorithm', 'Association Rule Mining'] |
Planning is a privilege | Like many Americans, I have spent the last few days refreshing the news, waiting to learn whether or not a second stimulus check will be included in the Covid-19 relief deal. Will it be $600, $1200, will my student loans come due in February or April? I’d like to make a plan.
Americans wait, while Congress seems to be gambling with our lives. I wonder — have we failed to communicate our needs to the right people? Is compromise between political parties a naive dream? Do our legislators even care?
For some, $600 to $1200 might take the edge off a strapped budget. Maybe they’ll be able to pay a small bill. Get ahead on a debt. Buy a few items they’ve been needing. Perhaps they will sock it away in a savings account. For others, it might mean half a rent payment for a bill long past due, maybe enough money for food for a month, or just enough to cover needed prescriptions. It’s an absurdly small amount of money, and yet we are forced to watch the spectacle of whether or not it will be granted.
When COVID hit, Americans reengaged with conversations about savings. An economy largely dependent on loans and credit, now started to talk about the virtues of having three to six months in savings. We were given the advice to stop paying down debts and start saving, just in case the pandemic went on.
In some cases, the shutdown resulted in decreased spending on commuting, entertainment, and travel. We learned that many were in fact able to save, and that credit card spending declined. In the right light, it might have looked like we were becoming a financially prudent country, contributing to the mythology that severe hardship fortifies and builds character. And while these ideas will always find an audience among bootstrapped mentalities, the truth is much more sobering. During the pandemic, the rich indeed got richer, while those with the fewest financial resources, those who had already been facing the trauma of poverty — were harmed even greater.
The pandemic has been a disruption for most people. We’ve had to alter plans, change our routines, sometimes drastically, over and over again. I’ll admit that there are days when life has felt like a timeless chaos of weeks blending into months. If only I knew what was going to happen next week, or even a month from now, I’d feel better. The pandemic has shown me that the ability plan can be a privilege.
For many Americans, chronic poverty impacts one’s ability to think long-term — to make plans. The survival of now is all encompassing. If you are constantly worried about how you are going to feed your family and pay your rent, you likely do not have the mental bandwidth to plan. The pandemic has stripped many people’s ability to work more hours, get an extra job, to stay afloat, and make ends meet. Now they cannot be certain what the government will do, if anything, to help.
Most parents know that one of the most important resources they can give their children is consistency — the sense that things are secure enough for them to build a footing of their own. The spectacle of whether or not Americans will receive direct payments is disorienting, unnecessary, unjust, and dare I say, traumatizing. Months from now we will emerge from this, resolved that we will make better choices should another pandemic befall us. I’m not sure I will ever forget how fragile our economy felt, how fickle and random our legislators acted, and how insecure we made the most vulnerable feel. | https://medium.com/@niccastillo1017/planning-is-a-privilege-3aea986721b | ['Nicole Castillo'] | 2020-12-19 00:59:19.199000+00:00 | ['Trauma', 'Planning', 'Covid 19', 'Stimulus Package', 'Poverty'] |
The School System Doesn’t Care for Our Mental Health | Five days a week for eight hours a day, I and many other young people from England go to school. It is supposed to be a fun place to be where we can learn lots of useful stuff for life. But the reality is this; they don’t care about us. We just do menial work to make money for old, rich white businessmen. To them we are but worker ants with no emotions.
While it is clear that some teachers go above and beyond to create interesting lessons, we can not overlook the fact that the government has no care for our mental health. You can make the argument that it is not a schools purpose to get involved with us but that is where you are wrong. School may be the only chance that some people have to get away from hostile home environments. They say themselves that school is a safe place to reveal any emotions without judgement (not if you’re a boy because if you are, you are subject to bullying). This is wrong and can be helped but the teachers choose not to.
I know many people at school who have anxiety or depression/depressive thoughts. By simple observation, you can tell something is wrong. These are young people who need help but are not given it.
Finally, I would like to mention that in England, being part of the LGBTQ+ community is often sadly subject to bullying by immature people. They need to be supported by adults; adults at school as at home, they may not be accepted for who they are.
Even though it is not their job or most significant problem, the government/school system needs to address this. | https://medium.com/@jllcips/the-school-system-doesnt-care-for-our-mental-health-25d1ac59ad57 | ['J-Luc Cipieres'] | 2020-12-22 17:30:00.818000+00:00 | ['School Management System', 'Student Life', 'Schools', 'Mental Health', 'Students'] |
Woman of Color | I am deeply uninterested in being a “goddess”
I don’t want you to elevate me in some mythological way
that has no actual bearing on our day-to-day lives
the truth is
sun salutations and prayers to the moon
will not save me from the injustice
ever-present in the banality of working hours.
I want the recognition of being
a whole and complete person in my own right
I want to move through the spaces
that this world offers
with the same entitlement to them
that has been your birthright
I want you to act on the truth
that this is my birthright too. | https://medium.com/meri-shayari/woman-of-color-fdd1a2bb1502 | ['Rebeca Ansar'] | 2019-07-03 04:19:24.268000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Self', 'Women', 'Feminism', 'Equality'] |
Transfer Learning: Using pre-trained models for Image Classification (ResNet50) in Keras | The idea here is to use pre-trained models that already are out there available on the Internet for anyone to use and for a lot of common problems we can just import a pre-train model that somebody else did all the hard work of putting together and optimizing it. For example, if we are trying to do an image classification there are pre-trained models out there that we can just import. We can just use these pre-trained models as is, or we can also just use them as a starting point if we want to extend on them or build on them for more specific problems. This is called transfer learning.
Now we can find more of these pre-trained models and what are called Model Zoos. Model Zoo is a machine learning model deployment platform with a focus on ease-of-use. Deploy our model to an HTTP endpoint with a single line of code:
Another way of using these pre-trained models is through Keras. Keras applications are deep learning models that are made available alongside pre-trained weights. These models can be used for prediction, feature extraction, and fine-tuning. Keras is just a layer on top of TensorFlow that makes deep learning a lot easier. All we need to do is start off by importing the stuff that we need to run our model, so we’re going to import the Keras library and some specific modules from it. For our example we’re going to be using the ResNet50 model here using Keras.
So first we are going to import our image:
Then we are going to load up our model. We are going to import the ResNet50 model that is built into Keras along with several other models as well. We’re also going to import some image pre-processing tools both from Keras itself and as part of the ResNet50 package itself. Lastly, we are going to import numpy because we’re going to use numpy to actually manipulate the image data into a numpy array which is ultimately what we need to feed into a neural network.
So when you look up ResNet50 model description, there are some requirements and limitations to it. For example, your input images have to be 224 by 224 resolution, and also it is only limited to 1 of 1,000 possible categories, so that might not sound a lot to some people. For those reasons, we have to scale it down to 224 by 224 while we’re loading it and we will convert that to a numpy array, and then use the model’s preprocess_input function to further normalize the image data before feeding it in as input as shown below:
Now we’ll load up the actual model itself.
The weights, as shown above, represents that it’s going to use weights learned from the Imagenet data set.
Now all we have to do is, call model.predict (x) and see what it comes back with and also call the decode_predictions() function that comes with the ResNet50 model.
And that’s it. We just have to run and test our model on an image and see if its prediction really works.
To simplify this, we can run a little convenient function to reduce our code a little bit:
Now we can use one simple line of code to classify our image and test it:
Let’s try another one:
And another one:
As we can see our model was pretty accurate in classifying the images, and so far ResNet50 worked well for my photos, but there are other models included with Keras including Inception and MobileNet that you might want to try out if you do want to play with them. You do need to know what image dimensions it expects in the input, or else it won’t work at all.
You can refer to the documentation here for ResNet50 or try some different pre-trained models: https://keras.io/applications/ or you can go https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/keras/applications.
As we can see transfer learning can be very easy, not only for image classifications but also for other types of works like natural language processing. There are also pre-trained models available for that as well, such as word2vec and GloVe, that we can use to teach our computer how to read with just a few lines of code. All we have to do is transferring an existing trained model from somebody else that did all the hard work to our model, which we called it as “transfer learning”. | https://medium.com/@am-nazerz/transfer-learning-using-pre-trained-models-for-image-classification-resnet50-in-keras-e140892180d1 | ['Amin Nazerzadeh'] | 2020-11-10 17:32:37.068000+00:00 | ['Pre Trained Model', 'Image Classification', 'Keras', 'Data Science', 'Deep Learning'] |
Could we afford the pinnacle of public housing? | While the primary reason for The Wife wanting to move house was to have more space (read: away from me), I began to realise that it was a good opportunity to reset some parameters — a “reincarnation” of sorts.
Notwithstanding the charm of the Far End of the Northwestern Territories, it was quite painful whenever we had to venture out, no matter how convenient the public transport network is. Commuting to work takes us at least 1 hour each direction every day — this means that we collectively spend 4 to 5 hours per day as lifeless souls on Merlion City’s world-leading public transport.
With that in mind, we started to identify areas which are closer to civilisation.
The first place that came to my mind was the iconic 50-storey The Pinnacle@Duxton, which is probably as accessible as it can ever get. While The Wife concurred, she expressed her reservation about the price — “Sure very expensive one.”
Looking at the listed units for sale, the price tags next to them were at least S$900,000, with many of them asking for over S$1 million. And these were just for the 4-room flats. Asking prices for 5-room flats were closer to S$1.2 million.
Discounting the price factor, the 4-room flat options would not have given us any more space than what we already had. The 5–room flats seemed to justify the significant price premium on the surface but upon closer examination, the combination of block, stack and level play an important factor in determining whether a unit in The Pinnacle@Duxton has a dazzling unblocked view of the heart of Merlion City.
We could potentially end up paying a lot of money for a mediocre 5-room flat (in terms of block, stack and level) in The Pinnacle@Duxton and not feeling like we got our money’s worth. The alternative would have been to pay even more money for a stellar unit and be much deeper in debt.
A 5–room flat in The Pinnacle@Duxton would have met most of our criteria, except that the remaining lease tenure is slightly less than 90 years. If money is not an issue, this would without a doubt have been our choice, but I would not say that the value necessarily matches the price.
After some discussion, we concluded that we have not reached the “pinnacle” of public housing yet and hence we would have to go hunting for value elsewhere. | https://medium.com/@themoneypit/can-we-afford-the-pinnacle-of-public-housing-5c33a8e3c410 | ['Money Pit Digger'] | 2020-12-14 08:17:09.065000+00:00 | ['House Hunting', 'Property Search', 'Hdb Flat', 'Singapore'] |
Doc Hoff’s BlogBlogProject | “Coronavirus Capacity Issue: The Effect on COVID Patients and My Experience” by Kaitlyn Keane | Photo by De an Sun on Unsplash
I’ve been publishing blogs written by my University of Delaware students since 2013, but this will be the first post in a pandemic. This blog, by Kaitlyn Keane, was written for my Media & Politics class and describes her experience with an emergency-room visit in the midst of an outbreak.
The biggest issue that the Coronavirus pandemic has presented is how contagious it is, therefore stopping, slowing, and tracking the spread is extremely challenging and is only made possible by staying isolated from each other. Because it is so contagious, the number of people contracting the disease is higher than our hospitals are capable of caring for, causing maximum capacity to be reached and hospital workers desperately squeezing in more beds for more patients to save more lives. It is so scary that for some Coronavirus victims, whether they survived or not depended on whether or not there was space for them in the hospital, as one specific New Jersey individual was driven to 3 different hospitals to receive care as the first 2 were “full,” but by the time he had reached the third hospital, he had already lost the fight against the virus. It is completely heartbreaking and devastating, and though many lives have been lost to this issue and cannot be replaced, it is imperative that we as a nation work together to make sure we do not face a capacity problem ever again. I did not realize the severity of the situation until I first-hand experienced it.
I had not really experienced much of anything these past couple of months as I, like most other Americans living in the northeast, have lived a monotonous life in my house. Every day seemed to have blended together, and I eventually stopped watching the news as it made me feel anxious and powerless over the situation. I did not ignore the Coronavirus pandemic, but I just could not do anything about it besides stay home and encourage others to flatten the curve by doing so, so that’s what I did, while cutting down on the amount of news I read and watched. It was not until April 12th that I really gained first hand perspective on just how scary and real the situation is.
I live in a New Jersey suburb just outside of New York City, so Coronavirus hit my region especially hard. New Jersey hit its Coronavirus peak on Easter Sunday, April 12th, with over 4,200 new cases in that day alone bringing the state total to just shy of 60,000. That day I woke up with severe stomach pains that ended up being appendicitis, and the hospital in my area was completely overwhelmed and unprepared to treat any more patients. We pulled up to the emergency room and there was a huge line of about 75 people wrapped around the side of the hospital, all standing 6 feet apart. This was because the waiting rooms had reached their capacity inside, and so had the tents. There were giant white tents that were sprawled out in the parking lots and grass areas of the hospital’s property to create more space for Coronavirus patients. I had symptoms unrelated to the Coronavirus but needed to go into the operating room to get an appendectomy, so proving a negative Coronavirus test was necessary. The rapid Coronavirus test came back negative, and as I was being wheeled into the operating room, another nurse told the nurse who was taking care of me that the operating room was too overwhelmed with Coronavirus patients who were in worse condition than I was, and they had to pick and choose who to operate on. I was given antibiotics, that thankfully worked, but the risk of my appendix rupturing was still there. I was lucky enough to recover without surgery, but I know that many people may not have been, and I can’t help but think of others who visited the hospital during the pandemic needing intensive care but being turned away because the hospitals could not “fit” any more patients.
Even with taking such drastic measures as they filled the parking lots with tents, there were still sick people, both infected with Coronavirus and other illnesses, desperately needing care that were not attended to. Surrounding high school gymnasiums as well as large recreational centers have been converted into makeshift hospitals. While these are all great ideas, these tents should have been built and these spaces should have been converted before the peak of the pandemic given the projected numbers, not during the peak. Though the extent of the pandemic was unprecedented, when infection rates started to really spike in March, it would have been most effective to create additional hospital space at this time. I understand that this is easier said than done, but it is perhaps something we can learn from as it is better to be over prepared than under prepared, as merely resources would determine whether somebody lives or not.
Kaitlyn Keane is a junior with a Communication major and a minor in Journalism at the University of Delaware. | https://medium.com/@lindsayh-7884/doc-hoffs-blogblogproject-coronavirus-capacity-issue-the-effect-on-covid-patients-and-my-a739a030350 | ['Lindsay H. Hoffman'] | 2020-05-26 15:15:01.446000+00:00 | ['Coronavirus', 'Pandemic', 'New Jersey', 'Delaware', 'Emergency Response'] |
Self-Improvement Doesn’t Work Unless Your Mind Does | Self-Improvement Doesn’t Work Unless Your Mind Does
Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash
My sister’s friend is suicidal right now. I don’t say that for shock value, it’s just a situation I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. On top of her mental health, she’s spiraling out of control. She has a sister who also isn’t in a good place mentally and they both live together.
They’ve both been getting cheap plane tickets flying around the country will-nilly. Going out to bars and losing their ID’s only to have something potentially terrible happen to them.
I started wondering why they’re doing this. We went to high school with these girls and they were very successful musicians. It was obvious they’d be great music teachers after they graduated high school. At first, we were hesitant to say anything because we didn’t think it would help. After all, we’re not life coaches.
But then it crossed my mind that you don’t have to be a life-coach to prevent a friend from losing their life. | https://medium.com/illumination/self-improvement-doesnt-work-unless-your-mind-does-afd2bb107b6e | ['Khadejah Jones'] | 2020-12-14 17:26:34.663000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Mental Health', 'Suicide', 'Self', 'Self-awareness'] |
How Virta Health uses Figma to help patients reverse type 2 diabetes | Today we can monitor sleep, count our steps, record our heartbeat and even text our doctors — all with a click. Thanks to intuitive design, individuals are equipped to take ownership of their health unlike ever before.
When building experiences in healthcare, the stakes are higher. If your product fails, your patient fails — and that simple equation comes with risky outcomes. Designing for healthcare is complex — there are human lives on the line.
Meet Virta Health, the revolutionary company that delivers treatment for type 2 diabetes and other chronic metabolic diseases without medications or surgeries. This company is on a mission to reverse diabetes for 100 million people by 2025. Launched in 2014, Virta has already seen jaw-dropping results like:
94% of insulin users reduced or eliminated usage after 1 year
60% of patients reversed their type 2 diabetes after 1 year*
At Virta, design is central. According to David Hatch, Head of User Experience, it has been that way since the company’s inception, “The goal of design at Virta is to make things that allow all types of people to achieve healthy behavior change.”
Igniting the Figma flash mob
At Virta, design is a shared investment across all teams — from designers, marketers, and developers to physicians. The 11 person design team operates as a transparent and collaborative internal hub, touching every piece of the company.
“Other tools we had been using suddenly felt archaic.”
As early adopters of collaborative, web-based design tool Figma — some designers even refer to themselves as “OG Figma users” — Virta Health was designed from the ground up on Figma. Hatch said, “I felt like Figma was the future. The collaborative aspect is where our design culture took off.”
Virta team meeting
Collaboration and transparency are paramount for this young scaling startup. For Victor Kernes, the newest UX designer to join the team, getting up to speed was no challenge. “I was able to dive right in on day one because everything was current and lived in Figma.” (Fun fact: Victor taught himself to design by using Figma. Listen to his feature on Design Details Podcast).
As Hatch put it, “The idea that people could be untethered from the desktop environment made the tool easy to adopt.” Anyone can access, comment and participate in design from anywhere, on any machine. But the collaboration feature is what really hooked Hatch:
“I like to start a project, get something to a certain state and send the link to our UX Slack channel and ask for help. Within seconds I’ll see cursors jump into the canvas, start duplicating and making improvements. It’s impressive to see your team at work together. It’s like a Figma flash mob. Other tools we had been using suddenly felt archaic.”
Consistent design is intuitive design
The Virta design team subscribes to the principle that consistency is king. For example, if a patient is having a health issue, a physician will need to be able to communicate with their patient as quickly as possible through the Virta app. That path has to be predictable and well-known. There cannot be any unexpected left turns in the design and usability. You have to create consistency across everything. If someone is used to one flow, it can’t be different in another part of the app.
“I felt like Figma was the future. The collaborative aspect is where our design culture took off.”
For Virta, components in Figma are the key to unlocking consistent design. Once an element becomes repeatable, a component is created and UI can easily be duplicated which saves time. Victor explains, “Figma makes the process of replicating design much easier.”
Over time, the Virta team has made their component library more sophisticated. Based on the idea that if you build a component well, it allows for the desktop and mobile version to to exist in that single component and be responsive.
“As a designer who is responsible for creating UI patterns, the one thing I worry about the most is breaking consistent design patterns,” Joey said. “With components in Figma, consistency is created by default.”
In Virta’s visual component library today, everything is based off a structural component and then the team uses nested components to create new components from that base.
The team is also taking that principle of basing everything off a structural component and applying that to code to bake in even more consistency.
Empowering non-designers
With design as the heartbeat of the company, Figma is like the blood supply. Figma files are passing through Slack channels all the time. Marketers are adding copy changes, physicians are providing feedback on prototypes and designers are collaborating.
In the recent relaunch of VirtaHealth.com, the design team was tasked with reimagining the site in an effort to bring in patients in a more efficient way. Stakeholders included marketing, product, leadership and developers and the entire project took place in Figma — from ideation to developer handoff. “It offered us peace of mind,” recalls Joey.
With Figma, anyone could see how the project was tracking at any given time. The product team sat with designers during ideation, marketing was able to adjust their own copy and developers were able to move quickly with Figma. That transparency allowed a seemingly big project to get underway fast with their first page going live in just one month.
“Figma results in us doing more showing rather than telling,” said Dian Xiao, a UX engineer at Virta. “We get better feedback and we can iterate with more up to date information.”
Victor and Alex Tran, UX designers who partner with the marketing team, came up with a self serve-model which helps marketing move faster. Marketing has access to templatized Figma files for social images, landing pages and collateral. They can go directly into a file, spin up their asset, tag a designer using comments for illustrations or tweaks and voilà, their asset is complete.
“Figma results in us showing rather than telling.”
According to Victor, it has reduced at least two, if not more, cycles with design and shaved weeks off the process. Joey states, “The most magical part about working in Figma is that it gives non-designers the power to participate in their own content.”
Dian agreed, “It’s great to have someone visually respond back to what you shared instead of using words or Photoshop. People can build on top of your design while you watch.”
On the app side, collaborating with physicians is woven into the workflow. “What’s important is making sure everything is as functional, succinct, compact and dense as possible while still being very usable,” says Joey. He’ll often send Figma links over to a physician for fast feedback or invite them in during ideation to test a flow. The intuitive nature of Figma allows non-designers to easily jump in. Hatch states, “It’s beautiful to see two sides of house come together with one tool.”
Transforming the future of healthcare
At Virta, the company has come together around this shared commitment to design and has seen real impact this company in it’s patients:
“I’ve learned a new way of thinking and a new way of living. I love the way my life is now.” — Wilma, Virta Patient “The most important part of being in the Virta treatment is the app and scale that sends in my weight everyday gives me accountability.” Shirley, Virta Patient
By delivering a consistent user experience, they are positioned to make a real impression on the healthcare industry. As Hatch said, “We want to be proud of our designs but the most important thing is to serve and heal our patients.” | https://medium.com/figma-design/how-virta-health-uses-figma-to-help-patients-reverse-type-2-diabetes-5ba82691c98c | [] | 2018-05-30 15:16:01.478000+00:00 | ['UI', 'UX', 'Healthcare', 'Case Studies', 'Design'] |
Colonial Australia’s Strange Convict Society | Colonial Australia’s Strange Convict Society
How felons built a successful community
The founding of Sydney, 26 January 1788 (Wikimedia Commons)
On a sultry summer day in January 1788, beside the languid waters of Sydney Harbour, Great Britain began a truly strange, unprecedented experiment. It would build a colony using convicted criminals as colonists. Under the plan, Britain would turn Australia into a profitable and strategically-important colony, and the felons who would otherwise be hanged under harsh Georgian penal laws would be given a second chance at life.
James Mario Matra, one of the champions of the scheme, described it as “a most desirable and beautiful union […] economy to the public, and humanity to the individual”. Everyone would win, that is, except for the Aborigines whose lands had been seized for the experiment.
Britain transported 160,000 convicts to its Australian colonies of New South Wales, Western Australia, and Tasmania (then called Van Diemen’s Land) between 1788 and 1868, building a felon-majority society. Throughout the 1820s, convicts outnumbered free settlers to New South Wales three to one. In 1823, convicts made up 58% of the non-Aboriginal population of Tasmania. As late as 1837, 32,000 of New South Wales’ 97,000 non-Aboriginal residents were convicts under sentence, and many of the rest were emancipists (convicts who had been pardoned or whose sentences had expired).
The Australian colonies could not be run like a jail, and the governors London sent to Sydney and Hobart quickly realised they would need to win the co-operation of their disreputable colonists. They built a ladder to freedom, where a convict could earn a ticket-of-leave, entitling them to earn a living, then a conditional pardon, allowing them to live freely in the local district under the supervision of a magistrate. An unconditional pardon could follow.
Convicts not working for the government were assigned to settlers, and if they earned their freedom, could then have more convicts assigned to work for them, creating a cycle. Almost all work in the colonies was done by assigned convicts. Convict labourers cleared land and built roads, convict shepherds minded sheep, and wealthy settlers had convict servants keeping their houses. Educated convicts called ‘specials’, often convicted of white-collar crimes like fraud and blackmail, worked as clerks, civil servants, and schoolteachers. Each convict owed their master a certain number of hours of work a day — usually until four in the afternoon — after which they could work for themselves and make a small income. The system worked. The last major convict uprising was in 1804, at Castle Hill west of Sydney. After that, convicts usually preferred to work within the rules. So the Australian colonies became a functional society, and eventually, a flourishing one. Here are some examples of their success stories.
The Castle Hill convict rebellion of 4–5 March 1804, the last major convict uprising in Australia (Wikimedia commons)
Convict Lawyers
Of all the ways convicts could be employed, practising the law was the most controversial. Still, the Australian colonies initially had no choice but to use them — the only qualified lawyers they had were those who had been convicted of crimes, disbarred, and transported. One was George Crossley, convicted of perjury, imprisoned, pilloried, and then transported in 1799. Conditionally pardoned in 1801, he became a successful businessman, landowner, and lawyer.
Crossley’s moment came during the lead-up to the Rum Rebellion of January 1808. Governor William Bligh, of the Bounty mutiny fame, was locked in a legal dispute with the insubordinate officers of the New South Wales Corps, commonly known as the Rum Corps (Rum was used as unofficial currency in early New South Wales). Bligh, not sure how to deal with the officers, called on Crossley to advise him. Crossley had no copy of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England to refer to, but luckily for him, he was able to borrow one from Simeon Lord, a wealthy merchant. Lord, then one of the most successful businessmen in the colony, had originally been transported for stealing cloth.
Crossley’s efforts on behalf of the Governor went nowhere. Before Bligh’s dispute with the officers could be resolved in court, they overthrew him in the Rum Rebellion of 26 January 1808. The officers of the Corps had no truck with convict lawyers. “Lieutenant-Governor Foveaux has learned, with equal indignation and surprise, that men who have been prisoners in the colony have so far forgotten their former condition as to obtrude themselves into the courts of justice in the character of counsellors and advocates…” began their declaration on the matter. Crossley was found to have broken the law prohibiting convicted perjurers from practising law and was transported again — this time up the New South Wales coast to the coal mining settlement at Newcastle.
But all was not lost. The new Governor, Lachlan Macquarie, who arrived in 1810, was open-minded regarding convicts. Crossley was released, returned to Sydney, and successfully sued his persecutors for trespass and false imprisonment, winning £500 in damages. He lived out the rest of his life in Sydney, sometimes prospering, sometimes in trouble again. As historian K. G. Allars wrote, he was:
“…a colourful if somewhat shady character, not possessing all the virtues ordinarily required of attorneys, but sometimes unnecessarily maligned.”
Convict workers in colonial New South Wales (National Archives of Australia)
Convict Doctors
Sydney’s original hospital was a tent. In 1810, Governor Macquarie began building a new one. It was badly-designed for want of the attention of a proper architect, but fortunately for Macquarie, he had one. Architect Francis Greenway had been sentenced to death in Bristol for forgery. His sentence was commuted to transportation for fourteen years, and he arrived in Sydney in 1806. Macquarie commissioned him to look over the building, and he found it badly wanting. Under Greenway’s direction it was rebuilt and Rum Hospital, as it was called, began taking patients in 1816. Macquarie used Greenway for many more projects, and the architect’s face appeared on the first Australian $10 banknote — an ironic distinction for a convicted forger.
Management of the hospital was taken over by businessman and doctor D’Arcy Wentworth, Chief Surgeon of the colony. Wentworth was not a convict, although this may have simply been a matter of luck. Wentworth came from a wealthy aristocratic family, yet apparently still had a penchant for highway robbery. He was tried and acquitted four times. Facing court for the fifth time, and learning that the Crown had a witness willing to identify him, he volunteered to go to New South Wales as a surgeon in exchange for the prosecution dropping the case. He became extremely successful in the colony, was popular with the convicts assigned to work for him, and kept his convict mistresses in style. His son, William Charles Wentworth, became the dominant figure in colonial politics.
Sydney needed more than one doctor, though, and the criminal justice system gave it two very good ones. One was William Redfern, a young naval surgeon. During the mutiny at Spithead in 1797, he told the men to “be more united among yourselves.” For this remark, he was sentenced to hang. As he was only nineteen, the courts took mercy on him and commuted his sentence to transportation. He earned acclaim in New South Wales for his efforts to improve the health of the convicts. Macquarie recommended that he succeed Wentworth, but the British Government baulked at appointing a mutineer as chief surgeon. So Macquarie made him a magistrate instead. He went on to become a director of the Bank of New South Wales.
The other was William Bland, also a naval surgeon. Something of a volatile character, he was convicted of murder after he shot the ship’s purser in a duel. His sentence commuted, he arrived in Sydney in 1814. He was tasked with caring for convicts at Castle Hill, but after being pardoned the next year established a successful practice and became the doctor of choice for many of Sydney’s leading citizens. He would spend another year in prison for slander, before resuming his business permanently. He was elected to the New South Wales legislature in 1843.
Old Australian ten-dollar note featuring architect and convicted forger Francis Greenway with examples of his work (Wikimedia Commons)
Convict Schoolmasters
The colonial authorities were determined to educate the children of convicts to stamp out any hereditary tendency towards crime. As social commentator Reverend Sydney Smith wrote in England, “nothing but the earliest attention to the habits of children can restrain the erratic finger from the continuous scrip, or prevent the hereditary tendency to larcenous abstraction”. This task fell to Laurence Hynes Halloran, a very intelligent and erudite yet violent and disturbed man whose criminal convictions spanned three continents. He joined the Navy as a midshipman but was jailed for stabbing another midshipman to death in a fight. He founded a school that went bankrupt. He was charged with immorality and then went around England passing himself off as a curate. He moved to the Cape Colony in South Africa to start a new school but was expelled from the colony for criminal libel. Finally, convicted of forgery in England, he was sentenced to seven years of transportation, arriving in Sydney in June 1819.
Governor Macquarie and the leading emancipists recognised his potential value to the colony and he was granted a ticket-of-leave and tasked with founding a school. Called ‘Doctor Halloran’s Institute for Liberal Education’, it was Australia’s first grammar school, or academic high school. It provided a few select students with a pathway to Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Halloran, by all accounts, was a gifted teacher, although he remained in trouble with the law for the rest of his career.
Sydney hospital, built with convict labour between 1810 and 1816 and improved by convict architect Francis Greenway (Wikimedia Commons)
Conclusion: A Convict Country
Appointing felons to positions of power and responsibility was deeply-troubling to nineteenth-century sensibilities. Macquarie had little sympathy for those who felt this way:
“In my humble opinion, in coming to New South Wales, they should consider that they are coming to a convict country” he wrote. “And if they are too proud, or too delicate in their feelings, to associate with the population of the country, they should consider it in time and bend their course to some other country, in which their prejudices in this respect would meet with no opposition”.
Subsequent governors usually (but not always) adopted the same view.
As the Australian colonies became more successful, penal transportation quickly lost its value as a deterrent. A prison official at Newgate complained to the police commissioner in 1818 that convicts were viewing transportation “as a party of pleasure, as going out to see the world, they evidence no penitence, no contrition, but seem to rejoice in the thing.” With the opening of Pentonville Prison in 1842, the British government had a cheaper alternative to sending convicts halfway around the world. Transportation was scaled back, finally ending in 1868.
By then, the British colonies in Australia were wealthy, successful, and democratic. The children of convicts, schooled by convict teachers like Dr Halloran, could now read and write well enough to follow public affairs in newspapers, participate in public debate, and vote in elections by secret ballot. The first modern election in the world, using ballot boxes and government-printed ballot papers, was held in the Australian colony of Victoria in 1856. So the convict society succeeded. | https://medium.com/history-of-yesterday/colonial-australias-strange-convict-society-565449080fcb | ['Adam M Wakeling'] | 2020-12-14 06:02:39.796000+00:00 | ['Society', 'Australia', 'History', 'United Kingdom', 'Criminal Justice'] |
It was difficult to wrestle with the realization that someone or something had to die for me to eat. | It was difficult to wrestle with the realization that someone or something had to die for me to eat. If not an animal, it would be a plant. This piece by Macken Murphy reminded me.
I still remember the revulsion toward factory farming I felt as a child, imagining the dark recesses of my childhood bedroom at night were cages packed so tightly with chickens, they could not move. I still watch the raw predatory passion of hyenas. They will not even wait for their prey to die but will just begin eating, covering themselves with blood. The stakes for them, life and death, are more immediate. And they accept and face what they do. | https://medium.com/illumination/it-was-difficult-to-wrestle-with-the-realization-that-someone-or-something-had-to-die-for-me-to-eat-ecd7268c2b5a | ['Rebecca Sealfon'] | 2020-12-22 17:35:06.121000+00:00 | ['Vegetarian', 'Meat', 'Vegan', 'Veganism', 'Food'] |
The Editing Process That Helps Me Produce Better Stories | Editing — a crucial part of writing. The act of going over the material and making it the best it can be.
I find editing requires just as much, if not more effort than writing. That’s why it’s important to create an editing process that you can stick to even when you don’t feel on top of your game.
An editing process is something that changes and evolves, of course, so it will never be set in stone. Mine isn’t either — but I feel it’s gotten up to a point where it helps me create writing that is good, or at least as good as I can get it to be, whether I’m working on a Medium story or a novel.
So, since it works for me, feel free to steal a little something. | https://medium.com/your-first-novel/the-editing-process-that-helps-me-produce-better-stories-52fceb31950 | ['Maya Sayvanova'] | 2020-04-10 11:56:37.971000+00:00 | ['Inspiration', 'Books', 'Editing', 'Writing', 'Creative Writing'] |
The Five Rules You Need to Know to Keep Yourself From Getting Stuck | The Five Rules You Need to Know to Keep Yourself From Getting Stuck brett fox Follow Sep 3 · 4 min read
I’ve been doing a lot of research on Steve Jobs lately. Did you know that he used to practice his Macworld and product launch presentations around 200 times before the big event?
Picture: Depositphotos
Watch any Jobs presentation and you’ll notice how smooth and effortless he appears on stage. You’ll also notice that, when he does a demo (which is part of just about every Jobs presentation), the demo almost always works perfectly.
On the rare occasion when something goes wrong, Jobs calmly moves on. He never, ever gets stuck.
Rule number one for never getting stuck in business: The more prepared you are the less chance you’ll get stuck.
200 Rehearsals. There’s a reason why Jobs was so, so good, and it’s all the time and effort he put into practicing. The analogy in business is preparation.
I know, from my own business experience, that the more prepared I was, the more likely I could respond to any business situation.
For example, we were in the middle of raising our next round of funding. There were four investors that were a couple weeks away from giving us term sheets. At the same time, we had just about exhausted our funding.
In our board meeting, one of our investors, “Raul,” surprised me by demanding the company be shut down. This was truly a make or break moment for us.
From somewhere deep inside me, I said, “Instead of shutting the company down, why don’t we put everyone on minimum wage. That will give us plenty of time to see if one of the investors give us a term sheet.”
Raul agreed with my suggestion, and the company was saved (three of the four potential investors did give us term sheets). However, imagine if I was stuck? The company would have died right then and there.
Rule number two for never getting stuck in business: Do your contingency planning ahead of time.
The reason I was able to give Raul a solution was all the preparation I had done. I had actually discussed the possibility of being shut down with Tina, our controller.
Tina and I talked through the financial contingencies, and we knew that going to minimum wage would buy us a six week lifeline.
Rule number three for never getting stuck in business: Having a great team around you really, really helps.
As much as I would like to take credit for the idea of going to minimum wage, it was Tina’s idea, not mine. Tina was excellent at her job, and I was lucky to work with her.
It was the same with the other members of the executive team. Adolfo, Dave, Jeroen, and Shoba always had contingencies for their projects.
Rule number four for never getting stuck in business: Yes, you actually do need a business plan.
Part of the reason we were able to have contingencies is we had a business plan. Without a plan, you don’t know where you’re going. And, if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re much more likely to get stuck.
Even if you do come up with an alternative, you’re much more likely to make the wrong decision without a plan.
You won’t know how to quickly research if your idea makes any sense. This new alternative is just something that sounds good in the moment.
Rule number five for never getting stuck in business: Slow down, if you do get stuck on a problem you haven’t prepared for.
Every once in a while, you will get a problem that you haven’t prepared any contingencies for. What do you do then?
Our natural tendency is to speed up our decision making process when we’re handed a problem we haven’t expected. Instead, you should try and slow down your decision making process.
Do you remember the scene in the movie, “Apollo 13,” when the team on the ground has to figure out how design a carbon dioxide filter? This was not a problem anyone prepared for, yet the team solved it.
It was all the preparation, just like Steve Jobs did for his presentations, that allowed the NASA team to solve all the problems they had to solve to get the Apollo 13 astronauts home.
They didn’t speed up, and they didn’t panic. They slowed down and solved the problems. That’s what you’ll do too.
For more, read: https://www.brettjfox.com/what-are-the-five-skills-you-need-to-be-a-great-ceo | https://medium.com/swlh/the-five-rules-you-need-to-know-to-keep-yourself-from-getting-stuck-3ecc23ce3756 | ['Brett Fox'] | 2020-09-04 06:42:02.109000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Business', 'Startup', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Venture Capital'] |
Winter Is Here, But Our Service Won’t Freeze: YEF’s Charity Voyage. | All set to get cozy in your blankets and feel the warmth of the heat inside? Well, you are already wearing a hoodie, right? Oh! you’re relaxing in your blanket right now? That’s great. I have got no words to describe this feeling. But there is another scenario that can’t be described.
We have grown and been better, seen better days, and lived a better life, but some people suffer daily and do not have access to the necessities to make a living — food, shelter, and clothes. To these people, we are the hope that glows in their hearts and gives them the courage to face life.
At YEF, we believe that ‘Giving Is Caring’ and work for the betterment of society. We have volunteers and teams working tirelessly to support and help the people who are in desperate need of any kind of help. After launching campaigns related to women and child education, women safety and awareness programs, and rapid response, we have launched a new project, Project Care A Lot. Here we donate winter armours (blankets and winter clothes) to the people who survive by living gruesomely on the streets. They face a lot of difficulties and are exposed to almost every disease.
During tough times like now, one should maintain perfect hygiene and should stay away from cold. The COVID-19 pandemic has made us realize what our body means, what our body can do, and what can make it stop working. As winter is already here, the chances of getting a cold and falling sick are very high.
R esearch tells us that a cough releases approximately 3000 droplets, and sneezes release an estimated 40000 droplets.
In the eye for a solution to make the people feel better in the winter season, we launched the project. The first step was taken by one of our volunteers, Jyoti Shankar, who distributed some clothes and blankets on 27th November at his locality in Mahadevpur. It was a proud start to our newest project, and it was an unbelievable experience for Jyoti.
“It was a beautiful experience to distribute winter clothes and to see them smile with hope, was a delightful sight to see,” said Jyoti.
The second step was taken by Anushka Gupta, a resident of Gurugram, Harayana, who distributed winter clothes to poor kids the next day. It was a pleasant evening for the kids to wear new clothes and stay warm. Anushka shared her experience and stated her efforts showed positive results and that the kids whom she helped, grinned with joy.
Our Project — Care A Lot
On 9th December, volunteers from YEF went to Shakurbasti in Delhi and distributed blankets to the people who lived on footpaths, near the railway station. It was a disheartening sight to see people beg for basic necessities. We gave them blankets to stay protected from the chill winters of Delhi.
Another volunteer of YEF, Abhinav Kohli, made an effort for the project by distributing blankets and warm clothes to the people who sat on the footpaths. Abhinav distributed these blankets and clothes in Lucknow near his locality.
Recently, with the help of one of our interns, Suraj Bansal, we distributed blankets to kids at DUSIB Shelter Home in Shakurpur, Delhi.
It was a proud moment for us as we successfully distributed winter clothes to people who were in dire need of them. In this modern world, when we see someone suffer, it’s somewhere our fault too that made those people suffer, so we as an NGO are trying to make a better future for the people living in our society.
Project Care A Lot is a mission for us which we’ll complete with great enthusiasm and dedication.
Support us in our mission and help us in our endeavours. | https://medium.com/@yefindia/winter-is-here-but-our-service-wont-freeze-yef-s-charity-voyage-fd77f0fb12e9 | ['Yef India'] | 2020-12-21 13:03:20.593000+00:00 | ['Ngos In India', 'Ngo', 'Charity', 'Donations', 'Charitable Giving'] |
Mister Rogers Is The Good Guy of Legends | Indeed, says Blank, the legends are even more intriguing when they concern people generally thought of as wholesome. That’s what happened to John Gilchrist, who was a freckled three-year-old when he played “Mikey” in a long-running series of ads for Life cereal in the 1970s and ’80s. The commercial, which shows a kid who usually turns his nose up at unfamiliar foods happily enjoying a bowl of Life, turned Gilchrist into a star and the words “Hey, Mikey!” into a catchphrase.
It’s saccharine stuff — but during the 1980s, a popular urban legend about Gilchrist caught fire. The story goes that he died after eating a supposedly fatal combination of Pop Rocks and a carbonated beverage. In real life, Gilchrist is just fine; he’s middle-aged and working in media sales.
The reason celebrities are so susceptible to these legends is simple. They are “intimate strangers,” Blank says. “You can know a lot about them even if you’re not in relationship with them.” After all, he adds, “Every time I tie my shoes, I have a little bit of Mr. Rogers in me.” He’s thinking of the real TV legend — not the creepy character of urban myth. But as long as the star is loved and remembered, Blank says, people will likely tell tall tales about Mr. Roger’s supposed evil — precisely because they’re so difficult to believe.
When you’re bigger than life, especially in such a wholesome aspect, people want to believe the worst about you. It’s telling that we can’t accept goodness for what it is, instead, feeling the need to demonize it in some way. I have a personal experience with Mister Rogers that is the antithesis of what most people feel about him, but knowing the whole story makes a difference. I wrote about it here:
In the end, it seems Mister Rogers really was a good as he appeared, which, in this world, is sometimes harder to believe than fiction. | https://medium.com/@ccuthbertauthor/mister-rogers-is-the-good-guy-of-legends-ab49ce1473a1 | ['Chloe Cuthbert'] | 2020-12-08 21:33:46.266000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Culture', 'Celebrity', 'Life Lessons', 'Society'] |
VeVe Tokenomics: In-app Funds and Token Buy-Backs | The flow of funds within the VeVe digital collectibles ecosystem is integral in maintaining the in-app token supply and liquidity. In order to maintain this pool and optimize fund flows, buy-back mechanisms have been included to facilitate the purchasing of tokens from exchanges. For the user, however, all of these transactions take place in the background, removing barriers to entry and keeping the mechanics of the system consumer-friendly.
VeVe Digital Collectibles
VeVe offers the world a new way to participate and interact with their favourite fandoms, with officially licensed digital collectibles across six fandom verticals: Pop Culture, Sports, Gaming, Film & TV, Anime & Animation, and Celebrities.
The experience is akin to the physical world of collecting, which fans already know and love, and moves the experience into the digital realm-right into the palm of your hand.
One of our earlier articles- Purchasing Mechanics Part 1: How the ECOMI Ecosystem Works- detailed the introduction and use of Gems as the in-app currency. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s important to start there before diving into the fund-flow and buy-backs information below.
Gems + OMI for the Ultimate Collectors Experience
The introduction of the Gem model serves a number of purposes:
They provide a familiar in-app currency for non-crypto users and removes the steep learning curve required when entering the crypto-industry such as wallets, keys, exchanges etc… as well as removing any potential security issues with those steps.
Gems can be converted to OMI tokens within the app and sent from your in-app wallet to exchanges if that is how you choose to use them. This feature will be exposed to non-crypto fans as they dive deeper into the app, and offers an option to take up that learning curve at a later date.
The purchase of Gems via an in-app purchase generates an additional stream of revenue for the company (referred to here on out as ‘Gem revenue’), which is used in the buy-back mechanism discussed below in more detail.
Primary vs. Secondary Markets
It’s important to understand that within the VeVe app, there are two places collectibles can be purchased:
The Store
This is for primary sales. That is digital collectibles and artworks produced and listed by VeVe. Purchases in the Store can be made using fiat currencies and Gems. Regardless of the mode of purchase, any purchase within the Store triggers the same OMI mechanics, and token flows, detailed below.
The Market
This is for second-hand purchases. That is, the Market is where you can buy, trade and sell your collectibles with other users. Purchases in the Market are made with Gems.
Gems are available for purchase within the app as a standalone purchase or can be made at the point of sale using Apple or Google in-app purchases. | https://medium.com/ecomi/ve-ve-tokenomics-in-app-funds-and-token-buybacks-7ea8ac1a19c9 | [] | 2020-12-29 00:54:15.089000+00:00 | ['Ve Ve', 'Ecomi', 'Nft', 'Digital Collectibles', 'Ecomi Updates'] |
New job PSE SALES & SVCS/DISTRIBUTION ASSOCIATE in Florida | Company : United States Postal Service
Salary : $18.49 an hour
United States Postal Service
External Publication for Job Posting 10548911
If this job requires qualification on an examination, the number of applicants who will be invited to take or retake the
examination may be limited.
Branch
Gulf Atlantic District
Job Posting Period
03/19/2021–03/21/2021
This job has an exam requirement. Currently, applicants for this posting who do not yet have an exam score are being
invited to take the exam. Examining will continue until capacity has been reached.
Job Title
PSE SALES & SVCS/DISTRIBUTION ASSOCIATE
Facility Location
OPK-RIDGEWOOD BR
225 COLLEGE DR
ORANGE PARK, FL 32065
CONTACT INFORMATION: Joanna Borger | [email protected] | (904) 622–9397 | MGR CUSTOMER SERVICES
Position Information
Title: PSE SALES & SVCS/DISTRIBUTION ASSOCIATE
FLSA Designation: Non-Exempt
Occupation Code: 2395–0017
Non-Scheduled Days: VARIES
Hours: VARIES
Window training is required after hire, followed by an end-of-training test on which employee must qualify to remain
employed.
Postal Support Employees (PSE) hold temporary appointments for periods not-to-exceed 360 days. Subsequent
appointments after a 5 day break in service may be offered but……….
For more information and Apply : https://www.jobssummary.com/2021/03/new-job-pse-sales-svcsdistribution_52.html | https://medium.com/jobssummary/new-job-pse-sales-svcs-distribution-associate-in-florida-b27e48af6ef4 | ['Hazel Grace Lancaster'] | 2021-03-22 08:01:36.469000+00:00 | ['Employment', 'Team', 'Traveltherapyjobs', 'Workfromhomejobs', 'Company'] |
CEGP slams revival of mandatory ROTC | Students protest to abolish ROTC after the death of UST ROTC cadet Wilson Chua in 2001 | Photo from Bulatlat.com
The fascist state proved its palpable fetish anew to militarize the youth when the House Committee on Basic Education and Culture passed the substitute bill that would impose mandatory ROTC in Grades 11 and 12. The College Editors Guild of the Philippines (CEGP) strongly opposes this desperate move to revive a program that would only legitimize abuses and its perpetuation in Senior High School. Above all, ROTC possesses an incomparable list of decadence and torture inside the school that even led to the death of Mark Welson Chua, a ROTC cadet from the University of Santo Tomas (UST) who exposed the corruption of his comrades in the unit. Despite of this well-known history of legitimizing violence, compulsory ROTC passed through the committee within the first few minutes of the hearing proving it as a done deal ordinance.
The Guild condemns Duterte’s obsession of utilizing the youth as machineries to support its kleptocratic rule. It is appalling to visualize how an entire generation of our students being lured to a totalitarian leader and are willing to maim progressive groups and worst, to harm fellow citizens in pursuit of satisfying their commander’s lust of power.
The Guild asserts that ROTC would only transmogrify our students into exploitable cannon fodder by continuously inculcating mercenary tactics as primary mode of upholding the nation’s sovereignty. What state has to address, however, is its malicious neglect in providing nationalistic, scientific and mass-oriented education that would produce hundreds of thousands of youth who value peace, possess high respect for human rights, and would pledge an unqualified support in joining the people’s struggles.### | https://medium.com/@cegphils/cegp-slams-revival-of-mandatory-rotc-508971691ba7 | ['College Editors Guild Of The Philippines'] | 2019-02-06 03:23:11.886000+00:00 | ['Rotc', 'Philippines', 'Duterte'] |
Why SMS + Chatbots = Game Changer | SMS and chatbots are becoming commonplace in B2C communication. So, what happens when we combine the two?
SMS
Short Message Service (SMS), or texting, has become ubiquitous in our personal lives and 97% of smartphone users regularly use it to communicate. So, it makes sense that businesses have also adopted SMS to connect with customers; 52% of business leaders in North America say it’s already a major disruption in their industry, and there are no signs of this trend stopping anytime soon. The growth in business to customer (B2C) SMS is also supported by customer behavior which shows that 85% of customers prefer receiving text messages over a phone call or email, which contributes to SMS having higher engagement and open rates.
Chatbots
An emerging technology — less familiar than SMS for many — that has been gaining momentum in the communication space are chatbots, which are computer programs designed to simulate conversation with human users through text, speech, and other gestures.
While the word ‘chatbot’ is often used interchangeably with ‘conversational agent,’ chatbots are actually a subcategory of conversational agents/dialog systems. As with everything else in the tech world, the nomenclature can be confusing, so let’s clarify a little bit:
The two categories of conversational agents/dialog systems are task-oriented dialog agents and chatbots.
Conversational Agent / Dialog System — Programs that communicate with users in natural language (text, speech, or even both), through the use of word-classification processes and natural language processing. Dialog systems generally fall into two classes, task-oriented and chatbots.
Task-Oriented Dialog Agents — Programs designed and deployed to help users complete particular tasks, such as helping customers answer questions or address certain problems. These programs are capable of collecting information from users through short conversations. This category also includes the digital agents which have become commonplace in our cellphones and home controllers; think Alexa, Google Nest, Siri, etc.
Chances are, you’ve interacted with task-oriented dialog agents via pop-ups on the bottom right-hand corner of your phone or computer screen — just this morning, I was browsing through my banking app when a message from “Erica,” Bank of America’s virtual financial assistant, asked if I needed assistance.
Chatbots — A mode of conversational AI technology, with programs more sophisticated than that of task-oriented dialog agents. Chatbots are designed for longer, less structured conversations which imitate human-human interaction; they range in complexity but often include the ability to:
Understand context
Analyze emotion
Learn from interactions
Interact when needed: proactively, scheduled, on-demand
The Benefit of Dialog Systems
A study by Oracle found that by 2020, 80% of businesses plan to utilize dialog systems. There are two big appeals to this new technology, especially for customer service use cases. First, is the 24-hour availability of these systems, and the second is that it offers a less costly alternative to employing people for this role. Market research by IBM shows that chatbots have the potential to reduce customer support costs by 30% across industries.
Most businesses that currently leverage dialog systems are using task-oriented dialog agents; this makes sense, considering these programs are being deployed with a certain goal in mind. These goals can range from helping a customer answer a specific question, or improving lead generation by engaging with customers as soon as they land on a page. In these instances, there may not be as much of a need for complex chatbots to be able to mimic unstructured, candid conversation.
SMS + Chatbots = A Game Changer
When we think of chatbots, we often think of the programs embedded in websites or mobile / web applications. But, what if we delivered the human-like intelligence of chatbots through text modality?
Enter: the SMS chatbot.
As mentioned earlier, SMS has been adopted heavily for B2C communication because of its ubiquity, scalability, and effectiveness in reaching customers. AN SMS chatbot combines conversational AI with the ubiquity of SMS — this means that businesses can engage with customers naturally and intelligently through customers’ preferred channel of communication.
Current SMS use cases tend to fall under the following categories: alerts, notifications, marketing and special offers, customer support. Automated conversational experiences don’t make the list yet, but the adoption of SMS chatbots could change that; it’s not far fetched to say SMS chatbots could help shape a world where automated conversational experiences exist at our fingertips.
What would this world look like? Here’s a few examples of how an SMS chatbot can deliver value in these spaces:
Mental Health Service Delivery — The US currently suffers from an insufficiency in mental health services, despite 56% of people in the country seeking help in this space. Access to these services is extremely limited — 96 million Americans have had to wait more than a week for mental health treatments — due to the cost of hiring skilled staff, and the few options for treatment.
SMS chatbots can be leveraged to increase access and limit wait times for people in need of mental health services by engaging with, and conversing with individuals as a therapist would. While this may not be a permanent solution, it could be used as a temporary intervention in the interim while an individual waits for a face-to-face appointment. Compared to the current situation of having no intervention during this waiting period, individuals could benefit from the immediacy of a personalized treatment option.
Personalized Education — How many times in college did you wait outside of a professor’s office for an hour just to ask a few questions? Have you ever needed help during a time that fell outside of office hours? Speaking from experience, these things happened to me a lot. Even with teaching assistants, the limitations of the professor to student ratio is difficult to overcome, especially at larger institutions.
Now, imagine an educational experience where you simply pull out your phone to ask for feedback on your essays or to ask a quick question about how to find the best resources for your research paper. SMS chatbots could make it possible to provide personalized educational experience and deliver attention to students quickly on a one-to-one basis.
The Future of SMS Chatbots
Training chatbots to interact with people in nuanced, natural conversations is a difficult task, and as with any new technology, there are ethical implications that should be considered while building and deploying this tech. But if done right, SMS chatbots offer a huge potential to deliver value in spaces where our experiences are lacking due to access, deliverability, or other limitations to human interaction. | https://medium.com/telnyx/why-sms-chatbots-game-changer-851b4da02781 | ['Risa Takenaka'] | 2020-11-25 17:05:07.199000+00:00 | ['Chatbots', 'Conversational Ai', 'Bots', 'Sms', 'Chatbots For Business'] |
Motion Recording for Oculus Avatars & Game Objects in Unity With VR Labs’ Free MotionTool | Recording Avatars, but why?
One possible reason, as mentioned above, is the need to record a stereo 360° video containing Oculus avatars among other stuff. But being able to record and replay the actions of avatars opens up a whole new world of possibilities. You can:
have a prerecorded avatar that greets the user and guides him through your experience.
simulate different scenarios in environments like classrooms, workplaces, public institutions, banks, hospitals and so on.
use avatars to teach or demonstrate certain actions inside your application
prerecord avatars and replay them as reactions to your user’s actions
use recorded avatars for aiding your development and testing your application
use Avatars as NPCs
There are many more ways in which to make use of prerecorded avatars and in the end it’s up to your own, specific use-case. But all those cases require the same prerequisite, namely the ability to record and replay them. This is where our tool comes into play and gives you value by saving you time and pain.
But why a tool?
Why would you bother using a tool in the first place? If you are reading this article, then you probably know the answer already — Oculus do not have a tool of their own that does that, neither did we find any 3rd party tool that does it. The other, more important reason is, that it’s a bit of a complicated process and it’s lacking transparency. Oculus have created a mechanism to transfer avatar pose information over the network, as the core idea of the avatar construct as such is to give its users an appearance, which improves the social experience and interaction between them. But the way they accomplish this is by writing binary “packets” at fixed time intervals (most commonly 30 times a second) and sending them over the network, where they are read by the other participants or clients, “decoded” and applied to the avatar that represents the person that sent them. The process of encoding and decoding the packets and applying them to some avatar is completely opaque to the developer, so they have to use those packets themselves, whether they like it or not. This might be a bit too “low-level” for many developers, especially when they have other tasks at hand and their time is precious. Based on those packets and a couple of examples from the Oculus SDK, we created our tool, which can store all the avatar pose information for a given period of time in a separate file. It can later apply the stored poses on one or more avatars, thus creating something like “canned” avatar animations.
How to use it?
The tool comes ready with examples and there is a series of tutorial videos, which I encourage you to watch before using the tool for the first time:
It contains different Unity components that you can attach to GameObjects in your scenes and assign them the objects that you want to record or play back on. The tool stores the data in its own .asset file formats. It also has a couple of synchronization components in case you want to record or play back to/from multiple data files at once. If your use-case is similar to ours, i.e. you want to play back the motions over the same avatars and objects that you record from, then you can use our special “Record Director” editor utility. It can automate the setup process entirely, you just need to tell it which avatars and objects you want to record and it takes care of everything.
At the time of writing this article, you can use the MotionTool for recording only in the Unity Editor. You can’t record in a built Player, no matter the target platform. You can though, play back recorded data in a Player.
Share your feedback
Share your experience with the tool, send us suggestions for useful features or improvements, what you would like to see and what would be beneficial to you (for example record-in-player functionality) or report issues or bugs that you have stumbled upon — every feedback is greatly appreciated and will help us improve even further!
We are looking forward to get in touch, you can reach out here! | https://medium.com/telerik-ar-vr/motion-recording-for-oculus-avatars-game-objects-in-unity-with-vr-labs-free-motiontool-1299aee5223f | ['Hristo Zaprianov'] | 2019-05-16 14:59:05.674000+00:00 | ['Oculus', 'Unity', '360 Video', 'Free', 'Virtual Reality'] |
Design considerations for a Geospatial Intelligence App and it should be Qt. | Getting technical
When designing an app these days you follow a mobile and cloud first strategy. The front-end should be optimized for mobile displays and the app is using a backend which is hosted in a cloud based infrastructure.
In the 90’s the “Green Team” developed a virtual machine which was able to run byte-code by providing a no-cost runtime for the most popular platforms. The mascot was named duke, the company name was Sun, but desktop development was no fun. Java offered platform independent APIs and GUI toolkits for desktop development.
They started with the Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) designed as a thin layer abstracting the underlying native operating system user interface. The next toolkit was Swing offering richer widgets and a model view controller (MVC) design. Swing widgets were drawn using Java 2D technology and offered a look and feel based on plugins. By the way “Big Blue” developed a Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) which accessed the native operating system user interface and being used by a famous IDE named Eclipse. Right now, another toolkit formerly knows as Java FX is intended to replace Swing in the near future. But, when you take a look around you do not find many desktop applications being developed using Java and there are various reason for it.
Manager: “Write once, Run anywhere.“
Engineer: “Write once, Read twice (Code Review), Ship thrice (Linux, Mac, Win), Debug many times (Production is evil).”
There is a trend using progressive web apps for mobile and desktop development. Electron allows the development of desktop apps using web technologies. It combines the chromium rendering engine and the Node JS runtime in a somewhat client-server architecture. This reminds me of the weird Applet and ActiveX architectures from the 90’s. Developers were trained to deliver high quality desktop apps using the UI components which were shipped with the operating system. Time to market is crucial, so you had to plug your UI components into the browser.
Manager: “It is exactly the other way round. You just need to use TypeScript with a bunch of cutting edge web frameworks running in chromium and NodeJS to deliver high quality progressive web apps.”
Engineer: “Nope, it is just weird!” — “PWA means Progressive Weird App!”
If you only target the Win platform — in the context of desktop apps there is good reason for doing so, call it market share — you started with the native Win API or the wrapper around it being named Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) in the 90’s. We should not forget about Win Forms which was used by dozens of Visual Basic developers. In 2002 the .NET Framework entered the stage and was offering language interoperability and a common language runtime. Today, if you want to target Linux, Mac and Win there is another option in town better known as .NET Core offering a platform independent API. For native desktop development we know about Win UI targeting Win only and for multiplatform support offering UI forms there is Xamarin. VS Code and MS Teams are being developed with Electron and so we hope that someone from Redmond is showing some love to a multiplatform native lag free UI toolkit.
In the past I only got my hands dirty with some demos for the Mac using the Cocoa framework. It feels like developing for Win by using the MFC in the 90’s and yes Swift is a nice way to replace Objective-C. But, don’t get me wrong I really like this kind of entry threshold which keeps the unexperienced developer away from creating bad designed and unstable apps for the end users.
“Mac is for the cool guys wearing sneakers and big respect to anyone who delivered a production ready app using Cocoa and Objective-C.”
Do we ran out of technologies yet? No, we don’t!
A long time ago in a kingdom far, far away… — if you take a look on a map you will easily see that Norway is not that far away from Germany — a company named Quasar Technologies designed an open source widget toolkit for multiplatform development being based on C++.
“When based on C++ it is, be very skilled you must, young Padawan.”
The first two versions of Qt were only shipped for the Unix and Win platform. Since then, Qt was released for various other platforms targeting mobile, automotive and embedded devices. A skilled developer can easily implement the business workflows using C++ and offer a neat UI by using QML (also known as the better HTML) and JavaScript. Qt is offering a kind of model view controller approach being very similar to the Java Swing implementation. Surprise, surprise both toolkits were designed at the same time. The new Qt Quick controls offer various styling options using color accents which makes designing an app following a visual key a breeze.
“When excellent user experience you reach, implement native look and feel rendering you will.”
With a toolkit being based on C++ there is no automatic garbage collection out of the box. I think automatic garbage collection was first introduced by Lisp in the 50’s — big clap to the Lisp creators. Qt offers a kind of parent child memory management concept. When the parent instance is deleted all the child instances are also deleted and the memory shall be freed. By implementing data complex workflows you will easily recognize that you have to think about memory management and how the data should be laid out in memory. From my personal experience, automatic garbage collection works fine if you have to fight task complex workflows like being used in these enterprise ready webservices architectures. It is not a surprise that Java was and maybe Go is in high demand for enterprise ready webservice development.
Taking a look back at the functional requirements formulated as user stories: There is no such need for automatic garbage collection, now!
“An engineer uses the skillset for knowledge and technical excellence, never for attacking the infrastructure with unnecessary garbage.”
Summary
Our Geospatial Intelligence App should target multiple platforms, should be easily customizable and should not rely on automatic garbage collection.
We are going to show some love to an European Technology Stack based on C++ and we hope it is Qt. | https://medium.com/geospatial-intelligence/design-considerations-for-a-geospatial-intelligence-app-and-it-should-be-qt-de4e3a6775a0 | ['Jan Tschada'] | 2020-10-25 13:56:17.081000+00:00 | ['Architecture', 'Software Engineering', 'Software Development', 'Geospatial', 'Qt'] |
The Vivid Quality of Love | The first time I fell in love it was an exercise in wolfing down saltwater and thinking it was wine. Who was I to know the taste was off? Up to that point love was what I could only see in passing glimpses, like islands outside a porthole. And yet, even after having been in love, I’m still resigned to making guesses as to what it is or what I truly felt.
I’m having these thoughts not even a mile away from the Pacific Ocean at a train station in Santa Barbara, California. The station is lovely with its adobe walls and low-pitched clay tile roof, but it’s overshadowed in beauty by a magnificent living structure to its west, a Moreton Bay Fig Tree.
This Moreton Bay Fig Tree (Ficus macrophylla) does not stand, it bursts. Its several gray trunks are elephants exploding from the ground in full gallop. Its massive buttress roots ripple into wavy pony walls. It sparkles emerald green on one side of its leaves and radiates a warm peachy coral blend on the other. A behemoth, this tree’s canopy stretches so wide a city engineer estimated over 9,000 people could gather underneath it.
There is more than one “Moreton” in Santa Barbara. What makes this one different is its story. In 1876, a sailor arrived to the city’s shore on a windjammer from Australia. With him he had a sapling that was native to his port of departure. He gave said sapling to a local girl as a gift. Harboring deep affection for trees, I immediately envisioned it as a grand romantic gesture. Maybe love is a living thing.
And then I’m ninety miles south in my old office. I no longer see a giant tree. I can only see the delicate nape of a neck, a gentle turn of the head, and her bright probing eyes.
Some Septembers ago, I had been hired to write videos. They had no grace, it was similar to what blares on those small TVs at a gas station. But the actress I worked with balanced out the soul suck. She was natural light in our windowless workspace. As we grew closer, I reminded myself she had a boyfriend and that their relationship was public and observed. But then our conversations became more personal and I started to wonder.
“Do you have a girlfriend?” she texted me on a November afternoon.
I had been buried in my couch watching television. I muted it, sat up, and held my phone like it was porcelain.
“Nope.”
“Why? You’re a catch!”
My heart hit a tempo fast enough to carry me past the compliment and to the question I had wanted to ask for a few weeks.
“Are you really in a relationship?”
“We’ve been having some problems. He moved out while we figure things out. We’re kind of open.”
Her figure promenaded into my thoughts and obscured any warning sign. I dreamt of her long hair: bouncier than inflection in a tone, her laugh: warmer than hills and dales in sunrise, and her eyes, always meeting mine.
On a day in December, I entered her office under the pretense of wanting to share a video.
“Here, sit down,” she said, gesturing to the one chair in her office. “We’ll share.”
And then she landed lightly on my lap. I do not remember what we watched but I do remember her red dress, short enough for me to see where the knee becomes the thigh. I remember the weight of her small frame pushing down to keep me in place when I started to stand up. I remember my cluelessness, unsure whether she was interested in me. Maybe love is warm pressure.
Ficus macrophylla belongs to a group of trees unfortunately known as strangler figs. In nature, their seeds disperse by way of bird flight. The seed drops from the sky and lands on an unexpecting tree. The seed’s roots will grow down around its host, eventually encompassing it. Sometimes it protects the tree from the elements. Sometimes it kills it.
And then in January I turned a year older. She took me out for a drink and gave me a ride home afterwards. Somehow uncertain what her hand on my leg meant, I only gave her a hug before I exited her car. But then a few minutes later a text buzzed.
“I’m still in your alley, doing work.”
She meant answering emails. I think. I took a deep breath and walked back with a starbound astronaut’s purpose. I approached her car. She rolled down her window and I didn’t hesitate. Maybe love is the gamble and electricity of a first kiss.
I sped down Los Angeles’ freeways to get to work the next morning, to get to her. When she arrived, I whirled around in my chair and watched her walk by without a word or look. She only talked to me when it came to time to film. And thus began a fluctuation between flirtation and terse distance.
No woman had ever captivated me like she did. I interpreted these deeper feelings as intonation of a romantic destiny with her. I convinced myself the ebbs were the price I would have to pay for the flow. On a February evening somehow warmer than she had been to me during the day, I tried to return to the crest of her affection and stay there.
“I just want you to know that I’m in love with you.”
“Oh no….We would never be able to do anything in public.”
Her very public and real but not real relationship.
“I don’t care about that, all I want is you.”
“No, no. I need to make things work with him. Please respect my decision.”
But then a few days later…
“Thinking of you.”
But also…
“I’ve bitten off more than I can chew in the boys department.”
But also…
A picture from her bath.
But also…
“If I choose you or him, I lose either way.”
In 2008, a memo was sent to Santa Barbara’s city council. It noted the Moreton Bay Fig Tree was in “continuous decline.” Since then the tree has received regular soil injections to mitigate its root rot. The city’s botanic garden explained to me parts of its canopy are dying. I hadn’t noticed.
“You’re in love with the idea of me,” she contended back on that depressing February evening.
I have questioned, argued against, and agreed with that thought many times over and never in the same order. Whatever it is I felt, she never met me in kind. Maybe love is only love if its middle is equidistant between two points. But even now that thought causes my mind to protest: You did love her. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. Someone can not disqualify your love if they’re not the ones who feel it!
My mind seems bound to this maddening, silent, eternal debate. But my heart…
Another morning, another piece of writing I don’t care about. My shoulders sag and I paw a copy from the Xerox. I drift down a hallway, brushing the corridor like a picket fence, toward the soft burn of string lights that lick the walls of her office. The building’s air conditioner is frosty, and she is nestling inside her winter coat. I give a tight-lipped smile. She looks at me and decides to make small talk. My jaw stops clenching. In a while, I notice something new.
“Your hair looks different.”
“New extensions.”
She lifts her hair. I read the small rises on the side of her head with my fingers like braille.
She wraps her arms around my waist like a harness, supporting the weight.
March came, and she put in her two-weeks notice. I found out she was leaving in a meeting. I haven’t seen her since her final day and it’s been years since we’ve corresponded. The gaps in between my thoughts of her have become canyons. My feelings for her are now artifacts: frayed and no longer used. But it must mean something that they have not vanished. Maybe love is a sound that can grow faint, but never stops echoing.
It feels like I keep acquiring puzzle pieces but never the picture on the box. Maybe love is only recognizable by its shape, a silhouette on a wall, the more vivid quality opaque. Or maybe I’m exhausting myself by expecting exacting explanation. Maybe love is a constellation: random distant lights we ascribe meaning to. I saw her and I conjured love. I see the Moreton Bay Fig Tree and I conjure an act of courtship. And this is where I confess I’m certain it wasn’t.
It’s true that the tree was given by a sailor to a local girl. But the limited historical record indicates that this local, unnamed girl was quite literally a girl when she received it. Her family wound up moving away and re-gifted the tree to her friend, a 9-year-old child named Adeline Crabb, who moved it to its present-day location. It might have been a loving gift, but was almost assuredly never a romantic one. I wish I could peer through the leaves and find a card like it was a bouquet.
Regardless of the truth, I’m still stuck on a line: what I want to do when I meet the next woman I will love. I do not know who she is or where I will meet her, but I know she will be someone who I would want to give a tree to. And unlike this sailor’s gift, mine will come with a note.
I’ll tell her that while love remains mysterious to me, I have my theories. I would speak to the hard-earned experience that a life alone is a ship that’s slowly sinking. I would suggest that if that’s true, love must be a liferaft. That it can save those brave enough to step in and start rowing, but that both people must row. That those aboard must give energy to their love if they want to land ashore.
I’d write this guesswork to the woman I love. I would ask her, “Won’t you row with me?” And I wouldn’t be afraid when she said yes. | https://medium.com/@willlerner/the-vivid-quality-of-love-fa1919799435 | ['Will Lerner'] | 2020-12-24 00:31:46.839000+00:00 | ['California', 'Love', 'Santa Barbara', 'Trees'] |
How to create/import/manage wallet in Magnum | How to create/import/manage wallet in Magnum
Creating a wallet is incredibly simple and can be done either through the Dashboard or in the login window. If you’ve never used Magnum, you will be offered to create a wallet immediately upon opening the app, after which you will have to set a password and save your mnemonic phrase.
And when in the Dashboard, you can find the “Add wallet” button on the left side panel or in the “My Wallets” tab. Either way, you will be presented with a choice of the cryptocurrency to use, after which your wallet will be generated based on your mnemonic phrase.
How to import your existing wallet into Magnum?
If you know a wallet’s private key or mnemonics phrase, then importing it to Magnum will not pose any challenge. Once you’ve created a Magnum Wallet, find “Add wallet” on the Dashboard, go for “Import mnemonic phrase” or “Import private key”, select the cryptocurrency and enter either the private key or the mnemonics phrase.
How to send/receive transactions using Magnum?
The most basic wallet operations in Magnum are performed intuitively. To perform a transaction, select the wallet you wish to send from, enter the amount and provide your password. You can also manually set the network fee to speed up the transaction or save some coins. If you wish to receive a payment, you can copy the address from the wallet’s page or make use of the QR code that is available right beside it. | https://medium.com/@Magnum_Wallet/how-to-create-import-manage-wallet-in-magnum-3411deb7256e | ['Magnum Wallet'] | 2019-09-10 14:13:48.865000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Wallet', 'Bitcoin', 'Blockchain', 'Crypto'] |
Has politics taken over our lives? And is that necessarily a bad thing? | Has politics taken over our lives? And is that necessarily a bad thing?
I grew up in a family where we all seemed to share very similar political beliefs. I come from a family of highly educated individuals, all of which have offices sprinkled with golden frames that encase a beautiful sheet of fine paper decorated with calligraphy that reads ‘PhD’ or ‘MD,’ some might have both. Given that, a part of me thought that if such well educated individuals thought a certain way, that it was imperative that I followed that too. Therefore, our Christmas dinners went beautifully; my grandad ranting about free healthcare and the constitution, and everyone else clutching onto their conservative beliefs and nodding, including myself (but not for long).
My family has always been rather close really. The lack of political dining table debates must have had some effect on that. It wasn’t until I slowly began to realize that I could develop my own political beliefs by educating myself, instead of conforming to my family’s ideas, that family dinners became rocky to say the least. Agreement between family members turned to full blown debates and my grandad pulling out his pocket constitution. Yes, he carried a pocket sized book that dictated the entire constitutional law. Strange to say the least, but I must admit, slightly admirable towards the dedication.
It’s strange how a belief about a law, a political figure or movement has shaped our lives. The truth is, today’s society has made us believe that political beliefs and morals are synonymous, and as much as I hate societies ideas, I have to admit that they’re not necessarily wrong. Nowadays when I meet someone, one of the quickest things we may begin to discuss are political movements, specifically the Black Lives Matter movement. One of the things I have heard the most is, “if you don’t support BLM, it doesn’t inherently mean you’re racist,” argument (you are). A persons political views are so incredibly telling and it’s so sad. When did our lives become so insanely oriented towards politics? When did our family relationships become dictated by it too? It’s only a sign of just how divided we have become, but is that inherently a bad thing?
As much as my family will continue to bother me about this, politics has taken over our lives and says a lot about people, and that’s not a bad thing. We need to continue these debates, informing ourselves and growing as people. Political views are sadly very telling, but I guess it can be a good definition of character. Don’t get me wrong, just because we support different candidates, doesn’t mean you’re a terrible person. At the end of the day I still adore my family, but really it’s about what you’re supporting beneath the facade of that candidate.
That was a bit of a ramble I guess, but follow for more random midnight rants. | https://medium.com/@aldybgg/has-politics-taken-over-our-lives-and-is-that-necessarily-a-bad-thing-fe6578fc88aa | ['Anna Balarezo'] | 2020-12-19 18:56:37.204000+00:00 | ['Social Movements', 'Society', 'Politics', 'Protest', 'Family'] |
Securing 50 Million in Smart Contracts. Lessons Learned | Toto, I Have a Feeling We’re Not In Kansas Anymore
Intro
I would like to share the important lessons I have learned writing smart contracts in solidity to protect the value locked in them. Paranoia, testing, giving yourself space to think and continuous feedback from auditors are mantras you must adopt if you want your contracts to survive the treacherous territory that is the dark forest. You might not sleep well when your smart contracts go live on mainnet and have a significant amount of money locked in them, but it’s better to be prepared and know the risks than walk into this blind.
Paranoia
The first lesson is to stay paranoid and think about how you would go about breaking this software if you were an adversary. In order to survive, think from first principles. You must spot not only the obvious attacks that allow someone to drain money through a simple function call, but also think about how someone could manipulate share prices using flash loans or other means to extract value in an unintended manner. If you have the resources, ensure one person’s role on your team is to think about how to break your code. Code reviews should be a regular part of development with engineers thinking through how they can break code and carefully examining the assumptions that went into the software that was created. If you have time, take a day to write out all of the external functions that can change state and think through all of the ways that someone could remove funds without authorization. Assume nothing when you are trying to break your code and try all paths.
Testing
You can never invest enough in testing, ever. It would be easy to just ignore this and say that the auditors will catch issues, but the reality is, auditors miss large vulnerabilities every day, so that isn’t really something you can put all your faith in. Instead, take personal responsibility for security and test the team’s code as much as you can. You should write tests that not only follow the happy path, but also ones that try the sad path and use restricted functions or features from an unauthorized account. Your testing strategy should have a multi-pronged approach. Integration testing is by far the most valuable type of test you can do as it simulates what will actually happen in production. Integration testing is even more powerful now that most blockchain test frameworks allow you to fork mainnet to simulate what would actually happen if your smart contracts ran on mainnet at a particular point in time. Unit tests are also helpful, but because they will need mocks to test complex functions, they might not be as useful as the integration tests. Other static and dynamic analysis tools should be run at regular intervals such as slither which can detect all sorts of different vulnerabilities.
Time
Most startups are trying to ship as fast as possible to avoid obsolescence and secure market share. However, developing secure software is a process and if you skip steps, it is unlikely that things end well. Taking a bit longer to do proper testing and auditing is a small price to pay compared to the financial and reputational damage that occurs when code gets hacked. If a piece of code looks fine but you aren’t ready to approve it for some reason that you can’t put a finger on, give it some time and come back to it. Trust your instincts, I have caught critical bugs by stepping away from a code review and then coming back later and questioning all assumptions from the ground up.
Audit(or)s
If you aren’t thinking about engaging auditors or at least other engineers external to your team to do code reviews, you probably shouldn’t be thinking about working with smart contracts in the first place. Auditors are the last line of defense between your code leaving your local or testnet environment and going into the real world. Auditors should be engaged throughout the software development life cycle so that they have a good understanding of the system and can give relevant and contextual feedback on updates and new code.
We’re Not in Kansas Anymore
Ultimately, even with all of this preparation and process, you will have to take a leap of faith and hit the deploy button. Once you’ve gone through all of the testing, auditing, code reviews, code re-reviews, you will need to release the code into the wild. At this point, you have done everything in your power to avoid hacks by testing, emphasizing code reviews, and getting your code reviewed by external parties. We’re not in Kansas anymore. Writing smart contracts carries lots of risk, so buckle up, enjoy the ride and hit the deploy button with confidence! | https://medium.com/@elliotfriedman3/securing-50-million-in-smart-contracts-lessons-learned-32cddc0225a3 | [] | 2021-07-23 06:23:17.182000+00:00 | ['Solidity', 'Smart Contracts', 'Ethereum', 'Defi', 'Smart Contract Security'] |
Cleo Capital Thesis: The Future of Income | Cleo Capital is a thesis-driven fund, focused on 3 key areas: The Future of Income, Complicated Consumer, and Decentralized Enterprise. We primarily lead rounds at Pre-Seed, working with amazing founders from day zero. This article is part of a series explaining our thesis areas and the specific markets we are interested in.
We invest in startups that make it easier for people to earn and have sources of income.
The way people earn money is changing
W2-only income represents a shrinking part of US earnings. The Monday-to-Friday 9-to-5 grind is no longer the main source of income for most Americans — and it’s likely this trend will continue to rise over the next few years. It’s no secret why: the quality of jobs has been declining over the last 40 years. In many cases, a full-time job doesn’t pay a livable wage, and people are forced to pick up additional jobs in order to make up their income.
The current full-time job setup doesn’t work for millions of Americans for a number of reasons:
Lack of network : Many industries are word-of-mouth focused when it comes down to hiring, and individuals require a large professional network in order to land a job. Those who don’t have this network are pushed to the sidelines.
: Many industries are word-of-mouth focused when it comes down to hiring, and individuals require a large professional network in order to land a job. Those who don’t have this network are pushed to the sidelines. Geographical barriers : It’s no secret that jobs tend to be more plentiful in big cities as compared to smaller towns. A McKinsey Global Institute study shows that this gap will only widen, with rural areas losing even more jobs. If you don’t live in a big city, your chances of finding a meaningful full-time job are about to decrease even further.
: It’s no secret that jobs tend to be more plentiful in big cities as compared to smaller towns. A McKinsey Global Institute study shows that this gap will only widen, with rural areas losing even more jobs. If you don’t live in a big city, your chances of finding a meaningful full-time job are about to decrease even further. Need for flexibility: The majority of individuals no longer want the strict 5-day structure that comes with many full-time jobs. In fact, Forbes notes that 80% of women and 52% of men need flexibility in their jobs.
We seek a solution to the income problem
Cleo Capital’s aim is to create economic opportunities for individuals by unlocking new forms of income generation. Everyone needs money to live — but not everyone needs to earn that money in the same way. Our fund looks to raise the economic floor so that all individuals can earn an income in a way of their choosing in order to make a livable wage in a meaningful and rewarding way.
The labor market is already changing, and has been changing for the last decade. If only 1 in 3 Americans work full time, what are the other 2 up to? The gig economy, which includes temp workers, on-call workers, freelancers, and independent contractors, includes about 36% of US workers. If the gig economy continues its growth trend, it will include over 50% of the American workforce by 2027.
Those involved in the gig economy are finding it an effective way to earn an income. In fact, according to Upwork’s comprehensive Freelancing in America survey, 90% of freelancers believe that the outlook for the gig economy will only improve as time goes on. Not only are freelancers and contractors making the kind of income they seek, they are also living the lifestyle they want. A McKinsey study notes that freelancers are the most satisfied group within the workforce.
Related and overlapping with the gig economy is the creator economy — individuals that make things to be sold, in the simplest terms. Their products can range from YouTube videos to infographic content to influencer posts on social media. Over 50 million people are part of the creator economy worldwide; however, only about 2 million of those people earn the equivalent of a full-time income from their pursuits. The creator economy needs a middle class, as the Harvard Business Review investigates. In order for more creators to earn a sizable income from their efforts, they need solutions to create more work, share their work, find their audience, and discover passive forms of income.
What do people need to earn an income without having a full-time job?
In order to support non-W2 workers as they grow in number and income potential, we seek to create platforms and tools that provide support to the individual as opposed to the enterprise.
How can a solution enable individuals to produce work, find work, connect with those who offer work, or share their work with their target audience?
Rent the Backyard, for example, enables individuals to earn a passive income by using space they already have. Using this platform, people who have outdoor space can build a small, sustainable home, rent it out, and earn an income. Rent the Backyard provides full support and guidance through the building process so individuals do not need to have any construction or home-building experience.
On the other hand, Lunch Club is an AI-powered professional network that helps people make important contacts. Users add in their background and professional goals, and the platform checks in each week to see if they are interested in making new connections. If they are, the AI sets up 45-minute one-on-one conversations with others who appear to be valuable connections.
Some solutions, on the other hand, enable individuals to complete specific tasks in a streamlined and efficient way. They can be sector specific or function specific. StyleSeat, for example, is a tool specific to the beauty industry. It makes it easy for potential customers to discover salons and book appointments. Tools that ease the burden of everyday business processes, such as incorporation, invoicing, bookkeeping, scheduling, communication, and collaboration are what workers in the gig economy require in order to earn income in a way that works for them.
Another example is SoleVenture. Workers can manage back-office tasks that are integral to running their own business, such as managing savings and tracking money, through a series of tools and services, all from one single platform.
Cleo Capital: Request for startups
In order to fuel the future of income and the many ways individuals can earn a wage, we are looking for the following types of startups. However, if your startup doesn’t fit into any of the categories listed below but can still support the gig economy and other non-traditional ways of earning an income, we are interested in learning more.
Work marketplaces: Connecting workers with those looking to hire them or buy from them. How can a marketplace solve the bootstrap problem and provide value to workers?
Connecting workers with those looking to hire them or buy from them. How can a marketplace solve the bootstrap problem and provide value to workers? Products utilizing existing assets: We are looking for ways to enable individuals to earn incomes using assets, capabilities, and resources they already have available to them.
We are looking for ways to enable individuals to earn incomes using assets, capabilities, and resources they already have available to them. Used goods economy: Can your product help connect sellers and buyers of used cars, clothes, jewelry, real estate, furniture, appliances, and more?
Can your product help connect sellers and buyers of used cars, clothes, jewelry, real estate, furniture, appliances, and more? Creator economy: We are looking for community-building applications or new monetization models that benefit creators of all kinds.
We are looking for community-building applications or new monetization models that benefit creators of all kinds. New income opportunities: How can a product better align incentives with an employer in order to create additional channels of income?
Join us in supporting the changing future of income. Get in touch at cleocap.com.
Byline: Anam Ahmed | https://medium.com/@cleocapital/cleo-capital-thesis-the-future-of-income-a080d89a92bb | ['Cleo Capital'] | 2021-04-23 17:39:56.453000+00:00 | ['Future Of Income', 'Future Of Work', 'Gig Economy'] |
Me versus We | Me versus We
It has been a few months since my last discussion on culture. To recap, the difficulty I have with discussing culture is the inability of people to describe it. As Kroeber said “Despite a century of efforts to define culture adequately, there is no agreement among anthropologists regarding its nature.”
Margaret Mead wisely noted that “Language is a discipline of cultural behaviour” and that’s our open door because any model cannot be complete and true within itself (Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem). In other words, if language is part of culture then you’ll never going to be able describe it within the bounds of language itself.
It was this thinking that led me to mapping culture and the previous “Off the beaten track” posts.
Part I — What culture is right for you?
Part II — Exploring culture
Part III — Exploring Brexit
Part IV — From Values to Rituals
Part V — Exploring Value
Part VI — Embedded in memory
Now since then, I’ve started slowly using these culture maps. As you would expect, a couple of things have therefore changed. All maps are imperfect representations of a space and it’s through use and exploration that we develop more “useful” maps. No surprises there.
The first major change were the anchors of the “many” and the “few”. These always caused a lot of debate, they seemed highly political and created difficulty in terms of people identified with one or the other but in reality they had a bit of both. A simple solution was to change the terms to “We” and “Me”. The other change was to note that behaviour was not a single thing but a pipeline of evolving components. Hence with this in mind, I bring you the new and improved culture map — until, of course, we find a better one.
Figure 1 — New and Improved Culture Map
We and Me
The “We” and “Me” anchors enable me to describe how we have elements of self interest and elements of collective interest. In terms of “We” then this is normally described through the “collective” and its control over our lives. This in turn is connected to our sense of belonging (otherwise we reject the control) and the success of the collective including the behaviours of the collective.
In terms of “Me” then that seems to be connected to the individual and expressed through our agency (i.e. our control over the environment around us), the structures that we exist within and our behaviour. This “We” and “Me”, I’ve tried to highlight in figure 2.
Figure 2— “We” and “Me”
This distinction felt more appropriate, more meaningful. As with all maps, you cannot prove the space (it will change anyway with time) but instead we can measure how useful it is in aiding our understanding of the space. And then came along COVID-19.
This debate and distinction of “We” versus “Me” seems to be playing out at a national level in particular with responses to COVID-19. In China, a more Confucian culture with a stronger emphasis on “We” then the state has imposed that control, has emphasised that collective “belonging” in the battle against the virus and individuals have reacted to modify their behaviour. There has been a strong emphasis on the value of individuals over the economy (people over market) and as with any collective, its future success in competition with others will become embedded in memory. In other words, China could emerge as the new world leader if it is seen as more successful in combating the pandemic. Furthermore, if this is true, then the idea that China values people over markets (or more crudely — people over profit) and that such a value should be more universally accepted could well become embedded in the memory of everyone.
In contrast with the US, there is a slightly different picture. In the past US politicians have talked about “togetherness” but what is meant by “together” is not uniform. For some, together describes more of a collection of individual responsibilities i.e. the market of many Me’s where the overall effect is caused through aggregation. For others, “together” describes a collective responsibility i.e. “We” as a group needs to achieve something. This same sort of distinction appeared when I was investigating Brexit — when people talk about “together”, some mean a collective “We” whilst others mean a market of “Me”.
The US approach under Trump seems to be more market driven, more individual, more concerned about the rights of “Me” and the market of “Me” whilst describing this as facing the challenge together. There is real emphasis on the value of “the market” over “the people”, with ideas from how the old (normally meaning other “old” people and not the respondent or their family) should sacrifice themselves to save the market
or how the market will solve the problem and that we must protect the market and individual’s rights. There’s even discussion in some quarters whether the “collective” cures (lockdown, isolation, Government intervention) are worse than the disease itself and hence it should be left to the market and voluntary groups despite individualistic behaviours such as hoarding. As I said, it’s not uniform, there is a clear schism with US political circles.
I’m also not saying it’s the morally right or wrong choice though I have strong views on this. That said, how well the approach works (i.e. its success) will influence the standing of the collective (i.e. the US itself) and its values. If the approach succeeds then the standing of the US will rise and this value of “market over people” will become twinned with success and embedded in the memory of everyone. If, however, the US fails to manage COVID-19 then its standing against China could fall and this value of market over people will become embedded as a failure in the memory of everyone.
The latter leads to darker paths unfortunately. From the map above, a collective’s success requires its value to diffuse and become accepted. There are many enablement systems in this process, one of which is propaganda. If this map is a reflection of reality then it is likely that if the US is failing then we will see increasing and more aggressive use of terms like “China virus”, “Wuhan virus” and other attempts to deflect the cause of failure rather than admission that the collective’s value was wrong.
There is also a longer term implication, assuming that COVID-19 isn’t over by Easter or three months but more like 18 months and this change is to do with behaviours becoming embedded and a new isolation economy forming. However, for the time being, I’m interested in this distinction of “We” and “Me” and so we will leave other effects until later.
Thoughts and comments welcome, references to papers on the subject — particularly those that can help me improve the map. I suspect once we get through the pandemic, there will be a lot of discussion and reflection on this topic of “We” versus “Me”. | https://medium.com/@swardley/me-versus-we-975f518b8219 | [] | 2021-03-18 15:29:45.656000+00:00 | ['Pandemic', 'Exogenous Shocks', 'Culture', 'Mapping'] |
Facing My Shame | I was able to hide my excoriation disorder pretty well until my late twenties. I lived alone a lot, or with people who were frequently not home. As soon as they were gone, I’d run to the bathroom and start digging into my face. I’d keep lights low, or sit a certain way so no one could see where I’d been doing the most picking. If someone asked why my face was so blotchy and red, I’d make an excuse. I have sensitive skin, so it wasn’t too hard to come up with something that sounded like a reasonably rational explanation.
Then, in April 2005, I met the man who would become my husband.
Excoriation disorder isn’t one of those things that comes up over dinner. Or ever, if you can help it. Literally no one in my life up to that point knew what I’d been dealing with. My future husband was already taking on someone with dysthymia and two anxiety disorders — what more could I ask from him?
I don’t remember exactly how he discovered my disorder, not the way I remember being a ten-year-old staring into the bathroom mirror and pressing my fingernails into my face for the first time. But when you live in a small apartment with your romantic partner for many years, it becomes almost impossible to hide. I tried to explain it to him but left out the OCD part. It felt like too much. “Stop picking your face,” he still admonishes me, as if in the past three decades the only thing preventing me from doing that is a stern lecture. If only it were that easy. This being America, I can’t afford more of the cognitive behavioral/exposure therapy that worked so well for my anxiety disorders. And I already know that my primary care physician will insist on my going to a psychiatrist for OCD treatment rather than prescribe something herself. I have yet to find a psychiatrist in this city who charges less than $250 an hour and takes insurance. (I did my previous round of therapy through an adult anxiety clinic at a local university.)
So, as many of us with mental illness, I’m fighting this one alone. | https://medium.com/swlh/facing-my-shame-df6e80cd1b41 | ['Jennifer Loring'] | 2019-05-21 12:51:39.816000+00:00 | ['Mental Illness', 'Ocd', 'Dermatillomania', 'Mental Health'] |
What Is Growth Hacking? | Growth hacking is just an umbrella term that focuses on various strategies used in the digital marketing field. It is often used for early-stage startups that want massive initial development with small budgets and in a short amount of time. The field was actually coined by Sean Ellis.
What Are Growth Hackers?
A growth hacker uses low-cost, creative strategies within the digital marketing field to help gain and retain customers. Sometimes, a growth hacker may be referred to as simply a marketer, but don’t let that fool you as they’re not just marketers. Anyone involved in the process is considered a growth hacker.
The growth hacker focuses on customer acquisition, product-market fit, data, and various growth hacking strategies that can be used in the long term. These growth hacks concentrate on the field in which they’re used, the user base, and analyze all data gathered in-depth. In short, they are a person whose true north is growth.
How Growth Hacking Works
The digital marketing field focuses on successful growth without spending too much money. It’s important to find the right growth hack to figure out why growth happens and how to ensure that it is going to work in each and every scenario it is applied to.
Most startup companies, regardless of the field, utilize the pirate funnel from Dave McClure as their growth recipe. These include acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral. However, they also have to raise awareness about the brand, focus on analytics, and ensure that they have free reign when growing their name. Long-term growth hacking is also needed to help the marketing tactics get started off right.
The most important and first thing is to get visitors and traffic to the website. Once that happens, the visitors have to convert to users, and they must be retained. Ultimately, the best way to do this is to be a pioneer in the field.
How to Start the Growth Hacking Process
It seems easy at first, but organic methods might not be enough. Businesses must create a product and test it extensively to ensure that people like it and are willing to buy it. This is important as it helps obtain the data needed to understand the persona of the buyer, which thus helps target the right strategies.
Product development is key, but so is success measurement. A/B testing is crucial, along with a number of other conversion techniques.
Strategies Used
There are many strategies that you can use when it comes to growth hacking, the most essential one is having the growth hacking mindset, being able to look at any platform and coming up with ways to growth hack it then there is the strategy of using pre-existing growth hacking tools on the market like expandi (for LinkedIn automation), Lemlist (for email automation), vice versa and then there is the growth hacking mindset.
Growth Hacking Examples
Examples of growth hacking within any field can include Hotmail, DropBox, and Airbnb. For example, Hotmail allowed people to add a line to their outgoing email, which encouraged the new user to sign up.
Conclusion
Many companies want to help to get the right data and focus on growing their business. One of the Worlds best growth hacking agencies is WEAREGROWTHHACKERS, they makes use of the right growth hacking tools and strategies that gets you results for peanuts when compared to traditional marketing. For more information check out: (www.wearegrowthhackers.com) | https://medium.com/@kingpublications5/what-is-growth-hacking-4cdccbc51b82 | [] | 2020-12-17 22:27:05.186000+00:00 | ['Growth Marketing', 'Growth', 'Growth Strategy', 'Growth Hacks', 'Growth Hacking'] |
The 2020 election makes clear: We are a very sick society | For starters, as a general rule, the American people are incorrigibly uninformed and ignorant — not just about the issues but also a basic understanding of how our government works or who represents us at its various levels.
Tommy Tuberville, Alabama’s senator-elect who is a far-right extreme ideologue (because what else do you get from the Republican Party these days?), was unable in an interview last month to correctly name the three branches of American government and similarly revealed himself to be ignorant of basic facts of U.S. and world history.
A U.S. senator-elect. Someone who is about to enter the most powerful legislative body in the land. If he doesn’t know these things, what are the chances that the people who voted for him do? Not good.
Don’t get me wrong—I don’t mean to just pick on Alabama (though, granted, it is an easy state to pick on). Civic and political ignorance is not so much an Alabama problem as it is an American one.
As a general rule, the American people are incorrigibly uninformed and ignorant — not just about the issues but also a basic understanding of how our government works or who represents us at its various levels.
Seriously—how many Americans could name the three branches of their federal government, or the chambers of Congress? How many even know what Congress is, much less who represents them in it? How many could tell you the number of U.S. senators they have, who those senators are, or who their state’s governor is? How many have even a rudimentary understanding of how laws are made? How many have even a clue what the U.S. Supreme Court is, much less the name of even one single justice on it, or how many justices there are, or what function they serve, or for how long? If you say the name Mitch McConnell, how many Americans could tell you who he is? How about John Roberts?
For an illustration of the gravity of this problem, look no further than Florida (because of course this happened in Florida), where Republicans apparently successfully stole a state Senate seat by placing a fake third-party candidate on the ballot whose last name was the same as that of the Democratic incumbent, siphoning votes away from that incumbent. The fake candidate received more than 6,300 votes.
It’s true—many voters don’t even have a clue who they’re voting for. Some just pick a name that sounds familiar, assuming, of course, that they vote at all.
Sadly, most Americans are still stuck at the “how many branches of government” phase.
A clueless electorate is one that is especially vulnerable to lies and propaganda, which is exactly how Donald Trump came to power in the first place. There are several insidious factors that have accelerated this trend: the death of legitimate local news outlets, which have largely been replaced by partisan, ideological sites that often exist for the express purpose of spreading disinformation; the profit-driven nature of corporate mainstream media, where headlines are written based on what will generate the most clicks, rather than what’s actually newsworthy; and the rise and dominance of unfiltered social media, which allows bad actors to communicate falsehoods directly to their audiences without the traditional layers of journalistic accountability that were in place long before the existence of platforms like Twitter.
A clueless electorate is one that is especially vulnerable to lies and propaganda, which is exactly how Donald Trump came to power in the first place.
Now, all Donald Trump has to do is tap the “tweet” button, and millions of people consume his lying, sociopathic filth in real time before fact-checkers even know what hit them. Trust me—he won’t be the last aspiring tyrant in America who exploits this, and the next one might be far more competent and intelligent than he ever was.
But even that’s not the full story. An electorate that is either unwilling or unable (for whatever reason, and I can’t think of a good one) to become knowledgeable about their system of government, their elected officials, and the issues that face them is an electorate that is far more likely, by and large, to simply “pick sides.” This phenomenon is exacerbated by absurd diametric paradigms that prevail in American culture, such as red states versus blue states, left versus right, Democrat versus Republican, socialist versus capitalist, etc., which essentially demand that the public abandon any respect for nuance, complexity, ambiguity, or intellectual curiosity, and instead just line up behind their “tribe” no matter what.
I happened to live in Seattle in 2014, the year the Seahawks won the Super Bowl. I did not (and still do not) have a clue about the Seahawks, and I never cared to learn. But when they started doing well, I jumped on the bandwagon just as easily as anyone else, strictly because of the intensity of the environment in which I was living, where people were talking passionately and relentlessly about the team and I had some very close friends who were heavily invested in it.
Never mind that I had absolutely no idea what I watching, up to and including Super Bowl XLVIII, where the Seahawks defeated the Denver Broncos 43–8. I still celebrated along with everyone else, simply because my team had emerged victorious, even though it’s a team about which I knew nothing and thus could never hold an intelligent, informed conversation.
An electorate that is either unwilling or unable to become knowledgeable about their system of government, their elected officials, and the issues that face them is an electorate that is far more likely, by and large, to simply “pick sides.”
I suspect that this is the way many or even most Americans treat politics. If you live in a context where an overwhelming majority of the people you interact with espouse certain passionately-held ideological beliefs, follow a very narrow collection of slanted media outlets, approach the external world with certain deeply-ingrained prejudices, etc., you are very likely to follow suit. That’s just human nature; we are social creatures and thus are deeply and inextricably shaped by each other. Emotions, and emotional experience, influence us much more than objective fact. That’s why “owning the libs” has become so much more important to so many people than actually justifying the merits of their arguments.
This might also be a clue as to why we managed to oust Donald Trump even as the Republican Party tragically made some huge downballot gains in Congress and maintained its malignant chokehold on statehouses across the country. There were probably just enough people in just enough swing districts who found Donald Trump to be personally offensive but nevertheless grew up voting Republican, have memories of voting Republican in the past, have close friends and family who are Republicans now, perhaps follow right-wing media, and thus still believe that voting Republican is an acceptable or mainstream option. But because most Americans are woefully uninformed on the issues, they don’t understand or perhaps refuse to countenance the fact that today’s Republican Party is just as bad as Donald Trump himself. So here we are, sadly. | https://peterwarski.com/the-2020-election-makes-clear-we-are-a-very-sick-society-1d1aa1ec7671 | ['Peter Warski'] | 2020-12-07 00:50:05.563000+00:00 | ['2020 Presidential Race', 'Election 2020', 'Politics'] |
What The Sports World Taught Me About Saying Goodbye. | “Hey Dan, I need to speak with you in my office.”
I knew what that meant.
I hadn’t been pitching well for a number of weeks, and we had just taken the bus back from Southern Maryland to our home ballpark in Long Island, New York. It was maybe 2am when we returned home from our weeklong road trip, and the team hurriedly grabbed their travel bags from the bottom of the bus to get home and get some sleep. I had to wait.
It was that talk. My manager explained that time with the team ended that night.
By the time our meeting was over and my fate sealed, everyone else had departed. I dreaded packing up and saying goodbye — I never knew what to say, getting released is an awful experience and a lot of emotions run high.
The clubhouse was nearly empty as I cleaned out my locker; I was thankful for the quiet and lack of prying eyes. When a guy was cleaning out his locker, whispers passed around as the news of his fate spread. But this time, there were no eyes on me; I was nearly alone as I took my time restoring my locker to its spring condition.
I had some close friends on the team; but they were gone, rushed home after a long bus ride. And I’d be gone before they returned for tomorrow’s game.
There was no goodbye.
The Packed Bag and the Bro-Hug
He walks over in civilian clothes with a tightly packed three-foot long duffle bag thrown over his shoulder. He taps you just as you’ve pulled your jeans up after showering. You’re caught off guard as you look for the deodorant in the top cubby of your 2-foot wide locker.
You turn around, look at his solemn expression and his duffle bag, and you know. You know he’s no longer a part of this team; he’s heading home. Released is the term for being no longer contractually obligated and obliged to provide the skilled labor of a professional athlete.
Leave your jersey and get out.
What do you say to your fallen comrade in that moment as he says goodbye at your locker? You’re staying. He’s going and you’re not happy that he’s going, but you’re also glad that it’s not you.
What does that goodbye look like?
It’s Nothing.
I never had the words. How could I dispense meaningful words to a friend to whom I’d gotten close over numerous months and years? You spend every waking minute with your teammates:
sitting in the bullpen
shagging batting practice
running sprints
playing catch
doing tedious exercises to stay healthy
getting pre and post-game tape, meds and treatment
eating
showering
winning
losing
succeeding
struggling
You do all of it together.
Then one moment, he taps you on the shoulder, duffle bag bursting and his jersey hanging with a lonesome drape in a desperate locker.
To Me, Goodbye Is a Merely a Look.
I never had a meaningful word to say in one of those moments. To my close friends when they departed, or when I was the one given the boot, little came to mind. I’m good with words but failed to muster much of anything.
I thought about it often.
Was I a bad friend?
Why didn’t I have something great to send them out on, to tidily sum up our friendship and let them know that things wouldn’t be as good after they departed?
Many of my teammates I never saw or heard from again, and I knew that would likely be the case immediately after they were gone. But others, I knew we’d talk again sometime down the road. And when we did, we picked right up and reminisced like it was yesterday.
Because You Both Know.
I decided that a nod, brief eye contact, and a take care was enough. In no way profound, but a look was enough to simply acknowledge our bond. Our time spent was good, and we’ll remember it that way.
The good times you share with another aren’t amplified by some profound final words, nor are they diminished by them. Cherish those in your life while you have them, and think fondly when they’re gone.
Don’t worry so much about goodbyes — give a nod, move on and keep the memories in your back pocket. | https://coachdanblewett.medium.com/what-the-sports-world-taught-me-about-saying-goodbye-b80a1a4c8dbc | ['Dan Blewett'] | 2018-07-17 01:07:34.622000+00:00 | ['Sports', 'Relationships', 'Leadership', 'Parenting', 'Baseball'] |
Wool Weekly — Volume 15 | October has gone in the blink of an eye and we’re well into November. Over the last week at Wool Digital we have launched our brand new website. You can check out our site and find out what we’ve been up to here. | https://medium.com/wool-digital/wool-weekly-volume-15-73f6c6acfb54 | ['Emma Cookson'] | 2017-11-03 10:11:38.746000+00:00 | ['Manchester', 'Digital Agency', 'Advertising', 'Digital Marketing', 'Web Development'] |
Accelerate your learning of Docker configuration with GUI tools | You can speed up your learning of Docker configuration files, like docker-compose.yml, by making use of a GUI tool, like Rancher.
Learning Docker configuration is difficult. I have never been the type that can scan through vast amounts of documentation and piece everything together. If there isn’t a tutorial or an example that I can use for reference, I will struggle to cobble things together. One method I have found that is useful is to make use of GUI tools that walk you through the process step-by-step and then allow you to view the output and learn from it.
For this exercise, I am going to be using Rancher from Rancher Labs. The same style of workflow should work for most GUIs that handle Docker configuration. For example, I am currently using this method to learn more about Kubernetes configuration with the Kubernetes Dashboard.
Let’s get started! The first step is to open Rancher and click on the ‘Add Stack’ button near the top.
On the next screen, add some text to the ‘Name’ field, along with an optional ‘Description’, and then click the ‘Create’ button at the bottom.
We now have our application stack created, but there are no services in our application.
We can look at our current docker-compose.yml file (and rancher-compose.yml file) by clicking on the ‘More actions’ menu (three vertical dots) and selecting ‘View Config.’
As you can see, there isn’t much to look at. The only configuration in our files at this point is the version identifier.
Now that we have a baseline for our docker-compose.yml file, let’s go ahead and create a new service and see what changes.
Click the ‘Add Service’ button (not the dropdown arrow) to open the ‘Add Service’ screen.
On the ‘Add Service’ screen, enter some text for the service ‘Name’ and optional ‘Description’ fields. Then enter the Docker image you want to use for this service (my test Docker image is available here). We will leave the ‘Scale’ options at the default of ‘Run 1 container’ and the ‘Always pull image…’ checkbox checked.
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you will see a number of options and tabs to add more configuration to your service. We are going to leave the defaults (note the ‘Console’ and ‘Auto Restart’ values) and click the ‘Create’ button at the bottom.
Now we can see that our first service has been added. Click on the ‘More actions’ button again to see what changes have been made to the configuration files. Note: You want to click on the ‘More actions’ button on the Stack level, not the service level (see arrow below).
Now we are getting somewhere! Remember the last time we looked at these files, all we had was version: '2' . Now we see that we have added a services section to both files and we can see how the configuration has been spread between the two files. The docker-compose.yml file defines the image, stdin_open, tty and the label for ‘Always pull image.’ Meanwhile, the rancher-compose.yml file handles the scale options and start_on_create. You can start to see how the changes made in the GUI alter the .yml files.
From here you can add new services or alter existing services like adding volumes, environment variables, port mappings, etc. through the GUI and then checking to see how that changes the .yml configuration files.
Note: To alter existing services in Rancher, you will want to click on the ‘Upgrade’ button (up arrow icon in screen below) and not the ‘Edit’ option in the ‘More actions’ menu.
Learning Docker configuration can be tricky, but making use of the tools available will give you a leg up in the process. Have fun and let me know in the comments below if you have any tools or tips that you find useful for learning and implementing Docker configuration in your environments. | https://medium.com/ihme-tech/accelerate-your-learning-of-docker-configuration-with-gui-tools-f5cb6c290516 | ['Brian Dart'] | 2017-08-28 16:01:01.009000+00:00 | ['DevOps', 'Learning', 'Tech', 'Software Development', 'Docker'] |
Deep Learning Hello World - MNIST | Our First ANN Implementation
Now, we are ready to go 😃 I just want you to know that there might be still few things which may not be well understood at this moment. I will try to write in brief about them. They will be covered in much more detail in upcoming articles. The intention here is to introduce you to the world of deep learning tool set and how to use them.
Load the libraries and import MINST dataset: The first step is to load libraries and import dataset. MNIST dataset is now bundled as part of Keras datasets. Below is the code to do this:
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd
import os
import tensorflow as tf
import seaborn as sns # Step 1. Load train and test data set.
mnist = tf.keras.datasets.mnist
(X_train_full, y_train_full), (X_test, y_test) = mnist.load_data() # Step 2. check the size of training and test datasets print(X_train_full.dtype, "-", X_train_full.shape)
print(y_train_full.dtype, "-", y_train_full.shape)
print(X_test.dtype, "-", X_test.shape)
print(y_test.dtype, "-", y_test.shape) # Step 3. Randomly check one of the data points.
X_train_full[30]
y_train_full[30]
The code is self explanatory and nothing complicated. When you execute X_train_full[30], it will display a 2D array of 28 X 28 with numbers ranging b/w 0 and 255, since each data point is 28 X 28 size. The dtype is unit8 which holds values b/w 0 and 255.
Scale the data and create validation set: The next step is to scale the data b/w 0 and 1 and create the validation dataset. For the validation dataset, we will divide the X_train_full, y_train_full into two sets of X_valid, X_train and y_valid, y_train .
# Scale the data b/w 0 and 1 by dividing it by 255 as its unsigned int
X_train_full = X_train_full/255.
X_test = X_test/255. # View the matrix now. The values will be b/w 0 and 1 X_train_full[30] # Create the validation data from training data.
X_valid, X_train = X_train_full[:5000], X_train_full[5000:]
y_valid, y_train = y_train_full[:5000], y_train_full[5000:] X_train.shape
# should give o/p of (55000, 28, 28) X_valid.shape
# should give o/p of (5000, 28, 28)
We have a validation set of 5000 records and training set of 55000 records. By the way, we haven’t used matplotlib and seaborn until now. Let us use them to see the images in jupyter notebook. Execute the below code to see the output of the actual image and also the heatmap for the image.
# view the actual image at index 30
plt.imshow(X_train[30], cmap='binary')
The output of the above will be as below:
Figure 2: visual image at index 30
# Lets look at the pixels in detail using SNS plt.figure(figsize=(15,15))
sns.heatmap(X_train[30], annot=True, cmap='binary')
And this code shows you the complete 28 X 28 grid with data of each pixel as below.
Figure 3: Pixel view of the image
Model Building: Its now time to build our model. The concepts from my first article will be useful to understand it better. Here is the code to build the model.
# lets create the model
# Flatten = make the array to sequential layer
# Dense = creating a hidden OR output layer LAYERS = [tf.keras.layers.Flatten(input_shape=[28,28],
name="inputLayer"),
tf.keras.layers.Dense(300, activation="relu", name="hiddenLayer1"),
tf.keras.layers.Dense(100, activation="relu", name="hiddenLayer2"),
tf.keras.layers.Dense(10, activation="softmax", name="outputLayer")] model = tf.keras.models.Sequential(LAYERS)
A lot is happening here. Let me explain
Input Layer: We have flattened the input matrix of 28 X 28. Which means we will have 28 x 28 = 784 input values per image.
Hidden Layers: We use ‘Dense’ to create hidden and output layers. In the above code, we have created 2 hidden layers. We have 300 and 100 neurons in hidden layers 1 and 2. These are just random values I picked. You can chose any other values as of now. Later in my tutorials, I will show how to arrive at these values using Keras tuner. I am using ‘relu’ activation function in the hidden layers. Again, just follow this as of now. We will discover more on activation functions as we learn about them.
Output Layer: The output layer is having 10 neurons since we have values b/w 0 and 9 in our dataset. We are using ‘softmax’ as activation in output layer since we are dealing with multi-class classification problem.
You can imagine our neural network as below:
Figure 4: Deep neural network with 2 hidden layers
Let us now look at the summary of the model. It has a lot of information to be digested. Execute the code model.summary() in jupyter notebook. You should see the below output.
Figure 5: Model Summary
It shows 3 columns. “Layer” column shows the name of the layer. “Output Shape” column shows number of neurons in each layer. “Param #” is the column which needs to be understood. There are some random numbers in there. Let me explain.
Param # is the calculation of weights and biases. In hiddenLayer1, we have 300 neurons receiving inputs from 784 neurons from inputLayer. Which means that we have 300 X 784 = 235200 weights. Biases are equal to number of neurons in that layer. In hiddenLayer1, its 300. So if you add up weights and biases you get 235500 (235200 + 300). Similarly the values for other layers can be calculated as below:
# Param # (Nodes in layer A * Nodes in layer B + Bias)
# hiddenLayer1 = 784*300 + 300 = 235500
# hiddenLayer2 = 300*100 + 100 = 30100
# outputLayer = 100*10 + 10 = 1010 # Trainable Params = 235500 + 30100 + 1010 = 266610
Trainable Params is the total number of weights and biases which can be modified to train the model. If you add up above numbers, you get 266,610. I hope this is crystal clear now. Lets move on.
Weights and Biases: Let us look at the weights and biases. We can use the below code to view the weights and biases which are assigned initially.
hidden1 = model.layers[1]
weights, biases = hidden1.get_weights() #weights should be a metrics of 784 X 300 and biases should be 300
weights.shape
biases.shape print(weights)
print(biases)
When you execute the print statements, you will see random values for weights and 0 values for all biases. These are updated as the model starts learning during back propagation.
Loss function, Optimizer for back propagation: We now need to define the operations for back propagation. We need to set the loss function to be used, optimizer for updating weights and biases and the metrics for accuracy.
LOSS_FUNCTION = "sparse_categorical_crossentropy"
OPTIMIZER = "SGD"
METRICS = ["accuracy"] model.compile(loss=LOSS_FUNCTION,
optimizer=OPTIMIZER,
metrics=METRICS)
I am using the sparse_catagorical_crossentropy as the loss function and stochastic gradient descent as the optimizer. I will write more about these in future articles. The metrics specifies the parameter which we want to use as a measure to evaluate the model performance. Once all these are chosen, we call compile method on the model.
Model Training: Its time to train our model and see the how well its performing. We need to understand one new term and its called EPOCH. Simply put, epoch is the number of times model has to be evaluated during training.
EPOCHS = 30
VALIDATION_SET = (X_valid, y_valid) history = model.fit(X_train, y_train, epochs=EPOCHS,
validation_data=VALIDATION_SET)
In the code above, we have defined 30 epochs, which means that the model has to do forward propagation and back propagation 30 times. The validation set is used to validate out model against training data set. When the code is executed, you will see output something as below:
Epoch 1/30
1719/1719 [==============================] - 5s 3ms/step - loss: 0.6110 - accuracy: 0.8479 - val_loss: 0.3095 - val_accuracy: 0.9162
Epoch 2/30
1719/1719 [==============================] - 5s 3ms/step - loss: 0.2867 - accuracy: 0.9175 - val_loss: 0.2354 - val_accuracy: 0.9360
Epoch 3/30
1719/1719 [==============================] - 5s 3ms/step - loss: 0.2328 - accuracy: 0.9341 - val_loss: 0.2017 - val_accuracy: 0.9450
Epoch 4/30
1719/1719 [==============================] - 6s 3ms/step - loss: 0.1986 - accuracy: 0.9433 - val_loss: 0.1725 - val_accuracy: 0.9506
...
...
...
...
Epoch 30/30
1719/1719 [==============================] - 6s 3ms/step - loss: 0.0285 - accuracy: 0.9937 - val_loss: 0.0681 - val_accuracy: 0.9808
batch size and no. of batches: When the model is being trained, it doesn’t pass one input every iteration. Instead, it take a batch size. The fit method has a batch_size parameter, which by default is 32 if not specified. So in our case, considering a batch size of 32 and a training set of 55000, we get the number of batches to be 1719.
Below is the brief of all the parameters of the output:
# Epoch 1/30
# 1719/1719 [==============================] - 5s 3ms/step - loss: 0.6110 - accuracy: 0.8479 - val_loss: 0.3095 - val_accuracy: 0.9162 # default batch size=32
# No. of batches = X_train.shape/batch_size = 55000/32 = 1719 # 1719 = No of batches
# 5s = 5 seconds for one single Epoch
# 3ms/step = time taken for one batch
# loss: 0.6110 = training loss (summation of all losses in all batches)
# accuracy: 0.8479 = training accuracy (summation for all batches)
# val_loss: 0.3095 = validation loss
# val_accuracy: 0.9162 = validation accuracy
When you observe the output of model training, you can see the accuracy improving after every epoch. Which suggests that the model is learning by adjusting weights and biases which are the trainable parameters. We can visually see how the model reduced loss and increased accuracy using the history we captured during model training. Here is the code and visual representation
pd.DataFrame(history.history).plot(figsize=(8,5))
plt.grid(True)
plt.gca().set_ylim(0,1)
plt.show()
Figure 5: loss and accuracy
From the above figure, its clear that after 20 epochs (x-axis), the model is not learning much. We have ways to optimize and we will discuss on how to do that in upcoming articles.
Model Testing: Now let us test our model against the test data we created at the beginning and see how it performs. The code to do this is straight forward.
# validate against test data now
model.evaluate(X_test, y_test) #Output:
#313/313 [==============================] - 1s 2ms/step - loss: #0.0734 - accuracy: 0.9763
As we can see from the output, the loss and accuracy are very much close to validation dataset (val_loss: 0.0681 — val_accuracy: 0.9808). We could tune this is bit more but out of scope for this article.
Let us now take some sample from test data set and try to see if we get the right predictions:
X_new = X_test[:3]
y_pred = np.argmax(model.predict(X_new), axis=-1)
y_test_new = y_test[:3] for data, pred, actual in zip(X_new, y_pred, y_test_new):
plt.imshow(data, cmap="binary")
plt.title(f"Predicted: {pred}, Actual: {actual}")
plt.axis('off')
plt.show()
print("---"*20)
We are taking the first 3 values from test data and trying to predict the values. We are then comparing the predicted values v/s actual values in the loop. I got all the 3 predictions correct. You can try out with some other random samples OR by converting some of the other hand written images into 28 X 28 pixel and see how this model performs.
This completes our ‘hello world’ for deep learning. Before closing this article, I want to showcase one more tool which can be very handy to visually examine out model. The tool is called ‘Netron’. You can either download it from the github location OR open your saved model directly in browser window using the URL: https://netron.app/. I will leave you to explore more on this tool which comes in quite handy for initial learning.
You can refer the jupyter notebook for the MNIST implementation here.
Hmm… If you have come till this line and understood at least 40% of the article, you have achieved what is need to go ahead. Keep learning. | https://medium.com/@srinivas-kulkarni/deep-learning-a-to-z-part-2-mnist-the-hello-world-of-neural-networks-2429c4367086 | ['Srinivas Kulkarni'] | 2021-03-31 06:12:13.108000+00:00 | ['Mnist Dataset', 'TensorFlow', 'Keras', 'Forward Propagation', 'Deep Learning Hello World'] |
Google Adwords with rails(part 1) | Start Code
I used the https://github.com/googleads/google-ads-ruby.
Get Client All Adword Account ID And Account’s Inform
The refresh_token is accessed by client and
client.service.customer.list_accessible_customers().resource_names
response client’s all adwords’ account id. It looks like customers/XXX-XXX-XXX
The step can success by test developer_token. And
resource_name = client.path.customer(ad_words.gsub("customers/", ""))
customer = client.service.customer.get_customer(resource_name: resource_name)
response account’s inform. client.path.customer({ customer's id}) . It inputs only the number.
The step needs basic developer_token( be reviewed ), or it will response auth error.
Finally, We finished Adword Api start. Next time we will get campagin’ s cost amd search by time.
reference: | https://medium.com/@huangyudi/google-adwords-with-rails-76e736fb66c3 | ['Huang Yu Ti'] | 2020-11-29 12:53:15.756000+00:00 | ['Rails', 'Adwords', 'Google Adwords', 'Google Api'] |
After Banning TikTok and Other Chinese-Made Apps, India Goes After Clones | TikTok and several other apps were banned in India a month ago, and now the government there is cracking down on dozens of clones that have popped up in their absence.
The country’s ruling political party today announced the takedown of 47 Chinese mobile apps, including one called TikTok Lite. The apps were all “variants and cloned copies” of TikTok and the other 58 Chinese-made apps that were wiped from Indian app stores in recent weeks.
Indian authorities claim the apps were secretly collecting users’ data and sending it to servers in China, making them a potential spying threat. “This decision is a targeted move to ensure safety and sovereignty of Indian cyberspace,” the government said last month.
TikTok racked up 164 million mobile app downloads in India during the first half of 2020, according to research firm Sensor Tower. Since the ban, Indian users have flocked to other video-sharing apps, such as Roposo and Zili. However, the TikTok clone app indicates some users in the country are trying to circumvent the ban.
Other Chinese apps that India outlawed last month include WeChat and UC Browser, which come from the two biggest tech companies in China, Tencent and Alibaba Group. And others could be on the chopping block. According to the Economic Times, local authorities are examining 275 mobile apps, including Tencent’s popular gaming title PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, for violations of national sovereignty and user privacy.
In the US, the Trump administration is also considering a ban on Chinese-made social media apps, including TikTok. White House officials are worried the Chinese government could exploit the same apps to collect data on US citizens for spying purposes. However, TikTok has routinely denied that it poses a threat to users’ security.
“We’re committed to building an app that respects the privacy of our users and to being more transparent with our community,” the company said last month. | https://medium.com/pcmag-access/after-banning-tiktok-and-other-chinese-made-apps-india-goes-after-clones-daf487249b6b | [] | 2020-07-29 16:01:01.383000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Social Media', 'India', 'Apps', 'China'] |
Episode #42: 🇧🇶 Excerptoshi Truthers Unite!!! | Transcript
Aaron Lammer: Hey. Welcome to Coin Talk. I’m Aaron Lammer. Rare introduction with my cohost Jay Kang on the line. Hello, Jay.
Jay Kang: Hello.
Aaron Lammer: Sounds like there is some great ice cream truck action where you are.
Jay Kang: You know, I’m in my office, which is basically in an industrial part of Brooklyn. So, I’m looking down on this alleyway between two industrial buildings. There’s an ice cream truck that’s sitting there. I have no idea what it’s hoping for. The only people around here are annoying artists.
Aaron Lammer: It’s for you. If you have to ask, “Who is the ice cream truck for?” It’s for you.
Jay Kang: Oh my God. It’s so loud.
Aaron Lammer: Very sorry to everyone listening at home for this ice cream truck, but we’re just gonna ride on. This is Coin Talk. It’s the show of bitcoin sadness, occasional joy, sometimes somewhere in between.
We’re brought to you in partnership with Medium. Medium has tons of great writing about crypto. It’s all at me.dm/crypto. Hey, you should become a member if you’re reading a lot of stuff on Medium. You hit their wall. It’s five bucks a month. You get all kinds of great stuff like the transcripts to this show. Speaking of which, here is the show. Okay, Jay, I’m gonna do the throw here myself.
Jay Kang: Okay.
Aaron Lammer: I’m gonna play the music, all right? You ready?
Jay Kang: Yeah.
Aaron Lammer: This episode of Coin Talk was taped Wednesday August 22nd at 1:33 PM. The bitcoin price index … I’m stalling until I can open my block folio … is $6,433.
Jay Kang: Wow. That robot sounds a lot like you, if you were doing a robot voice. I thought for a second that the ice-
Aaron Lammer: We paid a lot of money for that robot, right Jay? It’s probably the biggest line item. That robot’s basically the third host by cost. The expenses we’ve incurred with that robot.
Speaking of robots, man, I’ve been feeling pretty crappy about crypto this week, and I feel like the robots have gotten all the gains. The dominant news story this cycle, there was that New York Times story about retail investors losing money. It’s just a bummer. No one wants to hear about this kind of stuff.
Jay Kang: Yeah. Who is actually making the money, then, if retail investors are the ones that’s losing it?
Aaron Lammer: Robots. I mean, I think the exchanges are making money on every … it’s just like gambling. The people who make the money in the gambling are the people who skim off every transaction.
Jay Kang: So, we’re the suckers who are buying and selling junk stocks while the exchanges and the bankers behind all of this are the ones that are just making money off fees?
Aaron Lammer: To me, the most interesting story of the last year, really, is Bitmain, which is not worth as much as, I think, every coin except Bitcoin. They’ve taken a lot of the money that’s been earned in crypto. I think when a historian unpacks all this financial history, it may be like, “Oh, minors and exchanges got 98 percent of the profits of the whole crypto.”
Jay Kang: Yeah, everyone here paid into it, we’re just suckers.
Aaron Lammer: Yeah. And then, like the Winklevoss’s and the early whales. But basically, the early whales and the people with an institutional position in the eco system. And I would say at this point, I look at something like Chinese mining as almost something like an institution. It’s not going anywhere.
Jay Kang: Yeah, as long as crypto is around, I can’t imagine what would cause them to lose their stranglehold. I mean, weirder things do happen in crypto from time to time, but, it’s just such a dominant right now and everything else is in such disarray that I think it would have to be a revolutionary technology change that would, or even like the unveiling at Satoshi, or something like that.
Honestly, I thought that’s what we were gonna talk about this week. I felt like this was gonna be our first non doom and gloom episode in a while.
Aaron Lammer: Jay faked me out and he sent me an Amazon link this week that was, it’s true, to the book that our favorite for who Satoshi is, Excerptoshi, the man who published an expert from a potential book out from the Satoshi Nakomo … I think the Nakamoto Family Foundation.
Jay Kang: Yeah. Well, it’s the reason why I knew that this was happening was because after Excerptoshi first came out I wrote an email to the email that was attached to it and I said that, “I’ve been trying to find Satoshi for years. I cohost Coin Talk a Bitcoin related podcast, is there any way I could speak to someone on the record or off who is at the Nakamoto Family Foundation?”
And, they wrote me back yesterday and said, “That will not be necessary. The embargo has been lifted. Everything he wishes to be expressed has been posted on the site as of today.” Which, I take to mean that the book was out, you know? That’s why I was emailing you all this stuff, but apparently it’s not. It’s just like the galley for the books. This is like the most interminable launch party ever.
Aaron Lammer: But wait, how can we get a galley of the book? That’s all we need so we can review it on the show?
Jay Kang: Well, I mean, I don’t know. Okay, do you want me to write the Nakamoto Family Foundation back and be like-
Aaron Lammer: I’m gonna say this. Me and you don’t know the most about crypto. I’m not even sure we know an above average amount about crypto. But I will say, I think we’ve taken Excerptoshi about as seriously as anybody. We have given-
Jay Kang: We’ve actually-
Aaron Lammer: His literature, a deeper read than almost anyone, and I believe that we did it on the good faith that Excerptoshi might actually be Satoshi.
Jay Kang: And, we never said that this was not Satoshi.
Aaron Lammer: Okay, I have a few options here. One is, we could try and back door it and book Excerptoshi on the long form podcast, as if it’s like a literary thing, but then it’ll just be me and you waiting for there for your ass.
I can not tell what is going on with this other than like Occam’s Razor is that it’s just some person said, “I am Satoshi Nakamoto. I am the Nakamoto Family Foundation,” and there’s nothing out there that really stops you from doing that.
Jay Kang: Yeah. It just seems very … the book itself. The new messages on the Nakamoto Family Foundation website, which include a couple more of those puzzles that he put in the first one, remember in the first message there was like a cryptogram.
Aaron Lammer: Oh yeah.
Jay Kang: So there’s a new cryptogram. I did not bother trying to solve it because I know that it would probably be really easy, but also beyond my capacities, which is a very frustrating duality of circumstances. But yeah, I think that we should just ask for … Okay, I’ll ask for the excerpt, or I’ll ask for a galley of it. I don’t know if a self published ebook really has galleys, but maybe they can give us like a self exploding PDF or like galleys on the blockchain or something like that so they can track if we send it to somebody else.
Aaron Lammer: What is your take on why this roll out is coming so slow? Like, if you’re gonna do a hoax, generally you just drop the internet with the hoax. Are we supposed to believe this is more real because it’s coming out in successive waves, so that when the actual book comes out, you and me will have already spent six hours of air time talking about Excerptoshi?
Jay Kang: If the con is to try to get media people to puzzle over it and talk about it at every stage, they have found their marks.
Aaron Lammer: I mean, my true hope is that we can eventually have whoever is behind Excerptoshi on the show, and they will explain themselves and explain to us why they did this and why these details like, “My mother was like in publishing.” Why these bizarre set of details have been mapped onto the person Satoshi. I hope we get to come back to that.
Jay Kang: Well, there’s new details. Did you hear about this?
Aaron Lammer: Oh, no. I didn’t. No, no. Tell me.
Jay Kang: This is on the Nakamoto Family Foundation website, and we are now approaching five minutes talking about this.
Aaron Lammer: We got, hey, podcasting is for.
Jay Kang: Okay. “No one knows I come from the Caribbean and have family still there, where my life as a former professional poker player or the decency to consider the possibility” … his grammar is a little off … “or the decency to consider the possibility that my focus is strictly placed on my family, which is what inspired the title of the book. Surely some of you remember meeting me at FCO9. That you didn’t know it was me that you were talking to is no fault of your own. It pains me to know that these” …
So, he also says-
Aaron Lammer: This is … I’d like to say that the speech is kind of in the tone of like a Bond villain who’s like, “It was me behind it all. When you met that strange woman at the hotel, she was my spy. I was watching you all along Bond.” And it’s like, “Yeah, we didn’t know that it was you ’cause we still don’t know who you are.”
Jay Kang: Exactly. The other, and this is sad, but, the other detail that he put in there is that his grandmother has been diagnosed with leukemia and that it has reminded him of the ill effects of being an immigrant child coming to a new country with nothing and being face to face with the realities of immigrant life.
So, Satoshi has now sort of revealed that he’s an immigrant from the Caribbean.
Aaron Lammer: I mean, that is, that, I agree, is a rational read with that. I still don’t know … He didn’t literally say that. He said, “I’m from the Caribbean and I’m an immigrant.” You could read that a few ways. That could be like a Dutch guy who like grew up in, what’s the Dutch island in the Caribbean?
Jay Kang: Antilles.
Aaron Lammer: Aruba?
Jay Kang: Right. Aruba, yeah.
Aaron Lammer: Yeah. Like, was in Antilles, and then their parent moved to work at like Wall Street. I’m just saying.
Jay Kang: That’s true.
Aaron Lammer: We can make no assumptions about Excerptoshi ’cause he’s withholding information from us and playing with our hearts.
Jay Kang: I know that the little league world series is on, but maybe 10 years go there was a little league world series team from Saudi Arabia, and it was all American. It was all American kids who were like six foot two or something like that.
You’re like, “Wow. Saudi Arabia’s little league team.” And it’s all people who are working there in the oil industry. So, it could be something like that. I think you’re right. Or, he could be like a Dutch Aruban, like Sidney Ponson, former pitcher for the Baltimore Oriels and now immigrated to the United States back from … who knows.
Aaron Lammer: I mean, there’s a lot of possibilities. I will say, just reading this as a pure work of literature, which is how we always encounter Excerptoshi, I do think that these details of saying like, “My story has an element of the immigrant story in it,” very quickly led my mind towards some of the stuff that’s happened in Venezuela and these transitioning economies.
Did Excerptoshi have some sort of formative experience with a collapsing market that led to the creation of Bitcoin? Cause we already know that Satoshi was very interested in the economic crash. But Satoshi would’ve already been a working adult by then.
Jay Kang: Or like, did he-
Aaron Lammer: Is there some previous economic trauma in the situation?
Jay Kang: Or did he grow up in Saint Kits amongst like a cul de sac of money launderers and thought to himself, what is the most efficient way of laundering money out there.
Aaron Lammer: I’m just gonna say that taking Excerptoshi literally at his word, Excerptoshi could be an American kid, like a Dan Bilzerian type whose father was a white collar criminal who fled to the Caribbean, and he could describe being an immigrant like in Saint Kits or Trinidad or something like that. And, that would really, in a novelistic sense make a lot of sense that this was someone who was avenging the regulatory persecution of his father figure.
Jay Kang: Oh yeah. Well, look, I think that it is interesting that he’s like saying … The one part that stuck out to me, honestly, is that he was like, “When you met me at FCO9,” I don’t know what that is, but I imagine it’s like something conference ‘09.
Aaron Lammer: I feel like that’s some like rap shit talk. It’s like, “When I grab your chain at the 2001 VMAs, you knew who I was. You didn’t know that I was Satoshi, but you knew that you were talking to someone who grabbed the chain.”
Jay Kang: It is. It’s kind of like there is this, “Oh, you didn’t expect the immigrant kid from the Caribbean to be the one that was like leading you along the whole way.” You know? “I’m just a humble man from humble beginnings.” It’s like a … It almost feels like it’s a verbal quint, like coming out as a Keyser Soze. Like, “You never suspected me. You thought I was dumb, you thought you were smart. But guess what bitches.”
Aaron Lammer: He’s taunting the audience a little bit and he’s suggesting that the reason people haven’t figured him out is that they’ve somehow doubted him or that they couldn’t imagine a person like him being Satoshi, which presents a very weird picture, ’cause I don’t really even know what the mainstream idea of who Satoshi is.
I guess he would be saying, “I’m not a Nick Szabo cryptographer, libertarian type.” But he is that, I think. And he’s saying he was at this conference that, I’m just gonna guess that that conference was like a conference of a bunch of the people who were suspected of being Satoshi era Bitcoin people had been.
Jay Kang: Yeah, so like, compiling what we know then, right? We know that his grandmother who has leukemia now ran a printing press, a sort of publishing house. We know that he says that he is from the Caribbean, and that he is an immigrant. That he was at FCO9. Right? Like doy?
Aaron Lammer: That’s right before Bitcoin, right?
Jay Kang: I guess my question’d be like, don’t you feel like at this point maybe we could triangulate who this might be? How many people were at FCO9? You know? How many of them like-
Aaron Lammer: I agree.
Jay Kang: … of Caribbean descent and so, FCO9 was Financial Cryptography ’09. Data security, the International Conference, which was in Acura Beach Hotel and Resort in Barbados.
Aaron Lammer: Maybe he’s just fucking with … He was like, “I was like on the wait staff at FCO9 when I was working as like a hotel worker in Barbados, but I was the true originator of Bitcoin.” Is he gonna give away what his real identity is as part of this? Or is this book gonna be published anonymously and it’s just a clue, again, that people are gonna try to figure it out.
Cause, I would agree with you. If this was the real person, you have enough data points to figure out who it is. However, those data points may not point to anyone because there’s no real evidence at all here that’s unique that this is Satoshi.
Jay Kang: The interesting thing is that I’m looking over the speaker list at FCO9, and it’s a lot of academics. It’s not people … It’s people from Harvard, it’s people from the University of Cambridge, Indiana, UC Berkeley, that’s just one panel, you know?
Aaron Lammer: But that’s, anyone who is involved in what would become the field of crypto then would’ve been an academic, what other thought would we really have?
Jay Kang: Oh, no no. I agree. I agree. It is actually kind of a specific reference. You know? That actually is interesting to me. He is … FCO9, I’m sure is not something that one can just Google and come up with without knowing at least a little bit about this world.
Aaron Lammer: Well, it’s possible that if he’s familiar with the world of Satoshi hunters, which we have to assume that he is, and this is true whether he is Satoshi or Excerptoshi. He would know … I don’t know this for a fact, but I would guess that there are astheros and serial killer lore, certain hot spots where it’s like …
I just read Michelle Mcnamara’s book about the Golden State Killer.
Jay Kang: Sure.
Aaron Lammer: And when they look at the strongest evidence, she correctly predicted that he went to Sacramento State, which is a pretty limited pool of people.
Jay Kang: Yeah.
Aaron Lammer: She knew his approximate age. And they were right about that stuff. If Excerptoshi says, “Oh, I was at FCO9,” I’m guessing that somewhere on forums, if we track this long enough, we’d find that this is like the core Nick Szabo, a bunch of these high probability people were there. It’s like locating himself as within a certain milieu without literally calling out his own identity.
But I agree with you, just with the, “I grew up in the Caribbean,” I feel like you could get to a list of a few at most.
Jay Kang: I mean, look. I think that what I would do if I was a journalist, is I would look through this …
Aaron Lammer: What are you, on sabbatical?
Jay Kang: I’m divesting from journalism.
Aaron Lammer: Oh yeah? You’re short journalism [crosstalk 00:18:08]?
Jay Kang: I’m short in journalism. I went on Bitmax and put a huge short on … yeah.
Aaron Lammer: You’ve been taking out twits on Civil?
Jay Kang: Hey, hey. Those are our friends. I would …
Aaron Lammer: Hey, I’m not short on journalism. You’re the one that’s short on journalism.
Jay Kang: I think what I would do is I would just call, or I would email all the people on this list. You know? And, just ask them, “Do you have any idea? Did you talk to somebody who talked about their grandmother who ran a printing press?” You know?
There’s like, I’d say like 100 people on this list. It seems like their schedule is they had maybe eight days together or five days together. And, you would think that if maybe one of these people did talk to somebody of Caribbean descent perhaps who’s grandmother did run a printing press, or a publishing house. Then you have who Excerptoshi is, right?
Aaron Lammer: Right. But we’re not closer to knowing whether Excerptoshi is Satoshi. All we know now is that the person who’s clearly being fingered by this document is a real person, which doesn’t even prove that that’s Excerptoshi, it proves that Excerptoshi has written a work of speculative fiction using the identifying details of this person.
I just can’t believe that this honey pot leads back somewhere rational. Cause if it does, then the most bombastic thing to do would be like, on the last page of the book, you’re like flipping, flipping, flipping, it’s like, “Oh, I forgot. Here are the private keys.”
Jay Kang: Yeah.
Aaron Lammer: And it’s be like, “Whoa.” You know?
Jay Kang: Yeah.
Aaron Lammer: Short of that, there’s really nothing to tell-
Jay Kang: Here’s the other problem that I have, is that the release date for this book says it’s in January. That’s so far away.
Aaron Lammer: But that’s kind of public though.
Jay Kang: No, but it’s self published. It’s not like he’s waiting for like Random House to do a publicity round and waiting for the right timing to tie it into the election or something.
Aaron Lammer: What percentage chance … Okay. It’s January 4th. You and me are betting on the Augur market. We’ve both just purchased the book and stayed up all night, read the whole thing. What is the percentage chance that you wake up that morning thinking, “The person who wrote this book is a real person, and it is the real creator of Bitcoin?”
Jay Kang: I mean, look. If we’re talking seriously, I would say very low, like under one percent. But, I don’t know. I actually think of all the Satoshi hoaxes and all the Satoshi stories, whether Dorian Nakamoto … Although, that one was pretty funny, honestly, accept for that sort of anguish it caused Dorian himself.
I would say this is at least the most fun, don’t you think? It’s like a … It has a lot of elements to it and it’s so weird. Guys, we’ve been talking about it for 22 minutes now.
Aaron Lammer: It’s weird that it’s a little believable. It’s a little like the P tape in that it’s a little too far to be believable, but then there’s like a weird double take where you’re like, “But doesn’t that make it a little bit believable?”
I was gonna say closer to 20 to one, 30 to one. I think it’s more like a five, two percent, three percent chance that this is the real person and that … and this isn’t just the reel, this is the book presents some incontrovertible journalistic proof that they’re Satoshi. Which they could have. It’s not just the private keys. There is multiple routes to proof, and we don’t really know what all of them are ’cause we don’t know what cards Satoshi is currently holding, or even if Satoshi is currently alive, or if Satoshi is a man or a woman.
I will say, this book, it is surprising to me how far you can take a hoax like this without really doing more than put up a website that has no CSS.
Jay Kang: Yeah, I mean, I don’t … I basically am of the mind right now that whoever is doing this is convinced that he is Satoshi. I don’t think it’s a joke.
Aaron Lammer: Oh, interesting. So you’re going for more like a mad genius, like the joker kind person.
Jay Kang: I think this is something I’ve mentioned the show before. When I would write a … When I wrote about Satoshi in the past, I got some phone calls from people who, it was honestly a little scary, but it was people who had called and told me they were Satoshi. I would say, “Okay.” And within five minutes, they would tell me that they had also invented like email and the internet and self driving cars where … It was people who were obviously crazy, but there’s clearly no incentive for that person to call me and say this sort of stuff unless they really believed it.
I feel like there’s a version of this where the person who is saying they’re Excerptoshi is actually convinced that he is actually Satoshi. Otherwise, I don’t know. It’s an incredibly good rouse if it is.
Aaron Lammer: I like this. I like this route. I’m seeing like a follow up in our Bitcoin Maximalist movie, future movies, same area where, in the present day a young economist in the Nouriel Roubini mode is like trying to sound the alarms against Bitcoin Maximalism and he’s just shouting from the hilltops, “It’s going to zero, it’s going to zero.” And as the Bitcoin world comes, he gets driven completely insane and then at the end, he’s in an asylum and everyone’s like, “I am Satoshi Nakamoto.”
“No, I am Satoshi Nakamoto.” Cause it’s a litmus test of like who-
Jay Kang: It’s like the end of Amadeus when Salieri is being worked through the insane asylum, but instead everybody’s screaming about how they’re Satoshi.
Aaron Lammer: I mean, it’s a litmus test of like, what the greatest grandiose thought of yourself and your era is that people in an insane asylum think that’s who they are. They think they are Michael Jackson, or that they are Jesus Christ. I think probably historically, the leader in people in insane asylums thinking they’re that person is Jesus Christ.
Jay Kang: Yeah, yeah. No, no, no, no, no. That’s … I agree with that. I think it’s an interesting …
Aaron Lammer: In a Bitcoin Maximalist universe, Satoshi Nakamoto is Jesus, will be Jesus Christ, right?
Jay Kang: But I also think that part of the sort of evidence of how pervasive and interesting the Satoshi myth is, is that there are people who probably have no idea what Bitcoin is who are pretending to be Satoshi Nakamoto. It’s not just for Bitcoin people, the myth, it’s something that has pervaded other people to get sort of in the psyche of people who are unwell to be like, “Oh yeah, and I also invented Bitcoin in addition to like these other mysteries that I account for.”
So, I don’t know. That’s interesting.
Aaron Lammer: There’s probably hundreds of Satoshi’s all over the world like, dudes who are hanging around Swiss wine bars picking up women and being like, “I’m secretly Satoshi Nakamoto.” You know?
Jay Kang: That’s a terrible, that’s a terrible, terrible drift.
Aaron Lammer: I mean, people, there was a guy impersonating Stanley Cooper. So, if there’s like that, think how many people would say they’re Satoshi Nakamoto. And like, since basically I think people’s born in assumption is that Satoshi Nakamoto is some kind of a nerdy white guy, like, 20 percent of the people out there could claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto.
Jay Kang: Yeah.
Aaron Lammer: Maybe not worldwide, Europe or America.
Jay Kang: But not Excerptoshi. Excerptoshi is a Caribbean-
Aaron Lammer: Excerptoshi is of Caribbean descent and has repeatedly, the main thing we know about Excerptoshi is Excerptoshi is recklessly narrowing the circle around his own family.
Jay Kang: Oh yeah. I mean, I really do think I could probably email all these people today and get some answer back. Now, it might be that none of them remember any conversation and actually, more likely that would be true. That would at least be a start. How many people were at this conference? It couldn’t have been more than a couple hundred.
Aaron Lammer: Can we just commission Adrian Chan to do this for us?
Jay Kang: Adrian, I’ve divested from … I’ve divested from journalism and I need your help.
Aaron Lammer: I double dare you to email every single person on the FCO9. Investigate them personally and come on the show and report to us about it.
Jay Kang: Actually, you know, I am going to send this to Adrian. I’ll see what he says. I sent him the Excerptoshi thing and he didn’t even read it. And I was like, “Why did you not read it?” And he said, “Because it was so obviously bull shit, can you stop wasting my time?”
Aaron Lammer: I feel like Adrian Chan’s refusal to discuss Excerptoshi with us is more evidence that Excerptoshi could be real.
Jay Kang: Or it’s more evidence that Adrian is Excerptoshi.
Aaron Lammer: Because like, what if Adrian is like hot on the trail of Excerptoshi and he’s like, “Aaron and Jay gotta stop taking this so seriously. They’re gonna blow like my scoop that it was Excerptoshi.”
Jay Kang: But, let’s go to the bad story right now, which is the Eth market.
Aaron Lammer: Okay.
Jay Kang: Or the Eth market, I don’t know how to pronounce it. But like, the Ethereum market is doing terribly right now.
Aaron Lammer: Yeah. Did you notice that just because I became an Ethereum Maximalist during the crash or have you actually been watching it for reasons other than to hold it against me?
Jay Kang: Yeah, it’s mostly like a … I don’t even really think it’s a shot at Froyda, I think it’s probably just like being a dick where you started telling me that you were buying Ethereum and I started checking to see if it had gone down.
Aaron Lammer: You definitely have never been a huge Ethereum fan. And to be honest, other than my very first fore’s, I wasn’t either. I think I was kind of playing, you know when people play poker and you kind of just assume every hand’s gonna go like more or less an average poker hand?
Jay Kang: Yeah.
Aaron Lammer: I was kind of like, “Okay, well, you know, it’s kind of rexed to Bitcoin, they’re probably just gonna both go back up and at that point it’ll gain. I don’t have a very deep investment thesis, which brings me to like, I finally asked our friend Ledger Status, I was like, “Hey man, we gotta start chilling some F here. We gotta get this market going here. What’s going on?”
He was like, “Well, no one really gives a shit about ICOs anymore. And, what’s the demand for Ethereum when no one cares about ICOs?”
And I was like, “Yeah. Fuck.” I didn’t think of that.
Jay Kang: We love Ledger, and I will say that one of the downsides to having someone that is reasonable and smart in your life that you can talk to is that when they say something deflating and right, you can’t really argue about it.
Aaron Lammer: I had like no argument against it. I was like an old person asking someone how the printer worked, and they were like, “You have to turn the printer on.” And I was like, “Oh, thank you young man.” In a sports context, I would always be like, “Yeah but.” And this one I was like, “Oh yeah. Fuck. You’re totally right.” How long has it been on this show since we’ve talked about ICO?
Jay Kang: Okay, so to risk a little bit of silly correlative thought though-
Aaron Lammer: You think we killed the ICO market by mocking it on the show.
Jay Kang: Well no, the peak of Ethereum, which was around $1500, $1400, when was that? Was that during the peak of ICO insanity? I feel like it was a little bit afterwards. I don’t know if we can say that Ethereum only pumps when ICO market is pumping, but I think what we can say probably is that if there’s no ICO interest, then it is harder for Ethereum to pump. Does that make sense?
Aaron Lammer: Okay. Yes. Except there’s one more ingredient that I didn’t really think about either, which is that a ton of that Ethereum went to all these shitty ICOs and those ICOs own token, is now fucking deeply in the toilet that people are gonna be selling their Ethereum hoards and people are panicking ’cause Ethereum’s worth nothing now. It’s kind of like a vicious cycle, a perfect storm of shitty conditions stemming from the ICO boom, as I recall.
Jay Kang: Yeah, yeah. It might just be like the bottom fell out. Right? We talked about last time, and I did get a little bit heated, but I was just like, “What is … Cause I was thinking about it, and I was like, you know, I was trying to think about a year ago when I would talk to you and some of our other friends, and there was all this Ethereum stuff coming up.
Remember? They were like, upgrades that were coming.
Aaron Lammer: It was a Metropolis.
Jay Kang: Yeah, Metropolis and there were upgrades coming and Fatalic was gonna talk at Tech Crunch Connect or something. Do you remember that? There’s all that sort of … There were these sign points that people were pointing to saying like, “This is why this is a good investment.” It has progress, it has a future, it has a face. And I just felt like there was none of that excitement anymore.
It might be that I no longer read the Ethereum Reddit every day like I used to. But I don’t think that that, I don’t think that that sort of hype around specific future events exists anymore. There is a question right now of what are we really looking forward to in terms of Ethereum.
Aaron Lammer: Well, so like Joe Lubin from Consensus, the Ethereum co founder was like, “Look, price crashes are gonna happen. It’s still in development. It’s gonna take a bit. Maybe these price crashes,” I think he said maybe they could be good. I feel like the price is only a negative seen in the context of at one point was significantly above $1000 and it’s now below $300.
If had slowly crawled here, it would be fine. It’s the experience of the roller coaster that has made this seem pretty dead in the water now.
Jay Kang: All right, so, our third story, this is positive I think, is that Bitcoin has come to the English Premier League, or cryptocurrency at least. And the news story was that seven Premier League Clubs have agreed to set up a digital wallet with eToro. And this is sort of a sponsorship that eToro, which is a wallet investment program, I think, from Tel Aviv, the teams are Brighten and Hove Albian, Kartiv City, Crystal Palace, Lester City, Newcastle, South Hampton, and Tatnum.
Within that group there are some pretty big clubs. I mean, I think Brighten and Kartiv, Kartiv just got promoted this year to the EPO. Lester obviously won a couple years ago in one of the surprising results in all sports history. Newcastle is a story big club, and Tatnum is one of the most popular clubs in the world.
This is actual real, sort of, engagement I think that-
Aaron Lammer: These people really took their money. I feel like, the basis of this story has basically been, “We’re willing to pay you a bunch of money, in Bitcoin.” And they were like, “Cool. We’ll take it.”
They’re like, “You’ll set it all up and we can exchange it for pounds if we want to? Fine. Whatever you want.”
Jay Kang: The head of eToro’s UK division, his name is Dick Balgandum, had a statement about this and he said, quote, “Today’s announcement is the first small step on a long road to football fully embracing blockchain technology. Education will be key so that industries can understand the potential and so getting global exposure through these premier league clubs represents a great opportunity to raise awareness. Blockchain brings transparency, which means it can improve the experience for everyone who loves the beautiful game.”
That is basically right out of any type of shit coin ICO. There’s absolutely no explanation of why this is true or how it’s going to happen, but hey, I respect the hustle.
Aaron Lammer: Yeah, I mean, I started, you sent me this and I started clicking around and I ended up on some story about how like, “UFA is using blockchain for ticketing to make sure there’s no duplicates of tickets.” And I was just like, “I literally have no idea what this means.” It’s like they’ve tested it at a stadium in Estonia. And I’m like, “Here we are trying to sync the Infera chain, which is still sitting at 86 percent. You’re telling me that this whole stadium was running some sort of a blockchain ticketing?”
I don’t even know how to read these articles anymore. In some ways, this eToro story, I at least understand what they mean, which is, they made a Bitcoin wallet and paid millions of dollars in Bitcoin to put eToro logos on their jerseys.
One thing I don’t understand is, my understanding of the Premier League was like each team had kind of like a unique jersey advertisement scene.
Jay Kang: Yeah.
Aaron Lammer: But there’s gonna be eToro on all of these different jerseys?
Jay Kang: Oh no, no, no. I think it would just be at the stadium or something like that.
Aaron Lammer: Oh, okay. Okay. Cause that’s what I thought. I kind of like the history of the pairings of teams and sponsors and how that works into the [crosstalk 00:36:29].
Jay Kang: Yeah, this is not like the NBA or the MLB where people are crying foul and saying it’s like, once tony and story don, ethical institution is now taking dirty money and giving itself over to corporate sponsors. A lot of the sponsors on EPLT jerseys are Chinese gambling sites and stuff like that.
Aaron Lammer: I feel like the most common money in the EPL is like Russian oligarch who made money on oil markets. Oil markets in kind, buy out jerseys on said Premier League team. Of the companies that I do not recognize on jerseys, they’re almost always Russian gas companies.
Jay Kang: Yeah. And every other jersey has like a middle eastern airline on it.
Aaron Lammer: Or a middle eastern oil conglomerate.
Jay Kang: Chinese gambling, Saudi airlines, or Qatari airlines, and Russian gas companies. That’s about it. Welcome the blockchain to that wonderful triumph for it. It’s good.
In that story, I actually found a much funnier story, which is that there’s a team in Gibraltar, it’s a pro team. I didn’t realize that Gibraltar had a Premier League. Is Gibraltar even a country? I thought I was just, is that where the Strait of Gibraltar is?
Aaron Lammer: I think that’s like a territory, sort of like the Puerto Rican model.
Jay Kang: Gibraltar united, a football team playing in Gibraltar, semi professional Premier Division is the first one to, part two pay its players with cryptocurrency.
Yeah, there’s also a football team, or soccer team out there that pays its team players in cryptocurrency. This seems like a terrible idea, by the way. That’s why I probably don’t know.
Aaron Lammer: Well, that’s what I wanted to ask you. So, I ask you, Jay, you’ve left your employment at Vice, but you’ve got other employment opportunities. Your next job says, “Jay, there’s the salary we’re offering you. These benefits. One more thing. You have to take payment in Bitcoin and/or you have to take payment in the token of the company.”
Jay Kang: Absolutely not. No.
Aaron Lammer: “Do you accept this?” What if it’s not an option? What if it’s like, the job, it’s a great paying job, but it pays in Bitcoin.
Jay Kang: I would say …
Aaron Lammer: I don’t have a problem with that.
Jay Kang: They would have to pay me double in Bitcoin what I would’ve accepted in US dollars. Yeah.
Aaron Lammer: Double?
Jay Kang: They would have to-
Aaron Lammer: To make up for the volatility or just for the inconvenience?
Jay Kang: Both. If they’re going to pay me, let’s just say out of, they were gonna pay me 50 thousand dollars a year, I think I would need 100 thousand dollars a year in Bitcoin.
Aaron Lammer: Well, what if your Bitcoin compensation is paid to the value of the dollar? So it’s pen Bitcoin, but it’s Bitcoin that’s like, “You’re getting the same amount as you would.”
Jay Kang: No, I would need 100 thousand dollars in Bitcoin tagged to the US dollar at that time. Yeah.
Aaron Lammer: Wow. See, I have no problem. I’m like, “Okay, if you’re gonna peg it, it’s gonna be like a stable value, pay me it and I can either keep it in Bitcoin or I can just trade it “
Jay Kang: Yeah, but then you have to pay taxes on it.
Aaron Lammer: You have to pay tax on it as income anyway.
Jay Kang: Yeah, but you have to pay taxes on the income and the sale of Bitcoin. Oh yeah, for sure.
Aaron Lammer: You think so? So, you think all these people who are being paid in Bitcoin are paying double taxes on it?
Jay Kang: Well, if they immediately cash it out to US dollars, yeah. Why wouldn’t they?
Aaron Lammer: It’s one or the other. Either it’s … Because, the cost basis is how much … Let’s say they pay you out at Bitcoin 5000.
Jay Kang: Yeah.
Aaron Lammer: Okay? They pay you one Bitcoin for a weeks of work. $5000, that’s one Bitcoin.
Jay Kang: That’s not so bad.
Aaron Lammer: Okay. Then you immediately cash that in and you have 5000 US dollars. Okay, so either that’s a capital gain that you gain that much in your portfolio, or it’s income, but it’s not both.
Jay Kang: I don’t think so, because I think that basically you are paying … Is the IRS really going to sit there an acknowledge that you got that Bitcoin out of income?
Aaron Lammer: Well, you’d have to document it the same way you document your salary.
Jay Kang: And how is the company going to pay your Bitcoin based W-2 and take that tax out of the payment that they give you?
Aaron Lammer: Each transaction is timestamped with a US dollar amount, then you just basically calculate everything. Look, I don’t know that’s how they do it, but it’s not like that crazy that someone could do it.
Jay Kang: Okay. I’m sticking with my guns. I would need like double.
Aaron Lammer: I agree, it seems like a pain in the associated, and I would say, the further away you get from Bitcoin to like, “I’m getting paid in shit coin X,” you really have to pay people at a premium.
Jay Kang: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think that, we don’t even have to ask the question of whether or not this is good or bad for Bitcoin, right? Obviously it’s neither. It’s just like a funny story. I do hope at some point, much like the people at the World Series of Poker where I like block folio patches, it would be kind of cool to see some EPL team, or even like championship league team, some lower division team wearing like a crypto based patch.
I’m actually kind of surprised that no crypto company has tried to sponsor and MLS team or something like that. It seems like that would be kind of obvious.
Aaron Lammer: I mean, I’m not sure if everyone wants their business. Some of these companies seem shyer. It seems like the EPL already has a rich history of catering to the OTB industry and degeneracy of every kind. It make sense to me they would be an early adopter.
I think if crypto succeeds, we’ll see this everywhere and it seems like the people that are gonna pump advertising dollars in, are these kind of exchangy, financial producty. My understanding of eToro is it’s sort of in the Robin Hood vein.
Jay Kang: So, it’s like a complete consumer product.
Aaron Lammer: I don’t really know though. I have not used it. Yes. And I think it’s got like futures and stuff like that also.
Jay Kang: Oh cool. Can we sign up for it?
Aaron Lammer: We could with a VPN. I think it’s not come to America yet, I don’t think. I think it is coming legally to America I believe. Probably we will see some e … Hey, eToro, sponsor the show.
Jay Kang: Yeah, yeah.
Aaron Lammer: We want to be your US ambassadors.
Jay Kang: We literally said nothing bad about eToro that whole time.
Aaron Lammer: I know. eToro is gonna emerge remarkably unscathed from this segment. And we’d make great US brand ambassadors. We’re available to attend sporting matches, could gamble on air, whatever it is you want us to do, we got it. That’s it. | https://medium.com/s/cointalk/coin-talk-42-excerptoshi-truthers-unite-4eda76b43b0b | ['Coin Talk'] | 2018-09-05 19:53:24.776000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Crypto', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Ethereum'] |
Here are some of the historic firsts of Biden’s incoming administration | Here are some of the historic firsts of Biden’s incoming administration
Since winning the election, Biden has made moves to carry out his campaign promise of building an administration that looks like and reflects the diversity of America.
Vice President-elect Kamala Harris has already shattered a monumental barrier by becoming the first woman elected Vice President.
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Here are other people who would be historic firsts:
First Black deputy secretary of the Treasury
Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo: Adeyemo currently serves as the president of the Obama Foundation. Adeyemo served during the Obama administration as the President’s senior international economic adviser, and also served as deputy national security adviser, deputy director of the National Economic Council, the first chief of staff of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and senior adviser and deputy chief of staff at the Department of the Treasury.
First Hispanic American White House social secretary
Carlos Elizondo: Elizondo was a special assistant to the president and social secretary to the Bidens for all eight years of the Obama administration. He will be the first Hispanic American appointed to this position. During the Clinton administration, Elizondo served in both the White House and in the Office of the US Chief of Protocol.
First woman to lead the US intelligence community
Avril Haines: Haines would become the first woman to serve as director of national intelligence. Haines served as assistant to the president and principal deputy national security adviser to President Barack Obama. She chaired the National Security Council’s Deputies Committee, which is responsible for formulating the administration’s national security and foreign policy. Haines previously served as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Avril was also legal adviser to the NSC. She served as deputy chief counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee while Biden served as chairman.
First Latino and immigrant as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security
Alejandro Mayorkas: Mayorkas would be the first Latino and immigrant as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security if confirmed by the Senate. He was deputy secretary of Homeland Security during the Obama administration, and served as the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. While at USCIS, Mayorkas oversaw the implementation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which was an executive action under Obama that protected young undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children from deportation. President Trump moved to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2017 but was ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court from doing so.
First woman as Treasury secretary
Janet Yellen: Yellen would make history as the first woman to serve as Treasury secretary. Yellen already made history as the first woman to have chaired the Federal Reserve, and did so from 2014 to 2018. She previously served for four years as the vice chair of the board, and president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco for four years prior to that. Yellen was also chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 1997 to 1999. | https://medium.com/@gesapw/here-are-some-of-the-historic-firsts-of-bidens-incoming-administration-95a1281a345d | ['Gesap Maxcu'] | 2020-12-01 18:35:30.687000+00:00 | ['News', 'Administration', 'Biden', 'Presentations', 'President'] |
COVID-19 and Prison | It is no doubt that the coronavirus pandemic has completely shaken today’s society. With over 2.7 million worldwide deaths, an intense economic distress, and a seemingly unanimous feeling of hopelessness, I began to wonder what the impact of COVID-19 has been on the prison system.
As a result of mass incarceration, overcrowding of prisons and jails is a large problem that we face in this country. According to “Overcrowded”, the article by Penal Reform International; in overcrowded prisons all across the country, we see:
Poor health care
Increased gang activity within the prisons
Increase in individual mental health issues
Violence/Racism
Spread of disease
Staff stress
So if these are the normal conditions of an overcrowded prison, I can only imagine that the coronavirus pandemic has extremely intensified each of these issues, especially the spread of disease.
Prisons are not exactly ideal for following social distancing protocols. Prisons are full of communal spaces which can easily be deemed unsanitary and also breeding grounds for disease. In the article, “Since you asked: Just how overcrowded were prisons before the pandemic, and at this time of social distancing, how overcrowded are they now?”, author Emily Widra of the Prison Policy Initiative explores how overcrowding is now more deadly than ever with this pandemic. She added findings from a University of Miami study that studied a correlation between COVID-19 cases and prison population reductions in her article. It was found that, “prisons holding between 94 and 102% of their capacity had higher infection rates and more deaths than prisons operating at 85% of their total capacity”. (2020) This shows that there is a correlation between crowded facilities and increased spread and rate of spread of this disease. Toward the end of the article, Widra shares this shocking statistic: “As a result, our crowded state and federal prisons have a COVID-19 case rate four times higher, and a death rate twice as high as in the general population.”
It is undeniable that society treats prisoners as second class citizens. But even if they are considered to be, are any citizens deserving to be in conditions that make them more susceptible to death and disease?
Sources:
Widra, E (2020, December) Since you asked: Just how overcrowded were prisons before the pandemic, and at this time of social distancing, how overcrowded are they now?. Prison Policy Initiative. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/12/21/overcrowding/
Penal Reform International Writers. “Overcrowding”. Penal Reform International. https://www.penalreform.org/issues/prison-conditions/key-facts/overcrowding/ | https://medium.com/prison-and-justice-system-reform/covid-19-and-prison-29f24c360f39 | ['Danielle Quarless'] | 2021-03-22 07:02:25.289000+00:00 | ['Prison Reform', 'Prison', 'Covid 19'] |
I argued a shooting death case in front of Amy Coney Barrett. Here’s why she shouldn’t be on the Supreme Court. | I argued a shooting death case in front of Amy Coney Barrett. Here’s why she shouldn’t be on the Supreme Court. Dan Canon Follow Dec 28, 2020 · 5 min read
Brad King before he was killed by part-time sheriff’s deputies
Now that it’s been two months since Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation, I can confidently say she is not qualified to sit on the Supreme Court. Sure, she was nominated by the vilest figure in the last century of American politics. Sure, McConnell rammed her nomination through the Senate while millions of Americans were dying, getting evicted, and trying to figure out where their next meal was coming from. And sure, Barrett is an ideologue who will undoubtedly be toxic to women, unions, the LGBT community, immigrants, and any other vulnerable population you can think of. Those curiosities render her unqualified from the get-go. But this column is not about any of that stuff, about which billions of useless words have already been spent. This is a story about Brad King, who is dead, and his parents, Matt and Gina, who are alive. I had the privilege of representing them in front of then-Judge Barrett earlier this year, during the brief period of time she presided over the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
Brad was killed in his own backyard in central Indiana after he called 911 to report a mental health crisis. He was 29. Because of his mild schizophrenia, he lived with his parents. He had no history of violent or aggressive behavior whatsoever. In her testimony, Brad’s mother Gina described him as “just sweet” and, as much as she worried about his mental health, she was never concerned about her safety or anyone else’s. A “bad day” for Brad was a day when he would “be more quiet and stay in his room.” Even in leaving him alone, Gina’s only concern was that she “felt sorry for him. Because I know sometimes when Brad would get nervous, he would want to call people. Sometimes if he was having a bad day, he would say, ‘I need to call my brothers and talk to them,’ or ‘Let’s call Grandma’ or something.”
Where the Kings live, as in most of America, the only responders to mental health calls are cops, many of whom might have had a few hours (at best) of training on recognizing mental health issues. But Brad had made emergency calls before, and experienced deputies were always able to talk him down without incident.
On November 29, 2016, things didn’t go so smoothly. Two volunteer, part-time sheriff’s deputies, one who was a full-time researcher for Eli Lilly and the other an insurance agent, answered the call. They killed Brad within thirty seconds of laying eyes on him. Their story was that Brad lunged at a deputy with a ten-inch kitchen knife that he produced from the pocket of his shorts.
Brad wasn’t able to tell his side of the story. But the story told by the cops didn’t add up. The knife they supposedly recovered had no fingerprints on it. One deputy said the knife was in his right hand; the other said it was his left hand. The knife was recovered from Brad’s left side, but he was right-handed. And even though Brad was supposedly charging directly at one of the deputies, the bullet entered his shoulder and traveled left to right through his body.
Even assuming deputies told the truth about what happened, it’s hard to see why they defaulted to lethal force. Brad’s father Matt summed it up aptly: “He called for help that day. That’s what I know. He called for help, numerous times. And they knew — they knew he was coming — they knew they were coming because there was a person suffering from a mental issue. They knew that. It wasn’t a criminal thing that they were investigating. It was a health-related issue. So those two guys should have never been there to begin with.”
None of this was enough to move Barrett or the two other judges on the panel, who refused to revive the Kings’ case after it was summarily tossed in the trash by a different Trump judge before it got to trial. The judges said that despite all the physical and circumstantial evidence, it wasn’t even worth letting a jury hear the case. The self-serving story of two part-time cops was good enough to deprive the Kings of any hope of closure for the death of their son.
Perhaps you’ve reserved some optimism for the whole “Barrett’s a mom and a Catholic so there must be some compassion there” thing. Sorry, but no. In her confirmation hearings, she spoke about how the George Floyd video was “very, very personal” for her family, and that she and her children “wept together” over what must have been the zillionth police murder in her history as a lawyer and mother. But her mentor, the late Antonin Scalia, seemed to think it was constitutional to put innocent people to death, despite his ultra-Catholicism. There’s no reason to believe that any sort of ideological consistency will prevail simply because of a judge’s familial status or bizarre metaphysical beliefs, and those factors made no apparent difference in Brad’s case.
Here’s where this gets complicated: In saying that being part of this horrendous decision should disqualify a judge from serving on the Supreme Court, by extension, I’m saying that damn near every federal judge is similarly unqualified. Almost none of them believe that cops should be held accountable for killing mentally ill people who call for help. This sort of thinking, in which cops are extended every benefit of every doubt, feasible or unfeasible, is the norm. Barrett didn’t even write the opinion in Brad’s case. It was written by a liberal judge who, like all her colleagues (of whatever political persuasion), was willing to write the police a blank check. That’s how our courts have operated for decades, and even in a post-BLM society, few of those in robes have the intestinal fortitude to do anything different.
So I am unmoved by Justice Barrett’s faith. I am unmoved by her status as a working mother of seven. I am particularly unmoved by her fake expression of sympathy for George Floyd, whose case she had nothing to do with, when she couldn’t spare any for the people who actually appear before her. I’m unmoved because I’ve seen so little compassion for grieving parents like Matt and Gina throughout my career, from any federal judge, let alone the Federalist Society drones who have lately taken over the judiciary. The basic inability to do what’s right for families like the Kings should be disqualifying. Not just for Amy Coney Barrett, but for the whole lot of ‘em.
A version of this originally appeared in LEO Weekly. | https://medium.com/i-taught-the-law/i-argued-a-shooting-death-case-in-front-of-amy-coney-barrett-89b4165f7df2 | ['Dan Canon'] | 2020-12-28 18:24:43.185000+00:00 | ['Police', 'Law', 'Criminal Justice', 'Civil Rights', 'SCOTUS'] |
Explorer for Google Groups | Explorer for Google Groups
Ever bumped into the Google admin-managed Groups parent limits? They can be an issue for B2B multi-tenant application authorization, particularly if you are serving Google Cloud Storage objects in a differentiated way.
Use this utility to proactively check whether you’re getting close to these limits, and to understand hotspots.
It provides a visualizer as well as CSVs for offline analysis
Batch mode enables you to run it at low load times and analyze the cached results later
You can search for an identity (user, service account, or group) whose ancestry to map, or for a group prefix for which to display summary statistics.
You can also highlight a group’s parents within the visualizer to identify potential group optimizations.
Considerations
The utility does not include group ownerships, which do count towards the quota; there isn’t a way to do this other than scanning the entire groups tree.
Each edge joining a child via multiple groups to a single parent (ie. diamond patterns) is counted; the actual Groups limits may be calculated differently for some children.
Scaling
This utility takes a number of measures to address performance and scaling in addition to the batch mode mentioned earlier; it…
caches prior query results.
supports multiple service accounts, since some aspects of the Admin SDK Directory API Groups quota metrics are per-identity; two service accounts appear to be sufficient to support reading almost 5k groups.
takes advantage of Go concurrency with WaitGroups.
implements channel-based throttling.
Note that for constant-load applications such as this utility, exponential backoff actually increases load; it is only useful for spiky load use cases.
Webserver
The Go webserver implements endpoint-specific approaches to serve static files, dynamically generated JSON, and interactive query responses.
Visualization
The graphical visualization is based on vis.js network diagrams and includes a sample data generator for simulation.
Tuning the visualization for 5k nodes required a bit of trial and error. For instance, physics-based graphs improve node spacing for large graphs, but are too slow for thousands of nodes; however, some of the physics options still have a useful effect, though it’s different than it would be with physics enabled. | https://medium.com/google-cloud/explorer-for-google-groups-4de258b1344f | ['Ferris Argyle'] | 2021-01-25 20:47:30.447000+00:00 | ['Google Workspace', 'Visjs', 'Google Cloud Platform', 'Go'] |
Which is the best free Property Listing Sites ? | Best Property Dealer in Hisar
If you want to sell your property fast and are looking for one of the best free property listing sites in India — dealacres.com is the perfect place to be. When it comes to free property advertising websites, it is critical to choose the one that will be truly helpful and effective in selling or renting your commercial or residential property. With some of the most simple and easy features to upload your property, dealacres.com is one of the most friendly and one of the fastest growing free real estate advertising websites in Haryana & Delhi NCR today. Use it to post and list free property ads online to promote your property for sale or for advertising your rental property.
Looking For Affordable Plots — https://dealacres.com/amolik/
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For Unlimited Free Listing Of Your Property Plz VISIT | https://medium.com/@vermanishant795/which-is-the-best-free-property-listing-sites-a2d3b8fad39a | [] | 2021-12-27 04:26:54.062000+00:00 | ['Real Estate Market', 'Real Estate', 'Real Estate News', 'Real Estate Investments', 'Deal Acres'] |
Open Sourcing the Civis API Client for Python | Open Sourcing the Civis API Client for Python
by Keith Ingersoll
We’ve written before about the Civis API and how we’re using it to do some serious data science. With the Civis API, we no longer have to worry about whether we have enough RAM on our laptop to build that intensive model, or whether there’s another job running on our shared server hogging all the processors. It has become an integral component of our operation — so much so that we developed a client library to make it even easier to use. And we’re happy to make this library open-source, so everyone can harness the power of the Civis API in their own custom workflows.
The Civis API Client for Python has a few key features which make working with the Civis API more productive and fun:
1) It’s easy to install: just run pip install civis .
2) The client includes a set of high level functions for common workflows. You can move data to and from the cloud with a single line of code.
import civis
import pandas as pd # Load data into a Pandas DataFrame
df = civis.io.read_civis(table="table", database="database", use_pandas=True) # Upload a Pandas Dataframe to the Cloud Asynchronously
civis.io.dataframe_to_civis(df=df, table="new_table", database="database")
3) You can write custom workflows in native Python syntax. The Python client takes care of making the correct HTTP calls and passing parameters. With the special parameter iterator=True , it even stitches together paginated API calls. For example, you can measure just how big your data is:
import civis client = civis.APIClient()
database_id = client.get_database_id("my_database")
data_mb = 0
tables = client.tables.list(database_id=database_id, iterator=True)
for table in tables:
data_mb += table["size_mb"] or 0
print("Big Data! {} MB".format(data_mb))
4) There’s Python-specific documentation. You can head to ReadTheDocs to see some more examples and read our detailed documentation.
There you have it — the Civis API Client for Python is open for business. Log into Civis Platform, generate an API key (if you haven’t already), and get started! Oh, and don’t forget to check out our other open source projects. | https://medium.com/civis-analytics/open-sourcing-the-civis-api-client-for-python-c5a45a1e5a0c | ['Civis Analytics'] | 2018-03-06 18:30:38.566000+00:00 | ['Open Source', 'Product', 'Data Science', 'Data Science Engineering'] |
How to Evaluate Subgraphs | In this post I am going to use the DODO DEX subgraph to demonstrate how I evaluate subgraphs.
Before I begin, there are a few things to keep in mind.
The subgraph may have been changed or updated by the subgraph developer by the time you read this article. That said, the principles remain the same.
I assume you understand what The Graph protocol is, what a subgraph is, and how it works.
I assume you know what Ethereum is and how to make sense of on-chain data on block explorers like Etherscan.
I created an easy-to-use template for how I rationalize my evaluation of a subgraph. You can duplicate it and modify it to suit your style.
If you create your own version from my template, I’d love to see it. I could improve mine from your implementation.
Curators signal to indexers what subgraphs to index, and they do that by staking the GRT token on a bonding curve. It is important you carefully evaluate a subgraph before staking on it.
Let’s begin.
The first thing I do is try to understand what DODO DEX protocol is and how it functions. A quick google search leads me to the project’s website. I then confirm if the website I’m on is the same as the one in the link from their twitter page. On their website, I see that they are a decentralized exchange where users can swap one token for another, add liquidity to pools and mines the native DODO tokens as a reward for providing liquidity.
When evaluating a subgraph, there are a few key criteria you need to pay attention to. You’ll find these definitions in my template.
Subgraph Function: How would you describe what the subgraph does?
How would you describe what the subgraph does? Production Ready?: Does this subgraph look production ready?
Does this subgraph look production ready? Usefulness to Others: Does this subgraph look like it will be useful to others?
Does this subgraph look like it will be useful to others? Improvements: What changes would you make to the schema including additions or modifications to entities, fields, field types, relationships, or any other improvements?
What changes would you make to the schema including additions or modifications to entities, fields, field types, relationships, or any other improvements? Similar Subgraphs & Comparison: Are there any other subgraphs that do similar things? How does this one compare?
Are there any other subgraphs that do similar things? How does this one compare? Status: Identify the degree of completeness, complexity and accuracy of the implementation
I’ll explore how I evaluate each criterion.
Subgraph Function
To find out what the subgraph does, I go to the playground of the subgraph and query it. As you can see in the image below, when you hit the play button, it returns the indexed data.
From seeing the various tokens, including their addresses, symbols, etc., we can conclude that this subgraph provides data for the DODO DEX protocol. I record this information on the template.
I’ll be creating a post on how to use The Graph playground to query data. If you understand GraphQL then this will feel right at home. | https://medium.com/@itsjerryokolo/how-to-evaluate-subgraphs-40a052f56a50 | ['Jerry Okolo'] | 2020-12-16 20:11:42.818000+00:00 | ['GraphQL', 'Itsjerryokolo', 'The Graph Protocol', 'The Graph', 'Subgraph'] |
Moving From Self-Employed to Corporate Can Be A Leap Forward, Not A Step Back | Photo by Cam Adams on Unsplash
You’ve had your own business for the last 5 years. Your biggest customer is going away. You’re getting tired of chasing down clients and dealing with people who don’t value what you offer. Maybe your family clamors for a “real” job with benefits.
Can you survive in a cubicle after tasting the joys of flying solo?
Many entrepreneurs feel sad when they make this move. Sometimes they wonder, “Am I a failure?” Or they simply miss being able to make the kinds of choices available only to entrepreneurs and the identity that goes with saying, “I’m a business owner.”
Others — probably the majority — are deeply relieved. Entrepreneurs tend to embrace change and many see this move as the path to yet another adventure.
Having your own business makes you a better player in the corporate game.
Many former business owners find they’re in better shape to deal with corporate BS than they were before. They’ve gained perspective. They know they’ve got options: if you’ve built up a business once, you can do it again.
Still, you can experience some challenges on the road back to the cubicle. For example:
(1) If it’s been a while since you did the job search thing, your resume may need a makeover.
Pick up a handful of books from the bookstore. Draft your resume. Get feedback from executives in the field and/or company you are trying to enter.
If you get inconsistent feedback, or mostly negative feedback, seek help from a professional consultant. Getting on a payroll faster means your fees will be repaid many times over.
Avoid any service that promises to get you a job or get you “in front of” managers who can hire you. Only a recruiter can do that. Stay away from the companies that promise to “blast” your resume to a few hundred prospective employers.
(2) Practice spinning your story of why you’re ready to return to corporate life.
Tell the truth with a positive angle. Your future employer will be concerned that you’ll return to self-employment after you’ve paid a few bills and saved some money. Your goal is to ease their fears.
The best way to convince them you’re serious is to research the company. Show that you’re excited by the possibilities of working for them in very specific ways.
(3) Enjoy your honeymoon period once you get on a payroll.
For the first 6–12 months, back-to-corporate workers tend to have fun. It’s like playing a new game.
You’ll find yourself snickering at the games people play…long unnecessary meetings, contributions to birthday gifts, and writing “reports” that nobody reads.
You’ll also enjoy getting things free that you used to pay for. No more dealing with the computer repair guy. Just call tech support.
(4) Expect to be amazingly productive in your new job.
Working on your own has given you perspective. You guard your time more carefully. You ask, “Do I really need to do this?” You’ve learned to figure things out yourself before you ask for help.
(5) Plan for a return to self-employment, even if you’re happy.
Once you’ve been on your own, you probably caught the bug. Even if you don’t miss being on your own, you have to remember that corporate jobs can change or disappear without warning. It’s like losing your biggest customer with no plan in place to replace the income.
Everyone should have a side hustle, starting around age 35 or 40. As you get older, you face age discrimination in your own company, as well as when you seek another job.
A side hustle is the closest thing you’ll have to job insurance. You’ll be more confident on the job and often perform even better because you don’t go into panic mode over rumors of change. You know you and your family will do just fine.
Now you have time to plan your next move in a leisurely fashion. Take classes. Visit the Small Business Administration. Attend networking events featuring business owners.
But be very, very discreet. Your company wants to believe you’re committed to staying forever, even though they rarely reciprocate.
Corporate to Entrepreneurship Can Be A Round-Trip
Finally, keep in mind that the journey between corporate life and entrepreneurship is very much a two-way street. These days, people go back and forth. I know many people who found themselves happy to be back on a W-2 schedule … and many who loved their corporate world but were really glad they had a side hustle too.
Learn more about side hustles from a good book by Chris Guillebeau and a set of interviews I conducted with people who turned their side hustles into full-time careers. | https://medium.com/changing-careers/moving-from-self-employed-to-corporate-can-be-a-leap-forward-not-a-step-back-ad1a73f6bb43 | ['Cathy Goodwin'] | 2020-07-23 15:19:57.058000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Life', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Careers', 'Business'] |
Where Can I Find a Hacker to Hire? | Are you interested in hiring a hacker? Looking to find a hacker for hire service you can fully trust? a very substantial number of people search the internet daily trying to look for legit hackers they can trust to deliver different services they need. But before you are ready to hire and pay for services, you need to be sure of the service you are buying.
Since the hack community used to be generally unorganized, it could be hard getting the right hacker for the job. But thanks to Alienmanhackers, all that has changed now. You can now hire any of the trustworthy and professional ethical hackers on the mainstream internet (without having to get on the dark web), to carry out any service you may be interested in.
All you are required to do is to hire a professional and reliable hacking service is to visit — www.alienmanhackers.xyz
How Can You Hire a Hacker Online?
It is not a new concept that people use the internet to buy and sell products and information. A lot of people have seen news articles about the hacker’s community markets for email hacking, cell phone hacking, social media hacking, ddos attack and other professional hacking services that you can easily hire online to meet your needs.
But, know that you don’t exactly need to travel deep into the dark web anymore in order to be able to access or used any of these services? Years ago, purchasing these services was only possible on the dark web. But these days, you can now hire and use professional hacking services easily. You only need to know where to look for the legit and verified-hackers.
Hackers for Hire, which entails customized hacking against an individual or company specified by the person paying for the service. The platforms advertising Hackers for Hire are not undoubtedly hard to find since alienmanhackers came into play, either. While researching on a Darkweb review to find freshly-generated sites on the Dark web, I was able to pull up ten distinct Hacker for Hire pages without much attempt.
Who will need or use this service, and how easy it is to find a service like this? A likely buyer would be anybody at all that does not have the practical skills to carry out the types of attacks listed below, or a body who has been offended by a company or person and is looking to pay someone to attack them on the web. If they know where to look, these services can be quite easy to find.You can hire a hacker for a broad range of services. These may include; hacking cell phone, email accounts or social media accounts.
What are Some Services You Can Hire a Hacker for?
Hire a Hacker for Cell Phone: You can hire a cell phone hacker to hack any cell phone you want to hack. Do you have suspicions your spouse is cheating on you? Are you disturbed about what your kids do on their cell phones? Are you an employer worried that your employee may be selling valuable company secrets? Whatever you reason for wanting to hire a cell phone hacker, you can never go wrong choosing one of the professionals at alienmanhackers. You can use this service to hack and spy iPhone as well as android phones.
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Related Questions.
How can I hire an expert hacker with good job security?
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Is hiring a hacker illegal? My boyfriend is cheating on me. Will hiring a hacker put me in trouble?
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Related Questions
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Contact alienmanhackers.xyz or send a mail to [email protected] | https://medium.com/@trentelmanwybe/where-can-i-find-a-hacker-to-hire-d256b7d9d6b9 | ['Trentelman Wybe'] | 2021-06-17 08:48:21.561000+00:00 | ['Infidelity', 'Hacker', 'Family', 'Love', 'Cheating'] |
Afraid | Sign up for Everyone deserves to be heard...
By Blue Insights
Creating emotions — Spark plugs to ignite your virtual humanity! Take a look | https://medium.com/blueinsight/afraid-564ac7c0fd98 | ['Sean Zhai'] | 2020-12-18 05:54:17.408000+00:00 | ['Loneliness', 'Humanity', 'Emotions', 'Youngadult', 'Blue Insights'] |
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Business Blanks : Fire Them. No, this article doesn’t deal with male… | A serious business topic, not so serious writing style.
No, this article doesn’t deal with male biological issues, the ‘blanks’ are unprofitable business resources. And please remember that profit is not always measured directly in dollars, time is also valuable.
Note: This article presumes your primary business purpose is profit generation.
A business resource can be defined as an asset that aids one’s business purpose, and there are costs associated with any asset. Using accounting terminology, the Return On any Investment (ROI) should always be directly or indirectly, positive. If not, a solution may involve sourcing a less expensive alternative, updating your manufacturing techniques, revising your pricing structure, or perhaps a resource deletion.
‘Deletion’ does sound serious. But to persist with ‘blanks’ that directly oppose your primary business goal of making profit is nonsense. ‘Business stupidity’ may be an appropriate term.
Two very important potential ‘blank’ resource groups form the crux of any business; they are your salespeople and your customers. Members of both groups are hired, and when necessary they need to be fired. The hiring/firing of employees isn’t a new concept to most of us, but perhaps the hiring/firing of customers maybe something a little lateral for some readers.
In addition to the direct effect of poor performance from these two groups, the link between them is your primary marketing information source. Your customers continually provide vital clues as to the ‘match/mismatch’ between your Marketing Mix and their Purchasing Mix. Both groups need to perform in a variety of ways.
There are many similarities between them:
Very expensive to hire & train … the good ones are difficult to replace
Can be very time-consuming … those continual empty promises
Risky … no guarantees of success
Getting accurate information is like extracting teeth
Non-performing customers and salespeople can be similarly treated according to three steps:
Identify
Qualify
Rectify
Hiring Salespeople:
Ignoring the flowery questions that many small/medium business owners/managers/sales managers tend to ask applicants at interviews, you need to establish four important things:
Do they understand the job requirements? Leave no ‘grey areas’.
Does your organisation enable salespeople to carry out their job requirements effectively?
Is the applicant an interesting person that will fit into the team?
Have they shown proof of previous results/capability? Remember, many of them hold Doctorates in ‘Spin’.
Now get them to sign a lawyer-approved sales-performance-based employment contract, even if they are only earning sales-based commission. Explain it well, and get a signed understanding, and a signed acceptance of all conditions. Detail specifically any clauses referring to employment termination. Ensure clauses pertaining to the use of any information are included.
All your salespeople, irrespective of their remuneration setup, cost you. Even more so should they not perform. The question then beckons, “What are they really doing out there”? If necessary, you must be able to terminate their employment very quickly. A salesperson’s job security should always be his/her sales performance.
If they excel, pay very well. Remember (assuming you haven’t got a badly designed compensation package), if they are earning lots … so are you. Follow the above recipe and you will only attract above average salespeople, you’ll scare off the non-performers. Let applicants back themselves; with salespeople, their employment needs to be at their risk, not yours.
Firing Salespeople:
Any ‘blanks’ need to go ASAP. This is where astute sales-management is vital, or it will cost your organisation a lot more than you think. But what are those costs:
Direct costs of employment
Opportunity costs of sales not attempted/won
Market share performance
Image damage; what is being said/done with your customers
Misleading information to you
Information to competitors
Poorly performing salespeople know they aren’t achieving the expected results and are smart enough to plan for the inevitable. Albeit somewhat creatively, it’s likely they will have a copy of your customer database already. Clauses against its use by any party must be in the contract signed at the time of employment, clauses that are generally totally ineffective.
a) Contracted Salespeople:
Talk to your identified ‘blank’. The conversation regarding their performance won’t come as a surprise, but your pleasantries might throw them a little. During this conversation the situation needs to be qualified, and their non-performance history fully explained. The salesperson needs to understand that you have decided to end the relationship and why, and that it will be done as per the contract they signed. Be clinical.
At this point you have a caged animal very much on the defensive. They will promise to change, guarantee improvements, and then there are always those many external mitigating circumstances and excuses? The old cliché that a leopard doesn’t change its spots certainly applies, and a probation period will simply waste time for both parties, and only waste your money. They are probably well into their new job-search process, and only want to eke out another few week’s pay.
Have a pre-paid cab arranged to take them home (assuming they use a company car), and their final pay cheque ready. Monitor the removal of personal belongings (desk/car) and escort them off the premises.
b) Non-Contracted Staff:
Help them to go … yes! This applies to any employee, not just sales staff. In many countries, employee-protection legislation exists and smart employees know how to use it. Avoid possible confrontation legalities and unpleasantness by coming to a mutual agreement regarding the situation (i.e. square peg in a round hole), and then promoting their job-search efforts.
Sure, it’s a tough financial and personal pill to swallow, but the alternative often becomes a waste of time, effort and money. Allowing them to attend interviews during work time and supporting their move is a simple form of damage control. If by chance they haven’t plundered your files, they possibly won’t, and if negative gossip hasn’t yet permeated the office, it too may not occur. They’ll leave a lot sooner (cheaper for you), with far less animosity than would otherwise be the case (often 3 months of pain).
Yes it’s going to be expensive to replace the person, but the situation is quite possibly partly your fault! How well were they interviewed? What monitoring processes have been in place throughout their employment? How well was the job specified? How was performance measured? Were all the necessary resources supplied? Were they a square peg in a round hole from the beginning? … You should have seen the signs.
As an employer, learn from these situations. Document all details and try to avoid the same issues in future.
Hiring Customers:
They’re hired just the same. The costs associated with getting new business are normally measured in time value. Add a few extra people into the equation for major tender responses and the initial expense can be extremely expensive. I only hope you do enough homework (risk minimising) to warrant the gamble. It’s also worth considering opportunity costs of the work those extra people haven’t done.
Consider an example: (normal day-to-day business)
For example, a salesperson’s cost (those that have a base salary) on an hourly basis (include a share of company overheads) is calculated as $20. Assuming a sales hit-rate of 1:10, the average time spent losing a sale being 2 hours and the average time spent winning a sale being 7 hours, the direct cost to the company for each order from that salesperson is $500 (18 x lost-sale hours, plus 7 x won-sale hours = 25 hours x $20). Add in other assistance and it’s likely that for each successful sale (tenders aside) the company has actually spent close to $700. Often the initial purchase-order profit doesn’t cover this cost. Use your own figures, you’ll find it interesting.
Then there are the ongoing costs of those customers, keeping an account operating, payment terms, authorised discount levels, support labour/time, phone-calls/time etc. Although these costs may seem minor, multiply $50/year by a few hundred almost-dormant customers.
Sorry for being a little cynical, but some customers will use you as an expert they can call upon for advice and guidance. They don’t intend to buy anything, but as their supposed supplier they feel they have the right to abuse the relationship in this way. Sadly, you feel obliged to assist, in the romantic notion that they will automatically purchase from you in the future. Remember, you do have competitors, and nice guys often come last.
Customers are fickle. They will also approach your competition when a major purchase is planned. There are no guarantees of your success, yet you have suffered the expense of being their free consultant.
Firing Customers:
Ever wondered why many large organisations stop dealing directly with their little customers? They just aren’t profitable … so they’re fired, for doing absolutely nothing wrong. These non-profitable customers are very generously passed onto their agents/dealers to handle … unprofitably … in the hope that they might buy sometime soon. And what’s more, the list is often very out-of-date. Well … what can one say, “Thanks for the opportunity expense”.
Why do smaller businesses cling to those almost-dormant ‘blanks’ like their business life depended on them, perhaps it does? The mistake they make is setting up accounts for them, offering them an automatic discount level, and giving them 30 days to pay. Wait until the customer earns those privileges. As a suggestion, establish the cost of invoicing, producing statements etc., it may surprise.
We’ve all heard of the 80:20 rule, 80% of your business from 20% of your customers. The other 80% of your customers are potential ‘blanks’ that are probably on the customer databases of most of your competitors, with a similar status. Perhaps 10% of those potential ‘blanks’ may make reasonable purchases in the medium future and if possible you need to establish which organisations they are, and maintain their status quo.
Fire the remaining 70% (approx.) and make them cash-sale C.O.D. customers, who will simply receive cash receipts at the time of purchase. Until they earn the right to improved conditions, give them nothing, but be sure to explain your system to them. To become an account customer with 30-day terms they need to spend over a predetermined minimum each year. Discount levels kick in at predetermined annual purchasing levels, etc.
You do however want to keep in contact with your fired ‘blanks’. A single-page quarterly email newsletter is ideal to inform people of latest developments and special deals. Ensure your emailing list is ‘opt-in’ only.
**********
Male sterility aside (apologies), congratulations if you are firing ‘blanks’ within your organisation. If you’re not, count your losses, as they’re mounting as you read. | https://medium.com/@steve-underhill/are-you-firing-blanks-f93017d7bc2d | ['Stephen Underhill'] | 2020-12-17 10:09:32.250000+00:00 | ['Management And Leadership', 'Client Management', 'Sales Development', 'Customer Service', 'Business Strategy'] |
Dr Tonjanita Johnson of ‘The University of Alabama System’ (UAS): 5 Things You Need To Know To Be A | Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share the “backstory”behind what brought you to this particular career path?
As a third-generation college student, I always knew that attending college was a given, but pursuing a career in higher education was never a part of my plan. I grew up in a small, rural community in west Alabama, where we could only get two stations on the television, one of which was ABC, where I adopted trailblazing anchor Carole Simpson as a role model. My plan was to attend Howard University in Washington D.C., and major in broadcast journalism so that I could eventually replace Ted Koppel as the anchor on ABC News Nightline.
That plan was short-lived as I ended up attending a minority journalism workshop at The University of Alabama (UA), where I earned a New York Times Scholar Award, which came with scholarship funds to attend UA but required me to pursue a degree in print journalism instead of broadcast. After graduating four years later with a degree in journalism, I immediately went to work at a daily newspaper in north Alabama, covering, of all things, local colleges and universities and the higher education beat. After a couple of years of being a reporter, my alma mater contacted me to gauge my interest in an entry-level position as a communication specialist in the news bureau, an area responsible for the communications and public relations efforts of the University. I got the job. It was an incredible learning experience, and I had exceptional mentors there as a young professional. Taking on that role sparked what is now a nearly 30-year career in the field of higher education.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your teaching career? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I learned to appreciate the old saying, “Never say never” on the front end of my career. Early in my marriage, I remember jokingly telling my husband, who is a native of Mississippi, that if he ever tried to move us to his home state, I would divorce him. As fate would have it, when he retired from the NFL as a professional athlete, he applied for a position at Mississippi Valley State University in Itta Bena, MS, to be closer to home. Wondering what I would do in Itta Bena all day if I didn’t have a job, I applied for a Director of Public Relations position at the University as well. I remember telling myself that we must be crazy to be thinking about moving ourselves and an eight-month-old from New Orleans, Louisiana — one of my favorite places in the world to eat I might add — to the Mississippi Delta.
When the President of the University called our home one afternoon to speak with me about the job for which I had applied, I remember frantically gesturing to my husband to say that I wasn’t home, but he handed me the phone anyway. During the call, the President began to share his vision and very detailed plan for taking this small, historically black university from “excellence to preeminence.” The rest is history. In just a few short years under that President’s leadership, we had taken an institution of a little more than 2,000 students to more than 4,000 and counting. Plus, after only a year, I had been promoted to my first cabinet-level position as the President’s Executive Assistant and Chief of Staff. That unexpected career transition and the extraordinary mentorship of that President created an entirely new world of opportunity for me in the higher education environment. Not only did he encourage my growth and development as an administrator, he encouraged me to pursue my doctorate and stay connected with students and the classroom through teaching.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t think that big things were going to come from my experiences at such a small institution. But, I’ll tell anyone that without my time at Mississippi Valley, there is no me in terms of the professional that I am today. What I learned from that experience is to never underestimate or despise small beginnings. I worked there for seven years, learning and gaining hands-on experience in high-level processes that would have taken years for me to work my way into at a larger, more complex institution.
I’ve worked from Tennessee to New York and taken on teaching and administrative roles at complex research institutions and overseen multiple divisions within complex higher education systems. Learning to be faithful and committed to your work in small-scale environments, where you know that few people are paying attention, is a powerful lesson. This is also the kind of proving ground that demonstrates your ability to be trusted with even greater roles and responsibilities.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything in education that is that we shouldn’t take for granted our role in the holistic development of our students’ lives. We learned very quickly that, at the college level, our campuses were much more than just an educational site. Many of our students depend on our campuses as their primary source for housing, meals, medical services, mental health support, Internet and technology services, and general social engagement, among other forms of support.
As we sought to better understand the impact of the pandemic on our students and how we could help them stay engaged during the time of virtual/remote learning, social distancing and the temporary modification of many campus services, we got to know our students and their needs so much better. As a result, I, along with so many of my administrative and faculty colleagues, are now looking at new and more innovative ways that we can continue to meet the changing personal and social needs of our students and expand or enhance existing services and support structures that will allow students to have a more productive and successful academic experience.
Many of the academic, physical, emotional and social challenges of our students have been exacerbated by the pandemic, and I’m pleased to see that we are using the information that we have gathered from students to improve our campus environments and speak more directly to individual student needs in order to support their overall academic and personal success.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the main focus of our interview. From your point of view, how would you rate the results of the US education system?
As a person of color growing up in a small, rural community, I have not only had the direct opportunity to see how transformative it can be to have access to a quality education but also what it is like to witness the tragic result of living in communities where there are major disparities in the quality of educational opportunities available to its citizens. So, even as I acknowledge the exceptional accomplishments and vast improvements in our U.S. system of education, I can’t help but see those achievements through a lens of inequality.
Although I have spent my entire career working in academic environments where innovation and a commitment to educational excellence are foundational tenets for a successful community, I need only take a short drive to my beloved hometown, located in Alabama’s Black Belt region, to be reminded that there are so many communities across our country where individuals from a variety of social, racial, ethnic and economic backgrounds are still struggling as a result of many years of inequalities in the various systems that undergird our communities. Educationally, the U.S. has a countless number of very significant points of pride, which are worthy of recognition, but we still have a long way to go when it comes to ensuring that all — or even the majority — of our nation’s students have access to the quality of education that they so deeply deserve and need to improve our communities and their overall quality of life.
Can you identify 5 areas of the US education system that are going really great?
I hate to keep referencing this awful pandemic that has so negatively impacted the lives of so many individuals and families around the world, but if there is any silver lining in all of this for education, it is that we have learned to be more nimble and adaptable and to recognize that change is sometimes needed in order to remain relevant and viable. So, I’m really encouraged by the fact that, across the U.S., institutions are rethinking outdated educational models and looking more critically at individual student needs.
While it gives me pause to think about heaping praise on a national educational system that has the level of inequities that ours is currently experiencing in the U.S., I think we are doing a much better job at recognizing that there is not a one-size-fits-all method for teaching and learning. We are engaging in more productive national dialogue regarding the purpose and value of education, although this is still a topic of great debate. We are giving greater thought to how we connect educational experiences to real-life needs, whether they are related to workforce needs or a student’s practical needs for their personal aspirations and career goals. We are also becoming increasingly more creative in curriculum development as we seek to ensure the achievement of important student learning outcomes. We are packaging educational opportunities in a format that better speaks to the needs of non-traditional and working students and for those with unique educational needs.
Can you identify the 5 key areas of the US education system that should be prioritized for improvement? Can you explain why those are so critical?
I know it’s easy to debate important areas for improvement within our U.S. education system, but from where I sit, we could start with these.
Improving the salaries of qualified educators, especially our K-12 teachers. If you want to produce top-quality students, you have to start with high-quality teachers. It’s shameful when our teachers have to put in a full day’s work in the classroom and then head off to another job just to make ends meet. I read an article late last year that said teachers make 20 percent less than other professionals with similar educational backgrounds and credentials and some make even less than the current living wage. Given the complexities of today’s education environment, that’s pretty discouraging.
If you want to produce top-quality students, you have to start with high-quality teachers. It’s shameful when our teachers have to put in a full day’s work in the classroom and then head off to another job just to make ends meet. I read an article late last year that said teachers make 20 percent less than other professionals with similar educational backgrounds and credentials and some make even less than the current living wage. Given the complexities of today’s education environment, that’s pretty discouraging. Poverty — Although an issue all its own, is another concern that we need to address in our country if we hope to improve education. I don’t know how we can be surprised by students who have extreme difficulty staying focused on classwork and staying in school when they are struggling day to day with food and housing insecurities and living in environments impacted by crime and violence.
Although an issue all its own, is another concern that we need to address in our country if we hope to improve education. I don’t know how we can be surprised by students who have extreme difficulty staying focused on classwork and staying in school when they are struggling day to day with food and housing insecurities and living in environments impacted by crime and violence. Technology — While it’s cliche to say we live in a technological age, it’s true. And, improvements in technology are needed for both instructors and learners. Many of today’s faculty need additional training in modern classroom technology to not only help students keep pace with the technology that they will encounter in the outside world, but also to help improve teaching and learning outcomes. Students also need access to reliable Internet resources and modern technology so that they can engage with a broader and more diverse range of learning resources and develop a mastery of basic technologies that would be expected of today’s well-rounded student.
While it’s cliche to say we live in a technological age, it’s true. And, improvements in technology are needed for both instructors and learners. Many of today’s faculty need additional training in modern classroom technology to not only help students keep pace with the technology that they will encounter in the outside world, but also to help improve teaching and learning outcomes. Students also need access to reliable Internet resources and modern technology so that they can engage with a broader and more diverse range of learning resources and develop a mastery of basic technologies that would be expected of today’s well-rounded student. Addressing reading and math deficiencies — Too many of today’s students are struggling with reading and math deficiencies, and when these gaps occur early in their educational experiences, students quickly become discouraged, often making unfair judgments about their capacity to personally succeed academically.
Too many of today’s students are struggling with reading and math deficiencies, and when these gaps occur early in their educational experiences, students quickly become discouraged, often making unfair judgments about their capacity to personally succeed academically. Funding continues to be an ever-green issue, particularly in most public school environments at all levels. While I agree that simply throwing money at an issue is not going to make problems magically go away, there are some investments that need to be made in support of education to enhance teacher quality, reduce class sizes and provide better educational facilities and resources for students and faculty, which will go a long way in improving overall quality and reducing inequities in education.
Super. Here is the main question of our interview. Can you please share your “5 Things You Need To Know To Be A Highly Effective Educator?” Please share a story or example for each.
Highly effective educators never stop learning and they seek to understand the unique learning styles of their students so that everyone finds a way to successfully engage in the learning experience.
Effective educators make the learning content relevant to the learners and seek feedback on how to improve the learning process.
Highly effective educators have some pre-established ground rules for the learning environment and work with students to add others to help ensure shared ownership of what takes place in the learning space.
I believe that highly effective educators are creative and not paralyzed by having to do things the same way every time because “that’s just how we’ve always done it.” I truly dislike those words.
The best educators, in my opinion, understand the importance of passion and compassion as it relates to their work — they are passionate about their role as an educator in a way that makes the learning process exciting, and they care enough about those who are experiencing challenges in the learning environment to explore ways to ensure that they succeed as well.
As you know, teachers play such a huge role in shaping young lives. What would you suggest needs to be done to attract top talent to the education field?
As I suggested earlier, I think it is important for us as a society to bring value back to the teaching profession because teachers are an important foundational element to progressive, well-educated communities. Regardless of our profession, most of us can clearly pinpoint a teacher, mentor or some other individual whose instruction or guidance taught us something important about our chosen profession or our lives in general. It’s difficult to attract excellent educators if we don’t demonstrate that we believe in the significance of their work by paying them a respectable wage, investing in the facilities where they have to teach and supporting efforts that help make their work easier and more effective.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Einstein is credited as saying, “Once you stop learning, you start dying.” So, I’m constantly looking for opportunities to learn something new. Being a life-long learner not only reminds me that I don’t know everything, but it also keeps my mind young and constantly open to new ideas and fresh ways of doing things. I don’t ever want to think of a day where there is nothing new to learn or encounter someone who can’t teach me something new about life or the world we live in.
We are blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)
I’m sorry for being greedy, but there are three individuals that I would genuinely enjoy having an opportunity to spend a few private moments with — Dr. Condoleeza Rice at Stanford, Dr. Michael Crow at Arizona State University, and Dr. Larry Bacow at Harvard University. While I recognize that they are all truly elite leaders in the higher education space, I’m more impressed with their history of working in complex environments with a sensitivity to finding ways of bringing everyone along. In spite of having enjoyed a career filled with immense responsibility and complexity, Dr Rice, who is an exceptional scholar, has always seemed to find value in simplicity and humble beginnings. Plus, she has Alabama connections and continues to support efforts to help the state build capacity and reduce critical inequities. I’m just fascinated by Dr. Crow’s work as a higher education visionary and his never-ending commitment to finding ways to support the needs of all learners within his university community. And, finally, when I was a much younger professional, I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Bacow when he was at Tufts University. He made such a powerful impression on me, and that encounter convinced me that I was in the right field and that I had the capacity to impact the world wherever I was planted. Sometimes, people never know the impact they have on others, and I would love to thank him for that.
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https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonjanitajohnson/ | https://medium.com/authority-magazine/dr-tonjanita-johnson-of-the-university-of-alabama-system-uas-5-things-you-need-to-know-to-be-a-b7e45bd8ff77 | ['Penny Bauder'] | 2021-02-28 15:08:03.424000+00:00 | ['Social Impact'] |
Breaking The Scene (Children of Men — Opener) | Today I felt like looking into one of the best scenes of Children of Men, which coincidentally is one of the best film openers ever made. Without further introduction, let’s get into it.
Scene Comes From: Children of Men
Where to Watch: For purchase/rent on streaming services
Scene Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSdL1zeOfdk
Scene Context
Humans have become infertile and the world has been ravaged by military government.
Scene Conflicts
The world is in shock based on the day’s news
Theo wants to get on with his day
Scene Outline
A crowd of people watch reports of the murder of “Baby Diego”.
Theo wades through the crowd and orders his coffee.
Theo watches the report, which reveals Diego was the youngest person in the world, at 18 years old.
Theo gets his coffee and leaves as news-watchers cry.
Theo, outside in industrial London, starts to pour alcohol into his coffee as the coffee shop he just left explodes.
Why It Works
Definition by Juxtaposition: While everyone else is frozen in place, Theo moves. Without a line of spoken dialogue, we are given an exemplary rundown of our protagonist. This is someone who doesn’t feel like everyone else. He’s not concerned with the world anymore and, made evident by his alcoholism, would rather forget the harsh reality he’s stuck in.
Thematic Foreshadowing: Because Theo leaves the coffee shop and refuses to watch and pity his world, he survives. No spoilers for the film here, but this is a key theme to the entirety of the story world. Those who are stuck in self-pity will lose out to those who find ways to move forward.
Surprise over Suspense. 90 percent of the time, you should go for suspense. There’s a ton of people way more qualified than me which can explain this. But, in this specific instance, it’s the shock inherent in the explosion that grabs us. We need to be in the same mindstate as our protagonist in the opening, and so to go for the lack of explanation in the explosion was a sincerely wise decision.
Hard Exit: Right after the explosion, the scene’s over. There’s no explanation given as to the cause of the explosion, and no need to see the aftermath. All we need to know is Theo’s alive. You should never spend more time in a scene than you need, and right when we see that Theo isn’t killed by the bomb, the scene’s over and we can move onto the next piece of the story.
Summary
In two minutes, without a single line of dialogue, we have a strikingly concise idea of who Theo is and the world he’s unwillingly apart of. As far as openings go, it’s harder to find a more efficient and impactful opening than this one. | https://medium.com/@jturkbio/breaking-the-scene-children-of-men-opener-e9c520b35a5b | ['Jason Turk'] | 2020-12-22 17:48:30.688000+00:00 | ['Children Of Men', 'Scene Structure', 'Scene Analysis', 'Screenwriting', 'Alfonso Cuaron'] |
Self-Service Data Interfaces | In today’s world, technology is analogous to data. Netflix, Uber, and LinkedIn are pertinent examples of firms that have tapped into the symbiotic relationship between data and technology. Firms such as these increasingly rely on data to make strategic decisions ranging from hiring to budget allocations to managing day to day operations. Every customer touchpoint is digitized and recorded for analytics. Similarly, Capital One, a pioneer in information-based decision making, has invested heavily on accumulating large amounts of data in order to inform multiple aspects of its business.
However, data that is not used effectively is as good as data that does not exist. For example, a line of business within an organization may invest analyst time on gathering data from its enterprise data warehouse, performing a data analysis to address a business problem. This work and the outcome of the analysis often remains within the confines of that business line. More often than not, another business line within company may want to perform the same analysis; but in the absence of an information wiki/knowledge repository, they have to start from scratch, causing the same work to be repeated multiple times.
If commonly used analytical data is consolidated, processed, and presented via a standardized presentation layer with search functionality, the repetitive and redundant work is significantly reduced. Organizations often focus heavily on streamlining and centralizing accumulation and storage of data. Often a much lower investment is made into presentation and delivery. To really tap into the power of analytics, the data/tools used in a project need to be matured by creating efficient presentation/consumption layers that not only serve as a visual representation of information for its immediate users, but also acts as a self-servicing layer for the broader enterprise community.
The Three Levels of Presenting Data for Consumption
Traditionally, data is presented for consumption in three ways:
1. The basic level is the actual raw data that can be used as-is and is in the most granular form. This is useful for analysts and developers looking for more flexibility to massage the data to their needs. 2. The second level of presentation involves applying some refinement to the data so it can be used in repeatable processes such as standard reports. 3. Finally, the highest level of presentation is visualizations and business intelligence which involves presenting data visually to generate business insights.
An efficient and well-designed presentation layer has to address all three needs. Hence, a digitally-driven organization has to consider the implications of all three levels of data presentation and their consumption requirements.
Investing in Solutions to Reduce Complexity
Digitization requires reasonable investments in the Cloud and enterprise technological capabilities. These technology investments can vary from data centers to Platform as a Service models to databases to software to tools etc. The behind the scenes cost data on these investments is often complex, segregated, and confined within individual lines of business. For as these investments grow, each line of business will need to maintain complex technology cost structures and a footprint spread across both their on-premises and Cloud platforms. An integrated enterprise-level technology cost data warehouse with standardized analytical frameworks and presentation layers can create tremendous value for leaders to understand and benchmark their costs.
One such effort within Capital One is the Tech Cost Transformation. The goal of this initiative is to consolidate and streamline the collection, storage, and presentation of technology costs data while creating standardized analytical capabilities to enable transparent and efficient cost management. A repository of cost enriched data has been gathered from individual line of business data sources and a financial management tool scores the cost models to process the data and the associated financials. In order to make such large volumes of processed data from disparate sources available for usage, this web-interface was designed to create a standardized presentation layer addressing all three data consumption needs stated above.
Delivering on Data Presentation Needs
A data presentation layer built as a web-interface can facilitate easy access to data and program information. Hence the content flows on the website are designed based on the evolution of the cost transformation program. The application is hosted in our Cloud environment and creates the required user layers to easily get to our standard Reporting and Data Suites. Each page has been designed to serve as an information wiki to the data.
We recognize that not everyone who needs access to this data is an analyst or technologist; so the pages are created to convey the program story to a broader, less specialized audience. Users familiar with the program can navigate to interactive reports and the downloadable data files. Alternately, someone new to the program may simply browse the self-service pages to obtain contextual information before engaging with the data.
Our overall aim is to create self-servicing capabilities to meet the needs of all audiences with diverse skill-sets and unique data needs. This style of presentation layer was our solution to making data access simple and effective. Data delivery and presentation are as important as streamlining & centralizing accumulation and storage of data. Our belief is that accessible self-servicing data layers can build excitement and increased activity on your data.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, collecting data is only the first step in the process of working data into your business plan. Creating service layers for data presentation can create extensive usability. Extensive usability can lead to better analysis. Better analysis can lead to better decisions. Better decisions can enable increased organizational success. Here at Capital One we’re dedicated to maximizing every layer of our data on our journey. | https://medium.com/capital-one-tech/self-service-data-interfaces-8a9b605f2b3d | ['Viji R'] | 2018-05-11 17:24:20.187000+00:00 | ['Big Data', 'Data Visualization', 'Data Science', 'Capital One'] |
How can you test the demand for your product before building it? | Create a survey
Surveys can contain two types of questions:
Closed (quantitative data): Multi-choice questions give a better response rate, and it’s easier to process and visualize the resulting data. A respondent has a choice from radio buttons or checkboxes.
Open (qualitative data): These questions require a text answer to explain the cause. Always try to ask, “why or why not?’ to dig deeper into the problem.
What is great about online surveys is that people feel anonymous, which leads to them being very honest and straightforward. Remember that open questions give lower response rates, so you want to make sure every question is essential and none are “nice to have” questions.
Recommended tools:
Build a prototype
“The key principle in lean methods is to reduce waste, and one of the biggest forms of waste is to design, build, test and deploy a feature or product only to find out it is not what we needed.”
Your fundamental goal should be to learn something at a much lower cost in terms of money and time through building a real product. Here’s what I love about prototyping:
Making sure as soon as possible that everyone in the team has a consistent vision of the product.
A remarkable tool to communicate between different departments like marketing, design, development, C-level.
Ability to gather quick feedback from your target customers (you can read more about creating UX personas).
Having a pretty solid foundation for the development documentation.
High fidelity mockups are deliverables from designers to front-end developers.
In EFEKT- UX/UI studio, we use Invision to create clickable prototypes. It’s a great way to link screens and create user flows, which we might test with end-users or a customer. There are numerous tools that you can use to create your first sketches. From the very simple like Balsamiq, Whismical to more advanced software like Sketch or Figma, where you create a User Interface as well. Many people don’t appreciate pen and paper which is super efficient at explaining your ideas with a team. In our UX workshops or internal meetings, we love to use quick sketches to facilitate valuable discussion about many different solutions.
From low to high fidelity
In-depth user testing
There is no question that talking and testing with the possible target group is one of the most powerful sources of inspiration for many breakthrough product ideas. In every user or customer interaction, it’s good to understand:
Are your customers who you think they are?
Do they really have the problems you think they have?
How does the customer solve this problem today?
What would be required for them to switch?
When we were creating our first startup, Wooby (coloring books enhanced with Augmented Reality), we wanted to face our very first skeleton with users. We defined our target group as three — seven-year-old kids. Where could we find them? The highest density of our users per square meter is available in kindergartens, so I reached out to one of them and asked the principal if we could run a free, creative lesson. I explained simply that a kid can color an animal, then we provide a smartphone with a mobile application, and they can see their animal in 3D with the same colors as were used on the paper. Magic! | https://uxdesign.cc/how-can-you-test-the-demand-for-your-product-before-building-it-f9010bcfd646 | ['Simon Wesierski'] | 2020-03-12 23:09:33.914000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'User Experience', 'Product Design', 'Business', 'Product Management'] |
Burnaby, Canada: Explore The City As Your Try The Different Things To Do! | Burnaby is a city in British Columbia, Canada, sharing an east border with Vancouver. In terms of population, Burnaby is the third-largest city in British Columbia and attracts a lot of tourists throughout the year because of its picturesque beauty and serene surroundings.Art, music, culture, history, wildlife, and traditions outline the soul of the city and there won’t be once during your visit that you will be in a dilemma about what things to do in Burnaby! From visiting lakes and parks, climbing mountains and trying a hand at the casinos — there are too many things for you to explore at Burnaby.
8 Best Things To Do In Burnaby
When it comes to making an itinerary for a trip, there shouldn’t be any room for confusion and we assure you that as we give you a list of the 10 best things to do in Burnaby during your trip:
1. Burnaby Mountain — Go Biking!
Burnaby Mountain is a low lying, forested mountain in Burnaby which is known for its mountain biking trails. The yearly celebration of light firework festival on English Bay west of downtown Vancouver can be seen from the park and attracts an audience on the parks’ westward-facing lawns. The place is also complemented with restaurants that attract visitors with fine dining which can be enjoyed while watching the beautiful view of Vancouver on the west and Indian Arm Mountains to the North.
Location: Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
Timing: Open 24 hours
Entry Fee: Free
Must Read: .10 Best Things To Do In Calgary For An Ultimate Holiday In Canada
2. Playland At The Pacific National Exhibition — Channelize Your Inner Kid!
Playland is the oldest amusement park in Canada and is located in Hasting Park. It is interesting to know that the opening scenes of the horror film, Final Destination 3, were shot at the park. Playland offers 30 rides such as wooden roller coaster, arcade games and the pendulum ride at the park is one of the most fun things to do in Burnaby! The regular season of the park is from May to the end of September every year and it reopens for Fright Night from mid-October till Halloween weekend.
Location: 2901 E Hastings St, Vancouver, BC V5K 5J1, Canada
Timing: 11 am to 5 pm
Entry Fees: $32.50 for one day pass and $99.50 for seasonal pass.
Suggested Read: Top 21 Things To Do In Canada For An Absolutely Thrilling Holiday In 2021
3. Deer Lake — Take A Stroll!
Deer is situated in central Burnaby, having a wide variety of flora and fauna. The lake is featured with numbers of walking trails, which connects the lake and its surrounding forest to the boat launching pad, picnic sites, playground, Burnaby Art Gallery, Burnaby Village Museum, Shadbolt Center for Arts and the surrounding community. Boating is cherished as one of the best things to do in Burnaby Canada and must be experienced by all at the Deer Lake as they provide rental facilities of different types of boats like Canoe, Kayak, pedal boat, and rowboat.
Location: Central Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
Timing: 8 am to 4.45 pm
Entry Fees: Free
Suggested Read: Canada In September 2021: Your Personal Guide For A Tour Down The Best Experiences
4. The Capilano Suspension Bridge — Pay A Visit!
Suggested Read: Visiting Canada In November? See How To Make The Most Of Your Trip In This Season
Planning your holiday but confused about where to go? These travel stories help you find your best trip ever!
5. Confederation Park — Swim And Chill!
Image Credit: Pixabay
Suggested Read: 13 Things To Do In Niagara Falls, Canada In 2021: An Experience Below A Majestic Waterfall
6. Starlight Casino — Play A Game Of Luck!
Your search for the best things to do in Burnaby at night ends here, as the Starlight Casino is the perfect place to spend laughing over drinks and a game of cards. The Casino is well-equipped with private salons, restaurants, and has numerous slots and table games. There is also a private room at the Casino where you can host independent games.
Location: 350 Gifford St, New Westminster, BC, V3M 7A3, Canada.
Timing: Open 24 Hours
Entry Fees: Free
Suggested Read: Monsoon In Canada: See How Best To Enjoy This Blissful Season In Canada
7. The Ismaili Centre — Explore!
Suggested Read: Temples in Canada: 9 Places That Are A Testament To This Country’s Diverse Culture
8. Pacific Breeze Winery — Taste The Delicious Wine!
Further Read: 10 Budget-Friendly Hostels In Canada For Enthusiastic Backpackers!
Burnaby is a wonderful place in British Columbia surrounded and connected to many metropolis cities by all convenient means of transports. It is without a doubt, an ideal place for tourists and travelers and there are a plethora of things to do in Burnaby during your stay there. Experience hikes, wines, and much more as you plan your trip to Canada with TravelTriangle.
Disclaimer: TravelTriangle claims no credit for images featured on our blog site unless otherwise noted. All visual content is copyrighted to its respectful owners. We try to link back to original sources whenever possible. If you own rights to any of the images, and do not wish them to appear on TravelTriangle, please contact us and they will be promptly removed. We believe in providing proper attribution to the original author, artist or photographer.
Please Note: Any information published by TravelTriangle in any form of content is not intended to be a substitute for any kind of medical advice, and one must not take any action before consulting a professional medical expert of their own choice.
Frequently Asked Questions About Things To Do In Burnaby
What is there to do in Burnaby for free?
Some of the things to do in Burnaby for free are:
1. Take a walk at Burnaby village
2. Take a Hike
3. Enjoy the art at the city’s galleries
4. Experience Japanese- Canadian culture at the National Nikkei 5. 5. Museum and Cultural Center.
5. Ride on the Burnaby Central Railway
How far is Burnaby from Vancouver?
The distance between Burnaby and Vancouver is 12 km.
How to reach Burnaby?
The nearest airport to Burnaby is the Vancouver International Airport. You can also take the Skytrain from Vancouver which will take 15 minutes.
When is the best time to visit Burnaby?
The best time to visit Burnaby is between mid-July to late August because the weather is really comfortable and soothing!
How far is Burnaby from Stanley Park?
The distance between Burnaby and Stanley Park is 14 km.
Does Burnaby have snow?
No, even though the winters are freezing cold, the city does not experience snowfall.
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An occasional poet, a logophile by heart, and a minimalistic soul by choice, Christina is a lover of chai, furry friends, and all good things. A true believer of work hard party harder, she is a problem solver by nature, a mountain person to the core, and writing calms the chaos in her. Always up for a single malt, she can listen to Eminem, Justin Timberlake, and Adele all day long, she’s the first one to strike a conversation, and quotes that “a smile and silence can sail you through any situation, anytime, and anywhere”. So, who’s up for a drink?
Comments
comments | https://medium.com/@miss.sanakhan1993/burnaby-canada-explore-the-city-as-your-try-the-different-things-to-do-bfac87d74c81 | ['Sana Khan'] | 2021-08-02 06:09:54.843000+00:00 | ['Places To Visit In Canada', 'Explore Canada', 'Things To Do In Canada', 'Burnaby', 'Travel Tips'] |
Metaverse Big Bang: Star Atlas Launches Next-Gen NFTs through Galactic Asset Offering | As the inaugural unveiling of next-level NFTs to the world, Star Atlas has launched a Galactic Asset Offering (GAO) on September 7, 2021. The ongoing event brings all players, enthusiasts and collectors a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be part of the future by owning some of the most advanced metaverse NFT assets in existence.
During the GAO, assets are being rolled outhurt individually in limited quantities that will satisfy the initial demand from the community and meet the needs of collectors seeking to get their hands on the very first generation of AAA-grade metaverse NFTs.
Depending on inventory, the assets on offer will follow a simple step-pricing model that rewards early participants while giving the fans who were not fast enough a fair treatment, giving everyone the chance to assemble their desired fleet.
The first two waves of assets come in the form of a range of spaceship NFTs, with sequenced countdowns to drop time displayed on their Galactic Marketplace page. The rarity of spaceships increases based on ship class.
As a Genesis Generation of the ships, any consideration of a future release will be carefully measured against the data of capital inflows in the metaverse, asset deflation and any degree of inflation based on supply.
Future releases of the Galactic Asset Offering may also include other assets, but will not include Claim Stake NFTs, which are in the Marketplace due to being dropped to the recipients of Meta-Poster Rewards.
After the supply of assets on offer is exhausted, the items are available in the secondary marketplace on their Galactic Marketplace page, joining meta-posters and other assets like the Tigu space cat already trading there.
First wave of Galactic Asset Offering NFTs: September 7
Opal Jet
Category: Ship /// Spec: Racer /// Size: XX-Small /// Rarity: Common
The smaller sibling to the Opal Jetjet, the Opal Jet mimics the oversized engine block for blazing fast speeds on the racetrack. The Opal Jet is a one seater space racer capable of warping planet to planet. Packed with enough firepower to throw cover fire and then slip away in a wink. Enjoy insane speeds, no license required!
Marketplace link.
Pearce X5
Category: Ship /// Spec: Fighter /// Size: X-Small /// Rarity: Uncommon
Pearce’s X5 Car is a shapeshifting, two seater, nimble fighter and starship. It has four different primary modes of operation. (1) Attack mode with all weapons pointing forward. (2) Speed mode with all thrusters pointing to the rear. (3) Normal mode with the weapons and thrusters split to the forward and read. (4) Defense mode with the arms retracted and hull plating with the largest coverage.
The X5 Car is the stock patrol vessel for the Council of Peace with a pervasive presence throughout secured faction territories in space and on land. Be sure to earn your pilot’s license to take this through faction space.
Marketplace link.
Vzus opod
Category: Ship /// Spec: Data Runner /// Size: Medium /// Rarity: Rare
The VZUS opod is a stealthy, data validation vessel with robust living quarters and well-rounded starship amenities. Highly robust scanning radars, antennae, surveillance equipment and packed with explorer drones make this ship a favorite for small deep space explorer crews looking to trade in information with rare and valuable data.
Marketplace link.
Compakt Hero
Category: Ship /// Spec: Multi-Role /// Size: Medium /// Rarity: Rare
The Calico Compakt Hero nestles nicely into the Guardian’s hangar for distant shuttling or away team expeditions. Manufactured under the cost effective Compakt supply line, the styling is more suitable for rough exploration rather than traveling in high luxury style. Should the expedition carry on longer than planned, the Compakt Hero has fully sustainable life support capabilities onboard this medium sized, multi-crew, multi-role ship. Utilize the standard medium cargo hold and additional fuel module for freight lines to bring in some additional capital when traveling long and far in the comfortable interior accommodations. Enjoy the panoramic views of the nearly all glass ceiling on the top deck making the long flights a sight to behold from any angle of the ship. Additional VTOL and side winglet thrusters make this a highly maneuverable ship if things were to get hairy when deep in unknown territory. This robust ship is destined to help you survive and thrive among the stars.
Marketplace link.
Ogrika Thripid
Category: Ship /// Spec: Fighter /// Size: Large /// Rarity: Legendary
The Ogrika Thripid is a testament to glorious super luxury Punaab culture while demonstrating powerful and brutal strength. This large and heavy fighter also has a powerful rudder thruster for unusually quick maneuverability for a ship this size. The massive forward facing cannons are positioned to obliterate any enemy on the business end of the Thripid. On top of being an arsenal powerhouse, the interior provides a very comfortable and equally luxury accommodations.
The Captain of a ship of this magnitude can utilize the weaponry to establish a very safe escort environment while enjoying the lush amenities for long distance space travel with a huge boost to peace of mind.
Marketplace link.
Second wave of Galactic Asset Offering NFTs: September 9
Pearce X4
Category: Ship /// Spec: Fighter /// Size: XX-Small /// Rarity: Common
This is Pearce X4. A space-worthy, single passenger space bike that packs a punch. A popular model for short range COP patrols in space and on land. No pilot’s license required to explore distant exoplanets on a whim with the best, fully unobstructed view Pearce can offer. Comes standard with a bit of cargo space for those extra long trips through the vast, open range of outer space.
Marketplace link.
Opal Jetjet
Category: Ship /// Spec: Racer & Fighter /// Size: X-Small /// Rarity: Uncommon
Often thought of as the fastest modifiable, two seater, space racer vehicle, the Opal Jetjet growls its massive engine block and utilizes its forward and rear weapon turrets to overtake other would-be competitors on the racetrack. Coated in pure style from bow to stern, this ship can whip you across the track almost as fast as it can warp you across the sector. A comfortable and classic interior provides a familiar callback to an ancient and timeless aesthetic that humankind will never forget.
Marketplace link.
Fimbul BYOS Packlite
Category: Ship /// Spec: Freight /// Size: Medium /// Rarity: Epic
BYOS stands for Build Your Own Ship. Fimbul offers a full do-it-yourself package for the starship mechanic who likes to get their hands dirty. We do not guarantee all parts have survived their space trek to your doorstep but our handy guide will help you find a suitable replacement at a nearby scrapyard. Once assembled, your Packlite provides cozy and sufficient amenities for the space dweller who is resilient to life on the open slowave sea. A robust cargo hold can extend beyond its walls to take on those extra chunky hauls that pay the big bucks. If you need any extra room, reinforced mycellium bungies will ensure you use every last inch of cargo space. For the frugal cargo freighter, the Packlite is your dream boat.
Marketplace link.
Calico Guardian
Category: Ship /// Spec: Multi-Role /// Size: Capital /// Rarity: Legendary
Calico’s flagship multi-role, exploration vessel, the Guardian, is a marvel of modern spaceship technology. Clean, sporty and full of utility, this capital ship can be the home of an extra large crew destined to comb the furthest reaches of the known and unknown sectors of our galactic neighborhood. All imaginable creature comforts and sustainable bio practices onboard this ship put the crew of any Guardian at ease as they explore for new life and new biomes. Packed with two extra large chambers of explorer drones and dual cartography navigation rooms, the Guardian also doubles as the space charting headquarters for any and all exploration or data validation fleets. Comes standard with a double decker theater for keeping the crew entertained with the latest the metaverse has to offer in live, hyperlive and streaming entertainment. Stacked with massive turret cannons for heavy defense, if you had to choose only one ship to get you through your entire space life and career, you cannot possibly go wrong with the Calico Guardian.
Marketplace link.
Subsequent waves of NFTs
Asset drops will happen every week. Stay tuned for more information on those via our social media channel and keep your eyes on our website. | https://medium.com/star-atlas/metaverse-big-bang-next-gen-nfts-galactic-asset-offering-e60c792c7a9c | ['Star Atlas'] | 2021-09-10 18:36:09.676000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Metaverse', 'Nft', 'Space Exploration', 'Blockchain'] |
Why proper teaching method is the most important for developing country? | Illustration only, source: Giphy
Education has always been the biggest factor to shape civilization. This, in my opinion, distinguishes between developed and developing country. Education, moreover, also becomes the upmost reason why some countries develop much faster than another in the last 5 decades. In this writing, I will explain the reasons why.
I am Indonesian, and as a computer enthusiast, I’ve been dive in computer science and programming since Junior High School. Since then, I oftentimes learnt programming through an online course which usually created by an expert from a developed country, because of very limited resources about programming in my native language. When I was in college, at which I also learnt computer science, I realized that the more I learn from two different sources, the more different the outcomes I got. The biggest difference is on the ability to dive deeper and the capability to create something brand new based on the lesson we learnt before.
Illustration only. source: Giphy
Why did that happen? Based on my own experience and research, the problems are on the teaching method which used. In Indonesia, in my experience, the teaching method usually found too deep and on a specific use case only. That makes the student feels hard to dive deeper because we already too deep but didn’t know about the basic. But sometimes, we learn something too basic until we didn’t know how to apply this theory in the real world even didn’t know what for the theory is. For example, they taught me how to cook fried rice, but also taught how to cook Javanese fried rice and Balinese fried rice. But if I want to create another rice-based food such as porridge, I have to learn again almost from zero because I didn’t know how to create a bowl of “good” rice because I only knew how to cook rice for fried rice, that’s all.
On the other hand, when I learnt some lessons from an online course created by an expert from a developed country, I am amazed by their teaching technique which feels like water flows in the river. All about the foundation, best practices, and the application in the real world followed by a challenge which push the student to explore more on a similar even different context using their critical thinking abilities. If I use cooking fried rice as an example as before, I will be able to create another rice-based dishes because they taught how to cook fried rice just for an example and more focus on how to create a bowl of “good” rice, what kind of foods which can be made from rice, how the best practices to cook rice, and many more. In result, If I want to make cook a porridge, I don’t have to learn about cooking the rice at first because I already learnt before.
Illustration only. source: Giphy
Maybe no teaching method fits for all, but if we can develop proper ones, an accelerated education outcome is a certainty. In conclusion, the teaching method is one of many parts of the education system which contribute a big impact on the outcome of the education should get attention from the government of a developing country.
Disclaimer
This writing is based on my experiences, independent research, and opinions. Maybe many Indonesian students experience education differently than me and not every teaching technique in Indonesia match the stereotype I wrote. Fell free to discuss your opinion with me in comments below. Let’s learn together! | https://medium.com/@dararii/why-proper-teaching-method-is-the-most-important-for-developing-country-eec4d44df9fb | ['Darari Nur Amali'] | 2020-01-12 17:46:35.141000+00:00 | ['Indonesia', 'Teaching And Learning', 'Opinion', 'Education', 'Social'] |
Which JavaScript frameworks should you learn? | Let me first define what I think a coding framework is because the word is debatable. I think a framework is a library that defines structures about every aspect or layer that can make the task of creating applications easier. By layers, I mean things like databases, models, controllers, views, presenters, networks, etc..
Frameworks try to solve most of the big and known problems that are usually encountered by their applications. They have built-in design decisions that you do not need to worry about. They also have carefully-crafted guidelines.
Good frameworks also have smart defaults and follow the convention over configuration concept. The leader of this is the Ruby on Rails framework, which is one of my favorites. In JavaScript land, the leading JavaScript frameworks out there are Angular and Ember. | https://medium.com/edge-coders/which-javascript-frameworks-should-you-learn-in-2018-ecea9a27617d | ['Samer Buna'] | 2018-12-04 04:22:19.277000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Coding', 'JavaScript', 'Learning', 'Programming'] |
Testing your Elixir + Phoenix + Postgres app with Github CI | GitHub released their own CI recently, its UI and marketing look very fancy. I had to set up a new Elixir + Phoenix project and decided to give it a shot.
It took me a full morning to get a green check because the default Elixir template is very minimal and the documentation for creating workflows is quite a lot of reading to get through.
There are some nooks and crannies to get through, but when you get it to work it’s very powerful. Essentially, the default Elixir workflow is fine for testing your average Elixir library however, a Phoenix app will need some additional setup and services. In my example, I needed to set-up a PostgreSQL service.
First of all, we want to set the MIX_ENV environment variable, so when we use Ecto, it knows it should setup the test database. We can define global environment variables when defining the container in which our tests will run.
Setting up a database
But to use Ecto we actually need a database. In the workflow definition, we can define a list of services. These are docker images that are prerequisites for our test steps to run.
This is what my services configuration looks like:
Let’s go through this service definition rule-by-rule:
This defines what Docker image to pull in and run, in my case I am using the official Docker image for Postgres: https://hub.docker.com/_/postgres
We always have to define which ports we want to expose for our Docker container. In this case, I am just exposing the default Postgres port.
The Docker container we use has some environment variables defined, which it will use to configure the Postgres server. A full list of those variables can be found in the Postgres Docker Hub description.
Lastly, we have to pass some additional options. These options will directly map to the docker create command. The reason we need to add this health check is because docker create exits before the container is actually ready to be used.
Luckily for us, there is a simple command pg_isready available, which we can run on the container to check the status of the instance. As soon as the Postgres container is ready, Docker will exit and your test run will continue.
Connecting with the database
The default Elixir workflow should already have some steps defined. We are modifying the Run Tests step a bit so it will create a database and pass some additional environment variables.
All services defined will create a virtual host on the network, named after the service. This means you cannot simply reach the Postgres instance on localhost in CI, but instead have to connect to postgres
I have added an environment variable called DB_HOST in my run step that exposes the name of the service.
Additionally, I modified my Mix test configuration in config/test.exs to read this variable and fall back on localhost by default
Running your tests
By default Phoenix apps should have an alias for mix run test that runs ecto.setup , ecto.migrate and test .
When pushing new commits to your repository, the workflow should trigger, do all kinds of magic and run this command for you.
You can find the full workflow file here:
If you have any questions feel free to hit me up on Twitter.
References | https://medium.com/madeawkward/testing-your-phoenix-elixir-postgres-app-with-github-ci-5f3ec9f38ee0 | ['Nick Vernij'] | 2019-09-02 11:48:59.020000+00:00 | ['Github Ci', 'Postgres', 'Phoenix', 'Docker', 'Elixir'] |
Be Known With Us | Be Known With Us
Open your heart and write for us
Image by BrAt82 on Shutterstock.
Who we are
Welcome to Being Known where we bring forth our courageous authentic selves and experience the range of human emotions together; sharing our experiences of being alive with one another and giving our words wings.
Writing real and raw from the heart most of the time, and sprinkling in some microfiction fun (because life is all about balance), we come together in joy and in pain and we lift each other up.
We struggle, we heal and we grow together; holding hands on our ongoing journeys of becoming perfectly imperfect.
We accept one another without judgment. We encourage self-inquiry and we come to know our deepest selves as we journey inward, holding safe space for one another.
We value vulnerability, authenticity, and transparency, recognizing their power of healing, of connection, and of making a difference in the world.
We share ourselves from the inside out because we deeply believe that sharing connects us. We write to feel alive; to get in touch with our emotions, to set ourselves free, and to tell our stories.
We write to be known as we are.
What we’re looking for
We are looking for writers and poets who are ready to open up their hearts and share with us their experiences of being human, of being alive in this perfectly imperfect world of ours.
We want your authentic-self here; your lived experiences, your real and raw stories from the heart (unless writing microfiction — 50 or 100-word stories only).
Stories must be original (your own and not previously published in other publications on Medium), well-written, well-organized and formatted, and requiring little to no editing. We expect you to proofread your own work before submitting it and to follow Medium’s Curation Guidelines.
Please allow up to 48 hours for your draft to be published, if accepted. We will of course let you know either way.
How to apply
Please leave a comment/response to this story letting us know that you’d like to be added as a writer. We will review your writing and add you if we think it’s a good fit.
Looking forward to growing together,
Your Editors. | https://medium.com/being-known/be-known-with-us-bf4c0e1925fe | ['Galit Birk'] | 2021-01-02 02:37:08.077000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Poetry', 'Being Known', 'Microfiction', 'Life'] |
The Unusual Origins of Popular Acronyms | Photo by Pete Nuij on Unsplash
Sometimes things can turn out quite different from when they started, right? Well, when it comes to well-known acronyms, they are no exception.
P.S.A. — Few know that this little dandy originally stood for the Porcupine Survivors Association. Yes, poor souls who came into contact with the little creature’s quills, and lived to tell about it, would meet monthly to discuss their harrowing encounters and ways to prevent such an ordeal from happening again. Occasionally, those afraid of getting flu shots or giving blood donations were allowed to attend these meetings in hopes of surmounting their pointed fears.
D.I.Y. — This one started as an unorthodox brotherhood of sorts. Called the Daring and Intrepid Yodelers, this fraternal society found unique, and often dangerous, ways of displaying their vocal prowess. Known places of serenading included literal cliff edges, snake pits, Colorado River category 4 and above rapids, stygian volcanic caves, and — a societal favorite — grizzly-infested dens of Kodiak Island. Puts a bit of a damper on those self-completed household projects.
F.A.Q. — Now a helpful acronym for questioning customers on consumer websites, F.A.Q. used to refer to those Frequently Annoying Quadrupeds carousing homes in old log cabin days. Prior to industrial construction-material advancements, including drywall, sheetrock, and weathered-paneling, little critters used to find ways of invading abodes on the regular. So oft was the attendance of opossums, coons, mice, rats, and other furry whippersnappers within the home that many a log-cabinite refrained, “Get the F.A.Q. out of here!”
W.T.F. — Many don’t know the simplistic provenance of this bemused reply. The pioneers of wood tile flooring actually used the acronym for their business name, Wood Tile Flooring. They prided themselves on masking wood in a way where it looked, incredibly, just like tile. Their business has lasted for over a hundred years and thrives to this day, though due to customer opinion they opted to change their DBA.
S.A.T. — Around the time the idea of the Scholastic Aptitude Test was being thrown around by academics in ivory towers, freshman college students took pity on their future collegiate colleagues and started a campus-based club that soon expanded to off-campus environs, including suburban households and televised cooking shows. Before the SAT was a test, it stood for Saturdays Are for Tiramisu. That’s right, college freshmen and apron-wearing homeowners alike enlivened their weekends with the practice and art of creating the Italian coffee-flavored dessert. Sadly, these days high school seniors taking the SAT think little of baking and sweets. But they can still partake in the original baking tradition on any other Saturday when they can close the textbook and flip open a cookbook. | https://medium.com/the-haven/the-unusual-origins-of-popular-acronyms-aca2e73bfb70 | ['Nolan Yard'] | 2020-12-18 18:10:25.013000+00:00 | ['Acronyms', 'DIY', 'German', 'College', 'FAQ'] |
PMPS: LEVERAGING SECOND-PARTY DATA FOR DIGITAL CAMPAIGNS | In the first installment of this series, First-Party Data: A Hidden Gem for the Post-Cookie World, we looked at how an advertiser’s customer database, or first-party data, can be used for advertising purposes. Now we will expand to the world of data sets that you can leverage to help increase, and refine, your first-party data while generating awareness and preference in the pursuit of sales.
Suppose your most desirable customers tend to read either New York Times or People Magazine online. You could just place advertising on either NYTimes.com or People.com, but that would result in a lot of wasted impressions, served to those who might not be aligned with your product or service. How do we minimize that waste? That is where second-party data comes in.
SECOND-PARTY AUDIENCE BUYING: WHAT IS IT?
I am referring to “second-party” here as the audience data of online publishers and other media properties like ad networks. The data is theirs — not yours — hence the second-party designation. Their audience data really is comprised of multiple audience segments, with data points that result in profiles that may look like your desired customers.
If you are a CPG company, you may want to target those who are buying your competitive set in the hopes of converting a percentage of those to buy your brand. If this is the case, your criteria may include reaching those who:
Match your geographic distribution area
Are within your desired customers’ HHI range
Shop at a specific
set of retailers
Or any combination
of the above
This approach allows an advertiser to use a media property’s larger audience set, minimizing waste while adding new users who can eventually grow your first-party data. You are not on NYTimes all the time, just when your target audience happens to be viewing. With apologies to the late Rod Serling, you’ve now entered the world of the Private Marketplace (PMP).
THE PRIVATE MARKETPLACE: HOW SECOND-PARTY AUDIENCE BUYING GETS DONE
Unlike the large ad exchanges that utilize available inventory from thousands of sites, the private marketplace allows an advertiser to programmatically buy only the audience they desire to target within a restricted set of one or more sites. Working with a publisher PMP allows for buying select audience segments that match up with an advertiser’s desired audience data, as noted above. Some things to consider when working with PMPs:
Make sure that there is alignment with your audience. For example, you may not want to use a particular PMP if less than 5% of your desired audience is going to a specific site or series of sites within that PMP. Consider 15% — 20% or more as a good guideline.
Think beyond “open web” display banners. Can you reach a publisher’s in-app or social media users? While there might be additional premiums for these, the additional costs may be justified if your desired audience is engaged with these platforms.
Balance a PMP buy with other tactics for overall efficiency. No one tactic can serve every marketer’s objectives. Remember that the key is to test and see if this approach works within a selection of tactics that meet your overall parameters for effectiveness and efficiency.
With the era of cookie-less advertising fast approaching, using PMPs to access second-party data will likely become a viable option to not only enhance campaign performance but grow your customer base as well. | https://medium.com/gkv/pmps-leveraging-second-party-data-for-digital-campaigns-37eac9c51522 | [] | 2020-12-28 21:21:17.374000+00:00 | ['Digital Marketing', 'Digital Marketing Agency', 'Advertising', 'Data', 'Big Data'] |
Stakin Bi-Weekly Newsletter Vol. 33 | Another week, another newsletter filled with the latest info about the PoS Blockchain market, this week; we’re discussing:
ICON Foundation Announced: Migration to ICON 2.0 Nearing Completion
SKALE Represents At One Of The Biggest Ethereum Hackathons of 2021
Interchain Security Is Coming To The Cosmos Hub!
Solana Has Become The World’s 7th Biggest Crypto Asset
Polygon Matic Announces Upcoming Hackathon
StaFi Mainnet Chain 1st Anniversary
Polygon x Mina Partnership Announcement
ICON Ready For Launch of New EVM & eWASM-Compatible Blockchain: ICE
Lido Finance Now Supports Solana $SOL!
Migration To ICON 2.0 Nearing Completion
In a recently published roadmap update, the ICON Foundation announced that the long-awaited ICON 2.0 migration is nearing completion. As of the 31st of August 2021, the block import test run is at 100%. That is a massive milestone for the network and sets the entire migration process on a path to take place shortly. Furthermore, the foundation announced that starting the 1st of September 2021, the developers have begun the next phase of the block import process and perform additional testing. For all info, check the roadmap here.
SKALE Represents At One Of The Biggest Ethereum Hackathons of 2021
On the 31st of August, SKALE announced that they’re excited to help hackers with mentors, swag, and of course, $12000 in SKL bounties as the only Multichain Ethereum Native Solution. One of the biggest Ethereum Hackathons of 2021 is only one more week away, and with the help of SKALE, hackers will be able to build the next generation of DApps on the SKALE Network. For all info and how to join, click here.
Interchain Security Is Coming To The Cosmos Hub
Recently, Cosmos announced that Interchain Security would be coming to the Cosmos Hub. Interchain Security lets Cosmos stay true to its sovereignty and open-source philosophy and enables blockchains to integrate economically but not politically. The project is ambitious, but development is well underway, with early estimates that Cosmos Hub testnets could be tested in Q4 2021. For further information, have a look at the Cosmos blog.
Solana Has Become The Worlds’ Seventh Biggest Crypto Asset
On the 9th of September, CNBC announced that Solana had become the world’s seventh biggest cryptocurrency after a surge of 50% in one week. In addition, the Solana network has just reached the seventh point among the ten most prominent digital currencies in the world, the expulsion of dogecoin, with the optimism that the blockchain may be a long-term competitor of Ethereum. According to CoinGecko, the SOL token of Solana has tripled over three weeks and now has a market value of over $45 trillion.
Polygon Matic Announces Upcoming Hackathon
On September 1st, Polygon Matic announced the upcoming Polygon Grants Hackathon, backed by a line-up of fantastic sponsors and ecosystem partners with rewards worth $100k! For anyone interested in joining, you can do so via the link in the Tweet below.
StaFi Mainnet Chain 1st Anniversary
On the 7th of September 2021, StaFi Mainnet Chain celebrated its first anniversary. As StaFi Validators, Stakin feels very proud to be a part of this ever-expanding, ever-developing ecosystem. We hope for even bigger things in the future!
Polygon x Mina Partnership Announcement
On the 10th of September 2021, Mina Protocol and Polygon announced that they would be working together to bring enhanced scalability, privacy, and verifiability to the DeFi economy. This integration of Polygon utilizing Mina enables use cases, such as:
DeFi platforms to pull in user information privately and securely to meet KYC requirements or any other such requirements
NFT builders to keep ownership data private, and
Social Media dapps to verify that users are real people without requiring them to share PII.
For the full announcement, click here.
ICON Ready For Launch of New EVM & eWASM-Compatible Blockchain: ICE
Recently, ICON announced the arrival of a brand new project coming to their ecosystem: The ICE Blockchain. This new blockchain, dubbed ICE, will usher in a new application hub for the ICON ecosystem. When finished, ICE will provide developers with improved tooling, EVM and eWASM compatibility, and immediate access to the growing ETH and Polkadot ecosystems. It also marks a shift towards the ICON project through a separation of functionality, product focus, and the goal of each network. ICE will become the ecosystem’s application hub while we redouble our efforts to make ICON the industry’s top interoperability and cross-chain standard.
Lido Finance Now Supports Solana $SOL!
Lido Finance, a liquid staking protocol currently supporting Ethereum 2.0 and Terra, has expanded to Solana $SOL. Thus, users of Lido can now stake Solana’s native $SOL token through the protocol and receive stSOL in return. For more information about Lido, please click here. That said, Lido also plans to launch a staking solution for the Polkadot and Polygon blockchains. Furthermore, the project said development teams MixBytes and Shard Labs are working for the Lido DAO to bring staking services for DOT and MATIC tokens, respectively.
KILT Network Launch!
Ladies, Gentlemen, Unicorns, and other blockchain enthusiasts, it is with great pleasure that we announce to you that KILT Protocol is now live and that Stakin has been selected as the first validator to join the network. Thus, we will be offering staking services for KILT soon, so keep an eye out if you are interested.
The KILT Protocol is a simple protocol for creating, claiming, issuing, presenting, and verifying digital credentials for those who are unaware. In contrast to peer-to-peer solutions for this, KILT features self-sovereign data and revocable credentials using blockchain technology. KILT was built to be a business enabler, not only for the software industry but also for any entity, which has or wishes to establish a business model based on trust. | https://medium.com/stakin/stakin-bi-weekly-newsletter-vol-33-ae383f6b48bb | ['Gisele Schout'] | 2021-09-11 07:31:08.597000+00:00 | ['Staking', 'Staking Rewards', 'Proof Of Stake', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain'] |
Issa Amro, my peace activist friend facing military incarceration & how you can help him… | I have introduced you to Issa the Human Rights Defender, but now I want to introduce you to Issa, my friend
I had the privilege of being ‘introduced’ to Issa in 2015 by the inspiring firebrand and ‘Code Pink’ activist that is Ariel Gold, an American Jew. Ariel had connected us in order for me, as co-founder and chair of Jersey Palestine Solidarity Campaign, to support Youth Against Settlement’s annual ‘Open Shuhada’ campaign.
Chatting with Issa in Hebron
Issa and I spoke many times, but we first met in 2016 when I visited the region due to wishing to understand more the issues on the ground. In 2018, I was posted to Hebron for 3 months to serve as a Human Rights Monitor. This was a life defining experience for me, but was also the period when Issa became to me, a dear and respected friend.
‘Liberation 75’ and my personal reflections from witnessing an occupation | by Natalie Strecker | Nine by Five Media | Medium
Issa, like all of us has many layers: he is strong, courageous, outspoken and direct, but he is also incredibly insightful, supportive, humble and so very thoughtful. On this theme I would like to share just 3 of the many precious experiences I got to share with Issa:
One day after 4 weeks of working long and arduous hours giving protective presence and recording human rights violations and trying to somehow make sense of everything I was witnessing and the inhumanity of the situation, I hit rock bottom after having seen the humiliation of a young teenage boy and then, when visiting his family, becoming aware of the abject poverty they were experiencing as a consequence of the occupation. I, after having been given a key by Issa, went to sit in the gardens of the YAS Centre in Tel Rumeida, one of the quieter places you can go in the old city and I sobbed. Issa found me and he said to me, “you need to take a break”, which I had already planned to take the next day. Issa instructed me to go and pack my stuff and he would organise my transport to where I had planned to take my days off. As always, he wouldn’t take no for an answer and I went back to my apartment where I was staying and met him a short while later at a junction of what is known locally as ‘Happy Bunny’. Issa walked me to a taxi of a friend of his and said to me: “my friend will take you to the door, now go rest and I will see you in a couple of days”. I felt 2 things at that moment, overwhelming gratitude, but also the burden of European privilege. You see, I knew I got to take a rest that he doesn’t ever get to take. A couple of days later I came back and Issa, as he always did, ‘checked in’ on me to make sure I was okay.
Issa, as I quickly discovered was the norm with Palestinians, was very protective of those who came to try to support them, the irony of course is not unacknowledged. He even insisted on things such as having someone walk me home at night.
My tattoo!
Issa was also who I went to when I wanted to check that the Arabic tattoo I was about to have stating ‘Free Palestine’ in Ramallah (my first ever tattoo and for me a rebellious act of resistance in response to all I had seen), was correct and that I didn’t end up living to regret the moment by having some dubious words forever imprinted on my skin.
Then there was my final night in Hebron, a night when my heart broke. Along with the many tears that were shed, however, there were also many, many laughs! I went to the YAS centre, where I went almost every evening to spend my free time with the local activists and of course, frequent visitors and volunteers with the centre. Unbeknown to me, Issa had organised a special pizza and kanafe party for me. There was music, the nightly campfire, conversation and then there was the long and drawn-out goodbyes.
Final night in Hebron at my pizza party
As I left my posting, I knew that I would never be the same again, the Palestinians taught me so very much about life, about courage, about steadfastness, which they refer to as ‘sumud’; but Issa gave me valuable lessons in true friendship and for this reason he will forever remain one of the greatest and impactful friends of my life. | https://medium.com/nine-by-five-media/issa-amro-my-peace-activist-friend-facing-military-incarceration-5448eef64949 | ['Natalie Strecker'] | 2021-01-15 19:12:45.832000+00:00 | ['Israel', 'Palestine', 'Human Rights', 'International Law', 'Politics'] |
How Trader Joe’s Dunks $13 Billion By Doing The Opposite | Now, congressional leaders and appropriators are in the middle of negotiating a $1.4 trillion, 12-bill spending package that will increase agency budgets for the rest of the fiscal year, hoping to pair that funding bundle with desperately needed coronavirus relief.
The stakes: Millions of Americans are set to lose a critical safety net as a number of pandemic assistance provisions expire at the end of the month. A government shutdown on top of that would be a true nightmare scenario.
“If we do not act, 12 million Americans could lose unemployment aid just after Christmas and millions more access to paid sick leave and protections against evictions,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the incoming chair of the House Appropriations Committee, on the House floor. “This will put working families over the edge and our economy closer to the financial cliff.“
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Plan B: If lawmakers can’t reach an agreement on a massive spending package by Dec. 18, they can avoid a shutdown by passing another CR that extends current government funding into early next year.
Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said the one-week stopgap amounts to “an admission of failure.”
“It’s the right thing to do,” he said, but “we ought not to believe or pretend or represent that this is the way we ought to do business. It is not. It is a function of procrastination, a function of failing to come together and making compromise.” | https://medium.com/@sonamkapur8373783/how-trader-joes-dunks-13-billion-by-doing-the-opposite-ec8862c64a87 | [] | 2020-12-10 15:39:10.400000+00:00 | ['Expressjs', 'Love', 'Enough Noice', 'Relationships'] |
Eroding the Barrier to Entry in Game Development | The process of building an indie video game, especially for Virtual Reality, can be an arduous years-long endeavor. Becoming a professional game developer takes years of specialized study, building connections, and mastering emerging technology, with the reward of working in an exciting creative field. Like any industry, it takes focus and dedication to become a pro. But this barrier of entry can be a limitation on new, diverse game concepts.
For an aspiring game developer without a background in tech, the path to creating a game can be long and daunting, especially for VR. Between navigating the esoteric nuances of a game engine and learning complex coding languages, it can take months to even approach the starting point of development. Identifying bugs and merging branches with a co-developer makes the process even longer. But a new application called Gamelodge seeks to accelerate that process.
Gamelodge, is a new platform that serves as both a depot for games made by other users and a stepping stone for aspiring game developers. It is a cooperative game engine that offers users an all in one opportunity to design, script, and share game ideas socially in VR and on desktop. It aims to resolve common pain points in game development, such as the tedious write, compile, distribute, test process, by eliminating the need to compile code and allowing users to build and test together in real-time. The application is available on Kickstarter through August 22, 2020.
Existing applications that have attempted to offer a sandbox game building environment have a variety of limitations that Gamelodge overcomes. Roblox has become popular with young gamers, but falls short on graphical fidelity and VR controls. Other options that thrive in VR suffer from limited scripting accessibility, poor control systems, and often don’t offer desktop support. These shortcomings are core competencies in Gamelodge.
From start to finish, a user with no experience with complex game engines or knowledge of code can build a game in a weekend. Objects, particles, and textures can be easily uploaded to the shared database, or users can drag and drop objects from the existing library of models to start building a scene. Users can make games without writing a line of code with the in-app scripting library. New scripts can be swiftly written in Miniscript and immediately applied without compiling a new build or exiting the program. The whole process can be done collaboratively with other users in-game.
Even experienced developers can find value from a tool that allows for such swift creation. One study showed that just 20% of released games make a profit, which means a lot of time, money, and energy is lost on games that don’t resonate with their audience. For a creator who is debating the direction to take their next project, the ability to build and test game concepts in an easy and accessible environment can be a form of early market research. An early draft of a game idea, built quickly and shared within the community, may help identify which aspects resonate with players and which parts miss the mark.
In the ever-growing yet slowly diversifying community of game developers, new tools that help democratize the industry are more important than ever. Broadening access to both creating and testing games could reduce developer resource waste and expand the voices and concepts showcased in the game world. Ultimately, a space that allows anyone to play and create games with friends collaboratively across platforms could break down some of the barriers in game development and empower a new community of creators.
To become a chef, you must attend culinary school, but you don’t need a culinary degree to cook a good meal. With tools that increase accessibility to game development, you don’t need an engineering degree to build a good game.
About the author, Ela Darling, co-founder of Gamelodge
Ela has a diverse background in Virtual Reality spanning over six years. Cofounder of GonzoVR, a live VR broadcasting platform, and Gamelodge, a comprehensive sandbox game builder. She has spoken about various aspects of VR at conferences all over the world including a TEDx talk in 2016, and is considered a pioneer in certain verticals in the industry. | https://medium.com/edtech-trends/eroding-the-barrier-to-entry-in-game-development-b1f13c84a886 | ['Alice Bonasio'] | 2020-08-08 20:32:03.380000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Virtual Reality', 'Games', 'Tech', 'Game Development'] |
I&CO Equity and Justice Action Plan Update | As 2020 comes to an end, we at I&CO, wanted to provide an update on the commitments made towards becoming a more equitable firm back in July 2020. These commitments will be updated as we advance.
Commitment 1
I&CO is committed to being an anti-racist company by continually examining and adapting our culture to be a more inclusive environment that confronts injustice and oppression in our everyday lives and interactions.
November 2020, we started our journey with an all-staff anti-racism workshop, which created a foundation for us to build upon. I&CO is committing to ongoing anti-racism coaching for the entire team in 2021 and looking to add training to our onboarding process.
Woven into the fabric of everything we do and guiding us in making the right decisions are our I&CO Maxims. The addition of our newest Maxim, “Be just. Do right.” continues to shape our culture as a reminder of our responsibility to create an anti-racist work and place.
For open dialogue and knowledge sharing on social justice, we have commenced monthly forums at I&CO. Wherever possible, our goal is to share our work with the community-at-large.
Lastly, the lead up to the 2020 election has ended, but we continue to support employees’ use of work hours to engage in volunteerism and political activism as we enter 2021.
Commitment 2
I&CO is committed to creating work that does not contribute to systems of racial oppression or the spread of racism in the world, assessing all future work to ensure we are reducing — not creating — harm.
This commitment has evolved to focus on building a foundation that evaluates and changes the working process, not only its output. Using a “pause and process” system, we have identified dedicated moments that will be used for reflection and facilitate an open discussion among team members. These moments are as follows:
Pre-Project: Client Evaluation Start of Project: Project Goal-Setting During the Project: Notice & Adjust Post-Project: Reflect & Measure
We want to create an environment that encourages everyone to share ideas or flag issues. This practice is being pressure tested on current projects and will be continuously refined.
Commitment 3
I&CO is committed to becoming a more racially representational firm, beginning with how we identify and recruit talent and assess our team makeup.
We want to create a welcoming and inclusive environment for all candidates. Dedicated to improving our recruitment practices, we have researched and started implementing best practices with diversity, equity, and inclusion in mind.
After identifying our shortcomings, we recognized the need to establish a consistent hiring process. As part of that standardization effort, we will:
Commit to being mindful of resources that seek out talent, and expand our recruitment to include representation-focused partners
Equip hiring managers and interviewers with guides for unbiased and inclusive recruitment practices
Build interview feedback forms to eliminate groupthink and biases during the assessment process
We are continuing to explore diversity metrics that are meaningful in our journey to become a more anti-racist and inclusive firm.
Lastly, our internship program continues to evolve as we identify ways to support applicants from a broader catchment of backgrounds to find ways to make the internship program accessible.
Commitment 4
I&CO is assessing all discretionary spending decisions to ensure we are supporting BIPOC business owners whenever possible.
Recognizing that our dollars have influence and power, we set out to evaluate and evolve our discretionary spending.
We began by creating an Anti-Racism Checklist, a system by which I&CO employees can assess a company’s active contribution to a White-supremacist system through:
Treatment of employees
Potential harm in past and current products/services
Stance on equity
Political spending
We used our checklist to assess 67 existing partners and identified 10 companies that we are no longer spending money with. These companies have been replaced in our vendor line-up either by BIPOC businesses or by competing companies who are more actively anti-racist.
Based on feedback from an I&CO team member, we are now working on the second iteration of the Anti-Racism Checklist, thinking about how and if we can better evaluate harm done by a company’s political spending. We are also working on incorporating a measurement of a company’s work in reparative justice and harm reduction. | https://medium.com/iandco/i-co-equity-and-justice-action-plan-update-70374204053b | ['I Co'] | 2020-12-19 15:03:21.952000+00:00 | ['Equity', 'Company Values', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Diversity And Inclusion', 'English'] |
TOP 30 Social Anxiety Quotes: Inspirational Quotes to Overcome Social Anxiety | Home Social Anxiety Quotes
“That never wrote to me” ― Emily Dickinson “I’m not anti-social. I’m just not social.” ― Woody Allen
“I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart: but really with it, and in it.” ― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights “Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.” ― Ray Bradbury
“A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value “For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people’s faces.” ― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human
“I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.” ― Herta Müller, The Hunger Angel “I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
“He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost.” ― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human “What is society but an individual? […] The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This was how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror at the illusion of the ocean called the world.” ― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human | https://medium.com/@healthylifestyel/top-30-social-anxiety-quotes-inspirational-quotes-to-overcome-social-anxiety-c63d2dab7e0e | ['Healthy Lifestyel'] | 2020-12-18 10:01:16.082000+00:00 | ['Anxiety', 'Quotes', 'Mental Illness', 'Social Anxiety', 'Mental Health'] |
Comunicarea patrimoniului cultural indigen în mediul online: o prezentare generală a politicilor GLAM | Open GLAM presents global perspectives on open access to the cultural heritage in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs). Submissions are welcome so please get in touch.
Follow | https://medium.com/open-glam/comunicarea-patrimoniului-cultural-indigen-%C3%AEn-mediul-online-o-prezentare-general%C4%83-a-politicilor-e0143323d682 | ['Brigitte Vézina'] | 2020-10-28 16:29:19.945000+00:00 | ['Openglam', 'Traditional Knowledge', 'Română', 'Muzee'] |
CYCLES (poem) | CYCLES (poem)
I try to fill this hole inside me with
people that I trick myself into liking
or by stuffing my mouth up
with food when things get too tough
or too real
and I can’t handle the pain any longer
wishing I felt the same way
hoping things were easier
wishing I was normal
hoping to be able to love and be loved in return
but the silence is too strong
and thinking makes my tears sprint out of my eyes
what if im meant to be alone?
I can’t think of a world without people
but yet when I get home i’m all alone
with my overly eager mind
making me go over things so much it consumes me
left to wonder staring at the walls
keep wishing someone would talk to me
maybe that would help
I feel so hopeless sometimes
like something’s missing
and living without it is a death wish
but yet here I am, wandering around
no place to go
no place to be
home is not a house
home is a person
and im homeless
I built a shelter inside me
to protect me from the cold
but now it’s too strong to let anyone in
im scared, and lonely
when will this feeling end?
my heart and soul will shatter
into a thousand pieces
only so that I can pick them and myself up again
until there’s nothing left to put together
Abril. A | https://medium.com/@insomniasapphic/cycles-poem-efaa89a9faef | ['Abril. A'] | 2020-12-20 03:26:40.212000+00:00 | ['Philosophy', 'Poet', 'Love', 'Poem', 'Thoughts'] |
Do You Know the Difference between Romper, Onesies and Creeper of Babies? | Nowadays shopping for newborn toddlers and kids become a difficult task for parents. This is because of uncountable varieties of clothes. In today’s world Parents are very conscious about not only the style of babies' outfit but they also concern with the patterns and colors of the dresses. Selecting the outfits for even a newborn baby had also become an important part of a parent’s life. And for selecting the best clothes for their loved ones they must have the knowledge of upcoming trends and fashion of baby clothing.
As we know rompers, Onesies and creeper all are the types of one-piece outfit and because of this many people get confused. But being a choosy parent it is very essential to know the difference between these three clothing. All these outfits are worn until babies wear diapers, as they are very comfortable and convenient for putting on and changing the diapers. For the most part, zips are utilized in these outfits which make it conceivable to change the infant’s diaper without the need to remove all garments. That’s why most of the parents prefer these types of outfits for small babies.
Now one by one we will discuss the important features of all three types of garments mention above:
BABY ROMPERS — It is one-piece clothing that comes mostly with full sleeves and long legs with zippers which make it easy to change a diaper. But for summer seasons they are also available with short sleeves and legs. These are available in different sizes starting from newborn baby size to 3 years old toddler. They are worn casually at home but like little girl smocked dresses, their fancy version also comes for parties and festival seasons. They are very comfortable for the summer season as they don’t require putting on any extra top or T-shirt.
CREEPERS FOR KIDS — Presently coming towards the creeper, it is a sort of exceptionally long T-shirt that can attach the diaper. Unlike normal T-shirt which may get rolled up, the creeper is very comfortable do not allow wind to cause discomfort to the baby. Children’s creeper should always be dressed over the head but sometimes this creates inconvenience to parents of newborn babies.
KIDS ONESIES- It is also known as snapsuit. It always comes with snaps and buttons for closure and tends to conceal the diaper inside. It is also a one-piece outfit which replaces the need for pants and shirt. It’s also available in warm fabric for the winter season. The attached cap or hood makes it very convenient for windy and awful weather. Like the above two outfits, it is also very easy to put on and take off onesies. | https://medium.com/@littlethreadinc/do-you-know-the-difference-between-romper-onesies-and-creeper-of-babies-35f983c43bd | ['Little Threads'] | 2020-01-31 06:41:23.761000+00:00 | ['Little Girls', 'Baby', 'Dresses'] |
REVIEW — LONDON REAL Business Accelerator Course | I started my own online clothing brand last year and have been on a mission to constantly learn, grow and take it to the next level as I had been doing everything myself relying on my experience working for other people but without any real guidance.
I have been a fan/follower of London Real for a few years now and can honestly say, along with other things of course, the many interviews I watched was a MASSIVE of part of helping me change my mindset, improve my health, believe in myself more, overcome my struggle with chronic knee pain and depression and start moving towards a life that I wanted. Hearing the stories of so many high performing and interesting people who overcame adversity, become strong and health and become super successful in their chosen field REALLY inspired me to improve my life and think in a different way.
So, when I was looking for something to help me improve my new business and learn how do things in a more structured way, I seen an ad for the LR Business Accelerator course and it really spoke to me so I went to the website and reading all the info and watching the videos. I had seen a couple of them before but before I thought about going self-employed so I never acted upon it though I did remember them. I booked a free consultation call and knew this was something I needed to do, so after viewing quite a few more video reviews from past students I borrowed the money and signed up!
I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but as I seen how Brian went from doing podcasts in his kitchen to making LR into the success it is today with so many amazing guests, courses and producing awesome inspiring documentaries I KNEW I would benefit from this and I wasn’t disappointed! A little surprised and frustrated at times as it took me a slightly different direction but it was all good and I learned a lot! As well as physical products to sell I now have a 6-part video series that I managed to make a few sales from before the end of the course so it opened up something new to add to my business and the know-how to create many more.
The course was very well structured, with great video modules, team leaders who had been through the course themselves and clearly knew what they were doing and gave great advice as did Brian himself on the weekly live calls. It was great to be on a course and have a team of like-minded people from different background who were very encouraging and going through the same type of struggles.
It taught me a lot of things that will not only help my current business but help me expand it and even start new businesses as it teaches principles that can apply across the board. We were shown how to bulletproof your business idea by identifying and combining what you are passionate about, what you are good at and finding and testing your target audience and learn various skills from vlogging, setting up a new website, automated email and creating digital products using your IP (your own knowledge about ANYTHING that you can share with people and give them value — Intellectual Property)
There was a big focus on taking ACTION now, beating procrastination and pushing through your fears, doubts and all forms of resistance. The course forced me to face 1 of my biggest fears, speaking in public/on camera. I went from someone who was always an introvert and would never speak on video to doing almost 30 vlogs and 3 live webinars before the end of the course and it made me realise I can do so much more than I thought I could!
I am grateful to Brian, the team leaders/staff at LR and my fellow teammates for everything I learned and I would highly recommend the course for anyone interested in starting an online business, even if you don’t currently have an idea! This course will help you find one! | https://medium.com/@born2bleed/review-london-real-business-accelerator-course-ce8a86144a50 | ['Stephen Brown'] | 2020-12-22 16:06:33.924000+00:00 | ['London Real', 'Online Business', 'Digital Product', 'Business Accelerator', 'Born 2 Bleed'] |
How are Demo videos helping in improving brand visibility! | The struggle of brand visibility gives chills. The process is not only tricky but frustrating. Efforts often go for a toss, and the struggle seems never-ending. Be it digital marketing or video marketing, suggestions with them are many for attaining the visibility goal. But how are they helping today? And how are demo videos helping in improving brand visibility in this context?
Over time, demo videos have served as an effective tool for brands in improving their reach. The question put here is, what we are going to do in a detailed analysis. But before we begin, here’s a gist of all that the blog is going to address.
What is a demo video?
A demo video or a demonstration video is a type of video where viewers receive a practical explanation of a product or service on its usage.
That would be the definition in most simple terms. For example, when you look for a guide for using your new washing machine. The video that explains to you about the do’s and don’ts is what a demo video is.
When you make one, ensure it is easy to understand. As viewers look forward to these kinds. Solve their problems and address the issue at hand. That’s how your demo video should look.
To emphasize the importance of how demo videos help in improving brand visibility. Check out the following:
Image source: Yansmedia
From the above illustration, the emphasis put forward cannot be denied. Thus investing in demo videos/ product videos is bound to turn out to be effective.
Apart from this, what needs further attention is how people stumble upon videos. Demo videos are often searched by people to clarify doubts. The image here emphasizes the user practice of searching.
There are also some types of demo videos, as per Vidyard’s finding making the most buzz:
Overview demo: Where a gist is presented rather than a descriptive explanation.
Live demo: Where demo is performed live over virtual mediums.
Recorded demo: Where an explanatory video is already recorded in a stepwise manner.
While indulging in demo videos, there’s a lot more to learn. Having expert guidance then helps.
Reasons for using a demo video
Almost 54% of the viewers now demand videos to understand. Their viewership then gets proportional to brand visibility and reach. In addition to this, addressing the same and learning how demo videos are helping in improving brand visibility. Here are a few reasons for your understanding.
Easy showcasing of product features.
Helps people in decision-making for a product.
Help brands in proper redressal of audience issues and doubts.
These videos save a lot of time and money spent.
Engage the consumers better about the products.
Helps brands create interesting videos.
Apart from these, they are helping in brand visibility at various stages of the marketing funnel. Brands consider these videos in the following ways:
Awareness stage: Brands use these videos as highlighters of the core context.
Consideration stage: At this stage, there comes an overview of the context, and then shared across channels.
Delight stage: When demo videos are used during this phase, they are descriptive to ensure better understanding.
Out of these, demo videos are helping in improving brand visibility the most during conversion.
The reasoning?
This image highlights the key attribute of the consideration stage and also demo videos. The purpose of demo videos is linked with solving issues and providing solutions.
Another key reason for using demo videos is demand generation. Studies show that 72% of people use videos to learn about a product/ service. Use shorter videos to capture attention, and you will see the response.
This will further add to the notion of demo videos helping in improving brand visibility and awareness.
Benefits of using demo videos
So far, we have emphasized what a product demo video is and the reasons for using demo videos. Now the focus will move towards the benefits of demo videos.
Easy explanation of product features-
The best part about utilizing a product demo video is that it explains the viewers’ benefits without being too sell-oriented. It serves as a solution by explaining the functionality of each added feature. Besides this, it gives you the room to showcase why certain things have been done or added.
The best part about utilizing a product demo video is that it explains the viewers’ benefits without being too sell-oriented. It serves as a solution by explaining the functionality of each added feature. Besides this, it gives you the room to showcase why certain things have been done or added. Provides help in introducing new products to your consumers-
We have already learned that demo videos are beneficial in the consideration stage of the marketing funnel. Thus, these can be easily conveyed to brand loyalists. Sending them new product demo videos via emails or prompts on social media can help you win them completely. Due to this, their trust also intensifies further.
We have already learned that demo videos are beneficial in the consideration stage of the marketing funnel. Thus, these can be easily conveyed to brand loyalists. Sending them new product demo videos via emails or prompts on social media can help you win them completely. Due to this, their trust also intensifies further. It’s the solid proof that it does what it says-
Demo videos are the proof no one can deny. Marketing messages are no longer the sole driving force.
People don’t trust these messages until they have proof of what they see. First off, these videos show the live usage, and second off, they guide through every step. So people tend to believe these more when they see things happen in action.
Demo videos are the proof no one can deny. Marketing messages are no longer the sole driving force. People don’t trust these messages until they have proof of what they see. First off, these videos show the live usage, and second off, they guide through every step. So people tend to believe these more when they see things happen in action. Solves the hassle of in-person demonstrations-
Demo videos helping in improving brand visibility is now an undeniable fact. Let’s see this using an example. We all are familiar with the provisions of Urban Company that often adds demo videos/ pictures on how things will be in reality. This whole idea worked in their favor, and now we all know what it does, more so, how it does. And all this was done without in-person demonstrations. All thanks to the videos.
Demo videos helping in improving brand visibility is now an undeniable fact. Let’s see this using an example. We all are familiar with the provisions of Urban Company that often adds demo videos/ pictures on how things will be in reality. This whole idea worked in their favor, and now we all know what it does, more so, how it does. And all this was done without in-person demonstrations. All thanks to the videos. You can repeat these videos over time-
The biggest benefit of creating demo videos is that you can repeat them over time. They are the perfect fit for delivering the brand message. All the platforms like YouTube to different social media/ websites can have them repurposed over time. These are timeless and relevant up till the product has an active life cycle.
These are some common and identified benefits of demo videos. But more can come your way when you try using them in your video marketing.
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How to make them interesting?
Demo videos might be monotonous at times, but you can make them interesting. Here’s something you can do to improve on the quality that you give out.
Make sure to give out a point-to-point and straightforward script. 90 seconds should be enough for you to deliver the message.
Always focus on giving out a solution through your demo videos rather than stating the features. Once you do that, you will see definite results. This being in agreement to the statement of demo videos helping in improving brand visibility.
Always question the purpose of your demo videos, i.e.,
What- The demo does or what it solves How- The demo rectifies the issue Why- The demo should pull customers towards you.
The characters of your videos should be relatable to your audience.
Don’t give away too much. The videos should show the working but keep your ground and show that it’s you who is adding the ‘how.’ Show your value.
Always work on including a CTA. You sure don’t want to miss out on those prospects who come to you but don’t get a direction. You may have a look at the following video for the same:
Be very sure of what you are giving out. You should know your product/ service well before presenting it to your audience.
Indulge in creating a video hook for your narrative. People should be lured to watch what you present. Make sure to do that.
Please give them a personalized touch to make them more attractive to your viewers.
Conduct proper research before you give anything out to your audience. The best way to start, ask a lot of questions about anything and everything for your product. Try to see it from the buyer’s perspective.
These were certain aspects to focus on during the process of video creation.
Conclusion
With this, we have reached a conclusion of this blog and also demo videos. The purpose of these attributes covered here was to convey that if demo videos are taken up well, they can benefit your brand.
Product demo videos can be game-changers if used well in your marketing campaign. Demo videos helping in improving brand visibility is the most significant aspect emerging now. And it would stand alone and shine on if you seek the right expert help.
Approach a video marketing agency to have proper guidance on the same as they hold the expertise to guide you. You will learn about the appropriate type and strategy to put forward. I hope this helps you in the journey! | https://medium.com/@mridushibose/how-are-demo-videos-helping-in-improving-brand-visibility-6f777976d279 | [] | 2021-12-16 12:16:17.032000+00:00 | ['Brand Visibility', 'Product Demo Video', 'Strategy', 'Videos', 'Video Marketing'] |
Here Are The Best Code Editors For JavaScript Developers | Whether you are new or experienced in JavaScript, code editors are important. In fact, a good code editor will make you more efficient and help you debug your code.
In this article, I’ll talk about the best code editors you can use. This will help you improve your productivity and build awesome projects. So let’s go!
First…what is a code editor?
A code editor is a program designed to write and edit code. This might seem simple but that’s the goal. Well, can you use a plain text editor like Notepad to write your code? The answer is yes, but I DON’T recommend that.
Code editors are awesome because they offer an environment for fast development.
Now let’s see my top-most code editors:
Atom
What I like about Atom is the fact that it’s customizable. The interface is clean, and it’s many awesome themes give you so much motivation to do one thing: write code.
For example, here’s one of the most popular themes you can get: it’s called Atom Material UI and I can say it’s a nice theme.
Another good point is the GitHub interface. With it, you can stage and push your files to GitHub with just some clicks.
The Atom editor’s power comes from its large open source community. This allows almost infinite addons. In fact, Atom is one of the most customizable code editors out there.
You can use it on Windows, Mac, and Linux. This is great as I am currently using Linux for development.
Atom is created by Github and now owned by Microsoft. And I can say it’s a great code editor that I definitely recommend.
Get it here: Atom Code Editor
Visual Studio Code
I use Visual Studio Code or (VS Code ) on a daily basis to work with my remote partners. And I must admit it’s powerful.
And no need to say that VS Code is available on the major platforms. Yes, when I work with my remote coding partner, it doesn’t matter if I use Linux, Windows, or Mac. And that’s what I like about VS Code.
In fact, a lot of developers swear by it and it. And it has become the standard development platform for developers for a couple of years. VS Code is powerful and offers a lot of features like:
– Emmet,
– A built
-In Git interface,
– Intellisense,
– An integrated command-line interface, and many other extensions like EsLint or Prettier.
If you want to know all the powerful features of VS code, here’s something that can help you for sure:
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/whyvscode
And if you want to know all the amazing things you can do with the VS Code, I found this website for you:
https://vscodecandothat.com/
You can download it here: Get VS Code
Brackets
I started using brackets when I was learning web development for the first time. And I liked it. The truth is that Brackets has an interface that makes you feel comfortable. So if you are new to web development, I recommend you Brackets code editor.
Get it here: Brackets Code Editor
Sublime Text
I used Sublime Text for some time, but, I didn’t like the interface. Now it’s my opinion because a lot of people are using Sublime Text. Still, it’s one of the most popular code editors you can use.
Get it here: Sublime Text
There are a lot of code editors out there and those I talked about in this article are a few. In fact, there are a lot of other programming languages like NotePad++, Vim, or Visual Studio (not VS Code). Take a look at this article for more: Most Popular Development Environments | https://medium.com/@mouhadiouf/here-are-the-best-code-editors-for-javascript-developers-58ac5db35988 | ['Mouhamadou Diouf'] | 2020-12-04 09:12:06.719000+00:00 | ['Javascript Tips', 'Javascript Development', 'Code Editor', 'JavaScript'] |
The Ethics of Reciprocity | It’s only right to give a gift in return. Photo by Ben White on Unsplash
Why one good turn demands another
We have a moral duty to repay what we owe. I don’t just mean literally repaying money owed to our creditors but repaying favors and gifts. On an intuitive level we all know this, but it’s not normally explicitly talked about on a moral level. It’s time to change that and spell out an ethics of reciprocity.
Prison sentences: a case study
When we bring morality into a debate, it’s usually to argue about the harm or benefit done to people and our duty to follow certain principles. Take, for example, arguments about prison sentences. We argue over the ability of prisons to rehabilitate, thereby making the prisoners happier in the long run as well as making the rest of society happier by changing a destructive person into a productive one. We talk about how we have a duty to keep society safe from dangerous people by locking them away, or how it’s unjust for us to lock someone away for a long time in bad conditions.
That ignores part of our intuitive understanding of justice. When someone hurts society, they owe a debt to us. They repay this debt through their time imprisoned. Once they’ve served their sentence, we even explicitly say that they’ve “paid their debt to society”, or “paid their dues”. This is called retributive justice. We instinctively know it, but we tend not to bring it into our arguments.
That’s one reason why it’s so difficult to motivate public opinion about prison reform. Reformers talk about how prisons don’t work to reform the prisoners. They’re right, but people don’t much care, because that’s only one role of prisons. Reformers also sometimes point to criminology research and say that we don’t need to keep so many people imprisoned, that it’s reached a point where it isn’t making us safer. They may also be right about that, but again, it doesn’t motivate public opinion because that’s only part of what prisons do. Prisons are still serving their purpose as a place where people are punished to repay their debt to society. Because we don’t normally talk about these kinds of moral debts, it’s hard to have constructive arguments about issues, like prison reform, where these debts matter.
Reciprocity is a fundamental moral sensation
Morality feels simpler than it really is. It seems to us like some things are obviously good and noble and right, and others are clearly wrong and outrageous. Moral philosophers have worked for centuries (if not millennia) to create logical systems that can justify these feelings and resolve disagreements, with mixed success.
The systems are all derived from our basic feelings of right and wrong. We have a fundamental sense that we ought to treat people well, not harm them, and follow certain rules. We argue about how to weigh those different feelings — should we be honest even when it hurts people? — but the inputs to our arguments are those moral feelings.
The sense of reciprocity is another of those basic moral feelings. Think of someone who just takes and takes but never does anything for anyone in return. Their ingratitude doesn’t feel like a minor character flaw, like if they were forgetful or chronically late, but a more serious moral defect.
We see things the same way when we hear about someone being fired or dumped by their lover. We don’t just think about how bad they’ll feel. We mostly think about whether they deserved to be treated that way. If someone was a good employee, we’ll be outraged that their employer wasn’t good to them in return. If they had always been cheating on their partner, then we’ll shrug at the news they’ve been dumped, even if it left them devastated. We care about more than the emotional impact; we keep a mental tally sheet of what people deserve.
People throughout history have seen filial piety the same way: if you don’t pay back your parents for the work they did raising you, then you’re doing something morally wrong. They held the same attitude towards repaying your ancestors, or the spirits of the animals you hunted, or other gods or spirits. Think also of the concept of “blood money” — paying money to the victims of a crime you’ve committed as a way of literally settling the debt. No amount of money can restore the life of someone you’ve killed, but that’s not the point. It’s to settle a moral debt, not to undo damage.
Implications
Justice
An ethical code of reciprocity can help us rationalize our views of justice. We want to draw a line between justice and vengeance, for example. Justice demands punishment proportionate to the social damage done by someone’s actions. Vengeance (and revenge) mean delivering punishment greater than is demanded by justice. They’re when you overstep the bounds of justice out of a personal emotional desire.
The way we normally think of morality has led to this retributive desire being stigmatized. Some believe that all suffering is bad, so anything that increases suffering must be bad, therefore any punishment that doesn’t deter or rehabilitate offenders is unjust. That view of justice is too narrow to fit our moral intuitions. Even many of its adherents can’t bring themselves to be consistent. For example, I’ve seen believers in this view of justice make an exception for people convicted of rape or hate crimes. At that point, they’re no longer concerned about reform and deterrence, but about making the punishment fit the crime. They’ve tried to dull their sense of reciprocal justice but it comes roaring back in the cases they find particularly shocking.
This also why improving the condition of prisons is so controversial. To those with no sense of reciprocity, improving prison conditions is simply a way to raise the standards of living of some people. What can be wrong with that?
The problem is that prison is a way of paying back the harm inflicted on society. A tough, spartan life is the prisoner’s way of paying his dues. A life where the greatest problem is a limited Playstation game catalog — as the mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik complained of — is not a suitable way of paying back a debt to society.
Loyalty
Loyalty has a mixed reputation. It might make you think of faceless, mindless hordes doing what they’re told. You might instead think of a band of brothers sticking together when their lives are on the line. You might even think of the romanticized loyalty codes of the past, like the codes of chivalry or bushido.
The ultimate meaning of loyalty is being reliably good to the people who’ve been good to you. It’s simply another example of reciprocity. The loyalty owed to others, then, is proportionate to the good they’ve done for you. People who don’t want to be loyal to a group (or to a partner, or friend, etc.) will try to describe all the ways the group has been bad to them, as justification for why that group isn’t owed (much) loyalty. The group members will take the opposite position and lay out benefits that person has received and why they do owe the group continued loyalty.
When someone talks about how their country has mistreated them, or their parents neglected them, they may be implicitly making this kind of argument for why they don’t have any duty of loyalty. When someone complains about their partner’s behavior, even after all they’ve sacrificed for their partner, they’re implicitly making the argument that their partner isn’t paying the ‘loyalty debt’ that they owe.
That doesn’t mean those arguments are automatically suspect: some people really have been mistreated and shouldn’t be expected to show a typical level of loyalty. Think of Muhammad Ali: one reason he refused to fight in the Vietnam War was the racism he experienced in the US. You could argue that he was right, that the suffering other Americans inflicted on him reduced his duty to them. You could argue the other way, too, of course; the hardships Ali experienced weren’t so bad that he could abandon his duty, or that his duty was to America writ-large and the bad behavior of racist Americans was irrelevant. The point is that there’s a real, intellectual argument to be had about the merits to this justification for draft dodging (setting aside his other, legally defensible religious objections).
Tradition
Tradition is how we practice reciprocity towards our ancestors, and how our descendants will practice reciprocity towards us. Many things we do will benefit the people of the future, e.g. protecting the environment, or investing. One way future generations can pay us back is by respecting our values.
We would be demanding too much loyalty if we expected future generations to behave just as we do, but considering how much their lives will have been improved over hunting-gathering, it’s fair to expect them to observe (or at least pay lip service to) some of our most basic values, such as a high respect for freedom or a taboo against infanticide.
Distinctiveness
Is there a need to have a separate way of talking about a duty of reciprocity? Can it be covered by other ways of describing right and wrong? No. I’ll go over specific moral beliefs and why they can’t do the job.
Utilitarianism
You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. When you cut down the forest, splinters will fly. The ends justify the means. These phrases all point to the same idea: that the end results of an action are what matters, and they can justify any collateral damage.
This is the moral philosophy called consequentialism. The consequences of an action are what matters; the motives are irrelevant, as are any ethical principles. All that matters is the end result. The most important consequentialist philosophy is called utilitarianism. Utilitarians believe that the specific consequence that matters is the net happiness created. If an action creates more happiness than unhappiness, it’s a good action.
Imagine a relationship between Tom and Jane. Jane dumps Tom, and he’s heartbroken. A utilitarian would look at that and say Jane did something wrong if she made Tom unhappier than she made herself happy. That’s not how we feel about break-ups, though. If Tom had spent years caring for Jane and being a good boyfriend, then we’d say Jane did something wrong- she owed Tom, in a sense. On the other hand, if Tom had been negligent or even had affairs, then we would applaud Jane’s decision. She deserved better- which is to say, Tom owed her more.
Utilitarianism wouldn’t be able to describe the relationship in a way that reflects our values. Reciprocity offers a distinct, useful perspective.
Golden Rule deontology
“Deontology” is just a philosopher’s way of saying ‘code of ethics’. The “Golden Rule” is possibly the most famous code of ethics, and it’s a single rule: do to others what you’d have them do to you. There are variations of it across cultures, such as the Jewish teacher Hillel saying that you shouldn’t do to your neighbors the things that are hateful to you. The Golden Rule is very flexible, so it can cover the same situations as our ethics of reciprocity, but perhaps not as well.
Imagine a young man named Steve. He had a falling out with his parents a few years ago over politics, and now they never talk to each other. He gets a call from his sister saying that their father has died and Steve should go home to comfort his mother and help her prepare the funeral. Steve thinks of the Golden Rule: if his girlfriend had died, would he have wanted his parents coming to comfort him and help him prepare for the funeral? No, he hates them and doesn’t want anything to do with them. Therefore, he shouldn’t help his mom.
Our ethics of reciprocity would give the opposite result. Steve owes a debt to his parents, even if he doesn’t like him, and the least he can do to repay that debt is help his mother in her grief. That answer jibes much better with our natural sense of right and wrong.
Kantian deontology
The brilliant German philosopher Immanuel Kant invented his own code of ethics. He called it the “Categorical Imperative,” and it consists of three (or more) formulations.
One part of the Categorical Imperative is that you should never treat people as a means to an end, but instead as an end unto themselves. Don’t use people, basically. That’s certainly good advice, and it does cover some situations we’re interested in: if you just take from other people without acknowledging your duty of reciprocity, then you’re treating them more as a means to an end (getting stuff) than as individuals just as worthy as you are.
It doesn’t cover all the situations, though. What about our debts to abstract entities like our community or nation? They aren’t people, so it’s not clear under the Categorical Imperative that we have a duty to honor our debts; the reciprocal approach is clear. It’s also fuzzy on the nature of how we could avoid using generous people as a means to an end. If someone is always there for us and helps us out, we certainly ought to do something instead of taking them for granted, but Kant isn’t clear on what we should do, just what we shouldn’t do. Reciprocity does — to an extent — tell us how to act.
Another part of the Categorical Imperative is that you should behave in a way such that everyone else in the world could act the same way and it would be fine. You can’t steal, because otherwise everyone else would steal, and the whole idea of private property would collapse and stealing wouldn’t even make sense any more. It’s a contradiction.
This formulation does allow for a duty to abstract entities. If no one helped their community, then communities would no longer exist as such, and no one would be able to survive long enough to make that choice. No man is an island, after all. It has the same fuzziness issue as before, though, as it still only tells us what we shouldn’t do, not what we should do. To continue our example, how much do we owe our community? Just enough to allow the species to survive? Kant would call this an imperfect duty, which means we don’t owe it our entire time and energy, but he doesn’t give us much more help than that.
Virtue ethics
The idea of virtue ethics dates back at least to Aristotle, and it’s regained popularity recently. Virtue ethicists believe that we should focus less on actions in the abstract, and more on what kind of person we want to be. There is some overlap with ethics of reciprocity: a virtue ethicist could say that gratitude is a virtue that should be cultivated, therefore it’s important to pay back your debts.
Virtue ethics is a very personal view of morality. That makes it great for finding our direction in life. That makes it less great for answering questions about social issues like justice or civic disobedience. Reciprocity can tell us more about these things.
Moral Nihilism
Moral nihilism is the view that there is no such thing as right or wrong. Nihilism can’t be used to judge right in wrong in the kinds of reciprocal situations we’re looking at, because it can’t be used to judge right or wrong in any situation. It denies the validity of any such judgment. There’s no question that it’s distinct from the ethics of reciprocity.
Moral Hedonism
Moral hedonism is the philosophy that doing good means having fun. An action is good if it pleases you, and bad if it makes you feel bad. Hedonism is opposed to principles of duty, obligation, and responsibility, which is a core part of reciprocity. It’s also opposed to doing things for other people at your own expense, which is another core part.
Objectivism
Ayn Rand is a controversial figure. A refugee from communist Russia, she developed a philosophy of Objectivism which is almost the opposite of communist ideals. Her attitude and approach towards other philosophy lead many to view her as not really a philosopher. Still, her ideas are interesting and have been very influential, especially in the US, so it’s worth addressing them.
In Objectivist philosophy, something is right so long as it serves your self-interest. Objectivism’s distinct from hedonism, as Rand defines self-interest as something other than just satisfying your desires. It’s not completely clear what self-interest means to Rand, though.
Objectivism, like hedonism, is directly opposed to reciprocity. If you’re given a gift, a sense of reciprocity demands that you return the favor. Objectivists deny that you have any such duty. Your only duty is to serve your own self-interest, and if you spend your time repaying unspoken debts then you’re misguided or even immoral.
Objections
Not all moral intuitions are equal
Why should we treat all moral intuitions as equally legitimate? Why should we think of this kind of moral debt as being on the same footing as the Golden Rule, for example? If we do treat them equally, wouldn’t we have to start recognizing all moral feelings as legitimate, and treat ‘blasphemy’ as immoral, and condemn eating ‘unclean’ foods, and all the other moral beliefs humans have had?
If we could find other broadly shared moral sentiments like reciprocity, then I would bite the bullet and say we should account for those sentiments as well. There just aren’t, in fact, very many of those, so accounting for them isn’t difficult. Maybe you could look around human societies and say “all human societies treat their dead with respect, even if ‘respect’ means different things to different groups. Must we therefore consider treatment of our dead to be a moral issue?”
I would respond yes, it’s fine to start thinking of respecting the dead as a moral issue, arguing about it the same way we argue about offensive speech or adultery or corruption or any other moral concern. It’s just that “respect” is so subjective, and so bound up in specific traditional practices, it will be hard to reach any consensus about how to respect our dead. Whether it’s a moral issue isn’t the problem; whether it can be handled philosophically is the problem. That’s true for other moral sentiments, but not for reciprocity.
Creating moral blackmail
If reciprocity means you owe a debt to anyone who gives you something, then people who keep giving you things — even against your objections — will hold power over you. By creating a debt, they will gain influence you, in a kind of ‘moral blackmail’ (or, perhaps, just an extreme version of guilt-tripping). To an extent, we already recognize this power of gifting: giving gifts to politicians is heavily regulated, and many times people don’t accept gifts from enemies.
Our duties to over-givers like these are naturally lessened. As an analogy, think of someone who complains all the time. Normally we have an ethical duty to avoid making people feel bad, but if someone always finds a reason to feel bad about everything we do, there’s a point where we can stop taking their objections seriously. Our duty to be nice to them is reduced. Likewise, if someone bombards us with gifts, then we don’t have to treat that debt seriously.
Wouldn’t recognizing the moral force of reciprocity therefore lead to a society where we’re trying to help each other all the time to hold power over each other? That’s certainly not the worst dystopia imaginable, and even resembles some real-world cultures. Still, if we were to explicitly recognize the moral weight of reciprocity, then we’d be more likely to turn gifts down. Rejecting gifts would be less insulting when it has a known, rational explanation.
Not everyone senses this reciprocal debt
If reciprocity is a universal moral truth like duty and compassion, then why do some people not feel it very strongly, if at all? And why is it lessened in some cases, e.g. we don’t feel any duty when a company gives us free samples?
Not everyone feels the pull of duty, compassion, empathy, or other moral goods, either. Some people are amoral or selectively moral. The near-universality of slavery throughout history doesn’t prove that compassion and egalitarianism aren’t moral values, it just shows that people can find a way to work around their morality and ignore uncomfortable realities.
In brutal societies, treating executions as entertainment is normal, so one’s compassion is attenuated. In corrupt societies, fair play is for fools, so one’s sense of justice is attenuated. | https://simon-greenwood.medium.com/the-ethics-of-reciprocity-f89baef96f1d | ['Simon Greenwood'] | 2019-06-05 14:52:13.879000+00:00 | ['Philosophy', 'Ethics', 'Morality'] |
“How you look, how you sound”: feeling our prospects for AfroAsian solidarity | “How you look, how you sound”: feeling our prospects for AfroAsian solidarity
October 1, 2020
In the opening pages of her celebrated Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Cathy Park Hong engages the age-old topic of racial self-hatred, making the astonishing claim that this subject has been underemphasized in discussing Asian American cultural production:
There’s a ton of literature on the self-hating Jew and the self-hating African American, but not enough has been said about the self-hating Asian. Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy. Your own defense is to be hard on yourself, which becomes compulsive, and therefore a comfort, to peck yourself to death. You don’t like how you look, how you sound. You think your Asian features are undefined, like God started pinching out your features and then abandoned you. You hate that there are so many Asians in the room.[1]
This pronouncement that self-hatred ought to comprise the analytical basis for Asian American culture conveys much more about Hong’s literacy in Asian American Studies than it does about the state of our “literature.” Indeed, perhaps the most prominent aspect of Asian racial discourse since 1965 has been what Asian Americanists now widely pan as “the pathology argument.” The academic-theoretical expression of this concept, which has had profound impact in literary studies (of which Hong’s poetry has been a splendidly generative object), is the notion that Freudian melancholia constitutes the Asian American person. It is now an academic commonplace that Asian-ness in America is founded upon the “losses, disappointments, and failures” generalizable to much of post-1965 Asian immigration psychic life, concatenating the model minority myth to the affective structure of racial experience.[2] The argument unfolds that minoritized subjectivity (let’s say: yellowness) commences from the irredeemably lost love-object (whiteness); yellowness loves whiteness, and whiteness does not love yellowness back. According to its authors, David Eng and Shinhee Han, racial melancholia reveals both whiteness’ absolute power as well as the subsequent framework for yellowness’ psychic constitution: as not only tethered to and interpellated by whiteness, but as always already its constitutive other, which, in my view, pathologically seizes up any liberatory possibility while also reducing yellowness, in effect, to a form of narcissistic attachment.[3] Aligning herself with this woe-is-us narrative, Hong suggests that Asian Americans must melancholically pursue self-definition — “how you look, how you sound” — through the lens of racial whiteness, leaving little hope for the possibility of an Asian happily and/or stealthily “undefined” by the white gaze.
In the immediate wake of the appearance of Minor Feelings, the novel coronavirus unleashed an intense wave of anti-Asian sentiment and violence. Appearing in the pages of the New York Times Magazine as the Asian American voice to explain this anti-Asian onslaught, Hong offered yet another shocking pronouncement: “I never would have thought that the word ‘Chink’ would have a resurgence in 2020.”[4] When I first read this sentence, I wondered what kind of liberal-white-poetry enclave Hong had been living in until she recently discovered the “minor feeling” of racial melancholia, and my poet-friends confirmed that it was probably the kind that easily conjures the epithet but tries not to utter it. (In my first year of graduate school, Bob Hass, former poet laureate of the United States, told me that I should speak up because he “couldn’t read my face.”) I wondered, too, what the state of racial discourse must be in this country that such a voice was needed at all, benighted to assuage white liberal consciousness with the silly yet dangerous notion that anti-Asian racism is rare and new, having sneaked its way in through a once-in-a-century pandemic and during a resurgence of fascism, American-style. Unlike Hong, I have lived most of my life with “chink” — a term that originally targeted Asian men specifically — constantly in my ears. Then again, I have never once felt that there are too many Asians in the room.
In the early days of the pandemic in South Carolina, where I have lived for three years, the threat felt palpable enough that in my household, my usually-white-passing partner took on all of the grocery shopping. I also developed a habit of walking our little dog, Teddy, only with my phone fully charged. I found myself frequently checking in on Asian friends and colleagues, scattered all over the country due to the cruelty of academia, from Cambridge to Irvine, New Haven to Oakland, not to mention the many family members who are likewise dispatched to far-flung parts of the country. All I wanted, I thought to myself repeatedly, was there to be so many Asians in the room, to which a newly discovered app, Houseparty, served as metaphor and virtual wish-fulfillment. In the early weeks of the pandemic, amidst this vulnerability, there were so many joyful video and phone conversations, early and late because of time zones, including with my infant niece who will forever be regaled with stories about the opening months of her life. Here was, I thought, true melancholy: not a matter of better understanding oneself vis-à-vis whiteness, but rather a Lordean surviving of white supremacist conditions via the timeless reminder that we are, in fact, surrounded and held and constituted by love bonds — and not by their lack or absence.
The uprisings surrounding a concomitant wave of unmitigated anti-Black violence — upon the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd — comprise the second racial reckoning of 2020, demanding all of our critical attention, political pedagogy, and renewed habits of assembly, care, and love. Yet what are the precise prospects for AfroAsian solidarity in this moment of crisis? Asian American forums, perhaps most seriously in the famously unserious Facebook group called Subtle Asian Traits, have been grappling with this question, establishing deliberate links to our renewed antiracist consciousness during the pandemic. That is, Asian Americans are navigating and addressing anti-Black racism in our communities — most often beginning from our nuclear families, according to Subtle Asian Traits — to impressive effect: in September 2020, 69% of Asian Americans report supporting Black Lives Matter, slightly higher than Hispanics (66%) and in contrast to 55% of the country overall.[5] The general intelligence is rich — and growing.
Echoing the chorus, Vince Schleitwiler sagely reminds us that any new Asian American political consciousness ought to begin exclusively from solidarity with Black Lives Matter, since we only know ourselves as “Asian American” in the first place from the historical alliance between Black and yellow:
As the first Asian American movement demonstrated, the development of such a consciousness cannot end anti-Blackness in itself. But it can remind us that no one, including Asian Americans, will be free until Black people are free, and so solidarity against anti-Blackness must be fundamental to our collective self-definition. Because without it, we wouldn’t even know who we are.[6]
What it means to know ourselves — and to love ourselves — is to align yellowness with Blackness in an anti-Black world. Rather than racial melancholia, Schleitwiler’s focus on the possible end of anti-Blackness stems from the Ontological Turn in Black Studies, specifically the theoretical tendency and field of thought known as Afropessimism that has singlehandedly popularized the notion that anti-Blackness is axiomatic to reality itself. Our racial consciousness as Asians begins with this axiom, where ontology and epistemology meet, and thus, according to Schleitwiler, “it’s crucial to recognize that the impetus to reimagine a critical Asian American racial consciousness was not COVID-19, but Black Lives Matter.” Yet such reimagining is itself a herculean task, given the aforementioned tendency for some powerful Asian Americans, particularly those ensconced in elite academia, to adopt the position that our group is by default, by self-hating pathology, white-desiring and white-allied.
This Asian American form of colonized consciousness has produced at least three interrelated deleterious effects on the ever-growing Black-allied Asian community. First is the mainstream de-centering of pro-Black Asian writers and activists through every step of our history, including contemporary intellectuals such as Schleitwiler, in favor of white-centric voices that center self-hatred and pathology. Second is the foreclosure of possibility for yet more Asian Americans, awakened by Black Lives Matter, newly desiring to duck the white gaze as much as possible so that we can check out “how we look, how we sound,” once we confidently prefer to feel unfettered by it. Finally, there is the misreading of the Asian Americans who have already attempted to do exactly this, (a)voiding white-centrism altogether, by creating forms of yellowness that have pro-Blackness already built in. This racial misinterpretation of Asian Americans, if it can be corrected at all, may offer a way toward an invigorating reimagining of ourselves.
Conflating racial justice with a reductive notion of cultural inheritance, a brazenly reactionary discourse of cultural appropriation has emerged in recent years to stake the claim that culture functions as a property right to be either rightfully owned or wrongfully expropriated. By definition, culture cannot be property, yet given the neoliberal order, it is not surprising that a possessive model of cultural identity, abetted by corporate academia’s obsession with standpoint theory and diversity numbers, is seemingly all that we have. When this erroneous model of cultural capital meets the erroneous presumption of the anti-Black Asian, our prospects can look grim indeed.
Take, for instance, Awkwafina, whose meteoric ascent in popular culture was quickly dimmed, her pre-Hollywood persona and performances as a YouTube hip-hop artist called out as “a case study in cultural appropriation.”[7] Only if one begins from the racist archetype of a white-allied Asian does this reading have political force. What critics of her “performance of Blackness” have missed entirely is that many Asian Americans of mine and Awkwafina’s generation — before Asian American YouTube and before the full-blown globalization of Asian pop cultures — studied Blackness intensely, with Eliotic great labor, driven both by the desire to survive white supremacy and by an abiding, adoring love for Black cultural forms. MC Jin, Jeremy Lin, and Eddie Huang are additional examples of this millennial tendency, as is the most visible Asian American from generation X, Andrew Yang, whose signature policy position, Universal Basic Income, is part and parcel of the Black leftist tradition. The two most public-facing Asian American intellectuals working today, Viet Nguyen and Jeff Chang, both began their vocational paths studying Blackness. Before Wong Fu and Boba shops and The Farewell, many of us routed our racial identities through Blackness, not as uncritical mimicry or opportunistic theft, but rather as our yellowness. Our yellowness was routed through and rooted in Blackness, by necessity as well as by grace. In doing so, we stood on solid historical ground, too, where Grace Lee Boggs, Emma Gee, and Yuri Kochiyama had already tread. Thus, our version of raciality already includes a preferential option for Blackness as a constitutive feature. My students may wonder at the beginning of the term why their professor for Black Feminist Theory and Introduction to African American Studies looks and sounds like he does, and I assure the vocally curious ones that it is they who are new to the room.
For its part, Afropessimism’s ontological argument — that anti-Blackness constitutes the world on the phenomenological, affective, social, and political registers — has made much hay out of explicitly foreclosing interracial solidarity. According to Frank Wilderson, ontology commences from the fault line between the Black and anti-Black, the latter of which includes all non-Black people, thus precluding the possibility of any “analogy” whatsoever. Yet as recent assessments of Wilderson’s long-awaited book have made clear, telling everyday Black people in 2020 that they are enslaved and socially-dead may convey an elitist academic posture at least as much as it does the basis for a liberatory politics.[8] (Please try telling my first-generation, working-class students in AFAM 201 — many of whom are already miffed at Du Bois for calling the inhabitants of the “Sea Islands of the Carolinas,” in the final pages of The Souls of Black Folk, “of primitive type” — that their station in the symbolic order is, ahistorically, that of ‘Slave.’) Ultimately, what makes me sad about both racial melancholia and Afropessimism is just how similar they are, despite their separate claims to a sui generis position for yellowness and Blackness. (I make this comparative explication in full in my forthcoming book, Other Lovings: Queer Love Bonds in Black and Yellow.) Both are rooted in white psychoanalytic theories: Freud for Eng and Han, Lacan for Wilderson. Both insist that the “subjects” they are describing are constituted by absolute negative terms: lack, lovelessness, absence, death. Both abet a popular discourse surrounding one’s ineluctably melancholic or death-bound standpoint as the only one they can ever claim vis-à-vis the white gaze, rejecting others who may have gathered already in the quest to avert both the notion of a singular subject-position and to refuse a determinative whiteness.
What if racial melancholia has simply neglected its conceptual corollary? If yellowness is constituted by a failed love for whiteness, then it follows that whiteness is constituted by its inability to love yellowness back. Wouldn’t one prefer the position of the one who feels love rather than the one who can’t? Read and felt this way, it is quite obviously yellowness that is in the stronger position than whiteness: the position of the lover, the logic of better-to-have-loved-and-lost-than-to-have-never-loved-at-all. What if, by way of that originary loss, our libidinal racial attachments, rather than to a self-hatred based on whiteness, can be and have been routed to a love of the other based on Blackness? What if a new form of love, based on the forms of life that emerge from anti-Blackness — Blackness — is what, in fact, constitutes yellowness? This is our grasping for an us already here, loving those gathered in the social task of so many Asians in the room, albeit a virtual one for now.
[1] Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (New York: One World, 2020), 9–10.
[2] David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 50.
[3] See Hua Hsu, “The Stories We Tell, and Don’t Tell, About Asian-American Lives,” The New Yorker, July 17, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-stories-we-tell-and-dont-tell-about-asian-american-lives.
[4] Cathy Park Hong, “The Slur I Never Expected to Hear in 2020,” The New York Times Magazine, April 12, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/12/magazine/asian-american-discrimination-coronavirus.html.
[5] “Asian American support for Black Lives Matter still strong,” September 20, 2020. https://asamnews.com/2020/09/20/support-weakening-for-black-lives-matter-but-still-strong-among-asian-americans-and-blacks.
[6] Vince Schleitwiler, “Solidarity with Black lives demands a new Asian American movement,” International Examiner, July 6, 2020. https://iexaminer.org/solidarity-with-black-lives-demands-a-new-asian-american-movement.
[7] Bettina Makalintal, “Awkwafina’s Past Makes Her a Complicated Icon of Asian American Representation,” Vice, January 24, 2020. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkeg9g/awkwafinas-past-makes-her-a-complicated-icon-of-asian-american-representation.
See also Lauren Michele Jackson, “Who Owns the ‘Blaccent’?,” Vulture, August 24, 2018. https://www.vulture.com/2018/08/awkwafina-blaccent-cultural-appropriation.html.
[8] See Jesse McCarthy, “On Afropessimism,” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 20, 2020. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/on-afropessimism.
See also Vinson Cunningham, “The Argument of ‘Afropessimism,’” The New Yorker, July 13, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/20/the-argument-of-afropessimism. | https://medium.com/@seulghee-lee/how-you-look-how-you-sound-feeling-our-prospects-for-afroasian-solidarity-c05991120b9 | ['Seulghee Lee'] | 2021-02-26 14:02:25.514000+00:00 | ['Afro Pessimism', 'Racial Justice', 'Asian American', 'Andrew Yang', 'BlackLivesMatter'] |
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